Power and Corruption

August 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram

When I was young, I thought the world would be a lot better off if women were running things. I figured there would be no war, that kindness would prevail, that courts would be fairer, that there would be more empathy, and that government fraud would be reduced to a minimum. Boy, was I delusional!

In my defense, I didn’t really have any facts to base that theory on, just what I knew about women. Mainly me.

Now there are plenty of facts, facts that show up in the news every day and have for the past couple of decades, and it turns out that women are every bit as corrupt and as sociopathic as men, using their positions of power to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, enrich themselves to the detriment to the country, and all the other ways people in poser have of holding themselves above “the deplorables” they hate, as well as their own constituents. And oh, yes . . . as is abundantly apparent when some of the women politicians open their mouths, they are every bit as unintelligent and ignorant as some of the men in politics.

It’s not just politicians and those running political machines, as well as anyone else who carves out a place of power for themselves, but district attorneys and judges, too. It’s no secret why so many of these individuals are women — women make up about 56% of students in law school. I was right — women in such positions are more empathic, but for the wrong side. It used to be that justice favored the victim (or at least it was supposed to), but now “justice” favors the perpetrator. Occasionally victims defending themselves end up in prison instead of the perpetrator. Too often, cops arrest doers, the DA refuses to bring them to trial, and so the criminal ends up back out on the street to do it again. And so more victims. But oh, that poor perpetrator! He had such a terrible life. (Not a word about the victim who now has no life, just a grave and grieving relatives.) Then there’s cashless bail where the perpetrator is released on his own recognizance with no incentive to return for his trial. Even worse, when they are here illegally committing crimes, sometimes the judges even conspire to let the doers go to keep them from being deported.

Why? I have no idea. Perhaps they really are empathic, though judges are supposed to be impartial. Perhaps they really do care, but it’s a killer’s empathy — not just an empathy for killers (because as some judges have said, they can’t convict if they don’t know the reason for the crime) but an empathy that gets innocent people killed. Perhaps they have a greater agenda — greater crime rates increase chaos, and in chaos is power.

As it turns out, women — or rather some women — are every bit as addicted to power as some men. Lord Acton’s belief that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” holds true for women, too. Even if women go into politics or the law or whatever for humanitarian reasons, they begin to believe that they deserve their power, and when their bad actions have no consequences, they begin to believe that they are right no matter how reprehensible they might be. It’s more than that, though. Although power does lessen people’s moral culpability, it seems as if morally ambiguous people — people who are ready and willing to be corrupted — are drawn to positions of power.

Despite the message you might be getting from this blog, the truth is, it doesn’t really matter to me if the powerful, morally ambiguous person is a woman (except that it gives women a bad name). I simply don’t like powerful people. Period. They take too much power from the rest of us.