Scott Pruitt

Tommy the Hamburger is here again, and this is Historical Depravity, where we dig up the polished bones of history, crack them open, and show you the rot they tried to dress up as greatness. They called these people kings, visionaries, captains of industry, patriots, reformers, whatever flattering bullshit helped the blood dry faster. I'm here to show you what they actually were. Scott Pruitt got marketed as a sober law and order conservative who would bring balance back to environmental regulation. That is the mythology. Serious public servant. States' rights man. Corrective to bureaucratic overreach. The practical grown up who would stop the Environmental Protection Agency from harassing hardworking industry and return it to its "proper" role. If you listened to the cleanup version, he was never really anti environment. He was just anti excess. Anti red tape. Anti hysteria. A disciplined steward who would respect both economic growth and the rule of law. That is horseshit. The reality is that Pruitt functioned as a corporate sabotage artist inside the very agency he was supposed to run for the public good. He did not merely trim rules around the margins or disagree with some regulatory philosophy. He worked to hollow out enforcement, downgrade science, delay protections, elevate industry influence, and turn the EPA from a public health shield into a friendlier operating environment for the very sectors it exists to restrain. He treated environmental law less like a civic duty and more like a hostile codebase to be disabled from the inside. Fuck me sideways, there are few more American forms of depravity than appointing a man to lead a protective institution because he hates the institution's protective mission. The myth says Pruitt fought for fairness against overregulation. The reality says he spent years aligning himself with fossil fuel and corporate polluter interests and then carried that alignment into federal power. The myth says he brought common sense. The reality says he brought a worldview in which scientific evidence, public health warnings, and ecological stewardship were irritants to be subordinated to political theater and donor friendly deregulation. The myth says he represented a different policy preference. The reality says he helped weaken safeguards with consequences measured in dirtier air, dirtier water, more emissions, weaker enforcement, and more confidence among polluters that the cop had fallen asleep. Pruitt's pre EPA career mattered because it showed exactly what kind of bastard he was going to be once he got the keys. As Oklahoma attorney general, he built a reputation by fighting the EPA and aligning himself with energy sector priorities. He did not arrive in Washington as some neutral administrator open to evidence. He arrived with a record, a constituency, and an ideology already wired against environmental restraint. That is important because one of the favorite cleanup moves in public memory is to describe administrators like him as flawed managers who later got carried away. No. He was carrying the project in with him. And that project was simple enough: treat regulation as the enemy, treat polluters as misunderstood wealth creators, and treat the agency's own scientific and enforcement capacity as something to be politically disciplined. Inside the EPA, that translated into a thousand forms of rot. Delays. Rollbacks. hostile messaging. pressure on staff. elevation of industry friendly voices. strategic narrowing of the agency's moral imagination. This part matters because institutional sabotage often looks boring if you only see it up close. It is not always one giant dramatic abolition. Sometimes it is death by memo, staffing pressure, review bottleneck, rhetorical reframing, and leadership contempt. You do not have to kill the agency outright if you can make it hesitate, retreat, demoralize itself, and defer. The attack on environmental protections under Pruitt was not just abstract ideology. It intersected directly with power plant emissions, methane rules, vehicle standards, water protections, toxic exposure questions, and the broader posture of whether the federal government would actually impose costs on dirty industries. When leadership signals that polluters deserve sympathy and regulators deserve suspicion, that changes the entire atmosphere. Companies notice. Lawyers notice. state regulators notice. enforcement officials notice. The public may hear a speech about balance, but the regulated industries hear something much more concrete: the pressure is off. That is one of the reasons this sort of administrative depravity is so dangerous. It communicates with elites in coded reassurance. Nobody has to say "go ahead and pollute." They just need to hear that the leadership is hostile to aggressive enforcement, friendly to rollback arguments, and eager to reopen settled fights. Once that happens, every regulated actor starts recalculating around a friendlier horizon. Pruitt also embodied the special filth of regulatory capture culture. Not because he was uniquely inventive, but because he was so naked about where his affinities lay. The EPA under him did not feel like an institution leaning uneasily between public health and industry pressure. It often felt like an institution whose leadership had already chosen a side and was now using formal authority to reward that side. That is more than disagreement. That is a betrayal of office. And the office mattered, because the EPA is not some ornamental bureaucracy. Air rules matter. Water rules matter. Toxic substance review matters. Greenhouse gas regulation matters. Chemical exposure standards matter. Enforcement posture matters. People who sneer at the agency like it is just a paper shuffling nuisance usually