Month: August 2026

So Many Unethical Quotes, As The Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck Picks Up Steam

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I really didn’t want to post again so soon on this, but the frantic denial and blame-shifting efforts by the Mad Left regarding a disaster of their own making is beyond anything I anticipated, and I anticipated a lot.

Lord Woolley, the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, said Arday had been subjected to the “most horrendous, toxic, vicious witch hunt” leading to his death. Woolley is supposed to be a scholar. A witch hunt describes an effort to pin vile deeds on a victim who is innocent of such deeds. Arday did exactly what he was accused of doing, and he was in the process of being appropriately held accountable for what he did. Cambridge was also appropriately criticized and condemned, and will continue to be.

Today, Lord Woolley said: “We need an investigation into the media onslaught, the vicious media onslaught.” It’s called journalism, you dolt. For once, the left-biased news media did its job and exposed a DEI fraud as well as the institution that betrayed its standards, students and reputation by promoting and defending him. This is rich: the Left wants to investigate its captive news media for reporting the truth.

The hilariously named “Good Law Project” got thousands of idiots to sign an open letter. I’ll bold the most insane parts. It reads,

We, the undersigned, are appalled by the sustained and malicious attacks on the academic integrity of Professor Jason Arday.

Entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday and referred to two universities. Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. The relevant academic journals also found no basis for the claims.

Yet despite these unequivocal findings, rightwing media have attempted to smear Professor Arday’s reputation and undermine his career. That should concern everyone who believes in academic freedom, fairness and due process.

It is difficult to ignore the question of motivation. When a distinguished Black academic is repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated, it signals there is an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.

Professor Arday, a working class Black man, became the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His remarkable journey, scholarship and leadership should be celebrated, not overshadowed by campaigns built on allegations that have been comprehensively rejected.

Professor Arday has contributed to public life for many years, building a distinguished record of charitable and community service. This latest smear campaign and the spread of misinformation are deeply alarming – not only because of the impact on one individual, but because of the message they send to aspiring Black and Brown young people who seek to attain positions of leadership.

The demonisation of Professor Arday, and recently on Misan Harriman, risks creating a chilling effect, signalling that success and public service may be met with hostility, misrepresentation, and disproportionate scrutiny.

We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.

There can be no place in higher education for campaigns that weaponise baseless accusations to damage reputations and careers. Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the colour of their skin.

Niiiiice! Lies everywhere!

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Ethics Dunce: Playboy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Item: 2018. The Miss America Pageant puts Gretchen Carlson, former Fox blonde turned #MeToo icon, in charge. She says it is no longer a beauty pageant. Result: the end of Miss America.

Item: 2021. Victoria’s Secret brings in Megan Rapinoe, vocal butch lesbian athlete and LGBTQ activist to rebrand the female sex fantasy company. Result: Uh, no. It quickly returned to its core values after a period of confusion, sales and turnovers…which included Megan.

Item: 2023. Budweiser brings on feminist marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid who decided America’s top-selling beer needed to be pitched to a younger market, so she made male cross-dressing self-identified female Dylan Mulvaney the symbol of Bud Light in an ad campaign, because there’s nothing that appeals to middle-aged, bear-drinking football fans like “chicks with dicks.”

I just learned that “Playboy’s” new editor is gay in “I’ll make Playboy playful again, says its new gay editor/Phillip Picardi,” Quote:

“He wants to “destigmatise male sexuality”, he says, and “help men to build a healthier relationship” with the women in their lives. “I’m hoping we can be a space for men who feel caught between needing to be manosphere-adjacent and needing to be the performative liberal male,” he says…. “We should promote the idea that we can be excited about sex and we can be excited about each other and excited about touching each other,” he says with a cheeky grin.”

To me, that model on the current Playboy cover is androgynous, scuzzy, and reminiscent of what Hustler thought was sexy. But I am not a marketing target for Playboy, (or Hustler) and never was.

