“bias makes you stupid”

Just the Facts, Ma’am: The Historian’s Responsibility

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Guest Post by AM Golden

[From your host: AM Golden has a second guest post this week, which is what happens when you send two excellent submissions that get lost in my email. This one is not only on a topic near and dear to my heart—the ethics rot in the ranks of American historians—but also on a specific historian and work that I had flagged for a potential Ethics Alarms post myself. How I love it when a participant in the ethics wars here not only saves me the time and toil of writing a post, but does such a superb job of it, which AM definitely does here. JM.]

Of the professions that have been disgracing themselves for the last 10 years or so, the betrayal of historians has cut me the deepest.

We all have biases.  Each of us has a responsibility to be aware of those biases in a professional setting and work to subdue them.  Prior to the 2016 campaign, I’d already learned to get a feel for an author’s premise before starting a book.  If an author likes Andrew Jackson, for example, he or she will likely rationalize unpleasant facts about his life.  If an author hates him; however, he or she will diminish Jackson’s triumphs.  This is unprofessional. It is also unethical. A historian should be devoted not only to fact, but also putting fact within its appropriate historical context.  Whether you like him or not, Jackson played a significant role in our country’s history.  A competent historian can produce a “Warts and All” portrayal without compromising the integrity of the subject.

Since 2016, a new practice has entered the history books:  gratuitous, sometimes barely relevant, statements about Donald Trump.  A recent book I will not name included two completely superfluous footnotes regarding secessionist states and how many of them voted for Trump.  In general, though, it’s included in the prologue or, more often, the epilogue to allow the author to tie the secessionists, the Dixiecrats or some other group of bigots (but never, for some reason, FDR’s State Department which deliberately slow-walked paperwork for desperate Jews in Europe) to Trump.

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Stop Making Me Defend the Supreme Court!

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Almost a year ago, Ethics Alarms discussed the case of Liam Morrison (above), a seventh grader who was told that his “There are only two genders” T-shirt was inappropriate as school attire. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld a District Court decision from 2023 that the Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts didn’t violate Liam’s First Amendment rights by telling him to change his shirt.

Chief Justice David Barron, writing for the Court, concluded that “the question here is not whether the t-shirts should have been barred. The question is who should decide whether to bar them – educators or federal judges.” He continued, “We cannot say that in this instance the Constitution assigns the sensitive (and potentially consequential) judgment about what would make ‘an environment conducive to learning’ at NMS to use rather than to the educators closest to the scene.”

I wrote, in a post agreeing with the decision both ethically and legally,

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“Welcome Summer!” Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Last week on YouTube’s “The Morning Meeting,” Mark Halperin and Dan Turrentine appeared to acknowledge Ethics Alarms’ “Julie Principle.” They just didn’t know what it was called.

President Trump had delivered the commencement address at West Point while wearing a red MAGA cap (Oh NOOOO! He’s violating “norms” again!) and on Monday published a Memorial Day Truth Social post like some of his previous holiday wishes—you know, one of his “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!” style shots. Halperin noted that many Democratic critics and pundits, right on cue, were freaking out.

“If you read [historian] Heather Cox Richardson or the emails and texts I get from my Democratic sources, as I said before, the Trump administration’s over. And it’s just a bankrupt, you know, corrupt mess and he’s already a failed president and he’s not getting anything done. That’s their point of view. They also are very taken with his wearing a MAGA hat … to give … a West Point graduation speech,” Halperin said. “They’re taken with his tweet, his Truth Social post, saying ‘Happy Memorial Day’ and criticizing Joe Biden. And they’re back to a Adam Schiffian and [biased and Trump Deranged historian] Heather Cox Richardson point of view, which is everything Trump does is an epic disaster and that the American people will turn on him and Republicans in the midterms because he’s impolite.”

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In San Francisco, the Dumb Rise and Almost Immediate Fall of “Grading for Equity”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments


When I am forced to consider what is considered “right” and “wrong” in California in general and San Francisco particularly, I feel like I have stumbled into a real life Bizarro World. That is the cube-shaped planet in “Superman” comics where brain-damaged mutations of Superman and Lois Lane pursue a topsy-turvy existence constrained by practices and values that are the reverse of what normal Earthlings regard as self-evident.

The latest manifestation of this West Coast insanity is, or was, “Grading for Equity“, a woke education scheme that was scheduled to be imposed this fall at 14 high schools and over 10,000 students. “Grading for Equity” forbids homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that counts are student grades on a final examination, which can be taken as many times as it takes to pass. “Grading for Equity” also de-emphasizes the importance of timely performance, completion of assignments, and consistent attendance, so students turning in assignments late will not be penalized. Not showing up at class will not affect grades either.Students with scores as low as 80 (out of 100) will get an A; a score as low as 21 will be considered sufficient to pass, with a D.

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In a Competitive Commencement Season, Evelyn Harris Makes a Strong Bid For Most Unethical Speech of 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Favorites Tim Walz, Scott Pelley and Kermit the Frog may have fallen to an underdog: “musician and activist” Evelyn Harris (whoever she is) may have succeeded in embarrassing her host school the most of all with her 2025 commencement speech.

