Sometimes I run a piece through Claude to see how it appears as an AI revision. It’s always much better. The one below is a rewrite of yesterday’s post. But I sometimes miss my unusual word choice and structure.

When Everyone Had the Power to Act, No One Did

Victoria Wilson
August 11, 2025

US Attorney General Joe Thompson’s recent assessment of Minnesota’s fraud crisis cuts to the heart of a systemic failure. As he told the Star Tribune: “This fraud crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Politicians who turned a blind eye. Agencies that failed to act. Prosecutors and law enforcement who didn’t push hard enough. Reporters who ignored the story. Community leaders who stayed silent. And a public that wanted to believe it couldn’t happen here.”

Thompson is describing something profound: the collapse of state capacity through a thousand small abdications of responsibility.

The Architecture of Inaction

At every decision point—what scholars call the “locus of discretion”—someone could have acted. The architecture of prevention was already in place; what failed was the will to use it.

Politicians possessed both influence and institutional knowledge. Any number could have quietly removed a questionable contractor from consideration or flagged suspicious applications. Career bureaucrats, masters of administrative friction, could have deployed their expertise differently—slowing suspicious applications rather than legitimate ones, demanding additional documentation, or simply doing their jobs by visiting the nonprofit distribution sites that journalists later discovered were empty storefronts.

But the machinery of oversight had been recalibrated around different priorities.

The Pendulum’s Swing

Law enforcement and prosecutors had internalized a new philosophy. Years of concern about overcharging and mass incarceration had created an institutional bias toward restraint. The progressive approach—emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment, empathy over enforcement—had become orthodoxy. This wasn’t necessarily wrong in principle, but it created blind spots in practice.

When the prevailing wisdom holds that harsh enforcement causes more harm than good, the institutional reflexes that might catch sophisticated fraud schemes atrophy. The very skills and instincts that prosecutors once relied upon were now viewed with suspicion, even by the prosecutors themselves.

The Fourth Estate’s Absence

Perhaps most puzzling was the media’s delayed response. Major fraud schemes leave trails—suspicious contracts, questionable nonprofits, patterns of payments that don’t match claimed activities. These stories don’t require deep investigative resources so much as basic skepticism and persistence.

Yet for years, the story went untold. What accounts for this collective editorial blind spot? The same social and ideological currents that affected other institutions likely influenced newsrooms as well. When the dominant narrative emphasizes compassion over skepticism, reporters may unconsciously avoid stories that complicate that narrative.

Social Proof and Professional Risk

The community leaders Thompson mentions—board members, nonprofit executives, civic figures—faced their own constraints. In professional networks where certain viewpoints signal virtue and sophistication, dissent carries social costs. The cocktail party circuit that shapes elite opinion had settled on particular truths about criminal justice, social services, and community empowerment.

Raising uncomfortable questions about fraud prevention or accountability could mark someone as unsympathetic, backward, or worse. When career advancement and social standing depend on maintaining good relationships within ideologically coherent networks, the incentives point toward conformity rather than vigilance.

The Paradox of Distributed Responsibility

This case illustrates a peculiar modern phenomenon: system-wide failure despite individual competence. None of these actors were incompetent or malicious. Politicians understood governance, bureaucrats knew their procedures, prosecutors understood the law, reporters could investigate, and community leaders cared about their communities.

The failure occurred because everyone was optimizing for their immediate institutional and social environment rather than the system’s overall integrity. Each actor made rational decisions given their constraints, yet the collective result was irrational—a massive fraud that continued for years despite numerous opportunities for intervention.

The Cost of Consensus

Thompson’s critique suggests something uncomfortable: that the very social and ideological consensus meant to create a more just society may have created new vulnerabilities. When preventing harm becomes conflated with avoiding enforcement, when empathy becomes synonymous with credulity, the institutions meant to protect public resources become unable to protect them.

This doesn’t argue for a return to punitive excess, but rather for institutional cultures capable of holding multiple values in tension—compassion and accountability, reform and vigilance, trust and verification.

The Minnesota fraud case reveals what happens when that balance is lost, when the locus of discretion at every level points in the same direction: away from the uncomfortable work of saying no.