Gen. Custer, Pickett’s Charge, and the Seven Enabling Virtues

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Today, July 3, in 1863 was the date of Pickett’s Charge, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee ordered a desperate Napoleonic advance against the Union line at Gettysburg in what has come to be a cautionary tale in human bravery and military hubris. The same day marked the zenith of the career of George Armstrong Custer, the head-strong, dashing cavalry officer who would later achieve both martyrdom and infamy as the unwitting architect of the massacre known as Custer’s Last Stand.

I have vowed to do all I can, which admittedly isn’t much, to get the story of what I like to call Custer’s First Stand into our nation’s cultural memory. I wrote much of what you are reading now way back in 2011, and have not adequately fulfilled my pledge since, although I have mentioned “Yellow Hair” (as his Native American conquerors called him) periodically over the years. Many historians have opined that Custer may have saved the Union army from defeat at Gettysburg with his bold actions this day, and therefore may have saved the Union itself. That accomplishment is far more important than the blunder at Little Big Horn that defines Custer’s image and reputation.

Custer’s heroics on the decisive final day of the Battle of Gettysburg teach their own lessons, historical and ethical. Since the East Calvary Field battle has been thoroughly overshadowed by the tragedy of Pickett’s Charge, it is little known and seldom mentioned. That is wrong.

Tell your friends and families the story, which has never been portrayed on screen. It is a really good story.

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Chris Cuomo Generously Reminds Everyone That It Is Possible To Be Even Less Coherent and Legally Astute Than Justice Jackson

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Every time I think about the fact that Chris Cuomo, once the golden boy of CNN, is a lawyer I want to burn my law school diploma. Every time I think of all the money “Fredo” was paid to make Americans dumber and more ignorant (as when he announced that “hate speech” was not protected by the First Amendment), I begin questioning the choices I have made in life that brought me to my current lowly position in life. And every time he opens his mouth on his podcast, I want to hold his empty head up to my ear so I can hear the ocean.

Here, in full, is Chis’s most recent foray into Dunning-Kruger chaos:

“In the eyes of the law, Dobbs was the right decision. Why? Roe created a legal rationale that did not exist! And if you do not create it constitutionally or legislatively, it should not exist. And legislation is where you fill in the hole between implicit and explicit, and that wasn’t done with Roe. The Congress should have codified Roe v. Wade. But they were never going to. Why? Because it’s such a useful device to divide us, so helpful to the parties. Dobbs was therefore the right decision. Well, then why didn’t the liberal justices [vote with the Dobbs majority]—because it’s political. Because they feel it’s political. They don’t want to say it, but they’re all female. I mean, now they’re all female on the left. And it’s political. Now, do I like their political position? Yes, I do. I believe that reproductive rights are a thing. And I think that they are obviously invested in women, and they should be. And that taking it from them was taking a right from women. And that’s the first time I’ve seen that done, except for prohibition. And I think it was wrong. But legally, I think it was the right decision.”

Well thank-you, Chris, for that anala…wait, WHAT?

That dog’s breakfast of Authentic Frontier Gibberish makes one of Jackson’s dissents seem like Oliver Wendell Holmes at his best. Reproductive rights “are a thing”? What the hell is that supposed to mean? The reason Roe made no sense is that there is no such thing as a foggy “reproductive right” that includes killing unborn children. Prohibition took away a real right as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, as getting drunk is clearly, for some, “the pursuit of happiness.”

Neither Roe v. Wade nor Dobbs were designed to “divide us,” and the reason Congress didn’t codify it under Carter, or Clinton, or Obama, Chris, you moron, is because they didn’t think it was necessary. They thought (as did I) that the issue was settled by Roe, at least legally. Abortion was still always going to be divisive; no law was going to change that. Remember the Defense of Marriage Act? Abortion is squarely in the category of an ethics conflict, and ethics conflicts are always divisive by nature. Roe was shoehorned into the law by the Supreme Court to settle the issue and end division, just as Chief Justice Taney foolishly thought the Dred Scott ruling would end the controversy over slavery.

Oh, and would someone point out to Chris that there weren’t three women dissenting in Dobbs, because Justice Breyer hadn’t retired yet?

Independence Day Weekend Open Forum! [And A Rueful Movie You Might Want To Watch After You’ve Finished “1776”…]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s “The Egg” above, from the excellent movie adaptation of “1776.” I’ve performed that number many times as part of the regular repertoire of my now defunct D.C. musical revue group, “The Music Lobby.” (Of course I played John Adams.)

“1776” is one of several movies I always watch this time of year, along with “Gettysburg” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Last night ,however, I took the advice of a friend and occasional EA participant and watched “Eddington,” a controversial 2025 movie that you probably haven’t seen, as very few people have.

