A Letter to the Guardian of Predators
Dear Ms. Bondi,
I don’t know you personally, but I know of you. I know you as the United States Attorney General, serving as the head of the Department of Justice and the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government. Previously as the Florida Attorney General. I’ve read the statements issued in your name, watched you testify before Congress.
From where I sit I can see the tentacles of shame have wrapped themselves around your heart. Draining you of love, erasing empathy, killing compassion.
As you sat in your seat before Congress, I watched you thumb through your book. That private catalog where you’ve organized individualized insults for each adversary, flash cards of cruelty customized to match your opponents. Even during congressional hearings, you return to those pages, fingers tracing your arsenal of personal attacks. Studying them. Rehearsing them. Ready to deploy the precise insult that will cut deepest.
The pettiness of it is staggering. Here you sit, in a position of immense responsibility, and you’re leafing through schoolyard taunts like a child planning revenge on the playground. The insults themselves are childish, unimaginative. They make you sound incompetent, small, utterly unequal to the office you hold.
When asked to turn and face the victims of your coverups, you cower and flip through your flash cards for a lethal zinger. Rather than accountability, you offer performance. Rather than answers, you deliver rehearsed cruelty. The victims sit there, waiting for acknowledgment, for justice, for some sign that their suffering matters. And you’re rifling through pages looking for the right insult to deflect attention from your failure to protect them.
You’ve aligned yourself with powerful men whose transgressions you help to manage, whose scandals you help to bury, whose victims disappear into the machinery of legal maneuvering and strategic silence. Each time you provide cover for cruelty, each time you shield wrongdoing from consequence, something happens to you. There’s a hardening that occurs, a coarsening that shows in your expressions, in the way you speak, in the quality of presence you bring to your public role.
I don’t mean physical appearance. I mean the ugliness that seeps in when we absorb the cruelty of others, when we make ourselves vessels for their misdeeds. You carry their skeletons now. And you’ve added your own contribution: your catalog of calculated cruelty, your system for inflicting maximum damage. You’ve become the predator’s guardian.
Your office holds tremendous influence. You are the people's lawyer, sworn to serve their interests, to pursue justice on their behalf, to hold the powerful accountable, to stand as a barrier between predators and their prey. Instead, you've become something else entirely: a guardian not of the vulnerable, but of those who harm them. A protector not of truth, but of its concealment. Someone who brings flash cards of insults to Congress.
We the people see the tentacles tighten with each compromise, each moment you choose expedience over principle. They feed on the widening gap between the person you once hoped to be and the role you’ve agreed to play. And they convince you that your book of insults is smart preparation, that your critics are naive, that the distance you feel from your former convictions, if there were any, is maturity rather than moral erosion.
The skeletons you bury aren’t abstractions. They represent real harm, real victims, real consequences that you’ve chosen to enable through your protection of those responsible. You’ve made choices that have had deadly consequences for some and impunity for others. That’s not speculation. It’s the visible record of your tenure.
Start today. Refuse the next cover-up, name the next wrongdoing, choose truth over expediency. Release ALL of the Epstein files. Un-redacted. It’s not too late to close that book of personalized attacks. Not too late to face the victims with honesty instead of hiding behind flash cards. The cost would be real. Some of your current allies would abandon you, some doors would close. But you’d finally be able to look in the mirror without seeing the accumulated weight of all those buried skeletons reflected back at you.
The tentacles only have the power you continue to grant them. But you’ve granted them so much already: your integrity, your moral clarity, the person you might have been.
Somewhere beneath the hardening, beneath the ugliness of absorbed cruelty, beneath the catalog of grievances and flash cards of insults you consult even in the halls of power, there might still be the person who once believed that power should serve something higher than itself.
The question is whether you can find her again.
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