Month: May 2025

End of May Ethics Inventory, 5/31/25

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nice. A pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine student who was the chosen MIT Commencement speaker this week changed her approved speech to condemn Israel for “genocide,” the current code-word favored by anti-Semites to mean “Jews aren’t allowed to defend themselves.” All the Jewish families as well as the Israeli students walked out of the ceremony in protest. Megha M. Vemuri, the speaker and president of the Class of 2025, was banned by the school from attending the later undergraduate ceremony, an MIT spokesperson told Fox. “MIT supports free expression but stands by its decision, which was in response to the individual deliberately and repeatedly misleading Commencement organizers and leading a protest from the stage, disrupting an important Institute ceremony,” the university said in a statement. 

MIT has no one to blame but itself. It has encouraged anti-Semitism on campus (like Harvard and other schools) and teaches its more suggestible students to embrace “intersectionality,” in which Palestinians are equated with “oppressed” minorities, and Jews with “racist whites.”

Meanwhile:

1. Loretta Swit died. She was a minor star who made her name and fame playing the character in “M*A*S*H” that Sally Kellerman had created in the hit Robert Altman movie in the long-running TV adaptation. (The TV show got Swit a lifetime sinecure guest starring on shows like “The Love Boat” and “Murder She Wrote” for the remainder of her career.). The character’s name was “Hot-Lips Houlihan, and because the New York Times cannot stop injecting leftist sentiments and propaganda into every corner of the paper, it wrote in Swit’s obituary,

This is garbage, and it makes me wonder if the writer saw the film. The character was nicknamed “Hot Lips” because a supposedly secret sexual adventure she enjoyed with her obnoxious lover (and ranking superior) Major Burns, had been inadvertently broadcast over the outpost public address system. Margaret Houlihan had been caught saying, “Kiss my hot lips!” and the name stuck. Since “Hot Lips” nicknamed herself, the moniker could hardly be called sexist, but political correctness still reigns at the Times. The movie “M*A*S*H” was about sexual hi-jinks among the doctors and nurses far more extreme than in the moralistic and sometimes oppressively liberal TV version. Writes Ed Driscoll on Instapundit regarding the 1967 hit, “The Times in 2025 looks back at the collective writing, directing and producing efforts of Richard Hooker, Ring Lardner Jr., Robert Altman and Larry Gelbart and concludes “That’s not funny.”

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Oh Dear! Patti Lupone Took My Advice and Now Broadway Wants Her “Cancelled”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Back in November of last year, I wrote about the silly–but instructive—Broadway feud between diva Patti Lupone and performer Kecia Lewis, who is black, and who has received some accolades herself. Lewis was starring in “Hell’s Kitchen,” a 2024 jukebox musical about the life and career of Alicia Keys in a theater that shared a wall with the theater featuring “The Roommate,” a quiet, two-actor drama starring Mia Farrow and LuPone. The amplified sound in “Hell’s Kitchen” at two points in the musical could be heard by the audience LuPone’s show, so LuPone sent a polite note to the “Hell’s Kitchen” producers asking them to turn down the volume at those points in the sound design that were loud enough to interfere with her show. (The producer of “The Roommate”should have handled that, but Patti has power and influence and has never been shy about using them.) “Hell’s Kitchen” complied. LuPone, in gratitude, sent a thank-you note to the producers and flowers to the stage management and sound staff.

But Lewis decided to play the race card, because that’s what so many of the Woke of Color have been taught to do, because it works. She posted a video on Instagram reprimanding LuPone for supposedly engaging in race-based “microagressions.” I wrote in “Dear Patty LuPone: Please, PLEASE Tell Kecia Lewis ‘Oh, Bite Me!’” that I was ” hoping against hope that LuPone, who is the epitome of a diva (as this Ethics Alarms post demonstrates), either issues an emphatic “Bite Me!” to Lewis or ignores her completely as not worthy of attention from Patti’s perch on Broadway Olympus. Lewis is the racist here; she is the one who is stereotyping a white performer as insensitive and dismissive.”

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Just the Facts, Ma’am: The Historian’s Responsibility

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Guest Post by AM Golden

[From your host: AM Golden has a second guest post this week, which is what happens when you send two excellent submissions that get lost in my email. This one is not only on a topic near and dear to my heart—the ethics rot in the ranks of American historians—but also on a specific historian and work that I had flagged for a potential Ethics Alarms post myself. How I love it when a participant in the ethics wars here not only saves me the time and toil of writing a post, but does such a superb job of it, which AM definitely does here. JM.]

Of the professions that have been disgracing themselves for the last 10 years or so, the betrayal of historians has cut me the deepest.

