This is what your friends and relatives who voted for Democrats want unleashed on society, or at least don’t care if it is. Because their scrapple costs too much.
Commentary from “Plan Nine From Outer Space”:
In Which I Lose Respect For Yet Another Brainwashed Facebook Friend…
This hurt. The long-time friend who posted the following commentary on the announcement above is someone I have long regarded as intelligent, reasonable, fair, perceptive and responsible. He is also deeply religious, and generally civically literate. Yet he posted the above announcement of this event, which I hadn’t hear of before, with the following commentary:
It seems we’re being given some warning. How do these people stay so enraged, for so long, based on such poor information? It exhausts me just reading about it…A million? The 5th anniversary of the January 6 Insurrection garnered only a few hundred participants. Success for this effort may depend on whom and from where the call to action is amplified. Let’s hope the President and White House are not inclined to acknowledge it. Ugh.
“Ugh” is right. How do “these people” stay so enraged? The online social media mob my friend is pandering to are the rage addicts; they have been enraged at MAGA and Donald Trump since he upset Hillary Clinton’s dream of being the first female President and Obama’s anointed successor! And ” based on such poor information”? “Based on such poor information”!!!!! What does he think was good information? That Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack?” That the Wuhan virus was so deadly that we had to shut down the nation, wreck the economy and tamer with election security just in time to elect Joe Biden? That the Republican party was the existential threat to democracy? That the inflation Trump inherited from the Biden administration was all Trump’s fault? That “the border is secure”?
Meanwhile, anyone referring to January 6, 2025 as an “insurrection” is either an idiot, a lair, hack, or believes everything MSNow says. Even Jack Smith, the Biden Justice Department didn’t try to claim it was an “insurrection,” and it was looking into every nook and cranny to come up with ways to lock those unruly conservatives.
This is like a production of “Rhinoceros,” Eugene Ionesco’s political allegory about a small French town where the residents start turning into horned beasts. Not you, my friend! Not you too!
One Upside Of The Left’s Gloating and Dreamcasting After The Mid-Terms: Their Civic Ignorance and Arrogance Are Being Displayed For Everyone to See
My progressive Facebook friends, and others of course, are re-posting that leftist fever dream with gusto. Posts like this are all over social media and X.
The confident and completely mistaken rhetoric that accompanies these celebrations is even being echoed by the dumb conservative news media as well. Here’s Fox: “Democrats’ midterm sweep hands them a path to bypass the Electoral College before the 2028 presidential election. Trifectas in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada could push the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to 272 electoral votes, two more than the 270.”
No, there is no path. The Democrats’ fondness for cheating can’t get around this one: there is no “If enough people decide not to obey the Constitution, then they don’t have to obey it.” Uh-uh. Sorry. Go back to school, if you can find one that bothers to teach Civics 101. The Electoral College is how the Constitution dictates that Presidential elections are decided. Democrats don’t like that? Swell, let them try to pass a Constitutional Amendment, and good luck.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is unconstitutional, and pretty clearly so. The Compact Clause (Article I, Section 10) requires explicit Congressional consent for interstate “compacts” that alter the balance of power within the federal system and infringes upon the interests of non-compact joining states. But more decisively, the structure of the Electoral College was carefully designed by the Framers through difficult constitutional compromise. Bypassing or nullifying the operational impact of the Electoral College across state lines using a multi-state agreement rather than going through the formal Article V constitutional amendment process violates the structural integrity of the U.S. Constitution.
And that, you confirmation bias-addled revolutionaries, is the position our substantially originalist SCOTUS is bound to take, should take, and will take. Sure, there are “experts” who deny reality, but there are experts who will say anything, like, say, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation prop. Bias makes experts stupid too.
The Electoral College is here to stay, for better or worse.
Defeated Members of Congress Actually Do This? And We Let Them Get Away With it?
Buried hundreds of words deep within an article in “The Athletic,” the New York Times’ online sports publication, about the looming failure of the Protect College Sports Act after the Democrat sweep, is this fascinating bit of information:
“Many lawmakers simply don’t return to Washington after being voted out. They lose their physical office space starting next week.”
What? WHAT???? They lose the election and blow off their last two months on the job? No elected member of Congress who does that should be allowed to hold elected office ever again. They should forfeit those two months of salary and their pensions. No one should hire them for any job; they should be shamed and shunned. Their names should be prominently displayed, published and circulated. In fact, this practice—how long has it been going on? Centuries?—should have been illegal, and a law should be passed imposing a hefty fine on any House member or Senator who engages in it.
My head started exploding when I read that passage 20 minutes ago, and it hasn’t stopped oozing brain matter like Mt. Vesuvius oozed lava yet.
