Unethical Headline of the Week: Mediaite

“Jeffrey Epstein Lawyer Alan Dershowitz Registers as Republican After 67 Years in Democratic Party”

It’s hard to get blacklisted on Ethics Alarms. Snopes, MSNBC, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, The Smoking Gun, Media Matters and The Daily Beast all managed to do it through repeatedly dishonest, biased and misleading stories. In other words, a site has to be even more biased and untrustworthy than Fox News, the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post to end up on mu blacklist.

Mediaite was once barely tolerable when the able Joe Concha worked there as a counter-balance to the mostly knee-jerk leftist propagandists like–-yecchh—Tommy Christopher. Joe is long gone, however, and what is left is unethical human dreck like whoever approved that headline.

The technique is called “poisoning the well,” and it is recognized by journalism ethicists, if there are any now, as a slimy tabloid tactic. Dershowitz authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal announcing that he was leaving the Democratic Party and why, despite pretty much opposing most conservative and Republican positions—even, he says, “immigration.” The Dersh” likes open borders? Wow. He also things abortion is swell.

The GOP might want to throw him back, like a three-eyed fish.

Schadenfreude Isn’t Unethical BUT…

…It is often an indicator of malfunctioning ethics alarms.

My late wife, who loved all creatures great and small, would have openly rooted for the bull in a bullfight. Therefore the tragic result pictured above would not have upset her at all. I, on the other hand, blessed with a sophomoric sense of humor, a taste for slapstick, and an attraction to the macabre find value in that photo from different sources.

As Ethics Alarms frequently reminds readers, feelings, thoughts and motives do not make actions ethical or unethical, hence the verdict that “He meant well” is a rationalization. However feelings can have signature significance, or at least provide disquieting clues to an individuals priorities and character.

Relaying feelings also is conduct, and thus can be ethical or unethical. Nelson Muntz’s trademark…

…for example, would be cruel in the presence of the victim.

How do you react to de la Puebla’s misfortune? Would it be different if you were among the spectators?

And now…a song:

Open Segregation And Discrimination In A (Of Course) California School District

I want to hear someone try to defend this.

The Daily Caller reports that the Albany Unified School District in California hosted a trip to Virginia for “young men and women of color.” They visited Historically Black Colleges and Universities, while discussing “social justice,” according to documents obtained by parental rights group Defending Education. The local Board of Education trip approved the trip at a cost of $42,845.

“This unique mentoring program encourages Albany High School young men and women of color to develop social, personal, and academic success skills,” the Board’s statement announced. “Students gather in a safe, supportive, and empowering environment to voice their needs and challenges. The students engage in enriching discussions on social justice, education, leadership, mental well-being, and self-awareness. This mentoring program is transforming the lives of young men and women of color to make a significant global impact in society.”

The favored students also visited the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial and the Black Heritage Trail. But wait! There’s more…

“AUSD’s 2025-2026 Local Control and Accountability Plan names “Young Men of Color and Young Women of Color Programs” that aim to “provide social emotional supports to most underserved students.” The programs are part of a $1,257,234 “social emotional/mental health” support effort.

“The same plan details the district’s intention to provide staff with “professional development” programs centered on “culturally responsive/anti-racist pedagogy.” These teaching practices are necessary to support “student groups who are persistently and historically underserved,” the document states.

“Another document from 2026 includes a goal of “Recruit[ing] and Retain[ing] a Diverse, High Quality Staff,” DE found. The Superintendent Report detailed plans to “strengthen inclusive hiring,” expand “equitable recruitment pipelines,” and implement “affinity-based supports.” The report mentioned a “Black Teacher Project” to help in these race-based hiring and retention efforts and suggested the district would track staff demographics as an indicator of success.”

Questions:

  • How can a school district get away with flagrant racial discrimination like that in the 21st Century?
  • Are there no white families at all in that district? If there are, what the hell is the matter with them? Why would they permit such biased treatment of their children…in a program they are paying for?
  • Are there no “parents of color” in that district with the integrity to protest a policy that is divisive, illegal and discriminatory? 
  • Does California secretly lobotomize its citizens? Is Weenie juice secretly put in the water?
  • How can educators so smugly described a purely discriminatory educational exercise without any ethics alarms ringing?