Wikipedia describes “Eddington” as a “satirical neo-Western thriller,” which should tip you off that it defies easy labeling. The movie was a box office disaster: I would attribute that to terrible marketing and the fact that “Eddington” has something in it to offend just about everyone. Begin with the title, which reveals nothing about the movie: it sounds like an episode of “Downton Abbey.” In 1965, a satire about the funeral industry based on Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” succeeded with the catch line, “The motion picture with something to offend everyone!” People went to see it on a dare. That might have worked with “Eddington.”

The film is the artistic expression of Ari Aster, the writer/director who is best known for his horror movies. “Eddington” is kind of a horror movie as well: it focuses on a small New Mexico town going especially nuts in 2020 when the rest of the country was going nuts too. It does not have a happy ending (neither did 2020); its protagonist (another fascinating performance by Joaquin Phoenix) is confused, inarticulate, and not very bright. I believe it is the first and probably the best possible embodiment of a “Great Stupid” movie—the term Ethics Alarms uses to describe the cultural, intellectual and political blight that spread its dark wings over the land in 2020.

You may have noticed that that blight is getting more ridiculous than ever in 2026.

The critics were divided over “Eddington,” usually complaining about Aster’s “lack of focus,” meaning that he mocked and denigrated all sides of the political spectrum and did not clearly take sides. That’s a virtue, in my view, as it takes on the Wuhan Virus lock-down and mask mania, social media and screen addiction, “influencers,” Black Lives Matter, the “white privilege” cant, anti-police rhetoric, the gun culture, the homeless, the Bidens, and much more. (I’m going to watch it again.)

Since much of themovie’s benefits lie in its unpredictability, I will not supply any more details except revealing the line that made me laugh out loud. A white teenager is seen lecturing his gobsmacked father at the dinner table about his generation’s determination to “eliminate whiteness,” parroting the now familiar gibberish of Ibram X. Kendri, the Black Lives Matter grifters, and Harvard professors. After listening to the rant, the father pauses a beat to gather his composure, and says, “Are you fucking retarded?“

I’ll publish the best reviews of the movie as guest columns.

But I digress! This is the place for you to choose the ethics topic. Please do so with wisdom, taste, passion and dispatch…

An Idiot Test For Conservatives: Tucker Carlson Says He’s Starting A New Political Party

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I’m giving my inner Fredo a workout lately, because so, SO many positions that I have emphasized early and often on Ethics Alarms have been proving blazingly accurate. To be fair, it didn’t take an IQ much higher than Fredo’s to figure out that Tucker Carlson was a huckster, a fraud, a hypocrite, a shameless self-promoter, a liar and a weasel, but for some strange reason—maybe it was the hair?—an amazing number of usually smart people couldn’t see it. Glib demagogues and sociopaths are like that, though: they hypnotize people with their verbal facility and shameless audacity

Tucker’s latest grift is that he says he wants to start a new political party, presumably of dim-witted, gullible, anti-Semitic, isolationist Republicans. He even appeared on MSNow right after renouncing the GOP, knowing well what the network is and the America it wants to create, but never mind, Tucker Carlson literally has no integrity. He’s smarter than Marjorie Taylor Greene (who isn’t?), not as obviously bat-house crazy as Candace Owen, not as pathetic as Bill Kristol, but still: the man is not a serious person. He makes Bill Maher seem like Victor Davis Hanson. Carlson is a trust fund rich kid who never had to do a hard day’s work in his life, and is the kind of pseudo-intellectual not very bright people think is brilliant.

I’ve written way too much about this creep, but I’m proud to say that I declared that Fox News needed to fire him in 2013, a full decade before they did. Since then I’ve caught him in conflicts of interest, rigging his debates, promoting anti-vaxxers, leaking to the New York Times, found him to be a race-baiter and a legal ignoramus, a destructive agent of distrust and division like Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, General Edwin Walker, Alex Jones, and Robert Welch, openly racist, a hypocrite, a conspiracy theorist and a liar, a toadying suck-up, a publicity whore, and a anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, and more. Other than that, however, he seems to be a great guy.

That’s going to be some party he starts.

Based On THIS Story, I Am Tempted To Take Back Everything Nice That I Wrote Earlier Today About Minnesota…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A three-person Minnesota panel including Gov. Tim Walz granted a pardon to prevent an immigrant convicted of sexually abusing a child from being deported.

Or, as PJ Media’s Matt Margolis more colorfully put it, “Imagine being so consumed by hatred for Donald Trump and his immigration agenda that you would hand a full pardon to a man who sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl for four years, just to keep him from being deported. You do not have to imagine it. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) actually did it.”

