Prelude.

Well, here I am again, starting off the Ethics Alarms day with a post related to politics and government. This is not a political blog, and I strive mightily to prevent it from being one. However, I cannot operate an ethics information and analysis site that fulfills (or, to be realistic, attempts to fulfill) the mission I have set for it and ignore massive, serious, indeed historic events and issues that have ethics principles not only at their core, but at risk because of them.

Those who have followed Ethics Alarms for the past decade know that I had made up my mind to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election because I had concluded that Donald Trump lacked literally every character trait, instinct and qualification that my study of leadership and the American Presidency had taught me that a U.S. President must have. I knew that Hillary Clinton and, of course, her husband were corrupt, dishonest and untrustworthy, but I also knew that she had the intellectual ability and at least some of the experience necessary to handle the job. I wrote dozens of posts about how unfit Donald Trump was, and that doesn’t take into account the Trump critiques I had written years before he had announced his candidacy in 2015.

Then, mere weeks from the election, I realized that the Democratic Party had rigged the nomination process to ensure Clinton’s victory, and that Clinton and the Democratic Party were ready, willing and eager to cheat in order to obtain power. How far that party (and the rotted news media that conspired with it) would go, as we now know, was fully revealed over the next eight years.

I decided, a couple of days before I had to vote, that it was a choice between an unfit candidate—Trump—and a dangerous, anti-democratic party ironically called the Democratic Party. I voted for neither as a matter of principle. I found myself surprised when my emotional reaction to Trump’s stunning upset was relief. The American system had, once again, gotten lucky. The public had recognized what I had, though almost too late, recognized myself.

An arrogant, elite, ruthless political party had the culture, society and government by the throat, and by a miraculous confluence of unlikely and indeed accidental events, had been at least temporarily foiled. It was a result that I analogized to the “futile and stupid” rebellion of the Deltas in the finale of “Animal House,” when the expelled Faber College students demonstrated their contempt for the system that had mistreated them by disrupting a parade and humiliating those in power.

And, memorably, the most chaotic of the rebels ended up a U.S. Senator.

The next four years proved my analysis of the Democratic Party correct, in fact too generous. It marshaled its allies in the news media, education, the law, the judiciary, academia, Big Tech, the federal bureaucracy and, of course the news media to launch what I have tagged as “the 2026 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck,” denying an elected U.S. President the mantle of legitimacy as well as the basic deference, respect, honor and cooperation a POTUS must have to carry out his agenda and policies. This divided the country to a dangerous extent. It set terrible precedents that I concluded, correctly, would damage the office and the future functioning of democratic institutions.

Worst of all, perhaps—it is a close competition—I saw an entire political party representing a large proportion of the public actively seeking to weaken and distort the First Amendment, the metaphorical beating heart of the unique structure our Founders created. This was (and is) a party that not only supports but relies upon a journalistic establishment that does not keep the public informed, but rather seeks to manipulate it by withholding information and employing partisan bias and advocacy in what are supposed to be objective news reports. This mutated Democratic Party also endorses censorship, using the usefully vague terms “hate speech” and “misinformation” to justify quashing dissenting views, opinions and analysis that the party deems a threat to its primacy.

The degree to which the disastrous Biden Presidency extended and metastasized these anti-democratic attitudes and tactics would have once been unimaginable, but, fortunately and inevitably, the wheels fell off, allowing Trump to return to office and allow him to use the bitter experiences of his first term to begin an administration the way every elected President before him had been permitted to begin it—with support of the public and without overwhelming unethical obstruction, though there is still plenty of that.

In the process, perhaps out of fatigue, confusion, panic or incompetence, the party that I had concluded was rapidly tipping toward totalitarian methods and aspirations has outed itself spectacularly along with most of its submissive media minions. The Democratic Party is protesting the DOGE assault on wasted and irresponsibly spent taxpayer funds. It is opposing efforts to reduce the bloated bureaucracy. It is allying itself with racial and gender discrimination. Its elected officials have reacted with unrestrained fury to President Trump’s efforts to bring outsiders and iconoclasts into management positions to mute the Deep State, and beclowned themselves by resorting to fearmongering, insults and ad hominem attacks during confirmation hearing. They have been behaving and sounding like Sixties Vietnam War protesters, shouting obscenities and calling for violence in the streets.

Make no mistake: we are in an ethics drama. Politicians and journalists in this culture who have functioning ethics alarms could not behave like this. There have been only five or six transformative ethics battles in American history—I do not want to be distracted now by naming them—but we are witnessing one of them. The United States has been lucky in the outcome of the others (“There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” – Otto Von Bismarck), but luck always runs out eventually. It had better not be this time.

On February 14, Vice-President J.D. Vance delivered a valentine to free speech by confronting European leaders at the Munich Security Conference with their nations’ ominous opposition to freedom of speech. Prof. Turley, a free speech warrior in academia, wrote, “For the free speech community, it was truly Churchillian — no less than the famous Iron Curtain speech in which Churchill dared the West to confront the existential dangers of communism.” The conservative bloggers, pundits and commentators hailed the speech, and, stunningly, the Axis news media attacked it—not just attacked it, but resorted to fake history, rationalizations and false equivalencies to side with the European censors while condemning Vance.

I do not believe, and nor should you, that the Axis propagandists are doing this without support and incentives from the Democrats. Moreover, the endorsement of censorship by our own “free press” shows just how dire our nation’s democracy crisis is. Some of the negative reaction to Vance’s speech is cognitive dissonance reflex by the Trump Deranged: Vance=Trump, anything Trump is associated with must be bad, ergo a speech extolling freedom of speech and democratic values must be bad.

[Tangent: On Facebook, I realized that one can identify the Stage 5 Trump Derangement victims by noting who is obsessed with the re-naming of the Gulf of Mexico.. These same once-functional citizens didn’t object to stripping a U.S. President’s name from an Alaskan mountain, or assaults on memorials to Jefferson, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt among others. The gulf was named by Spanish conquerors when there was no United States for it to border; there is nothing sacred about the name, and, frankly, if I were a body of water and had the choice to be identified with either the greatest country in the modern history or the corrupt, chaotic, apparently incorrigible mess that is Mexico, it would be the easiest of choices.]

Much of it, however signals that there is a large and powerful segment of our society that literally, and I literally mean literally, does not support American values. They are vocal, relentless, influential and attention should be paid.

I will explore what the last few days have revealed in Part 2. It is…well, it must not be taken lightly.

Vance’s speech is here.

Over to you, Geena…