In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Samuel Kercheval:
“A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery…”
Forgiveness is virtuous only AFTER the harms caused by wrongdoing have been arrested, exposed, explained, publicly repudiated, and then punished. To ‘forgive and forget’ without these actions (which restore and affirm the legal, social, or physical boundaries against which wrongdoers transgressed) is to grant a pseudo-license in the form of precedent.
The only harms from which we can reasonably expect protection are those for which full accounting is rendered.
Consider:
Anchor-baby incentives
No other country incentivizes and rewards illegal entry by bestowing full citizenship status to the child of an illegally present foreigner. It wasn’t always the case here, either. So-called “birthright” citizenship had been limited to the children of American citizens and LEGAL permanent residents. US-born children of those who are legally here temporarily, foreign diplomats, guest workers, etc., are citizens of their parents’ country.
Somewhere along the way, we ‘let slide’ a ‘liberal’ interpretation of the citizenship clause, one which omits the condition on which a birth “on US soil” confers citizenship: that the person not be a citizen of another country. Letting it slide has birthed the evil of human trafficking run by criminal cartels, a burgeoning underclass of welfare-dependent immigrants, and an unsustainable burden on US taxpayers.
The Plandemic
Global, multigenerational harm was caused by the monstrously destructive response to the release of Dr. Fauci’s FrankenVirus.
So far, we’ve achieved only an official admission that lab leak is the likely source of the C19 pandemic. From this, we might see more effective efforts to quash “gain-of-function” projects. But the harm caused by the virus itself was many times eclipsed by the destructive actions of government actions that actively sought the forcible suppression of human society. These evil acts have been neither repudiated nor punished. Not surprisingly, the plandemic playbook that was so successful in delivering god-like power to tyrants is being attempted again.
Gender ideology
Among the most insidious and destructive deployments of weaponized empathy in recorded history can be seen in the “success” achieved by Leftists in socializing – imposing on the general population – the rare psychiatric disorder of gender dysphoria. How did this even happen?
It actually became inevitable when we acquiesced to the Leftists’ pronoun demand. We ‘let it slide’ as ‘kindness’ to ‘affirm’ the physiology-opposing ‘identity’ of a person in the grip of gender dysphoria.
What seemed a harmless accommodation a decade ago has now eroded sex-specific designations in schools, athletics, prisons, and even safe houses for abused women.
Climate “crisis” hysteria
The credibility of the lie: “Greenhouse gas emissions are causing catastrophic global warming” has crumbled under the weight of evidence to the contrary. Yet because we failed to fully repudiate the narrative as a power-seeking strategy of would-be tyrants, its obvious falsity has been ignored and its presentation simply changed to “climate change”.
Note that the doctrine is still entirely reliant on suppressive control of so-called greenhouse gas emissions that supposedly trap enough heat to endanger the planet. Although demonstrably false, this remains an essential component of the Climate Crisis religious doctrine because there’d be nothing to control without it. So the destructive policies pursued by proponents of this religion only get more draconian over time, evidence be damned.
Gratefully, we are witnessing a rapid course correction in the US. But that change, of course, will be both shallow and short-lived if we attempt to shortcut the restoration of moral respect for the equal standing of each person who attends a full reckoning. This is why the lawsuits drawn by President Trump’s executive orders on Immigration, DEI, Transgender Affirmation, and others should be welcomed as necessary opportunities to re-establish the foundational doctrines on which our Republic stands.
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