How Trump Made Me A Quaker: Faithful Resistance with Daniel Hunter

Download the transcript and discussion questions.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: 

1. The Quaker belief that there is “that of God within every person” shapes Daniel’s approach to how he approaches even his “enemies”, focusing on helping everyone “find that greater wisdom, that greater voice” rather than wanting them to suffer. How does this perspective challenge typical approaches to political opposition? What would it look like to organize from this belief?
2. Daniel emphasizes the importance of staying grounded while being confrontational, noting that “we don’t have an obligation to be effective—we have an obligation to follow what Spirit tells us to do.” How do you balance the urgency of responding to injustice with the need for spiritual grounding and sustainable action? What does faithful resistance look like in your own life?
3. Daniel describes four phases of anti-authoritarian struggle: shock, slow down, stop, and win. He believes we’re currently in phase two—slowing things down. What examples do you see of this “slowing down” happening in your community? How might we better coordinate these efforts to move toward phase three?

Part 1: The Accidental Quaker 

Zack Jackson

In times of political upheaval, when institutions feel unreliable and the future uncertain, how do we find our footing? How do we resist authoritarianism without becoming what we oppose? 

I’m Zack Jackson and today on the podcast, we’re featuring an interview with Jon Watts and Daniel Hunter. Daniel discovered his answer in an unexpected place. As director of “Choose Democracy” and a seasoned organizer, Daniel has spent decades fighting for social change, but it wasn’t until Trump’s election that he found himself claiming an identity that he’d been circling for years, that of a Quaker. 

In our conversation, you’ll hear how 400 year old Quaker principles are providing a roadmap for modern resistance, why Daniel believes we’re witnessing massive acts of civil disobedience that are going largely unnoticed, and how spiritual grounding can fuel sustained political action without burning us out. 

This is a conversation about finding strength in uncertainty, courage in community and hope in the midst of chaos. It’s a conversation that is vital, timely and filled with practical resources for resistance. Speaking of practical resources, we called up George Lakey to answer a listener question about what to do when protests turn violent. So make sure to stick around to the end to hear his suggestions. And now, without further ado, let’s get into our conversation with Daniel Hunter. 

[Music]

Jon Watts

Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. I wonder if we could start by telling us a little bit about your spiritual journey and how you found your way into Quakerism?

Daniel Hunter 

Well, I hate the phrase, but it would be somewhat appropriate to say that Trump made me Quaker. I’ve been next to friends for quite some time. So I’ve been a friend of friends, or, you know, I’m a lowercase f friend. Joked that way for quite some time as someone who I went to Earlham college, a Quaker school. I worked at training for change, a Quaker organization led by George Lakey. I have attended meetings periodically, and often found them blissful and occasionally overly quiet, as someone who grew up in the black Baptist Church. After Trump won, there’s a moment where I was being asked by a reporter, they asked me, with great passion, a kind of question like, “how do we make it through? Like, how will we survive these times?” And there was kind of both, not just them, but not just as a reporter, but like, personally, like, how do we and so, you know, we talked for a while, and eventually they asked a question that surprised me, which was some variant of, “how do you hope that Trump supporters get their comeuppance in the time ahead? How do you hope that they suffer out of this, learn the error of their way?” Some version of that, and I remember my media training, which is, don’t answer a tough framing like that, don’t bite. 

And so I’ve tried to back up in my mind of, what do I really want to say here, what’s the most important true thing? And I slipped pretty far into the what’s the most true thing in the moment. And so I answered, you know, the way you’ve probably had that experience where you’ve talked faster than your mind, your mind is processed. And I said, “Look, I’m Quaker. What that means that I believe there’s that of God within every person. And so what needs to happen in the time ahead is each person needs to get greater access to the inner divine, to the spirit that moves within all things. And that’s what needs to happen in these times ahead.” 

So later, I laughed about it with my wife, hahaha, that’s so funny. I must be really tired, because that’s not how I have identified. And the next day, I had another interview with another reporter, and the same set of questions came up another version of like, “how do you hope people suffer?” And so I was like, well, I won’t answer as flippantly, I’ll find something that’s more more me. I won’t answer the way I did last time. And so I was like, “Okay, what’s most true? So I took a pause and Okay, well, look, Quaker, what that means is I believe there’s out of God within every person and on.” So it all felt right. And so that would be my moment of being convicted, convinced, convinced, as it were, but, but I feel kind of exposed as a Quaker who hadn’t anticipated that way.

