So, a few years ago I did a broadcast where I said that our society needs a better class of scumbag. I’ve been rather proud of that observation and sadly I’ve continued to be ever more convinced that I’m right. Our scumbags are really scummy. But I fear that what I mean by this comment may not be clear.
You see, a society’s elites have never really been the best and brightest. Government and high society have pretty much always been populated by scumbags. Psalm 62 says that the high-born are a lie. The idea that kings and princes and the celebrities are the best and brightest is neither historically, nor logically supportable.
Jeremiah 5 says this:
5:1 “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem,
look around and consider,
search through her squares.
If you can find but one person
who deals honestly and seeks the truth,
I will forgive this city.
2 Although they say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives,’
still they are swearing falsely.”
3 LORD, do not your eyes look for truth?
You struck them, but they felt no pain;
you crushed them, but they refused correction.
They made their faces harder than stone
and refused to repent.
4 I thought, “These are only the poor;
they are foolish,
for they do not know the way of the LORD,
the requirements of their God.
5 So I will go to the leaders
and speak to them;
surely they know the way of the LORD,
the requirements of their God.”
But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke
and torn off the bonds.
I think this passage is so fascinating because here’s Jeremiah, a descendant of priests, someone who knows and respects the law—but someone who respects order and social prestige and hierarchy. You say, “Luke, how do you know that?” Because Jeremiah tells us that’s what he believes! Jeremiah believes that the godless poor are just the rabble, but the leaders, the princes, the nobles—they aren’t like the rabble, no, they’re honorable and righteous.
Except they aren’t.
In a fallen society the leaders are never better than the rabble, and sometimes they are worse. And we’re seeing this in our society today.
There are 4 stories that are utterly shocking to a rube like me that used to believe in institutions. I used to believe, like a fool, that those who worked in government or academia or medicine or law had higher moral standards and were serious people.
But alas and alack, they are none of those things. They are scumbags. And I get that. I get that people in government are scummy—and maybe they always are—but the kind of scumbags we have in our society aren’t engaged in run-of-the mill corruption. Nor are they working hard to cover-over their crimes. The amount of corruption and debauchery and villainy is really incredible. And I mean that in a literal sense. These people are so corrupt that it makes it hard to believe that people in these kinds of positions could BE this corrupt AND SO VERY BAD AT HIDING IT!
So, I want to do a rapid review and round-up of some of the news stories I’ve been following and thinking about. I want to talk, at length, about all these issue with you lovely folks, but I get 15 minutes a week, and there’s, tragically, a lot more than 15 minutes a week of corruption worthy of discussing!
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade admitted to having a romantic relationship and going on multiple international vacations together. And they both claim that Ms. Willis reimbursed Mr. Wade, who paid for these trips with his company credit card, by paying him in cash. Cash that came from a hoard she keeps at home. Cash that is not tied to any bank withdrawal, and cash that Mr. Wade never deposited. More than that, when asked where Ms. Willis had accumulated such a large hoard of cash she said that it was from money she had taken from her election campaign fund—which sounds like racketeering…but hey, what do I know!
The second story that I want us to think about is about a Harvard Medical Researcher. Khalid Shah a respected researcher and neuroscientist has been called out by Elisabeth Bik, a renowned data manipulation sleuth.
Bik points out that a whole host of published research papers that have Shah’s name attached have plagiarized images and data falsification. Shah is not the first Harvard associated researcher to be hit with allegations of data fraud, and it’s unlikely that he’ll be the last.
The third story comes from investigative journalism from Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag, and this is still developing and there are a lot of moving pieces that are quite complex so I will oversimplify this, and hopefully it will be a useful oversimplification. But in short, here’s what we know. We were told that the Russiagate hoax, and it was a hoax, was begun because the FBI received intel from the Steele Dossier that was, essentially, Clinton Campaign propaganda.
BUT, now it appears that that’s not the whole truth, or even the relevant truth. The Steele Dossier, it would appear, is actually a product of the CIA and the Five-Eyes Intelligence Consortium. So, what happens is Brennan who was Obama’s CIA director, has the CIA in London spy on a bunch of Trump people, and they create the Steele Dossier, which is given to the Clinton campaign which is then given back to the FBI so the intel is laundered!
And the fourth story I want us to consider is the growing scandal about the January 6th bombs. Again, I’m going to oversimplify, but here’s what we know. There were bombs that were discovered on January 6 at the DNC, while Kamala Harris was there. Camera footage was able to follow the man who planted the bomb and get his metro train card, his vehicle license plate number and home address. The FBI was staking out the house when they were called off that surveillance. But now we know that there were bomb sniffing dogs who went right by the bomb and never marked it. And dogs don’t miss stuff like this if they are legit bomb-sniffing dogs. So what happened?!
What is abundantly clear from all four of these news issues is that there is unfathomable amounts of corruption going on in our system. Scientists, Prosecutors, the FBI, the CIA, there’s corruption everywhere.
It’s bad enough that we have prosecutors trying to undermine elections. But do they have to be so seedy? It would be one thing to have a real puritanical corruptico, someone who was disciplined and intelligent and careful and fully committed to moral ideals who then tried to undermine an election, but when it’s a seedy, corrupt, classless, obnoxious, fool like Fani Willis it’s just all the more tragic.