“Playboy” is already the walking dead, but still, the Santayana quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is germane here, as is the principle that when an institution, tradition or product no longer has a place in the culture, you can’t save it by destroying its identity and integrity by pretending that it’s something else. Let these things die with dignity, or at least go down fighting.

On The Left’s Horrifying Lack Of Integrity In The Wake of The Arday Scandal: I’m Sorry I Was So Right, And How I Wish I Were Wrong. Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

As I have mentioned here several times, the past six years and especially the last two have profoundly discouraged me. I have seen the profession I have dedicated what I laughingly call “my career” become more corrupt, greedy and immune to ethics alarms. One of my bar associations—oh hell, I don’t have to avoid embarrassing it any more, do I? The District of Columbia Bar—that I had served well and enthusiastically for over 30 years unceremoniously fired me for daring to dig into a profession-wide ethics problem involving powerful members. Both of the distinguished institutions that gave me a diploma have revealed themselves as fatally politicized and untrustworthy. I have seen so many valued friends, colleagues and associated reveal themselves as literally rendered intellectually crippled by the The Great Stupid, and the nation I revere, respect and admire is being threatened by an ideology espoused by grifters, liars and fools who have somehow managed to bring better and smarter people down to their nauseating level.

The Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck, which I’m officially designating today, is massively important though its significant has nothing to do with Jason Arday. It is important because…

  • Such a thing occurring at a major, internationally-renowned institution of higher education, demonstrated just how corrupted such institutions have become
  • The specifics of the episode illustrate vividly the pure illogic as well as the destructiveness of the whole “diversity is our strength” delusion, but most disturbing of all,
  • In its reaction to their self-made debacle, the progressive hive’s absence of integrity and inability to admit or even discern “what’s going on here” and conclude that they, and those they have followed, extolled and defended, have been and are spectacularly, utterly wrong.

In short, they won’t or can’t be honest, they won’t or can’t admit that their critics have been right, they won’t or can’t even accept the facts in front of them and reach a rational conclusion. I don’t even know what to call people like this. They aren’t stupid, at least not all of them. They aren’t hypnotized or hearing voices in their heads. So how can they be “fixed”? How do you deal with millions and millions of such people when they and their delusions threaten the fabric of society?

Yesterday I wrote a brief update on the Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck noting that I had been prescient when I predicted,

“You know, don’t you, that the next step will be a tsunami of op-eds and essays criticizing and condemning the conservatives—racists, all of them— who “killed” Arday with their determination to drive a neurodivergent “of color” out of his remarkable position. So he puffed up his resume a little bit— Everybody does it. How else was someone like him to break through the societal barriers white society has erected to impede people like him? I will be shocked if Arday isn’t quickly canonized as a victim. It is the perfect way to deflect attention away from the real issues behind this tragedy.”

Nevertheless, I did not expect this desperate backlash from the Left to be so pervasive. My long-time Georgetown history professor friend posted with favor this pathetic “everybody does it and if they are white they get away with it” comment:

Doris Kearns Goodwin — Plagiarism/improper attribution. Career survived. Still a celebrated bestselling historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual.

Edmund Morris — Inserted fictional characters and invented scenes into his authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. Controversy notwithstanding, continued publishing and remained a prominent biographer until his death in 2019.

Joseph Ellis — Lied about serving in Vietnam. Suspended for a year, returned to teaching, continued publishing bestselling history.

Laurence Tribe — Acknowledged improper attribution in a book. Career survived; Harvard’s Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus. (Harvard Law School⁠)

Stephen Ambrose — Plagiarism/improper attribution across multiple books; later evidence challenged claims about Eisenhower interviews. Continued writing and remained a bestselling historian until his death in 2002.

Mike Barnicle — Resigned from the Boston Globe amid fabrication/plagiarism controversies. Rebuilt his career. Longtime television commentator and MSNBC contributor.

Mitch Albom — Published a column falsely describing athletes attending an event they didn’t attend. Suspended briefly; remains a bestselling author, columnist and radio host.

