The Star Spangled Naked Teacher!

It’s been a long time since Ethics Alarms had one of its trademark Naked Teacher Principle tales or even one of it’s many variations, like the Nearly Naked Teacher’s Volunteer Principle, the Drag Queen School Principal Principle, the Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle, and the Too Sexy Firefighter Principle, to name just a few. This one, from Alexander, Georgia, has nothing to do with July Fourth, except that I discovered the story this morning. It is certainly past time for one of these posts: the last one under the tag was here, and it was only about the related Naked Mayor Principle, involving the moronic mayor of Minot, North Dakota who accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to the city’s attorney.

Above is Maris Nichols, 25, a married Georgia high school teacher, who really likes having sex with students: she’s been indicted for showing at least six students the sweet mysteries of life in her classroom, at a golf course, and in a closet). Two of the teenagers were younger than 16. What puts Maris into the Naked Teacher Principle category is that she is a very provocative OnlyFans performer, and was being blackmailed by some of her students—it is unclear if they were among the one she was boinking—for better grades. They had discovered the OnlyFans channel she owns, operates, and uses to display her excellent Linda Lovelace impression, among other things.

Gen. Custer, Pickett’s Charge, and the Seven Enabling Virtues

Today, July 3, in 1863 was the date of Pickett’s Charge, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee ordered a desperate Napoleonic advance against the Union line at Gettysburg in what has come to be a cautionary tale in human bravery and military hubris. The same day marked the zenith of the career of George Armstrong Custer, the head-strong, dashing cavalry officer who would later achieve both martyrdom and infamy as the unwitting architect of the massacre known as Custer’s Last Stand.

I have vowed to do all I can, which admittedly isn’t much, to get the story of what I like to call Custer’s First Stand into our nation’s cultural memory. I wrote much of what you are reading now way back in 2011, and have not adequately fulfilled my pledge since, although I have mentioned “Yellow Hair” (as his Native American conquerors called him) periodically over the years. Many historians have opined that Custer may have saved the Union army from defeat at Gettysburg with his bold actions this day, and therefore may have saved the Union itself. That accomplishment is far more important than the blunder at Little Big Horn that defines Custer’s image and reputation.

Custer’s heroics on the decisive final day of the Battle of Gettysburg teach their own lessons, historical and ethical. Since the East Calvary Field battle has been thoroughly overshadowed by the tragedy of Pickett’s Charge, it is little known and seldom mentioned. That is wrong.

Tell your friends and families the story, which has never been portrayed on screen. It is a really good story.

Continue reading

An Idiot Test For Conservatives: Tucker Carlson Says He’s Starting A New Political Party

I’m giving my inner Fredo a workout lately, because so, SO many positions that I have emphasized early and often on Ethics Alarms have been proving blazingly accurate. To be fair, it didn’t take an IQ much higher than Fredo’s to figure out that Tucker Carlson was a huckster, a fraud, a hypocrite, a shameless self-promoter, a liar and a weasel, but for some strange reason—maybe it was the hair?—an amazing number of usually smart people couldn’t see it. Glib demagogues and sociopaths are like that, though: they hypnotize people with their verbal facility and shameless audacity

Tucker’s latest grift is that he says he wants to start a new political party, presumably of dim-witted, gullible, anti-Semitic, isolationist Republicans. He even appeared on MSNow right after renouncing the GOP, knowing well what the network is and the America it wants to create, but never mind, Tucker Carlson literally has no integrity. He’s smarter than Marjorie Taylor Greene (who isn’t?), not as obviously bat-house crazy as Candace Owen, not as pathetic as Bill Kristol, but still: the man is not a serious person. He makes Bill Maher seem like Victor Davis Hanson. Carlson is a trust fund rich kid who never had to do a hard day’s work in his life, and is the kind of pseudo-intellectual not very bright people think is brilliant.

I’ve written way too much about this creep, but I’m proud to say that I declared that Fox News needed to fire him in 2013, a full decade before they did. Since then I’ve caught him in conflicts of interest, rigging his debates, promoting anti-vaxxers, leaking to the New York Times, found him to be a race-baiter and a legal ignoramus, a destructive agent of distrust and division like Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, General Edwin Walker, Alex Jones, and Robert Welch, openly racist, a hypocrite, a conspiracy theorist and a liar, a toadying suck-up, a publicity whore, and a anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, and more. Other than that, however, he seems to be a great guy.

That’s going to be some party he starts.

This Ethics Story Is Bad Enough, But The Conservative Media Ignoring It Is Worse

The New York Times “breaking news” story from the weekend begins, “Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit: An agreement between the U.S. and Kazakhstan has given a group of American investors with ties to the President and the Commerce Secretary access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten.”

