Character

Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part III: The News Media and the Race-Baiters [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a recent essay, Victor David Hanson concisely summarizes why the Left’s angry narrative that Claudine Gay was forced out as Harvard’s president because of racial discrimination is untenable and self-damning. He wrote in part,

…In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal. Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism. Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons. One, Gay’s meager publication record — a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own — had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.

Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses. Instead, both pleaded “free speech” and “context” considerations.

Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities — except apparently white males and Jews. Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.

Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.

And yet one after another of the prominent pundits, journalists and commentators immediately worked hard to spread the “Gay was a victim of systemic racism” narrative. In so doing, they discredited themselves and the ideology that warps their judgment and ethics.

Presidential candidate Cornel West, a former Harvard professor, wrote, “How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza – Ackman, Blum, Summers and others – push out the first Black woman president of Harvard! This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable! I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large! But we shall remain strong in our fight for Truth Justice Love!”

Al Sharpton told his MSNBC audience that the Harvard president’s resignation is an “attack” on “every Black woman” in US.

Mara Gay, one of several NYT’s race-baiters, told MSNBC that”This is really an attack on academic freedom … This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism, & … I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks”

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: District 7 Boston City Council Member Tania Fernandes Anderson

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ohhh, yeah, Boston must have high expectations for THIS City Council member…

Back in the Home of the Bean and the Cod, where of-color Mayor Michelle Wu held an apartheid Christmas Party to which no white officials were invited, (in case you’re curious, yes indeed, Mayor Wu has attributed Claudine Gay’s demise at Harvard to “racial bias”), newly elected city councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson has to retake her oath of office after a video was circulated on social media showing that she neither said the words nor raised her right hand during this week’s swearing-in ceremony.

Fernandes Anderson was instructed by both City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune and the city’s law department to retake the oath, both verbally and in writing. The do-over was supposed to take place at 9 a.m. today, but though City Clerk Alex Geourntas arrived to swear in, she wasn’t there. The District 7 councilor’s staff told Geourntas at around 11 a.m., and again shortly before 1 p.m. that she was on her way, but Fernandes Anderson eventually called in at 3:15 p.m. to say she wouldn’t make it.

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Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part I: Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Introduction

The worst part of writing a daily ethics commentary blog arrives when a juggernaut ethics train wreck starts causing carnage in all directions. Following the story is critical to the mission here, but doing it thoroughly makes Ethics Alarms less interesting, more predictable, and boring both for me and the readers. Examples of this phenomenon are, unfortunately, numerous. I’m sick of writing about Donald Trump’s miserable habits and rhetoric. I’m sick of writing about the Left dividing the nation, wrecking democracy, and crushing institutions to try to avoid having to defeat him fairly. I got thoroughly sick of writing about a dumb, corrupt, arrogant Democratic Representative who pulled a fire alarm like a 13-year-old to disrupt a House vote, and who should have been harshly punished for it…but was allowed to get away with an obvious lie. Etcetera: the mainstream media bias that so many progressives refuse to admit…the George Floyd Freakout…the DEI scam….the January 6 narrative….you can list them as easily as I can.

And I am really sick of writing about Harvard’s unethical culture, but having to watch and write about the Claudine Gay scandal is the worst yet. This story should have been quickly resolved, allowing Ethics Alarms to concentrate on more legitimately contentious matters. The facts aren’t in dispute, or shouldn’t be, embarrassing though they may be: [Added: I’ll get around to placing links to the corresponding EA posts, I hope, when I have time. You can also find them by searching for “Claudine Gay,” Harvard,” or by clicking on the “Claudine Gay” tag after the post.]

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Unethical Quote of the Month and Ethics Dunce: Ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I was prepared to write a sympathetic and generous post in response to the resignation of Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard University. It must be a crushing blow for her, both personally and professionally. At this moment, I can’t think of a fair analogy from the past in any field: the closest I can come is Richard Nixon’s forced resignation from the American Presidency. She was celebrated as a great trailblazer as the first black and first black female president of the world’s most famous university only a few months ago. Her fall was rapid and ugly.

