Molineaux is the lead catalyst for American Future, a research project that discovers what Americans prefer for their personal future lives. The research informs community planners with grassroots community preferences. Previously, Molineaux was the president/CEO of The Bridge Alliance.
Whenever we or our loved ones are harmed, it is our human tendency to seek vengeance. Violence begets violence. Violent words lead to violent actions, as we’ve witnessed in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
The violence of the gunman is his alone.
Our response to violence is about us.
I confess that when I first heard the news, I experienced two seconds of satisfaction that Trump, the man who has used violent rhetoric, was reaping what he sowed. The next moment brought up dread that more violence would follow, blame would be cast upon President Joe Biden.
My third thought was more measured and reflective. What was my role in the increasing levels of societal violence? Others will quote polls about our willingness to use violence to achieve political aims. Others will quote statistics about gun access and gun violence. These statistics are conceptual tools to measure what individuals think about and care about most. Being statistics, most of us will exclude ourselves from the findings. We believe we are better than what the statistics show.
We should take a second look. What do we have the power to change? That would be ourselves.
We can let go of our initial responses to hearing the news about the attempted assassination, letting these thoughts pass through our system without attaching any meaning. They are our unfiltered and unconsidered thoughts. We can choose a more reasoned and humane thought that is actionable. Thoughts like:
- How am I increasingly open to violence?
- What have I posted on social media lately?
- How am I speaking with my friends who are deeply committed to their candidate?
Our self-image may be peace, diplomacy and compassion. We may have the self-image of a warrior, protecting others. We may consider ourselves “above the fray.” There are endless self-images we adopt.
Regardless of our chosen or unconscious self-image, we can practice acts of kindness towards others. It is a step towards non-violence that doesn’t threaten our self-image as peaceful people. It calls us towards more peaceful action. Kindness pulls us toward each other, as citizens.
When we squabble and fight amongst ourselves, we grow mean and harden our hearts to each other. Our tone grows sharp and biting. In these moments of stress, we are not peaceful or diplomatic or compassionate or protective or above the fray. We are RIGHT and they are WRONG.
This self-righteous response is low-level emotional violence. If allowed to remain, it will root deeply and present itself as arrogance and condescension towards others. Justified in violent words. If it grows, actions may follow.
Violence is a response to feeling powerless. During our never-ending campaigns, we citizens are told we have power, at the same time the campaign experts and PACs seek to manipulate us to do their bidding. Vote for “our chosen” candidate or don’t vote at all. Tactics of demoralization or obstacle building are rampant. So are get-out-the-vote efforts to overcome dissuasion tactics. We never quite know if what we think are our own thoughts. And we could never admit to being influenced by the campaigns at all, so these efforts go unaddressed.
Add in conflict profiteers, whose business is based on self-righteousness (they and their listeners are RIGHT!) with permission for violent rhetoric and it is inevitable that violent acts will follow. People who listen to conflict profiteers, be they mainstream media or YouTubers, slowly brainwash themselves into violence as acceptable action. Conflict profiteers are banking on us losing sight of our shared humanity.
Let us begin anew on a peaceful path. Commit to rooting out violence from yourself. It’s the only place to start.
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.