Is anyone else following Hunter Biden these days? He's been clean and sober for years now, and his redemption arc is truly beautiful to see. He's found his voice and has been sitting down for real and honest conversations with a wide array of far-right figures. He's willing to talk to anyone, even people who have spread vile lies and hate about his family, and he's willing to have hard but honest conversations. I have immense respect for him, and his voice is going to matter in the months and years to come.

He also writes regularly on Substack and I'm a free subscriber. This morning his essay on forgiveness and accountability landed in my email inbox, and it really touched me. I found it incredibly insightful. I wanted to share it here, in its entirety, because I think a lot of you will appreciate it. People like Hunter give me hope for America's future. If his words speak to you, you can also subscribe for free at https://substack.com/@hunterbiden. Along with Heather Cox Richardson's excellent Letters From an American these make essential daily reading for me.

So, without further ado, here's the essay I wanted to share with you. Please tell me what you think.

What Forgiveness Is Not

Forgiveness is not forgetting, nor is it letting anyone off the hook.

Hunter Biden

Aug 18

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In Limpopo province, where South Africa loosens into Botswana, the bush thins and the sky opens and the animals move through the landscape with the unhurried authority of creatures that have not yet learned to associate the sound of an engine with death.

Two young men arrived there dressed for the occasion. Their gear had been purchased on Madison Avenue. The rifles were custom. The boots were new. They had flown a long way to stand in this particular stretch of earth and kill something beautiful.

They found a leopard.

The animal had lived its entire life inside a set of instincts refined over millennia. It could cross open ground without being seen. It could wait in a tree for hours without shifting its weight. It possessed a kind of physical intelligence so precise that the word intelligence barely contains it.

They shot it.

There is a photograph. You may have seen it. Two young men holding the body between them. Both smiling. The animal hanging limp, its weight distributed between their arms, its beauty converted into evidence. The photograph was taken to commemorate the achievement. It circulated widely.

What the photograph communicates, to anyone willing to look at it without the filter of politics or celebrity, is something simple. Two people who had the power to kill something they could not equal, and who mistook the killing for accomplishment.

Orwell wrote about this. Not about leopards. About an elephant, in colonial Burma, and about the officer who shot it. But the officer in Orwell’s essay understood something the two men in the photograph do not appear to understand. He knew, even as he raised the rifle, that the act was wrong. He knew he was performing for a crowd. He knew the power he held was not his own but borrowed from a system that required the performance to continue. He pulled the trigger and he felt the full weight of what the trigger meant.

The men in the photograph are smiling.

That is the difference between a person who has done something wrong and knows it and a person who has done something wrong and believes it was their right.

The first can be reached.

The second requires something other than forgiveness.

I know what it is to be the person who needs forgiving.

I have sat across from people I damaged and said the words and meant them and discovered that meaning them was not enough, that the words were only the beginning of a process that required everything I had and produced no guarantee. I know the specific humiliation of that position. The way it strips every defense. The way it requires you to stay present inside the exposure without reaching for something to cover yourself.

I also know what it is to wait for someone to say the words and have them not come.

To understand, from both sides of the table, that forgiveness is not a sentiment. It is a structure. And when the structure is skipped, when the naming is avoided and the behavior continues and the language of healing is deployed to prevent the accounting rather than complete it, something does not heal.

It waits.

There is a morning coming that I can already see.

It has not arrived yet. But the speeches are being drafted. The op-eds are being outlined. The language is already assembled, waiting in the same drawer where it has waited after every American crisis that ended without a reckoning.

It is time to come together. We must look forward, not backward. For the sake of the country.

The words will sound reasonable when they arrive. They will be spoken by people who mean them. They will carry the weight of genuine exhaustion, because the country will be exhausted, and exhaustion makes the promise of moving on feel like wisdom.

It is not wisdom.

It is the same mistake dressed in the same language it has worn every time.

After the Civil War, the country chose unity over reckoning.

Lincoln was dead within weeks of Appomattox. The man who replaced him dismantled Reconstruction with the quiet efficiency of someone who understood that cruelty did not need to be loud. It needed only to be structural.

The freed population, four million people promised citizenship and protection, was left exposed to a system designed to restore the old order under different names.

Black Codes. Convict leasing. Sharecropping. Jim Crow.

Lincoln died in 1865. The Civil Rights Act did not arrive until 1964.

In the space between those two dates the country congratulated itself for having reconciled.

