Citizenship

Last Head Explosion of 2025 (I Hope)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Before I post a more substantial essay today I will have to puck the skull pieces and brain bits off of my living room ceiling, carpet, furniture and TV screen after making the mistake of watching CNN’s Abby Phillip show for ten minutes. As usual, her panel of partisan idiots (with the exception of CNN token Republican Scott Jennings) were babbling on with today’s Trump hate. I expected that, but as I routinely switch channels whenever this thing passes my eyes, I did not expect that the level of discourse would be beneath what I would expect late in a cast party when all of the woke actors are half- or totally crocked.

There was no expertise, useful analysis or objective commentary at all, just indignant repetition of Axis talking points as fact: gaslighting, or fake news for the ignorant and gullible. “Trump has used the Executive Orders to get around Congress, and changed the Presidency by doing so!” (Barack Obama openly and specifically established this as a “norm.”) “Trump just defies the Constitution and the Supreme Court lets him get away with it!” (The comment came up regrading SCOTUS taking up the birthright issue, regarding which the Trump administration has made a legal argument, and has not defied the Constitution.) “Yes! It’s just like abortion…” (No, you idiot, it is not “like abortion.” Abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution: an activist Court bent the document out of shape to turn abortion into a right that not a single Founder would have endorsed. Birthright citizenship IS in the Constitution, which is why it is unlikely that the Trump theory will prevail.) “Everything Trump does is to line his own pockets!” (Pure talking point, and one that I read or hear every single day from the Trump Deranged. How does enforcing the immigration laws, purging illegal discrimination against whites and men and trying to dismantle mainstream media and educational political manipulation “line his pockets”? “The economy is in bad shape!” (The third quarter (July-Sept) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by a 4.3% annualized rate, the best in two years, which means that the economy is not in bad shape, but never mind.) And so on. All the women on the panel were wild eyed and angry (this is not professional deportment for television “journalism,” and the men, with the exception of Jennings, sat back and sagely nodded their head,s quickly shutting up if they tried to make a factual correction and were shouted over. Jennings just composed his next articulate rebuttal in his head, and waited for an opening.

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Holly Mathnerd Is Right that Effective Gun Control Is Impossible Without Govt. Gun Confiscation by Force, But Doesn’t Everyone Know That?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Right on cue, the Brown mass shooting was instantly the inspiration for the usual gang of anti-Second Amendment zealots, utopians,”Imagine” fans, fact-phobic progressives and nascent totalitarians (funny how they hang out together…huh!) to again scream for “common sense gun control.” Joe Biden did it, or whoever was standing near him barely moving their lips or pretending to drink a glass of water.

Last week, quirky, smart, logic-obsessed substacker Holly Mathnerd issued a typically thoughtful essay called “The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control…the math behind the policy.” Holly gifted me with a subscription to her blog a while back as a gesture of professional courtesy so I pass her analysis on to you. I have written essentially this exact post on Ethics Alarms before and long ago, however, and probably more than once. My reaction to Holly’s work is, “Yes, of course. Why do we keep having to explain this?” Her delivery is a lot less abrasive than mine, so if that helps, great.

Gun control is also on my list of policy objectives that I view as unethical because they are impossible, and arguing for them is 1) a waste of time, 2) misleads the slow of wit into thinking they aren’t impossible when they are, 3) constitute virtue-signaling and 4) would be terrible mistakes even if they weren’t impossible. Read Holly’s whole argument, but the short version is…

If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms. Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality. What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.

In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone. Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades. So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns. That requires locating them.

There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification. Anything less is symbolic. Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.

That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale. At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door. This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime. Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups. Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.

There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.

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The President Sues the BBC, and It’s the Right Thing To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Florida states:

‘In the BBC Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance”… first broadcast on October 28,2024, the BBC intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021…. The Panorama Documentary deliberately omitted another critical part of the Speech in such a manner as to intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said. The Panorama Documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”… 

President Trump never uttered this sequence of words. This fabricated depiction of President Trump during the Speech was false, deceptive, and defamatory given that President Trump’s actual and full remarks during the Speech were (a) “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressman and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:12p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 14:52 into the Speech), and then, much later, (b) “[B]ut I said ‘Something’s wrong here, Something’s really wrong, can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021 at 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 69:30 into the Speech). 

“Moreover, the BBC purposefully omitted President Trump stating, less than one minute after urging supporters to cheer for their senators and congressmen, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 15:48 into the Speech).”

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More on Trump Derangement and I.C.E.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I still am noodling about how exactly to define Trump Derangement beyond listing the symptoms. I’d say, for example, that a retired and distinguished lawyer re-posting with favor a typical Occupy Democrats Facebook rant qualifies as one. This particular Occupy Democrat post—is that group worse than Move-On, better, or the same?—expressed outrage over “US citizen and Army veteran George Retes'” testimony to Congress over (if he is to be believed) a mistaken arrest and abusive treatment by I.C.E., as it mistook him as an illegal immigrant. Naturally, since he was recruited by Democrats to impugn the agency, my friend (and a somewhat famous classmate who has been engaging in what I would call borderline unethical conduct by regularly attacking his former client, President Trump) automatically accepted his account over that of Homeland Security, which in a release rebutted Retes’ claim as well as that of others who have been cited by critics as being falsely detained or arrested.