Jonah Lehrer — Plagiarism/self-plagiarism and fabricated quotations. Lost major jobs and had books recalled, but returned to publishing books.

Stephen Glass — Fabricated sources, quotations, people and entire stories. Journalism career ended; later earned a law degree and built a career as a paralegal.

Michael Bellesiles — Serious research-integrity problems in Arming America. Lost the Bancroft Prize and resigned from Emory. Later returned to teaching and publishing.

Marc Hauser — Found responsible for multiple counts of scientific misconduct at Harvard. Left Harvard but subsequently wrote books and pursued work outside traditional academia.

Brian Wansink — Cornell found academic misconduct involving data, statistical methods and authorship. Resigned from Cornell; continued professional work outside his former academic position.

Brian Williams — Falsely embellished accounts of his reporting experiences, including the Iraq helicopter story. Lost the NBC anchor chair but returned to national television at MSNBC.

Ruth Shalit Barrett — Plagiarism and accuracy controversies during her journalism career. Continued writing after the original scandal, though later faced another major journalism controversy.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne — Stanford president whose laboratory papers contained serious errors and whose handling of corrections was criticized. Resigned the presidency but remains a Stanford professor and laboratory head.

White academics and journalists do face consequences for lying, plagiarism, fabrication, or misconduct. But that disgrace does not become a death sentence for their careers or their humanity. Many have been allowed to apologize, regroup, keep working, publish again, rebuild their reputations, and have second acts.

I had to point out that her first example, Doris Kearns, is a legitimate and credentialed scholar who taught a course I took and admired, and she never claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days or had schools she never taught at listed in her biography. I didn’t bother noting that including Stephen Glass ( or Mike Barnicle or Mitch Albom) with the academics iss an outrageous apples-and-oranges cheat, as they were not academics, and in Glass’s case (and he is very white), his humiliation and condemnation was analogous to Arday’s, and Arday might have also “built a career as a paralegal” if he hadn’t been clinically insane and hadn’t killed himself.

One would think that when the New York Times, which seldom finds an issue it won’t spin the advantage of progressives and Democrats, begins a story like this in its thorough examination of the Arday affair …

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Comment of the Day: “On The California-Texas Foiled Baby Murder Case, Part I: Prelude”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Tim LeVier, who I believe is tied with Glenn Logan as the longest tenured commenter to your host’s ethics pronouncements, delivered as probing and ethical a suggestion for handling child birth surrogacy as I can imagine.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “On The California-Texas Foiled Baby Murder Case, Part I: Prelude,” which, I must mention, is getting remarkably little publicity from the pro-abortion Axis news media. Gee, I wonder why…

***

The underlying problem in these surrogacy cases is that these contracts seem to be “early”. I’d like to read the actual contracts in these scenarios to see what they contemplated, if anything. In truth, the surrogacy contract should be accompanied by a fully funded escrow account and a trustee. Payments from escrow should be structured for specific milestones and performance. The contract should recognize the surrogate’s absolute right of autonomy, but contractually, “life of the surrogate” should be the only consideration when allowing the surrogate to terminate.

Let’s generate a fictional scenario where the couple will pay $50k (inclusive) for a surrogate. The escrow account should be funded at 200% or $100k. If you can’t fund this escrow account in advance, you don’t get to sign a contract.

Payment for attempt ($5k)
Payment once pregnancy is confirmed at 8 weeks ($5k)
Recurring payments for pregnancy support ($10k spread-out)
Success fee for birth ($30k)

But also, the extra escrow is for additional success fees for a multiple birth scenario (Twins/Triplets) ($20k/ea)

Have a condition for payment from escrow for “Failure to adopt” or “Termination of Contract” from the bio-parents. ($5k/ea)

Termination of contract should be clearly stated as the limit of the bio-parents decision-making once pregnancy is established.

