We don’t even flinch. Because deep down, we already expect it. Not just from one politician, or one country. From the whole machine.
This is not the exception. This is the age. The age of scandal.
It’s tempting to believe the world is more corrupt than ever. But it’s not. What’s changed is that corruption no longer bothers to whisper. It walks past the cameras like it owns them. The governments own most investigative reporters. The majority of them report only the news they want them to report …to people too tired to question anything.
Secrets used to be locked in filing cabinets. Now they leak from group chats, deepfakes, metadata, and disgruntled staffers with Wi-Fi. Anyone can expose anyone. And yet—nothing really changes.
Once, scandal was a career-ending event. Now it’s a minor inconvenience. A talking point. A momentary dip in polling before the next distraction kicks in.
The playbook is always the same: Deny. Deflect. Blame the media. Then post a photo kissing a baby or petting a dog. Wait for the algorithm to flush the memory.
The truth is, they’re not even trying to hide anymore. Because they’ve learned something terrifying: We’ll keep scrolling. We’ll be mad. But we’ll move on. Because there’s always another crisis. Another headline. Another dopamine hit of moral outrage.
We’ve confused exposure with progress. We think because we see it, we’ve somehow stopped it. But visibility is not victory. Outrage is not action.
And scandal is not justice.
There’s an economy around our disbelief now. A whole ecosystem designed to keep us in a loop of shock, click, forget. The media monetizes it. Politicians manage it. And the rest of us? We watch. We share. We rage. Then we go to sleep.
Scandal has become a spectacle. Not a breach of trust—but a performance. And somewhere along the line, we stopped demanding accountability. We settled for drama.
The most dangerous part of all this? Not that they lie. Not even that they steal.
It’s that we’ve started to expect it. To build our lives around it. To let our standards rot slowly, because hope feels naïve and memory is short.
They know this. That’s why they smirk when caught. That’s why apologies sound like PR scripts. That’s why scandals pile up faster than consequences.
Because they’ve figured out the one thing that breaks democracy isn’t corruption. It’s exhaustion.
Maybe the real scandal isn’t that they lied. It’s how quickly we learned to live with it.
