How desperate must progressives be to stoop to an appeal to an authority as untrustworthy and ridiculous as Alex Jones? “Headquarters” is a Democrat social media account “followed by” Kamala Harris and others in the Democratic leadership. Alex Jones told the morons who listen to his garbage that he thought the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. Who could be a worse character to use as validation for anti-Trump positions? Tucker Carlson? Daffy Duck? Luigi Mangione? Mr. Ed? Marley’s Ghost?
I have never understood how Jones gained any notoriety at all, except that there are a depressing number of cognitively impaired right-wingers out there. Even in that brief clip he broadcasts his ignorance: Congress doesn’t invoke the 25th Amendment and even raising that (the ever-popular Plan E on the list of Axis “Get Trump!” plots) is signature significance for an idiot.
But I digress. This is your weekly white board for new ethics issues and angle. Fill it up!
Francis Turner, a Brit I have never heard of who is currently living in Japan, has a substack up titled “Pleading the Fifth when you have already received a Presidential pardon is like wearing a mask after being fully vaccinated.” It’s a good line, but untrue. There were good reason, in Fauci’s villainous mind, for not testifying honestly in a Congressional hearing. He’s a narcissist and an unapologetic former Deep State operative, and he knows the Axis of Unethical Conduct is invested in defending him forever as long as he never betrays it. To testify honestly, Fauci would have to admit he was wrong, that he lied, and that terrible damage was done to the nation because of his lies and mistakes. It would mean accepting responsibility and being accountable. People like Fauci aren’t capable of doing that.
It was this argument by Turner, however, that fascinated me.
“I’m willing to forgive people but has to be a quid pro quo that is an acknowledgement that there is something to forgive. If you can’t admit you made mistakes and that those mistakes killed people, bankrupted businesses and so on then you don’t get my forgiveness. And as I tweeted1 people who got things wrong up to about June 2020 get a pass because there was a ton of confusion and (especially from the PRC) misleading information so figuring stuff out was hard. But anyone who continued to advocate school closures, isolation of the elderly, mask safety theater and so on after that date needs to apologise. Anyone who insisted on vaccination of everyone, including the young, and wanted passports, mandates or other coercive measures needs to apologise. Anyone who mindlessly mocked recommendations for Hthe world a huge favor by admitting that they made mistakes and apologising for them.CQ, Zinc, Vitamin D, Ivermectin and so on needs to apologise […]. So does anyone who deliberately misinterpreted President Trump’s remarks about disinfectant to imply that he said people should inject bleach. In fact the mainstream media needs to do a general apology for their un-questioning slavish devotion to “the science” even when said “science” changed its mind and their related trashing of anyone who didn’t follow “the science” as it was declared to be at the time….
“In the midst of all the “under the advice of my attorneys I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, to refrain from answering your questions” blather, Herr Doktor Science notably failed to apologise. Not in his opening statement, and not when explicitly asked to by Senator Bernie Moreno. He just repeated his 5th amendment spiel… The world has moved on. But I read some of the Fauci diaries. I’ve read the commentary on it by Alex Berenson and Jeff Childers and many others. And my frustration has come raging back…”I don’t require a jail term, repayment of all the moolah or even an admission of guilt. Just man up (almost everyone concerned is of the male persuasion), put on your big boy trousers and say sorry.It can be just that one word. “Sorry” No need to say why you are apologising. No need to say who to. Just say the word.This particularly applies to Herr Doktor Science because he’s got a presidential pardon so saying sorry won’t land him in jail. Unless of course he shares other people’s skepticism about the validity of the autopen pardon he received…
“Sir Elton John says ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word’ but that’s no excuse to not say it.”
One of my oldest (in both senses of the word) friends is a history professor at a major university here in the D.C. area. The things he posts on Facebook are head-exploding: like the mutation of his former rational self that EA expatriate Curmie has morphed into under the gamma rays of Trump Derangement, my scholarly friend frequently makes arguments I would expect from Ben Stiller’s character in “Tropic Thunder.”
