Diarrhea Lettuce: Building a Culture of Resistance One Poop Joke at a Time
This essay originally appeared on The Politics Chicks' Substack, where I was invited to contribute a guest column on the topic of my choice. So of course I decided to write about diarrhea lettuce. Many thanks to the Chicks for the invitation, and for allowing me to include the essay here as well.
As I am sitting here writing this essay on a beautiful midsummer’s day in late July 2026, there is absolutely nothing funny about the state of our union.
Thanks to Donald Trump and his Republican bootlickers, America is literally burning down: our Constitution, our economy, and a significant portion of our natural landscapes are all on fire at the moment. Here in Minnesota, we spent the winter fighting the domestic terrorists known as ICE as they invaded our communities and kidnapped and murdered our neighbors. Now that it’s summer, we are watching the Boundary Waters burn and checking our air quality apps to see if it’s safe to breathe when we walk the dog.
And it’s not just Minnesota. ICE is busy kidnapping and murdering citizens of many other states–outrages which barely make headlines in our Vichy media. It’s very difficult to keep track of the atrocities because the hits just keep on coming: missing Senators (he’s definitely dead, folks), garbage SCOTUS decisions, an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite that has led to the charming “diarrhea lettuce” discourse, and continued electoral fuckery by a Republican party that is very aware that the only way it can stay in power is to cheat.
None of this is funny. None of it.
Except for the diarrhea lettuce discourse, which is hilarious.
The first time I saw the term “diarrhea lettuce” on social media I laughed so hard I woke up the dog. First of all, the word diarrhea is just funny, and not only because poop jokes naturally awaken the junior high lunch table in all of us. Why is it spelled that way? That renegade “h” is utterly confounding, and the double-r is ridiculous. Do not even get me started on the British spelling: “diarrhoea” is a hate crime, what with those three fucking vowels right in a row. Add to that the fact that it is now the fruits and vegetables that are poisoning us and you have a perfect storm of explosive diarrhea and fits of the giggles. There were a couple of days when my social media feeds were nothing but diarrhea lettuce jokes, and I cackled at every single one of them, including my own:
Obviously it goes without saying that the outbreak itself is not funny. We are now in the midst of one of the largest recorded Cyclospora outbreaks ever recorded in the US, with thousands of illnesses reported across dozens of states and more than 140 hospitalizations to date. Cyclospora outbreaks happen every year, but the current outbreak’s scale and complexity are largely unprecedented.
What is also unprecedented is the context for this outbreak. The federal agencies that would normally be front and center in managing the outbreak, especially the Centers for Disease Control and the Food & Drug Administration, have been decimated and declawed by the Trump administration. Noted lunatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our erstwhile Secretary of Health and Human Services, took a break from chugging raw milk and calling fluoride “industrial waste” to lie to the media about how the outbreak was “under control”. This was despite the fact the FDA was still investigating, a key lab result had just been shown to be a false positive, and former CDC officials were pointing out that cuts to parasite surveillance programs likely made it harder to detect and track the unusually large outbreak
And this is where the importance of all those diarrhea lettuce jokes becomes paramount. As Oscar Wilde famously noted, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
My own relationship to political humor begins with my parents, who are die-hard old-school Chicago Democrats with a finely-honed sense of the absurd. The only politician they hate more than Trump is Reagan; the only politician they hated more than Reagan was Nixon. I have been trying to steal my mom’s Watergate-era DICK NIXON BEFORE HE DICKS US t-shirt for decades; she has passed down to me my grandmother’s engagement ring and the family silver, but will not hand over that t-shirt.
My earliest political memory is the election watch party my parents hosted in November 1980, and my father telling 10-year-old me that Reagan’s victory that night was the worst thing to happen to America since Herbert Hoover (a really good line, and also, in retrospect, the absolute truth). We had decorated the living room with red, white, and blue streamers for the party, and when we were cleaning up a bit of them got stuck on one of the light fixtures. My mother looked up at the bit of crepe waving gently above us and said grimly, “that is staying up there until a Democrat is back in the White House.” Twelve years later, when Bill Clinton was elected, my parents clapped and cheered and I almost fell off the ladder from a fit of the giggles as I pulled the dusty, moldy Reagan Streamers down.
Fast forward twenty-five years or so. It’s 2016 and Trump has just been elected and it feels like the world is falling apart. Desperate for an outlet for my rage and confusion and fear, I turn to Twitter. I find millions of likeminded people, but the cacophony initially terrifies me. The barrage of thoughts and ideas and opinions is both overwhelming and exhilarating. So many people to follow, so many arguments to observe, so many inside jokes and lingo and rules of engagement that I don’t yet understand. For the first few months, I lurk on the outskirts and observe the proceedings. In particular, I watch for the women, and what I find is women who are absolutely fucking unhinged and hilarious, who don’t give a shit, who aren’t afraid, who clap back at a neverending series of men who try and fail to shut them up. The women I love the most are the ones who wield sarcasm and smarts like a scythe, cutting through the bullshit in 140 characters or less. I watch and I learn.
