Boy, And I Thought The Last Times Op-Ed I Criticized Here Was Bad! Peter Baker Says, “Hold My Beer”!

If you can read the crap the Times’ Peter Baker threw at us in “In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission” without getting the dry heaves and being tempted to destroy you computer screen with a hammer, you have a piece missing. Its subhead: “President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans.” KABOOM. Head exploded, brains on walls and ceiling. How date Baker write that? How dare the Times print it? This is simultaneous smoking gun evidence of Trump Derangement, incurable bias, and denial of reality. The gift link is here. Have a bucket nearby. Here’s the gift link. I don’t think the opportunity to read such malign, intellectually dishonest junk is truly a “gift.”

To state the obvious, Baker has the utter gall to make his fatuous assertion following a sort-of President who did this…

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We Don’t Have To Debate This, Do We? Brian Kilmede Is an Ethics-Challenged Idiot and Fox News Must Fire Him Immediately.

Why hasn’t he been fired already? Why wasn’t he pulled off the air with a giant hook before he could complete what would laughingly be called his “thought”?

“Fox & Friends” co-anchor Brian Kilmeade, who has long been an embarrassment on Fox News’ routinely embarrassing news happy talk moring show “Fox and Friends,” said during a discussion with fellow (almost equally annoying) anchors Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt last week that homeless people (like the maniac who killed the young woman on the train in Charlotte) should be given “involuntary lethal injection(s).” Homeless problem solved!

Jones began the assault on due process, civil rights and decency by saying about the homeless, “A lot of them don’t want to take the programs. A lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re gonna give you, or you decide that you’re going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.” Kilmeade added. “Or, involuntary lethal injection — or something. Just kill them!”

Nice.

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ The NYT on the Kirk Assassination…

Not for the first time, the New York Times, like the Axis media it rules over as the “news source of record,” has reminded me of the “dishonest waiter. 

In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, the late, great Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, evokes the analogy of “the dishonest waiter” in a memorable speech:

“My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, ‘all historians make mistakes.’ But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.”

Bingo. New York Times, meet David Irving! Of course in this case the victim of bias and bad faith is not the history of the Holocaust, but the life and reputation of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and organizer who was assassinated by a radicalized leftist who had been told by the Axis that Kirk was. Just as Stephen King pronounced Kirk a monster who believed in killing gays, the Times pronounced him an anti-Semite by attributing ananti-Semitic statement he was criticizing to him. But you see, King is just an old knee-jerk progressive celebrity (like Whoopie Goldberg, Robert DeNiro or Bruce Springstein) whom nobody should pay attention to when he opines outside of his area of expertise. The New York Times’ job is to inform the public, correctly. Yeah, I know, I know, anyone can make a mistake (Rationalizations 19 and 20) but oddly, the Times never makes such mistakes that unjustly impugn and denigrate Democrats and fellow progressives.

Then the Times added to its ethics-transgression dossier regarding Kirk by publishing this garbage op-ed: “I Was Supposed to Debate Charlie Kirk. Here’s What I Would Have Said.” The editor who green-lighted this thing should be stuffed into a barrel with fat Lithuanian midgets, to quote Woody Allen in “What’s Up, Tiger Lilly?” A socialist demagogue I blissfully had never heard of before, Hasan Piker, gave us one side of a debate that never occurred, omitting Kirk’s, or anyone’s with half a cerebrum really, rebuttals of his consistently dubious assertions, some of which included,

  • “[Kirk fell] victim to what clearly seems to be a rising tide of political violence.” Deceit: It is a rising tide of political violence against conservatives and Republicans coming from the Left’s campaign of demonization. Left that detail out, I guess. Kirk would have corrected him.
  • The United States has both very loose gun laws and more violent gun deaths per capita than any other developed nation in the world. And while shootings occur most anywhere, campuses can be especially deadly. As news broke that Mr. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, there was a near-simultaneous tragedy at a high school in small-town Colorado, where a 16-year-old shot two fellow students. There have been 47 school shootings this year.”

Ah yes, another anti-gun hack exploiting a murder that could not possibly have been prevented by more gun laws (except ones banning and confiscating all guns)! And calling the execution of Kirk while speaking at a college a “school shooting” is statistical manipulation designed to deceive—which is why the “school shooting” figures are wildly inflated. There is no connection or relevance between the assassination and the Colorado episode or any mass shooting.

  • The author tries to blame Kirk’s death on the usual anti-American, anti-capitalism boogiemen: “rising rents and homelessness, the destruction caused by climate change, titanic levels of inequality, and too many others to name here. Our capitalist way of life — always accumulating, never evening out — leaves more and more people to deal with these problems on their own.”

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Comment of the Day: Glenn Logan

The assassination of Charlie Kirk and the aftermath of spin and consequences has brought out the best of veteran commenter Glenn Logan, who just had a distinguished COTD two days ago. Here is another, this one on the post, “Ethics Dunce: Stephen King.”

Among Glenn’s points was the topic of an EA post that his supersedes. Glenn writes,

“Getting someone fired for dancing on the grave of a person unlawfully killed in front of his family while speaking to a group of college students is not “cancel culture.” It is justified societal opprobrium for awful, unethical behavior that casts significant doubt on their possession of important qualities of caring, fairness, respect and humanity that are absolutely required for a society to function even at a basic level.”

Bingo.

Above you see an (incomplete) spreadsheet of individuals who have openly celebrated or justified Kirk’s assassination. I doubt that it is compete (and surprised that it is so short), but never mind: the issue is which of them deserve to be fired.

