1. What happened to Rob Reiner? How did he get that way? I’ve asked my wife to swear that if I ever start writing or saying things this stupid and ignorant, she will hit me over the head with a brick.
2. Declaring Trump a criminal is on the cusp of libel, and capitalizing “criminal” is unethically illiterate for someone with so many followers.
3. The tweet deceitfully implies that using the platform to spread misinformation is unique to Donald Trump. What is significant is that virtually only conservatives and Republicans (and the Babylon Bee) get punished it. Chris Cuomo, to name one of many examples from the news media, tweeted that “hate speech” wasn’t protected by the Bill of Rights, and that it would be illegal for anyone but journalists to read Wikileaks leaks of classified documents. He’s a lawyer (how did THAT happen?), and the public assumes he knows what he’s talking about.
4. Nothing Trump tweeted ever threatened to overthrow the government by any definition: Reiner’s tweet is disinformation!
5. Nothing Trump ever tweeted was “Criminal activity” either. Also disinformation, and yet on Twitter Carl’s deranged son remains.
6. It is clear from Reiner’s tweet that he believes that political opponents’ criticism of his party and political allies should be stifled and blocked if possible. That marks him as hostile to democracy…like increasing numbers of Americans and politicians of his political persuasion.
The New York Times this morning had no reports whatsoever on the emerging truth that the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s ominous-sounding “misinformation and disinformation” board, Nina Jankowicz, has not only been a purveyor of “disinformation” (aka. “intentional lies”) herself, and also, in the blunt words of the editorial board of the New York Post, “a partisan hack,” but also a narcissistic whack-job, as the TikTok video above clearly shows.
The fact that the Biden Administration would be so dense as to appoint a woman like this to head an agency that was guaranteed to set heads exploding everywhere but in the anti-free speech community called Wokeville (see “evil” hidden in there? Huh? HUH??)is just one more indication that common sense and basic competence have left the building, the building being the White House. And Ethics Alarms mocked Trump for not hiring “the best people” as he had promised on the campaign trail! I owe Donald an apology. Even Omarosa, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon weren’t any more untrustworthy than Jankowicz, and they hadn’t been put in charge of a censorship operation.
Oregon’s Woke Governor Kate Brown (above), who humiliated her state during the George Floyd Freakout and who is one of the many state governors whose extremism and incompetence shows just how nuts George Will’s inspiration that U.S. Senators should be barred from the Presidency is, just released convicted murderer Kyle Hedquist from prison. He was serving a life sentence with no chance of parole, but since he was a non-violent offender, and Democrats don’t think non-violent offenders belong in…no, wait, that can’t be right. I guess the reason Brown released Hedquist is that she has minimal reverence for human life—loving abortion will do that to you—and doesn’t like locking up criminals no matter what the crime. The latter delusion has been on display among Democratic attorneys general and district attorneys throughout the nation. (But don’t worry, it’s the Wuhan virus that’s the culprit for skyrocketing violent crime.)
(Sorry, I woke up bitter and sarcastic today. I need a new mattress.)
Hedquist was 17 and a serial burglar when he led 19-year-old Nikki Thrasher down a remote logging road and shot her in the back of the head execution-style because he feared she might tell police about burglaries he had committed. It has never been determined that she actually know about the burglaries, but I’m sure we can all agree that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Hedquist was convicted of murder in 1995 and sentenced to be forever behind bars, but the judge did not count on The Great Stupid descending over Oregon like the plagues of Egypt.
That sound Jeff Goldbloom and Sam Neill hear at the end of that clip is a newly freed Tyrannosaurus Rex, which I would much prefer having in my back yard than have what Democrats want to inflict on the nation.
I was all set to vote for Hillary Clinton, disgusting oozing metaphorical warts and all, a few days before Election Day 2016 when some new revelations sunk in, and I concluded that her party was an ideological outlaw, bent on destroying the basic foundations of our nation to ensure their power while using that power to corrupt the culture further. Boy do I hate being right about that—but I was.
The most chilling T-Rex roar yet may be the revelation during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing this week by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkashas. He revealed that his department is setting up a new board designed to counter what it deems to be “misinformation and disinformation” “Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers is co-chair with our Principal Deputy General Counsel, Jennifer Gaskell, in leading a just recently constituted misinformation disinformation governance board….the goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat.” New director Nina Jankowicz’s focus will reportedly be on “irregular migration and Russia.” That’s supposedly the “threat.”