They say you’re known by your enemies. Well, if Fani Willis is the enemy of the republic, then that says an awful lot about our enemies. It’s not even a clever scam—she’s just getting the guy she’s shacking up with who will take her to Belize—she doesn’t know what continent Belize is in, btw—and Aruba and Napa Valley, and she touts how she’s saving democracy. C’mon, guys, at least gimme a Bond-villain level of evil, but this is just so shabby.
And the same thing with Khalid, and admittedly, it might not be Khalid, maybe it’s just a coincidence that dozens of papers he’s had his name on since 2001 all have the same kinds of data manipulation and falsification…just a crazy co-inky-dink!
But here’s a Harvard researcher. He’s respected. Why? Why lie? Why cheat?
Money.
You gots to get your grubby paws on that sweet, sweet, grant money! And he has received Federal Grant money through the DoD. And he received grant money from the DoD to do papers that had falsified data in them!
This is what I like to call fraud. Plagiarism is bad enough. But when you’re getting paid to produce information and you falsify the information that you’re paid to produce on behalf of the US taxpayer, that’s fraud.
And fraud would be bad enough. And it’s always disgraceful and always bad and should always be punished and prosecuted. But it’s like he didn’t even try to hide it! When you look at how obvious some of these incidences of fraud are, it’s obvious that he’s either very lazy, very sloppy, or a very bad criminal. He would appear to be a scumbag. Granted, there’s always the possibility that he’s a victim of circumstance. But in all likelihood, he’s scumbag. And what a low-rent scumbag he is. The fact that papers like this make it through the peer-review process is perhaps the most damning part of it all! Does peer-review mean anything? Or is the whole system corrupt?
And of course we must consider our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the CIA and the FBI. It’s bad enough that they’re political hacks, but the fact that they’re so bad at it and they just utterly refuse to come clean and fess up.
And, if I’m being honest, it’s a little scary—if they are this bad at spying on our own people how bad are they at spying on our nation’s actual enemies! But, we’ll save that terrifying consideration for another day—my question is, how much influence is the permanent bureaucracy exerting on elections? And, more than that, why do they believe that it’s justifiable to do so? What gives them the right to violate laws and behave unethically? Because Orange Man Bad?
But I keep coming back to this thought that the thing that is most upsetting isn’t that there are corrupticos—but that their corruption is so petty and dingy and shabby. It’s so hackneyed and pedestrian. We’re not looking at criminal masterminds; this isn’t Charles Augustus Milverton or Professor Moriarty, here. These aren’t brilliant, clever, cunning criminals. These are people who would be loan-sharks in bad plaid suits in alternate timelines.
I want to return to Jeremiah’s words:
5:1 “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem,
look around and consider,
search through her squares.
If you can find but one person
who deals honestly and seeks the truth,
I will forgive this city.
2 Although they say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives,’
still they are swearing falsely.”
3 LORD, do not your eyes look for truth?
You struck them, but they felt no pain;
you crushed them, but they refused correction.
They made their faces harder than stone
and refused to repent.
4 I thought, “These are only the poor;
they are foolish,
for they do not know the way of the LORD,
the requirements of their God.
5 So I will go to the leaders
and speak to them;
surely they know the way of the LORD,
the requirements of their God.”
But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke
and torn off the bonds.
The rich and powerful, the leaders of our nation, those in positions of authority and respect—that might have meant something once. I don’t think it means anything anymore. And that is tragic. I want to live in a world where a scientist or a prosecutor or an intelligence agent is someone to whom I can grant default respect and trust to, because I believe that that person is fundamentally honest, integrous, and righteous.
But we don’t live in that world. And we don’t live in that world because we have rejected Christ and his morality.
James Madison once said this,
But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
And I think it’s worthwhile to consider what he’s saying. Madison is stating quite clearly that unless we have virtuous leaders elected by a virtuous public then no form of government can possibly protect our rights and liberties. There is no system that can stop evil. There are no rules that can be established.
You know why?
Because vicious people will break the rules! Good laws and good systems of government constrain and direct the energies of a virtuous leadership and body politic—it is wholly useless to the vicious. Indeed, a nation of laws run by a pack of vicious scumbags may be worse because it may give the patina of lawfulness and dignity to their crimes. The thin veneer of righteousness might cover over the cesspools of their cynicism.
We are now in the place of Jeremiah. We have seen that huge swathes of Americans are vicious, selfish, corrupt, and wicked—and we had hope that good government would save us. But there is no saving anything when the population is corrupt. Because no nation will have godly leaders very long of it has a wicked population. We thought to go to the leaders and found that they’re just as bad as the rabble! And in some ways worse!
We’re always gonna have scumbags, but we need a better class of scumbags. We need scumbags who are cleverer and who have higher ideals. Or at least scumbags who know how to cover their crimes so we aren’t the laughingstock of the world.
But, I guess you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.
And in the end it doesn’t really matter. The solution is not in solving this or that issue or seeing this or that corruptico go to jail—though we should work for that—but in the reformation of society. The solution to society’s ills is the salvation of souls and the transformation of sinners into Christ’s likeness. We need to seek first the kingdom…and, well, you know the rest.