Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Debilyn Molineaux is a visionary, storyteller, innovator and entrepreneur. Her life’s purpose is bringing about a thriving, just and healthy democratic republic in the United States. She launched the latest expression of her work, American Future, in late 2023, noting that imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow.
Unleashing Americans’ imagination about the future we want is the antidote to the malaise left by the conflict profiteers.
As a pioneer in the democracy ecosystem, Molineaux also offers consulting services to nonprofits, philanthropists, corporate leaders and foundations. She has co-founded or led initiatives over her 20-plus-year career to reach millions of Americans. Empowering her fellow citizens and scaling the work of her fellow leaders continue to be Debilyn’s passion and mission. Her actions help nurture and drive the large-scale collective action that moves our democracy forward.
Debilyn has initiated, partnered and advised on a multitude of big ideas:
- American Future, to add everyday people’s voices to the future narrative.
- Bridge Alliance, where hundreds of organizations became a pro-democracy ecosystem.
- National Week of Conversation, to provide a central annual event that promotes healthy engagement instead of toxic division.
- Living Room Conversations, to provide do-it-yourself conversation guides for understanding people with differences.
- Inter-Movement Impact Project, to connect several aspects of democracy work together.
- The Fulcrum, a news platform that covers democracy reform efforts at state and national levels.
- Bridging Movement Alignment Council, a network of more than 500 "bridging divides" organizations.
- JEDI Fellows (DEI initiative), to assist the pro-democracy ecosystem be representative using a four-fold diversity model (ideological, generational, gender and race/ethnicity representation) of the United States.
She brings a big idea or vision to reality by:
- Employing deep listening for underlying assumptions, blind spots and hidden assessments.
- Guiding purposeful conversations to ground dreams into action plans.
- Networking with people, sources and ideas that can be additive or collaborative to your idea.
- Challenging conventional wisdom and channeling missing voices.
- Communicating diplomatically, especially on tough topics.
I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Molineaux in June for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work:
The Fulcrum interviews Debilyn Molineaux, President & CEO, Bridge Alliancewww.youtube.com
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.