rely, often without even knowing it, on the fact that someone somewhere is supposedly making sure the river is less poisonous, the smokestack less lethal, the dumping less brazen, the drinking water less carcinogenic, the pesticide less casually destructive, the emissions less catastrophic. When that protective architecture is weakened, the harm does not show up as a clean cinematic event. It shows up as more asthma, more contamination, more long tail cancer risk, more climate damage, more cumulative exposure, more communities asked to absorb the costs so somebody else can keep the quarterly numbers pretty. That is why the "jobs versus regulation" script is such manipulative crap. It tries to force the public into a stupid cartoon where industry prosperity and human health stand opposite each other like boxers in a ring. In practice, the people most exposed to weak regulation are often workers, poor communities, children, and politically disposable populations who do not have the luxury of treating pollution as an abstract policy debate. They breathe it, drink it, and get sick from it. Pruitt's style of governance did not heroically liberate ordinary people from bureaucracy. It made life easier for industries with the resources to translate deregulation into gain while pushing risk outward. The climate dimension matters too. Pruitt was not merely skeptical around the edges. He participated in a broader Trump era project of weakening climate oriented federal action and recoding environmental seriousness as elitist overreach. In a time when climate science was already screaming louder and the costs of delay were mounting, that mattered. You do not have to be the only man worsening the fire to deserve blame for kicking the hose out of someone's hand. And then there is the personal corruption and ethics stink, because Pruitt managed to combine ideological sabotage with grubby little self serving behavior in a way that almost feels too on the nose. The soundproof booth. The travel. The sweetheart housing arrangement tied to lobbying relationships. The constant impression that public office was not only a policy weapon but a lifestyle upgrade. That layer matters because it revealed the same basic disrespect that marked his policy posture. The rules were for other people. The standards were for other people. The mission was for other people. He would use the institution, not honor it. That combination of petty greed and large scale institutional damage is a very specific American form of rot. It is never enough for the bastard to merely help polluters. He also has to act like the public purse and public trust are his personal buffet while he is doing it. The false legacy around Pruitt now tends to come in two shapes. The first says he was a reformer who had some ethics issues. The second says he was too sloppy and self indulgent to be an effective ideological operator, so his real damage gets overstated. Both are convenient lies. The ethics scandals did not cancel the regulatory sabotage. If anything, they distracted from it by making him look like just another crook with expensive tastes rather than a man helping remake the relationship between the federal government and environmental harm. And the fact that he eventually became politically unsustainable does not mean the damage was imaginary. A bastard can be both clownish and dangerous. American history is crowded with exactly that type. What makes Pruitt historically depraved is not merely that he was corrupt, or anti regulatory, or friendly to dirty industry. It is that he stood at the head of a public health institution and behaved as if its protective mission were itself the problem. He helped recast environmental protection as illegitimate aggression, science as ideological clutter, and polluters as the real victims. That reversal is poisonous because it trains the public to identify freedom with exposure and dignity with deregulation. It makes people cheer for the weakening of the very structures meant to stop them from being quietly poisoned. And that poison is not metaphorical. It lives in particulate matter, chemical runoff, emissions, drinking water risk, and long range climate consequences. Administrative sabotage has a body count even when the bodies do not pile up dramatically in one place. They scatter across years, counties, lungs, bloodstreams, pregnancies, cancer registries, emergency rooms, and heat maps. That is exactly why people like Pruitt are so dangerous. The harm they facilitate is vast enough to matter and diffuse enough to hide. So no, I am not interested in hearing that he simply had a different regulatory philosophy. Plenty of philosophies do not involve kneecapping your own agency on behalf of the industries it polices. And no, I am not interested in hearing that he was mainly a personal corruption scandal. That is the smaller story because it is easier for television. The bigger story is that he helped operationalize contempt for environmental protection from inside the state. The myth says Scott Pruitt was a principled reformer correcting bureaucratic excess. The reality says he was a corporate friendly saboteur who weakened environmental protections, degraded enforcement culture, and used public office to make polluting power feel safer and public health restraint feel weaker. The myth says he fought for ordinary Americans against regulators. The reality says he made ordinary Americans more exposed while making powerful industries more comfortable. The myth says his downfall was about ethics. The reality says the ethics filth was only one symptom of a much larger betrayal. That is the depravity on record. The myth is smaller now, the stink is stronger, and the body count is still the body count. See you in the next grave I have to dig up.