“Not the Bee” is a conservative commentary site that, in the spirit of The Libs of TikTok, highlights supposedly outrageous news from the political Left. It is already on thin ice with me as a source of ethics stories, in part because its tendency to mix politics with Christian proselytizing is an irritant. Another problem, which the issue at hand illustrates, is that apparently in the proprietors’ jaundiced eyes, the Right can do no wrong.
In this story, much discussed in the Axis media (of course), it was revealed that a disturbing number of leaders in the Young Republican organization are preening, juvenile assholes who think praising Hitler, joking about rape and killing Jews, and making racist slurs is funny or acceptable. These were captured in a leaked series of group chats that, it is fair to day, did not cast the future leadership of the GOP in an encouraging light, nor did it help disabuse progressives of their incessant narrative, highlighted by the previous sort-of President…
…. that Donald Trump, MAGA, conservatives and the Republican Party are aspiring fascists driven by “toxic masculinity.”
I wrote of the revelation in part, “Smoking guns are no less damning whenever they surface. Politico writes, “The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.” I don’t see how anyone can quibble with that.”
So Not the Bee, said, in effect, “Hold my beer!” “The primary point of debate is not whether the comments were morally wrong, but whether or not it should be a national news story,” it intoned. What? It certainly is a national news story, as it casts a harsh and appropriate light on the culture in some of the dark corners of the conservative movement and the mind of its participants as well as its leadership. So did the reaction of NTB, which mirrors the reflex instinct of the Axis, which is that any scandal involving Democrats is a “nothingburger.” You know, like Hunter Biden’s laptop, evidence that Obama helped orchestrate the Russian Collusion hoax, evidence of witnesses called by Liz Cheney et al. to suggest Trump incited the J-6 riot being coached, Fulton County’s DA using her pursuit of Donald Trump to fund a tryst with her adulterous lover, Joe Biden being accused of rape by a Senate staffer, more recently the astounding number of progressives who cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and so on, ad infinitum.
Not The Bees’s device? Why, go right to #22 on the Ethics Alarms Rationalization List:
22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things.”
If “Everybody does it” is the Golden Rationalization, this is the bottom of the barrel. Yet amazingly, this excuse is popular in high places: witness the “Abu Ghraib was bad, but our soldiers would never cut off Nick Berg’s head” argument that was common during the height of the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal. It is true that for most ethical misconduct, there are indeed “worse things.” Lying to your boss in order to goof off at the golf course isn’t as bad as stealing a ham, and stealing a ham is nothing compared selling military secrets to North Korea. So what? We judge human conduct against ideals of good behavior that we aspire to, not by the bad behavior of others. One’s objective is to be the best human being that we can be, not to just avoid being the worst rotter anyone has ever met.
Behavior has to be assessed on its own terms, not according to some imaginary comparative scale. The fact that someone’s act is more or less ethical than yours has no effect on the ethical nature of your conduct. “There are worse things” is not an argument; it’s the desperate cry of someone who has run out of rationalizations.
Here is what the site posted. I can now confidently say that Not the Bee’s ethics alarms go one way only, which means they are inoperable. Obviously this also applies to all of NTB’s “authorities:”
Yechhh.
Ethics Alarms 
I saw that yesterday. I felt the same way you do.
If they don’t care that the perceived leaders and young core of the movement—a desperate movement, one that must succeed against all odds, to clean out the Augean stables of cultural poison apathetic Americans allowed the far Left to bury and warp our institutions with for the past 25 years—are juvenile, stupid assholes as bad as the worst of those they oppose, then these apologists are useless, and the movement will fail. No decent, intelligent, ethical people will want to be associated with them or what they claim to represent. i sure want. They damn well better care.
“No decent, intelligent, ethical people will want to be associated with them or what they claim to represent.”
Ok, so my emotional reaction to this sentence both sounds and feels quite cynical on my part, but it is what it is:
I’m guessing the calculation may be that the intersection of GENUINELY decent+intelligent+ethical (as opposed to posing as such) is a small enough minority that its members can be safely ignored without jeopardizing the movement.
Consider how many (on both right and left) seem perfectly willing to overlook gross violations of ethics as long as they are committed by “their” side — so willing that they don’t even bother coming up with a rationalization for why what is declared to be despicable evil when the “enemy” side does it is self-evidently just fine when one’s “own” side does it.
The failure to even reach for a rationalization (however phony and weak) to “justify” despicable behavior (again, on both right and left) makes me think that folk who behave in this way actually view all pronouncements about such behavior as a theatrical performance in which actual ethics is irrelevant.
Too cynical? I hope so!! I welcome all efforts to talk me down here…..
What is the main idea of NTB’s response?
I take it to be that they are decrying hypocritical pearl clutching according to NTB the style guide if they have one.
Why are the names of these supposed leaders not printed? It seems every state has a chapter and each has a leadership team. I want to know who the leaders are who made the comments so I can determine whether or not our state chapter is involved.
If we cannot determine which chapter’s leaders are the guilty parties it makes it difficult to remove the appropriate persons. Moreover, if we cannot identify the exact persons we need to know which member were on each of the Telegram chats and they can all be asked to resign. Clean house by removing the guilty parties.
I am hesitant to label any of the offending persons “leaders” until we have some actual names and chat rosters.
I don’t think looking to a satire magazine that reflects model ethical behavior is a good use of time.
Nothing satirical about “Not the Bee.” Because it’s not the Babylon Bee. Hence the name…
Young Republican organization are preening, juvenile assholes who think praising Hitler, joking about rape and killing Jews, and making racist slurs is funny or acceptable.
