A few weeks between Harvard Business School graduation and his next job, at the language learning company Duolingo in Pittsburgh, was all it took for Jackson Shuttleworth to put together Count the Vote — with his infant son, Benji, on his lap much of the time. The website promotes the virtues of being a poll worker, a job drastically understaffed even before the coronavirus pandemic, and puts application forms for 3,000 cities, counties and states just a click away. It's Shuttleworth's first professional foray into civic engagement; he was a management consultant for six years after Boston College and his last venture at B-school was creating Jova, a cold brew coffee company. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
Making it easy for young people to sign up as a poll worker, anywhere across the country.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
It might be "fake" civics, but I was the lieutenant governor at Kansas Boys State in 2007. I'm not sure how indicative it was of how Kansas politics work, but being a part of 300 young men play-acting at government for a long weekend was certainly an experience.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
I moved to Munich to launch the German office for my design consultancy — and still remember my first company-wide presentation in German. I wasn't ready (my boss was having connectivity issues and couldn't be heard) which made the entire presentation more thrilling. Terrifying, really. I had only been learning German for two years, so it felt like a huge accomplishment when hundreds of people could understand and engage with what I was presenting.
And your most disappointing setback?
When I graduated high school, I thought I wanted to be an engineer, but I almost failed out of my intro-level physics class during my first semester in college. That's when I learned the cruel lesson that what we're interested in and what we're good at don't always match up — and no amount of committing physics formulas to memory would make me understand them.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
It requires me to make sure I'm not always building for myself as the user, because a lot of our government has been designed by and for educated white men — and there are a lot of issues in what's been built. It means being intentional in getting diverse perspectives and opinions on what I'm building, and making changes that don't always line up with what I think, because it's not about just me and my experience.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
"People won't remember what you said or did, but how you made them feel," an aphorism mainly attributed to Maya Angelou. Also, "The words we say have meaning. But it's our actions, that either back up what we say or contradict it, which matter more."
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
I'm not sure how a company based in Vermont hasn't discovered the New England genius that is Moose Tracks: vanilla ice cream with mini peanut butter cups and fudge. Mine would not be standard Moose Tracks, but maybe with some salted pretzels thrown in for good measure.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
Definitely "Veep." As someone who's never officially worked in politics, I assume that HBO series shows how politics actually works. I've yet to be convinced otherwise.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
I wish I could say something more cultured than "Scroll a bit further on Reddit." But it's typically "Scroll a bit further on Reddit." I start every morning with the New York Times on my phone, though.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I love the mediocre single-serve coffee you can make in so many hotel rooms. You can have your fancy, overpriced Starbucks in the lobby; I'll brew my own on this bizarre device that hasn't been changed in 10 years.
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.