The Heir doesn't believe Fortune magazine has any business whatsoever suggesting that Ghislaine Maxwell should get a new trial.  He came across that editorial while finding out whether a 2+2=5 judge granted Maxwell a new trial.  Maxwell already had one trial and she was convicted.  Why the Heir wonders would she need another one?  Just because of that one juror?  This the Heir believes is only happening because Maxwell still has the best defense money can buy.  If she does get another trial and she's convicted *again*, her legal team will keep picking at *that* trial for excuses to get even a *third* trial.  They want to retry her until she's acquitted, no matter what it takes.  If Fortune magazine doesn't see what the Heir sees as obvious (because this is also what happened with Cosby), it makes him wonder whether Fortune magazine is only taking Maxwell's side because she's a socialite.  How about the survivors?  The Heir would ask Fortune magazine, do you believe the survivors?  If not, then the magazine is part of the blame-the-victim epidemic.  If so they do believe the survivors, they then can't believe both the survivors *and* Maxwell without using a kabuki dance logic to try to have it both ways.  Ultimately, this is about the children and making sure that they don't end up believing that what Maxwell did was perfectly okay in the event that she walks on a technicality.  The Heir also wants Fortune magazine to also think about the children.

Almost as a followup on what the Heir said 1/5, and barring any changing or mitigating circumstances, the Heir intends to boycott those activist groups who in turn are boycotting Biden's appearance in Georgia on MLK Day.  Also, if those groups succeed in making Biden change his plans, the Heir will likely decide not to support the voting rights bills even though he agrees with what's in them and what they're supposed to stand for.  But the Heir disagrees the apparent point of view that democracy should somehow involve anti-Biden-ism as a kind of "agitation."  He's not sure sure what Ed Snowden type groups see as "agitation" is really all that good for the democracy the Heir wishes we had during the 80s when the same politicians were being reelected time and time again when the Heir was too young himself to vote.  The concept of agitation really only benefits small vocal groups, and not the populace as a whole.  Agitation tends to reinforce the groups' sense of righteousness in opposition to the populace's supposed wrongness, and therefore the larger populace must submit to the smaller groups.  This the Heir sees as the opposite of democracy, and certainly as the opposite of what the voting rights bills stand for and what's in them.  Democracy is not about Ed Snowden-ism.  That's what dictatorships are about, and last the Heir has heard, Ed Snowden right now still lives within the borders of a dictatorship.

As of this writing with me the Mentor, tomorrow's going to be the anniversary of the 1/6 riots.  The Heir's commemorating a day beforehand by truly wondering whether we necessarily "lost" democracy that day.  He thinks about all the times there are Union Addresses, and there's always one designated absentee who gets to hide out in an undisclosed location until maybe about 24 hours after, and then we get to find out who that is.  The Heir wants to research this one, but he gets the impression that this is a tradition that goes back to the Cold War, but he's not sure when.  He doesn't think today's Millennials fully appreciate the anxiety of the 80s over the possibility of a nuclear war, but that was what he thinks people were concerned about when they designated an absentee.  He also gets the impression that this tradition still continued after the Cold War was over, and regained new importance during the Age Of Terror.  After we killed Osama bin Laden, it appears as though we *still* continued this tradition to this very day.  Biden's due to do a Union Address, and it's anyone's guess as to how they'll manage that whole absentee practice in light of 1/6.  So the Heir's 60% sure that they must have had a designated absentee (or at least one) when they did the formalization of the election results, so whether it was a nuclear war or a terror attack, that person at worst would run the country somehow.  Speaking of the 80s, that was when the Heir thinks we should have been the *most* worried about democracy, and yet we appeared the *least* concerned, as we seemed to have reelected the same people over and over again without even a thought to the job they're doing.  The Heir's wondering...

"...How was *that* democratic???"