I don’t understand this story at all.

Stop Making Me Defend Jeff Bezos To Totalitarian Progressives! [Updated!]

UPDATE: I had multiple sources for this post, none of which, apparently, were accurate. Plus, the announcement above appears to be false. At this link, the paperback version of the book is indeed available at Amazon. I’m going to wait a bit, and leave this post up until I am confident that the whole thing is a hoax, or figure out what is going.

I apologize for the confusion. Right now I hate everybody and everything.

***

See, all you Jeff Bezos haters and Amazon boycotters? There wasn’t anything to get upset about after all. Jeff still cares about your values and the Democratic party, and Amazon is on the right side of the angels after all!

Amazon just censored “Camp of the Saints,” first published in 1973,that portends the destruction of the West as a result of third-world mass migration. Yes, it’s apparently a “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory book.

Never heard of it. However, for Amazon, the most popular and easily accessed book merchant, to refuse to sell a book like “Camp of the Saints” is undeniably viewpoint censorship. Yes, yes, I know, the First Amendment only applies to government censorship. That’s been the go-to rationalization by progressives to control the distribution of ideas they don’t like and find “dangerous” on social media, at college campuses and in the news media for a long time now. But freedom of speech, communication and thought is a core value in this country, or is supposed to be.

All my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends who announced they were boycotting Amazon, and the Washington Post staffers who resigned in protest when Bezos, the owner of the D.C.-based Democratic Party propaganda mouthpiece, refused to endorse Kamala Harris for President, should beg his forgiveness. Bezos is part of their club: he just didn’t want a paper he publishes to look ridiculous by endorsing an idiot.

By the way, I find Kamala’s ghost-written memoir of her run for President to be “offensive content.”

One wag writes on X: “I’m sure all the people who whine about ‘book bans’ when a school board prevents 6-year-olds from reading about gay sex” will be just as upset about this development. Funny, but I doubt it.

This also looks like an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to the unschooled how the Streisand Effect works. As I just noted, I never heard of the book, and wouldn’t have read it I had been aware of it. However, for the real defenders of democracy and our individual rights as Americans, making this book, whatever it says, into a runaway best seller now might teach the totalitarian Left a lesson. Here is what it looks like:

Nah, what am I thinking? The totalitarian Left hasn’t learned anything since it memorized Big Brother’s mottos—you know, like “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,” which explains the state of both our educational institutions and our journalism.

Gee, I Wonder Why We Haven’t Had a Female President Yet…

…and aren’t like to have one any time soon?

Item: Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer (above) is resigning from the Trump administration, the White House announced today. She was facing an internal investigation into allegations that she used agency resources for personal trips, and that she was having an affair with a member of her security team.

Item: Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General, was forced to resign after multiple botches, a series of episodes of unethical conduct in the Justice Department, and being responsible for one of the most unprofessional appearances before a Congressional committee of any Cabinet member within memory.

Item: Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had to be fired in the midst of another sexual misconduct scandal as well as blatant misuse of department funds and making inflammatory and inaccurate public statements regarding I.C.E. activities in Minnesota.

Item: Hillary Clinton…well, do you need more? This week bipartisan scumbag (and longtime Clinton pollster) Dick Morris confirmed that the Bill & Hillary was pretty much a sham and a marriage of political convenience well before Bill was elected President. Admittedly, there is always reason to doubt Morris as well as the blog that first published this “bombshell” last week, but is anyone surprised? Hillary also launched the fake “Russian collusion” hoax after lying about her secret server, and had the “Worst Loser Ever” title for failed Presidential candidates locked up until Donald Trump dethroned her.

Item: Kamala Harris managed to unseat Hillary for the title of “Most Incompetent Presidential Candidate of a Major Party,” after being a babbling, useless, DEI Vice-President for four years.

