Source: The Atlantic
“When the American republic was founded, the Earth was no more than 75,000 years old. No contemporary thinker imagined it could possibly be older. Thus Thomas Jefferson was confident that woolly mammoths must still live in ‘the northern and western parts of America,’ places that ‘still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us.’ The idea that mammoths or any other kind of creature might have ceased to exist was, to him, inconceivable. … In trying to imagine how [the founders] would perceive the state of their republic in 2025, the risk is that we invent our own versions of Jefferson’s nonexistent beasts. The originalist fallacy that dominates the current Supreme Court — the pretense that it is possible to read the minds of the Founders and discern what they ‘really’ meant — in fact turns the Founders into ventriloquists’ dummies. We express our own prejudices by moving their lips.” (10/10/25)