For some reason, Smith College, which has apparently become too woke to function, included Harris, a relatively obscure singer (but more importantly, an activist) among its all female honorees this year. The most prominent one of these would probably be far-left historian Danielle Allen, who has several items in her Ethics Alarms dossier. Or maybe it would be the (historic!) highest ranking trans official in US history, former assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Rachel Levine, one of Biden’s DEI appointments. Then there was new age-y guru Preeti Simran Sethi, the only one of the four who is a Smith grad. All of these, however, whatever their issues, at least managed to compose their own speech to give to the graduates.

Harris didn’t. Smith officials learned that her entire speech had been cribbed from other sources without attribution (you know, like Joe Biden once did), and had to inform the Smith community that it had been deceived. “It has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients — musician Evelyn M. Harris — borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity,” the letter read in part.

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One For the Unethical Quote of the Month Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”

—–Liliya A. Medvedeva, Russian pensioner, quoted by the New York Times in “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History” about how many Russians regard the brutal dictator as a hero for his role in defeating Germany in World War II.

But Lily, everybody doesn’t make “mistakes” that result in the deaths or executions of between six and nine million people.

You idiot.

For the record, Lily’s rationalization is one of the most obnoxious on the list, #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!”

Re Abortion: Another “Bias Makes You Stupid” Op-Ed in the NYT

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s kind of funny when headline writers are so clueless and biased that what they think is a “res ipsa loquitur” story proving one thing actually reveals something completely different.

The headline on a Times op-ed ed last week was “A Brain-Dead Woman Is Being Kept on Machines to Gestate a Fetus. It Was Inevitable.” (I’m using my last gift link of the month on this one, so you’d better read it!) The writer was Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School.

The entire piece radiates contempt for the concept of treating the unborn as human lives, which, you know, they are and rather undeniably so. Readers are informed that Adriana Smith is brain dead, and has been connected to life support machines for more than 90 days to save the life of her baby. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she died from multiple blood clots in her brain.

“Her fetus’s heart continued to beat,” writes the professor, as if it was an abandoned car with a functioning carburetor. Georgia, she explains, is one of those crazy, fetus-worshiping states where a nascent human being is deemed a human life that can’t be snuffed out on a whim if it has a heartbeat. This, to the op-ed’s author, the headline writer and the New York Times is completely unfathomable.

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“The Ethicist” Faces The Ultimate Ethics Test…and Flunks

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The topic is abortion.

This is discouraging, if not unexpected. After all, “The Ethicist,” aka. NYU philosophy professor Kwame Appiah, works for the New York Times, Where Ethics Go To Die. Nonetheless, the clueless certitude of his latest column is as offensive as it is indefensible for someone in the ethics field.

An inquirer asked The Ethicist “Does My Spouse Get a Say in Whether to Carry an Unplanned Pregnancy?” That framing alone was foreshadowing for what was to come; notice that the issue is a “pregnancy” and whether it is wanted. and not the snuffing out of a nascent human life, which is where this ethical conflict becomes difficult to resolve.

This time, I’m going to do running commentary on both “Name Withheld’s” query and Prof. Appiah’s answer. First, the question:

“I’m 46, unexpectedly pregnant despite having entered perimenopause, with three children already (the youngest is 4).” COMMENT: And your age and the number of children you have affects the right of an innocent life to continue how?

“My husband calls this a “disaster,” and believes abortion is the clear choice because we didn’t want another child or plan on this pregnancy.” COMMENT: Ending a human life is only a “clear choice” for psychopaths.

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“Jake Tapper, Ethics Villain” Continues—Today’s Episode: “Jake Is Unethical, But He’s Not Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In a just released video, conservative scholar and commentator Victor Davis Hanson adds his perspective to the Jake Tapper scandal, a sub-scandal to the Biden Dementia cover-up conspiracy of which he was a part, itself a sub-scandal of the Democratic Party’s descent into aspiring totalitarianism. From the transcript…

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“The Case of the Cut-Short Crucible”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That’s what this unholy mess of a high school play ethics train wreck would be called if it were an old “Perry Mason” episode.

The run of a student production of “The Crucible” at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge Georgia was cut from two performances to one for reasons unknown. Understandably, the students and their parents were upset. The administration explained that the reason was a licensing agreement violation, and the school was afraid of having to pay damages, or something. It said in a statement,

“After Friday night’s performance of “The Crucible,” we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play. Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script. These alterations were not approved by the licensing company or administration. The performance contract for The Crucible does not allow modifications without prior written approval. Failing to follow the proper licensing approval process for additions led to a breach in our contract with the play’s publisher. The infraction resulted in an automatic termination of the licensing agreement. The second performance of The Crucible could not occur because we were no longer covered by a copyright agreement.”

Ah, but woke theater Fury Howard Sherman, the same guy who thinks that it’s okay for actors to boycott performances they are contractually obligated to perform because they don’t like the political views of particular audience members (like, say, the President of the United States), is muckraking again. He writes on his website that he’s sure that the show was really cancelled because “the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledge American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust.” See, somebody’s mother told a student that the principle had said “that somebody in the audience didn’t like the context of the play and said that it was demonic and disgusting” so the final performance was cancelled.

Does Sherman produce any evidence that isn’t double hearsay that such a sequence occurred? Nope. Do we hear a quote or see a message from the alleged illiterate lunatic who registered such a complaint? No again. But never mind: Sherman is a progressive (to be fair, most theater types are progressives…welcome to my world) with an agenda.

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