Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Crime
Turn to right-wing media outlets and one narrative you’ll hear is about a “crime wave,” especially in progressive cities and the need for an authoritarian to provide safety. At least, that’s what I hear, with chagrin. Dig into the statistics, and there’s another story that emerges about the data itself, from which these “news” reports are derived.
First and foremost, national statistics for 2022 are not yet available. The latest data available is for 2021 and when reporting on crime rates, most media compare statistics from 2020 to previous years. In other words, the data is not current. And in 2020, as has been reported, there was a significant increase in violent crime, especially murder. Crime statistics for 2021 and 2022 are not yet fully available. This is due to a change in how we collect the data. For years, we’ve heard about the inconsistent (and voluntary) submission of crime data by law enforcement agencies to the FBI for national analysis. The Department of Justice has worked to solve this dilemma by creating a new database, which began collecting data in 2021. Even so, in 2021, only 11,794 of 18,806 law enforcement agencies complied by reporting data. As an example, Los Angeles and New York City have not reported 2021 data as of October 2022.
So what is the truth? It’s complicated. Several news reports focus on big cities, others on medium size cities. One report contains a city by city breakdown from January - June of 2022 compared to 2021. It was the most current data I could find. This preliminary counting (as reported to the new national database) shows an overall decrease in murders and sexual assault, but an increase in robbery and aggravated assault. You can see for yourself, each city has its own ups and downs.
Between 2010 and 2020, violent crime rates peaked in 2010 at 405 offenses per 100,000 people. In 2014, it dipped to 362. By 2020, it had risen to 398. Within that 10 year period, 405 to 398 is statistically insignificant at approximately 1%. Regardless of what the data is, we often prefer to play the blame game, or counter the blame game. We would be better served by addressing the issue on the merits.
Immigration
Immigration has been a hotly debated topic for over two centuries. As a young nation, citizens often espoused the “keep them out” mantra due to economic or racial fears. And politicians have used these fears to whip up support by promising to protect their voters from “those people.” While African Americans were already in the nation, waves of people looking for opportunity came to the U.S. from 1820-1924 without a formal immigration process. People arrived from Ireland, Germany, China, Italy, Eastern Europe and Russia (including Jews), Mexico and beyond. The Chinese exclusion act of 1880 prohibited anyone of Asian descent for 10 years from entering our shores. This was a xenophobic closed door policy, not an immigration policy. In 1924, our first immigration policy was enacted; a quota system to slow down (or stop) the arrival of new immigrants. It was a bad policy then, and the subsequent evolution of laws has never slowed immigration or treated immigrants equally, regardless of country of origin.
The last immigration legislation was passed during the Reagan administration in 1986. Three subsequent enforcement laws (1996, 2002, 2006) added staff, surveillance equipment and fencing to combat illegal immigration, but did not change the how and who of immigration policy. Two subsequent presidents have issued two Executive Orders each (DACA and DAPA), with Trump’s orders canceling Obama’s.
In other words, we keep putting bandaids on an obviously broken system with no systemic solutions in sight. Every day, thousands of people want to come to the United States and that will continue. How do we decide who to let in and who to exclude? Asylum seekers and refugees are different from other immigrants in our policy solutions. There is a mix of skilled and unskilled workers; those with family residing in the U.S. and those who want their family to follow them. Unfortunately, as so often happens in politics many people are pointing fingers with few willing to tackle the underlying causes.
This political hot potato, like crime statistics, becomes another tool of heated rhetoric. Lots of hot air. No commitments. And who benefits? Not us, the people of the United States.
Peaceful Transfer of Power
All of this was on my mind as I watched the 15 rounds of nominations for Speaker of the House. It was a good exercise for the American people to witness. It was a demonstration of the peaceful transfer of power and using the constitutional process we have to reach an agreement in a nonviolent way. The rhetoric of the six GOP holdouts (and some of the Dems, too!) was pure propaganda and blame-casting for issues that remain unresolved after decades. Their use of the power they held was annoying to many, but it was also masterful. And now a minority of six members of Congress have dictated the rules of the House for the other 429 members.
The moderates of both parties missed an opportunity to form a powerful coalition. I fully understand the political risks that both the Democrats and Republicans will face in opposing the party leadership and choosing to work together. For those of us who believe in finding common ground it is imperative that we thwart the power of the extremes on both sides. The extremes have made cooperation or compromise with the other party an act of political suicide. No one seems to have the courage to act on what is obvious to the exhausted majority: Congress is dysfunctional and we need to work together to fix it.
It is time for real leaders to step forward and to put our country before their party loyalty. We call on the moderates of both parties to have courage and trust in those who elected them. We, the exhausted majority, want solutions.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.