Knock me over with a feather. I once subscribed to Slate when it was an innovative commentary e-magazine genuinely striving to be independent and non-partisan. Then it went full woke and Trump Deranged, and managed to get on the EA blacklist. Frankly, I didn’t know it was still being published. But Hanna Stotland an independent educational consultant specializing in crisis management authoring her second Slate piece after seven years, delivered a superb analysis. You can read it here, but Slate still requires a subscription: if ayou have one, shoot me a copy and I’ll update this post. Some notable passages from the publicly available version deserve emphasis and should whet your curiosity:
Christoper Gallant, 37, is an openly gay military pilot, former air traffic controller and volunteer firefighter who is running against Rep. Nick LaLota, who represents New York’s First District, covering eastern Suffolk County. Photos “surfaced,” as they like to say, showing Gallant in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear. In some of the photos he appears to be doing…stuff…with another man.
The photos originally appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather about 15 or 16 years ago. In response to the photos entering the campaign conversation, Gallant’s lawyer said that the photographs “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship. Chris was also friends with the owner of Mr. S Leather, and the shoot was intended to be fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products” and that Gallant “remains fully committed to his campaign and to earning the trust of the people he seeks to represent.”
Right. About that trust thingy—oh! I forgot to mention that Gallant is the Democratic Congressional candidate in the race! Did I have to?
“This is the Democratic congressional candidate for CD1,” the local GOP wrote on Facebook above the smaller photo above. “Is this who you want to represent us in Washington DC?” That’s certainly a fair question. I hold that there is an equivalent of EA’s recently revisited Naked Teacher Principle in play here, though I’m not sure what I would call it. A candidate who has allowed himself to be photographed like that gets no sympathy from me if that choice eventually costs him a job teaching in a public school, and the standards of character and role model fitness for a member of Congress should be a higher bar than the one required of teachers. Sadly, considering the current Congress, that is obviously not the case.
Since Oct 7 2023, every human on the planet has had a choice. To stand with Israel, the Jewish people, and Western Civilization, or with Hamas, Terrorism, and the evil actors who would tear it down. That Time for Choosing is ever-present. Who do you choose? #WeAreNotOkpic.twitter.com/FIW8ChBx2T
“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”
New York’s anti-Semitic, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his official statement on the anniversary of the unprovoked and ambush Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel that included the murder of unarmed civilians, rapes, infanticide, and the taking of over 200 hostages, mist of whom died.
I could have had a much longer headline, and had to restrain myself to avoid posting one. Anyone who agrees with this vile man is an Ethics Dunce, as is anyone who voted for him or would argue that such votes can be justified. Mandani qualifies for an EA “Incompetent Elected Official” designation, because condemning the victims of terrorism while supposedly memorializing those victims is incompetent and irresponsible, unless one is an Ethics Villain, which Mayor Mamdani certainly is.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the debut of Fox News, a day that will live in infamy for the Totalitarian Left, much as Elon Musk’s rescue of Twitter is reviled. Americans under the age of about 50 never reflect upon what broadcast news was like before October 7, 1996, and most of them can’t imagine how crucial the conservative news network has been to our democracy.
The emergence of Fox News has had some unfortunate and unanticipated consequences too, but those who argue that the United States, its public, culture and society would be better off with no TV news options other than the liberal Democrat monopoly of reporting and opinions, which was the state of the medium before Rupert Murdoch’s daring innovation, is revealing their own bias.
The revolution may well have failed without Brit Hume, so today seems like an appropriate time to honor him. Hume started his career in national broadcast news with ABC—you know, the company that now calls “The View” a news program. In 1989, he became ABC’s chief White House correspondent and was prominent in that role until he quit in 1996 to join the new rebel network. A thorough professional, a recognizable face and a respected name, he instantly gave credibility and visibility to the Roger Ailes-led project.
Apparently there are no genuinely apolitical, unbiased, independent, trustworthy, competent lawyers who have the ability to investigate the accelerating Ethics Train Wreck launched by a booze, pot and ketamine-fueled orgy at a Cornell fraternity. (Previous EA posts on the thing are here and here) Gee, I’m kinda surprised. I would have thought, with all the millions of lawyers in this country, there would be at least a couple without the flaming ethics deficits of Letitia James, the lawfare New York Attorney General appointed Special Prosecutor for the state investigation, and to handle the Cornell investigation…waaait for it…
Sally Yates!
Yes, it’s Sally Yates, the Obama Justice Department appointee who refused to execute President Trump ‘s policies in his first term when she was Acting Attorney General, then after she was fired (she should have been disbarred) joined the Axis Russian Collusion conspiracy. Ethics Alarms had several posts condemning this proudly unethical lawyer, a true Ethics Villain, like…
There are so many reasons for Michiganders regardless of party and ideological bent not to vote for Abdul El-Sayed that the revelation that he likes to fart in public seems trivial in comparison. He’s a Communist who lies about his beliefs; he has called for defunding the police and he is anti-Semitic, though to today’s Democrats that’s a good thing. He refused to disavow his pal Hasan Piker, who is a vocal America-hater. Naturally Bernie Sanders, AOC and Obama are supporting El-Sayed.
Now a longtime aid to the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan has quit and gone rogue, calling his former boss for whom he worked as a bodyguard and a staff assistant a “manufactured man” who has maturity more appropriate to a high school locker room. Jordan Domingue told the media that during El-Sayed’s gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, he realized that the candidate was a “30-year-old leapfrogging into a job he was inexperienced for and only got through connections.”
“Now I’m far from blameless, and will reflect for years how I let myself be captured by loyalty and personality,” Domingue added. “When he acted like an entitled mobster to elected officials in 2017-2018, I excused it as a justified outsider earning their place. When he would say one thing to one group and another thing to a different group hours later, I considered it just the norm or ‘strategic ambiguity’ as he calls it.”