This isn’t one of the “good illegal immigrants” the New York Times is always blubbering about. The pardonee, Tou Lue Vang, is a 42-year-old Laotian-born immigrant convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct after a guilty plea. The details of his crime are especially disgusting. Vang pleaded guilty in 2006 to repeatedly sexually abusing a young girl beginning when she was only 10-years-old and continuing for four years, starting in 2002. When police arrested him in 2005, Vang didn’t even deny his crimes, explaining that it was a “cultural thing” to “marry and have sex with girls as young as 12.” Vang also tried to pay his victim to keep her from telling anyone about the abuse.

A cultural thing, is it? Add one more reason to the long, long list of why the the U.S. should not permit immigration from countries that have values and traditions antithetical to American culture. You know, like child rape…

Vang’s plea deal kept him out of prison because woke states like Minnesota don’t believe in criminal penalties, or something. Nice. It cost Tou his legal immigration status, and he received a final order of removal in October 2006—yes, that’s during the Bush Administration. Never mind: Vang stuck around for nearly two decades until Trump’s Minnesota operation focusing on the “worst of the worst” illegals caught up with him last year. Vang applied for a pardon in July 2025, hoping that the crazies in Minnesota would give it to him and, with Walz’s help, they did.

The pardon came from a three-person panel that consisting of Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), and Minnesota Chief Justice Natalie Hudson. Ellison defended his pardon of the pedophile by citing his opposition to President Trump. I think it is fair to diagnose Trump Derangement when public officials loose child rapists on the public to show their disrespect for the President of the United States.

Or am I being too judgmental?

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ProPublica Really Thinks Revealing That Florida Actually Executes Convicted Murderers Will Turn Americans Against DeSantis, Trump and Republicans

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

(That’s a famous photo of the execution of the John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators)

Ah, the ethical delusions of the woke and biased!

ProPublica is another one of those supposedly “non-partisan” watchdogs that somehow only finds the conduct of Republicans and conservatives worth criticizing, with enough rare exceptions to let them say, “But what about…?” to rebut that verdict sufficiently for those who aren’t paying attention.

Being reflexively progressive, ProPublica has long been an opponent of capital punishment, though the position is misplaced absolutism. Now it announces, “Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at a faster rate than ever before. What followed was the most intense period of executions the state has carried out in more than eight decades.”

This supposedly horrific “period of executions” meant that a grand total of 19 murderers who had forfeited their rights to live in a civilized society were dispatched instead of being kept alive at taxpayer expense. Let’s look at the killer ProPublica picked to have us weep for in the first half of the long article: Frank Walls, whom Florida executed last year.

Walls committed his first murder on March 26, 1985, at the age of 17. He noticed 19-year-old junior college student Tommie Lou Whiddon sunbathing at the beach, went over to her and slashed her throat. Walls then stole her car. Whiddon’s body was discoveredthe next day lying in a pool of blood on the beach. On September 16, 1986, he killed 24-year-old Cynthia Sue Condra by stabbing her 21 times. He left her body on the side of a road.[4] On May 20, 1987, Walls broke into the mobile home of 47-year-old Audrey Gygi. Walls raped her, left, but later decided to come back and murder her.He stabbed her to death, stole a fan and a radio, and left her nude body to be found after she failed to show up for work. On July 22 that same year, Walls committed a double murder. He broke into another mobile home inhabited by 22-year-old airman Edward Alger and his girlfriend, 20-year-old Anne Louise Peterson. Walls forced Peterson to tie up her boyfriend, then tied her up as well. Alger managed to get partially free and attacked Walls. In the fight, Walls cut his throat with a knife, but Alger bit Walls on the hand, causing him to drop the knife. Walls then shot Alger three times in the head. After sexually assaulting Peterson, he shot her in the head too, and when the first shot didn’t kill her, Walls put a pillow over her face and shot her again, killing her. The couple’s bodies were found the next day.

The story, as is de rigueur in such sobfests, is told from the perspective of death penalty activist Father Dustin Feddon, who has nothing better to do than “administer” to condemned prisoners like Walls. ProPublica never informs its readers of the details of why Walls was on Death Row. It just arrays the usual anti-death penalty rationalizations:

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July 2: Let’s Thank Minnesota For Saving The USA

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

If you know anyone from Minnesota or is unfortunate enough to have to live in that ethically-addled state today, pause in your appropriate contempt for the blight on the Republic the Land of Lakes has become in recent years. Express your gratitude for their state, whose brave soldiers in this day in 1863 may have quite literally saved the United States of America and made this 250th celebration possible.