I an not sympathetic any more, however. Her Unethical Quote of the Month is her resignation letter, which you can read here. It is disgraceful. She never alludes to her failure to adequately address the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism demonstrations on the Harvard campus. She never mentions her plagiarism in multiple scholarly papers, without which she probably could have survived the criticism arising from her inept testimony in Congress. What she says, in the midst of empty rhetoric about her aspirations and how much she cares about Harvard, is this:

“[I]t has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

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Grading The Harvard Crimson’s Pro- and Anti-Claudine Gay Editorials [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Breaking! Minutes after I posted this, the Harvard Crimson announced that Harvard president Claudine Gay is resigning.

Harvard’s daily campus newspaper, the venerable Harvard Crimson, currently has two editorials and one student op-ed up regarding the President Claudine Gay scandal, aka The Harvard President Ethics Train Wreck, in which the new president, the first black and only the second woman ever to hold the post, faces duel crises of confidence regarding her leadership. The first is her stuttering and inadequate response to anti-Jewish demonstrations on campus, low-lighted by her evasive and cringe-worthy testimony before Congress. The second is the subsequent revelation that Gay engaged in plagiarism in multiple scholarly works to a degree that would get her school’s students sanctioned.

In an official editorial, “President Gay Plagiarized, but She Should Stay. For Now,” a majority of the editorial board argues that,

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Ethics Dunce: Carolina Panthers Owner David Tepper [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This one is almost too easy to bother posting.

The NFL’s Carolina Panthers owner was videoed as he threw a drink at a fan or fans in the stands beneath his box near the end of his team’s latest loss, a 26-0 wipe-out to the Jacksonville Jaguars. There’s no audio in the video, which was posted on Instagram, so we don’t know (yet) what the provocation was, but it doesn’t matter. Dousing a fan with a drink will get usually get the drink-tosser escorted out of any stadium or arena—I’ve seen it, more than once. For an NFL owner to do it to a fan, well, this mandates a Costanza:

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Comment of the Day: “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Nikki Haley’s Answer To ‘What Caused The Civil War?’

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This choice was tough: yesterday’s post on Nikki Haley’s bone-headed and tone -deaf answer to the soft-ball question about the cause of the American Civil War sparked several COTD-worthy observations, but I chose this one, by Chris Marschner, to represent the field. Haley’s gaffe, along with her typically weaselly attempt to wiggle out of it, is looking like that rare breed these days, a botched public statement that actually has “legs” and does serious harm to a candidate’s prospects, like President Gerald Ford’s assertion in a debate that Poland wasn’t an Iron Curtain country, or Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” statement. Naturally some on the Right rushed to Haley’s defense, as with this WSJ piece, and critics on the Left “pounced,” as with historian Heather Cox Richardson’s substack piece that called Haley’s answer “the death knell of the Republican Party.” ( This is known as “wishcraft.”) To me, this was just one more instance of Haley proving that she is untrustworthy and excessively calculating to ever believe. In some respects she’s the opposite of Trump, who is, mostly correctly, regarded as an authentic character who believes what he says, at least when he says it. Like the vast majority of politicians, Haley appears to believe what she thinks the most people want her to believe, until she discovers that they don’t.

I’ll say here that I think Chris is too easy on Haley. To answer that question without even mentioning slavery is incomprehensible, especially in 2023, when an entire political party has bet all its chips on racial grievances, “a threat to democracy” by racist fascists, and Trump Derangement. Any minimally educated and aware politician should be able to say, succinctly: “There were three primary causes: slavery, states’ rights, and to preserve the union. Next question.”

Here is Chris’s Comment of the Day on the post, “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Nikki Haley’s Answer To ‘What Caused The Civil War?’”…

***

South Carolina the first state to secede from the union did so on December 20, 1860. The rationale for secession was the fear that the institution of slavery was being threatened by the federal government. There was no blood spilled until the decision to preserve the union was made a year later.

According to Historytoday.com, “The American Civil War was fought to preserve the Union. There had long been tensions between the rights of the states under the constitution and those of the federal government, so much so that South Carolina and the administration in Washington almost came to blows over the issue of tariffs in the 1830s. It was slavery, however, that brought matters to breaking point.”

The Civil war began in April of 1861 when Abraham Lincoln ordered that Fort Sumter, under the command of U.S. Major Robert Anderson who occupied the still under construction fort during the approximate 15 month standoff between Union forces and the South Carolina militia, be resupplied with fresh troops and “humanitarian aid”. Naturally this was seen as an encroachment by U.S. troops on sovereign ground by the South Carolina Governor. Nonetheless, Lincoln sent the ship called the Star of the West with 200 troops and supplies to resupply the fort. When it arrived in Charleston harbor it was driven back to sea by the militia.

