20 of the Biggest American Scandals No One Talks About Anymore

Remember the DuPont scandal?
20 of the Biggest American Scandals No One Talks About Anymore

For those searching for a higher power in their lives but who don’t mesh with any of the major religions, consider the 24-hour news cycle. It’s like a vengeful god demanding to be fed, hungry for increasingly violent and outrageous sacrifices. If it doesn’t get them, it’s going to send us a plague of intimate details about the personal lives of C-list celebrities, and we’ll do just about anything to avoid that.

As a result, atrocities that would be front-page news for an entire year in another era can come and go by dinnertime. No matter how shocking the scandal, it can be overshadowed by the next, and by the time we’re five scandals deep, it might be forgotten entirely — if it ever got the chance to grace most people’s trending topics pages at all.

So when user Sxzym asked r/AskReddit, “What is a massive American scandal that most people seem to not know about?” the replies were a treasure trove of faded but still stinking headlines.

jiggywiz 1y ago CIA flooded poor neighborhoods with crack in the 80's. Right around the time the story was made public it was overshadowed by a presidential fellatio scandal.
Gaelir 1y ago The church of Scientology blackmailed and threatened IRS people to get their tax exempt status.
kilertree 1y ago The media destroyed Gary Webb's career because he exposed the C.I.A's connection to Cocaine. News Papers like the New York Times later apologized.
1y ago Japanese internment camps in the US. I put Japanese in quotes because they were nearly all Americans of Japanese-ancestry who were displaced from from their homes, moved into camps with limited belongings for who knows how long, and forced to sell-off businesses/houses. Children were born in those camps. And it's 2023 and apparently never taught in schools.
1y ago Native American boarding schools. Native Americans children were forcibly removed from their communities and forced to attend a government ran brain washing institution where they suffered abuse and much more.
hellawhitegirl 1y ago I truly didn't know anything about the Osage native Americans getting murdered and how super wealthy they were. And, boy, the government treated them awfully. But that is with most natives.
FireWoman89 1y ago The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy. Between 1936 and 1951, several car and oil companies conspired to control the streetcar system in cities all over the USA. They replaced electric streetcars with gas-powered buses. Antitrust practices continued into the 1970s to kill expansion of the electric transportation systems. That's why the USA doesn't have mass transit.
laneb71 1y ago I'm sure others have said it but Enron was so awful and deserves to be remembered. The financial elite lost billions and billions in normal Americans savings because of their greed and recklessness. It left many broken families in its wake to no fault of their own.
granweep 1y ago The for-profit juvenile detention system. Basically, judges in Pennsylvania were intentionally handing out harsher sentences because these for-profit juvenile prisons contributed to the judge's campaign (in PA they elect their judges which blows my mind for this very reason but that's another story).
Moonatik_ 1y ago Edited 1y ago The Afghanistan Papers. Came out a few years before the withdrawal, they revealed how the US military in Afghanistan had no idea why they were there or what their mission was and they kept this secret from the public. The war was only ever going to end one way, and they knew it. Amazing that they acted so surprised when it did end that way.
10-100-11-01-0 . 1y ago The Abu Ghraib prison incident. Just read the Wikipedia page about it, the images of American soldiers smiling with their thumbs up next to the prisoners they violated and killed... Its just sadistic and horrifying. And only one guy was imprisoned for merely six and a half years.
Shoddy_Art_1155 1y ago Edited 1y ago Tuskegee Syphilis Study. It was a 40-year long study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health Service that involved 400 African American men with syphilis who were not informed of their condition or given proper treatment in order to study the progression of the disease.
SuvenPan 1y ago In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people. The Equifax breach investigation highlighted a number of security lapses that allowed attackers to enter supposedly secure systems and exfiltrate terabytes of data that exposed millions of names and dates of birth, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, and other personal information that could lead to identity theft and fraud.
randomusername1919 . 1y ago DES given to pregnant women from 1940 until 1971. It gave girls who were born after prenatal exposure a much higher risk of several cancers, including one cancer that no one else gets. It also causes an inability to carry pregnancies in some women who were exposed to it before birth. Boys born after exposure were cryptorchid and had a high rate of micro penis. There was a registry for these children so they could be tracked for medical needs and if other effects cropped up, but Congress did away with the registry. The changes that
super_mega547 1y ago The Dupont scandal. DuPont chemical dumped thousands of tons of chemical waste containing a long chained fluorocarbon also known as PFOA into waterways in Parkersburg, West Virginia. These chemicals were found to directly cause cancer and birth defects. Unfortunately the irresponsible disposal and manufacturing of this chemical didn't just effect America; trace amounts of PFOAs can be found in virtually every single living creature on earth.
CharsOwnRX-78-2 1y ago The Business Plot Smedley Butler alleged that a cadre of Wall Street bigwigs approached him (through a bonds salesman) to lead an army of 500 000 men on Washington, overthrow FDR, and install Butler as a dictator. It was laughed off as a could never happen, but the committee assigned to investigate it discovered that basically the plan was already finished, and the conspirators were just waiting to pull the trigger...
THElaytox . 1y ago Edited 1y ago the forced sterilization of thousands of native american women for decades. they'd often go in for surgery for something completely unrelated and end up with their uteruses removed or tubes tied, or they'd be told the process is reversible when it isn't to get consent. as many as 25% of all native american women in the US were sterilized at one point, pretty much all without informed consent. edit: this was up until the 1970s btw (and probably continued for a bit after), not like colonial era shit.
SuvenPan 1y ago Congressman Gary Condit(50) had an affair with Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old DC intern from his California district. Levy disappeared one day and was later found dead in a DC park. Four months later 9/11 happened and the story disappeared from the news.
znark 1y ago Dennis Hastert was Speaker of the House and served prison time for sexually abusing boys. Не was longest-serving Republican Speaker from 1999 to 2007. After he left, he was investigated in 2015 for paying hush-money. The hush-money was to cover up sexual abuse back when Hastert was wrestling coach. Не only served 15 months. I think it was overshadowed by 2016 election and because Hastert was forgotten after leaving Congress and wasn't well known Speaker.
Horrific_Necktie . 1y ago How about that time the major telecoms took over 400 BILLION dollars to install fiber optics in homes, schools and libraries across the entire country and just....didn't? The money was just reinvested in the companies to expand overseas and pay legal fees fighting against competitors with fiber plans and blocking future expansion. Here is 400 billion dollars, please use it to give us all good internet Ok Hey, where's that high speed internet you were gonna put in? Oh we decided that was way too expensive, it would cost like 400 billion and we just don't

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