Tentatively, I start to make jokes of my own. People start to laugh and follow me, including some of the unhinged, hilarious, scythe-wielding women. I gain confidence in addition to followers. I become known for a series of running gags and catchphrases, which follow me across social media as Twitter collapses in on itself like the house at the end of Poltergeist and the world continues to burn. People on social media start replying to my jokes with things like “I would not be able to get through this without your humor.”
I realize that I, too, will not be able to get through this without my humor.
Of all the things the Trump administration has taken from us over the last ten years, one of the most diabolical is a shared understanding of the truth.
I’m supposed to keep this essay to 1800 words max, so a full accounting of the lies spouted by Donald Trump as President, or as a candidate, or as a reality-show host, or as a famously inept, dishonest, racist businessman, or as a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and Epstein Island patron, is both impossible and unnecessary. Suffice it to say that there were a fuckton of lies told during his first term, and when he returned to the gig in 2025 he started right up again.
And this time it’s worse because the few Republicans who held on to any shred of decency in that first term are now long gone. Everyone around Trump 2.0 is a goddamn liar too, even the ones that are probably dead. In the midst of the Diarrhea Lettuce discourse we also got the “where the hell is Mitch McConnell?” discourse–another fertile ground for jokes that are both hilarious and not in the least bit funny. In the swirl around McConnell’s disappearance and the competing narratives about what to do about it is the core offense: the brazen, egregious, absolutely shameless lying on the part of the Republicans. The clear denial of what is right in front of our eyes.
The jokes write themselves as easily as Ai produced that ridiculous photo of “Mitch” in the “hospital”--and this is not to be taken lightly in times such as these. Humor is one of the most effective defenses against this brand of lie because a joke’s absurdity is the counterargument to the absurdity that bad actors try to disguise as truth. A joke reveals the disconnect between what is real and what is pretend, and it gives us a bit of hope in the process because what is more hopeful than sharing a laugh with your fellow travelers through hell?
A joke is a sharp political tool; it can slice open the belly of power and expose the metastasizing tumor of hypocrisy inside. But here’s the thing: humor cannot actually remove the tumor. It would be a mistake to frame political humor as political action. Humor in and of itself is not activism, but it can be a fundamentally important source of the fuel that powers it.
There is real live actual scholarship that supports this idea. The role of humor in political resistance has been the subject for an increasing number of social scientists in the last few decades. One of the most interesting is the work of Majken Jul Sørensen, a Danish sociologist whose research focuses on nonviolent resistance, social movements, and the role of humor in political activism. Her 2016 book Humour in Political Activism is an exploration of humor as creative nonviolent resistance–not a substitute for action, but one of the ways political movements can inspire, sustain, and energize people to act. If you are interested but not interested enough to read an entire academic text, I would highly recommend this 2008 article by Sørensen, “Humor as a Serious Strategy of Nonviolent Resistance to Oppression,” which includes the following observation:
“The importance of humor as a way of resisting oppression should not be exaggerated, but humor does have a powerful potential in facilitating outreach and mobilization, a culture of resistance and turning oppression upside down…Because of its irrationality, humor has an ability to affect relationships in surprising and unpredictable ways and undermine traditional sources of power, such as the police and the military, which are firmly based in rationality.”
I was reminded of Sørensen’s quote during the ICE occupation of Minnesota this past winter. As Trump’s Temu Gestapo marched through our streets, snatching workers from job sites and parents from school pickup lines and shooting people in broad daylight, Minnesotans organized and patrolled and witnessed and reported and screamed and pushed back, but it never seemed like enough.
One Saturday in early February 2026 I posted a joke on Threads about making a Costco run that weekend. My plan was to buy stuff for a supply drive sponsored by a local coffee shop; the supplies would be delivered to families in St. Paul who were terrified to leave their homes because of ICE. People laughed at my joke but then also started asking if they could contribute to my shopping trip, and without giving it too much thought I said “sure” and posted my personal Venmo. I figured another hundred bucks for much-needed sanitary pads and laundry detergent and baby wipes would be great.
Within an hour, I had almost $1000 in my Venmo. By the time I got to Costco, it was almost $2000. Twenty-four hours later, it was almost $4000 and I had to tell people to stop Venmoing me because there’s no way I could spend that much money at Costco and still fit everything in my car. I started posting links to local community organizations in the Twin Cities who were active in the fight against ICE, and people started reporting their donations to those organizations. It was astonishing, and gratifying, and it reminded me that nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.
And if a joke can provide the inspiration for that something, then bring on the diarrhea lettuce, baby.
