Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
While visiting New York City recently, I saw a man in a wheelchair attempting to cross the street near Penn Station. Between the bag he was holding, a missing foot and a quick signal light, he was challenged. I observed dozens of people flowing around him, presumably not seeing a human in need of assistance. In a neighborly way, I asked if he’d like a push? When he agreed, I handed him my roller luggage and said “If you push this, I’ll push you.” Within seconds, we were across the intersection and I was ready to move on with my day. But the gentleman needed more.
As he got settled on the sidewalk in a spot of sun, he noted that we were outside a diner and he asked me to get him some hot tea. Digging in his pocket, he pulled out a wad of cash and offered to buy me a drink, too. I declined because I just wanted to get on with my day and go to my hotel room. But I agreed to get him two cups of hot tea with lots of sugar. He gave me a $10 bill and I fulfilled his request. And I must admit to some impatience when he wanted me to pour the many sugar packets into his tea for him. Then I noticed his hands were misshapen. All through our interaction, he was speaking (more mumbling, really) and jumping from subject to subject so fast that I stopped trying to keep up. He needed human interaction.
After a few moments, I needed to get on with my day, and I left him chattering on the sidewalk to passersby. I wonder who was the next to stop and help him? And spend a few moments with him, human to human? As humans, we impact one another in trivial and profound ways. It was but a few minutes of my life. A small thing to me.
The encounter left me unsettled, as he needed more than I was willing to offer and I carried guilt, anger, fear and judgment with me for much of the day. I kept returning to: What more could I have done, without disrupting my day? What more should I have done, regardless of the day I had planned?
My conscience is pricked by the number of people who are homeless and traumatized. Our culture has three primary responses to those in need.
- Judgment that they made choices and are personally responsible for their plight.
- Indifference or helplessness in the face of the needs of others; it is easier and better to ignore “them.”
- Compassion and empathy for those in need and harsh judgment on others who do nothing.
I propose we need new thinking; a healthy version of each response listed above.
- Teach critical thinking skills in school and adult education, to help people make better choices and be aware of opportunities to improve their lives.
- Make it profitable for our best and brightest ideas to serve humanity, and create systems in which the vulnerable among us can thrive, instead of exploiting them.
- Set up listening centers, where lonely people can find and talk with each other; foster human interaction. Perhaps a new version of the human library?
The next morning, as I left my hotel to get coffee (at 5:45 a.m.!), a big, young man was haranguing an elderly man for a dollar, while his elderly wife stood by silently; her cell phone pressed to her ear. I didn’t sense any immediate danger and breezed by. Their encounter ended when I was about 20 paces away, and the young man headed in my direction. We never spoke, but I wondered why he chose that couple to panhandle to? And why did he harass them after they said no? This encounter was interesting, but left my conscience unbothered. Maybe after the previous day, I had shifted from compassion to indifference as a survival mechanism to avoid feeling helpless? I’m still pondering this. I also know that had I sensed danger, I would have stopped to help.
Before I left New York, a man opened fire in a subway car in Brooklyn. While my family called to make sure I was safe, no one in Manhattan mentioned it. I noticed more police in the subway stations. I was more aware of people around me, especially on the subway. But no one seemed to think anything of it. Just another day in NYC.
My heart was warmed by the images of people helping each other in Brooklyn. My hope is that we find ways to help each other outside of sudden, tragic incidents. We are at our best when we are healthy in our interdependence.
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.