Author: Jack Marshall

Not “The Great Stupid,” Just Good Old Fashioned American Stupidity That Lets Bad Ideas Take Root And Demagogues Prosper…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yesterday on her MSNBC show, Tiffany Cross featured Fernand Amandi, a Democrat pollster and adviser, and a regular on hers’s over-heated far-left hysteria orgy. Just think, the New York Times spent 6+ full pages today calling for the metaphorical life boats because Tucker Carlson’s monologues criticizing the Times and its pals for their anti-democratic efforts are getting longer, while Cross is part of an entire network that deals in toxic narratives and bias from dawn til dusk that the Times barely never criticizes at all.

This time, her frequent guest went quickly from gaslighting to totalitarian strategy.

First the gaslighting:

The Democrats have a wonderful story to tell! And I think it could be distilled to something as simple as: the Democrats saved your life. They saved your job. They saved the economy. And now they’re trying to save democracy from a Republican party that no longer believes [in] it. 

Isn’t that great? Who besides Rob Reiner could say something so ridiculous on television and not have to leave with his head in a sack? Yes, Democrats really are going to continue arguing that if you vote Republican you’re going to die, that a tanking economy is a great economy, that the pandemic deaths (or deaths attributed to the pandemic to achieve maximum fear) under Trump were “blood on his hands” and the even greater number of deaths under Biden’s watch were still “blood on Trump’s hands,” and that the party trying to crush free speech, cripple the rule of law, weaken the integrity of elections, pack the Supreme Court and criminalize Democratic opposition is going to “save” democracy.

The bet is that progressive-dominated educational institutions and news media has left the public so ignorant and incompetent that this might sound reasonable.

Then Amandi provided the totalitarian strategy: to beat the GOP in the coming elections, all Democrats have to do is arrest them!

[I]t’s one thing to try and disqualify a Republican party that no longer believes in democracy, but you need a little bit of help. If the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General Merrick Garland, do not start issuing indictments, not to the front line of Proud Boys and picknickers of January 6th that led an insurrection, but to the perpetrators of the crime, the Members of Congress who we now know through text messages were plotters, the ringleaders at the top echelon of the Republican party, up into an including the Republican president, Donald Trump, voters are not going to believe that, they’re gonna just think that it’s political back-and-forth. The Justice Department needs to hold the perpetrators accountable….If these Republicans gain control, they will not give it back. We will lose democracy. And if you lose democracy, it’s not the sort of thing that you get back…You may not see it again in your lifetime in this country. 

Why of course! Why didn’t we think of that before! The way to win elections is to arrest the leaders of the opposing party! That will save democracy!

And Tiffany Cross said, ” Yeah! I think that is the message that voters need to hear.” Continue reading →

Lazy Sunday Afternoon Ethics Picnic, 5/1/2022: A Very Merry Un-Birthday Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There’s vintage Disney—back before it decided it had a stake in having young children instructed in sexual matters by teachers, and when innocence was considered worth protecting. Yes, I recognize the irony in saying that about an “Alice in Wonderland” clip, given that Lewis Carroll was unhealthily obsessed with little girls, often asking their parents for permission to photograph them nude…and got it! (Alice was his favorite model.)

That’s the very strange and great Jerry Colonna voicing the March Hare, and Ed Wynn, of course, as the Mad Hatter.

Today is my “un-birthday.” My 94-year-old aunt, the last surviving member of her generation in my extended family called me up this morning to wish me a happy birthday. Since my real birthday is December 1, I was faced with an instant ethical conflict: was the right course to tell the truth, risking embarrassing her, or to play Birthday Boy, lying but being kind in the process? I opted for honesty, both using the Golden Rule—I wouldn’t want to be patronized—and deciding that my aunt, still sharp and always with a sense of humor, could, like Tom Cruise, handle the truth. She could; she laughed, wondered how she has the wrong date on her calendar, and we talked for an hour. SHE mentioned “un-birthdays,” causing me to recall the song.

1. Ethics lesson: Integrity should trump Loyalty. Elon Musk, responding to to the absurd ad hominem attacks from progressives calling him a fascist, a white supremacist and, worst of all, a conservative, provided this handy dandy sketch via, of course, Twitter, explaining that his beliefs have remained relatively stable, while his critics’ perspective has shifted:

2. And we trust these people with educating or rising generations…The University of Southern California former dean of the University of Southern California asked the law firm Jones Day to investigate allegations that its education school directed administrators to omit information from its U.S. News & World Report rankings submission to boost the school’s placement.  at least as far back as 2013, According to the just-release investigation results,   former dean Karen Symms Gallagher made sure that the Rossier School of Education only included information on its Ph.D. program, which has a lower acceptance rate than its Ed.D. programs,  despite explicit instructions in the questionnaire to include both Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs. Gallagher stepped down in 2020 after 20 years as dean. She’s now a professor at Rossier.