Part 2: Quaker Wisdom for Authoritarian Times

Jon Watts 

So given all that, what wisdom do you think Quakerism offers us in this moment? 

Daniel Hunter 

Well, the piece that I don’t know what it offers to others, I know what it offers to me. What it offers to me is, well, I’ll back up this way, which is, I think we’re entering in a moment which Trump is moving as an authoritarian. And there is something in the atmosphere. I’ve been meeting with a group of spiritual folks who are all kind of from different philosophies of life, but all exploring what is going, what is up with these moments, what is up in this times. And one of the things that we did at one moment was ask ourselves, what are all the all of the things that we are reducing trust in during these times, and we began listing things that people and ourselves and others are have reduced trust in reduced trust in media, reduced trust in mainstream institutions, government institutions are less reliable, less trust in whether or not we’re seeing things that are true online, whether or not people have real information. And we just began listing the number of things we’re in a moment and which reduce trust in the weather, and the uncertainty that we’ve, you know, come with about what weather patterns will be like, you know, due to climate change. 

And there’s a lot of very large reasons to trust things less, and that’s an attribute of these times. And so in comes an authoritarian who says, “Trust me, because I will give you certainty in a time of uncertainty, the whole system is broken because there are immigrants who are in this country who are ruining it for everyone. If we got rid of them, we’d be fine”, and that provides us a shortcut, emotionally, mentally, for people who are trying to deal with the amount of uncertainty and the amount of distrust, focus it in on on one thing a different option is to embrace, hold on to a level of uncertainty. But in order to do that, you have to have some things that steady you. And so I think one thing that Quakerism offers is a kind of a steadiness, a faith in a being larger than yourself, that is guiding, that is providing wisdom, is offering wisdom in these moments, but it also provides a way that navigates through. For me, a way to not turn into my opponent, to not become destructive. 

And just today, actually, we saw someone who was so frustrated, who they shot to Israeli folks at a museum, who gathered at a museum and they were frustrated by this incredible genocide that’s happening in Gaza, and the frustration I can join with and the acts of violence as a way of trying to resolve are abhorrent, and that that Quaker understanding of abhorrence to violence is steadying the belief that everyone has that of the divine within them, keeps me from that kind of action, because instead, I’m interested in, how do I tap that of God within every person? How do we help everybody find that greater wisdom, that greater voice? And that’s a deep spiritual task that does not allow the kind of shortcuts that violence suggests, or the kind of shortcuts that an authoritarian suggests, and so It keeps us on a particular kind of path. But I think that there’s an interesting thing happening in these times, which is during such moments of rupture that we’re experiencing. It’s not just a rupture of politics, it’s not merely a rupture of economic order. There’s a rupture of spirit, a rupture of soul. There’s a real moment when people are searching for answers, and people are looking for deeper understandings of who they are, where they fit, who their community is, what their people are. And I hear it across the board. Are organizers who I talk with, who are saying, “I think I need God”, who have been atheists their whole lives, or folks who I know, I mean, there’s an elder Quaker who said, “I really need to deepen my practice to stay stable in these times.” So I think that’s part of this moment that we’re in. So that was my way of stabilizing, so holding on to a tradition that I’ve been next to, but haven’t held as my own, that I’m now holding as my own.

Jon Watts

So how are you working this all out in practice? What does resistance actually look like right now? 

Daniel Hunter 

So right now, one of the things that we’ve been teaching people is some traditional non violence theory. We’ve been teaching people that power does not reside just alone in the people who are so called “power holders”, or the elites, or people on the top of the chart, of the organizational chart, but in people who do things for living in labor, in the work. Gene Sharp, I think, said it succinctly. He said, look, a ruler by themselves does not, they do not milk cows, they do not build roads, they do not create postage stamps. They do not deliver packages. They do not, they don’t do those things. People do them. And so if people refuse to consent, then unjust rulers cannot continue to rule. 