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“Baseless”?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

How many times have you read or heard Axis “journalists,” Democrats, the Trump Deranged and your smug and brainwashed social media friends mock any suggestion…especially those by Donald Trump…that our election results are untrustworthy and the 2020 election may have been stolen, by saying the claim is “baseless”? I can find that denial in new online content still, and would, if my sock drawer wasn’t in such bad shape.

Since that election in the teeth of The Great Stupid, the assessment here on Ethics Alarms has remained the same, to wit: It is impossible to prove the election was stolen, but the suspicion is far from “baseless.” Moreover, the fact that the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s rote rebuttal continues to be that the claim is “baseless” is itself justification for that suspicion.

Democrats held their primary election for Wisconsin governor last week with the party terrified that Democratic Socialists of America candidate Francesca Hong would be the victor, putting what the party considers to be a flippable U.S. Senate seat in the hands of a nut case who wants to eliminate Thanksgiving and defund the police. Despite all pre-primary pollsters declaring that Hong had a double-digit lead over Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Cowley managed to win the primary in the early morning hours. But something was clearly amiss.

Milwaukee Election Commissioner Paulina Gutierrez said when she arrived at the courthouse in Milwaukee County, 5 out of the 9 USB drives she brought with her did not have the absentee vote results they were supposed to contain. That amounted to 15,000 ballots, and Crowley won by only 3,783 votes. Election officials re-downloaded the missing information, or that’s what they said they were downloading, and brought the drives back to the courthouse. Crowley was declared the winner by the Associated Press at 2:34 a.m.Meanwhile, NBC News chief data analyst Steve Kornacki was on camera, so stunned he couldn’t speak.

The video of Kornacki learning about the USB debacle was posted to Twtter/ X. His long moment of stunned silence has been making its way around social media. The Daily Mail posted a section where Kornacki could not help but laugh and asked NBC News national politics reporter Ben Kamisar, “Are you serious?” when the two learned that restarting the process might take hours.

“We’re kind of, indefinitely waiting for them to get their act together here,” Kornacki told Kamisar later. “It really is coming down to this one giant update in Milwaukee, but man, we waited 90 minutes for them, they did this whole procession, and then they find out there’s nothing on the sticks,” he said. “The audience has been with us for four, six hours in some cases, for this moment that didn’t happen…I think we are gonna wrap it here, for the reasons we’re saying here … I want you to know, I hate doing this to you.”

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Update: Addendum to “Making Ethics Sense Of The Jason Arday Saga”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I don’t really want to pat myself on the back for predicting this last night minutes after I learned about the sad finale to the Jason Arday debacle. Anyone who has followed the unethical patterns of the political Left and who is capable of objective thought would have known this would happen.

I wrote,

“You know, don’t you, that the next step will be a tsunami of op-eds and essay criticizing and condemning the conservatives—racists, all of them— who “killed” Arday with their determination to drive a neurodivergent “of color” out of his remarkable position. So he puffed up his resume a little bit— Everybody does it. How else was someone like him to break through the societal barriers white society has erected to impede people like him? I will be shocked if Arday isn’t quickly canonized as a victim. It is the perfect way to deflect attention away from the real issues behind this tragedy.”

I just finished a cup of coffee and two yummy hot biscuits, and saw these:

Morons. Look at the “loves” for the first one, by Sadiq Khan, whoever the hell he is.

It’s early yet. Those op-eds are probably just being finished now. I certainly wasn’t the only one who knew this would be the reaction by many on the Left. Here’s a quote from another “X” post on the topic: “The story that will be spun about Jason Arday will be that his death lies at the feet of the people who called out his serial fabulations for being what they so transparently were…”

Making Ethics Sense of the Jason Arday Saga

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

All outlets are reporting that Jason Arday, the DEI academic fraud whose career and reputation were spectacularly derailed the same week his autobiography was published by Simon & Schuster, has been found dead. Details are slowly emerging, but if his death was not a suicide, it will stand as one of the most spectacular coincidences of all time. I’m going to write this with the presumption that the 41-year-old took his own life. [The New York Times report is here.]