The probe turned up what Jones Day referred to as “irregularities” in how the education school calculated and reported research expenditures, and it identified other possible misreporting of faculty metrics, online program enrollment, graduates’ job-placement rates and more.  USC had pulled the  school from consideration in the U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings prior to the report.

Will she be sacked as a professor? What’s your guess? Continue reading →

The New York Times’ Hysterical (And Unethical) Hit Piece On Tucker Carlson

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

So many things jump to mind as Ethics Alarms considers the astounding front page attack on Fox New pundit Tucker Carlson in today’s Sunday Times, preceded by the article’s online release yesterday, first among them being “Stop making me defend Tucker Carlson!” Tucker Carlson is an unethical, dishonest, ambitious and cynical pundit whose sincerity and and integrity are ephemeral at best. I learned this long ago when he was still wearing bow ties to signal his conservatism, engaged in such activities as falling asleep on “Fox and Friends” and seeding his conservative news and commentary website The Daily Caller with soft porn to goose traffic. I won’t watch Carlson’s show unless I have to for Ethics Alarms purposes, and then only via videos.

Carlson has increasingly become a demagogue as his ratings have soared. Yet Ethics Alarms has condemned the efforts by progressives (you know: anti-free speech advocates) to bring him down and end his ability to counter the 95%-5% mainstream media pro-Left bias by employing boycotts of his sponsors. I am confident that Tucker, like Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olberman, Melissa Harris Perry, Dan Rather, Glenn Beck and other ethically inert media supernovas will eventually be exposed, disgraced, or self-destruct in an overload of narcissism and arrogance. It is almost inevitable.

Nevertheless, the unrestrained Times piece is the Dean Scream of progressive mainstream media fury over the fact that it no longer can control what Americans know and think. It is headlined in the print edition “American Nationalist,” which the Times appears to assume its readers will respond to as they would to “American Nazi.” Nationalism is commonly defined (by sources that are not politically committed to making the definition repugnant) as promoting the interests of one’s nation  and the goal of maintaining that nation’s culture, independence and sovereignty. The Horror. The fact that the Times is so certain that being identified as a nationalist is so damning might be more significant than the attack itself. Continue reading →

7 Observations On The Unethical Tweet Of The Week By Rob Reiner

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Observations:

1. What happened to Rob Reiner? How did he get that way? I’ve asked my wife to swear that if I ever start writing or saying things this stupid and ignorant, she will hit me over the head with a brick.

2. Declaring Trump a criminal is on the cusp of libel, and capitalizing “criminal” is unethically illiterate for someone with so many followers.

3. The tweet deceitfully implies that using the platform to spread misinformation is unique to Donald Trump. What is significant is that virtually only conservatives and Republicans (and the Babylon Bee) get punished it. Chris Cuomo, to name one of many examples from the news media, tweeted that “hate speech” wasn’t protected by the Bill of Rights, and that it would be illegal for anyone but journalists to read Wikileaks leaks of classified documents. He’s a lawyer (how did THAT happen?), and the public assumes he knows what he’s talking about.

4. Nothing Trump tweeted ever threatened to overthrow the government by any definition: Reiner’s tweet is disinformation!

5. Nothing Trump ever tweeted was “Criminal activity” either. Also disinformation, and yet on Twitter Carl’s deranged son remains.

6. It is clear from Reiner’s tweet that he believes that political opponents’ criticism of his party and political allies should be stifled and blocked if possible. That marks him as hostile to democracy…like increasing numbers of Americans and politicians of his political persuasion.

7. Deft and funny take-down, John Rich!

The Biden Ministry Of Truth Fiasco: “Disinformation,” “Misinformation,” And De-Information

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The New York Times this morning had no reports whatsoever on the emerging truth that the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s ominous-sounding “misinformation and disinformation” board, Nina Jankowicz, has not only been a purveyor of “disinformation” (aka. “intentional lies”) herself, and also, in the blunt words of the editorial board of the New York Post, “a partisan hack,” but also a narcissistic whack-job, as the TikTok video above clearly shows.