Then consider how objectively awful the most prominent female elected officials around the country are. Nancy Pelosi…the Squad…Marjorie Taylor Greene…Jasmine Crockett…Lauren Boebert. Not only the elected officials either: this week we learned that the one qualified, intelligent woman making up the woke division on the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan, was a ringleader in the plot to delay the Dobbs decision’s release, even though the politically motivated stall put the lives of the conservative Justices at risk.

Could someone possibly be a worse big city mayor than Karen Bass in Los Angeles? Can anyone imagine D.C.’s Black Lives Matter pandering Mayor Muriel Bowser as Presidential material? Rep. Katie Porter, who once poured scalding mashed potatoes on her husband’s head and who held a “Fuck Trump” sign at her state party’s convention, is the leading Democratic female candidate for California Governor. NY Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani: I can’t wait to hear how she tries to talk her way out of that one. Stacey Abrams was supposed to be rising star, but she proved to be a Machiavellian opportunist. On the GOP side, that description fits both has-beens Nikki Hailey and even has-beenier Sarah Palin.

I could go on—Susan Rice, Lori Lightfoot, the Massachusetts Woke Twins, Gov. Martha Healey and Boston Mayor Michelle Woo, and speaking of the Bay State, fake Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren— to just top off the iceberg—but the point is that the XX side of our society isn’t generating talent that justifies all of the wishing and hoping for a female POTUS.

I have theories about why our system and culture doesn’t produce competent and trustworthy female leaders in sufficient numbers, as well as why those it does produce tend to be corrupt and incompetent power-abusers. I will leave those theories for another day.

Ethics Quiz: AI Jesus

We all knew this was coming, as sure as God made little green idiots. Nonetheless, it poses an ethics conundrum. Several, in fact.

First, though: “What’s going on here?” What’s going on is that once again, someone has figured out a way to profit from human desperation, sadness, and gullibility, or, as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” P.T. was being conservative in his estimate.

For just $1.99 per minute, or $49.99 for 45 minutes (what a deal!) anyone can have a spiritual conversation with a digital avatar of Jesus Christ, whose appearance is modeled on actor Jonathon Roumie’s portrayal on the TV show “The Chosen.” This courtesy of the Just Like Me website, which explains, “Jesus AI is an artificial intelligence tool designed to offer comfort, encouragement, and timeless wisdom inspired by teachings of love, compassion, forgiveness, and personal growth. It is not Jesus Christ himself, nor does it possess divine authority.”

We can cross off dishonesty from the list of possible ethics breaches, I guess. But historians and anthropologists believe that Jesus probably looked like this…

I still have questions, however.

Gavin Newsom’s Book Trick

In November, California Gov. Gavin Newsom offered donors to his political donors a “free” copy of his forthcoming book: “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.” “Make a contribution of ANY AMOUNT today and I will send you a copy,” he wrote.

67,000 supporters bit, and the book those donors received accounted for roughly two-thirds of the print copies of the memoir that have been sold so far. Federal records reveal that Newsom’s political action committee paid $1,561,875 to buy and distribute copies of his book through the donation program. Newsom gets no royalties from the book, avoiding the trap other politicians have fallen into. Meanwhile, the New York Times, which has, surprisingly, been alert to this long-standing slimy tactic, still listed Newsom’s book on its Best Seller list, even though the paper has elsewhere explained that the books were not “sold.”

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokeswoman, kind-of explained, “When The Times has reason to believe that sales of a book include a mix of organic and bulk sales, the book’s best-seller ranking is accompanied by a dagger. That’s what we did with the Newsom book.”

Oh. What?

Smoking Gun Evidence That Democrats and Progressives Seek One-Party Rule, Not Democracy: The Virginia Special Election

This is another integrity test for your woke friends who claim that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.

Tomorrow, Virginians (like me) will go to polling places to decide whether to vote for a “proposed constitutional amendment.” Note that the proposed amendment isn’t included on the ballot. This is because Democrats, who dominate the state government cheat. There is no other way to explain this.