We all have biases.  Each of us has a responsibility to be aware of those biases in a professional setting and work to subdue them.  Prior to the 2016 campaign, I’d already learned to get a feel for an author’s premise before starting a book.  If an author likes Andrew Jackson, for example, he or she will likely rationalize unpleasant facts about his life.  If an author hates him; however, he or she will diminish Jackson’s triumphs.  This is unprofessional. It is also unethical. A historian should be devoted not only to fact, but also putting fact within its appropriate historical context.  Whether you like him or not, Jackson played a significant role in our country’s history.  A competent historian can produce a “Warts and All” portrayal without compromising the integrity of the subject.

Since 2016, a new practice has entered the history books:  gratuitous, sometimes barely relevant, statements about Donald Trump.  A recent book I will not name included two completely superfluous footnotes regarding secessionist states and how many of them voted for Trump.  In general, though, it’s included in the prologue or, more often, the epilogue to allow the author to tie the secessionists, the Dixiecrats or some other group of bigots (but never, for some reason, FDR’s State Department which deliberately slow-walked paperwork for desperate Jews in Europe) to Trump.

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It’s About Time: CNN Gets Called On Its “It Isn’t What It Is” Rhetorical Dishonesty and Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

and…

Good.

All ethical and aware Americans should treat their Axis-supporting friends, relatives and colleagues similarly. What both Miller and Hamill did was to label propaganda what it really was, and not allow it to falsely present itself as “journalism.”

Stop Making Me Defend the Supreme Court!

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Almost a year ago, Ethics Alarms discussed the case of Liam Morrison (above), a seventh grader who was told that his “There are only two genders” T-shirt was inappropriate as school attire. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld a District Court decision from 2023 that the Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts didn’t violate Liam’s First Amendment rights by telling him to change his shirt.

Chief Justice David Barron, writing for the Court, concluded that “the question here is not whether the t-shirts should have been barred. The question is who should decide whether to bar them – educators or federal judges.” He continued, “We cannot say that in this instance the Constitution assigns the sensitive (and potentially consequential) judgment about what would make ‘an environment conducive to learning’ at NMS to use rather than to the educators closest to the scene.”

I wrote, in a post agreeing with the decision both ethically and legally,

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“Welcome Summer!” Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Last week on YouTube’s “The Morning Meeting,” Mark Halperin and Dan Turrentine appeared to acknowledge Ethics Alarms’ “Julie Principle.” They just didn’t know what it was called.

President Trump had delivered the commencement address at West Point while wearing a red MAGA cap (Oh NOOOO! He’s violating “norms” again!) and on Monday published a Memorial Day Truth Social post like some of his previous holiday wishes—you know, one of his “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!” style shots. Halperin noted that many Democratic critics and pundits, right on cue, were freaking out.

“If you read [historian] Heather Cox Richardson or the emails and texts I get from my Democratic sources, as I said before, the Trump administration’s over. And it’s just a bankrupt, you know, corrupt mess and he’s already a failed president and he’s not getting anything done. That’s their point of view. They also are very taken with his wearing a MAGA hat … to give … a West Point graduation speech,” Halperin said. “They’re taken with his tweet, his Truth Social post, saying ‘Happy Memorial Day’ and criticizing Joe Biden. And they’re back to a Adam Schiffian and [biased and Trump Deranged historian] Heather Cox Richardson point of view, which is everything Trump does is an epic disaster and that the American people will turn on him and Republicans in the midterms because he’s impolite.”

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Fan Ethics: The Diane and Joe Saga [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Guest column by AM Golden

[From your host: This scary, poignant guest post sat un-noticed in my in-box for many weeks. I would have posted it immediately if I hadn’t missed it. Regular commenter AM Golden paints a vivid picture of how celebrity worship, then pursuit, can lead down dark alleys and perhaps to tragedy. At the end of this cautionary tale, AM writes, “Joe can obviously handle this situation himself.” I’m not sure it’s so obvious. Rebecca Shaeffer couldn’t handle it. Jody Foster didn’t handle it sufficiently wee to prevent her fan from nearly killing Ronald Reagan. John Lennon couldn’t handle it. Among AM’s provocative questions at the end of this case study is what ethical obligations an observer has to try to persuade someone in the throes of a dangerous obsession to change course, back off, or seek help. My reflex instinct is to say there is such an obligation, as there always is when one is in a unique position to prevent harm and fix a serious problem. That is a far easier position to defend in the abstract than in reality.–JM]

About 18 months ago, I made a comment about the importance of one’s Good Name – one’s reputation – that was honored with a Comment of the Day.   Among the stories related in that comment was the recent crushing experience of a fan I called Diane, who had a less-than stellar encounter with her favorite actor whom I dubbed “Joe Darling”. 

