Corruption in a Woke World by Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
Power and money are at the heart of politics, so it is unsurprising that politics is rife with corruption. Corrupt politicians rank among the world’s oldest professions. In his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain wrote: “There is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.” Theodore Roosevelt is alleged to have once said, “When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘present’ or ‘not guilty.’ Humor aside, has corruption become more common? Certainly, we have moved beyond the late 19th and early 20th Centuries’ big city political machines like Tammany Hall in New York and the Pendergast organization in Kansas City. But we live in a time and a place that venerates wealth and power.
President Truman famously refused a corporate board seat in 1953 – “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that does not belong to me. It belongs to the American people and its not for sale.” His decision can be contrasted to the wealth accumulated by ex-presidents Bill Clinton ($80 million) and Barack Obama ($70 million). George W. Bush has an estimated net worth of $40 million. Unlike Messrs. Clinton and Obama, Mr. Bush entered the Presidency with an estimated $20 million. And then we have the greatly resisted Donald Trump who became the first individual to lose a billion dollars while President. Yet he is the one cited by an honor-challenged media as being the most corrupt.
Since Clinton’s and Obama’s wealth was made after they left the White House, they may not meet a common definition of corrupt: “to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.” However, both diverged from the moral standards enunciated by Mr. Truman when he left the Presidency. Clinton and Obama had no qualms in leveraging their fame (or infamy) into book contracts and speaking engagements. Mainstream media’s lack of interest in their extraordinary (and quick) wealth accumulation may be explained by the fact we live in a material age, as Madonna sang almost forty years ago: “You know we are living in a material world/And I am a material girl.” The hypocritical woke elite publicly lament income and wealth inequality, while privately celebrating their own riches behind gated compounds.
The word “corrupt” derives from the Latin cor (altogether) and rumpere (break). Its meaning is broader than simply selling access for dollars, which President Biden’s son Hunter has done in China, Russia and Ukraine, activities “which,” wrote Kimberly Strassel in the April 8, 2022 edition of the Wall Street Journal, “raises questions about counterintelligence and extortion, even as it puts a spotlight on how honest President Biden has been in claiming no knowledge of his son’s doings.”
Corruption can refer to any action that results in dishonest and immoral behavior. It can refer to an organization that has debased its raison d’être – the United Nation’s Human Rights Council comes to mind. Corruption escalates in our woke world. In his recent memoir One Damn Thing After Another, William Barr wrote about the blitzkrieg of progressive ideological thinking: “The essential factor, in my view, was the corruption of the mainstream news media beginning around the turn of the century.” False stories of Russia-collusion during the 2016 Presidential election was manifest of media corruption, and it was corruption within Congress and intelligence agencies that led to Robert Mueller’s $40 million fruitless search for corroborating evidence of Russian interference. It was the corruption of ethics that allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to sit on a story of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer for over a year, a story written up by the New York Post on October 19, 2020 and then banned on social media. It was fifteen months before mainstream news outlets acknowledged the laptop and its contents. The intelligence services have yet to admit their role in withholding information. Woke corruption is pervasive. It raises fear in corporate boardrooms; it dominates Hollywood; it proliferates in colleges and universities, which shut down debate and cancel harmful (read conservative) speech, while claiming their mission is to seek truth.
This is not a blanket condemnation of all politicians, government bureaucrats and members of the woke community. Not all are corrupt and not all news sources are propagandists. But many are. Not all universities are hotbeds of progressive nihilists and not all boardrooms bow to woke ideologies. Serving the public as an elected representative is an honorable task and most who go to Washington do so to improve the lives of their constituents, but there are those who fit Ambrose Bierce’s description and who will, with the help of a compliant press, use all means to personally benefit. The decision by the jury in Grand Rapids last week to acquit Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta of conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer was an example of corruption embedded in the FBI’s “Praetorian Guard” mentality of entrapping opponents of favored politicians.
The world will never be rid of corrupt politicians, moralizing news reporters, social media suppressors, sanctimonious bureaucrats, obsequious business leaders and progressive professors. While cynicism may be unhealthy, skepticism about what we read, hear and watch is not. We should read extensively, retain our moral standards and form our own conclusions, while remembering we are part of a larger community. We should be wary of politicians bearing false promises. We should remember President Reagan’s warning of the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
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