Month: December 2025

Stop Making Me Sort Of Defend Trump’s Social Media Posts…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ugh. Yecchh. Blechh!

When I read that “People” headline, I genuinely thought that President Trump had deliberately decided to attack the Kennedy family in the aftermath of the tragic death of Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg. That would have been insane, of course, but after Trump’s Rob Reiner outburst, I was ready to believe the worst. Clearly, “People” wanted readers to believe the worst, to give Trump-Haters more fuel to inflame them and Trump supporters reason to switch sides.

[Notice of correction: Because of the “People” headline, I didn’t realize that Trump personally had made no derogatory comments about the Kennedy family, and just reposted the comments of others. I apologize for that error, and have revised the post accordingly.]

It is crystal clear, even from the Truth Social posts quoted in the article, that the President’s re-posting of anti-Kennedy social media invective had nothing to do with Tatiana Schlossberg whatsoever. Yesterday the news was full of talk about artists and audiences boycotting the Kennedy Center because it now had Trump’s name on it, and Trump, predictably, was striking back, using the social media posts of others to do so.

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Steven Spielberg Sure Is One Ethically Confused Jew

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Steven Spielberg finally got the love he was seeking from the Hollywood establishment when “Schindler’s List” nabbed him Best Director and Best Film honors at the Oscars (despite being only the second-best film he made that year, after “Jurassic Park”). The Holocaust drama also established the director as a Serious Artist. He founded the Righteous Persons Foundation with his profits from “Schindler’s List,” saying that he wanted to educate Americans about the Holocaust.

“I could not accept any money from ‘Schindler’s List,’” Spielberg said, ” if it even made any money. It was blood money, and needed to be put back into the Jewish community. My parents didn’t keep kosher and we mainly observed all the holidays when my grandparents stayed with us,” the filmmaker explained at the time. “I knew I was missing a great deal of my natural heritage, and as I became conscious of it, I began racing to catch up.”

Ah, but Stevie lives in the Hollywood woke bubble, and intersectionality and progressive cant dictates that in the Hamas-Israel war, the Jews are the oppressors—they are white, see. Whites are always are oppressors.

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Observations on an Anti-Trump Meme That Will Be Posted By One Of My Trump-Deranged Facebook Friends Any Second Now…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Typical, desperate, ignorant and stupid.

Right now I’m placing bets on which of my Stage 5 Trump-Deranged friends or relatives will bite first. Let’s see..

1. This logic is like that of the man who kills his parents and wants sympathy from the judge because he’s a orphan. Trump was impeached twice by Democrats in the House, in both cases without thorough hearings and with contrived accusations and dubious evidence. He was also acquitted in the Senate, and correctly so.

2. The “34 felony convictions” have been effectively vacated. Though the convictions have not been overturned yet, no conviction is final until appeals have been exhausted. The fraud case in question was always pure lawfare, designed by New York Democrats and a partisan AG to “get Trump,” as that Attorney General campaigned on: she promised to “get Trump.” After all, he was threatening to win the White House. Those convictions were also for a single act that all authorities agree harmed no one, was standard business practice, and would never have prompted legal action had not Donald Trump been involved.

3. My favorite fallacy here, however, is that academic credentials have any relevance to leadership ability or successful Presidencies at all. For that matter, presumed intellectual ability hasn’t correlated with Presidential success either. To take the obvious example, Abraham Lincoln had no academic credentials. Harry Truman, an average intellect at best, proved to be a far better President than many with advanced degrees (or Harvard educations), such as John Adams, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.

4. Best of all comparisons with Trump is this one, authored by social media wit David Burge in response to that meme above:

He’s referring, of course, to the Second Worst President Ever, Woodrow Wilson.

Ethics Dunce: New Frenchman George Clooney

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

How ironic. The same week we learn that George, his un-American wife and their two children have fled the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave for the Land of the Snail and the Home of the Censored, “Variety” publishes a puff piece on the part-time actor presenting him as more than he is, which is a bubble-dwelling Hollywood progressive laboring under the delusion that he has something useful to contribute to the public discourse. He hasn’t. Neither does “Variety”.

We are told that when George was preparing to make his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his film about TV news icon Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” he invited “60 Minutes” to witness that cast’s their first read-through. Clooney ‘s angle was that there is a parallel between McCarthyism in the 1950s and the “political pressure that news organizations face in the second Trump administration.” There’s a parallel all right, but it is the Democratic Party’s adoption of McCarthy’s tactics (like guilt by association) to try to dominate American policy and politics through fear and hate. President Biden’s “Republicans are fascists” speech was pure McCarthyism. The progressive pattern of cancelling any truth-teller who informs the public of what the 21st Century Left is attempting to do to the government and the culture is McCarthyism.

“When the other three estates fail — when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us — the fourth estate has to succeed,” Clooney tells “Variety.” I’m sure he really believes that, because George, while intellectually ambitious, just isn’t very bright: bias has made him stupid. If he was alert and capable of objective analysis, he would realize that journalism has already failed, unless one calls abandoning journalism for partisan propaganda is “success.”

