I feel constrained to post this after someone suggested that in the Bret Stephens essay I was bestowing Ethics Hero status on the Axis media’s top propaganda mouthpiece. The op-ed by professional illegal immigration romanticizer Isabel Castro (above) is a far more representative piece in a genre the Times is particularly fond of: demanding sympathy for individuals facing deportation entirely because of their own choices and conduct.
The title is a hoot: “How the ICE Raids Are Warping Los Angeles.” It is like a Chicago paper during the Prohibition and Capone’s zenith publishing a column called “How the FBI is Warping Chicago.” A sample..
I generally don’t want to wander into policy debates unless there is a clear ethical component. Competence. Honesty. Responsibility. Results, as we discuss here so often, are usually the result of moral luck. All we can do, in situations involving high-level leadership decision-making, is evaluate what the basis of the decision was, and the process under which it was made. What happens after that is moral luck, chaos, essentially. As an ethicist, I try not to base my analysis on whether I agree with the decision or not from a policy or pragmatic perspective.
In military and foreign policy decisions, the absence of clear ethical standards are especially rife. There are some who regard any military action at all except in reaction to an attack on the U.S. as unethical, and sometimes not even in that circumstance. They are absolutists: war is wrong, killing is wrong, “think of the children,” and that’s all there is to it. Such people are useless except as necessary reminders that Sherman was right.
President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities is a matter of leadership, not ethics. Leaders lead, and are willing to make tough, often risky, decisions. The U.S. Presidency requires leadership, and strong leadership is not only preferable to weak leadership, it is what the majority of Americans has traditionally preferred. The Constitution clearly shows the Founders’ preference for a strong executive branch, particularly in the area of national defense. Yesterday, the President took advantage of the Constitution’s general approval of executive leadership when national security is involved.
[From your host:I held this excellent guest column submission for about a week, waiting for a propitious time to post it. JD Vance’s adventure on the platform, which I discussed here, was exactly the context I was waiting for.And it gives me an0ther chance to feature Bing….JM]
Anyone who doubts the uniqueness of the American Revolution need only to look to France several years later when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and set up a Republic. As revolutions were wont to do, those who replaced the guys in charge eventually demanded that everyone follow their ideas in lockstep. Those who did not were accused of lacking sufficient revolutionary fervor and risked literally losing their heads. The self-righteous Jacobins who forced this pure ideology eventually devoured themselves as, again, revolutionaries are wont to do, until the head Jacobin, Robespierre, eventually lost his own head and disenchantment led to the installation of Napoleon as Top Dog.
That should have happened in the United States, too. Despite the passions of the Federalists and the Jeffersonian anti-Federalists, though some nasty words were printed and spoken aloud, no one was murdered for his lack of purity (unless you count Alexander Hamilton, which I don’t because that was less an ideological battle than a personal grudge).
Ever since talented-but-socially-awkward Elon Musk bought Twitter, turned it into X and antagonized all those people who bought his so-called climate-friendly vehicles, those same Tesla owners have flocked to every other faddish social media that promises 24/7 Trump/Musk hate in addition to freedom from having to be exposed to the opinions of those who disagree with them.
It was one of our illustrious commentators here (I do not remember which one. I apologize. It’s been three years and I’ve slept since then) who suggested that many of the Hollywood types would realize their mistake when they exchange 80,000 followers for 80. That person was right.
I have belonged to Facebook for years. I’ve tried Instagram but find it unwieldy and boring. I couldn’t help it, however, when one of my favorite performers made the Grand Announcement that he was headed over to the new Post.News in 2022, which promised conversations “moderated for civility”. It took ten days to get me onboarded and I found the place to be overwhelmingly progressive….and small.
Don’t get me wrong, there was a huge influx of members. Then nothing. Some of them even proposed that members try to make a positive platform there by building a community not based on complaining about the platform they’d just left. I heavily curated what I followed and then began contributing content on a daily basis: I recommended books on history that I’d read myself. I amassed over 30 followers over the next 18 months; the favorite performer barely broke 100.