Ethics Notes:

1. I learned of this tragic development (from Young Bill) literally as I was preparing to write a post called “Stop Making Me Defend Jason Arday!” My trigger was a Washington Free Beacon article titled, “Fallen Cambridge Star Jason Arday’s ‘True Life’ Memoir Appears To Poach Life Events From His Favorite Soap Operas, ‘Spartacus,’ and ‘Forrest Gump’ : A Free Beacon review of Arday’s memoir, out this week from Simon & Schuster, shows that his melodramatic autobiography tracks closely with plotlines from popular TV shows and movies.”

The message of the EA post was to be that we should learn the lessons of the Arday debacle and be clear about its causes and villains: the woke obsession with DEI, especially in institutions of higher education, is the main cause, and the villains are the Left’s culture warriors and race hucksters, particularly those who have infested the faculties and administrative ranks of our colleges and universities, specifically the irresponsible, incompetent fools at Cambridge. Then, I was going to write, leave poor Arday alone. He had been humiliated on the world stage, he was bound to be blamed by the real villains, who exploited him, his life was, if not ruined, would take a very long time to be livable, and he was obviously a disturbed and unstable individual. There was far too much glee in the long article by Benjamin Ryan finding suspicious parallels between Arday’s alleged life story and the plots of movies and TV shows he had seen. I also found some of the parallels contrived: life imitates art and art imitates life: any remarkable life is likely to resemble memorable drama and fiction to some extent.

The article was piling on, beating the metaphorical dead horse, kicking a man when he’s down. There was no need for that. Dismantle Cambridge and the indefensible void in academic integrity that made this tragedy possible. Flog academia, flame it, broil it. Expose and destroy everyone involved. Arday was the tool of unscrupulous, reckless, smug and intolerable people.

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Now THIS Is An [Unethical/Cheap/Clever/Creative] Law Firm ! (Pick One)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Who would have thought that Bert from “Mary Poppins” might have had a career in law firm marketing?

Trantolo & Trantolo, a small law firm in Hartford, Connecticut that also has offices in New York and Massachusetts, has been cited for more than a dozen “unauthorized sidewalk advertisements.” Put on the pavement using either power-washing or temporary chalk over stencils, the firm legal services marketing innovation violated a city ordinance that banned such messages without written consent. Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam told the media that the city has discovered at least 15 sidewalk messages promoting the firm. Unauthorized law firm promotion from the firm also appeared on 24 Hartford crosswalks before the West Hartford Department of Public Works powerwashed them into oblivion. I bet it looked sort-of -like at the end of the Chalk World sequence where Bert, Mary and the kids ride on merry-go-round horses, participate in a fox hunt and sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and then the rain washes Bert’s pictures away.

One message with the firm’s name attached said, “Look both ways before you cross.” Who could object to that public service message? But the firm has “an angle.” As Bing Crosby told Rosemary Clooney in “White Christmas,” everyone has an angle. Well, lawyers and law firms, anyway. Trantolo & Trantolo explained that one by explaining that Hartford “has a serious road safety problem.”

“Working with an outdoor advertising company that has executed similar temporary sidewalk campaigns in cities across the country, Trantolo & Trantolo recently placed a series of temporary stencils throughout Hartford and West Hartford highlighting important local and statewide safety statistics,” says the firm. Trantolo & Trantolo also promised that it would remove all the messages ” at the end of its campaign.”

You have to give the firm’s marketing department credit for creativity. However, the stunt violates the Kantian ethics test of considering what the world would be like if everybody did it, or even every law firm. Thank goodness this stunt didn’t occur to Morgan and Morgan.

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Friday Open Forum, “Two Things” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

In Billy Crystal’s hit comedy “City Slickers,” famous for getting old pug-ugly actor Jack Palance something nobody ever was thought possible for a performer like him, an Oscar, Jack’s character, a grizzled old cowboy called Curly, liked to say that life comes down to “just one thing.” This early morning post comes down to just two things, but I am counting on you to add to the total.

