Susan Kokinda and Stephanie Scott come to Hillsdale on May 7 to examine corruption, consequence, and the cost of refusing to stay quiet.

THE HILLSDALE CONSERVATIVES
Truth • Liberty • Local Stewardship
• Hillsdale County, Michigan • April 23rd, 2026 • 2¢

On May 7, Hillsdale Conservatives will host an evening centered on a subject most public institutions prefer to keep blurred, procedural, and safely out of plain view: corruption.

Not corruption as a slogan. Not corruption as a campaign-season insult. Corruption as it appears in public life when rules bend for the protected, records become disposable the moment the wrong person insists on keeping them, and official bodies discover endless patience for some conduct and none at all for the people who bring uncomfortable facts into the open.

That is the subject tying this event together.

Susan Kokinda, appearing with Promethean Action, comes from a movement that speaks in broad terms about oligarchy, national decline, and the need to restore a more productive and more serious American civic life. She brings the larger frame, the one that asks how corruption matures from a scandal into a culture, from a single abuse into a habit of governance, from a bad act into a whole ecosystem of protection.

Stephanie Scott arrives from the other end of the same problem.

Her importance to this event is not that she became controversial. It is that by insisting on her duty to preserve records and by refusing to treat election-retention questions as disposable technicalities, she helped drag a larger pattern into the light. Her public GiveSendGo legal-defense page is now part of that story, not only because it reflects the cost she has borne, but because it marks how long the burden can continue after the institutions around a case have already begun pretending the deeper questions no longer matter.

And those deeper questions do matter.

Because once the Scott case was opened up and the testimony was heard in full, the issue was no longer confined to one clerk, one conflict, or one disputed decision. The record pointed outward. It raised questions about what election records were preserved, who had custody, what authority was claimed, and why sworn admissions that should have triggered a countywide reckoning instead seemed to dissolve into silence.

That is where Hillsdale’s corruption problem comes into view.

Not merely in the underlying conduct, but in what followed. In the distance between what was admitted and what was done about it. In the gap between what ordinary citizens heard under oath and the visible reluctance of county power to pursue the implications with the same energy so often reserved for the people who force such issues into the open.

For many residents, that is the real scandal.

A county clerk’s testimony raised serious questions about record retention, ballot custody, and lawful authority. Yet the institutions that should have been most interested in that testimony never seemed especially eager to press it to its natural conclusion. The commissioners never gave the appearance of demanding a full public accounting. The sheriff never appeared moved to chase the matter to the wall. The prosecutor never appeared to show matching urgency where the admissions pointed inward. However one chooses to label that pattern, the public result looks much the same: the burden falls hardest on the dissenter, while the larger exposure is left to sit unanswered.

That is corruption in a form many people recognize immediately.

Not only the act itself, but the insulation around it.
Not only what is done, but what is protected.
Not only what is exposed, but who is made to pay for the exposure.

That is why this event makes sense.

Kokinda helps place the local fight inside a broader national pattern. Scott brings the local proof that these patterns do not remain theoretical for long. Eventually they land somewhere. In a county office. In a public fight. In a courtroom. In a family. In a bank account. In a community that suddenly has to decide whether it still knows the difference between accountability and theater.

So on Thursday, May 7 at 6PM, at Old Wilson Hall, 7 S. Manning St., Hillsdale, Michigan, Hillsdale Conservatives will host an evening with Susan Kokinda of Promethean Action and Stephanie Scott of GiveSendGo. $10 donation. Food and drink available.

There are times when corruption still hides behind paperwork, procedure, and the assumption that the public will never read closely enough to notice.

And there are times when it meets resistance.