Biden’s minions are so stupid, and so contemptuous of the public! True, many of them are as illiterate and badly educated as Democrats want and need them to be, but Mayorkashas might as well have announced that he was setting up a Ministry of Truth. This is why the news media have been almost completely silent on this (except for Fox News). They realize it sounds ominous. Right now what we know is ominous is only that Biden’s lackeys are so casual about throwing around the idea of the State determining what is “misinformation” and acting on the determination. They also didn’t think people would notice that the new “misinformation and disinformation” czar, Jankowicz, pushed the Biden false narrative that “50 national security officials, and 5 former CIA heads” were certain that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian influence op.”
It’s hard to be terrified of would-be totalitarians who are this incompetent, but what progressives these days lack in brains they make up for in arrogance and ruthlessness.
I’m not going to weigh in on Jankowicz’s ministry until I know what it really will be doing, but Prof. Turley, in his most recent article for USA Today (its there because none of the real newspapers like his focus on the Left’s ethics rot) does a superb job of blowing the whistle on Democrat-driven State censorship efforts that are exactly what they appear to be. Read it all, but here’s an excerpt…
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has declared Musk’s pledge to restore free speech values on social media as threatening Democracy itself. She has promised that “there are going to be rules” to block such changes. She is not alone. Former President Obama has declared “regulation has to be part of the answer” to disinformation.For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking to Europe to fill the vacuum and called upon her European counterparts to pass a massive censorship law to “bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”
For years, the First Amendment distinctions have been the focus of liberals who discovered a way to circumvent constitutional bans on censorship by using companies like Twitter and Facebook. Now, that successful strategy could be curtailed as shareholders join figures like Musk in objecting to corporations and media acting like a surrogate state media.
Faced with that prospect, Democrats are falling back to their final line of defense – and finally being honest about their past use of corporate surrogates. They are now calling for outright state censorship…
As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”
Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical…her call for censorship came just weeks after special counsel John Durham offered more details about the accusation that her campaign manufactured a false Russian collusion theory. One of Clinton’s former lawyers is under indictment for the effort. Clinton personally tweeted out the disinformation that is the subject of the federal prosecution. And the Federal Election Commission recently fined her campaign for hiding the funding of the Steele dossier. Given that history, it would be easy to dismiss Clinton’s calls as almost comically self-serving. However, the 27-nation EU just did what she demanded. It gave preliminary approval to the act, which would subject companies to censorship standards at the risk of punitive financial or even criminal measures.
If implemented, it might not matter if Musk seeks to restore free speech values at Twitter. Figures like Clinton are now going to the EU to effectively force companies to continue to censor users.
Faced with liability across Europe, the companies could be forced to base their policies on the lowest common denominator for free speech…
Once upon a time, I used to read George Will regularly. He was erudite, he was principled, he was equally critical of both political parties, and he was a reliable champion of ethical values. I don’t know if it was Donald Trump who broke him, but Will’s intellect and integrity certainly didn’t survive Trump’s rise. If nothing else, Will is an elitist, and the prospect of an unmannerly low-class boor entering the White House was too much for George’s aging brain to bear. He snapped, and suddenly the slave of cognitive dissonance, he decided that if a man like Trump was allied to the democratic and political principles he had spent his professional life passionately advocating and defending, then he shouldn’t defend them any more.
Snobbery over substance. Good plan, George!
Since his decline into irrelevance or senility I haven’t wasted a moment on Will’s writings; I don’t care what he thinks, because he no longer thinks clearly. His latest in the Washington Post, however, is special. Risibly titled “Amend the Constitution to bar senators from the presidency,” it checks all the boxes of a truly bad, indeed unethical, op-ed.
Will’s simple-minded argument is…
Banning senators from the presidency would increase the probability of having senators who are interested in being senators, and would increase the probability of avoiding:
Presidents who have never run anything larger than a Senate office. Who have confused striking poses — in the Capitol, on Twitter — with governing…
Oh I see now: George isn’t really advocating banning Senators from being President. He’s just cranky that Senators aren’t doing a better job, and deceiving his readers into believing there’s any solution other than electing better Senators. Of course, Will has never been willing to dirty himself with actual policy making or trying to build public consensus; it’s so much easier to stand on the sidelines and call everyone else idiots.
