Cherry is a member of the board of Independent Voting and president of the Leaders Network.
May 14 – Ten Black shoppers are shot to death at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket.
May 24 – Nineteen children and two adults, most of them Latino, are gunned down at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Two mass shootings. Ten days apart.
In the nearly 10 years since the Sandy Hook massacre, we have seen 49 people from the LGBTQ community killed in Orlando in 2016; 60 people killed and 411 people wounded, most of them white, at a concert in Las Vegas; and 11 Jewish people killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. The victims are diverse and include every race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation in America.
There are too many more mass shootings to list in this space. All of the mass shootings follow a similar pattern:
- Shock and sadness at the first word of breaking news.
- Live coverage from the media to present the accurate number of casualties to their viewers.
- Calls for our elected officials to take action.
No. 3 never leads to action. Because it can’t. America’s politicians operate in a broken political system that rewards partisanship and punishes collaboration. Republicans running for office in closed Republican primaries can’t be “shamed” into changing their positions on gun safety legislation. In fact, supporting this type of legislation guarantees they will be defeated in a primary challenge.
What about the Democrats? Nearly all of their anti-violence proposals are less about actually saving lives and more about staking out positions that will help them stave off potential challengers in closed primaries.
Neither party wants to break the current political stalemate by opening more primaries, ending partisan gerrymandering, and opening the ballot and debates to independent candidates, which means neither party is seriously committed to ending the barbaric carnage in our stores, schools, places of worship, movie theaters, workplaces or concerts. To quote the late head coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
We are a nation of 350 million diverse people with two political parties who control how we respond – or don’t respond – to our nation’s gun violence, which claims over 20,000 lives a year.
Principled people must get together and collaborate to solve our problems – including our nation’s violence, poverty, the economy and everything else. Let’s begin organizing outside of the limitations and handcuffs of the two-party system and begin ending the political paralysis that leaves more and more Americans in mourning. It is why I am proud to be an independent, specifically a board member of Independent Voting. Whether or not you identify as an independent, take a moment to take our survey.
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.