Month: July 2026

Yikes! An Entire State Supreme Court Flips Out And Attacks The U.S. Supreme Court! (Yes, That Is Unethical)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Several Ethics Alarms reader alerted me to this gobsmacking story, further evidence that the political left in this country is in the process of suffering a nervous breakdown. I am still not certain I am glad they did.

The court alluded to in the title is the Hawaii Supreme Court. That state needs to be given a bit of leeway for its excesses and delusions: Hawaii, even after more than half a century as our 50th state, is still a very different culture from the other 49. That’s part of its charm when you visit there, but it also has allowed a problematic mindset to linger. Hawaiians just don’t think the usual rules should apply to them, even in relation to the Constitution. Two years ago, in State v. Wilson, the Hawaii Supreme Court wrote that “[t]he spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons,” and that Hawaii would read the Second Amendment “differently than the current United States Supreme Court.”

Oh. Except that a state can’t do that.

More recently, the same justice who wrote that defiant legal nonsense authored a full-on attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, tacked onto a rather mundane case about prosecutorial misconduct. I will re-publish the whole amazing section below, but KABOOM! It is head-exploding. The diatribe, because that’s what it is, covers voting rights, campaign finance, abortion, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, the major questions doctrine, Chevron deference, the spending power, the removal power, and birthright citizenship, while accusing the Roberts Court of being racist.

Such tangential rhetoric is known as dicta, parts of a legal opinion that carry no substantive legal weight at all since it is pure opinion without definitive case authority. Even dicta, however, is subject to certain professional and ethical constraints. The Hawaiian Supreme Court rantis a bright line breach of several tenets in state’s Code of Judicial Conduct.

Canon I states, “A JUDGE SHALL UPHOLD AND PROMOTE THE INDEPENDENCE, INTEGRITY, AND IMPARTIALITY OF THE JUDICIARY AND SHALL AVOID IMPROPRIETY AND THE APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY.“

Under that banner are three mandates: Rule 1.1. Compliance with the Law, Rule 1.2. Promoting Confidence in the Judiciary, and Rule 1.3. Avoiding Misuse of the Prestige of Judicial Office. A statement that announces that a judge does not feel bound by U.S. Supreme Court decisions violates Rule 1.1. A judge attacking the integrity and motives of the U.S. Supreme Court undermines confidence in the judiciary, as prohibited by Rule 1.2. A judge using the prestige of his office to impugn a higher court is by definition an abuse of office, breaching Rule 1.3.

But wait! There’s more!

Canon 2 states, “A JUDGE SHALL PERFORM THE DUTIES OF JUDICIAL OFFICE
IMPARTIALLY, COMPETENTLY, AND DILIGENTLY.”

The anti-SCOTUS section shows a judge giving priority to his partisan and political beliefs over his duties as a judge, violating Rule 2.1. His unhinged attack on past SCOTUS jurisprudence indicates that he is incapable of “upholding the law,” and that he is also incapable of “impartial” conduct. Moreover, the opinion constitutes a flagrant bias based on political affiliation, breaching Rule 2.3.

The outburst is even worse than the many rules violations suggest. The logic is tortured, the law is bad, and the arguments are hysterical as well as not based in reality; worst of all, the Hawaiian judges appear not to understand how SCOTUS fits into the Constitutional governance formula. The core goal underlying the tantrum is an arrogant belief in judicial activism and judges usurping legislatures, as the Warren court did habitually.

As a final rotten cherry on this putrid sundae of unethical judicial conduct, The National Review noticed that a bot probably wrote the text. Nice. My position is that judges using AI to write their opinions is impeachable conduct, but then so is issuing such an attack on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here is the section, and I must add, having just read it through again, the naked Trump Derangement and partisan extremism is shocking. This isn’t just unethical. It is judicial insurrection. Luckily, progressives don’t read court opinions…

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Return To “The Odyssey”: Ethics-wise This Is All I Can Say Now, So I Guess I’m Going To Have To See The Damn Thing…[EXPANDED]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Above is Ben Shapiro’s podcast review of the movie conservative commentators and pundits declared woke and offensive long before it was released. Many also circulated false information to support their position, resulting in this Ethics Alarms post from May, which, thanks to a reminder from Ethics Alarms “gotcha!” master Neil Dorr, I returned to yesterday with a correction. All the reviews are out now, and the majority of them are raves, which doesn’t prove anything in my metaphorical book. (“The Crying Game” got raves. “Don’t Look Now!” got raves. “The Substance” got raves.) I do find Shapiro’s review above brave and encouraging, however. He’s a well known conservative activist and commentator and the creator of the Daily Wire, and still pronounced the film to be a) excellent and b) largely conservative in its perspective. Ben gets ethics bonus points for not following the herd.

