Garson is legal counsel and chief of staff for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.
A couple of weeks ago, on June 12, I watched Sachi Bajaj announce VoteAmerica as a winner of the 5th American Civic Collaboration Awards. It was the culmination of six months of hard work by the Bridge Alliance’s talented young intern (who was a college freshman when she joined us).
In many ways, Sachi’s work to revive the Civvys (which were last awarded in 2020) were worthy of a Civvy. At the heart of the award is the idea that together we can make a greater impact than we could ever make as individuals. That requires learning from each other and setting aside our egos for the greater good.
Sachi most certainly did that by:
- Following and adapting the template that Caroline Klibanoff of Made By Us created when she ran the Civvys.
- Using all of the Bridge Alliance’s communications tools to solicit a record-breaking number of nominations.
- Bringing the Bridge Alliance team together to winnow the nominees to 17 finalists.
- Recruiting leaders from throughout the democracy movement to choose winners among the finalists.
- Working with the Made By Us team to present the Civvys at the kickoff event for the first ever Civic Season in Atlanta.
Fortunately for the actual nominees, the Civvys can’t win a Civvy. Instead, we were treated to the inspiring stories of VoteAmerica (National category), Voters First Virginia (Local) and Kentucky YMCA Youth Association (Youth), as well as a touching message from Ellen Perry – the wife of Lifetime Achievement Award winner Rob Stein.
At a time when our nation’s future feels less certain than it has in decades, each of these organizations shows us that there is a growing segment of the American public ready and able to take our power back.
And the key word is “our,” as in all of us as Americans.
VoteAmerica is making it easier for every American to be an agent of change by incorporating civic engagement into our everyday lives. Whenever someone checks their credit score, files their taxes, changes their home address, or registers for classes, vital information about voter registration, vote-by-mail, early voting, voter ID, and more can be built directly into the platform’s user experience. More than 4 million Americans used VoteAmerica’s services in 2020 alone.
Voters First Virginia proved that we can make popular voting reforms happen, including in contested states like Virginia. They successfully led bipartisan coalitions that 1) instituted a citizen-led redistricting commission, 2) created a ranked-choice voting pilot, 3) made absentee voting improvements and 4) increased access to party nominating processes. The VFV model is now being used in Colorado and Arizona.
The Kentucky YMCA Youth Association is bringing together young people from throughout the Bluegrass State. The association has impacted tens of thousands of young men and women from nearly all of Kentucky’s 120 counties, and has sent a message by welcoming people of all backgrounds and experiences to its programs. Given the national footprint of the YMCA community, it isn’t hard to envision the team’s approach catching on across the country.
Finally, Rob Stein’s death was mourned throughout our movement. He helped set the tone for the democracy movement, and his positive impact will be felt for generations to come. When we received news of his passing, we knew we had to honor him, which we did with the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award.
As we honor and celebrate these incredible individuals and organizations, it’s important to remember why we’re doing this, and why the Bridge Alliance is a driving force behind two honors programs (the Civvys and the Democracy Awards). These award ceremonies provide roadmaps for success. By broadcasting the winners to a national audience, we are hoping to inspire people across the country to think big and understand that, together, we can help our beloved America better reflect the values and aspirations of we the people.
And so, as I watched Sachi leave the podium to catch a flight back home, I remembered that what we were doing that day wasn’t a vanity project. All of our work at the Bridge Alliance is driven by the idea that Americans can and will take back their power, and that young leaders like Sachi will be at the forefront of that effort in the years and decades ahead. The Civvys provide a piece of the map that they will use to get us there.
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.