You can read it all here, at a gift link. From my reading, the story seems well sourced and fair, though it is the Times, and the Times has been doing everything in its power for over a decade to undermine Donald Trump. The Times isn’t the only one reporting the story, though: The Nation pounced on it with glee; I’ve also found the story reported by Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, MSN, India Today, various leftist substacks (Paul Krugman loves this story), Yahoo Finance, Mediaite, the Financial Times, and more obscure platforms. I expect CNN, PBS, MSNOW and the alphabet networks to be along any minute.

What I can’t find is any reporting on this apparent conflict of interest and Trump family self-dealing by the conservative media. (As of this moment it is also missing from news aggregator “memeorandum,” I assume because this partisan site is so excited about the Supreme Court upholding the $5 million jury verdict against the President regarding the E. Jean Carroll affair.)

Ethics Dunces: “The Today Show” and Savannah Guthrie

I was briefly tempted to make the latest Savannah Guthrie sympathy porn outbreak on NBC’s “Today” show an Ethics Quiz, but to heck with it: I have no doubts about this. “Today” show is abusing its position as a news or an entertainment show to exploit the disappearance of co-host Savannah Guthrie’s almost certainly dead mother for cheap publicity and reality show appeal. As for Guthrie, it’s simple: she is unprofessional, self-indulgent, and incompetent.

The New York Post reports from “Page Six,” which catalogues celebrity news, gossip, and other matters that waste time and thought,

“[On]“Today” show on Tuesday… Savannah Guthrie broke down in tears while discussing the ransom note her family received in February allegedly claiming her missing mom, Nancy Guthrie, had died. “A lot of people at ‘Today’ are affected by it,” says a source. “There was a sense of sadness today. Everybody just feels so bad for her. There is a lot of uncertainty.” “There is a lot of admiration and praise for her that she is still able to do her job,” says our source. “People really support her and care about her, and people are heartbroken.” During the show, Guthrie said she had “no comment” on the headlines and is “not involved in … coverage” of her mother’s abduction, but that she couldn’t “pretend” to not be present for the conversation. “I just wanted to take the opportunity to really ask people and really beg people to come forward because somebody knows something,” Guthrie continued.“This is a news story today that is on your radar, but this is the life my sister, [Annie Guthrie], lives, that I live, that my brother, [Camron Guthrie], lives, that our extended families live, that our children live every day,” she explained. “We cannot be at peace,” the journalist said. “No matter how much I try to come out here every day and smile and find that joy — and I will, I promise I will — this is a moment to say we need your help. … I’m not gonna miss that opportunity.”Guthrie ended her emotional plea with a promise: “We love our mom, and we’ll never stop looking for her. Ever.”

Ugh.

Ethics Alarms flagged the news media’s Guthrie obsession as unethical special treatment for the rich and famous in February, when the apparent kidnapping was at least new:

Hey Democrats: This Is Your Party!

I can’t wait to hear my Facebook friends blame Trump somehow.

Last night Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old Democratic Socialists of America. member defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in their primary. Chevalier’s stated positions will make her the most radical Democrat, or member of any party, elected to Congress ever if she prevails in November. She wants to abolish police, prisons, and borders. “All deportations are wrong,” she maintains, even when an illegal immigrant has committed a felony.

She was one of the founders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the militant student group behind the violent 2024 occupation of Columbia in support of Hamas. “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization,” she says. “We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one…” She complains that Bernie Sanders and AOC are too pro-Israel.

How could any American vote for her? Chevalier calls the United States “a fucking disgrace,” and as signature significance for a woke maniac whose brain raised its hand and asked to leave the room, refers to the United States as “occupied” Native American land. Naturally, she also wants the government to seize “all properties from landlords.”

Imagine: the Trump Deranged are so warped by hate and hysteria that they are willing to put people like this lunatic and Graham Platner in positions of power and risk allowing the party that supports them to get control of the nation. For the second time today, I am reminded of that guy who shot the nails into his head to stop his arm from hurting.

It’s stunning that anyone would have to explain to someone with functioning neurons that it is irresponsible to support candidates like Chevalier and the party that spawns them. But this toxin has been seeping into the American culture for a very long time, since the late Sixties at least. The vile conservative talk show host and author Michael Savage had a best-seller 20 years ago called “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.” I wrote several articles about how unethical it was for one side of the partisan divide to call the other mentally ill; to me it was redolent of the way the Soviets discredited, isolated and imprisoned dissidents. Savage is vicious, but he’s not stupid, however. I may have to admit that in today’s environment, that ugly title has the ring of truth.

