Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Minnesota Star Tribune”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

As promised, I am posting the second half of the Ryan Harkins Comment of the Day double-header. This one is an analysis of the revolting Minnesota debacle that had “Knucklehead” Tim Walz pardon a confessed child rapist on the flimsiest of justifications to allow the man to escape deportation, whereupon he was deported anyway. [Is Vang wearing pajamas in that photo? I guess it’s a practical choice for a rapist…] Then Minnesota’s spectacularly incompetent governor complained that no one should suffer because of their “worst day” (the man had repeatedly raped the same girl for years), and was applauded by the state’s biggest newspaper for “standing behind” his indefensible pardon. Walz also implied that the ultimate deportation lacked “due process.”

At the risk of hitch-hiking on Ryan’s post, that last issue is one I find especially perplexing. The Biden Administration deliberately refused to enforce our immigration laws, flooding the nation with so many illegal immigrants that the procedures in place for finding and deporting them were bound to be ineffective, too expensive, too time-consuming, too much of a burden on the courts, and sure to inflame public opinion, making the necessary response politically impractical. It was, progressives thought, a fait accompli, silently accompanied by gloating and mockery. “Sure we ignored the law, and there’s not a thing you can do about it, so there!”

I believe that it was crucial to do something about it, and if it took a uniquely bold and defiant President willing to bend procedures, process, the law and public tolerance to accomplish an important mission, that is what Presidential power is for. Our best Presidents were willing to take matters right up to previously uncrossable lines and sometimes over them, and the Trump Administration commitment to dealing with the illegal immigrant avalanche is in the tradition of Jackson, Lincoln, FDR and Eisenhower at their best.

Sure it’s a slippery slope, and of course Democrats are indignant that their plot is being foiled. Nevertheless, I believe the President has to have the power to do what is in the best interests of the nation when situations arise that the usual processes can’t handle.

Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Minnesota Star Tribune“:

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Ethics Dunces: Any Conservative Who Says “Joe McCarthy Was Right.”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Today Stephen Kruiser, a conservative gadfly, began his daily with “The GOP Midterm Theme Should Be ‘Joe McCarthy Was Right'” and later writes, “Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media are… still badmouthing Joe McCarthy after seven decades and he was right about everything.”

That is offensive and ignorant. Ann Coulter has made similar claims over the years. Joe McCarthy was right about just one thing: there were Communists and communist sympathizers in the U.S. government then and there probably are now. He was wrong in his methods, he was dishonest in his tactics, he was hostile to freedom of speech and freedom of thought, he was an anti-Semite and an anti-gay bigot, he weaponized guilt by association, and his response to criticism or opposition was exactly the same as so many minority politicians and women like Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reflexively respond to opposition today. They cry “Racist!” or “Sexist!” Joe cried “Communist sympathizer!” It’s the same tactic.

Senator McCarthy waved papers in the air that he said contained confirmed Communists, but never revealed the names. The consensus is that the papers were probably blank. He wanted all homosexuals fired from sensitive positions because they were, he said, vulnerable to blackmail by Communist agents seeking to recruit them to undermine the United States. (So was being an alcoholic, like Joe.) He cynically exploited Cold War tensions to build his political influence and power, and aligned himself with the same forces in the nation that created blacklists.

McCarthy was the epitome of the patriotic demagogue. “McCarthyism,” which denotes the practice of wielding unsubstantiated accusations and the defamation of political opponents through calculated fear-mongering, was a fair description of the Senator’s methods, and is a perfect description of what the Left’s Axis of Unethical Conduct has been practicing since 2016. You know, like…

Extolling Joe McCarthy, an all-time Ethics Villain and a blight on our political history, is as repulsive as defending Graham Platner, Tim Walz or New York’s Mayor Mamdani. It is historically and ethically ignorant.

Post Script: As much as I view “iconic” Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block as an over-rated partisan hack, he certainly had Joe McCarthy pegged early on. “Herblock” habitually portrayed McCarthy with a bucket of tar and a dripping paint brush, a vivid image of his methods.

National Anthem Ethics: Mini-Drama At Wrigley Field

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The ethics in the now viral incident at the start of a Chicago Cubs baseball game are clear as a mountain stream. A Gen Z slug was ignoring the National Anthem, a Vietnam vet sitting behind him took offense and demanded that he stand, and when the kid resisted, gave him a sharp slap “upside the head.” Then the young fan finally stood up.

