Anger and hope—now with free shipping

THEFARCE.ORG is a daily reader-backed publication dedicated to fostering the anger and hope needed to defeat fascism and restore America's promise. 

Please subscribe. Free or paid—your support makes all the difference.

Featuring:

• How we got here.  
• How we get out.
• What we must do to protect the most vulnerable along the way.

Anger 

We knew 2025 would bring too much insight into one of the worst conversations of all time, “How could the Holocaust have happened?” 

But I didn’t expect the answer to be so obvious and boring. 

It comes from the top down. The elites have buckled like a cardboard knee. 

They’ve buckled so hard that when a big law firm or university even pretends to stand up, it feels like the scene in Casablanca where everyone at Rick’s rises to sing La Marseillaise.

Hope

Meanwhile, people have stepped up in larger numbers than in 2017. Hands off, #TeslaTakedown, No Kings. You can probably find a protest right now.

And while we can continue to yell at the Democrats (a minority) in Congress, we’ve all become aware that everything depends on us. No one is coming to save us.

So we’ve all quickly learned the 3.5% rule, which states, with some qualifications,  “no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event.”

Let’s be sure we’re ready for that peak event.

Why Both 

Erica Chenoweth, one of the researchers behind the “3.5% rule,” pointed to a study that prompted the launch of this site. She noted “…the emotions that mobilize people are anger and hope. Those two together, not just anger and not just hope, but anger and hope are what make people ready to engage in collective action."

It turns out that comes from a study called “Hope and Anger as Mediators Between Collective Action Frames and Participation in Collective Mobilization” by Anna Wlodarczyk, Nekane Basab, Darío Páez, and Larraitz Zumeta^:

Of all the emotions that can help people to find the courage to overcome fear and apathy, perhaps the most important is hope. As stated by Ahmed (2004), “hope is what allows us to feel that what angers us is not inevitable, even if transformation can sometimes feel impossible.” Anger alone lacks prospects for future change; therefore, we argue that it may be the component of hope that prevents anger from leading to resignation. 

We're All Spreaders

We’ve heard “courage is contagious.” Unfortunately, the elites have proven that cowardice is also contagious.

So what feeds courage and shames cowardice? Fearlessness. 

No one can always be fearless, but there are moments when we put the greater good above our own justified worries. THE FARCE is all about elevating and encouraging that fearlessness.

We can’t all step into the realm where this regime would love to make us unemployable. We all have obligations to ourselves and others that drown out our fearlessness. With your support, I want to free myself of those as much as possible.

Those with that freedom can and should step up and be the anger and hope we wish to see in the world. So I'm taking my shot. That’s only possible with a 100% reader-backed publication that I can publish from anywhere without having to answer to anyone, except history and my readers. So welcome! Did I ask you to subscribe if you haven’t already done so?

If you join right now for a whole year at a $30 level, you'll get a pin of the LOLGOP logo, which celebrates an elephant's ability to clean his own tail.

And subscribers at the $90 or over level can pick one of these t-shirts. 

Wear them where you want to help people be a little more fearless. Or you can subscribe, reject the swag, and feel even bigger!

About Jason Sattler

I am a grown man who calls himself LOLGOP. My apologies.

If you know me, it’s almost certainly by that name or because we went to Hebrew School together. But that ain’t no matter. I started calling myself this ridiculous name just before 2010, when the Tea Party exploited the online tools progressives had built to sell a reactionary agenda for the soul benefit of a few billionaires. 

This would turn out to be a familiar pattern.

Before that, I was a high school kid who dove hard into politics, helping run two campaigns and joining the Democratic Party of California Central Committee. After I graduated high school, I taught Language Arts at a public high school in Los Angeles for two three-year stints, interrupted by a year working as a “webmaster”—forgive me, it was 2000—for a nuclear disarmament non-profit.

I also wrote copy for the uncool/legal version of Napster, got an MFA, and helped build up the social media of a Finnish cybersecurity company. I even got to help with some early research into the misuses of generative AI.

In my spare time, my slight online notoriety allowed me to indulge my passion for writing columns that don’t really belong in newspapers. During the 2012 election, I became an executive editor of a left-leaning news site and then a columnist at USA TODAY for about five years.

At the beginning of 2024, I lost my gigs. Knowing that the next 10 or so months would largely determine the fate of my country and planet, I hired myself to work for democracy. We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and spread the word about actions everyone could take. But it didn’t work out. You know what happened.

Since the election, I’ve mourned and cursed the stars as this newsletter slowly took shape—a huge thanks to everyone who jumped in to support me early. I owe you! 

I’ve also been producing Andrea Pitzer’s NEXT COMES WHAT, which I say is the best podcast about fighting Trumpism, and contributing to Lakoff and Duran’s Framelab, analyzing how best to frame powerful progressive messages. 

For me, my family and my country, I feel doomed to do my best to look back and say, “I did all I could to try to prevent the worst and bring out the best.”

And suddenly, thanks to Erica Chenoweth, my answer was anger and hope.

I am an anger and hope machine. They’re the renewable energy that fires THE FARCE.

What's Next? History Repeats as Farce.

THE FARCE will publish at least five times a week, with two posts sent as emails, including one summary of what you missed. 

If this works, I have big dreams—which include a podcast/gameshow called “Ask Me Nothing,” a progressive Roku channel, and a digital platform that connects people to the best of progressive voices without signing them up for a million emails.

But first, the goal is to make THE FARCE a service worthy of your investment. And to keep you angry, and, hopefully, hopeful.