Ultimately, though, it was not a sustainable platform. It folded. Once again, members were looking for places to hide from the world, including Favorite Performer, and were pulled into Bluesky. This time, I didn’t take the plunge.
In April, the American Alliance for Equal Rights led by Edward Blum, the scourge of affirmative action and “good discrimination” policies, filed a complaint in an Illinois federal court alleging that the American Bar Association’s 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship discriminates against white applicants. Since their skin color renders them unable to apply, this contention seems beyond debate. The question is whether, as a trade association, the ABA has a right to discriminate.
The Alliance said it is representing an unnamed white male law school applicant who says that he would apply for the $15,000 Legal Opportunity Scholarship were he not prevented from doing so because he is the “wrong” race. The ABA awards between 20 and 25 such scholarships annually to incoming law students, according to its website, which is excerpted above.
I should have covered this in April: sorry. [Believe me, if I could find a way to work on the blog full-time without ending up living on cat food and in a shack by the docks, I would.] Anyway, this kind of thing is why I do not pay dues to the ABA, and why I am suspicious of any lawyer who does. It is an interesting case. I assumed that Blum would lose if the case proceeded, and that his main objective was to shame the ABA into opening up the race-based scholarships to all. But the ABA has no shame. And I knew that.
The American Bar Association responded to Blum’s suit this week, arguing that a scholarship program designed to boost diversity among law students is protected free speech. The 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship, the largest lawyer association in the nation asserts, is protected under the First Amendment. In its motion to dismiss the ABA also claimed that plaintiff American Alliance for Equal Rights lacks standing to sue.
A federal appeals court on June 19 extended its block of a Judge Breyer’s flamingly partisan order that directed President Trump to return control of California’s National Guard to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was obviously determined to let pro-open border crazies harass ICE agents and riot across Los Angeles.
The three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 9th Circuit issued a unanimous order, and one of the three judges was a Biden appointee! The roughly 4,000 National Guard troops can now stay in Los Angeles, to protect federal property and U.S. immigration agents, while preventing a replay of George Floyd Madness that the Mad Left would dearly love to see. Could a “Undovument Migrants’ Lives Matter” group be far behind?
I woke up today with so much already happening on the ethics front that I immediately knew I had no chance of making a dent in it, especially since I am facing deadlines and crises on other fronts. Let me get one minor matter out of the way before I turn it over to you, dear EA contributers.
There were two items in yesterday’s potpourri post relating to the persistent insanity on “The View.” I wonder if I should just ignore that idiot program from now on, applying the Julie Principle. Occasionally the thing makes news, but it is a blight on the culture and social discourse. Barbara Walters, who started it, needs to be marked down in critical assessments of her career because her creation inflicted Joy Behar, Whoopie and Sunny Hostin and the rest on our social and political discourse.
Here is one last “View”-related ethics ugliness. Speaking on the “Behind the Table” podcast this week (who listens to these things?), Hostin, arguably the worst of the worst on the current panel, discussed the moment when Kamala Harris declared on the show that she wouldn’t change a thing her alleged boss, Joe Biden, had done during his Presidency. Harris’s fatuous response—did she ever say anything that wasn’t fatuous?—came after Hostin tossed the Democrats’ DEI nominee the softest of softball questions: what would she do differently from Biden? “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” said Kamala.
Many believe that Harris lost the 2024 election in that moment, which is scary to think given how many other reasons she gave the voters to vote Republican. Hostin, in the podcast, said, “I knew it instantly when she answered it. Which is why I asked the follow-up question, ‘is there one thing?’ Because I knew, I could see the soundbite and I knew what was going to happen, but I thought it was a really fair question and I thought it was a question that she would expect… I feel terrible.”
Bob Hoge writes at Redstate, “Such are the depths to which our mainstream media has sunk, that a professional pundit doesn’t have regrets about trying to push an incompetent candidate on the country; no, her real regret is that Kamala was exposed.”
As I have mentioned here before, I usually sample broadcast news by simultaneously watching CNN, Fox News, BBC America and MSNBC on the DirecTV “News Mix” channel, never staying with any of them for more than a few minutes because they all are unethical, biased, and untrustworthy and it drives me CRAZY!