But there’s a sort of Quaker belief in there that one could assert, at least. I don’t typically frame it this way, but it can be framed this way, which is each person has worth and they also have a role in society that they can play, and by adjusting their role, they can make a difference in how things happen. So what’s this look like? So well, I’ll give one example of non cooperation in these times, which largely went unnoticed despite its large numbers. 

So Elon Musk, at one point, ordered everybody in the federal workforce, about 2 million plus people, to report to him effectively through the OMB and give a five line email about what they were up to. And immediately after this email went out, federal workers began organizing on signal chats. I happened to be next to some of them as they were chatting with each other and saying, we don’t, we don’t have to do this. Actually, he’s not a boss. We don’t know. We’re not going to comply with this thing. And so they began saying to each other, don’t do this. Don’t send an email back that began organizing within unions that then followed, where even some of the sycophants and Donald Trump’s crew so Patel and Rubio and others, I think, as they were seeing that their workers were not going to comply, began just making an official policy so telling the FBI, do not, you don’t have to reply to this email and on and on. 

And it was only, by the way, at that point that mainstream media really picked up the story and began telling the story of, Oh, see, there’s dissension in the ranks. But the story begins with regular individuals, regular federal workers, bureaucrats, who are being brave and who are not cooperating. In the end, some 1.3 million people or so defied the memo from the OMB, which makes it on par with one of the largest acts of non cooperation that’s happened in US history, uh, isn’t marked as such. Hasn’t been held up in that way, but it’s an example of the resistance that’s been up and happening. 

Another example of that from Sarah Inama, who’s a teacher in Idaho, who was told, because of the DEI policy, she was told that she wasn’t allowed to have a sign that says everyone is welcome in her school, and was threatened to be fired for doing it. And she said, “Fire me. It will stay up. Everyone is welcome. That’s a fact in my classroom”, and the community rallied around her T shirts with “everyone is welcome” began. They’ve sold out in the community, and it became a national story. And so these moments of resistance that we see can then echo out, and that gives more freedom for more teachers to stick up for dei across the country. 

So a lot of what I’ve been doing has been storytelling, because actually, our media landscape has been so poor at telling these stories of non cooperation that’s been happening. This is very important. It’s very important that we mark our heroes and heroines who are doing this. It’s very important that we don’t just notice the shock and the fear and the. Congratulations. Stories, those are important to take note of, and important, but actually the motion that we need is to identify the areas that are growing and to continue supporting those, swapping those stories as often as possible, because that courage begets courage. And so when you see people being courageous and doing courageous things, and we then need to create systems that begin moving towards mass larger scales, not of non cooperation. And that is how authoritarians are destabilized and typically taken out through civil resistance.

Jon Watts

Daniel’s been tracking something remarkable, acts of resistance happening right under our noses that are barely making headlines. When we return from the break, we’ll explore what Daniel calls the four phases of anti authoritarian struggle and why he believes that we’re currently in phase two. Don’t go anywhere. This is where things get real, practical. 

Midroll Ad

Jon Watts

Friends, mark your calendars! World Quaker Day is coming up on Sunday, October 5th, 2025.

This year’s theme is “Love Your Neighbor,” and the Friends World Committee for Consultation has created some wonderful resources to help you and your Meeting engage with this powerful message.

Planning an event? You can download special posters from the FWCC website to help you easily share the details with your local community. There are even coloring sheets for children. And to celebrate our international family, you can find a poster that helps us all learn to say “Love Your Neighbor” in eleven different languages.

Feeling musical? The website features songs from the World Quaker Songbook related to the theme, with links so you can listen and learn them ahead of time. Sing along and create some literal global harmony!

For deeper reflection, explore prompts and a helpful booklet delving into the many biblical passages about loving your neighbor. Plus, you can find recent writings from Friends, offering insights on the theme and how it speaks to our world today.