The fact that the Biden Administration would be so dense as to appoint a woman like this to head an agency that was guaranteed to set heads exploding everywhere but in the anti-free speech community called Wokeville (see “evil” hidden in there? Huh? HUH??)is just one more indication that common sense and basic competence have left the building, the building being the White House. And Ethics Alarms mocked Trump for not hiring “the best people” as he had promised on the campaign trail! I owe Donald an apology. Even Omarosa, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon weren’t any more untrustworthy than Jankowicz, and they hadn’t been put in charge of a censorship operation.

Continue reading →

Civilization Values Watch: The Kyle Hedquist Clemency Decision

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Oregon’s Woke Governor Kate Brown (above), who humiliated her state during the George Floyd Freakout and who is one of the many state governors whose extremism and incompetence shows just how nuts George Will’s inspiration that U.S. Senators should be barred from the Presidency is, just released convicted murderer Kyle Hedquist from prison. He was serving a life sentence with no chance of parole, but since he was a non-violent offender, and Democrats don’t think non-violent offenders belong in…no, wait, that can’t be right. I guess the reason Brown released Hedquist is that she has minimal reverence for human life—loving abortion will do that to you—and doesn’t like locking up criminals no matter what the crime. The latter delusion has been on display among Democratic attorneys general and district attorneys throughout the nation. (But don’t worry, it’s the Wuhan virus that’s the culprit for skyrocketing violent crime.)

(Sorry, I woke up bitter and sarcastic today. I need a new mattress.)

Hedquist was 17 and a serial burglar when he led 19-year-old Nikki Thrasher down a remote logging road and shot her in the back of the head execution-style because he feared she might tell police about burglaries he had committed. It has never been determined that she actually know about the burglaries, but I’m sure we can all agree that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Hedquist was convicted of murder in 1995 and sentenced to be forever behind bars, but the judge did not count on The Great Stupid descending over Oregon like the plagues of Egypt.

Continue reading →

Turley On The Democrats’ Open Advocacy For Totalitarian Censorship

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That sound Jeff Goldbloom and Sam Neill hear at the end of that clip is a newly freed Tyrannosaurus Rex, which I would much prefer having in my back yard than have what Democrats want to inflict on the nation.

I was all set to vote for Hillary Clinton, disgusting oozing metaphorical warts and all, a few days before Election Day 2016 when some new revelations sunk in, and I concluded that her party was an ideological outlaw, bent on destroying the basic foundations of our nation to ensure their power while using that power to corrupt the culture further. Boy do I hate being right about that—but I was.

The most chilling T-Rex roar yet may be the revelation during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing this week by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkashas. He revealed that his department is setting up a new board designed to counter what it deems to be “misinformation and disinformation” “Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers is co-chair with our Principal Deputy General Counsel, Jennifer Gaskell, in leading a just recently constituted misinformation disinformation governance board….the goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat.” New director Nina Jankowicz’s focus will reportedly be on “irregular migration and Russia.” That’s supposedly the “threat.”

Biden’s minions are so stupid, and so contemptuous of the public! True, many of them are as illiterate and badly educated as Democrats want and need them to be, but Mayorkashas might as well have announced that he was setting up a Ministry of Truth. This is why the news media have been almost completely silent on this (except for Fox News). They realize it sounds ominous. Right now what we know is ominous is only that Biden’s lackeys are so casual about throwing around the idea of the State determining what is “misinformation” and acting on the determination. They also didn’t think people would notice that the new “misinformation and disinformation” czar, Jankowicz, pushed the Biden false narrative that “50 national security officials, and 5 former CIA heads” were certain that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian influence op.”

It’s hard to be terrified of would-be totalitarians who are this incompetent, but what progressives these days lack in brains they make up for in arrogance and ruthlessness.

I’m not going to weigh in on Jankowicz’s ministry until I know what it really will be doing, but Prof. Turley, in his most recent article for USA Today (its there because none of the real newspapers like his focus on the Left’s ethics rot) does a superb job of blowing the whistle on Democrat-driven State censorship efforts that are exactly what they appear to be. Read it all, but here’s an excerpt…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has declared Musk’s pledge to restore free speech values on social media as threatening Democracy itself. She has promised that “there are going to be rules” to block such changes. She is not alone. Former President Obama has declared “regulation has to be part of the answer” to disinformation. For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking to Europe to fill the vacuum and called upon her European counterparts to pass a massive censorship law to “bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”

For years, the First Amendment distinctions have been the focus of liberals who discovered a way to circumvent constitutional bans on censorship by using companies like Twitter and Facebook. Now, that successful strategy could be curtailed as shareholders join figures like Musk in objecting to corporations and media acting like a surrogate state media.

