Challenging a line or two inside a chummy format is little more than fact-check pantomime, the performance of scrutiny with none of the rigor. It signals seriousness while leaving the audience with the impression that the differences are ideological rather than moral, that the right answer to dehumanization is to speak more softly to it. Worse, lowering the heat in the studio often raises it outside the room. Viewers are told to prize civility while watching politicians and pundits lie, mislead, and dissemble without consequence; the gap between polite banter and public harm curdles into resentment.

The trolling and half-truths must be met in the moment lest they metastasize in the feeds, producing an economy that packages its wares for audiences curated by shared hatreds. If we invite those whose programs obstruct a common life of equal dignity—deepening inequalities, narrowing rights, and multiplying suffering—we owe the public more than cordiality. A conversation that ends without fists is the minimum, not the model. Keeping the peace is necessary; calling it “exactly the right way” is an abdication.

Adding fresh water to a cesspool does not purify it. The work here is not governmental censorship but private stewardship—editorial design and curatorial responsibility. Don’t grant free and unfettered access to long-standing garbage-dumpers without meaningful challenge and correction. The problem compounds when the young, with little ability to distinguish vetted knowledge from confident fabulism, meet “the other side” for the first time because a host has imported that viewpoint simply to gain more reach. If you’re going to expose your audience to that guest, the framing, the record, and the counters must travel with them. Otherwise you’re not informing; you’re onboarding.

Fuck, I am so glad somebody wrote this because it needs to be said so loudly and on repeat. Throw back to the last time this happened (and it’s hard to believe in hindsight that seems mild by comparison to what we’re facing in the present). This is not normal, so stop normalizing it!

This is not pedantry. It is the substance of liberal responsibility. Politics is more than the absence of bullets; it is the quality of speech that fills the space bullets might otherwise occupy. Ideas may not pull a trigger, but they draw the lines of what type of violence becomes thinkable. The twentieth century’s worst episodes did not begin with gunfire. They began with named categories—“parasites,” “vermin,” “degenerates,” “enemies of the people”—ways of talking that prepared the ground for ways of acting.

The best moments in liberal modernity, by contrast, have tried to reset the moral grammar: The Reconstruction Amendments, Brown v. Board, and the Civil Rights Act recast public life around equal protection, dignity before hierarchy. To say “we argue here, we do not shoot” is a minimum. The question is what is being argued for, and what a platform helps along. Politics at its best turns enemies into adversaries under rules and accepts that conflicts over fundamental values endure, which is why the guardrails matter. The goal isn’t to anesthetize disagreement; it is to inoculate public life against dehumanizing hierarchies smuggled in as common sense.