Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Lately, I’ve been binge watching stories about con artists and cults. Every story I’ve watched starts with the primary human desire – wanting to belong and be part of something bigger. With few notable exceptions, we are all – yes all – motivated to belong. Our survival instinct is wired to this deepest longing in our hearts and undergirds most human activity. Scratch below the surface of our egos and you’ll find a story about belonging.
These are the most common stories we tell ourselves about belonging:
- Ambitious? You must succeed to belong.
- Money conscious? You must be wealthy or impoverished to belong.
- Generous? You must help others to belong.
- Religious? You must have the right beliefs to belong.
- Power seeker? You need to have or provide protection to belong.
None of these motivations are based on inherent human value. Instead they are based on a belief that we must always do more or be different in order to belong. This is the crux of any con or cult. “You can belong if (fill in the blank).” In one way or another, our biology has already groomed us, making us ready for exploitation. Our vulnerability may be greater when we have fewer communities to which we feel included. People who belong to more than one community seem less likely to become a victim of a con or cult. But no one is immune. No. One.
Within our politics, I see correlations between what happened to individuals in the docudramas and what is happening to our society at large. There are competing accusations about the delusion of the liberal academia/media and the alternate reality of MAGA populists. Our communities have been purged of those who “don’t belong,” which limits our ability to think critically. We cling to the community we have, fearing exclusion and social death.
While we cling to our beliefs and fight over who is most deluded, the conflict entrepreneurs (aka the con artists) tweak our fears of being excluded, declaring our enemies to be people who think differently from ourselves. They promise happiness when we vanquish our enemies at the ballot box or in school board meetings.
Our current conflict about the direction of our nation is being fueled by our own fears. What are the deepest desires of the American public? To feel included in society with a sense of belonging. Full stop.
I propose the fastest way to get out of our own way – to co-create a better future – is to start by being a community where everyone, in good faith, can be included and see an opportunity for themselves in society. There should be no litmus test to belong. Are you human? You belong.
For social cohesion, we do need to agree on norms. Formal norms include agreeing to abide by a common set of laws. Informal norms could include being respectful towards others, honoring human dignity and generally being a decent person, especially when no one is looking.
As conflict entrepreneurs predict dystopian futures while pointing at an outgroup (or group of “others”) to blame, I predict that the future is in our hands, minds and hearts. We can create an inclusive society through small acts with people we don’t know. We can engage others with curiosity, being kind and showing compassion by including people we’ve been conditioned to fear and blame. Getting to know people who are different from ourselves is the “missing piece” our society needs.
A healthy community is one where there is room for individuality and shared responsibility for the common good. This means taking turns in traffic instead of speeding ahead to cut in line. Or returning your shopping cart instead of leaving it by your parking spot. It might mean giving up your seat on the subway to a person who needs to sit.
Feeling included costs us nothing in material wealth. Inclusion is how we pause to consciously connect to each other. Do we stop in our faith community to welcome a new person? Do we smile at the person next to us in line? Do we look people in the eye with warmth and curiosity, seeing them fully?
Cults are part of culture. We need shared beliefs that bind us together. It is when our cult-beliefs are unhealthy that we separate from each other. Our nation is more separated from itself now than ever before in living memory. Only the pre-Civil War era was more divisive, leading Abraham Lincoln to note, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Deprogramming from our collective unhealthy cult beliefs is the challenge that lies ahead. It will involve every one of us committing to each other that we will not leave anyone behind. And we will want assurance that we will not be left behind, either.
We will be entering uncharted territory in the days ahead. The outcome is uncertain and mysterious. Our ability to manage our fears with compassion for ourselves and others is essential. And we must remember that certainty in chaotic times is the currency of con artists and cult leaders. They promise us a sense of belonging and a certain future, while separating us from each other. They take our money and disappoint us over and over again, until we break.
This time, the nation and democracy could break. It’s up to us.
My list of docudramas on con artists and cults:
- “Inventing Anna”
- “Tinder Swindler”
- “Fyre Festival”
- “Bad Vegan”
- “20/20, The Cult Next Door: The Mystery and Madness of Heaven’s Gate”
- “20/20, The Dropout: The Rise and Con of Elizabeth Holmes”
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.