Compared to most of the mouth-foaming progressive activist and propagandists that make up the New York Times stable of pundits, I suppose you could call David Brooks a sort-of conservative, everything being relative. But he also poses as a public intellectual and “the adult in the room,” which is why his recent disinformation while serving as a guest on the PBS NewsHour last week is so damning.
In a discussion about gun control, Brooks responded to host host Judy Woodruff query, “You agree the likelihood of there being any more federal action on guns is very unlikely?” by saying,
I have never understood why an Australian-style gun buyback is an affront to anybody. It’s an open choice. You can sell your gun or not. But if we’re going to reduce 400 million guns, it would take something like that, not even just banning future purchases. I mean, we have got 400 million here!
Typically, Ethics Alarms has highlighted July 3 with reflections on the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, for which the 3rd was the dramatic last and decisive day. I know it must be hard to believe, but I do get tired of writing the same things over and over again, an occupational hazard of being an ethicist during a mass ethics breakdown in our democracy and among the increasingly corrupt people we have put in power to protect it. I still can’t ignore Pickett’s futile charge and Custer’s charge as well, so I direct you to last year’s post on both events and their ethics implications.
However, this year I am introducing the July 3 warm-up with another crucial anniversary, one that may have had even more impact on the history of the United States, its prospects and its values than Gettysburg. July 2, 1776 is when the Continental Congress finally agreed to take the leap and forge a new nation (John Adams thought the 2nd would be thedaywe celebrated) and July 4, 1776 was the date the document was signed. But in-between those more noted dates the Continental Congress began debating and editing Jefferson’s draft Declaration, eventually making 86 edits that cut the length by about a fourth.
Because the Declaration of Independence is the mission statement of America, framing and sometimes compelling what followed, especially the Constitution, the editing decisions of July 3, 1776 affected our laws and culture in many ways that are unimaginable after more than 200 years. You can read the original here. It is this deleted paragraph, however, that most inspires reflections on what might have been (and what might not):
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of theChristian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
1. I hate to take pleasure in anyone’s career setbacks, but...the word that CNN’s unethical media watchdog, Brian Stelter, is about to get dumped is good news for everyone but him. It also means that CNN will have rid itself of its two most flagrantly partisan and dishonest talking heads, the other being Chris Cuomo. Stelter took over “Reliable Sources” from the flawed but qualified Howard Kurtz, who had covered media conduct for the Washington Post, and at least tried to be objective (and still does at Fox.) Stelter immediately transformed the Sunday show into a CNN-fawning, Fox News-bashing epitome of what a news ethics show must not be. The last hack standing among CNN’s worst is now Don Lemon, who because he is black, gay and cute apparently is immune from his just desserts. As Meat Loaf memorably observed, however, two out of three ain’t bad.
2. Wait, what? Tim Allen isn’t the voice of Buzz Lightyear in the new Pixar film? The Buzz origin film, which has Chris Evans as the new voice of the popular character from “Toy Story” 1-4 is already creating controversy because it features a lesbian kiss. You know: that’s Disney’s way now. The movie’s director Angus MacLane “explained” that the recasting was necessary because the new animated film called for a more serious Buzz. Does anyone believe that? Allen was replaced because he’s an outspoken conservative, and Disney/Pixar wanted a star who would vigorously defend lesbian smooches in a kids movie, because that is apparently it’s priority these days. If the director wanted Buzz to sound more serious, he could direct the voice actor to voice him that way.
In Brazil, a culture where respect for women is comparable to the U. S. in the early 19th Century, Gabriel Coelho forced Tayane Caldas, his 18-year-old ex-girlfriend, into his car as she was walking home from school. He drove her to his home, and the 20-year-old Coelho then tattooed his full name on the girl’s face, as you can see above. Coelho claims that Tayane consented.
So I guess she wants to get back together with him…
Actually, that seems unlikely. For one thing, she had requested and received two restraining orders against Coelho, one in 2021 and another this year. Still, Tayane’s mother had to encourage her daughter to press charges against her ex-boyfriend, as she was initially inclined to simply hide her new face tattoo with make-up. The fact that she even was thinking this way shows how primitive female self-esteem can be in Brazil.
Gabriel Coelho is under arrest, though his father backs his ridiculous defense that she consented to be branded. Of course he does. Men like Gabriel don’t turn out believing women are property without a role model.
People always tell me they watch the BBC because it isn’t biased like American broadcast news. It must be the British accents: the BBC is relentlessly, overwhelmingly left-biased. This is a socialist nation that is smothered in political correctness. It’s at least as untrustworthy as any US news source.
Here’s a case in point: the BBC changed the testimony of a rape victim who referred to her alleged rapist as “him.” That was a reasonable choice on her part, because, well, because of the rapist’s “part.” Never mind: Facts Don’t Matter in jolly old England either: the victim’s words were changed to avoid “misgendering” the rapist in an article on the BBC website, which replaced every reference to “he” or “him” with “they” or “them.”
Wait—was it a gang rape? The BBC said in response to the episode was, “Our only intention when deciding on language is to make things as clear as possible for audiences.” Now that’s hilarious! In what universe is calling a single person “them” and “they” clearer than calling a rapist who did the deed with an attached male sex organ “he” and “him”?
Silly me. I thought actor James Cromwell (“Babe,” “The Queen”) super-gluing himself to a Starbucks counter to protest the high price of vegan milk was the dumbest protest I had heard about in years, and it turns out that it wasn’t even the dumbest protest this month.
At the Louvre last night, a man disguised as a handicapped woman was rolling past Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in a wheelchair when he leapt to his feet and threw a custard pie at the painting. Why? Can’t you guess? He attacked the lady with the ambiguous smile to protest climate change, of course!
Walking Spuds just now before the rains come, I saw no fewer than fivefellow Alexandrians, ranging in age from about 60 to 13, walking along on a lovely, cool day without appearing to look up once from their cell phone screens. I said “Hi!” to two of them, but they didn’t hear me because they had earbuds blocking out all auditory stimulation from the outside world. One was walking a dog trailing behind., but I could have replaced it with a rabid wolverine for al she would have noticed.
Right after I posted about Stacey Abrams’ ongoing con and the mainstream media’s immediate resort to the “Republicans pounce!” deflection, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel tweeted, “Why did John Fetterman chase down a Black person with a shotgun?’ asks Barnette. The GOP use of this 2013 incident – which some PA Dems predicted would be used in the general to discourage Black turnout – has begun.” Barnette is recently defeated GOP Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Kathy Barnette, who raised the 2013 incident when Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman detained an innocent African-American jogger with a loaded shotgun and pointed it at his chest. How rude of her! (That was criminal assault, by the way.) Instapundit asks, “Who Among Us Has Not Chased Down an Unarmed Black Jogger with a Shotgun?” and the National Review muses on how the mainstream media would handle a similar incident if the candidate in question were a conservative rather than an extreme progressive “Bernie Bro.”
Finally: a respected, objective scientist who is trying to explain how useless the arguments of climate change hysterics are, and how incompetent and dishonest (or ignorant) the Left’s approach to the problem continues to be.
The scientist is Vaclev Smil. He’s the Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, with interdisciplinary research interests including energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies. His latest book is “How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.” The New York Times Magazine made the mistake (from its political agenda’s point of view, anyway) of interviewing him about climate change, and the interviewer, David Marchese, was clearly dismayed at what he heard.
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…
Ethics Alarms 