Schmidt is a syndicated columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Say you want to reduce polarization in the new year? Might I suggest going to see a movie this holiday season – but not just any movie. Check out “Spirited,” the musical starring Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds and Octavia Spencer.
Over Thanksgiving weekend my family went to see “Spirited” in a movie theater (it is also streaming on AppleTV+). “Spirited” is a musical version of the classic Charles Dickens story “A Christmas Carol.” I left the theater feeling energized for the good fight of repairing our democracy in 2023. And don’t worry, there will be no spoilers here.
For over two centuries, Jacob Marley has led the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet-To-Come in selecting a miserable soul for redemption. They spend the year preparing for Christmas Eve and then haunt the selected “perp” with hopes of changing them to be a more positive force for humanity. While looking for their next soul, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) runs into a speaker at a hotel, Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds). Briggs is a morally bankrupt media consultant and social media manipulator. One of the spirits who works for Marley describes Briggs’ company this way: “specializes in creating controversy, conflict, and disinformation for the benefits of his clients worldwide.” The Ghost of Christmas Present watches Briggs break into a musical number about weaponizing the war on Christmas for profit while speaking to the National Association of Christmas Tree Growers.
Here are a few of the notable lines from the song "Bringin' Back Christmas”:
“Outrage is a drug.”
“Now it's some slight manipulation but it’s what we’ve gotta do. See, we need some confrontation, or your message won’t get through.”
“But the world is, what? Tribal. So, if you want your sales to soar, it’s not enough for folks to love you, they gotta hate your rivals more. As an expert my advice is feed that hate, ‘cause hate is strong. Folks will gladly pay your prices to prove those Christmas-killers wrong.
“It’s not enough to want it. You gotta get mad. You have to fight.”
While watching the musical number, the Ghost of Christmas Present announces that Briggs is “like the perfect combination of Mussolini and Seacrest.” No surprise that Marley’s team chooses Briggs since the Ghost of Christmas Present tells the others that the guy causes division for his job and is sure that his redemption could have a “ripple” effect and make him a force for positive change in humanity.
This movie does a remarkable job of providing some life lessons, which, beyond helping each one of us personally, can help our society in combating the cycle of polarization that we seem stuck in. It highlights that division sells and we need to think about who is profiting from the ensuing disconnection.
There is a famous saying that the first step in solving a problem is admitting there is one. I would add that you also must identify exactly what that problem is. This movie helped me do that.
In 2020, Scientific American magazine published a study in which they found that it is the influencers in our social media, not the networks themselves, that amplify differences between us. They highlight that partisan bias is exacerbated on social media because online networks are often organized around a few key influencers. This feature of social media is one of the main reasons why misinformation and fake news have become so pervasive. In centralized networks, which our current social media platforms are, biased influencers have a disproportionate impact on their community. These influencers simply amplify rumors and suppositions into widespread misconceptions and false beliefs.
In the movie, Briggs is one of those influencers. We learn that he has no problem monetizing his skills at division. And like this fictional character, we have real-life examples working in our midst.
The magazine goes on to suggest that one way to lessen influencers' effects is to be intentional about the social networks in those echo chambers. The more equity in people’s social networks, the less biased and more informed groups will become. Or you could do what I do and largely stay off social media.
Unlike the movie, there is no amount of singing and dancing or unearthly spirits that are going to help heal what divides our country. That is up to each individual, reaching out to one another, looking for the traps that nonfictional characters are placing in front of us, and working to rebuild our institutions.
You don’t need to celebrate Christmas to enjoy “Spirited,” but you should be open to producing ripples on your own. Or as a different song goes, “Playing our parts. Changing hearts. One by one.”
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.