Egge is a songwriter affiliated with the Inclusive Democracy Culture Lab. Her 12 th album, “Between Us,” was released last year.
At the end of February 2020, I was scheduled to fly from my home in Brooklyn to play three concerts in the Pacific Northwest. I was glued to news reports of a new type of virus rapidly spreading in Seattle. I read about the outbreak in an assisted living home and watched scary videos of emergency rooms in China. I quickly decided that I would not be flying into the eye of the storm in Seattle, so I canceled flights and shows and let my fans know that their tickets would be refunded.
I repeated these steps for my shows in Texas the following month — and on and on again. The pandemic has been quite a tough time for me. I’ve been on the road touring since I was 21 when my debut album came out in 1997, and now I found myself without work. The last two years have been extremely challenging, as they have been for so many people.
In June 2020, I got a call from Eric Ward, senior advisor at Western States Center, an organization that works to strengthen inclusive democracy across the country. He invited me to join the group’s new Culture Lab, a program supporting singer/songwriters to build authentic community connections that combat the political and social divisions of our era. Ward is not only an experienced civil rights leader but a diehard music fan and musician himself — so I was very excited to join the group. The Culture Lab was a great opportunity to learn and to extend my community, an antidote to the isolation I felt at the time and a chance to learn more about what I could do to counter hate while sowing love, acceptance and understanding in a world in crisis.
The program mixed political education with relationship-building sessions held virtually over Zoom. We learned and practiced some basic skills to connect with people through shared values. I made friends and connections. Mostly, I began to comprehend the potential power that I have through my music to foster inclusion and belonging and that musicians can serve as trusted messengers to their fans to foster positive change. My mind was blown. My heart was opened.
A few months after the sessions wrapped up, I was invited to lead a new New York-based group – a smaller, more concentrated version that we named The Neighbor Project. I was joined by fellow musicians J. Hoard, Mali Obomsawin, Rench (of the bluegrass/hip-hop group Gangstagrass), Diana Jones and Lucy Wainwright Roche for virtual sessions seeking to promote the ideals of belonging and inclusion through collaboration with a neighbor.
The musicians in the cohort are all different, but our goals are the same. We’re trying to combat hate by bringing more inclusive messages and practices to our listeners (especially listeners who don’t tend to spend much time around people of different backgrounds than their own).
In my two years working with this amazing group of songwriters, we’ve all learned a simple lesson: Stopping the bigotry that threatens our democratic society can start with getting to know your neighbors and appreciating them for who they are. Our experiences show that it doesn’t take a huge investment, either. It just takes a little time and attention.
In the spirit of this, I now volunteer weekly through Mutual Aid South Brooklyn and my local Chinese-American Planning Council delivering meals to eight homes of mostly elderly Chinese Americans in my neighborhood. I realized this would be a good opportunity to work with some of the tools I was learning from the Neighbor Project.
My first few deliveries were more than a little awkward. Most of the people on my route seemed to live alone. I needed to put them at ease, so they wouldn’t just withdraw and quickly close the door in the face of a masked stranger. I turned to Google Translate on my phone to communicate. I thumbed out a message on my phone, held it up and pressed play. Out came my message from the speaker in a language they could understand.
“Hello, my name is Ana,” it said. “I’m happy to see you today. I hope you are well.”
It worked — sort of. Many folks were intrigued and nodded or waved thankfully. A few were a little put off and hurried back into their apartments before my greeting could play all the way through. The next week I tapped out a new, slightly longer message about the nice spring weather. I watched as some of their eyes lit up — one man gestured proudly to his small garden showing me his flowers.
Eventually, my neighbors got more comfortable with me and my halting use of technology. and our interactions have become more and more relaxed and welcoming.
One day last spring, I was walking in my neighborhood with my daughter, who was 7 at the time. We stopped to take in the beauty of the cherry blossoms and she befriended another little girl. They introduced themselves, but didn’t get much further than that because my daughter speaks English and her new friend Mandarin.
They did, however, share many other interests — like climbing trees, playing with sticks, drawing in the dirt, and swirling their arms in the air as the wind blew the pink blossoms from the trees.
When I told my daughter it was time to go, she asked if we could get the girl’s telephone number so we could meet up and they could play together again soon. I tried to explain to her why I couldn’t do that — I didn’t speak Mandarin.
“So?” my daughter begged me. “Please?”
I paused, took out my phone, and walked up to the girl’s mother. As I awkwardly motioned to my device, we eventually successfully”‘spoke” to each other — once again with the help of Google Translate, much to our daughters’ delight.
A month or so later we ran into my daughter’s new friend, Rachel, and her mother again in the park. We reunited like old friends. Even though we don’t speak the same language, it didn’t take much more than a few taps to break the ice.
These interactions might seem small in the face of everything that’s happening in the world, but I believe that through these connections we can make a difference. It’s now early summer of 2022 and I finally find myself going out on the road again. I’m looking forward to taking everything with me that I’ve learned during this destabilizing time and sharing them with my audience and the people I meet along the way.
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.