After Watergate the country chose healing over prosecution. The pardon was presented as mercy. What followed was a lesson absorbed quietly by every administration that came after: power does not produce consequences.

Each time America chose moving on over naming, the thing it moved on from returned under a different name. The wound closed over the infection. The surface looked clean. Underneath, the cause remained alive, patient and learning.

Like the hunters congratulating themselves over the photograph long after the animal has stopped moving.

In recovery you learn that amends have a structure.

You cannot skip from harm to wholeness. There is a step between them that cannot be bypassed, and the step is not apology. Apology is words. The step is amends.

Amends requires three things in sequence.

You name what you did. Specifically. To the person you did it to. In language that does not soften the naming.

You change the behavior that caused the harm. Not the language around the behavior. The behavior itself.

You accept that the person you harmed is under no obligation to forgive you. The amend is not a transaction. It is performed because the amend is the work. The other person’s response is not yours to determine.

I have made amends. I know what it costs. I know the specific terror of sitting across from someone you have damaged and saying the true thing without knowing whether the truth will be enough.

A country that skips this step has not healed.

It has agreed to stop talking about the wound.

And that agreement becomes the permission structure for the next one.

I sat across a table from a man who had spent a year trying to destroy my family.

His name is Lev Parnas. He had been sent to find evidence of corruption. He traveled to Ukraine, to Vienna, to London. He spoke with oligarchs and fixers. He found nothing, because there was nothing to find.

When the investigation produced no evidence, the operation turned to fabrication. Information from Russian agents. Manufactured documents. A disinformation campaign built knowingly on lies.

Lev participated.

Then the people who sent him abandoned him.

He went to prison.

And somewhere inside that experience he began to tell the truth. Not partially. Completely. Under oath. Before Congress. At enormous personal cost.

Then he asked to see me.

He sat down across the table and he wept. He named what he had done. He did not soften it. He did not explain it away. He said he had looked at me as a mark, a target, an abstraction. He said he was ashamed.

I forgave him.

Not because what he did was small.

Because the structure had been honored.

He named the harm. He changed the behavior. He accepted the cost.

He made the amend.

The people who sent him have done none of these things. The operation he described under oath continues. The lies he named are still in circulation. The architects of the campaign have not named what they built, have not changed what they are doing, have not acknowledged that the thing they constructed was built on fabrications they knew to be fabrications.

I forgave the man who pulled the trigger.

I do not forgive the people who handed him the gun and told him where to aim.

You can forgive your uncle.

The one who was consumed by something larger than himself. Who sat at the Thanksgiving table repeating things he heard on television with the certainty of a person who has been acted upon so thoroughly that the acting feels like thinking. Who forwarded the emails and shared the posts and absorbed the rage without understanding that the rage had been manufactured, tested, refined, and delivered to him by people who understood exactly what they were building and built it anyway.

Your uncle was raw material.

He can be reached. He can be talked to. He can, over time, come to see that the story he was given was not the story that was happening.

The uncle is forgivable.

Not because what he supported was acceptable, but because he was deceived.

The people who deceived him are different.

The architects. The strategists. The media executives. The elected officials who knew the narrative was false and amplified it anyway.

They were not deceived.

They chose.

And forgiveness applied to a choice that has not been renounced, that has not been named, that continues to produce the harm it was designed to produce, is not grace.

It is fuel.

The morning is coming.

All eras end. And when this one does the pressure to move on will be enormous. It will come from people we respect. It will sound like maturity. It will borrow the language of healing and national interest and the common good.

And it will be, if we accept it without the reckoning that must come first, the same mistake America has made after every crisis it survived without confronting.

The reckoning is not revenge.

Revenge is the mirror image of false forgiveness.

The reckoning is something else.

It is the insistence that before the country moves forward, the country names what happened. Specifically. In language that does not soften the naming.

It is the demand that the behavior changes. Not the rhetoric. The behavior.

The machinery that produced the harm must be dismantled with the same deliberateness with which it was built.

Without that, the moving forward is cosmetic. The surface heals. The infection remains.

And in ten years, or twenty, or fifty, the same sentence will return.

Let us move on.

The men in Limpopo are still smiling in that photograph. The leopard is still dead between their arms. The image circulates still, a trophy of something they believed they had the right to destroy.

The leopard cannot ask for a reckoning.

We can.

And the day we are asked to forgive the people who held the rifle and chose to fire,

without first requiring them to name what they killed and why,

is the day we become complicit in the next photograph.

Not forgiveness.

Reckoning.

And only then the possibility of a future that is not built on the same lie.

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