It is stressful and irritating to have so many ethics stories dancing in my head like sugarplums, so I’m going to indulge myself in a quick exercise to get them out there and make room for the incoming stampede….
1. Yes, Michelle Goldberg really is this clueless. The scary part is that there are so many like her. The most irritating Times opinion writer—-not the worst, now, there are worse than her, like Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman and the inimitable Charles Blow, but she’s the one who irritates me the most—put her name under an op-ed titled, “What’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?” Gee, what a mystery! What could it be? “Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future,” she decides. What are those “excellent policy ideas”? Goldberg points to dismantling “capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy [and] the nuclear family” and concludes that doing these marvelous things are just too darn hard for the faint-hearted.
It’s easier to be conservative, see: “The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times.”
Yeah, that must be it, Michelle.
It couldn’t possibly be that after assessing the state of the nation since 2008 and watching the collapse of the education system, rot in the cities, a rise in racial preferences, rampant inflation and an out-of-control national debt, chaos at the border, riots across the country launched by a Marxist scam group, the explosion of state-driven censorship efforts in the name of fighting “misinformation,” the transformation of journalism into a Leftist propaganda network, the return of anti-Semitism, the gradual destruction of women’s sports by trans-madness, and—there is a lot more—cutting to the chase, this…
…that some progressives have done what rational adults do when they find that something they really wanted to work doesn’t: they try something else.
Nah. It couldn’t be that...
2. I imagine this kind of thing also turns people off...The Green Party candidate for President, former Harvard (there’s that school again) professor Cornell West, owes nearly $466,000 in federal income taxes from 2013 through 2017. Before that, West accrued and eventually repaid) a debt of nearly $725,000 from 1998-2005, and more than $34,000 in 2008, according to tax records in Mercer County, New Jersey, where he owns a home. But wait! There’s more! West also owes $49,500 in child support from a judgement in 2003. Nice. He doesn’t pay his taxes, and he doesn’t support his children. West is, in fact, broke, and the reason, plain and simple, is that he has blown through millions by reckless spending, numerous romantic entanglements, and not paying his taxes. In a stunning report, Forbes found,
A review of federal filings and property records confirms that West’s net worth is near zero. …no one so far has explained how someone so successful became so broke. With West in position to affect who becomes America’s next president, Forbes set out to answer that question, digging into heaps of legal and tax documents filed in various jurisdictions over six decades. Turns out much of the damage was self-inflicted. West burst onto the national scene in the 1990s with Race Matters, a compilation of essays that sold more than 500,000 copies. He traveled the country to deliver speeches, hauling in more than $500,000 a year. Much of the money flowed to him with no taxes deducted. West blew it—on many things, especially women—leaving little left for Uncle Sam by the time tax season arrived. The liens piled up: $144,000 in 1998, $105,000 in 2000, $205,000 in 2001 and so on. “Almost like a reptile biting its tail,” he says now. West lived in a Four Seasons condo in Boston, which he later admitted he could not afford, and rode around in a Mercedes or Cadillac. One of his four ex-wives accused West of maintaining a covert apartment in Boston for $5,000 a month to use as a love den. She also alleged that, despite not having any health conditions, he later took a medical leave from his job at Harvard to live a “secret life” with another woman in New Mexico.
West says this is all water under the bridge and irrelevant to his candidacy, which is about ending poverty, mass incarceration and environmental degradation. “Any time you shine a flashlight under somebody’s clothes, you’re gonna find all kind of mess, because that’s what it is to be human,” West says.
Oh. It’s a funny thing: state bar associations won’t give people a license to practice law if they have a record of not paying taxes and failing to meet other financial obligations, because that is strong evidence that the individual is untrustworthy. West is running for President.
3. The rest of the story: Deja Taylor, the mother of the 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher in a Virginia classroom, was sentenced last week to two years in prison for felony child neglect. It was a sentence harsher than the six months prosecutors had agreed to recommend as part of a plea deal, but Judge Christopher Papile said Taylor’s negligent parenting had harmed more than just her child, citing the shooting’s physical and psychological toll on the child’s victim, first-grade teacher Abigail Zwerner, and its effect on other students and staff at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News.
Good.
4. Wait, Santa has to support Israel now? Apparently! In Sag Harbor, a village on Long Island, Ken Dorph had been hired to play Santa Claus at a Christmas event hosted by the local chamber of commerce. Then it was reported to the organization that Dorph had offended attendees at discussion talk at the local synagogue about the Israel-Hamas conflict by sharply criticizing a pair of speakers from the American Jewish Committee, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports Jewish people and Israel. Dorph was fired. This is a instance of someone being punished for a point of view, when that individual’s task is completely unrelated to that point of view. Moreover, Dorph would not have been appearing as himself, but playing the role of a right jolly old elf who has no opinions regarding Hamas and Israel whatsoever.
And that’s about all the discussion this minor incident deserves. Why the New York Times felt it deserved a lengthy story with a photo is a question I’ll let you ponder.
Ethics Alarms 
One thing Goldberg doesn’t seem to understand is that dismantling things like capitalism, the nuclear family, or the idea of a justice system that uses incarceration for punishment and deterrence, doesn’t provide a “vision of the future”, because it does not elucidate what will serve the functions of these things in this brave new world. Often, progressives don’t even acknowledge these things do serve a function, other than oppression of some sort.
I see that at Simple Justice, plaintiffs attorney/blogger Scott Greenfield had a similar reaction to Goldberg’s nonsense, concluding,
“But isn’t there some way to fight discrimination against black people, feed the hungry, respect women’s agency and still survive in a pluralistic society where you neither hate the Jews nor applaud terrorism as long as it can be spun to benefit an “oppressed” group? Yes, and it’s called liberalism. Perhaps the explanation for why so many former leftists are turning right is that they are coming to the realization that they were wrong, that leftists are wrong. The abandonment of progressive identity politics isn’t because there is a crisis of faith in progress, but because their faith is restored. It’s just that progressivism isn’t the answer.”
Ms. Goldberg lives in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. Mr. West lives in Mercer County, NJ. Both these neighborhoods are gentrified, upper-class, expensive digs. Why do all those who want to destroy capitalism benefit so greatly from it?
4. The NYT says that Dorph was “hired as a volunteer” to sit on a fire engine dressed as Santa in the annual Christmas parade. That doesn’t sound like a paid gig at all, making the incident even less worthy of a 1,100-word news story. For what it’s worth, Dorph, whom the article feels we should know is a gay atheist white father with two adopted black children (i.e., in the NYT’s view, a good guy), is also a complete asshole who attended an event at a synagogue where a video confirmed that he “on multiple occasions voiced frustration with the content of the A.J.C.’s hour-long presentation” (i.e., that he intentionally offended a Jewish audience by repeatedly interrupting the presentation that they had come to see with his own unwelcome comments and opinions). It’s not surprising to me that, given a choice of volunteers to star in the parade wearing a Santa suit, the chamber of commerce would decide to choose someone who was not widely despised in the community
“Hired as a volunteer” made no sense to me, which is why I didn’t quote it.
I couldn’t read the article, so this makes more sense. From the description, it sounded like the Jewish guy they hired to play St. Nicholas wasn’t the RIGHT KIND of Jewish guy.