The 2026 Mid-Terms Ethics Train Wreck is gathering steam…
How Can We Feel Positively About Veterans In A Culture That Increasingly Treats Them As Fools and Criminals?
This is the weirdest Veterans Day since the Vietnam era, and maybe ever. A major political party has just taken over Congress while decrying the use of military personnel for security and the national interest. Indeed, strong constituencies on both sides of the political divide are embracing the well-disproved notion that wars must never be fought at all.
A similar mindset immeasurably aided the rise of Hitler after the horrors of The Great War. It led the U.S. into abandoning South Vietnam before the mission was accomplished, and failing to complete the objectives in both Iraq wars and Afghanistan. That irrational and ahistorical position threatens to let Iran continue as the regional terrorism machine it has been for decades and the existential threat it aspires to be against Israel and the United States. It is why the nation foolishly no longer requires a period of military service for its citizens, and why recruitment has become increasingly difficult for our Armed Serviced.
The day before this Veterans Day, a lame duck Republican Congressman who has opposed the elected President of the United States from the beginning filed a contrived impeachment resolution against the Secretary of War for following the chain of command and doing his job. (More on this unethical debacle later today, I hope.) It appears that Democrats, progressives and the Trump Deranged will greet veterans today with, “Thank you for your service, you foolish tools of war criminals!”
Nice. I know I’m being repetitious, but these are the people most voters endorsed last week because hamburger is too expensive. (cont.)
Ethics Quotes of the Month: Arthur Schaper (American Greatness) and Victor Davis Hanson (Hoover Institute)
“The fallout falls fully on the voters. They are wrong, and they foolishly voted against their own interests out of short-term outrage. Across the country, Americans chose to punish the Republicans by punishing themselves even more. No matter how frustrating one may feel about incumbent Republican politicians at the state level or the federal level, the voters are not going to fix the problem by giving power to a political party that openly fraternizes with socialists, communists, Nazis, and antisemites.This is a major failing. The real outrage is the American voter throwing an electoral temper tantrum and hurting America.”
–—Arthur Schaper at “American Greatness,” in his essay, “A Contrarian View on Election 2026: Trump Was Right, GOP Was OK, Voters Were Wrong.”
Of course I think it is spot on: Schaper pretty much wrote exactly what I have been posting here over the past week. I particularly like this passage:
More Family Ethics: The Estranged Child Problem
The New York Times now sends me all of its advice columns in a nice, neat, email package. I have ignored “Social Qs” for some time because its columnist, Philip Galanes, is a left-biased goof and his perspective is not to be trusted. (Here was the last time EA pondered a “Social Qs” column.) However, by presumably pure coincidence, Galanes’s latest column supplements the issue raised in this recent Ethics Alarms post about the adult child who wants to have old Mom talk to a bot about her problems because the adult child is sick of listening to her.
The “Social Qs” inquirer named “Mom” says that after a single heated argument with her adult daughter, the daughter declared that she would have no further contact with her mother “and has stuck to it.” She asked Galanes what she should do.
My answer would be along the lines of, “Good luck: you raised an ungrateful, cruel, socially handicapped asshole.” Galanes, naturally, suggests that the mother see a therapist (the daughter rejected joint counseling) because “it would probably mean a lot to your daughter.” Sure it would: that would be a tacit admission that the mother was in the wrong. However, in the course of offering his advice, Galanes made an interesting observation that had never occurred to me but has the ring of truth. He wrote,
“Another observation — which, again, I won’t assume applies to you — is generational: My parents, for instance, believed that family was everything. So they took a lot of guff from their parents and siblings — who, in turn, tolerated unpleasantness from them. But my siblings and I are more focused on our mental health and well-being: You can push us only so far before we make our exit.”
Notice that Galanes said “we,” meaning that he endorses the daughter’s cutting off her mother and might do the same. This comes on the heels of another column from “The Ethicist,” in which an inquirer asked “Is It Wrong to Leave My 85-Year-Old Mother Alone on Thanksgiving?” the Ethicist thought it was a reasonable question and I ruled that even asking it was evidence of ethics rot. My own offspring barely speaks to me despite living rent free in my home and my wife and I rescuing him from an orphanage in a horrible country.
Is this a vile new cultural norm? Did the Boomers raise a generation that don’t respect their elders and look upon their families as casual connections to be cut off on a whim? How did that happen? Is this another side effect of Marxist indoctrination? And most of all, now what?
[Note: that scene above is what I believe is an excellent portrayal of a father-daughter estrangement being healed. The scene was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. I recommend the film, “Molly’s Game,” highly, from an ethical, legal, and artistic perspective.]
