Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
As so often happens in our hyperpartisan political environment, members of Congress and their constituents use events of the day to re-enforce positions they already have.
A perfect example is the Ukrainian crisis that has heightened the debate between those who believe we need to increase oil production and those who believe we need a more environmentally sustainable energy policy that is less reliant on fossil fuel.
Of course it is not surprising that our elected representatives are using the crisis to craft arguments and cherry pick facts to support their respective positions on the issues of climate change and the need for more or less oil production in the United States.
Those members of Congress who for years have been supporting a stronger clean energy policy are using the Ukrainian crisis, and the threat of a Russian cut-off of oil to the West, as an example of why we need to increase our efforts for energy sustainability.
On the other hand, many Republican lawmakers are using the Russian invasion as an opportunity to criticize President Biden’s energy policies they claim have limited domestic production, urging him to step up production so we can wean ourselves of dependence on Russia.
Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor from Oklahoma recently said: “The recent events in Ukraine are yet another example of why we should be selling energy to our friends and not buying it from our enemies."
The debate has been fueled by the dramatic increase in oil prices resulting from Vladimir Putin’s escalating war on Ukraine. Benchmark crude oil jumped past $110 per barrel last week to the highest level since 2014 and politicians have used the dramatic increase to support whatever position they already had as to the solution, as opposed to reevaluating and adapting their initial position based on the new circumstances that have arisen.
Unfortunately, members of Congress are reluctant to think deductively, analyze multiple premises and come up with conclusions based on the facts as opposed to preconceived opinions. How else can you explain that, despite the considerable change that the Ukraine crisis portends on the energy supply-and-demand equation, there is no apparent desire to adapt positions.
There is no doubt that the desire to get elected subjects political aspirants to what is called motivation emotion, influencing their reasoning and judgment. Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine who studies how motivation, emotion and intuition influence judgment, explains the phenomenon this say: "People are capable of being thoughtful and rational, but our wishes, hopes, fears and motivations often tip the scales to make us more likely to accept something as true if it supports what we want to believe."
The energy issue is of course complex and all the more reason that all of the relevant facts need to be considered to make a balanced decision. Is it too much to ask our leaders to stop allowing their ideology to undermine their ability to think critically? Admittedly it is not easy to access the facts. Recently the Financial Times stated:
“Not only does the crisis demonstrate our dependence on such regimes, giving them the ability to blackmail us, but we should also understand that our energy imports, in fact, bankroll the dangerous revisionist adventurism of the current government in Moscow.
“In addition to the all-important climate motivation, replacing imported gas with renewable energy is now a geopolitical priority.”
Yet at about the same time Auke Hoekstra, an expert on the path to 100 percent renewable energy, states that “700 studies (and # growing fast) of many researchers and research groups are now showing 100% [renewable energy] systems are possible and cost-effective.”
Whatever your position is, on this issue or the other great issue that our country must address we need more from our elected officials. We need leaders who take full accountability for actions through a willingness to amend one's positions by seeking our current research and analysis, thus resulting in a more constructive approach to problem identification and solutions.
As a citizen we must demand more of ourselves and our leaders. While it is difficult to accept facts that challenge opinions and beliefs you already have, it is time we all do so.
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.