Constitutional amendments, which must be approved by Virginia voters, have to be on the ballot with a full explanation of the amendment available to the public at least 90 days before the election. Virginia Code 30-19.9 provides,

“The explanation shall contain the ballot question, the full text of the proposed constitutional amendment, and a statement of not more than 500 words on the proposed amendment. The explanation shall be presented in plain English, shall be limited to a neutral explanation, which may include a brief statement on the effect of a “yes” and “no” vote on the question but shall not include arguments submitted by either proponents or opponents of the proposal.”

How has it been “made available”? I don’t know: I hadn’t seen it, and I’m fairly informed on such matters. Maybe it was in something I thought was junk mail. Maybe Democrats think posting something on a website nobody is likely to visit is sufficient advance notice. The alleged required explanation of the current proposed amendment is here. In addition to the deceitful and misleading language on the ballot above, we see:

I’m Baaaack!

I swore that I would get a post up before this horrible weekend was up. So here it is.

My computer, entirely because of unethical procrastination on my part, finally died as it was predicted to months ago. The time was 10:22, April 18, the anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. My new computer was purchased and set up by my IT expert, who lives with me, at approximately 11:16 on April 19.

It’s going to take me a while to catch up. I am so sorry for the interruption: there is a lot going on, isn’t there?

I want to thank Steve Witherspoon for passing along the news of my technological demise so the Alexandria police didn’t show up at my door for a safety check, like the last time. Steve had emailed me off site shortly before the Great Crash, so he seemed like a logical messenger.

Right now, the ethics story that gets my special notice is this, from The Federalist, which writes in part,

When the draft of the Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked to the press, the conservative justices who signed on to the majority opinion [faced a] very real threat of assassination…And still their pro-abortion colleagues stalled the release of the official ruling for weeks, putting the justices’ lives at increased risk, as detailed in Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Samuel Alito and reported Saturday by Fox News.

Alito is the justice who wrote Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling ending nationalized abortion. “Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat,” Hemingway, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief writes in Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome.” …Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the liberals when they expected to be wrapped up. They refused to provide a date. 

…On May 2, 2022, accomplice media outlet Politico published the 98-page draft of Dobbs. The unprecedented leak set off a wave of leftist protests and a literal firestorm of pro-abortion-led violence. …“In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations would be vandalized, some even set ablaze,” Hemingway wrote. Protesters also lined the streets and sidewalks outside the conservative justices’ homes…

“Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices. Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically,” Hemingway writes.  It took 53 days to finally release the Dobbs decision. Despite the growing threat to their colleagues, the liberals on the court refused to listen to urgent pleas to complete their work, Hemingway reports….

 “Hemingway wrote that Kagan, an Obama appointee, angrily confronted Breyer, a Clinton appointee, in May 2022 behind closed doors after at least one justice, Samuel Alito, had asked his liberal colleagues to speed up writing their dissent because of security threats,” Fox reported. “Breyer was most likely to agree to Alito’s request, Hemingway wrote.” Hemingway wrote that “Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking,’” according to Fox. 

While pro-abortion zealots were calling for heads to roll, the court’s liberal minority did nothing to, as the left likes to say with empty virtue, “turn down the temperature.”  The justices needed all the help they could get….

“Shortly after the leak, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to provide full-time security for all the justices, but he drew criticism because authorities did not arrest protesters despite a law that prohibits ‘picketing or parading’ near a federal judge’s home to influence a court decision,” Fox reported.

…Contrary to the belief by Roe’s supporters that the final outcome could be changed if they just demonstrated and threatened and destroyed enough, the conservatives on the court never wavered….The Fox report on Hemingway’s new book comes after former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer reported rumors earlier this week that the Supreme Court’s liberal minority is once again “slow-walking the dissent” in a landmark redistricting case Louisiana v. Callais, “so that [the decision] will not be issued in time for many Republican states to actually go in and redistrict based on the decision.”

Nice!

Unethical Substack of the Year (So Far): “Open Letters by Mersault”

The ficks are running thick this spring!

You know “Mersault” is an unethical and untrustworthy pundit because he, she or it won’t let readers know who is writing this far left, biased, garbage. (That’s a photo of the writer above) The author had the nerve to send this substack post to me unasked, and given its quality and content, I regard that act as in the same category as putting a flaming bag of poo on my doorstep.