Thing One: Fitch Ratings affirmed the United States’ “Long-Term Foreign- and Local Currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDRs) at ‘AA+’ with a Stable Outlook” yesterday, stating,

“The United States’ ‘AA+’ rating is supported by its large economy, high per-capita income, dynamic business environment and exceptional financing flexibility due to the U.S. dollar’s role as the preeminent global reserve currency. However, high fiscal deficits, a substantial interest burden, and high and rising government debt levels constrain the rating. Debt is more than double the ‘AA’ rating median. The government has not taken meaningful actions to address the large general government (GG) fiscal deficits (averaging 7% of GDP since 2022), and spending pressures will mount over the next decade due to an aging population…“

This sparked the Axis newx media to start its doomsday act, suddenly showing interest in the National Debt, while the anti-Trump conservative outlets did the same. The Triple Whammy of two Democratic Presidencies and two Trump terms has exploded the National Debt beyond all reason or fixing, both parties are complicit, and the only reason the issue is being raised now is because Trump is President and Democrats think the Iran War makes government spending useful as a campaign issue before midterms. Anyone who takes political warfare over the dept seriously is so dumb they’d probably vote for Kamala again. It’s obvious that no party is ever going to do anything about the National Debt, even though it is a ticking time bomb. Fixing the problem takes sacrifice, and any party in power that doesn’t ensure short term gratification for voters with 95 IQs and the attention span of mayflies is going to lose power. But accepting short term pain, giving up some overly expensive benefits and not just balancing the budget but achieving a surplus and then using the surplus to reduce the debt guarantees political disaster, so it is never going to happen. Never. Everybody figures that the disaster will happen after they are dead, so why worry? Brilliant. Ethics Alarms used to discuss how irresponsible and incompetent this is. The topic is now officially in my “Futile Ethics Grandstanding” category along with demanding that guns be banned, an end to all wars, the “two state solution” for Palestinians, and slavery reparations.

Thing Two: During the first Trump Administration a refrain on conservative blog Instapundit referring to the Democrats was, “All they had to do was not be crazy, and they couldn’t do it. “Yesterday President Donald Trump’s handpicked board at the Kennedy Center voted to add an inscription below the Kennedy Center’s sign, saying the arts complex was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” This is designed to get around the court order rejecting the attempted at re-naming of the performance complex to include Trump’s name. There is no defending this obsession. It is crazy, petty, the kind of thing that triggers the “No Kings” fools, and accomplishes nothing but stroking Trump’s massive and frequently bonkers ego.

Now go find more things…

On The California-Texas Foiled Baby Murder Case, Part II: Ethics Verdicts

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Again, I don’t know how any thoughtful, ethical person could question the outcome in this case. Apparently the “intended parents” refused to agree that they would seek appropriate medical care for the child after he was born with a serious but medically correctable heart problem. Having been unsuccessful in their efforts to have the child aborted late term, these ghouls were going to get custody of the child and perhaps have a hospital administer “palliative care”…that is, let the baby die. Pleasantly, of course,

A legal battle, at least regarding the life of the child, was averted when the child was born ahead of the September 3 due date.

As with some of the other cases discussed in Part 1, how could a typical pro-abortion advocate who uses the standard pro-abortion rhetoric about women’s “bodily autonomy” argue that the parents could force the surrogate to undergo an abortion? Yet abortion activists are apparently immune to integrity, logic, and decency. The main thing is to get the unborn child disposed of.

The surrogate’s contract contained a clause obligating her to submit to an abortion if the “intended parents” demanded it. The lawyers who drafted that contract should be sued for legal malpractice, and there are arguable ethical violations as well. I am wondering how common such contracts are, and how often they are enforced. For human beings cannot sell themselves into slavery or otherwise contract away their “unalienable rights.” That contract provision is unenforceable as against public policy, and should be made illegal by statute.

Republicans should pass the bill in the House and make Democrats show their lack decency when they vote it down.

Ethics points:

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