Pedro Silva is the Founder of Liberation Comedy and Director of Engagement for YOUnify. Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Laughter is the embodiment of depolarization. Just consider that in order for something to evoke laughter, it has to both have the capacity to hold tension and release tension at the same time. Like some kind of cognitive dissonance yoga, laughing requires one to hold a posture long enough to realize the benefits of the subsequent release. That’s why many folks in the bridging movement have begun to explore the power of laughter to bring people together across differences.
It’s no secret that pop culture in America has amazing healing and connecting powers. Throughout history, we’ve seen how artists, entertainers, athletes, and creators of every kind invite us into a space of transcendence that leads to connectivity. When harnessed, we see that when we join people together their energy for good can be amplified and scaled.
Toward that end, Liberation Comedy (LibCom), a brand new comedy concept founded by former pastor Pedro Silva, who currently works for a non-profit organization YOUnify as the director of Engagement, has launched an effort to use laughter as a scaffolding for building social cohesion. Liberation Comedy is based on the principle that comedy is an effective tool to bring people together through listening and laughing their way into embracing our common humanity.
In this time of social media and the divisive way that many of us use the internet, comedy can help us realize the absurdity of the “us versus them" mentality in our country and understand that we’re all in this together. To quote comedian critic Ronald K.L Collings:
“Comedy can be erudite or entertaining, or both, and yes, it can be rude and ridiculous, just as life itself can be. But in its finest moments comedy is the enemy of fanaticism, the foe of tyranny, the adversary of strident know-nothings, the nemesis of the pompous, and the friend of skepticism in an overconfident world. Then again, sometimes comedy is no more than the source of a full belly laugh.”
The hope of LibCom is that through the power of raucous laughter, we can drown out the voices that divide us as a nation by turning the rhetoric down a notch, listening and laughing more together and eventually hating less. Ultimately the goal is to harness the positive power of comedy to support constructive debate and encourage people to engage with people who think differently.
Liberation Comedy, if channeled responsibly, can be one component of pop culture along with music, theater, poetry, and other art forms to reach people’s souls so we can engage them to join in grassroots movements that scale and amplify our victories and advance our values for lasting impact.
To hear more about Pedro’s thoughts on the power of comedy, check out this post entitled, If We Can Laugh Together, Maybe We Can Last Together.
Click here to enjoy Liberation Comedy’s inaugural stand up set, “May Laughter Set You Free,” featuring Pedro Silva.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.