Has any conservative law professor—there aren’t many, but I can think of a few—ever argued that scholars, lawyers and legal commentators who advocate positions disfavored on the professor’s side of the ideological divide should be punished and “forced to recant” their stated opinion? If there has been any example of that, I must have missed it. Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, however, did exactly that after the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, held that the 14th Amendment protects birthright citizenship.
After the decision, Professor Pfaff went on BlueSky—I regard posting on that platform prima facie evidence that the poster doesn’t believe in pluralism and freedom of speech— to announce his contempt for and desire to discipline any law professor who disagreed with his obviously unchallengeable analysis of the issue, writing,
“There MUST be repercussions for the lawprofs who advanced such untenable arguments. Their behavior is — and I mean this literally, not dehumanizingly — parasitic. They exploit norms of collegiality and presumptions of integrity to advance trash. Which undermines the work of ALL of us.”
Those “untenable arguments” and “trash” were supported by four Supreme Court Justices in the minority, but never mind. The fascists of the Left believe that it is in the best interests of society to enforce “goodthink” and punish “wrongthink;” to prevent dissent and open civic discourse from threatening its power.
Pfaff was responding to similar sentiments posted by Georgia State University Professor Anthony Michael Kreis, and he’s an Associate Dean for Faculty Research & Development. In his BlueSky posting, Kreis wrote that he considered it loathsome that any Justices disagreed with what he, like Pfaff, considers the only position on birthright citizenship that it is honorable and legitimate to hold:
For a sports league that few care about and fewer watch, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sure gets into a lot of ethics controversies. Take this one, for example:
The WNBA suspended Toronto Tempo head coach Sandy Brondello without pay for one game after she referred to black Atlanta Dream star Angel Reese as a “protected species” in a remark that was picked up by a hot mic during a game.
In the Dream’s 111-92 win over the Tempo last week a Toronto player had a foul called on her after an offensive rebound tussle involving Reese. As the foul call was being reviewed, Brondello yelled at the referees, “Angel…she’s a protected species!” The WNBA announced the next day that Brondello must sit out the Tempo’s next game, and won’t be paid for it, adding,”The WNBA expects all coaches and team personnel to uphold the highest standards of professionalism and respect that are fundamental to our league.”
Brondello, who is white, had issued a written apology earlier, reflexively groveling so she wouldn’t be cancelled as a racist in a league where 81% of the players are “of color.” She wrote,
“Angel, I’m sorry. Last night, in the emotion of the moment after Nyara’s injury, I used a phrase that I shouldn’t have used, and I take full responsibility for that. My frustration was with the officiating, but my words unfairly put the focus on you. I also understand that my words carried an impact beyond what I intended, particularly for Black women in our league, and I’m deeply sorry for that. I’ve spent my career competing with, coaching and learning from incredible Black women. I regret that my words caused hurt to a community I respect so deeply. I have a lot of respect for you as both a player and a person, and I sincerely apologize to you, your teammates, and the Dream organization for my comment.”
Reese, meanwhile, couldn’t resist the urge to play victim and to imply that either everyone knows that Brondello is a bigot or that white people in general think of blacks as a separate species. She piled on thusly on “X”:
Nice. What Brondello should have said about Reese was “She’s an asshole.”
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Was it fair and responsible for the WNBA to suspend Brondello for calling a black star a “protected species”?
Zach Dean, a pan-sports commentator for Outkick, the conservative sports commentary website absorbed by Fox New, pronounced the suspension wrongful and even dangerous. He wrote in part,
Ray County (Missouri) Prosecutor Camille Johnston, 46, had “inappropriate sexual affairs “with three men, including a defense attorney representing several criminal defendants in cases prosecuted by Ray County, and Juan David Gutierrez an illegal immigrant accused of sexually assaulting another woman. The third unethical sexual relationship was with yet another defendant in a criminal case, and Johnston fired the employee who discovered it.
Yikes. Even the late Steven Bochco didn’t dream up a prosecutor that sex-crazed, and all of his lawyers were in perpetual heat.
