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The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

Walk around Washington, DC, and you might spot murals painted in Sean Dunn’s honor, along with yard signs featuring the DC flag—its usual thick stripes supplanted by clip-art baguettes.

Over the summer, as the Trump administration deployed members of the National Guard and ICE agents to patrol our streets and round up our immigrant neighbors, Dunn went viral for calling the federal law enforcement officers he encountered fascists and for tossing a hoagie—or hero, as the case may be—at one agent’s chest. To locals, the former Department of Justice paralegal’s stunt came across as a slapstick act of resistance in an otherwise unnerving time. To the Trump administration, it was a felony assault.

In the months since Dunn lost his government job and was arrested by a swarm of US marshals armed with........

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