Here’s Ann on her substack (of course she has a substack) still pounding away on “The Great Replacement” theory:
Americans see videos of thousands of Muslims marching through London and Paris, and say, Europe is finished. Shocked at the unassimilable cultures being dumped on them, Europeans imagine no one has ever suffered so much.
So it’s unanimous. The U.S. is so lucky to have Hispanic immigrants instead of Muslims!
The consensus opinion could not be more wrong. Europe has only just begun its experiment with “multiculturalism.” The U.S. is so far along on this journey, it would be a miracle for the country to survive another half century in any recognizable form.
In addition to being screwed by the sizable group of Americans always clamoring for cheap labor, the U.S. is uniquely screwed by its geography, as pointed out by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington twenty years ago. We are the only developed country that shares a border with a third world country—and that border is 2,000 miles long, protected by a picket fence. Moreover, the income gap between Mexico and America is greater than any other two contiguous countries in the world.
But why not cheer for the U.S. becoming another Mexico, as The Wall Street Journal does? Think of all that cheap labor!
One side benefit of having to watch all the Red Sox games as Boston closes in on a serious run for the 2026 World Series is getting a chance to see the various campaign ads for Congressional candidates in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the other New England states served by the New England Sports Network (NESN) that broadcasts the games to “Red Sox Nation.” Let me rephrase that: getting the chance to see how idiotic the ads are.
The one you see above, by Democrat Chris Pappas, is easily the best of the dozens of ads I have seen, and it’s idiotic—infuriatingly vague, misleading, and using broad innuendos that don’t make any sense.
What restaurant has “VIP sections”? The analogy between a restaurant and Congress is so strained it makes my brain hurt. What does “play by their own rules” mean?
I view any Democrat as ethically estopped from complaining about members of Congress engaging in stock trading. The most powerful Democrat in Congress for decades, Nancy Pelosi, was also the most flagrant beneficiary of Congressional inside trading. The Trump Administration has done a great deal to lower prescription drug prices, but nothing except nationalized health care or government guaranteed income can prevent citizens from having to make choices regarding how to spend their money.
But, again, this is by far the best ad I’ve seen. Several boast that they should be elected to Congress to “stand up to Trump.” What does that mean? The Democrats will vote against anything Trump supports even if its rainbows and lollipops. “Standing up to Trump” means what, making mean faces at him? Insulting him, like members of The Squad or Jasmine Crockett? How does that help constituents? Many also say they will “stand up to” or “oppose” I.C.E. Does that mean they support open borders? Do they not want to get the dangerous illegals out of their constituency? Or are these just meaningless, focus group-tested buzz words? Almost all of them say that if elected they will “bring costs down.” Do they not know that costs as a whole never “come down,” do they think people are so stupid they don’t know that, or are people so stupid they really think that?
Maybe it’s my imagination, but I don’t think so: I remember campaign ads once containing occasional genuine, practical, achievable policy positions. Now its all virtue signaling: Elect me because I hate Trump. Elect me because I don’t like I.C.E. Elect me because I’d really like to do all of these things I won’t have the power to do but at least I have good intentions.
Peyton Tolle is a Boston Red Sox rookie and already a team mate and fan favorite for his big extrovert personality that matches his huge frame (6’6,” about 260 pounds), highlighted by Tolle’s obvious joy at playing a kid’s game for a living.
In yesterday’s Red Sox 9-8 extra-innings win over the Seattle Mariners (The Red Sox are having one of their most entertaining seasons ever), Tolle, was Boston’s starting pitcher, did something that nobody could recall any previous major league baseball player doing. As you can see above, when the hulking Tolle went to tag out Mariners player Dominic Canzone on the first base line after fielding a bouncer back to him on the mound, he preceded his tag with a smile and a hug.
Some old timers gag when they see opposing team players even chatting cordially at first base. The unwritten rule of baseball was that on the field the other team was literally a mortal foe, and its players were to be treated as such. In the 1960s a player who did what Tolle did would be excoriated, fined, exiled to the manager’s “dog house” and probably demoted to the minors.
Last night the Red Sox players seemed to get a kick out of their exuberant rookie’s latest surprise—he also likes playing tricks on team mates—saying, “That’s Tolle!” as the agreed-upon answer when questioned by reporters after the game. The sports media was all positive, with ESPN calling The Hug “The most wholesome play of the season.”
Now and then there are moments when I feel that indeed I have not lived in vain.