Today he posted several defenses of Anthony Fauci, who is literally indefensible, comparing Rand Paul’s correct, factual and fair evisceration of the villain to a Soviet show-trial. Before that, the Professor posted with approval the following attack on the late Lindsay Graham by professional snot Andy Borowitz. I knew Andy in college. He was a standard issue Harvard Lampoon guy, overly convinced of his own wit and a sucker for a cheap shot. Whatever formula he developed over the years obviously works: he’s created and written successful sit-coms, has been a successful stand-up comic, and his satirical columns have been syndicated all over. That his major employers have been The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and The New Yorker should tell you all you need to know about Andy’s biases, and partially explains this effort which my Trump Deranged friend found so trenchant.
I think I’ll footnote it to make my commentary more accessible…
I have concluded, over the past year of almost constant disillusionment, that the public is being deliberately deceived regarding the legal profession’s “self policing” duties. To watch TV or legal-themed movies, one would think that any significant violation of a lawyer’s jurisdiction’s Rules of Professional Conduct is likely to result in disbarment. That isn’t true. It isn’t close to true. The overwhelming majority of unethical lawyers, even flagrant, criminal unethical lawyers who prey on trusting clients, are never disciplined. Not only that, lawyers use their bar associations to make certain that is the case.
I have two clients who have been victimized by the same D.C. lawyer. A detailed and fully competent complaint by one of those clients, a non-lawyer, was ignored. I am a recognized legal ethics expert, and after I learned the facts regarding a second client’s victimization by this predatory lawyer, I realized that as a D.C. lawyer myself, I was ethically obligated to file a complaint to the D.C. bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, as well as the lawyer’s other bar association. Rule 8.3 in almost all U.S. jurisdictions requires lawyers to file complaints when they know that another lawyer has engaged in conduct calling into question his or her honesty, integrity, or fitness to practice law in other respects.
A third bar association in a jurisdiction where this unethical lawyer has practiced law without a license refused to receive my complaint, arguing that since this crooked lawyer wasn’t licensed to practice law there, they had no jurisdiction. I’m not making this up.
In undertaking this task, I was shocked at how deliberately burdensome it is in every jurisdiction. You are forced to use websites which are written in jargon, with unduly verbose instructions and explanations. You are forced to fill out on-line forms which freeze and often don’t work. It is almost impossible to get anyone in the appropriate offices to answer the phone, so questions are not answered. The process is confusing for lawyers; non-lawyers are likely to find it impossible.
I believe this is intentional. I know the contempt lawyers have for client complaints; they are open about it. And it is true that a lot of clients think lawyers must be unethical because they didn’t prevail in a case. Therefore there is an institutional bias against complaints against bar member by non-lawyers, and that presumption that they are just a nuisance. Apparently the complaint system has been made so confusing and user-unfriendly in order to make all but the most determined victims of lawyer misconduct give up, throw up their hands and say, “Oh, the hell with it.”
But I am a lawyer and an ethics expert, and I was and am determined to get this spectacularly unethical lawyer where he belongs, ideally in prison, but at the every least in some other occupation where he will do less damage.
It was suggested that I lead this post off with this now well-circulated meme…
…but to me, it is too kindly and trivializes the villainy of the man. The old Ethics Alarms reliable, the unmasking of Lon Cheney in “The Phantom of the Opera,” better expresses just how repugnant his conduct has been.
If you are shocked—shocked!—to learn that Fauci is a celebrity-obsessed liar and unapologetic villain, you haven’t been paying attention or you just aren’t very bright. You certainly haven’t been following Ethics Alarms very long. I’m embarrassed that it took me as long as it did to write a full post about how despicable Fauci was, though by mid-summer 2020 I had figured it all out thanks to the photo of him maskless with two companions at a Nationals baseball game, where he had ostentatiously thrown out the first pitch (like a little girl) while wearing his virtue-signaling mask at least 60 feet from any other human being.