The online debate is contrived. Of course…

  • …the young fan was being disrespectful and deserved the rebuke
  • …he was also being ignorant, forgetting that there are a lot of veterans who take loyalty and reverence to the nation they served very seriously; my father would have said something to him
  • …he still had a right to sit if he chose to, though doing so was unethical,
  • …hitting the kid was indefensible, even if the contact was light and more symbolic than serious, and
  • …the young fan showed good judgment by capitulating and not allowing the conflict to escalate.

Further observations…

1. To his credit, the slapper says that he regrets the slap.

2. He also says he and the kid shared a beer at the game. That speaks well of the young man. It is also very typical of the kind of human comradery I have witnessed at baseball games many times over the years. Everyone there has a bond with everyone else—they are baseball fans and usually fans of the same team.

3. Lots of the critics of the veteran remind us that the slap was battery. No, it wasn’t assault: assault is when the victim is placed in fearful anticipation of unwelcome contact; battery is the contact itself. Since the slappee was hit from behind and didn’t see it coming, there was no assault, just battery.

4. Though technically a tort and a crime, the chances of either getting substantive legal redress is about zero. De minimis non curat lex.

5. If the slapper was the kid’s father, mother, or sibling, we never would have heard about the episode

5. Questions: would the veteran have handled the situation the same way if the kid had been black? Female? A Muslim? My guess: no, no, and no.

6. If the kid was with a group of peers, would he have stood? Would the vet have confronted him if he were with friends?

7. Would a black fan have behaved the same as the white kid? Maybe. If not, however, the incident would be characterized as a racial clash by the media.

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Train Wreck Update, In Which the Complicit and Corrupt NYT Journalists and Pundits Can’t Bring Themselves To Be Honest About Graham Platner”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Graham Platner seems like old news now that the Maine Democrats have another working-class hero to run against Susan Collins: a temperamental logger instead of a part-time oyster fisherman, Troy Jackson. I meant to post this Comment of the Day a week ago but got distracted: never mind. Ryan Harkin’s observations are still relevant, and, as always, he does a thorough and articulate job. This is the first half of a Ryan Harkins Comment of the Day double-header, with the second half arriving tomorrow morning.

Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Train Wreck Update, In Which the Complicit and Corrupt NYT Journalists and Pundits Can’t Bring Themselves To Be Honest About Graham Platner”:

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I think the observations from various conservatives is correct about the Democratic Party’s embrace of Platner: they are looking for the Democratic answer to Donald Trump, and thought maybe they found him in Platner. The problems here are manifold, though. First and foremost, they don’t understand what makes Trump popular to conservatives. Second, in searching for a masculine model, they have no idea what actual masculinity is. They took Trump’s crass behavior and somehow reasoned that they needed someone crass. (As though all their foul-mouthed, guttersnipe-turned-millionaire grifters weren’t crass enough!) They noticed Trump’s promiscuity and thought they needed someone who treated women dirty. They saw Trump’s businessman persona, and they thought they could create a businessman aura around their candidate. The problem in all of this is the Democrats cannot (and have for a generation at least) see anything beneath the surface. They are so caught up in superficial details and labels that they cannot even fathom there are depths that have to be considered.

Conservatives don’t like Trump’s promiscuity or narcissism; they tolerate it for Trump’s other characteristics and Trump’s record. Trump professed a love for the United States, which Democrats can never do. Trump identified the problems conservatives have, especially the hostility they have felt at values that have underwritten the United States since its founding: faith in God, self-determinism, and hard work. They have felt repressed by governments who catered to anyone but them, and especially to those groups who specifically weren’t them. Faith in God was derided; self-determinism was racist, violent, and toxic; hard work was treated as something to be punished. They have been struggling with the feeling of being replaced by foreigners, all the while being told they were imagining things. They were forced to observe, and call phobic if they didn’t support, every alternative lifestyle they had always believe was detrimental to a healthy family life. The list goes on and on.

Continue reading →

Rep. Brandon Exposes and Embarrasses The Woke Propagandist Who Runs The Smithsonian: GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

These exchanges are hard to watch unless you enjoy watching dishonest, woke propagandists being publicly exposed as the disgraces to their professions and the enemies of democracy that they are.

When the White House announced that it was reviewing Smithsonian exhibits for left-wing bias about a year ago, I wrote here (in part):

“There can be little question that the current curators of the Smithsonian museums have used their positions to promote woke agenda items and to manipulate the exhibits to try to indoctrinate museum visitors. Most of what the Federalist flagged as well as the White House’s items are genuinely objectionable…For example, Ibram X. Kendi is a race-hustler, and his presence anywhere in the museums is signature significance.

