America’s founders have become lightning rods in today’s culture wars. Their legacies are fiercely contested between those who see them as visionary champions of liberty and those who see them as rich white slaveowners. The contradictions they embodied are not relics of the past—our own lives are entangled in modern injustices, from the minerals in our smartphones to the labor behind their assembly. The uncomfortable truth is that every era is built on moral compromises that demand honest reckoning rather than easy condemnation.