Welcome to November, a month of vivid landscapes and reflective moments. As we approach Veterans Day, our thoughts naturally turn to the diverse and nuanced experiences of veterans.
This is a time not only for gratitude but also for deeper understanding. An organization called Veterans for All Voters reminds us to extend our recognition beyond a simple “thank you.”
The Veterans Day Message was written by Navy veterans Todd Connor and Eric Bronner of Veterans for All Voters. Their words resonate deeply and underscore the importance of active, meaningful engagement.
The Message
With Veterans Day upon us, it’s appropriate to thank military veterans and their family members for their service. There is something else we can do, though, and that is to ask them to continue serving by working to shore up our fragile republican democracy. To really honor veterans, and to allow them to continue to serve us as civilians, we need to grant them full access to civic life.
This begins, most importantly, with voting — where in 2020, almost 26 million independent Americans, including hundreds of thousands of military veterans, were barred by state election laws from participating in the presidential preference primaries. This unnecessary structural defect means that many Active Duty independent voters and veterans can’t even vote for their next Commander in Chief.
The two of us are proud Navy veterans. We learned and grew so much during our time of service. We are grateful for this country, our fellow citizens, and the opportunity to serve. Because we love this country so much, we have decided — as many veterans do — to continue serving. In our case, we are building and mobilizing a community of fellow military veterans to advocate for healthy electoral competition that will, in turn, make our politics less toxic.
Our organization, Veterans for All Voters, is fighting to let all voters — including over 50% of military voters who are independent (nonpartisan/unaffiliated) — fully participate in their taxpayer-funded public elections. Through open and competitive elections, we can make our government more responsible and politicians more accountable to all of us.
So, today, if you would like to thank one of our more than 285 veteran leaders in 47 states for their service, please consider one of the following actions:
- Join the nonpartisan reform movement and advocate for structural reforms that allow all eligible voters to fully participate in elections.
- Introduce a veteran or anyone who is “military-connected” to Veterans for All Voters.
- Donate to our nonpartisan nonprofit that is making a tremendous impact around the country and giving dozens of military veterans a new mission post-service.
We are military veterans from all walks of life, and every part of the political spectrum, banding together to make politics less toxic and our Republic more representative through fully open, nonpartisan, public elections. Simply put, we are fighting to #LetAllVotersVote in every single public election.
Please consider going beyond “thank you” this Veterans Day, and join or support the independent reform movement that we are building. Onward!
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.