  • There are 19 teachers who are, to use Glenn’s term, ghouls on the list. All of them should be fired. Teachers have to convey values as well critical thinking to their students. Believing in political violence disqualified them for either job.
  • 23 on the list have jobs that I would hold are irrelevant to expressed opinions, even ones as repulsive as cheering o a murderer. If cognitive dissonance causes others to avoid them or boycott their services, that the risk one takes no matter what opinion is broadcast to the world. The 23 includes several nurses, a veterinarian, a data analyst, two librarians, some physicians, two restaurant workers, a barber, a “processor,” an “assistant,”an author, a flight attendant, a few therapists, a business owner, a trans activist, a BLM organizer, IT support staff, a “patient support” staffer, a “wealth manager,” a retail manager and a real estate agent. These should probably not be fired.

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Ethics Dunce: Stephen King

Stephen King is a talented writer and master of his genre. He is also a typical knee-jerk New England Democrat whose political and social commentary has exactly as much value as Cliff’s at Cheers after four or five beers. He really stepped into the metaphorical “it” with the tweet above, for which he was roundly pummeled on social media and had to grovel an apology after Ted Cruz launched a particularly harsh attack, called the author a “horrible, evil, twisted liar” in his response.

King’s slur was in reference to comments Kirk made on his podcast in 2024, in which Kirk criticized children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel for citing God’s wish for Christians to “love thy neighbor” in Leviticus, and added that the exhortation should include gay people. Kirk pointed out that citing scripture as authority had obvious drawbacks, noting, “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.”

He did not, obviously, advocate stoning gays to death.

Caught, King tried to lie his way out of his own unmasking. “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [without] fact-checking. Won’t happen again,” King wrote after deleting the tweet. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” the 77-year-old author wrote.

But King already knew what Kirk meant, and has issued the lie anyway. How do we know that? We know because he mocked Kirk’s “just saying,” which means King knew what Kirk had said, and misrepresented it anyway as part of the Left’s desperate efforts to spin away the significance of Kerk’s assassination.

Boy, are they terrified of a tipping point! Good. They should be. Watching fish struggle when hooked is repulsive: it’s why I never could stand fishing. Watching the Axis thrash around now? Wonderful.

King and the rest, are showing the nation who they are.

Ethics Alarms Encore: “The Inconvenient Truth About The Second Amendment and Freedom: The Deaths Are Worth It”

Back in 2017, when I first re-posted  this essay from 2012,I noted that it was written in response to the reaction at the time from the Second Amendment-hating Left to the shocking murder-suicide of of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher. Nobody remembers the incident now, but the reflex reaction of the Axis of Unethical Conduct to  virtually every mass shooting or nationally-publicized gun violence incident has remained constant.  Now much of the “justification” for the assassination of Charlie Kirk has focused on his statement that mass shootings are the price we pay for the Second Amendment, and that the price is worth it. Maybe that position got him killed. His statement was 100% correct, of course, and when I was reminded that I had made almost the exact same assertion in the post below, I realized that I was ethically bound to repost it now. to Some of it is obviously dated (the reference to juvenile Carl in “The Walking Dead,” for example), but I have re-read it, and would not change a word of its substance.

Do I fear that this position puts me in the cross-hairs? No, because EA has relatively small circulation, and I don’t matter. But even if it did put me in personal peril, I could not and would not allow that possibility to stifle my opinion or my willingness to state it. That is what the bad guys want, and have been working to accomplish for many years. That is one of the reasons Charlie Kirk was killed.

Here, once again, is that 2012 post: Continue reading

Ethical Quote Of The Month: “Outkick” Founder and Podcaster Clay Travis

“You caused this.”

—Clay Travis, the founder of conservative sports site Outkick and co-host of “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” responding to former President Obama’s statement on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in which he deplored political violence.

Obama’s insincere and typically carefully-crafted public statement on the assassination of Turning Point USA founder and activist Charlie Kirk was this: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.”

Suuure, Barack.

Travis’s whole response:

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Attention Should Be Paid: The Ethical Response to Those Cheering Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

Returned EA commenter jdkazoo (Welcome back, Professor!) has correctly pointed out that it is unfair and illogical to cite individual social media users expressing glee or satisfaction at the assassination of Charlie Kirk as representative of the Axis (“the resistance”/Democrats/ left-based mainstream media—aka. journalists generally) as a whole.

That is sage advice and undoubtedly true. However, those reactions—and the entire alternate “X” where progressive fled to avoid having to defend their cant is teeming with them—are still significant and should not be ignored because:

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Comment of the Day: “Regarding the Charlie Kirk Assassination”

Glenn Logan, an experienced and excellent blogger now fortunately ensconced at Ethics Alarms, contributed the Comment of the Day in response to “Regarding the Charlie Kirk Assassination”… and here it is:

***

We never know at this point what kind of inflection point this moment is, or where it will lead. I have often thought that events like the Trump shooting would be the match that lit the fire. I have thankfully been wrong about most of this, so I will decline to try to read the tea leaves.

I have seen a lot of online anger, but it has been mostly modulated anger. That in itself is a significant distinguishing characteristic between the rhetoric of the right and left in such cases. If Charlie Kirk had been a high-profile leftist, we’d most likely be hearing calls for violent vengeance. I have seen none of that — not saying it doesn’t exist, it probably does, but it is neither common nor pervasive.

But that does not mean that the anger will not blow up, especially if the shooter is caught and turns out to be what most of us fear.

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Ethics Proposition: Someone Who Would Write, Say or Think This Cannot Be Trusted To Teach Children…

Fair?

Kristen Eve is a Pre-K teacher. Among her deficits is that she doesn’t understand the Bill of Rights. Or irony: I have no doubt that Kirk had sufficient integrity to understand that even an abuse of the right to bear arms resulting in his own death isn’t sufficient justification for removing that right from law-abiding citizens.

How many teachers like her do you think are out there indoctrinating kids? My guess: a lot.