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Has-Been Director Panders to the Trump-Deranged, Trump Responds Like The Silly Jerk He Is, and the Media Pretends This Is Newsworthy: Make It Stop!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I shouldn’t even be writing about this completely silly and worthless story. It exemplifies, however, the cesspool that we are going to be dunked in for all of the next year. Here’s how it goes:

ACT I

The mainstream news media decided to exploit the Christmas season as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump, since that is considered the patriotic duty of anyone who has ever had contact with him, and because he is a threat to democracy. So, as Columbus’s twin “Home Alone” movies were au courrant once again, Rolling Stone and some other enterprising Trump-bashers dredged up a three-year old Business Insider interview in which has-been movie director Chris Columbus, apparently looking to curry favor with the monolithic woke Hollywood community, revealed that Trump had “bullied” his way into the cameo he performed during “Home Alone 2.”

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“This is Basil. Though He Is a PhD, a Professor, and a Democratic Political Consultant, Bias Has Made Him Stupid and Ridiculous. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductable Donation to Help Us Find a Cure For Basil and Victims Like Him?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 Confirmation bias may be the most destructive bias of them all, creeping into the best of minds and casing them to malfunction wildly, and, in tragic cases like that of Basil Smilke, causing them to say and do things that destroy their credibility while making them look ridiculous. This is the bias that makes human beings see and believe what they want to see and believe when a conflicting reality is right in front of them.

I actually did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read Smilke’s opinion column on CNN’s website titled, “Kamala Harris is not a liability. She may be Democrats’ best weapon.” I got a mouthful of coffee on Spuds, who was lying on me, and he was not pleased. Reading the headline, I was prepared to see that the crazy thing had been authored by a student at Madame Louisa’s Home for the Bewildered, but no. Smilke appears to be well credentialed and to have all his faculties, not that being a professor and director of the Public Policy Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute of Hunter College is the highest step on the academic ladder, but hey: Hunter has more credibility than Harvard, and it doesn’t allow plagiarism.

Now, I recognize that Smilke is also a Democratic Party political operative and consultant, so there is an alternate explanation for the piece that doesn’t make him look like a confirmation bias-infected moron. He could be lying to the public and to Kamala Harris in the hopes of getting a job. That would be unethical, of course, but then he’s a Democratic Party political operative and  consultant.

His opinion piece—and why would even CNN publish something this absurd?—reads like it was written under the influence of some powerful mind-altering drug. Here is his argument:

  • Harris has been unfairly savaged by Republicans and conservatives (and a substantial number of Democrats, but he doesn’t mention that) because she is a black woman. It’s all sexism and racism. “Biden’s second-in-command, a former US senator and California attorney general, is being dragged down by a barrage of tropes, the kinds of chatter that many women and racial minorities frequently confront in politics.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 5: The Speed Hump Weenies

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

For this continuing series examining the biases that make me stupid (or not), on the one month anniversary of the last installment, I want to take up the matter of drivers who slow to a crawl or even stop their vehicles entirely when they encounter a “speed hump” in the road.

This past week two such drivers almost caused my car to run into them. In recent years Northern Virginia has gone speed hump mad, putting the things virtually everywhere that isn’t a highway or a main thoroughfare. I don’t mind them, however, nearly as much as I mind the way some drivers seem to regard them as explosive devices. You can safely drive over a speed hump at a moderate velocity; your transmission or axles aren’t going to fall off if your car doesn’t slow down into single digits.

I confess: I regard drivers who freak out at speed humps as emblematic of creeping weenie-ism in the nation. I imagine such drivers as still wearing masks alone in their cars, spending nights shivering in terror over the certain doom that the world faces if we don’t start living like prehistoric cave dwellers, fearing to allow their kids to walk unaccompanied a few blocks home from school, and who want the U.S. to minimize the deployment of its military to tasks involving expanding LGBTQ rights and advancing the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion. I envision them applauding when some anti-gun fanatic shouts that it would be worth eliminating the Second Amendment “if it saved one life” and crippling the First so no feelings are ever hurt by unwelcome opinions.

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