Bonnie Miller spent months working to get a measure on next week's Arkansas ballot that would have turned the state's political map making over to an independent commission. Her Arkansas Voters First Campaign gathered the necessary 150,000 signatures but was stopped on very narrow grounds by the state Supreme Court, meaning redistricting for this decade will be a partisan exercise controlled by elected Republicans. But Miller says she's not giving up on bettering democracy in her adopted home state, where she runs the League of Women Voters chapter in Fayetteville and is on the staff of the state university's law school. Her answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
The League of Women Voters seeks to improve government and impact public policies through education and advocacy.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
I ran for student government in middle school in southern California — unsuccessfully! My platform was not great and centered around more pizza and establishing dress-up days at school. I used a Mr. Potato Head during my campaign speech. Don't ask.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Chairing our Arkansas Voters First campaign. Leading a grassroots movement to establish people-powered fair maps in our state has been the highlight of my life. I've been able to work with so many wonderful people who are passionate about redistricting reform and move our state closer to that goal.
And your most disappointing setback?
Having our ballot initiative disqualified based on a procedural technicality. We expected opposition but thought we would at least have the opportunity to campaign on the issue. Instead, the court removed our proposal from the November ballot despite our having met all of the requirements to get on. The secretary of state, who sits on the board of politicians responsible for drawing legislative districts, fought us every step of the way. This proves exactly why politicians should not have the power to draw districts and how far they're willing to go to keep it — including disenfranchising voters. We won't stop fighting for fair maps in Arkansas!
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
Having grown up in a biracial household, I've always been aware there are different realities for people of color and white folks living in America. Seeing first-hand how my Latinx family experiences democracy and engages with politics has directly impacted the issues important to me. I want to live in a country where all people are equally represented in their government. Gerrymandering undermines representative democracy, especially when done for purposes of diluting the votes of Black, Indigenous and other people of color.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Don't respond from a place of heightened emotion. For me, this is always a work in progress.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Caturday: peanut butter ice cream with swirls of chocolate fudge and Trader Joe's dark chocolate peanut butter cups. The perfect Caturday treat.
What is your favorite TV show or movie about politics?
HBO's "Veep." Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer is brilliant.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Set my alarm. I usually check it at least three times before I fall asleep to make sure it's set.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I love to turn off the lights and dance alone to '90s pop hits in my house. You have to find joy where and how you can.
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.