It seems that Diane had been sending Joe emails through the public contact option on his website.  Many emails.  She had also been sending gifts to his private residence: All unsolicited; all unanswered.  This had gone on for three years before she met him at a pop culture convention.  Her thinking seems to have been that he would have told her if he wanted her to stop.  She’d also ordered a Cameo from him that had gone unfulfilled. I’d admitted back then that I had gotten vibes from her social media comments that she was a little fixated on Joe, who by all accounts a happily married man.  It had never occurred to me that she had been contacting him directly. 

When she went to his table at the convention, he figured out who she was.  He told her that he considered her behavior borderline stalking and that it needed to stop or he would take further action.  Mortified, she apologized and assured him she would leave him alone.  She admitted online that she feels like she ruins everything.

Admittedly, I felt sorry for her.  No fan likes these kinds of stories.  They reflect poorly on all of us.  I also felt that she had probably overlooked warning signs along the way that would have spared her such embarrassment.   Could there have been a misunderstanding?  Curious, I looked over her public social media page.  Sure enough, there was enough evidence there to indict her as an obsessed fan and a particularly obtuse one. Her behavior since then has not changed my opinion.

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I’ve Been Looking For an Excuse to Note the Passing of Harrison Ruffin Tyler, and I Finally Found One…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Harrison Tyler was the grandson of John Tyler, our tenth President of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” fame, who became President when William Henry Harrison died. When my late wife Grace and I were on our honeymoon, we met Harrison Tyler as we toured Sherwood Forest, the Tyler family home and plantation. He was still working as a chemical engineer at the time. I knew that Tyler had many offspring and was still spawning them in his 60s, but I found it astounding that his grandson was still among us. John Tyler was 63 when son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born, and Lyon was 75 when Harrison was born.

The ethics connection popped up in Ann Althouse’s post about Harrison Tyler, who died on Memorial Day. She quoted from a biography of Tyler that called him a racist. One of Ann’s astute commenters criticized the label as injecting “a kind of modern commentary” into a biography of a 19th Century historical figure. Ann bristled at that, writing that the conduct so described was “out and proud racism” and asking, “You think that’s modern commentary”?

Another commenter slapped Ann down decisively. “The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902,” the commenter wrote. “Yes, I think labeling the mindset of an 1840’s person using a word that wasn’t in their vocabulary is an author’s intrusion.” Yet another commenter wrote, “Racism was the water people swam in back then.”

Bingo. At a time when blacks were almost universally believed to be an inferior sub-species of human, “racism” as we now define it didn’t exist. Calling a President in the 1840s a racist is like saying that physicians who practiced bleeding in the 18th century engaged in medical malpractice. It’s presentism.

I’m surprised Althouse fell into that trap.

 

 

 

In San Francisco, the Dumb Rise and Almost Immediate Fall of “Grading for Equity”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments


When I am forced to consider what is considered “right” and “wrong” in California in general and San Francisco particularly, I feel like I have stumbled into a real life Bizarro World. That is the cube-shaped planet in “Superman” comics where brain-damaged mutations of Superman and Lois Lane pursue a topsy-turvy existence constrained by practices and values that are the reverse of what normal Earthlings regard as self-evident.

The latest manifestation of this West Coast insanity is, or was, “Grading for Equity“, a woke education scheme that was scheduled to be imposed this fall at 14 high schools and over 10,000 students. “Grading for Equity” forbids homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that counts are student grades on a final examination, which can be taken as many times as it takes to pass. “Grading for Equity” also de-emphasizes the importance of timely performance, completion of assignments, and consistent attendance, so students turning in assignments late will not be penalized. Not showing up at class will not affect grades either.Students with scores as low as 80 (out of 100) will get an A; a score as low as 21 will be considered sufficient to pass, with a D.

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In a Competitive Commencement Season, Evelyn Harris Makes a Strong Bid For Most Unethical Speech of 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Favorites Tim Walz, Scott Pelley and Kermit the Frog may have fallen to an underdog: “musician and activist” Evelyn Harris (whoever she is) may have succeeded in embarrassing her host school the most of all with her 2025 commencement speech.

For some reason, Smith College, which has apparently become too woke to function, included Harris, a relatively obscure singer (but more importantly, an activist) among its all female honorees this year. The most prominent one of these would probably be far-left historian Danielle Allen, who has several items in her Ethics Alarms dossier. Or maybe it would be the (historic!) highest ranking trans official in US history, former assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Rachel Levine, one of Biden’s DEI appointments. Then there was new age-y guru Preeti Simran Sethi, the only one of the four who is a Smith grad. All of these, however, whatever their issues, at least managed to compose their own speech to give to the graduates.

Harris didn’t. Smith officials learned that her entire speech had been cribbed from other sources without attribution (you know, like Joe Biden once did), and had to inform the Smith community that it had been deceived. “It has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients — musician Evelyn M. Harris — borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity,” the letter read in part.

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