1. Reading assignment! Esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Curmie has, as promised, posted an essay on his blog discussing the revolting development described here in item #3. I really should have devoted a whole post to it myself: that’s the saga of the San Francisco eighth-grade teacher who was pounced on by her school by being too informative in her instruction on American slavery: She actually brought cotton bolls into class. As he always has done, Curmie’s commentary is sharp and persuasive, and I recommend it highly. Here’s a sample…
Of course, there are those who need to be perceived as victims or they would evaporate like dew in an Arizona August morning. If they can’t complain that the real history of this country isn’t being taught, they’ll complain that it is.Naturally, the teacher in question was suspended for five weeks, and one can reasonably suspect that her subsequent apology was coerced as a condition of her reinstatement. It has all the authenticity of the fake confessions of American POWs in the Korean War. The problem here goes beyond punishing a teacher for doing nothing wrong. Her travails are the direct result of doing something right. Humiliating good teachers for doing their jobs has become a blood sport.This must stop.
Indeed it must, along with a lot of other things we are seeing lately courtesy of the Wonderful World of Woke. The question is how?
2. Wilful ignorance or sinister propaganda? Here’s a second reading assignment: progressive columnist Frank Bruni’s op-ed in the Times opposing the idea that parents should exert oversight on what their children are taught in school. Somehow he managed to miss entirely the core element of trust. Once too many teachers decided that their function was to engage in political indoctrination, once the web allowed parents to read about school punishing students for making finger guns and teaching their kids to sing songs extolling Obama, and when an unexpected side effect of (wrongly) closing the schools was to allow parents to witness the kind of instruction that goes on and the kinds of social justice warriors who handled it, responsible parents decided that it was time to assert themselves. And they have, and are. Good.Continue reading →
No, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court refused to allow Lionel Porter to become a lawyer because while he was in the midst of flunking all those bar exams, he practiced law without a license. The April 22 opinion explains.
I am stunned that any state, especially my home state of Massachusetts (where I passed the bar the first time despite studying for it almost always while listening or watching the Red Sox drive to the 1975 pennant) would allow anyone to take the bar exam that many times. It’s just not that hard, especially since Mass. went to the all-multiple choice Multi-State exam. I knew and know a lot of lawyers, and only one flunked the bar. That was my father, who took the exam the first time without studying just to see how he would do. (He just missed passing.) Continue reading →
“I said it in my role as an advocate to make a rhetorical point.”
—-ACLU lawyer Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, nominated by President Biden for the federal judiciary, in response to a question by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La) about why she told a Princeton audience that police kill unarmed blacks “every day.”
In the exchange you can see in the video clip above, Choudhury’s excuse for lying outright to a student audience at Princeton is that she did it to “make a rhetorical point.” Oh! That’s all right then!
Sen. Kennedy was quite appropriately aghast, as should any professional, citizen, lawyer or judge should be. The President’s nominee to sit on the bench for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York quite literally is saying that a lawyer can lie in public for a reason she deems appropriate. No, she can’t, not ethically, not if she wants to be trusted, and lawyers, like judges must be trustworthy. Her answer to Kennedy is signature significance for an unprincipled ideologue (her employer, the ACLU, is full of them, but that’s no mitigation) who is unfit to be a judge (and in my view, unfit to be a lawyer.)
The push to cancel student loan debt is another example of the Left embracing a terrible, foolish, indefensibly unethical policy for no better reason than hope that it will allow them it to gain political power. Word around Washington is that President Biden is “seriously considering” canceling up to $50,000 in student debt for all. Translation: Biden’s puppeteers/handlers/advisers are probably trying to get him to do it, insane and irresponsible as it may be, but Joe may be inclined to do it on his own, because 1) he’s just not very bright; 2) he’s not very bright and his cognitive functions have been deteriorating in front of the whole nation; and 3) he never had any integrity anyway.
The late Rush Limbaugh, commenting on Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, lamented that “You can’t beat free stuff!” He said that Democrats were always willing to buy votes by promising to pay for more or making “the rich” or private business do so, from living wages for jobs not worth them, to national health, to free college degrees and more. Tilting the U.S. to socialism and a “nanny state”? If that’s what it takes to win, sure! Turning the national debt into a ticking time bomb that future generations will have to suffer for? Why not? Student loan forgiveness is as good an example of Rush’s point as I can imagine.
Ethics Alarms 