Tangent: Ben does not get points for his delivery. Cowabunga, how can someone be peddling a podcast without taking the time to learn how to speak distinctly and clearly? Shapiro doesn’t open his mouth sufficiently when he speaks, he places his voice in his sinuses, and he speaks way, way too fast. I could make Ben three times as effective in a two-hour coaching session. Why doesn’t someone tell him? I found listening to his review excruciating.

But I digress. Christopher Nolan is a cult director who is intermittently daring and regarded as an auteur rather than an ideologue. His initially fame flowed from his Batman films, which posed provocative ethics scenarios. Personally, I thought “Dunkirk” was an inexcusable botch of an important historical film topic, and I haven’t forgiven him for it yet. I was still thrilled to learn that he was tackling Homer’s second-best story, however. “The Odyssey” has long been obscured by Virgil’s rip-off starring Odysseus mimic Ulysses along with stop-action films confounding “Odyssey” with the voyages of Sinbad.

Shapiro isn’t the only conservative critic to undermine the Right’s narrative that the movie is more woke propaganda: Christian Toto, the rightish Hollywood critic, also praised the movie. On the other side, several reliably progressive publications have slammed it. TIME’s critic called the movie an “eye-glazing dud of a movie.” The Economist—not that I care what that Eurocentric leftist pseudo-intellectual rag says about anything,  called Nolan’s film “a very silly adaptation of “The Odyssey”, and was particularly annoyed by the imposition of modern attitudes and conduct on the story. Anachronisms bother me too, but they are so frequent in period films that I tend to give them a pass unless they are really intrusive.

I now have enough information to make some ethics calls before I see the film. I have only paid money to see three films in a theater since Grace died, a) because I am in cash-flow hell, b) because I hate seeing movies alone and c) because seeing virtue-signaling Northern Virginia audiences wearing masks makes me crazy. I will see “The Odyssey,” however.

Ethics points:

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Is This Movie Marquee Clever, Unethical or Just Stupid? It’s Unethical, and Here’s Why…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I guess this is Ambiguous Bigotry Sunday.

Following a theme that began with this morning’s ethics quiz, we now have the viral controversy over the obnoxious Lake Aswego (Oregon) Theater and Cafe marquee for “The Odyssey.”

On social media (and elsewhere), the theater’s owners are being accused of “disgustingly blatant antisemitism” as Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute put it on “X.” I’m sorry I haven’t kept up on Lake Oswego movie theater marketing trends: apparently this one makes a habit of cheeky, politically provocative or otherwise controversial marquee messages. In February, for example, the theater’s message promoting “Melania,” the Amazon MGM documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, read, “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.” Amazon pulled the movie from the theater, and the proprietors reacted with a “Who, us?” shrug.

That example is not irrelevant: Lake Oswego is heavily Democratic, reliably voting for Democratic candidates for all federal and state offices. The last time a Republican was favored by voters was in 2016, when it narrowly favored Republican Secretary of State candidate Dennis Richardson while the city and the state went into Hillary Clinton’s column in the Presidential race. Lake Oswego is in Oregon, one of the most fanatically progressive, Democratic and woke states in the union. 80% of Democrats, the Pew Research Center says, hold “an unfavorable view of Israel” as of June 2026, an 11-point increase from 2025.

How likely is it that the marquee in a place like Lake Oswego, was deliberately praising “the Jews” (You know, as in “the Jews made a heroic odyssey”to Canaan”) as opposed to cheekily denigrating them? Not bloody likely at all. Is the message an innocent comparison of the endless warring between Israel and Palestinians to the Trojan War? If so, then why only mention “the Jews”?