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The Left’s Catch-22! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I have already mentioned here once today the public’s growing discomfort with the Trump Administration’s determined crack-down on illegal immigration, extending to mass deportations. That is one example of the very effective Catch-22 tactic the political Left regularly uses to ratchet policies, society and culture in an extreme direction with the assumption that undoing the damage will be practically impossible, making a very dubious development a fait accompli.

Another example of this phenomenon–it’s certainly clever and effective, just destructive and unethical—has been the Democrat’s deliberate expansion the federal government, the federal workforce and unaccountable bureaucracies. When the incoming Trump administration, via DOGE, began dismantling large swathes of the bloat, the standard scream was that the process was going too fast, cutting too much, and not following established process. The critics knew, of course, based on history, experience, political reality and human nature, that anything but rapid, meat-axe cuts across the board would result in no meaningful reductions at all. Expansion of the Federal government is a leftist strategy that diminishes personal liberty and government accountability—and it is also usually a fait accompli. Again, to his credit, President Trump has refused to play along with the game.

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The Kennedy Center Boycotts

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

My Facebook friends are almost unanimously calling for audiences to boycott Kennedy Center performances because they hate Donald Trump so much, and view his name being added to the Kennedy Center facade a just cause to…What? Destroy the arts in order to save them?

The boycott, which is taking hold because D.C.’s arts patrons are overwhelmingly wealthy, woke Democrats, is certain to have negative effect on audiences and artists. The National Symphony Orchestra, to name one boycott target, is hanging by a thread financially already. It has no other venue open to it. But the boycotters literally don’t care. Their aim is to grandstand, signal their virtue, and declare their intractable opposition to the elected President of the United States.

Artists are also engaging in this destructive and illogical protest. The Cookers, an “all-star jazz septet that will ignite the Terrace Theater stage with fire and soul” and a New York dance company canceled scheduled appearances at the Kennedy Center on New Years Eve, so as with the annual Christmas Eve jazz concert hosted by Chuck Redd that also canceled at the last minute, audiences looking forward to the event are being punished as proxies for the hated POTUS. How these protests have any impact on President Trump has yet to be explained.

The Cookers, in a statement, said, “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice.” Oh. Doug Varone and Dancers, a New York dance company, announced that it was canceling two performances in April. Varone, the head of the company, said it would lose $40,000 by pulling out, but that “It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating.”

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“Is Anybody There?” Ethics Tidbits To Spark Comment On A Dead Day…

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Views and comments have fallen off a cliff, along with anyone answering my phone calls and emails regarding the ethics biz. Dilemma: I have two rather important posts on the runway, but if I put them up now, will they be lost to much of the readership, who clearly are doing things rather than checking Ethics Alarms. Should I hold them?

I’m sick of thinking about, never mind writing about, Trump Derangement and the continued disgusting, unprofessional, unethical conduct of what we laughingly call our journalism. So this post is just going to consist of brief snippets with ethical resonance, at least to me, along with some housekeeping notes. Substantive posts will doubtless follow once I get my head straightened out. I’m going to number these brief notes so you can reference them in your comments, assuming there are any comments….

1. Right off, I want to thank those of you who have sent me cards and even gifts to express your appreciation of the blog and my work here. It means a great deal to me.

2. It is ridiculous, but predictable, that the New York Times and “60 Minutes” suddenly think what Marjorie Taylor Greene has to say is worth paying attention to, now that she has decided to turn against President Trump. Any Republicans who didn’t immediately reject this foolish, credentialed Dunning-Kruger victim from the beginning should be wearing a paper bags over theit heads.

3. Speaking of Greene, I have seldom seen so many “news ” stories and so much commentary about celebrities whose opinions, or even whose very existence, should mean so little to everybody. Who cares that “Chappell Roan walks back tribute to Brigitte Bardot over late star’s ‘insane’ beliefs,” for example? Who the hell is Chappell Roan? For that matter, why does anyone care about what Bridget Bardot thought or said about anything once she stopped acting in movies?

4. I do care a little bit that George Clooney has moved his family to France and accepted French citizenship. This guy exerts influence over the Democratic Party and was involved in the move to oust President Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee, and he thinks France is a better nation than his own. To me, that signals that his views on American policy and politics have no credibility.

5. Glenn Greenwald—you know, the guy who took my money to subscribe to his substack and then stopped writing it for months without offering a refund?—mockingly posted this excepts from an Ezra Klein slobber over Barack Obama’s oratory…

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Ethics Observations On The Dionne Quintuplets’ Resentment

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The last of the famous Dionne Quintuplets died last week. Annette Dionne, who seems to have been the strongest of the five identical sisters from the very beginning, was 91. The New York Times has an obituary that is also an excellent feature on their unusual lives (Gift link!)—this is the kind of thing the Times still does well. There isn’t a single slap at President Trump anywhere, at least that I noticed.

The article begins by noting that Annette, like all of her sisters, “resented being exploited as part of a global sensation.” I get it: the five girls were celebrities from the second they were born, and their fame was such that they never really escaped it: thus the last surviving quint being deemed worthy of a Times obituary more than 60 years after her birth. But resenting something that any objective analysis would find unavoidable is not just pointless, it’s unfair. In this case, the resentment was unfair to the quints’ parents and the public.