These resources are all waiting for you! To find them and help celebrate World Quaker Day on October 5th, visit FWCC.world/worldquakerday. That’s FWCC.world/worldquakerday

Part 3: Building Networks and Celebrating Resistance

Jon Watts

Before the break, we heard Daniel Hunter explain how his unexpected spiritual awakening as a Quaker informs his approach to resistance. Now let’s dive into the concrete examples of civil disobedience that he’s documenting, acts of courage that are happening all around us, often without recognition. These stories matter, because, as Daniel puts it, Courage begets courage, and right now, we need all the courage we can get.

Daniel Hunter 

So we’re just trying to help people unstick themselves, because there really are, basically, you know, there’s, there are four phases in terms of anti authoritarian struggle. Number one is shock. People have experienced that. Number two is you got to slow it down. And that’s a tough phase, because it’s not stopping everything. It’s not but the slowing down is very, very important, because you have to slow it down before you can stop it. So go through some shock, slow it down, stop it and then actually win, win things achievements on the other side to make sure you don’t get into that situation again.

Jon Watts

I get the feeling listening to those around me that people are generally tired. So what does resilience look like in this time? How can we be proactive and not just reactive?

Daniel Hunter 

One option is to steel ourselves to be ready to ignore and to defy orders that come through, so that when we’re told to do things that we know to be wrong, that we say, No, that’s wrong. I want to do it. And that’s more instinctual. I think a second one that might be a little bit easier and straightforward is to identify ourselves ahead of time, what are the communities we would need to be in that we’re not already in? So one of the things I’ve been appreciating watching has been universities have been organizing defense compacts modeled after like NATO Article Five, where, if they come after one of us, they come after all of us as a way of saying we’re in this together so we can connect with them, and in an explicit way, show. Solidarity. Solidarity isn’t a belief. Solidarity is an action. So community building is a meaningful intervention, not just an act of solidarity, but the spaces where people get to share these, these deeper harborings that are inside of ourselves. 

And so here I lean on techniques that are not necessarily my forte, but the strategies of community building, of art, of bringing people together through music and dance, these things are very important in these times to help rebuild and strengthen community and build resilience. And in fact, lots of authoritarian regimes have been taken down by groups who often do art in public, and then that becomes part of what they do. So thinking about, since I’ve just mentioned South Africa, thinking about how much South African music and funerals were used as organizing opportunities. And so here, I think just returning to part of the resilience is also building for yourself some community building for yourself some spaces that are protected offline, spaces that are protected from infiltration or feeling like you’re kind of the constant bombardment. So for me, it’s been having this group of people who we just get together, we talk about what is going on in these times that becomes a protected space for me, where I get to just show up as my full self and fall apart and do all the various things that are important in terms of my emotional journey that otherwise I might not have that space for you.

Daniel Hunter 

And then the last thing I’d say in terms of resilience is there’s nothing like action. Being in motion feels good on the body, but just from a pure I mean, if you’re just analyzing from an embodied experience, someone who’s standing up and doing something, you’re going to feel better than if you’re not doing something. And so questions of effectiveness, I believe in, I believe in strategy. I believe in but I believe in just getting in some motion. And so for folks who haven’t yet had a chance to show up at a march join a Tesla takedown action. These are great moments to have embodied experiences. Not just sign a petition that’s, you know, click on a keyboard, but have an embodied experience of being with other people who are doing some protests together, some resistance actions together, some organizing or stuffing, you know, flyers, knocking on doors. You know, pick your poison here but getting in motion will help with resilience.

Part 4: Creating a Better Tomorrow

Jon Watts 

Daniel, I really appreciate your energy and your encouragement. I’m reminded of the early Quakers in the 17th century, who, of course, went through their own crazy political tumult. There was a civil war in England, and they executed the king, and there was a lot of question marks on the future.

And I often look back to them as an example of a group of people who could bring a vision for a better world during a time of chaos. Early Quakers were imagining a better world, even when everyone around them was imagining a worse world. And so I wonder, do you do you see a scenario where we come through the current troubles and end up with a society that’s more whole and more just?