Just now, I saw Wolf Blitzer (has anyone ever parlayed a cool name into such a long, undeserved TV career despite persistent mediocrity?) interview an “expert,” clearly another Trump-hating law professor. She opined that President Trump “might” be violating the Constitution ( “KING! FASCIST!”) by directing ICE to again focus their illegal immigrant raids on restaurants, farms and hotels. It’s a likely violation of the Tenth Amendment, she opined. “The Tenth Amendment reserves the policing power to the states.”
That’s funny, I thought. I don’t recall the Tenth Amendment saying anything about police, and indeed, it doesn’t. What it says is that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Like the Second Amendment, the Tenth was not the Founders’ most shining hour in terms of clear, unambiguous language. The Tenth continues to be a rich and never-ending target for the Supreme Court controversies, but SCOTUS did rule, in McCulloch v. Maryland, that there is a principle of implied powers where the federal government (Congress or the Executive) can exercise powers not explicitly listed in the Constitution if they are necessary and proper for carrying out its enumerated powers. Obviously the ability to enforce federal law would fall under that category, but okay ICE foes, take your best shot and see what SCOTUS says.
However, what the “expert” implied was that the Tenth explicitly included policing as one of the powers reserved to the state. Wolf, either as a deceitful accomplice or as an ignorant boob (I’m guessing the latter to give him the benefit of the doubt) just sat there nodding. Thus any viewer who wasn’t moved to check the Bill of Rights (I’m guessing that’s 99.9% of CNN’s audience) was left with the false impression that President Trump is being a dictator again by directing a Federal Agency.
Let’s see: fake news, misinformation, partisan spin, deceit. Take your pick. No wonder the Axis was able to gull thousands of citizens into wasting time on “No Kings” day.
Unfortunately, this was a hoax that fooled the mostly reliable source I found it posted on, with no hint that it wasn’t authentic. Twitter/X cheated me out of my blue check payment and blocked me from my account for no discernible reason and I am not going to follow Truth Social any more than I am likely to hang out at Bluesky.
I originally wrote in part, “Yes, this is a violation of “norms” except for Trump’s norms, of which this is a familiar example. No other President would issue such a sarcastic jibe at passionate protesters against his leadership and policies no matter how ell-earned. That, I believe, would be their failing. President Trump is the perfect person to deliver the devastating coup de gras to these foolish, hysterical, unhinged boobs. Only he can say with such vivid authority, “You didn’t lay a hand on me!”
Alas, it was too good to be true, and I should have realized that. The real Real Donald Trump could not resist writing something much cruder and insulting.
I’ll just end with my obligatory statement that deliberately posting false information on the web is unethical even if one isn’t a journalist.
Special thanks to my friend James Flood, who was the first one to flag my gullibility.
This would be an Unethical Quote of the Week if there were any reason to believe what the New York Times says about President Trump, and if the Times didn’t make equally unethical quotes every day.
“…The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.
Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.”
It gives me great pleasure to know that Times boot-licker ” “A Friend,” the long-banned EA commenter who has set a nearly unbreakable record for unauthorized posts here, most bleating about how unfair I am to the noble Times, will be desperately searching for a way to rationalize that verbal offal without having to admit, “Okay, the Times editors are partisan hacks.”
Today, we heard from Felecia, a single mom of four who works up to three jobs at a time to make ends meet. She counts on SNAP to help put food on the table.
This is who Republicans in Congress are trying to take food away from.
I am not passing judgment on the SNAP controversy, and Felicia may be a nice person and a wonderful mother.
However, rudimentary thought and consideration regarding perceptions, personal responsibility and common sense ought to make all but the hopelessly obtuse realize that a morbidly obese woman is a self-rebutting advocate for food stamps, as well as a meme waiting to be posted. Moreover, why is a single mother who has to work three jobs having four children?
Is Sen. Klobuchar really so dense (well, yes) and crippled by tunnel vision that the flaws in this particular advocate’s position never occurred to her? I have to believe Felecia exposes the astounding immunity progressives seem to have to reality, unless they are cynically convinced that the American public really is dominated by morons.
Ethics Alarms 