In 1934, the birth of surviving quintuplets in Ontario, Canada was considered, justifiably, a medical miracle. All five of them together weighed only 13 pounds, 6 ounces. Yes, in a way they were freaks and treated as such, extraordinarily cute little freaks. Medical miracles give people hope; they suggest that the world is getting smarter, safer, more beneficent. This miracle happened in the pit of the Great Depression, when celebrities like Babe Ruth and Shirley Temple became icons because they made Americans forget their troubles.

To the girls’ parents, Oliva and Elzire Dionne, the arrival of five babies to a family living in poverty was a looming catastrophe. The parents and five children already lived in a run-down farmhouse lit by kerosene and serviced by an outhouse. The new babies were nursed on water and corn syrup until the family started receiving breast milk donations. The fact that the public was so interested in the quintuplets was a blessing that saved the family from disaster.

They were indeed exploited. The parents for a time surrendered custody of the girls and they were cared for by a government-appointed guardian, the doctor who had delivered them. The were housed and cared for by the doctor and a staff at “Quintland,” where they were displayed several times a day on a balcony as 6,000 spectators watched them through one-way glass.

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Unethical Website of the Month: Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This, you see, is why the D.E.I. societal pathogen will be harder to kill than the Hydra.

Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy site has a web page titled “Leading Change with Inclusion, Courage, and Global Perspective.” It explains why educators must “skillfully” attempt to “pursue equity and inclusion,” including instructions on how “good discrimination” can be preserved by a campaign to “anchor equity in strategy.” 

Dress up the pig any way you want, the policy being extolled on this site is still institutional and societal discrimination against whites, Asians, and men. Our corrupt and thoroughly politicized educational institutions are the ethics villains here, and the Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy website is a smoking gun.

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Thoughts About The Axis News Media Burying The Minnesota Fraud Scandals…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is the season of holiday wishes, reflections and aspirations. Do you know what my Ethics Alarms wish is? I wish that at least one reader, ideally one of our five commenters, would finally write in saying something like,

“I have to confess, I’ve been denying your regular, almost annoyingly repetitious assertions that the mainstream media is biased, that it is a member of what you call the Axis of Unethical Conduct, that the major legacy media sources now practice progressive, Democratic Party propaganda to the exclusion of balanced and fair (that is, ethical) journalism, that this results in a profound warping of the Democratic process, that the news media is in fact dedicated to promoting the power of the Democratic Party and its anti-American policy agenda, and that Donald Trump was correct when he pronounced the news media the ‘enemy of the people.’ But I can’t in good conscience deny this any more. You are right, and have been right all along.”

Actually there is one kamikaze commenter who should write this but who is banned and I still won’t let his comment stay up even if he does. With that single obnoxious exception, however, yes, that admission would make my year…not that the conclusion shouldn’t have been screamingly obvious to everyone for years.

I was thinking about this as I observed the current unethical news media self-indicting efforts to pretend that the unfolding Minnesota fraud scandal in the Somali community and elsewhere is a footnote to the “real” news. The Times did a relatively thorough report a full month ago; it has been fairly silent since, however, as the full expanse of the fraud scandal has unfolded. Network news has largely ignored the story too. Incredibly, the Minnesota Star-Tribune did not include the scandal in its 2025 list of top news stories. Today in CNN’s list of “Five things” readers should know about, developments in the Minnesota story is nowhere to be seen.

According to Axios, the Somali 9 billion dollar scamming wasn’t one of the top search topics, unlike Bad Bunny and Stephen Colbert (See, you have to know about a topic in order to search for it…well played, “journalists”!) The Hill gives us another classic example today of the oft-mentioned phenomenon that when Democrats have been caught in scandals or misconduct, it is the Republican/MAGA reaction that is the news: “MAGA World zeroes in on Minnesota over fraud scandal.” Other examples this month: The Guardian: “The right wing has seized on fraud cases in the state” and ABC News: “Trump has seized on the ballooning controversy in recent days …”

Other diversionary framing include the panic in the Somali community as ICE cracks down on Minnesota’s large unassimilated community consisting of people whose native culture regards cheating the government as a good thing. “ICE pounces!” is that theme. This is CNN: Anxiety grips Minneapolis’s Somali community as immigration agents zero in on the Twin Cities.

It isn’t only the Somalis: Minnesota, under the watchful eye of knuckleheaded Governor Tim Walz, has a fraud problem throughout its social welfare system. Why is an amateur Youtuber, Nick Shirley, making headlines with his Boy Scout merit badge-level investigative reporting? Where are the pros? Why wasn’t “60 Minutes” on this story like bees on a honeypot? CBS news reported the Somali scandal on December 11, but it’s been crickets since. But Shirley uncovered another Minnesota fraud, a hilarious one, last week: a Somali-owned daycare center with no children and a sign reading “Quality Learing Center.” The Quality Learing Center received $4,000,000 from Minnesota taxpayers.

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