Show and Tell Ethics: Five Observations on Michelle Obama’s Unethical Skirt

I was going to make this an Ethics Quiz, which is typically what I do with issues I believe can generate multiple and diverse ethics verdicts from the analytical and perceptive readers here, and often with matters I am not certain about myself. However, Michelle Obama’s custom designed skirt she decided to model as she appeared on a stage at the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago this week before “stakeholders” (Translation: Donors) was so indefensible by anyone who has not been permanently Obamafied, the crippling mental state where one is incapable of criticizing anything either Obama does or has done, ever, that my building a quiz around it would be dishonest.

As you can see, the former First Lady “wore a pencil skirt adorned with a large portrait of her late mother. The custom Acne Studios design was a tribute to Marian Robinson who died in 2024, aged 86.”

Ethics Observations:

Combine The Societal Corruption Of Legal Sports Betting With The Ethics Void In Collegiate Sports With The Woke Delusion That Every Wrongdoer Is A Victim And You Get…

…the head-exploding court decision that Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby is eligible to Big 12 football this season.

Sorsby had admitted placing at least 40 bets on Indiana football while he was playing for the Hoosiers, and approximately $90,000 in sports wagers using other people’s sportsbook accounts. He spent four years concealing his gambling from three different schools and only came clean once law enforcement swooped down on him. Now he says he is a gambling addict, and it would be hard to dispute that. The NCAA was alerted to Sorsby’s gambling in March. The organization notified Texas Tech of its investigation in April, and Texas Tech made Sorsby ineligible while it fought to have the star reinstated. Then Sorsby’s lawyers sued NCAA on May 18, seeking an injunction that would prevent the NCAA from banning him. And they were successful.

You won’t believe why, or maybe you will if you have followed the slippery slope of progressive enabling of wrongdoing. The judge’s logic: The NCAA would be harming a recovering gambling addict—poor lamb— by enforcing a rule that every pro sports league in this country enforces. Sorsby’s gambling history is a mental health and addiction issue, so the NCAA must consider his well-being and support him rather than punish him. Judge Ken Curry ruled that the quarterback would suffer “irreparable injury” if he isn’t granted a temporary injunction allowing him to play for the Texas Tech Red Raiders this season. To deprive him of the ability to “benefit from the elite coaching, training resources, camaraderie and regimen that only being a member of a Division I college football team can provide”would be unconscionable.

The fact that there is no way to be sure the gambling addict calling the plays hasn’t placed bets on his team’s point spread or isn’t under the metaphorical thumbs of organized crime or angry bookies, and been told that if his team doesn’t lose, his mother will be fish food? Never mind.

Graham Platner, The Human Smoking Gun

@theroguednc

A Maine voter said they would not support Platner if he had an Israeli flag tattoo.

♬ original sound – RogueDNC

There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.

This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.

The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)

If You Wondered If President Trump’s Elimination of Rep. Thomas Massie’s Chances Of Being Re-Elected To Congress Was Ethical and Necessary, Wonder No More…

Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky, emerged as a troublesome anti-Trump rebel motivated substantially by his opposition to Israel. He was defeated in an expensive Republican primary battle decided when President Trump endorsed his opponent: it was so expensive because anti-Jewish and anti-Isreal haters from both political parties gave generously to keep Massie on Capitol Hill. Among his fans are—no surprise— Al Jareeza, the Arab news agency, and ex-MAGA boob-turned-full-time-publicity-whore-Trump-basher Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marjorie, you may recall, claimed that the Rothschilds may have caused California wildfires using secret space lasers, and refused to support the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Bill in 2024, arguing that the measure could convict Christians for the Bible account that Jewish leaders handed Jesus over to to be crucified. I’m not a believer in guilt by association, but in the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene I could be persuaded to make an exception. Now to be fair, Massie is smarter than Marjorie.

But then so is my coffee mug.

Massie blamed AIPAC and “Zionists” for his defeat, and today, with nothing to lose, he took the House floor to deliver an alleged remembrance of the victims of the 1967 friendly fire attack by Israel on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War. Thirty-four U.S. sailors were killed and another 171 wounded in the incident which, like the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, is a favorite of anti-Israel conspiracy theorists. An investigation—more than one, in fact— concluded that the tragedy was the result of mistake by Israeli forces in believing they were attacking an Egyptian ship. Israel took responsibility for the disater within hours of the incident on June 8, 1967, officially apologized and later paid millions of dollars in restitution to the families of victims and to wounded survivors.

Never mind. Anti-Semites like Taylor Greene, Massie and lots and lots of powerful Democrats are convinced that the incident was one more plot by those evil Jews.

Again, this occurred in 1967. Why would a U.S. Congressman decide that it needs to be rehashed now, in 2026? I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count. We said things like that in 1967.