In the somewhat fractured democracy reform movement, Jenna Spinelle is doing her part to bring some cohesion. She has developed The Democracy Group, a network of 11 podcasts focused on improving the American political system and increasing civic engagement. (The Fulcrum has recently agreed to feature some of the network's programs on our site, and the first will appear soon.) Spinelle — who hosts one of the podcasts, "Democracy Works" — has lived in central Pennsylvania for most of the past two decades and has worked at Penn State since graduating in 2008. She now teaches journalism and works on external communications for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where the podcast network is housed. Her answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
A network of podcasts about democracy, civic engagement and civil discourse.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
I always went with my dad to vote as a kid, but the first real engagement was registering people to vote in the fall of 2004. I was a college freshman and struggling to find my place on the large campus. The registration drive was a great way to get to know people and meet friends that stuck with me through college.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
When "How Democracies Die" author Daniel Ziblatt told me during an interview that I had asked something no one had ever asked him before. He had done a ton of interviews for the book when I spoke with him.
And your most disappointing setback?
The moment not long after college when I realized that a career in journalism (at least full-time, anyway) was not going to be in the cards for me.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
The job I have now as a podcaster working in the democracy and civic engagement space is the perfect mix of my skills and identity. I use my journalism skills to do interviews on my show, the marketing skills I've built over the past 10 years to expand our network's reach, and my previous experience in civic engagement to stay connected to the mission that's at the core of our network.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Never stop asking questions or lose your sense of curiosity about the way the world works. I heard this from several of my journalism school professors and try to pass it along to my own students today.
It's easier than ever to be distracted by our phones and find simple answers to every question we have — and curiosity gets lost in the process. One of my favorite things as a teacher is seeing those lightbulb moments when students connect the dots on two things that they might not have ever put together otherwise.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
The All-Nighter: vanilla ice cream with chocolate-covered espresso beans and a coffee-caramel swirl.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
It's not solely about politics but I loved "The Newsroom" on HBO. More recently, I enjoy "The Circus" on Showtime. I hope it finds a way to adapt to the new normal.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Check the hourly forecast to see if the weather will cooperate for an early morning run.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I've never been able to whistle.
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.