Tuskegee University president Dr. Mark Brown (above), a retired Air Force major general, issued a memo to all students of the “traditional black institution” this academic year declaring that all students will be required to follow a dress code right out of 1962.
“The university has developed a new policy for student attire on campus, classroom attendance, and cell phone use in classrooms,” Brown wrote in a message to students. “Tuskegee students now have a dress code for public and professional places. The Student Handbook requires students to arrive on campus with a business suit and proper shoes for a business meeting. Students are prohibited from wearing revealing clothing in class, to the cafeteria or in official settings like Convocation. They are also not able to wear bedroom shoes, bonnets, or du-rags to class or the cafeteria. The goal here is not meant to restrict you from enjoying the Tuskegee Experience, but to prepare you with a solid foundation for the workforce you will enter once you leave Tuskegee. Employers are less forgiving and too often presentation may overrule stellar preparation.”
“Tuskegee University continues to prepare the best and brightest for a lifetime of success,” Brown added. “With these changes, we want to ensure every student is as prepared as they can be. I look forward to seeing you in August.”
The New York Times alerts us (yes, the episode was supposed to be in this post, but there wasn’t space):
“The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.”
It adds,
“State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.”
Being disturbed at this revelation, I was hurled into an abyss of worry and concern for our democracy. What could be done to forestall this seemingly unavoidable disaster?
More:
The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state. The Times obtained data from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.
In Wisconsin, which hosts an open race for governor, a competitive House election plus contests for both chambers of the state legislature, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots. During the last spring election, in 2023, the figure was roughly 2,300, or 47 percent of all tossed votes.
The increase is particularly striking when comparing primaries in 2024 and this year. In Michigan’s primary earlier this month, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving after the state’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024. In Washington, the number of late-arriving mail ballots increased from about 16,000 to more than 20,000 in the same period.
This terrible. I briefly considered hurling myself out of my office window, but then remembered that it was on the first floor. And then, in the depths of despond, while I pondered weak and weary, a sudden, astounding inspiration came to me like a thunderbolt out the blue!
Why not tell voters to actually go to a polling place and vote in person? It’s a perfect solution! Like so many other brilliant moments of perception, from gravity to the knock-knock joke, once someone says it, it seems so obvious and amazing that nobody came up with it long ago.
Thank you, thank you everyone. But I just happened to be the vessel. It was inevitable that someone would come up with the concept.
It is only fair to flag this idiocy, since I routinely call out the Times’ progressive and Democratic Party propaganda under the “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” banner and leave the Post, which I stopped subscribing to a decade ago because it was so infuriatingly biased, relatively unscathed, :
One of my few non-Trump Deranged Facebook friends posted that tweet today with the wry legend, typical of him, “I don’t see the problem…”
This wasn’t among my planned posts for today, but after picking on the Times in the previous post, I feel ethically obligated to point out that the Washington Post is an “enemy of the people” too.
Gotta kick-start things here, clearly, as the weekend just past was an all-time low for reader participation: just 19 comments, not counting my own replies, spread over eight posts. This was especially disappointing after the previous week of anomalous traffic at a level hearkening back to those halcyon days when progressives hung out here and hadn’t fled to Bluesky because they couldn’t handle having their knee-jerk cant challenged. Of course, the explosion of traffic was all bot-driven: it mostly came from China and Vietnam.
For this week’s potpourri, I decided to sample New York Times stories exclusively, first, because I got no sleep last night and am uncharacteristically lazy, even for me; second, because it will remind you (I don’t need any reminding) what a perpetual Democratic, progressive, “resistance,” Trump Derangement-spreading propaganda agent the Times is, and third, because for now, anyway, any article subscribers link to gets past the paywall.
The graphic above was based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), White House executive orders, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary’s Orders to chart notable geographic renamings in the U.S. from 1963 to 2026.
While renaming two large bodies of water is certainly an unusually flamboyant example of changing names of geographical locales for political or other reasons, Trump’s contributions to the map certainly have plenty of company. The hysteria attached to the most recent “horror,” the renaming of Lake Ontario (Who. Cares.) is, in this context, wildly excessive.
It is also, as an astute conservative contrarian on my Facebook feed pointed out, hypocritical. The same people foaming at the mouth over the loss of “Ontario” to name a lake shared by the U.S. and Canada were all-in as schools, streets, plazas, parks, buildings and more had their names changed by wokesters when The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land. They applauded attempts to erase from cultural memory such crucial figures as Founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley and John Tyler, and important historical figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun….and I’m not even talking about all the toppled statues.