Here is Fauci’s EA dossier, more negative than that of almost any public figure, including the Clintons. I already took a victory lap for pegging Fauci for what he was this April, so I will spare you another “I told you so.” That month, Anthony Fauci’s former adviser David Morens was indicted and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and two counts of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records relating to the origins of the Wuhan virus. He faces up to 51 years in prison. I wrote, “If Morens is guilty so is Fauci, who denied under oath that he funded ‘gain of function’ experiments that modified bat coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started.”
Sen. Rand Paul came to the same conclusion, not that it was elusive. In his excellent recitation of Fauci’s betrayal of trust and the public this morning as the doctor who proclaimed himself the personification of science was called to account, Paul said in part,
“There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis. And there will again be officials that insist uncertainty must be hidden for the public’s own good. They will demand obedience. They will invoke science. “I am the science!” as though it were a commandment. They will argue that government officials cannot be questioned, because questioning them would undermine public trust. They have it backwards. It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy.”
[Note: Flushed with unexpected good health, I promised yesterday to post on the unraveling Fauci scandal. 1) I wasn’t quite as recovered from the previous day’s cold, especially energy-wise, as I thought I was, and 2) I realized that today would be the more appropriate day for that post given that the arrogant Ethics Villain is testifying before Congress and Sen. Rand Paul would be, as the saying goes, “tearing him a new one.”Fauci gets his EA excoriation next, I promise.]
Just as a depressing number of people, either captured by the fascists of the Left or intimidated by them, deny that the Axis news media manipulates, censors and distorts facts and events to gain their ideological allies power “by any means necessary,” so do similar victims refuse to acknowledge the ideological capture of our educational institutions, with a few exceptions. My own two almae matres (Miss Rounds would never forgive me for writing “alma maters”) are prominent and despicable examples: Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, as I have documented extensively on EA.
Now comes a particularly egregious example of this dangerous phenomenon from Mt. Holyoke, one of the cluster of woke private colleges in northern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont along with Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wellesley, Dartmouth and Bennington.
Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts mandates that student organization leaders complete Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, and that they must develop “anti-racist plans” before the college administration will recognized them and allow them to hold sanctioned events. Without proof that an organization will be a full participant in promoting the Left’s anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight discrimination agenda, an organization will not be eligible for college funding. Chess club, drama club, Young Republicans, football team…it doesn’t matter: all the leaders of student groups must complete the required training before receiving official recognition from the college.
After a minimum of two student officers complete the training, each organization must create or update an “anti-racist plan.” Seriously? Did I just accidentally type the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, like “1984” in reverse? I can’t believe I’m writing this.
The latest revolting development is that a Minnesota jury convicted Shiloh Hendrix of a single charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct last week for repeatedly calling a black man who confronted and filmed her at a Rochester playground “nigger.” Hendrix also directed the slur at an 8-year-old black boy who had been going through her purse.
Because Hendrix’s speech was the conduct underlying the disorderly conduct charge according toMinnesota law, we have a controversy over whether using “nigger” as this awful woman did falls within the narrow “fighting words” exception to speech protected under the First Amendment.
The six-person jury returned its verdict after four days of testimony in Olmsted County District Court, finding Hendrix, 37, guilty on the count involving using “nigger” in her exchanges with videographer Sharmake Omar. She was not found guilty on the count involving the child. The full sentence: a stayed 90-day jail sentence, supervised probation, 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.
We are told Hendrix did not speak before sentencing. Good.
Yesterday, I woke up with the first truly terrible cold I have had in years. A while ago Ann Althouse was boasting about how long she had blogged without ever failing to get at least one post up, but the possibility of a similar achievement for me was blown to smithereens last July, you may recall, when I ended up in the hospital for a week with a monster hematoma in my leg. So I didn’t even visit my office or a computer on Monday, and decided to try to sleep all day, at least as much as possible between all the hacking and sneezing (and the day began at 7 AM with an MRI).
I did worry about Ethics Alarms, wondering how many comment bombs “A Friend” would leave without me being able to spam them, and also about kawaii65c843be72, who has taken over for mermaidmary (where has she gone?) as WordPress’s random punching bag with every attempted comment ending up in the moderation queue for no discernible reason. The lately AWOL Alizia’s comments also tend to land in spam or moderation, but that’s only because her opuses usually are approximately as long as “Don Quixote.”