“Does the Pride Flag have genuine historical significance? I suppose so. But emphasizing Ben Franklin’s early slave-holding stinks of the “1619 Project”: by the time that he was a Founder, Ben had become a vocal foe of slavery.

“I believe that a nation’s museums should err on the side of emphasizing the positive aspect of its history and culture, but that’s easier to say than to execute. Substituting one extreme bias for another is not a solution. But as I wrote in the previous post on this topic, I think finding an ethical balance will be a futile exercise.”

In a previous post, I had written,

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Another Unethical Website of the Month, But This One Is Scary…The Democratic Socialists of America

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Behold the official website of the Democratic Socialists of America. Unless it is a false flag effort by frightened Democrats or sneaky conservatives, this is a metaphorical smoking gun of epic proportions. Yet its content should not surprise anyone who has any historical perspective or who has been paying attention for the last, oh, two decades or so.

As for me, my inner Fredo is again saying, “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everyone says!” I’d like to find the first time Ethics Alarms started warning that the American Left and the 21st Century Democratic Party was sliding into totalitarian goals and tactics, but I know it was quite a while ago. I also know that EA’s objective analysis of this terrible political development, which creates a genuine threat to democracy unlike the fake threats to democracy heralded by Axis propagandists, was perceived as a partisan tactic itself and attacked as such, here and elsewhere. That was and is wrong for I was and am right, and it didn’t take any Fox News script to lead me to the truth. I was paying attention. Democrats were using the playbook of Communist regimes while accusing their adversaries of doing what they were doing themselves. And it should have been obvious to everyone. I’m not that smart. Heck, Donald Trump figured it out.

Now, suddenly, after sowing these metaphorical dragons’ teeth and getting the predictable bumper crop, some progressives and Democrats are waking up to what their cynical pandering to the anti-American, radical and ignorant extremes on the Left has wrought. Bill Maher, Van Jones, James Carville, Joe Scarborough, Senator Fetterman and others are suddenly saying, “Hey, hold on a bit, these Democratic Socialists are crazy, and they are going to get us slaughtered in elections.” To which I respond with two Hollywood clips from the EA archive:

I have no sympathy for these fools, and the group includes a lot of my Trump Deranged friends and relatives. They allowed Bernie Sanders, the epitome of a communist “useful idiot,” to become the face of the Democratic party along with “the Squad” and now the mayor of New York City. They relied on the our broken education system’s indoctrination process to ensure the ignorance of much of the public, especially Gen Z and, to be blunt, stupid people. Now all those ignorant voters are threatening to expose just how irresponsible and unhinged the Left has become, making even the hated Republicans and their boorish POTUS look safe by comparison.

You really have to read the rhetoric on the website, but I’ll give you just an appetizer to get you started, as readers are told what like under a socialist (<cough!> communist <cough!>) regime will be like:

“You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities…OK, enough about bills. What do you do on your day off?…what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?”

I have to note that all of the graphics pander to “people of color,” like this sweet portrayal of the average American family:

Read it all.

_______________________

Pointer: Steve Witherspoon

Unethical Website of the Month: “Real Studio Tales”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It takes a special kind of schmuck to call your YouTube channel “Real Studio Tales” and to fill it with tales that aren’t real. I don’t know who this particular schmuck is: based on his voice, he’s a British schmuck, who delivers the alleged Hollywood “Studio Tales” in a dead fish, enervated tone like a bored BBC announcer who is about to perish of ennui. I stumbled upon one of the channel’s videos late last night. The title sucked me in as YouTube’s algorithm enticed me with “At 100, Mel Brooks Names the Five Actors He Hates”; I had just watched the excellent documentary about Mel released last year.

I didn’t even watch the whole thing. I fast-forwarded through it to find out who the five were. Frank Langella….that was no surprise: Langella’s good, but has had several clashes with directors and producers in his long career. Gene Wilder…I knew Wilder and Brooks had something of a falling out after “Young Frankenstein.” Chevy Chase…everybody hates Chevy Chase. Jerry Lewis….compared to Jerry, Chevy is beloved in Hollywood. But…Harvey Korman? I was surprised at that one, so I watched that segment.