Johnston’s fling with Gutierrez was her masterpiece, however. Get this: Gutierrez was being prosecuted in Ray County, but this Ray County prosecutor gave him the keys to her car so he could flee to Florida, where she joined him on her vacation!
Johnston, the filings against her state, was guilty of an “obvious appearance of a conflict of interest” —- “Appearance”???? — had “forfeited the office of prosecuting attorney.”
I don’t understand this story at all. Did the woman have a psychotic break? How can someone rise to the level of prosecutor, or for that matter pass the bar after graduating from law school, who is capable of behaving this way? Maybe she learned she has only a year to live, and decided to go out with a bang…well, several bangs I guess. I would have guessed that she was hideous or something and desperate for a date, but she’s not. My next guess would have been that she was so sexually alluring that defendants and colleagues were constantly courting her, but that isn’t evident either. How could this happen?
And yet, over the past 20 years, I have been stunned and disillusioned by the low level of professional ethics of so many prosecutors, who are supposed to maintain exemplary ethics. I suppose having sex with anyone in pants is, all in all, not as unethical as knowingly prosecuting an innocent defendant, and that ethical breach is a lot more common than going on vacation with an illegal who assaults women.
One way you can tell with 100% certainly brainwashed (or dishonest) progressives is if they complain about NPR and PBS losing their government funding. It is the watermark of “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” gaslighting. This morning I received an unsolicited and unwelcome exhortation in my email inbox from the propagandist above, insulting my intelligence by seeking my money by telling me…
A billion-dollar hit to our industry is enough to make any Chief Financial Officer sweat. And that’s exactly what happened to public media one year ago today, when Congress voted to eliminate federal funding. My job as NPR’s CFO isn’t just to balance the books; it’s to protect a vital public asset. Today, I’m asking you to take action with me.
The NPR Network cannot back down on our mission because we know that millions of people rely on this trusted journalism and programming. And, I am so grateful that we don’t need to back down because supporters like you stand with us. Our strength – and our independence – has always come from you, the public. The NPR Network continues because the public decides it will.
I can tell you firsthand: you can’t run a world-class, independent newsroom on hope. A free press doesn’t just happen. Public media needs growing, reliable financial support to fuel essential reporting and build what’s next. Now is the time to give. Not just for yourself, but for our collective right to know the facts. Your donation of any amount is needed. Every dollar makes a difference.
Power to the public,
Daphne Kwon
P.S. When you make a donation to support this essential public service, you declare that you value access to the facts, for all.
“Access to all the facts”!
By pure coincidence, shortly after reading that garbage I saw that Newsbusters had posted some of the transcript of NPR’s anchor A Martinez (he humbly doesn’t claim to be THE Martinez) interview Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn) regarding President Trump’s recent televised speech. Highlights, as the Axis hack repeatedly invited the Democrat to attack the President and provided no balance or skepticism whatsoever:
The “Safe Return” memorial overlooks the entrance to Squalicum Harbor at Zuanich Point Park in Billingham, Washington. Community leaders dedicated the 16-foot monument on Memorial Day, May 31, 1999 to honor commercial fishermen from the Bellingham area who died or disappeared at sea. The sculpture features an eight-foot bronze fisherman casting a mooring line as he returns to port. He stands on a 19-ton block of red granite, bearing the names of local fishermen who never made it safely home.
But the statue is racist, you see. That fisherman is really out to lynch a black man. He’s carrying a noose, right?
At least that’s what Cara M. Munoz thought as she harassed workmen cleaning graffiti off the memorial. It may have been what the idiots who defaced the memorial thought too.
“What is that? You don’t want to respond? But that’s OK,” Munoz shouted. “Are you going to do anything about the noose hanging above your head?…“That’s a noose.That is a hate symbol by definition.” She continued to harass the workers until police arrested her on charges second-degree malicious mischief. Then she spit on the officers.
Munoz is proud of her stand against “white supremacy” and all those lynchings performed by fisherman in Washington. She posted several videos of her confrontation with the workers. These people are so certain they are righteous and reasonable in their indignation. The summer of 2020 permanently damaged their brains and personalities. I’m surprised Cara wasn’t wearing a mask, too.
