Liu is CEO and co-founder of Citizen University.
Last week I was at Disneyland with my daughter. When you’re there, it’s like a dream — a time-distorting swirl of people and sound and color. But as in a dream, certain details lodge in waking memory. One that has stuck in my mind is a burly young white father, ambling outside Fantasyland, wearing a T-shirt with a silhouette of a semiautomatic rifle and the words "Come and take it." This was days after Buffalo, and days before Uvalde.
This was, in short, just another day in America. But the reason that man and his T-shirt and his child stuck with me is that he felt it was utterly normal to wear such a shirt. In a way, it was.
"Come and take it" is the slogan of gun-rights absolutists who think any effort to promote gun responsibility and safety is a tyrannical assault on their liberty that must be met with … assault rifles. It is defiant and petulant. It is threatening. And though it tries to project strength and bravado, it betrays deep weakness and sickness. In the guns debate, only one is armed to the teeth. Yet that side acts as if it is cornered, helpless, has nowhere else to turn.
Cornered, helpless, nowhere else to turn is how those students and teachers in Texas felt yesterday and those grocery shoppers in New York felt last week. Cornered, helpless, nowhere to turn is how so many of us today feel about the national epidemic of gun violence — about the diseased state of our norms, the comatose state of our democratic institutions.
But we are not in fact helpless.
This morning I met with a group of high school students from the West Side and South Side of Chicago. Black and brown, from neighborhoods that lack grocery stores, well-paved streets, youth development programs, job opportunities. They have reason to be as angry and defiant and petulant as that Disneyland man. They have reason to be cynical about how much attention gets paid to mass shootings and school shootings when 19 shot to death is a routine, overlooked two-week tally in Chicago.
They were, instead, compassionate and purposeful. They felt for the families and neighbors of Buffalo and Uvalde even as they feel for their own families and neighbors. They want more voice, in their school and in their city. They are learning to organize and advocate. They spoke of the need for better laws on guns and better policies on mental health. They spoke as much of the need for better norms. The world does not expect or allow them to be full human beings with deep potential and wide interests. Still, they keep pushing to be their full selves. They feel most powerful, they said, when they are keeping the peace, standing up for others, calling out injustice, organizing protest, figuring out who decides things and making them listen. They are redefining what it means to be age 17 on the West Side — what people expect of you and what you expect of yourself.
None of us is powerless right now because all of us can change the culture of our community. That man in the "Come and take it" T-shirt is doing his best to change the culture, to shift the boundaries of what is normal and OK in public life.
We can do as those Chicago Public School students do, and commit to setting a different kind of example. We can learn from Sari Kaufman, a member of CU’s Civic Collaboratory and one of the survivors of the 2018 Parkland gun massacre: she didn’t just become a leader of the March for Our Lives movement; she created a project called MyVote to connect young people to local elections because she learned the hard way that change in this country comes from the local outward and the bottom up.
It is hard, when we are flooded by grief and numbed by death, to exercise civic imagination. But this is when we need it most. There is a different society to be had. One in which a teenager like the Texas shooter, a kid with a lisp and a stutter, isn’t bullied and shunned, doesn’t withdraw, doesn’t have easier access to firearms than to friends or counselors or opportunities to thrive. One in which gun owners, the day after, the minute after a massacre, do not harden their hearts and double down on talking points about "politicizing" guns but instead imagine what it’d be like to be there and then become the champions of responsible reforms. One in which people young and old recognize that the more we dehumanize each other the more we will kill each other and live in fear of being killed. One in which we are a strong people, able to integrate power and character, who don’t wait for strong leaders but in fact lead our leaders.
That is the society that every person I work with is trying to create. That is the culture we at Citizen University are trying to foster. It is what is in your power to make, at every scale from neighborhood to nation.
Come and build it.
This article was first published by Citizen University.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.