Reinhardt is a coach, mystic and writer.
"If you stay in this place out of fear you will not find the landscape that your imagination is yearning for. The effort of the imagination is to turn the boundary into an horizon because there’s no end point for you. The boundary says, ‘''nd no further’. The horizon says, ‘welcome’."-Barry Lopez
Today, the 52nd Earth Day, I wonder what it will take for us to understand that we’re all in this together. That all 7.87 billion of us share this beloved planet, Mother Earth, Gaia, our home.
I’m deeply immersed in reading Anne Baring’s "Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul." I find it a challenging read that is providing me with a better understanding of the long and deep influences that have separated us from revering Nature and one another. A deep and massive shift in our consciousness – individually and collectively – is necessary to move beyond the boundaries and barriers and conflicts that our cultural stories of separation have created and, indeed, continue to create.
As I pause, feeling the enormity of the shift toward recognizing our interconnectedness and interdependence and wondering how this shift can occur, Muse reminds me that the shift is simply from fear to love. That feeding the path of love and starving the path of fear is the way. Simple yes. And, not so easy in a world where fear is deftly used to manipulate, control, and dare I mention, profit. And, yet the shift IS happening!
More and more of us are following the advice of the indigenous grandfather who, when asked by his grandson which wolf would win the war between a good wolf and an evil one that was going on inside him, replied, “the wolf you feed.” While the story itself is one of separation and conflict, it offers a reminder that every choice we make is a vote for how life will unfold. Are we "voting" consistent with the life and the planet that we desire? Am I?
Are we feeding our bodies the foods to create and maintain optimum health? Or are we voting for junk food? Are we feeding our minds information and ideas to create and maintain new horizons for the health of our planet, our society, our communities, ourselves? Or are we voting for defending boundaries and what the mainstream still considers "news"? Are we feeding our soul stories, imagined and real, of inspiration, compassion, and love? Or are we following the dictates of religion? Are we voting for fear or for love?
More and more, I’m turning away from the old, the tired, the stories and ways that no longer work. I don’t wish to feed these "wolves" and look for ways to disconnect from them without disengaging myself. I want to nourish and nurture new ways of living and BEing here on Gaia, and this week, I’ve found some beautiful films to celebrate Mother Earth that offer both nourishment and inspiration to do just that.
Watching "Earthrise,"a short film about NASA’s Apollo 8 mission around the moon, I was reminded of those first profound photos of our home from space and that man’s artificial boundaries for nations are non-existent when Earth is viewed from space. You can watch it here. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to wonder, "What if we saw our home this way?"
The Barry Lopez quote above stopped me for several moments as I began watching the serendipitously discovered film "Horizons." on Emergence Magzine. Soul food indeed!
I’m "voting" for films like these and others from both Emergence Magazine and Films for the Planet to nourish, inspire, support me in making and sustaining the seismic shifts that both planet and people need to survive and to thrive. Let’s make some noise for remaking what is "news"! Let’s create horizons of welcome in our hearts, our minds, and our imaginations! Let’s be matriots for the Planet and Humanity!
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.