Let’s not bury the ethics lede: If it is irresponsible to treat a teenage climate change fanatic as a serious authority on international policy, and it is, it is similarly irresponsible to bestow the status of a journalist on a 15-year-old.

Yet the New Hampshire Republican Party, reminding us that the GOP isn’t called “the Stupid Party” for nothing, invited 15-year-old Quinn Mitchell to a June 27 town hall in Hollis, N.H. for fading presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis, and gave the boy press credentials. Morons, and Ethics Foul #1. The justification was (officially) that the kid has a political commentary blog, and a podcast, and says he’s attended more than 80 presidential campaign events since he was 10. That’s nice (but weird), and Quinn is evidently precocious and might be a real journalist some day (which the way things are going, is like saying he might be a real Stegosaurus some day), but that does not make him a journalist now. Some flack had the brilliant idea that inviting and credentialing a young conservative would be cute and show Generation Whatever that Republicans are cool. That flack needs to be fired.

Of course Quinn doesn’t think he’s a fake journalist and not qualified to inject himself into the proceedings, so when DeSantis foolishly called on him (“Aw, isn’t that cute, let’s see what the little feller wants to know…”), Mitchell asked a “gotcha!” question: Did the Florida governor believe that former President Trump had violated the law on Jan. 6, 2021? Naturally, the unprepared DeSantis huminahumina-ed his way through dodging it, and the video “went viral.”

That question was Ethics Foul #2, but you can’t blame Mitchell. Asking questions with an underlying agenda is a standard unethical journalism habit now, and the teen has no reason to think this isn’t what journalists are supposed to do. That’s what they have been doing his entire life.

Continue reading →

I had a couple of rapid thoughts when I saw this revolting story. The first was remembering how that line in the title above was one of my father’s favorite mordantly humorous slogans, along with “He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong!” and the tale about feeling sad and hopeless, hearing a little voice saying, “Cheer up, things could be worse!” and then, sure enough, things got worse. The second was realizing that I occasionally, very rarely but still occasionally, miss important information by refusing to watch Fox News. A third was deciding that I had mistakenly judged Leon Panetta to be an honorable and trustworthy public servant.

In an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Panetta, who was Bill Clinton’s Swiss Army knife aide and Cabinet member notably as head of the CIA, was asked by Baier if he had any regrets about signing the infamous open letter from 51 former intelligence officials using their influence and presumed expertise to advance the cover-up scheme declaring the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation.

In a head-exploding display of chutzpah, Panetta announced that he had no regrets at all, and that he has seen no evidence that would make him change his mind. Gobsmacked, Baier said, “You don’t think it was real?” Panetta responded “I think disinformation is involved here.”

Continue reading →

The editor of Campus Reform, Zachary Marschall, a PhD and an adjunct professor at the University of Kentucky, is far less diplomatic about Claudine Gay’s video statement (here) than I was yesterday (at the same link), but I substantially concur with his points in “ANALYSIS: Harvard president Claudine Gay is a hypocritical fraud.”

Among the details I only generally alluded to or failed to mention that he highlights:

• In 2022, Harvard ranked  as having the most anti-Semitic incidents of any campus in the country. 
• Though Gay claimed that Harvard “embraces a commitment to free expression,” in 2018, Harvard investigated a professor after students complained that he was making “verbal or non-verbal” microaggressions in class. Says Marschall, “A cohort of leftist university administrators that believe both speech and silence can be violence devoted more interceding in a nothing-burger incident than Gay has expended in response to student activists clamoring for more dead Jews.”
• “In 2020, then Harvard University President Lawrence Barcow issued a statement supporting the Marxist political movemnet Black Lives Matter, which just this week is celebrating the Hamas terror attacks.” Gay’s words suggested that Harvard would never do such a thing.   Marschall writes,

The anti-Semitic idea that Jews are benefactors of white supremacy informs Gay’s inability to take a consistent and morally sound stance on her students’ safety. Whatever capacity academics had for compassion and respect for people’s differences died in 2016 when Donald Trump’s candidacy drove the left into a radical combative hysteria. “The 6 justices who overturned Roe should never know peace again. It is our civic duty to accost them every time they are in public,” Harvard Law clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo stated after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Harvard scholars only know peace and empathy for their side, and Gay has made it clear that she considers Jews not on their side. 

Do read the whole thing.