Daniel Hunter 

I hope so. I think there are two aspects of sort of authoritarian struggles, in terms of, like, sort of creating the broad front to kind of fight it, which is, one is the negative coalition which is stopping bad things, and that, in some ways, is a little bit of the easier one to build. Here are the things that we oppose. So then there has to be a positive Coalition, a group that has vision for how do we get out of this mess? I’m not sure where it comes from. At the moment, it’s not that’s not a place where I feel like we’ve clearly got it, we’ve got it covered. We’re figuring that out. I think that’s an area we need to work on. I think we need more articulators of what is the kind of society that we want to have, what are the pieces that we need to put into place? What are the essential ones of that? 

I think broadly, democracy still can resonate as a thing, but so few of us have ever lived or experienced it. The only thing I’ve ever been asked to do by my government has been to vote, barely that. So that’s not actually much of a democracy. Democracy is a vision of representation and participation, and in fact, my government tends to repress people who involve themselves in participation. So. Yeah, and I’ve been inspired by, if folks have tracked or haven’t heard of the fight in South Korea, I think has been really meaningful, where they experienced a democratic backslide and and fought back heavily. And actually, years ago, they had a democratic backslide that did not advance their democracy, and so it backslid again. And so if we don’t solve the issues that got us in this place in the first, you know, first round, we will return here again, and we’ll return here again until we do so. I don’t know what that looks like in terms of the broad stroke of history, but I, my mom’s a historian and and I have a full belief that if we don’t, whatever problems we don’t solve, we’ll get a second shot at if we’re, if we’re alive to work it out. So it’s on On Us. It’s On Us. 

Jon Watts 

You wrote an article that went viral right after the election, and the title was “10 Ways to be Prepared and Grounded Now that Trump Has Won.” 

It leapt out at me at the time as being different from what other people were writing, I think just because of one word: grounded. I think I hear that word mostly in Quaker circles, so I was surprised to see it on a viral article about current events, and really grateful.

You know, I think of Quakerism as an opportunity for us to sort of dip our bucket back into a deep well, what Thomas Kelly would call the Eternal. You know, something deeper and more true than the current tumult and fear. 

And so that makes me wonder what you’re doing yourself to stay grounded, even as you’re thinking about strategies for confrontation? 

Daniel Hunter 

One thing that really helps me is having relationships and connection to people in other parts of the globe. And it’s been really helpful to chat with my friend in Columbia, who’s experienced a war through her entire lifetime. And I think a second thing is what I keep being reminded from the same woman in Columbia, she was recently on a rant about how users are always trying to talk about, are we winning? And she’s like, all these Americans, US Americans, they keep asking me, like, “Are we are we winning? Are we losing? How badly are we losing? Like, are we up? Are we down?” And she was just really reminding people, it isn’t that that isn’t really how life is. Life is bad things and good things. Life is mess and cleanliness. Life is mushy and and rather than kind of cleaning it up by just like centralizing it to one thing, it is all of those things and holding that, and that’s a practice that I think us Americans have gotten less good at. So having some connections externally has been very helpful to me. So that’s like one piece. 

And even if I didn’t have personal relationships, reading about other people’s struggles and reading about movements reminds me this isn’t wholly unique. We didn’t, we didn’t have a massive failure in the US that’s completely unique to every place and that releases me a little bit from feeling like we’ve just, we’ve we’ve fully failed on the left, and I look around and notice it’s a hard time. We have big issues on climate change. We have big issues on wealth and equality. Of big issues on AI. We have big issues that no one has clean answers for. But we don’t have an obligation to be effective. We have an obligation to follow what Spirit tells us to do. And so let’s find our role, and let’s, let’s go, be faithful.

Jon Watts

Thank you for listening, and thank you to our guest, Daniel Hunter. You can find out more about his work through the link in our show notes. Go to Quakerpodcast.com for discussion questions and a transcript of this episode, as well as a place to continue this discussion with like minded folks. This episode was edited and produced by Zack Jackson, with help from me, Jon Watts. I also wrote and produced the music. 

Thee Quaker podcast is a part of Thee Quaker project. We are a non profit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform in the 21st Century. If you like what we’re up to, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can go to Quakerpodcast.com and click support in the top right menu. Takes less than five minutes, and we really appreciate it. Thank you, and we’ll see you next week.

George Lakey 

George Lakey here

Zack Jackson

Hey, George. This is Zach from Thee Quaker Podcast.