The Great Stupid is particularly intense and contagious in Washington as well as its West Coast neighbors Oregon and California. I think it should be a recognized legal defense when sufferers like poor Cara behave like this.
Palm Beach has re-named its airport the President Donald J. Trump International Airport. I don’t know why this was felt to be necessary or desirable, but I don’t care what airports are named, and those who do, I believe, have deep emotional problems as well as strange priorities.
But in a gobsmacking bit of virtue-signaling to the Trump Deranged, United Airlines has announced a new policy offering passengers free flight changes if landing at an airport named for the current President of the United States is too traumatic. Anti-Trump wackos can now reroute to Fort Lauderdale or Miami at no extra charge so the Palm Beach airport’s name won’t cause such fliers permanent psychic damage.
A United memo to reservation agents reads,
“If a customer does not want to fly to the airport, use your empowerment to offer acceptable alternatives such as Fort Lauderdale Airport (FLL) or Miami International Airport (MIA), [telling the customer] ‘I understand that you’d rather not fly to this airport anymore. We can look at nearby airports like Fort Lauderdale or Miami instead. Is that an acceptable alternative?'”
To be fair to United, which is hard for me because I detest that airline, there were a ridiculous number of crazed reactions made the airport’s online contact form after the airport was renamed last week. Such as,
“How do we continue to get on our knees for such a narcissistic criminal so-called president?”
“I am writing to assure you that as long as you are calling this airport anything closely related to ‘TRUMP’ I will NEVER FLY INTO THERE. NEVER! You have 100% lost all my family’s business. Despicable move!”
“Hopefully you’ll have plenty of airbags to catch the barfs from people as they drive up.”
Yes, this is clinical. Maybe United is basing its pandering on the American with Disabilities Act.
Now it’s your turn…you pick the ethics topic, I sit back and enjoy.
1. The President has gotten much better at delivering speeches from a teleprompter which means that he’s worked on it, something neither George W. Bush or John McCain had the commitment and diligence to do. Trump was always better when riffing, but that led into interminable, unfocused rants, like his infamous 2024 nomination acceptance speech. Last night’s speech was, for Trump, remarkably crisp, succinct, and well-delivered.
2. As he was starting off, making the speech feel like a State of the Union message, I could see in my mind’s eye all the “lies” that the Axis fact-checkers would complain about this morning. I wish the President didn’t have to describe everything he views as an accomplishment in hyperbolic terms, as a superlative: “the best,” “the greatest,” “the biggest.” Surely he must know that the habit automatically invites skepticism: if some achievement really was the best, Trump would have a difficult time getting anyone to believe it. Isn’t there an advisor, a friend, a supporter, someone who could tell him this is a self-defeating approach?
3. My vote for the most unethical hyperbole last night: “This country was dead.”
4. The President was pointed as he brought out into the open the Deep State sabotage and the mainstream media propaganda that has hindered both of his terms. Good.
Ken White, once a brilliant, analytical libertarian blogger and an Ethics Alarms Blogger of the Year, has been so corroded by Trump Derangement that he managed to get himself banned from Bluesky for the unhinged post above.
The fact that Ken would stoop to being on Bluesky at all, since it is the most censorious of social media platforms, was already shocking, but that junk above is worthy of people like Bette Midler and Sunny Hostin, whose combined IQs wouldn’t equal what Ken White’s used to be.
How could this happen? I am put in mind of the Eugene Ionesco play “Rhinoceros,” in which people in a small French town start inexplicably turning into the dumb, snorting, horned beasts. It happened to Ken and Curmie…who’s next?
“Did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”
—-Minnesota Governor and all-time worst major party Vice-Presidential candidate ever Tim Walz, complaining about the deportation of Tou Lue Vang, an admitted and convicted child rapist and illegal resident, after Vang was pardoned by Walz.
I first wrote about this disgusting tale here, after Walz pardoned a Laotian child-rapist who had his legal resident status revoked 20 years ago because of the conviction. Walz made it clear that his pardon was designed to foil the Administration’s deportation efforts, though there could be no serious argument that a child rapist qualifies as a “good illegal immigrant” even under pro-open borders logic that there is such a thing.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had Vang deported anyway, as he had the power to revoke his latest deportation-blocking status, and off he went: So long, farewell, Auf Wiederseh’n, goodnight!
