And their land is no less returned, their vindication no less real, for having been delivered by a self-interested man rather than a noble one.

Justice, in the real world, is not usually a triumph of virtue.

It is more often an alignment of incentives — the moment when doing the right thing finally becomes the smart thing, when the machinery of consequence grows large enough that even the cowards find it in their interest to tell the truth.

The task, for those of us who care about outcomes rather than about the purity of the story, is not to wait for heroes.

It is to build the machinery — the recording, the federal case, the mounting evidence — until the pressure grows so great that self-interest itself begins to pry the truth loose from the people protecting the lie.