The online debate has seen a suspicious effort to deflect the real issue by arguing over whether “the Odyssey” was really before “the Jews.” Does the theater mean the actual voyage (there probably wasn’t one), or Homer’s poetic description of it? That’s not the real issue, and the debate over it is pedantic sophistry. The issue is whether the marquee is anti-Semitic, designed to appeal to anti-Semites (you know, progressives and Democrats), and cleverly composed to do so while giving the theater and fans of the smear plausible deniability.

The answers are yes, yes, and yes.

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Ethics Villains: Fordham University School of Law Professor John Pfaff and Georgia State University Professor Anthony Michael Kreis

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Has any conservative law professor—there aren’t many, but I can think of a few—ever argued that scholars, lawyers and legal commentators who advocate positions disfavored on the professor’s side of the ideological divide should be punished and “forced to recant” their stated opinion? If there has been any example of that, I must have missed it. Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, however, did exactly that after the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, held that the 14th Amendment protects birthright citizenship.

After the decision, Professor Pfaff went on BlueSky—I regard posting on that platform prima facie evidence that the poster doesn’t believe in pluralism and freedom of speech— to announce his contempt for and desire to discipline any law professor who disagreed with his obviously unchallengeable analysis of the issue, writing,

“There MUST be repercussions for the lawprofs who advanced such untenable arguments. Their behavior is — and I mean this literally, not dehumanizingly — parasitic. They exploit norms of collegiality and presumptions of integrity to advance trash. Which undermines the work of ALL of us.”

Those “untenable arguments” and “trash” were supported by four Supreme Court Justices in the minority, but never mind. The fascists of the Left believe that it is in the best interests of society to enforce “goodthink” and punish “wrongthink;” to prevent dissent and open civic discourse from threatening its power.

Pfaff was responding to similar sentiments posted by Georgia State University Professor Anthony Michael Kreis, and he’s an Associate Dean for Faculty Research & Development. In his BlueSky posting, Kreis wrote that he considered it loathsome that any Justices disagreed with what he, like Pfaff, considers the only position on birthright citizenship that it is honorable and legitimate to hold:

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Ethics Quiz: The “Protected Species”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

For a sports league that few care about and fewer watch, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sure gets into a lot of ethics controversies. Take this one, for example:

The WNBA suspended Toronto Tempo head coach Sandy Brondello without pay for one game after she referred to black Atlanta Dream star Angel Reese as a “protected species” in a remark that was picked up by a hot mic during a game.

In the Dream’s 111-92 win over the Tempo last week a Toronto player had a foul called on her after an offensive rebound tussle involving Reese. As the foul call was being reviewed, Brondello yelled at the referees, “Angel…she’s a protected species!” The WNBA announced the next day that Brondello must sit out the Tempo’s next game, and won’t be paid for it, adding,”The WNBA expects all coaches and team personnel to uphold the highest standards of professionalism and respect that are fundamental to our league.”

Brondello, who is white, had issued a written apology earlier, reflexively groveling so she wouldn’t be cancelled as a racist in a league where 81% of the players are “of color.” She wrote,

“Angel, I’m sorry. Last night, in the emotion of the moment after Nyara’s injury, I used a phrase that I shouldn’t have used, and I take full responsibility for that. My frustration was with the officiating, but my words unfairly put the focus on you. I also understand that my words carried an impact beyond what I intended, particularly for Black women in our league, and I’m deeply sorry for that. I’ve spent my career competing with, coaching and learning from incredible Black women. I regret that my words caused hurt to a community I respect so deeply. I have a lot of respect for you as both a player and a person, and I sincerely apologize to you, your teammates, and the Dream organization for my comment.”

Reese, meanwhile, couldn’t resist the urge to play victim and to imply that either everyone knows that Brondello is a bigot or that white people in general think of blacks as a separate species. She piled on thusly on “X”:

Nice. What Brondello should have said about Reese was “She’s an asshole.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was it fair and responsible for the WNBA to suspend Brondello for calling a black star a “protected species”?

