... is that they got caught. They aren't sorry for the damage done by the crime. They are only sorry for the shame and damage brought by getting caught.

In fact, it has always seemed to me that these assholes actually believe that a crime isn't a crime if you get away with it.

He’s much more likely to reward someone who’s done bad things than someone who’s refused to do them.

I hope we can do better in the future. I hope there is a future.

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

- Frank Wilhoit

The entire context is worth reading:

https://systemicunlearning.substack.com/p/wilhoits-law-there-is-no-such-thing

Excerpt:

For millennia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr. All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

is and was just a myth.