As an aside, I saw for the first time, the brilliantly gold-refinished hyper-muscular horses and riders that grace D.C.’s Memorial Bridge as I crossed crossed from from the Old Dominion to the Lincoln Memorial. They look great, in stark contrast to their tarnished, ruined appearance for, oh, as long as I’ve lived in the area. But I bet the Trump deranged still hate the upgrade, because he did it. For example, a Trump-hater posted on X a representation of how Trump’s arch would block the view of the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery. Huh. So you wanted to pull down every statue of the General across the country, but his plantation’s mansion is sacred!
I’m getting this Comment of the Day by Tim LeVier up about a week late. Fortunately, I was reminded of the topic because essays and articles about the weird outpouring of support for a child-killer keep coming. Here’s the beginning of one I read today in The Free Press:
“Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder. This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage.”
Tim’s analysis is as useful as I found it to be last week. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “On The Lindsay Clancy Support Movement: ‘What’s Going On Here?’”….[Oh…I know it’s foolish and biased to judge people by countenance, but boy, if I were casting Medea—or Lizzie Borden—that face would be irresistible.]
***
I have to break down any comment by the groups involved:
1. L. Clancy – She’s on trial. She did the deed. By her plea, I would say that’s an admission of being the one to have done the deed, her defense is not that she didn’t do it, her defense is that there’s disagreement to the severity of the charge due to her mental health. That is a proper question and should be settled by the courts / justice system.
2. The Parents and their Fundraisers – As I had heard it, money was being raised to support her parents through this and provide them with a place to stay because 3 years of motel rooms adds up.
It is a noble enough goal for the parents to attend the trial and confront the facts and reality of what is determined regarding your child. The people legitimately raising funds and supporting only this goal are probably showing some kind of exemplary ethics in being able to overlook the “Ick Factor” of the case and demonstrating a duty to care. How much easier would it be for the parents to not confront reality and wipe their hands of their daughter?
3. The Grifters – Ostensibly, there must be online grifters that have their own interests in play. They find hot button issues to sell some t-shirts and signs and whatever else will turn them a profit. They’ll lie about donating money and they’ll fan the flames to market and sell their wares.
These people are scum and not real people. They likely use AI generated video characters to fan these flames and profess their own special kind of virtue.
4. The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone they have no prior connection.
These people are deranged and one has to question where they came from and who has time to commit to such folly at a time when everyone and their mother is complaining about the cost of things. Why would anyone protest due process? She’s making her case in a court of law and the fair process will play out resulting in a judgment. This isn’t an area for “opinions” and to influence an outcome. Its meddlesome and the act of a narcissist that believes in one’s own “greatness” or “importance” over that of an impartial judicial institution.
[Note: I am abashed that over the years Ethics Alarms has neglected formal ethics theory far more than it has focused on it. Thus I was thrilled to receive this excellent guest post, submitted by faithful Ethics Alarms reader James Rogers. JM.]
It is evident to many, perhaps even a majority, that we have been living through and are still in a substantially unethical period in US and world history. How can we objectively determine if this is true? The multiple ethics train wrecks highlighted by our blog host is certainly one. Another reasonable and slightly less subjective method would be to consider how an eons-old founder of our civilization measured ethical people and behaviors generally and in the realm of politics.
Recently, I took the opportunity to read two books on the matter by Aristotle (4th Century BC), ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ and ‘Politics’. In those readings Aristotle directly addressed both the individual and societal perspectives on ethics and ethical government. This perspective has additional appeal as it isn’t tinged by modern religious biases.
Since we are humans, tackling individual ethics seems foundational as societal ethics comprises humans behavior and interactions regarding governance and broader economic and social commerce. Starting there, Aristotle points out there are three essential reasons for human action:
Pleasure (personal gain or goal achievement),
Honor (public recognition, affirmation, or reputation), and,
Virtue (for the benefit of another or others though it may also benefit you) without expectation of any recompense or acknowledgement.
These are universal in our human motivations, regardless of a person’s status, wealth or education.
Finding a truly or purely virtuous person or people to interact with is more than tough to find. In fact, it is fairly certain that person or set of people do not exist. Potentially someone independently wealthy, who needs nothing, who simultaneously is pursuing virtue is possibly out there, but it would be more than challenging to find and identify them. If this is an accurate assumption, the human race is likely facing tough choices individually, as they strive to be virtuous themselves while finding others to engage with who will behave, at least in part, virtuously. As a result, we often make our own personal ethical compromises and also in our associations.
Ethics Alarms 