George Lakey 

I’m not surprised you’re calling at this moment.

Zack Jackson

I should hope not.

George Lakey 

Don’t you love in the middle of all this craziness, some regularity in life?

Zack Jackson

I cherish all the regularity that I can get! Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to jump on a call and answer this quick question from a listener. It seems that you are much more qualified to answer this than us. So this listener sent us an email and said, “Hello, I just listened to two episodes of interviews with George Lakey. They were excellent and encouraging.” I would like to echo that as well. “My meeting is asking what we can do while at a rally or protest, if there is non peaceful action around us, such as turning our backs or sitting down or singing. I’ve been looking for some practical in the moment, actions one can do. I know that if we do not feel safe, we can leave. But what other things can you suggest? I’ve been searching, but have just been finding writings about non violence in general. Thank you for any help.”

George Lakey 

Fortunately, I have an entire chapter in my book, “How we Win” that focuses on exactly this kind of situation. What? What do we do when there’s violence in the mix, and there are a number of things we can do. In fact, it’s great to have half a dozen or so ideas in your head. So in the middle of it, you can decide, well, we’ll try this. And, hmm, that’s not working. Let’s try that. So here are some of the things that you’ll find in chapter 16 in how we win. 

Singing can be remarkably influential in shifting a situation. Nobody expects singing. Singing is amazing, so it’s good in preparing for an action to get a few songs going. That not only helps with preparation, sometimes we have training workshops to get ready for an action and singing is a great way of bringing the group together, getting them on the same page, but also it does familiarize people with a song or two that you can then pull out of the hat if you need it. Another thing that is very helpful is remembering that it’s possible to sit down and again, this is something you can prepare the group with ahead of time. In fact, I know one group that habitually got attacked. This was in France in the days of the Algerian War, when the peace movement in France continually did non violent direct action protests against the Algerian War, and were very often backed by the frisky right wing of France at the time. And they with the slogan that the French developed, they told me, was, when in doubt, sit down. So if you forget everything else, I say, when in doubt, sit down. It just it’s remarkable how much It dramatizes a shift in energy, which then invites the other side to be in consternation and confusion. 

Another thing is to hold hands. That’s easy to do. Some of these things are easy to do together, for example, singing and holding hands. Another thing is to chant a word or two, depending on what the situation is. A handy word to have in mind is peace and to just say that you know, loudly and over and over. Another one is respect. Each of those words. And you’ll think of others too. Are words that are basically signals of, oh, there’s an alternative behavior for you, the violent one to consider. And I’ll just keep reminding of you that, of that by saying respect, another possibility is to pray, and Quakers might especially and religious people might especially like to pray. But I’ve known some people who didn’t think of themselves as religious, but found themselves praying in a tight spot, and the praying might be done silently or even out loud, do not turn your backs when violence shows up in a scene that is, in fact, the opposite thing of what you want to do when you see violence on the edge of your crowd or demonstration or violence coming at you, or something that. That’s a great time to pay attention to it and to do it in an obvious way, such as that, one of the things that I’ve mentioned here so that it comes across to them. 

The ones who want to do violence or want to be threatening, you are paying attention to them. That’s when they need your best attention. And it could be in the form of prayer. It could be in the form of singing, holding hands, whatever, sitting down, and paying attention to them. Those who are want to do violence meets one of their needs, which is, they want your attention at the same time as it’s proactive on your part, rather than being apparently victims and just seeing what they will do, but to take an action, and they perceive it as an action, even you’re bursting into song, they will perceive as an action that responds to them and puts them in a bit of a pickle. Oh, now, what do we do? And that’s what we want. The ones who want to do violence, we want them to perceive us as strong and putting them in a dilemma, rather than the uh oh, we’re scared, which is, of course, their intention. That’s what they want. They want to scare us.

Zack Jackson

Well, again. Thank you so much for taking the time to to be with us, and to our listener, Nina, who sent that question in I hope that is helpful, and for all of you out there as well trying to engage in non violent ways, I cannot recommend enough that you pick up George’s book, how we win. It is so chock full of advice, just like this one. So until next time, thank you for listening.

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