Last July one of you actually sent the Alexandria police to my home on a status check, so this is official notice that such concern isn’t necessary. Come on—would I shuffle off these mortal coils while the Boston Red Sox are in the midst of an 18-2 run?
Post Script: A real friend immediately started bugging me to get a “COVID test.” You mean a Wuhan virus test? I know what my colds feel like, thanks, but she was one of millions so terrified and brain-washed by The Great Stupid’s most destructive trick, the pandemic panic, that she will literally never be the same. My first substantive post today will deal with the recent revelations proving that Dr. Fauci, that asshole, was even more of an Ethics Villain than I thought.
EA discussed “ideological capture” earlier today focusing on the law and academia, but as Americans who were paying attention (and who don’t rely on the Axis news media for the news), we were introduced last week to the desperate straits of the Smithsonian Institution, saddled with a woke ninny who gives “land acknowledgments” at every opportunity, and who pretended, under oath, not to know just how obsessed with promoting racial division and public contempt for their own nation the museum under her charge is.
On July 4th, the White House released a thorough and nausea-producing report on just how much “ideological capture” has infected the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). Titled SAVING AMERICA’S STORY: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage, the report, which you can and should read here, presents a damning case.
I had written earlier about this monstrosity,
…on the Smithsonian website, but there is so, so much more. For example, here is the Smithsonian insinuating, in text-book fake news fashion, that Ben Franklin may have used “enslaved persons” (the new, approved woke-speak for “slaves”) in his research, though there is absolutely no evidence of it.
The full segment on FOX this morning where I went after @NYCMayor. It includes the back and forth with me and @GriffJenkins which eventually led to FOX apologizing twice FOR me after I left! By the way I like Griff a lot:) pic.twitter.com/hef9LMRCoT
Some commenters were exercised that I called Whoopi Goldberg’s exhortation on “The View” for her audience to “block [Trump’s Presidency] every way we can! That’s all. Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. Don’t wait until November. Start looking now” a pure violation of FCC rules, which it is. Broadcast networks are permitted to use the airwaves only if they hew to the public interest. Editorials are in the public interest when they are labelled as such, and political endorsements are permitted. However, a network, in this case ABC, using the privilege of a government-owned and regulated broadcast channel to call on its audience to block the elected government of the United States is not in the public interest, and no news program with an FCC license has ever crossed that line before.
Now comes Fox News, swinging to the other extreme. Radio host Sid Rosenberg joined “Fox News and Friends” last week and launched into a rant against New York’s Muslim, Hamas-supporting, anti-Israel, communist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as you can see above. The trigger was the Mayor’s grandstanding about wanting to arrest Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu for war crimes.
Rosenberg was a guest, and as a guest, was not speaking for Fox News, nor was Fox News responsible for his opinions. Nonetheless, “Fox and Friends” co-host Griffin Jenkins felt it was necessary to distance the network from Rosenberg’s opinions and to disavow them directly to the Fox viewers.
“We know there are heated feelings around this war last hour, while discussing the role anti-Israel is playing in the rise of antisemitism, one of our guests labeled New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a quote, “terrorist,” Jenkins said. “Now that word carries an extremely serious meaning, it should not be used freely and its important we distinguish between strong political criticism and factual allegations.”
All Fox News needed to say, if it really needed to say anything, was to repeat the hoary disclaimer that the opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of Fox News. Who in broadcast news ever distinguishes between strong political criticism and factual allegations? On the other networks, guests, contributors and sometimes hosts routinely call President Trump a racist, a fascist, a pederast, a criminal, a dictator, demented, a murderer and worse. Virtually never does a representative of the program apologize or disavow these extreme accusations, and I only say “virtually” because I can’t monitor all the networks all the time.
Jenkins is right: enabling terrorists, encouraging or rationalizing terrorism doesn’t make someone a literal terrorist. However, he pushed back on that position when Rosenberg stated it. That was all that is necessary. He was engaging in responsible news analysis moderation. The other networks seldom even meet that standard.
Ethics Alarms 