I’d argue that they are actual hateful racists
Well, when they put stuff like that in print, I sure won’t argue.
Seriously, y’all. Stop the rushing to prostrate yourself to the left. By all means, hold the individuals responsible for this crap to account for their actions, but drop the broad brush bullshit. Do we seriously believe there weren’t young democrats calling for and celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk? Of course there were. Did anyone seriously call for a purge of all leftwing orgs from polite society because of their radicalism? Nope. So stop. The people who did this, assuming they did it (per politico), should be held accountable. 100%. That is it. Just those individuals. This doesn’t make all republicans nazis, no matter what the left says. They are going to call us all Nazis no matter what. Fuck them.
If you want to hold all republicans everywhere responsible for the dumbassery of a small group of individuals, you might as well give Antifa carte blanche to murder at will because the left ain’t gonna reciprocate. Stop prostrating. Be proportionate. By all means, hold individuals to account, but stop being the battered wives of the democrat party.
Not all Republicans are Nazis. In fact, the evidence is that most of them are not, and very many don’t even want to be associated with Nazis or the KKK.
It’s just their leaders. And not even all of them. Most are just unashamed Fascists. But that’s stating the obvious at this point.
They aren’t even very good at it. Telegraphing punches such as the attempt to get the generals on side at Quantico. Pardoning the obviously corrupt, in great numbers.
Thank goodness for their incompetence. It says a lot for the US that no one in power is good at this authoritarianism business. Trouble is, the opposition is just as inept.
That was a cheap shot. Claiming that most of the leaders are unashamed fascists is no different than claiming all most in the LGBT community are grooming children. I’m pushing back on both those ideas.
Bringing all the Generals to Quantico has nothing to do with telegraphing fascist punches. It has to do with ensuring that every leader knows the goals and objectives of the civilian controlled leadership. It is the same reason that the Globalists all converge in Davos for their meetings when they could be done via a zoom meeting.
As for pardons Presidents have absolute authority to pardon whom they wish. For Trump the vast numbers were not pardons but commutations for those held in the DC Gulag without trials for years until they got a trial while his predecessors pardoned their family members and never did a lick of time behind bars.
I challenge you to name one thing Trump and his administration has done that has been authoritarian let alone fascist. Every President issues Executive orders. When challenged in courts he defends them, as did his predecessors and if he loses he accepts defeat unlike Biden who ignored the courts routinely. The Executive Branch is charged with faithfully carrying out the laws passed in Congress. The prior administration decided its interpretations of law would be the way the laws were enforced. The current administration is enforcing the law as written and treating everyone as equally as possible.
If I remember correctly, Zoe Brain endorsed Faucism.
The pointing to the Hegseth meeting of generals and the pardoning of poor, useless George Santos is disappointing, but proves my point. The “No Kings” lament is based on nothing. Just dislike of Trump, his success, and his style.
Santos was not pardoned.
I fixed that.
Apparently the text exchanges were limited to members in 3 or 4 chapters – New York, Vermont and Arizona were mentioned. The main culprit was a guy by the name of Giunta. The part of the Politico story that undermines the narrative that no one was pushing back against his group of assholes is in the quote below
“Giunta claimed the release of the chat is part of “a highly-coordinated year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax and the New York City Young Republican Club” — an allusion to a once obscured internecine war that has now spilled into the open.
“These logs were sourced by way of extortion and provided to POLITICO by the very same people conspiring against me,” he said. “What’s most disheartening is that, despite my unwavering support of President Trump since 2016, rouge [sic] members of his administration — including Gavin Wax — have participated in this conspiracy to ruin me publicly simply because I challenged them privately.”
Wax, a staffer in Trump’s State Department, formerly led the New York Young Republican Club — a separate, city-based group that is at odds with the state organization, the New York State Young Republicans. He declined to comment.
The entire story contained only a handful of names yet claims there were thousands of texts. NP makes the exact point that I was trying to make which is not to condemn or tar an entire group for the actions of a few or suggest that the entire organization is polluted with such thinking.
They are like the pro-Hamasshole protesters.
Hmm. Like the flag in the congressman’s office, Republicans are called NAZIs, and then, sure enough, right on cue, they pop up acting like NAZIs.
I think there is some awareness rising in the conservative blogosphere that the chat group messages by the Young Republicans are bad. I have a link below to an article in Townhall, and within that article there is a link to a Daily Wire podcast with Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles and Andrew Klavan.
https://townhall.com/columnists/michael-j-hout/2025/10/19/calling-out-the-cancer-within-the-right-n2665166
If have written on Ethics Alarms before that I believe the Democrat base has gone crazy, as evidenced by the Charlie Kirk and Jay Jones trainwrecks. I do not believe that the Republican base, but there are enough radicals and crazies on the right to be concerned about.
I understand that JD Vance and other GOP politicians want to keep the spotlight on Jay Jones for perfectly understandable political reasons, however the GOP as a party needs to make sure that they exercise message and party discipline, clean the ship (by expelling members and YR chapters), and communicate in an unambiguous clear way that racism has no place in the GOP and the Maga / conservative movement. This means that the GOP and the conservative blogosphere have to take distance from toxic influencers such as Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes and other such figures as well.
I also understand if the GOP and the conservative blogosphere are waiting with their reaction, given the history of racial hoaxes in the past.
At this moment, as this does not appear to be a hoax, I am underwhelmed by how the GOP and many conservative web sites (including the Federalist) ignore or rationalize the problem.