Brian looks pleased, doesn’t he?
What Ethics Alarms terms the Axis of Unethical Conduct or AUC—the alliance of the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the mainstream news media—reached a new low in hostility to democracy and new high in hypocrisy yesterday after it was confirmed that the turnout for President Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa had been undermined by Nixon-style “dirty tricks.”
Yesterday morning, the front page of the Times was gloating over the surprisingly small audience for the President. Written by a team including staff Trump assassin Maggie Haberman, the story, which yesterday had a headline stating that the rally “sputtered” and on line says it “fizzled,” said in part, “The weakness of Mr. Trump’s drawing power and political skills, in a state that voted for him overwhelmingly and in a format that he favors, raised new questions about his electoral prospects for a second term at a time when his poll numbers were already falling.” It quickly became clear that there were sinister factors at work, but the reporters allowed confirmation bias to suppress what should have been an automatic instinct: “Gee, what could have caused this?” Instead, they went with an analysis based on their desires and hostility to the President, and presented readers with fake news.
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias.
It soon became clear that Tik-Tok and K-Pop users, mostly teenagers, reserved hundreds of tickets for the rally, without any intention of showing up. Brian Stelter, CNN’s risible “media watchdog,” happily reported Sunday morning,
“And it seems that one of the other reasons why there were so many empty seats is a no-show protest. A no-show protest. This all started with a video on TikTok created by Mary Jo Laupp, who is effectively being called a ‘TikTok grandma.’ So, she made a video more than a week ago urging viewers to go to Trump’s site, sign up to attend the rally, but pointedly not show up at the rally. And look, it did seem to work to some degree. We don’t know exactly how well but Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale was out there talking about how many people were signing up…..
In a tweet, Parscale had announced that there had been 800,000 requests for tickets.
Stelter then rewarded the organizer of this operation by bringing her on his show to interview. Her rationalization for the dirty trick was that black activists were angry because the President had scheduled his rally on the same week as “Juneteenth,” that revered annual holiday that virtually no one, including CNN, had ever talked about before the George Floyd Freakout.
“Do you think this is how it’s going to be from now on, whenever the President holds a rally there’s going to be this attempt to prank him, to troll him, to trick him,” Stelter mused. “So, really a form of protest, and what we’ve seen as a protest. We don’t know how much of an impact it had but it clearly had some impact in Tulsa.”
Ah! It’s a protest! Just like the looting and rioting was part of a “mostly peaceful” protest. Protests are good!
Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, the former McCain campaign manager who is continuing his late boss’s vendetta against Trump along with other “NeverTrumpers” like George Conway, was positively giddy, tweeting,
He added, “This is what happened tonight. I’m dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump. All across America teens ordered tickets to this event. The fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets. lol.”
Lol.
The dirty tricks that the Nixon campaign used to sabotage various Democratic opponents was regarded by the news media as evidence of his ethic void and an assault on democracy. Donald Segretti was hired by his friend Dwight L. Chapin to run the dirty tricks operation, which Segretti referred to as “ratfucking.” He went to prison for fraud. Now the AUC is applauding the same kind of conduct, endorsing the Nixon Watergate philosophy that “the ends justify the means.”
Ironically, just a few months ago, CNN Business warned: “TikTok could threaten national security, US lawmakers say.” It is, after all, a Chinese app. CNN reported that there was a bipartisan concern that TikTok could be used by the Chinese government to meddle in U.S. elections.
But this was great!
Here’s the future face of the Democratic Party cheering on ratfucking:
The same thing is rampant on Facebook. The same people who claim democracy was imperiled by “Russian interference” are raving about how cool it was that a Chinese owned social media site’s users prevented Americans from going to a Presidential campaign rally.
“The resistance” has corrupted them all, along with hate and unethical journalism. These are ruthless, hateful, cynical people, and our system of government may never recover if they gain power in November. The AUC is so brazen now that it apparently think there will be no adverse consequences of the American public realizing that it has no respect for the integrity of our election process.
I continue to believe that it is mistaken.
Ethics Alarms 
Five-minute buzzer sounded. Do you want me to email you the pdfs or are you going to get thee to scotusblog?
What does that mean?
jvb
I was asking Jack if he wanted to get hype and sit in the scotusblog live chat and then grab a pdf of today’s Supreme Court opinion(s)* as it went live or if he wanted me to just email him a copy as I did the last two opinion days.
As it turns out, today’s wasn’t politically charged or sexy in any way** so he probably won’t write about it.
