By Tom Hughes
Re: Atlantic Magazine October 31 article by Emily Ostler requesting ‘amnesty’ for Covid-era policy mistakes – The problem here is that The Atlantic article demands forgiveness and, presumably, restoration without repentance. Remember the Clintons’ favorite expression in the 90s – “Mistakes were made”? That’s what’s happening here. When this house of cards comes down and the massive fraud is exposed, the NEA and hundreds of corrupt school boards, thousands of corrupt politicians, their enablers in the donor class and millions of their followers and adherents are going to say just that: “Mistakes were made.”
Those corrupt school boards and governments didn’t just “make mistakes.” They conspired with the press at every level and conspired with social media to bully and silence anyone who suggested that they were in fact making mistakes. They insisted that black was white and they retaliated brutally – often with the help of law enforcement – when we objected. Our own families and neighbors insulted, vilified and excluded us. I’m reminded of a high school classmate, an accomplished mom, chef and lawyer who took to simply referring to anyone outside the C19 Activist Bubble as “primates” because she couldn’t bring herself to think of us as human anymore.
Our nation lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed and will never reopen. Every “mistake” they made was a mistake they forced on us over any legal or moral objection. Under the highly questionable banner of public health and safety, they silenced dissent, ruined lives, ruined businesses, and conveniently cleared the Medicaid rolls of thousands of expensive nursing home residents in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut – and Vermont, among other states.
Ask anyone who’s ever had to stand up and allocute to a criminal charge: you don’t get to say, “Mistakes were made” in court. Judges don’t have the patience for that. You have to say, “I did this. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway.” Most judges don’t care if you say you’re sorry or not, but they do care that you say out loud what you did. So I’ll entertain discussions about amnesty and forgiveness just as soon as they admit what they did. All of it.
Yesterday I showed someone a picture of my mother’s casket on a windswept hillside at the cemetery in 2020. There were seven people at her funeral, and three of the seven worked for the funeral director. She was buried in a sealed bag in her hospital johnny. No new dress. No Mass, no wake, no out of town visitors. You can be sure I’m not going to forget Governor Cuomo’s potential part in her death or Governor Lamont’s insane lockdown that kept family and friends away from her at the end of her life.
The power-hungry governors and the evil men and women who did this to us will never admit what they did because right now all they care about is hoping we’ll just forget about it. Some won’t because admitting it opens them to criminal liability (I’m talking to you, Dr. Fauci). Others won’t because they can’t admit that the ideology of the Authoritarian Left is irredeemably destructive.
I’m not holding out hope for any admissions of conscious wrongdoing here. And without admissions of conscious wrongdoing, they get nothing from me. They may want to forget what they did – but I never will.
A former embezzler, Tom Hughes writes and speaks on the subjects of Ministry, Professional Responsibility and Financial Crime from his home in northern Vermont.