That offensive, idiotic quote was Walz’s defense of his unethical pardon and critique of Rubio’s action. Those were supposedly rhetorical questions, but the answers are the opposite of what Walz appears to believe…which, when one considers that we are talking about the deportation of a man who had repeated sex with a 10,11,12 and 13 year old girl over four years and shrugged it off as normal in his “culture,” raises all sorts of different disturbing questions.
“Did deporting a serial child rapist make us any safer?” How could it be otherwise? “Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable?” Walz is presumably talking about Vang’s children. If by “more stable’ he means “less vulnerable to sexual abuse,” the answer to that one is also “yes.” But incredibly, Walz managed to top the idiocy and ethical obtuseness of his first two questions with his third: “Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”
To begin with, I must mention that Walz is almost as English language-challenged as the boob who picked him as her running mate. I’m guessing he meant, “Is deporting Vang more fair and just than giving him a second chance after his one mistake?” For there is no improving on the bonkers and demonstrably false idea that it is wrong to judge people based on their worst day, when that day is sufficiently damning. That idea is irredeemable: it enshrines a rationalization to insulate wrong-doers from accountability.
Governor, let me introduce you to the the concept of signature significance. It holds that a single act can be so significant that all by itself that act stands as a legitimate basis on which to assess the character of the individual performing it. Raping a child is as convincing an example of signature significance as one could imagine. Child rapists, even those who engage in it only once (which is almost never the case) are not good people, good citizens, or good immigrants, legal or illegal. Walz’s “worst day” delusion doesn’t even apply to Vang, for he raped his young victim again and again over a four year period. That’s a lot of “worst” days. Did Walz even know whom he was pardoning?
The comment also attempts to minimize the seriousness of child rape. It isn’t as if Vang drank so much he lost control once or had a psychotic break: he sexually abused a child repeatedly. Walz’s attitude is evidently, “Okay, so he raped a little girl. Haven’t we all done things we regret?”
The man is an ethically-addled moron….and the Democratic Party nominated him to be “a heartbeat from the Presidency.” Think about that.
The non-rhetorical questions raised by Walz’s latest indefensible outburst:
How did someone like this get to be a state governor?
Who among his voters can defend their votes?
Nick Arama writes at RedState: “Anyone who thinks like this should not only never be Vice President, but he should never hold any position that requires any kind of judgment ever.” Can there be any doubt about that assessment?
Why would any thinking American trust a party that ran someone like Walz for national office, or a party that would nominate for President someone who thought this guy was an able and qualified public servant?
As it doesn’t come up that often, once again I must review what the Ethics Alarms “Kaufman” designation signifies. I hand out the award for alleged ethics violation or other news stories so unremarkable and trivial that they are literally not worth talking about or thinking about, except to note how foolish it was to raise the matter in the first place. From the EA glossary:
“George S. Kaufman was a celebrated wit and playwright (“The Man Who Came To Dinner”, “You Can’t Take It With You”, and many more, usually in tandem with Moss Hart), and he moonlighted as a panelist on the early TV show, “This is Show Business,” which often featured a celebrity who would consult the panel members about a personal problem. On one show, singer Eddie Fisher ( father of Carrie and Isla, husband of Debbie Reynolds and, scandalously, adulterous lover and eventual pre-Richard Burton spouse of Elizabeth Taylor) wanted advice from the panel because desirable women refused to go out with him because of his youth. Kaufman ‘s unsympathetic reply:
“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope. The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”
A “Kaufman” is awarded when someone, usually in the news media, makes a big deal about something so trivial and unremarkable that it demands apathy. We are all familiar with fake news, and one of its more annoying sub-categories are stories that are presented and framed as news that aren’t news at all. People Magazine just came out with a doozy, as “Hazel” used to say on the long-running sitcom that nobody but me remembers: “Mom Defends Decision to Give Her Daughter an Unconventional Name: ‘It Just Felt Perfect’ (Exclusive)”
Ethics Alarms 