Zach Dean, a pan-sports commentator for Outkick, the conservative sports commentary website absorbed by Fox New, pronounced the suspension wrongful and even dangerous. He wrote in part,

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Now THIS Is An Unethical Prosecutor!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ray County (Missouri) Prosecutor Camille Johnston, 46, had “inappropriate sexual affairs “with three men, including a defense attorney representing several criminal defendants in cases prosecuted by Ray County, and Juan David Gutierrez an illegal immigrant accused of sexually assaulting another woman.  The third unethical sexual relationship was with yet another defendant in a criminal case, and Johnston fired the employee who discovered it.

Yikes. Even the late Steven Bochco didn’t dream up a prosecutor that sex-crazed, and all of his lawyers were in perpetual heat.

Johnston’s fling with Gutierrez was her masterpiece, however. Get this: Gutierrez was being prosecuted in Ray County, but this Ray County prosecutor gave him the keys to her car so he could flee to Florida, where she joined him on her vacation!

Johnston, the filings against her state, was guilty of an “obvious appearance of a conflict of interest” —- “Appearance”???? — had “forfeited the office of prosecuting attorney.” 

Yeah, I’d say that’s fair.

As soon as Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed documents to remove Johnston from office, a judge approved a preliminary order suspending her. 

I don’t understand this story at all. Did the woman have a psychotic break? How can someone rise to the level of prosecutor, or for that matter pass the bar after graduating from law school, who is capable of behaving this way? Maybe she learned she has only a year to live, and decided to go out with a bang…well, several bangs I guess. I would have guessed that she was hideous or something and desperate for a date, but she’s not. My next guess would have been that she was so sexually alluring that defendants and colleagues were constantly courting her, but that isn’t evident either. How could this happen?

And yet, over the past 20 years, I have been stunned and disillusioned by the low level of professional ethics of so many prosecutors, who are supposed to maintain exemplary ethics. I suppose having sex with anyone in pants is, all in all, not as unethical as knowingly prosecuting an innocent defendant, and that ethical breach is a lot more common than going on vacation with an illegal who assaults women.

__________________

Pointer: Young Bill

Dear NPR: I Guess Your Listeners Like Being Lied To But I Don’t, So Stay The Hell Out Of My In-Box…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One way you can tell with 100% certainly brainwashed (or dishonest) progressives is if they complain about NPR and PBS losing their government funding. It is the watermark of “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” gaslighting. This morning I received an unsolicited and unwelcome exhortation in my email inbox from the propagandist above, insulting my intelligence by seeking my money by telling me…

A billion-dollar hit to our industry is enough to make any Chief Financial Officer sweat. And that’s exactly what happened to public media one year ago today, when Congress voted to eliminate federal funding.  My job as NPR’s CFO isn’t just to balance the books; it’s to protect a vital public asset. Today, I’m asking you to take action with me.

The NPR Network cannot back down on our mission because we know that millions of people rely on this trusted journalism and programming. And, I am so grateful that we don’t need to back down because supporters like you stand with us. Our strength – and our independence – has always come from you, the public. The NPR Network continues because the public decides it will. 

I can tell you firsthand: you can’t run a world-class, independent newsroom on hope. A free press doesn’t just happen.  Public media needs growing, reliable financial support to fuel essential reporting and build what’s next.  Now is the time to give. Not just for yourself, but for our collective right to know the facts. Your donation of any amount is needed. Every dollar makes a difference.

Power to the public,

Daphne Kwon

P.S. When you make a donation to support this essential public service, you declare that you value access to the facts, for all.

“Access to all the facts”!

By pure coincidence, shortly after reading that garbage I saw that Newsbusters had posted some of the transcript of NPR’s anchor A Martinez (he humbly doesn’t claim to be THE Martinez) interview Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn) regarding President Trump’s recent televised speech. Highlights, as the Axis hack repeatedly invited the Democrat to attack the President and provided no balance or skepticism whatsoever:

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The Great Stupid Continues Its Rampage: The “Racist” Statue

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The “Safe Return” memorial overlooks the entrance to Squalicum Harbor at Zuanich Point Park in Billingham, Washington. Community leaders dedicated the 16-foot monument on Memorial Day, May 31, 1999 to honor commercial fishermen from the Bellingham area who died or disappeared at sea. The sculpture features an eight-foot bronze fisherman casting a mooring line as he returns to port. He stands on a 19-ton block of red granite, bearing the names of local fishermen who never made it safely home.

