Nsé Ufot is executive director of the New Georgia Project and its political arm, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a voter registration organization founded by Stacey Abrams when she was a Democratic leader in the state House. Ufot emigrated from Nigeria to Atlanta as kid, graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Dayton Law School and was previously an executive at Canada's largest faculty union and a lobbyist for the American Association of University Professors. Her answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
What's the tweet-length description of your group?
A nonpartisan civic engagement organization that has helped more than 400,000 Georgians register to vote since its 2014 launch.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
At 14, I served as a page in the Georgia House of Representatives. I shuffled notes between professional and grassroots lobbyists and the legislators I was tasked with supporting.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Expanding the Georgia electorate by building a team and a program that has helped 400,000 young, black, Latino, Asian American and women voters register to vote.
And your most disappointing setback?
I don't have any. I count them all as learning opportunities.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
I'm a naturalized citizen and a fierce patriot. I took an oath of allegiance to the United States of America and promised to defend its Constitution and its laws against foreign and domestic enemies to the best of my ability. Each day, I work to make sure that a government of, for, and by the people is the reality of folks like me from historically underserved and underrepresented communities.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
What Jay Z said: "A wise man once told me don't argue with fools, 'cause people from a distance can't tell who is who." There's also Proverbs 26:4: Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Georgia On My Mind: chocolate ice cream with peaches and peanuts. (I should crowd-source a better name.)
West Wing or Veep?
Both! I re-watch West Wing to remind me what is possible when smart, decent humans commit to working for the public good. Veep is hilarious and paints a sometimes uncomfortably accurate picture of the cast of characters that roams the halls of power.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Set the timer on whatever podcast I'm listening to for 20 minutes. I'm always asleep before it cuts off.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
As a kid, I would cry if my sandwich had the thick, end piece of bread. As an adult that makes her own sandwiches, I throw the end pieces out without a second thought.
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.