Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Over 60 years ago, the civil rights movement was only a dream. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to remind us our dream of America is unfulfilled and our work is unfinished. Today is for celebration and remembrance. It’s also a day of action, as we continue advocating for civil rights.
What civil rights are not yet assured?
- Full access to voting for all citizens.
- Equitable wages and worker protections.
- Equal access to resources like health care, financial services.
- Mutual respect and safety in community.
He spoke with a passion about the hypocrisy of our society and opened our eyes and our minds to see it for what it was: a failed dream of our founders. It wasn’t his fault that we had not lived up to the founding ideals. King accepted his turn in the story of America. And he continues to inspire us to take action and live into what we can become.
King was a man of great courage but he never gave in. He was jailed 29 times for acts of civil disobedience, most often on trumped-up charges, but he was not deterred. It took 13 years to build a movement, which resulted in the historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
He was a remarkable man indeed. In 1964, at the age of 35, he became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for peace.
It’s our turn now. What will we commit to do? What risks will we take?
As we lose the giants of the civil rights movement, like John Lewis, CT Vivian, Daisy Bates and others, we must accept the mantle of responsibility. It is my hope we do so with the same deep commitment to nonviolence as we live into the ideals of our (amended) founding documents.
Today, we have similar and dissimilar obstacles to the early civil rights activists. Similar and dissimilar biases. Similar and dissimilar motivations.
Our similarities are the embedded nature of white supremacy ideology, of defaulting to the human hierarchy that advantages one set of people over another and is often motivated by a desire for power. Another similarity is the discomfort we feel as Americans. It’s our turn to be uncomfortable with the status quo.
King referenced this discomfort specifically when he said, “the white moderate is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” If we are indifferent, if we remain on the sidelines, justice will never be achieved. Inaction supports the status quo. Yet America remains an unfinished story, and we are always evolving.
Today is dissimilar to the early civil rights era, as our challenges are exacerbated by rapidly changing technology. Social media allows disinformation to spread faster than wildfire. Friends and family have or can become radicalized, seemingly overnight. The challenges of today are fueled by conflict entrepreneurs, who have discarded truth as an inconvenience; their goals are to make money and gain power or influence. They serve only themselves at the expense of our nation.
On this day of celebration, remembrance and action inspired by MLK, let us take our turn. I extend this prayer and invitation to you and our nation.
We are connected, you and I. We welcome you to the beloved community. Will you grant yourself safe passage?
It’s not our fault that we live in these times. But it is our turn to pick up the mantle and live into a better and just America.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.