But the statue is racist, you see. That fisherman is really out to lynch a black man. He’s carrying a noose, right?

At least that’s what Cara M. Munoz thought as she harassed workmen cleaning graffiti off the memorial. It may have been what the idiots who defaced the memorial thought too.

“What is that? You don’t want to respond? But that’s OK,” Munoz shouted. “Are you going to do anything about the noose hanging above your head?…“That’s a noose.That is a hate symbol by definition.” She continued to harass the workers until police arrested her on charges second-degree malicious mischief. Then she spit on the officers.

Munoz is proud of her stand against “white supremacy” and all those lynchings performed by fisherman in Washington. She posted several videos of her confrontation with the workers. These people are so certain they are righteous and reasonable in their indignation. The summer of 2020 permanently damaged their brains and personalities. I’m surprised Cara wasn’t wearing a mask, too.

The Great Stupid is particularly intense and contagious in Washington as well as its West Coast neighbors Oregon and California. I think it should be a recognized legal defense when sufferers like poor Cara behave like this.

Today’s Friday Open Forum Is, Not Surprisingly, Open…With This Trump Derangement “Ripley”:

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Palm Beach has re-named its airport the President Donald J. Trump International Airport. I don’t know why this was felt to be necessary or desirable, but I don’t care what airports are named, and those who do, I believe, have deep emotional problems as well as strange priorities.

But in a gobsmacking bit of virtue-signaling to the Trump Deranged, United Airlines has announced a new policy offering passengers free flight changes if landing at an airport named for the current President of the United States is too traumatic. Anti-Trump wackos can now reroute to Fort Lauderdale or Miami at no extra charge so the Palm Beach airport’s name won’t cause such fliers permanent psychic damage.

A United memo to reservation agents reads,

“If a customer does not want to fly to the airport, use your empowerment to offer acceptable alternatives such as Fort Lauderdale Airport (FLL) or Miami International Airport (MIA), [telling the customer] ‘I understand that you’d rather not fly to this airport anymore. We can look at nearby airports like Fort Lauderdale or Miami instead. Is that an acceptable alternative?'”

To be fair to United, which is hard for me because I detest that airline, there were a ridiculous number of crazed reactions made the airport’s online contact form after the airport was renamed last week. Such as,

  • “How do we continue to get on our knees for such a narcissistic criminal so-called president?”
  • “I am writing to assure you that as long as you are calling this airport anything closely related to ‘TRUMP’ I will NEVER FLY INTO THERE. NEVER! You have 100% lost all my family’s business. Despicable move!”
  • “Hopefully you’ll have plenty of airbags to catch the barfs from people as they drive up.”

Yes, this is clinical. Maybe United is basing its pandering on the American with Disabilities Act.

Now it’s your turn…you pick the ethics topic, I sit back and enjoy.

Ten Ethics Points On Trump’s “Prime Time Address”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

1. The President has gotten much better at delivering speeches from a teleprompter which means that he’s worked on it, something neither George W. Bush or John McCain had the commitment and diligence to do. Trump was always better when riffing, but that led into interminable, unfocused rants, like his infamous 2024 nomination acceptance speech. Last night’s speech was, for Trump, remarkably crisp, succinct, and well-delivered.

2. As he was starting off, making the speech feel like a State of the Union message, I could see in my mind’s eye all the “lies” that the Axis fact-checkers would complain about this morning. I wish the President didn’t have to describe everything he views as an accomplishment in hyperbolic terms, as a superlative: “the best,” “the greatest,” “the biggest.” Surely he must know that the habit automatically invites skepticism: if some achievement really was the best, Trump would have a difficult time getting anyone to believe it. Isn’t there an advisor, a friend, a supporter, someone who could tell him this is a self-defeating approach?

3. My vote for the most unethical hyperbole last night: “This country was dead.”

4. The President was pointed as he brought out into the open the Deep State sabotage and the mainstream media propaganda that has hindered both of his terms. Good.

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