“The Unabomber Was Right”#12: The Perfect Victim
The New York Times tells a tragic story about a young woman, Bowen Wan, with medical problems, under pressure in her profession, lonely and isolated as a recent arrival from China, who was drawn into a relationship of trust with an AI chatbot. In the end, that relationship was fatal.
ChatGPT was thrilled to take on the role of friend, confidant, advisor and medical expert. Wan, emotionally vulnerable, was happy to have the resource. From the Times account:
….The medication that had kept her epilepsy at bay for more than a decade had, inexplicably, stopped working. Despite trying different drugs, Bowen found that her seizures roared back, sometimes striking more than once a day. Doctors began discussing whether she was a candidate for brain surgery. At the very least, they agreed that she could no longer handle the demands of her software engineering job at Amazon. So, in 2021, Bowen went on disability leave.
Besides trips to the grocery store, she rarely left the safety of her apartment, located in a trendy neighborhood in Seattle. A seizure could turn any outing into an embarrassing, even dangerous, ordeal. Meeting new friends felt out of the question, too: She couldn’t stomach the idea of enduring an episode in front of a stranger whom she did not trust to understand her condition.
Her parents were the only people she felt she could talk to about her epilepsy. Their frequent phone calls tethered her to the outside world. They took an interest in every detail of her day and didn’t judge her when she took long pauses to find a word. Then, in 2023, she found a new companion in ChatGPT. She asked the bot for relationship advice and help navigating her health insurance and disability benefits. In 2025, she averaged more than 1,500 messages per week, sometimes chatting for hours in conversations that would stretch late into the night. [cont.]
From The Res Ipsa Loquitor Files…
Christina Lorey is an independent, Madison Wisconsin-based journalist, “positive news” creator, and former local television reporter, anchor, and producer.
And also, apparently, a moron.
Comment of the Day: “Scary Trump-Deranged/Wokified Facebook Friend Update”
I want to apologize to Gamereg, who authored this terse and astute Comment of the Day for getting it posted so tardily. Fortunately, the foolish (but disturbingly typical) sentiments he was generous enough to thoroughly rebut remain evergreen and ever destructive even though the election has come and gone.
Before I turn it over to Gamereg, I want to express particular disgust at the first line. There is nothing racist about the Republican Party, its elected officials or Donald Trump, and yet this claim—not even claim now but official Big Lie—remains a staple of progressive, Democrat, Trump Deranged cant despite my efforts and those of many others to demonstrate beyond dispute that it is untrue. When I confront the “Trump is a racist” chanters and insist that they tell me what they think is their smoking gun, their answers range from “Oh, everybody knows he’s a racist” to “He said mean things about Barack Obama/Kamala Harris/ Colin Kaepernick/”The Squad” to “He called the white supremacy protesters in Charlottesville “very fine people “to “he called nations with ‘people of color’ ‘shit-hole countries'” to “huminiahuminahumina.” The most substantive response anyone has come up with is the October 1973 DOJ civil rights lawsuit against Trump, his father Fred Trump, and their real estate company, Trump Management Inc., alleging systemic violations of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in New York City. The Trumps settled the lawsuit in 1975 by signing a consent decree without admitting any wrongdoing or liability. The Justice Department’s evidence was strong; undeniably, the Trumps engaged in racial discrimination. Also undeniably, the episode is fifty years old. Fifty years ago Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed gay marriage. I stipulate that when a public figure’s last racially discriminatory act was a half century ago, the “racist” label cannot be sustained.
I also want to respectfully challenge Extradimensional Cephalopod, our esteemed missionary of effective and civil discourse with immovable ideologues who have adopted an unshakable belief and are inclined to disrespect anyone who attempts to dislodge it regardless of the evidence offered. I would like to read a non-fantasy formula for convincing a progressive shill that the first first line is the utter bias and counter-factual smear that it is.
He/She/It has been especially smug of late with the now familiar “Oh, you poor dim Earthlings, if only you could learn the skills I bring you, the talking past each other that has resulted in such bitterness and enmity in our political disputes would be no more!” I am reacting particularly to our recent debate on this thread, which contained a reference to my post seeking the most ethical way to treat a neighbor who tells me she cuts off anyone who doesn’t sufficiently oppose Donald Trump and support the Democratic Party.
Update: I invited her to dine out with me for Thanksgiving, since my family is dead or will be elsewhere, and she is estranged from hers. She was thrilled. We will not talk politics.
Here is Gamereg’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Scary Trump-Deranged/Wokified Facebook Friend Update”…