What Domingue really found intolerable, however, was El-Sayed’s affection for openly passing gas in front of staffers. “He would openly do so without warning or embarrassment as his form of stand-up comedy,” Dominguewrote. “To this day for him, the act of farting is easily one of the funniest things a person can do.”
Is that a good reason to vote against him, along with, you know, the fact that El-Sayed is an anti-American lunatic, which doesn’t bother the Mad Left these days? Le Pétomane was the stage name of Joseph Pujol (1857 –1945) who was a professional “fartist.” Not only could he fart at will, he could fart tunes. The Governor in “Blazing Saddles,” played by Mel Brooks, is named in honor of Le Pétomane.
There are lots of reasons to be dubious about this story. For one thing, it has “disgruntled employee” written all over it. For another, it was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, which is on the EA blacklist. I will also point out that supporters of Donald Trump are ethically estopped from assailing a candidate for having a sophomoric sense of humor and running for an office “he was inexperienced for.”
I also note that the levels of dignity and decorum, not to mention maturity, that the public has a right to expect from its elected officials has already been reduced to high school and even elementary school level by such class acts as GOP Rep. Lauren Boberg, Senator Fetterman dressing like gym rat and this…
Nonetheless, thinking that farting intentionally at the workplace is acceptable conduct does raise serious questions about judgment and socialization, if not sanity. And wouldn’t you agree that a superior intentionally farting among staffers in the workplace constitutes creating a “hostile work environment”?
The only reason so many polled still think that colleges are essential to education is that their own education was inadequate and their critical thinking faculties are under-developed. Or they are Democrats. Or both.
Substacker Steven Hayward writes,
Nearly every day brings fresh news of another university facing a huge budget deficit and enacting significant cuts to programs and personnel. The latest is the University of Minnesota, which is imposing cuts to fill a $225 million shortfall over the next two years chiefly because of the declining enrollment that everyone knew was coming. The University of Maine is likewise imposing—gasp!—faculty layoffs to close a $19 million budget shortfall.
Yet universities were heedless of the coming financial collapse, and went on building climbing walls, plush dorms, and adding more and more layers of useless and/or mendacious administrators (you gotta put those gender studies majors to work somewhere). (I reported here previously about the travails of Syracuse University, which is cutting whole departments because of falling enrollment and plunging revenue.)
Meanwhile, here is what an Ivy League education produces:
Thousands are now marching at Cornell University campus, standing in solidarity with Jane Doe.
“Tear down the fucking frats. No Justice, No Peace”
Thank you to everyone who is protesting. Jane Doe, you are not alone. We are all with you.
Cees Van Barneveldt argues in this morning’s Comment of the Day that The Naked Teacher Principle (NFP) “is wholly insufficient for today’s educational environment at public schools.” Beginning with a sentence in the final paragraph in my post, “The Naked Teacher Principle, Brought To You By “Only Fans” Again and Of Course,” it moves into new vistas where no previous EA post on the NFT has gone before.
And here it is…
***
...with holding a parent’s trust as a role model and a conveyor of societal values…
Assume that I were a parent of two teenage sons, and they are both educated at a public school. What reasonable expectations should I have for their education, and their development as young men ready to conquer the next stage of life? I mentioned the word “men” in the previous sentence, as we cannot skip sexual development, and the development of a healthy identity. What good parents want is that their boys grow up to men with character, who are secure in their manhood, who know how to properly interact with others including with the other sex, have healthy friendships, do not grow up to be bullies, are able to form healthy relationships and marriages.
The main responsibility for a healthy sexual and moral development of children lies with the parents. Sending a child to school means that some of activities of raising a child is delegated to a third party; however delegation of that task should leave the ultimate responsibility for moral development with the parents. Delegation requires trust. Trust that the values taught at school do not undermine the values taught by the parents and that are commonly held in the parent’s community. Trust that the schools are transparent to the parents about critical issues pertaining to their children. Trust that the teachers of the school act as proper role models, living out those values. This has implication for which teachers you hire and fire; which the NTP relates to.
The current day public school environment betrays the trust of parents in multiple ways. Schools deliberately undermine existing societal values by aggressively pushing radical social and sexual agenda’s favored by radical minorities by shoving these issues into the faces of very young children. I have mentioned transgenderism in a previous comment. Before the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage (Obergefell) the issue pushed at schools was everything related to homosexuality. This has resulted in a lot of sexual confusion, and a pandemic of children who at a way too young age are put on path of irreversible steps to gender transition. Even worse is that the public schools go to great lengths to hide all this from the parents of the children involved. This type of environments does not generate teenagers who are secure in their sexual identity, who know they are accepted; instead it creates teenagers who are physically and mentally damaged. It creates freaks like Tyler Robinson who was up to his ears in alternative sexualities like furry and transgender, and who proceeded to murder Charlie Kirk.
The current day public school environment betrays the trust of parents by pushing all the DEI and CRT crap on children. “Toxic Masculinity”, “Smash the Patriarchy”, “Men are trash”, “Women are the Future.”A couple of days ago we saw that this junk is aggressively promoted by the teacher unions. The result of this are dispirited and cynical young men who “fail to launch,” and will not leave their parents house until in their thirties, do not date and become INCELs, who resent women, and are open for the racist and antisemitic ideas of Mick Fuentes as a raised middle finger to the indoctrination they got at school.
That’s tainted Special Counsel Jack Smith wearing an anti-Trump shirt last week.
Nothing says independent, non partisan, fair, objective and unbiased like appearing in public billboarding a message attacking the official you were supposed to investigate.
At least he’s a defiant, transparent unethical prosecutor.