*it was opinion
**apologies to people who get hot and bothered about disgorgement.
Oh. I can’t remember the last time I got hot and bothered by what the SCOTUS has done. Not crazy about some of the decisions last week as I thought the dissents were more coherent but that’s just me. For instance, if SCOTUS said the Civil Rights Act didn’t define sex to cover transgender, I would have thought that was the correct decision, too. A simple change to the Civil Rights act would have solved the problem. Hell, cities, counties, and states already adjusted their definitions to include sexual orientation and transgender. I suspect most federal agencies also include those definitions as well. Same with DACA. If SCOTUS said it was the purview of the Legislature to fix these issues, I would have agreed. I am somewhat confused by the Court’s DACA ruling, though. If you issue DACA through an executive order then an executive order can end it, too, without some requirement of a clear executive reason. Congress needs to fix it; executive orders can’t create substantive rights.
By the way, I would love to do that, but today I have not one but three client deadlines, and a conference call. Getting up some posts will be my only respite.
You may be interested in this article by Cass Sunstein.
http://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-17/gorsuch-gay-rights-opinion-targets-affirmative-action
A stretch. SCOTUS ruled that VII unequivocally nabbed discrimination based on human characteristics, and that anti-gay descrimination was included. It is unlikely to use that logic to decree that a race or gender can be discriminated against for any reason, which is what affirmative action does—the reverse result.
So, should Title Vii be repealed so that employers could continue to help minorities overcome discrimination?
1) You’d have to repeal more than that.
2) Affirmative action doesn’t help minorities overcome discrimination.
I mean repealed.
We can only hope that the Resistance will not succeed in getting Biden into office.
Steve Schmidt puked:
“This is what happened tonight. I’m dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump. All across America teens ordered tickets to this event. The fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets. lol.”
“Savage blow” is absurd hyperbole, but more disturbing still is an adult cheering on what amounts to fraud by young people. If free tickets could be construed rationally as a “thing of value,” it would be wire fraud in fact.
At minimum, it is lying, and at one time in our country, lying was bad and especially discouraged in young people, for which “teens” seem to qualify. Unfortunately, lying in service of defeating Trump is apparently noble and praiseworthy.
If the “AUC” didn’t have double-standards, they would have no standards at all. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was cheering this on from the sidelines, as well. It’s creepy how unabashedly the Left keeps doing the most vile things and apparently getting away with it, even being praised for it.
Oh, and I think you left out the AOC tweet. I can see exactly where it was intended to be.
Jack said:
The AUC is so brazen now that it apparently think there will be no adverse consequences of the American public realizing that it has no respect for the integrity of our election process.
It looks to me like the “AUC” are correct. I have seen them pay no price whatsoever at the polls, and as long as the media continues to provide air cover, I can’t imagine how a famously disengaged electorate will ever come to see how truly loathsome their behavior is, and force them to pay a price.
I continue to believe that it is mistaken.
Optimism, I name thee Jack Marshall, and I pray it’s from your lips to God’s ears.
Glenn, I think there’s a strong possibility the polls are as fraudulent and as much a dirty trick as were the requests for tickets to the rally. See, eg., Maggie Haberman’s quote above. Polls are just part of the “narrative” that Trump’s going down! To Joe Biden? Have you seen his tapes recently? He can barely speak!
I have doubts. Conservatives have claimed poll bias for years, yet they have not proven to be so. The late polls in 2016 were about as accurate as they ever are. So while I keep hearing this “The polls are wrong!” plaint, I am skeptical.
Biden may be in the early stages of dementia, but a lot of people not necessarily members of the Left would vote for a piece of coal before they’d vote for Trump, and most of that is his fault. Right now, it looks like it may well do him in and take the Republican senate majority down with him.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not buying the “silent majority.” We’ve rarely seen it in real life.
You must be dismayed by the abandonment of ethics by NeverTrumpers, as you hav e been a NeverTrumper yourself for the past half-decade or so.
Never voting for Trump, maybe, but never a NeverTrumper, who are, like Conway, George Will, Bill Kristol,Romney and others, have taken the position since the election that they will actively work to remove, undermine, and defeat him, using any means necessary. I think they are tantrum-throwing class-snobs.
That’s exactly what they are. Worse, they are willing to risk a decent into socialism or even communism to get rid of him.
Talk about the cure being worse than the disease!
https://ethicsalarms.com/2018/05/31/dick-tuck-ethics-corrupter/
I think highlighting this post is timely.
I thought that post,was about men in drag. Boy was I wrong.
That’s a great catch, Steve. I had forgotten about that one.
Timely indeed.
–Dwayne
Yeah, this sort of election interference was supposed to be bad, even when largely imaginary…”The Russians!”.
Fool me once….. you know the saying.
Trump only needs to charge a nominal sum for each ticket which would go into his war chest or don’t issue tickets issue reservations and issue tickets based on first x number of reservation holders to show up and claim them.
I wonder if any DACA recipients used tik tok for that purpose and did not register as a foreign agent.