Faced with that prospect, Democrats are falling back to their final line of defense – and finally being honest about their past use of corporate surrogates. They are now calling for outright state censorship…

As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”

Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical…her call for censorship came just weeks after special counsel John Durham offered more details about the accusation that her campaign manufactured a false Russian collusion theory. One of Clinton’s former lawyers is under indictment for the effort. Clinton personally tweeted out the disinformation that is the subject of the federal prosecution. And the Federal Election Commission recently fined her campaign for hiding the funding of the Steele dossier. Given that history, it would be easy to dismiss Clinton’s calls as almost comically self-serving. However, the 27-nation EU just did what she demanded. It gave preliminary approval to the act, which would subject companies to censorship standards at the risk of punitive financial or even criminal measures.

If implemented, it might not matter if Musk seeks to restore free speech values at Twitter. Figures like Clinton are now going to the EU to effectively force companies to continue to censor users.

Faced with liability across Europe, the companies could be forced to base their policies on the lowest common denominator for free speech…

Take it, Burnsie… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: George Will (How Sad…)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Once upon a time, I used to read George Will regularly. He was erudite, he was principled, he was equally critical of both political parties, and he was a reliable champion of ethical values. I don’t know if it was Donald Trump who broke him, but Will’s intellect and integrity certainly didn’t survive Trump’s rise. If nothing else, Will is an elitist, and the prospect of an unmannerly low-class boor entering the White House was too much for George’s aging brain to bear. He snapped, and suddenly the slave of cognitive dissonance, he decided that if a man like Trump was allied to the democratic and political principles he had spent his professional life passionately advocating and defending, then he shouldn’t defend them any more.

Snobbery over substance. Good plan, George!

Since his decline into irrelevance or senility I haven’t wasted a moment on Will’s writings; I don’t care what he thinks, because he no longer thinks clearly. His latest in the Washington Post, however, is special. Risibly titled “Amend the Constitution to bar senators from the presidency,” it checks all the boxes of a truly bad, indeed unethical, op-ed.

Will’s simple-minded argument is…

Banning senators from the presidency would increase the probability of having senators who are interested in being senators, and would increase the probability of avoiding:

Presidents who have never run anything larger than a Senate office. Who have confused striking poses — in the Capitol, on Twitter — with governing…

Oh I see now: George isn’t really advocating banning Senators from being President. He’s just cranky that Senators aren’t doing a better job, and deceiving his readers into believing there’s any solution other than electing better Senators. Of course, Will has never been willing to dirty himself with actual policy making or trying to build public consensus; it’s so much easier to stand on the sidelines and call everyone else idiots.

Continue reading →

Wonderful Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 4/29/22: Chauvin Appeals, Curmie Attacks, Totalitarians Unmask, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

You know, I used to choreograph crap like that.

1. Reading assignment! Esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Curmie has, as promised, posted an essay on his blog discussing the revolting development described here in item #3. I really should have devoted a whole post to it myself: that’s the saga of the San Francisco eighth-grade teacher who was pounced on by her school by being too informative in her instruction on American slavery: She actually brought cotton bolls into class. As he always has done, Curmie’s commentary is sharp and persuasive, and I recommend it highly. Here’s a sample…

Of course, there are those who need to be perceived as victims or they would evaporate like dew in an Arizona August morning. If they can’t complain that the real history of this country isn’t being taught, they’ll complain that it is. Naturally, the teacher in question was suspended for five weeks, and one can reasonably suspect that her subsequent apology was coerced as a condition of her reinstatement. It has all the authenticity of the fake confessions of American POWs in the Korean War. The problem here goes beyond punishing a teacher for doing nothing wrong. Her travails are the direct result of doing something right.  Humiliating good teachers for doing their jobs has become a blood sport.  This must stop.

Indeed it must, along with a lot of other things we are seeing lately courtesy of the Wonderful World of Woke. The question is how?

2. Wilful ignorance or sinister propaganda? Here’s a second reading assignment: progressive columnist Frank Bruni’s op-ed in the Times opposing the idea that parents should exert oversight on what their children are taught in school. Somehow he managed to miss entirely the core element of trust. Once too many teachers decided that their function was to engage in political indoctrination, once the web allowed parents to read about school punishing students for making finger guns and teaching their kids to sing songs extolling Obama, and when an unexpected side effect of (wrongly) closing the schools was to allow parents to witness the kind of instruction that goes on and the kinds of social justice warriors who handled it, responsible parents decided that it was time to assert themselves. And they have, and are. Good. Continue reading →