Dead Mackerel Limey explained that though Mel thought Harvey was brilliant, his insistence on improvisation after years doing a sketch comedy on “The Carol Burnett Show” aggravated Brooks as a director. Korman kept that style within workable range in his first role with Brooks directing, as the evil Hedley Lamar in “Blazing Saddles,” but according to “Studio Tales” Korman made Brook’s directing chores unbearable in their next collaboration, 1977’s “High Anxiety,” Mel’s Hitchcock film parody. There was tension on the set as Korman seemed to want to debate every line and every scene. Eventually, we are told, the two didn’t speak except when the cameras were rolling, and Mel, though always extolling Harvey in later interviews and deeply respecting his talent, never used Harvey Korman in a Mel Brooks project again.

The ethics problem? He did. Three times.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: The Minnesota Star Tribune

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Vang’s actions 20 years ago were awful, but so were the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6, 2021, and those folks received Presidential pardons.”

—–The Minnesota Star, cheering on Gov. Tim “Knucklehead” Walz’s sick decision to pardon a serial child rapist in an attempt to foil efforts to deport him.

No one can trust a news source capable of putting such illogical, unethical garbage in print. Defense by non-sequitur! “Sure, he raped a child repeatedly for years, but Jeffrey Dahmer ate people!” There is no basis for comparison between the J-6 rioters, all citizens and jailed, some for a couple of years, for a single act, and a non-citizen who never spent a day in prison despite pleading guilty to multiple child rapes. The Star’s bizarre logic doesn’t even rise to the level of the worst of all rationalizations, Rationalization #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things.” Is the idea that Walz trying to let a child molester stay in his state is good because Trump’s pardon of the rioters wasn’t? What is the Star trying to say? Do the editors even know?

Then the Star’s grand finale is to quote with approval another one of Walz’s idiotic outbursts. “Taking them out with no due process”? Vang received a final order of removal in October 2006! There was due process to spare.

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering how the once great state of Minnesota came to such a precipitous decline in values and common sense. Once represented by the likes of Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, it is led by a principle-free, incompetent fool, with an addled newspaper like the Star warping the news to disguise his incompetence. Minnesotans used to be smart, creative, rational. They had standards, they had pride. What happened? Now they are sitting by while their state’s #1 paper applauds their Governor for pardoning a child rapist, and one who made it clear that he doesn’t think raping children is anything to get upset about. Americans are just weirdly prudish about such things!

So the citizens of Minnesota just nod their heads as their governor first pardons the man who rapes little girls and pays them to keep quiet, because Kamala choice’s to be VP wants to foil efforts to remove criminal non-citizens. They keep nodding as that governor describes years of multiple rapes as the rapist’s “worst day” [Vang didn’t think they were bad days at all], and nod some more as the Star calls Walz a hero for trying to inflict a sexual predator on their state permanently.

What is that? Brain damage? Hypnosis? Insanity?

I just don’t understand.

Trinity College’s Authentic Frontier Gibberish

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Trinity College has the gall to charge over $72,000 per academic year to students, and yet passes woke, divisive, fact-free mumbo-jumbo (aka. Authentic Frontier Gibberish) off as “education.”

“Unsettling the White Gaze” appears on the school’s anthropology course schedule for spring 2027, and is described thusly:

“White supremacy and racial capitalism structure our world, setting in motion the systems of domination that Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly describes as a ‘racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation’…Students will learn to turn their anthropological gaze upon whiteness itself and understand its insidious modes of self-and-other construction thus destabilizing its ocular power to define others. We will pay special attention to how the white colonial gaze has operated in the liberal discipline of anthropology and explore ethnographic methods for studying whiteness and white supremacy,”

Oh. What??? And who the hell is Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, and why should what she says matter to me any more than what, say, Adam Sandler says? [I just checked. It shouldn’t matter. She’s an obscure anti-white ideologue. Dropping in an appeal to authority using an obscure race-baiting academic is pretty desperate; then again, would any respectable scholar say something like “racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation” ?

Not to pile on too much, but gaze at her faculty photograph. A professor choosing to radiate such ‘tude—“Bring it on, whitey!” is to be avoided at all costs.

Ugh.

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, teaches “Unsettling the White Gaze,” and she is obviously an Authentic Frontier Gibberish master herself. She describes herself as a “white, disabled, trans anthropologist whose work focuses on how criminalized people who use drugs envision and experiment with abolitionist horizons of transformation, healing, self-determination, and solidarity beyond incarceration and forced-cure.” She also explains that she “participates in abolitionist, harm reduction, and transformative justice organizing projects in NYC and beyond.”

