The Boston Globe recently ran another story dripping with contempt over a successful Massachusetts businessman’s wealth—this time Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue’s. It’s become a genre unto itself: catalog what someone built, imply they should be ashamed of it, and let the reader draw the conclusion that success is inherently suspect.
I have a different view, and I’ve earned it the hard way.
Let’s start with the man the Globe put in its crosshairs. Mike Minogue wasn’t born with a silver spoon. He earned a degree from West Point, served as an Army Ranger, and was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions during Operation Desert Storm. He came home, went to work, and built a company that saved hundreds of thousands of lives before it sold. Whatever anyone thinks of him as a candidate, ignoring that record to sneer at his bank account is shameful.
A man doesn’t earn a Bronze Star and build a company from scratch by accident, and he shouldn’t have to apologize for what came after.
I know poverty. Not the kind people read about in a policy brief—the kind you live through as a child, wondering if there will be food on the table. I was brutally raped as a child, repeatedly. And even that isn’t my worst childhood memory. My worst memory is lying awake at night listening to my mother cry because we had nothing to eat.
I tell you this not for sympathy, but because it’s the foundation of everything I believe about success, and it’s why I find the current political fashion of demonizing wealth so dishonest.
I didn’t come out of that childhood hating people who had money. I came out of it wanting to understand how they’d built what they had: what they knew that I didn’t, what choices they’d made, what I could learn and apply to my own life. That curiosity, not resentment, is what helped pull me forward. It’s what got me through the Marine Corps, through law school, through building a career representing people who’d been harmed by some of the largest corporations in the country. Success was never the enemy. It was the goal.
Somewhere along the way, a large part of our political and media class decided otherwise. Building something—earning more, accumulating wealth, providing for your family beyond mere survival—has been recast as a moral failing. Success itself is treated as evidence of guilt, something that demands an explanation, an investigation, a tax hike, or a headline.
Here’s what makes that especially hard to stomach: the same people pushing that narrative are, quite often, getting rich themselves.
Look at the numbers. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley entered Congress in 2019 with a reported net worth of $12,500. Her most recent financial disclosures show a net worth of roughly $8 million—built up on a $174,000 congressional salary, largely through real estate holdings and her husband’s consulting income. Her husband, Conan Harris, is also a partner in the firm that was just selected for a nearly $2 billion, 40-year lease contract to build the new Springfield courthouse—a deal now facing a lawsuit from rejected bidders alleging the process was tainted by conflicts of interest involving his business partner. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has spent decades asking how many houses and cars any one person really needs, owns three properties himself, including a lakefront vacation home on Lake Champlain that he bought in cash.
I don’t begrudge any of them their success. That’s precisely my point. If it’s fine for Ayanna Pressley to build an eight-figure net worth in Congress, fine for her husband’s firm to land a two-billion-dollar state contract, and fine for Bernie Sanders to own a lake house, then it is fine for Mike Minogue, or anyone else, to keep what they built too. You don’t get to run a career on “the rich are the problem” and then quietly become one of them, or watch your own family cash in on state contracts. That’s not conviction. That’s hypocrisy dressed up as populism.
The people who suffer most from this double standard aren’t the wealthy—they can absorb the political attacks and the tax bills. It’s the people still living the life I once lived, the ones being told, implicitly, that wanting more for their families is something to be suspicious of rather than something to strive for. That message doesn’t help the poor. It traps them. It tells a kid listening to his mother cry at night that the people who “made it” are the enemy, rather than the example.
I don’t think success needs an apology. I think it needs to be earned honestly, and I think the people criticizing it most loudly ought to be held to the same standard they demand of everyone else.
That’s not a partisan argument. It’s a basic one: honesty over hypocrisy. And it’s long past time our politics reflected it.