Today, The Fulcrum is introducing a new biweekly advice column entitled, "Ask Joe."
In the divided political and social worlds we live in, tensions are often high in the workplace, in online conversations, at family gatherings, and even amongst friends.
Whether they rise to conflict, or fester beneath the surface, these tensions can impact you and everyone you know.
The "Ask Joe" column is dedicated to exploring the best ways to transform tensions and bridge divides. Our resident advice columnist, conflict resolution specialist, author, and Fierce Civility Project founder Joe Weston is here to answer your questions in order to resolve tension, polarization, or conflict.
To Ask Joe, please submit questions to: AskJoe@Fulcrum.us.
Let's kick things off with a question about trust in institutions:
Dear Joe,
I have friends who distrust the media, the government and corporations. But for some reason, they believe videos on YouTube or from other individuals and many conspiracy theories. These friends are super smart. Like, genius level IQ. And the depth of research they do far exceeds the time I have to examine and apply my own reasoning.
I have more trust in the media and government, less in corporations. So I believe more of what I hear in my day-to-day life, and spend a lot less time online. How can we discuss current affairs and such, without me feeling stupid and judging them as crazy?
Frustrated and Confused
Hello Frustrated and Confused,
I often hear this from people who are struggling with how to civilly exchange ideas with friends and loved ones. Though there are no quick fixes, certain approaches can help you stay in alignment with your values and, at the same time, find common ground.
Solutions offered by the Fierce Civility approach are simple and, albeit often times challenging to put into practice, they are effective. This pathway is designed to pivot you out of the rigidity that is created from spiraling in the realm of ideas, opinions, judgement, statistics and data, as well as pain, fear and trauma, and back to common-sense, heart-centered shifts in the dynamic.
So, you ask, "How can we discuss current affairs and such…?" Your wording already primes you for the solution. The first pivot is to avoid getting caught up in what you are discussing, and focus more on the how. If you feel that you can never win these conversations with intelligent friends, and that you end up feeling stupid and perceive them as crazy, then shift your focus. Ask yourself, which is more important to you: being right, or preserving the health and integrity of the relationship?
If the relationship is the priority, then come from your heart when speaking, and appeal to their hearts. Take care to help each other stay in your "best selves" and the heart connection that transcends current issues. You may realize something you have in common: You are both trying to navigate the current volatility and anxiety. You may also discover that, at a core level, you are both desiring to alleviate a sense of fear and fulfill a need for safety. From this shared space, recognition, healing and reconciliation can happen.
You may also want to consider how your judgment ("I'm stupid, they're crazy") is getting in the way of your authentic connection with this person whom you care about. Consider the Fierce Civility concept: My truth ≠ the truth. To illustrate: Think back to your eighth birthday. How much of that day can you remember (if at all)? If you asked those who were present on that day what they remember, would they recall the same facts as you? Who's right? Ultimately, the gift of this concept is that we get closest to the truth of any situation when we combine what each one of us remembers and how each of us sees it! Doing this requires that we listen and respond in an open, curious way.
Your situation is a classic example of the polarizing habit that we all have: the need to be right, and, therefore, deciding that others who see things differently must be wrong. When we do this, we forget that the average person has the capacity to perceive and retain only a portion of the data coming at them at any given time. This only becomes a problem when we hold the belief that the portion of what we perceive, believe or retain is the whole story.
What if you both have important information that, when combined, gives a fuller understanding of the situation? What questions would take you deeper into connection, trust, safety and a willingness to hear the other person's viewpoint? What if this combined knowledge could alleviate some of the anxiety and fear of our time for all of us, not exacerbate it?
Consider shifting the emphasis of your inquiry. Instead of focusing on why they are so trusting of social media, get more curious about what has caused them to develop a distrust of the news media, government and corporations. That's a far richer conversation that can lead to them feeling heard and understood; it may also lead you to consider new data. As well, do some of your own internal investigation: Why are you satisfied with what the news media and government tell you? Are you bearing in mind that, like all humans, they can only present a portion of the truth? This will result in an empowered vulnerability and humility that can rekindle the best in both you and your friends, and prevent further disconnection.
These pivots require courage, patience and compassion – for yourself and your friends. As we shift our focus away from the news media and online platforms, and back to one another, we rediscover that the power of the human spirit resides in our capacity to connect authentically, and to do the messy work of human relationships, no matter how smart, crazy or stupid we may be.
Trust your heart,
Joe
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.