Okaaaaaay…

If students are willing to sign up to take such self-evident crap and parents will pay for it, there’s not much that can be done. There were really silly, obscure courses at my college too, but they weren’t political indoctrination courses. These offenses to common sense and democratic society won’t dry up and blow away until there is sufficiently competent secondary and primary education to ensure college freshman have a sufficiently solid foundation in critical thinking to recognize a course like this one for what it is: pseudo-social science contrived to fulfill a political agenda.

Yikes! An Entire State Supreme Court Flips Out And Attacks The U.S. Supreme Court! (Yes, That Is Unethical)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Several Ethics Alarms reader alerted me to this gobsmacking story, further evidence that the political left in this country is in the process of suffering a nervous breakdown. I am still not certain I am glad they did.

The court alluded to in the title is the Hawaii Supreme Court. That state needs to be given a bit of leeway for its excesses and delusions: Hawaii, even after more than half a century as our 50th state, is still a very different culture from the other 49. That’s part of its charm when you visit there, but it also has allowed a problematic mindset to linger. Hawaiians just don’t think the usual rules should apply to them, even in relation to the Constitution. Two years ago, in State v. Wilson, the Hawaii Supreme Court wrote that “[t]he spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons,” and that Hawaii would read the Second Amendment “differently than the current United States Supreme Court.”

Oh. Except that a state can’t do that.

More recently, the same justice who wrote that defiant legal nonsense authored a full-on attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, tacked onto a rather mundane case about prosecutorial misconduct. I will re-publish the whole amazing section below, but KABOOM! It is head-exploding. The diatribe, because that’s what it is, covers voting rights, campaign finance, abortion, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, the major questions doctrine, Chevron deference, the spending power, the removal power, and birthright citizenship, while accusing the Roberts Court of being racist.

Such tangential rhetoric is known as dicta, parts of a legal opinion that carry no substantive legal weight at all since it is pure opinion without definitive case authority. Even dicta, however, is subject to certain professional and ethical constraints. The Hawaiian Supreme Court rantis a bright line breach of several tenets in state’s Code of Judicial Conduct.

Canon I states, “A JUDGE SHALL UPHOLD AND PROMOTE THE INDEPENDENCE, INTEGRITY, AND IMPARTIALITY OF THE JUDICIARY AND SHALL AVOID IMPROPRIETY AND THE APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY.“

Under that banner are three mandates: Rule 1.1. Compliance with the Law, Rule 1.2. Promoting Confidence in the Judiciary, and Rule 1.3. Avoiding Misuse of the Prestige of Judicial Office. A statement that announces that a judge does not feel bound by U.S. Supreme Court decisions violates Rule 1.1. A judge attacking the integrity and motives of the U.S. Supreme Court undermines confidence in the judiciary, as prohibited by Rule 1.2. A judge using the prestige of his office to impugn a higher court is by definition an abuse of office, breaching Rule 1.3.

But wait! There’s more!

Canon 2 states, “A JUDGE SHALL PERFORM THE DUTIES OF JUDICIAL OFFICE
IMPARTIALLY, COMPETENTLY, AND DILIGENTLY.”

The anti-SCOTUS section shows a judge giving priority to his partisan and political beliefs over his duties as a judge, violating Rule 2.1. His unhinged attack on past SCOTUS jurisprudence indicates that he is incapable of “upholding the law,” and that he is also incapable of “impartial” conduct. Moreover, the opinion constitutes a flagrant bias based on political affiliation, breaching Rule 2.3.

The outburst is even worse than the many rules violations suggest. The logic is tortured, the law is bad, and the arguments are hysterical as well as not based in reality; worst of all, the Hawaiian judges appear not to understand how SCOTUS fits into the Constitutional governance formula. The core goal underlying the tantrum is an arrogant belief in judicial activism and judges usurping legislatures, as the Warren court did habitually.

As a final rotten cherry on this putrid sundae of unethical judicial conduct, The National Review noticed that a bot probably wrote the text. Nice. My position is that judges using AI to write their opinions is impeachable conduct, but then so is issuing such an attack on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here is the section, and I must add, having just read it through again, the naked Trump Derangement and partisan extremism is shocking. This isn’t just unethical. It is judicial insurrection. Luckily, progressives don’t read court opinions…

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