I know, I know. Minnesota has gone completely nuts. It has an incompetent, silly, uber-woke governor; its Attorney General is an anti-white racist and probably a criminal, the Mayor of Minneapolis is an Ethics Villain, it has an anti-Semitic Congresswoman who has openly admitted that her first loyalty is to Somalia, its opposition to ICE operations represents more of a genuine insurrection than anything that occurred during the 2021 Capitol riot, and the state is in a tight race with California, Washington, Oregon, New York and Maryland for the booby-prize of “Most Embarrassing State .” But ’twas not always thus.

July 2 was the second day of the decisive Civil War battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the most complicated and wide-ranging day in the conflict. So much of desperate significance was going on at Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge, on Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den and a half dozen other key features on the battle field that whether an instance of heroism was recorded or forgotten is as much a matter of chance as anything else. Even determining what was the turning point in the day’s conflict, which ultimately was won by the forces of the North, is an exercise in searching for order in chaos.

There is no question, however, that the First Minnesota Volunteer Regiment’s astonishing heroics stand out even among the many other examples of gallantry on that day. The battlefield monument to the First Minnesota is the largest erected to any Union regiment, and yet it has not guaranteed our cultural memory of the epic sacrifice those soldiers made. Other second day exploits, due to sometimes arbitrary choices made by historians and film makers, have taken up the limited space available in the public’s attention to the details of the Civil War.

This is a massive injustice. As the battle raged for Cemetery Ridge, crucial high ground occupied by Union forces but under siege by the Grays, General Winfield Hancock saw a serious breach in the Union line. He realize, in horror, that Wilcox’s Alabama Brigade was on the verge of breaking through, possible dooming Meade’s army to defeat. The attack had to be blunted and and its advance stalled until he could round up sufficient reinforcements to repel the rebels.

Hancock ordered the First Minnesota to charge the brigade and hold the position, even though its 262 men was outnumbered by a force of more than 1200. It wasn’t quite the hopeless odds face by the defenders of the Alamo, but the regiment’s prospects were grim enough.

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July 4th Ethics: How Far Gone Do People Have To Be To Think This Is A Rational Way To Celebrate America’s Founding, And What Would Make Them Become That Way?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That is really and truly the official schedule for the Fourth of July celebration in San Diego County.

Nothing more needs to be said except perhaps,

Remember The Battle of Gettysburg

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Today is July 1, which is always treated across the United States as the gateway to a long weekend and the Fourth of July, and little more. This year, it is the run up to the 250th Anniversary of out nation’s founding. July 1 is also, however, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the most important and most deadly battle of the many important and deadly conflicts in the American Civil War. The two American armies that clashed in the Pennsylvania town sustained more than 50,000 casualties on the Gettysburg battlefield, which may be the saddest and noblest place in America. It is also reputed to be the most haunted, which considering the number of souls lost between July 1 and 3 in 1863, shouldn’t surprise anyone.

[Digression: The Gettysburg Hotel is allegedly haunted, and the proprietors designate specific rooms as haunted. The rent for those rooms is less than the other rooms because, I was told when I called to inquire regarding reservations, “guests tend not to stay the whole night in those rooms.]

Our 250th celebration is an appropriate time to remember Gettysburg, because it is one of those landmark events in American history that could have so easily turned out differently, and if it had, we would never have made to the Centennial, never mind the 250th. The fact that the North prevailed was due to a confluence of random events, the essence of moral luck.

If you have not made at least one pilgrimage to the battlefield, you owe it to yourself, to your family, and to the memory of the combatants, to go. You need not swelter in July. Gettysburg is just as inspiring in the Spring or Fall.

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And Speaking of Fake News: NPR!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says! I’m smart, and I want respect!“

Excuse me while I gleefully gloat over pointing out once again what a rotten, biased, disgrace of a news organization NPR is (and has been for a long while) right before it beclowned itself spectacularly yesterday by breaking the imaginary story that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the Supreme Court.

No, you can’t excuse this putrid example of the variety of fake news I call “Wishin’ and Hopin’ News” (in honor of the late, great Dusty Springfield) with the rationalization (#19 on the list) “Anyone can make a mistake!” For a professional news organization that has any scruples or legitimate editorial procedures literally never makes a mistake like this. NPR didn’t check its “facts” with the subject of the story. It didn’t get confirmation from the Supreme Court. It literally broke a story that didn’t exist because the Axis and the Axis propaganda network and the Trump Deranged and so, so many fans of NPR wanted this to be true so badly that NPR decided that Ethics Don’t Matter….though, to be fair, NPR decided this long, long ago, as when, oh, just to pick a random example out of the air, they blacklisted me as the network’s go-to ethics expert after a woke hostess deemed my 100% accurate explanation of how celebrities are vulnerable to late-hit sexual harassment accusations intolerable because, she told me, “I thought you were trying to defend Donald Trump.”

I may use the Alito episode from now on as my routine example of confirmation bias. The fiasco is so wonderful for Ethics Alarms in so many ways!

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