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“Psychology Today” (Again) Shows Why “Experts” Cannot Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Why is a standard issue anti-gun screed with moldy “common sense gun control” talking points being featured in “Psychology Today” under the guise of a “How to prevent suicides” article? Oh, lots of reasons, such as..

  • Anti-gun fanatics will use every opportunity imaginable to repeat their cant;
  • The fact that their objective, to somehow void the Second Amendment, is impossible doesn’t dissuade them from wasting our time;
  • Like most of the print media in the sciences, “Psychology Today” has been captured by the doctrinaire Left and allowed what should be a non-partisan topic be polluted by progressive activism;
  • Too many academics, scholars and experts today have no regard for integrity, and believe that they must accomplish their ideological goals by any means necessary, and
  • To someone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

“Reducing Gun Violence, Particularly Gun Suicides: What we can learn from other countries when it comes to reducing gun deaths” announces its bias and how that bias has made its “expert” author stupid right in the headline. Other countries have nothing to offer us as far as gun policies are concerned. They do not have the same culture as the United States, nor do other nations enshrine individual liberty as securely as the United States. Other nations did not rely on guns and self-determination to the extent that the U.S. population has throughout its history, and other nations are far more submissive to government interference with their rights than Americans are.

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Post Thanksgiving Open Forum [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I’d be interested in anyone’s anecdotes from yesterday about their confrontations over dinner with family on political matters. At the (fantastic) Shirlington Dog Park in Arlington, VA, I chatted with a freind with whom I have never discussed politics (and never will), who said she was spending the holiday alone because she wasn’t speaking to any of her relatives. They feel, she said with a voice dripping with contempt, that “the public should respect an elected President even if he did probably rape a 14-year-old.” Hey! Look at that beautiful Vizsla!

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There Is Still A Chance For Justice In the Sacrifice of Officer Derek Chauvin…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

When I posted on the shameful conviction of Officer Derek Chauvin in 2023 after trail that was biased from the start to its finsih, I led off with that climactic song from the musical “1776.” It seemed to me then that nobody did care, at least, not enough people in our corrupted and politicized justice system. I wrote in part,

“That the conviction of Derek Chauvin for murder was a frightening political act that trampled multiple constitutional rights of a single hated ex-cop (and later his three fellow police officers at the scene) has been increasingly undeniable. The justice system, the news media, the political system and the nation as a whole have apparently decided that Chauvin isn’t worth the effort to provide him with the basic rights and fair treatment that has been accorded to scores of murderers and thieves, and that is supposed to be the birthright of every citizen regardless of class, color or character.

“The U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that I have to believe was dictated by public relations rather than law or justice, recently turned down Chauvin’s last ditch appeal, based on his claim that he was denied his right to a fair trial because of pretrial publicity and public safety concerns in the event of an acquittal. Of course he was. Public figures had declared him guilty during the trial. A mass outbreak of race-based rioting (and “mostly peaceful” demonstrations) across the country had been triggered by Floyd’s death, though no evidence was ever offered at trial that Chauvin was motivated by racism. The specter of the Rodney King riots that erupted in L.A. after the police accused in his beating were acquitted had to loom large in the jury’s minds, as well as the likelihood of potential alienation from their friends, families and colleagues if they allowed an arch villain, in the already clear verdict of the media and the mob, to escape mob justice….He is a convenient sacrifice to racial guilt among whites and aspiring political power among blacks. Facts are irrelevant.”

It was and is a horrifying failure of our justice system, and a horrifying example of how political violence can succeed. Now a new filing in the case raises hope again that Chauvin, who has been nearly murdered in prison, may yet be exonerated. If, as the document and its supporting documentation claims, the prosecution withheld important evidence from the defense and the jury, then Chauvin was denied due process even beyond the due process we saw him be denied in his first trial. That would mandate throwing out the verdict and giving him a new trial, one would hope in a jurisdiction not as incapable of sanity as Minneapolis.

Here is a summary:

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And This Is Supposed To Be A Rising Leader of the Democrat Party…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Unbelievable. Or at least it should be unbelievable that an elected member of Congress would behave like this. That the party such an indefensible hack belongs to—and who is regarded as a leader of???— wouldn’t collectively disclaim any responsibility for said hack and wear paper bags over their heads in penance. That…oh, never mind. Why do I bother?

Diving in to try to defend Virginia Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D) after the Epstein files revealed that she had been reading texts from the convicted sex-trafficker during a House hearing, Crockett got up and accused Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sarah Palin and Trump official Lee Zeldin among other Republicans officials of receiving political contributions from “someone named Jeffrey Epstein” as she claimed that Republicans were exacting a double standard—you know, like Democrats do routinely. But the Jeffrey Epstein she was tying to Romney et al. was a completely different person.

Was the ethically-inert Texas Congresswomen shooting off her mouth using false information because she is irresponsible and incompetent, or was she engaging in despicable deceit (that is, lying) to mislead the public? Who knows, and I don’t care: her declaration was a bright-line ethics breach and sanctionable in either case, as well as signature significance both for an untrustworthy member of Congress and a hyper-partisan asshole.

Ah, but this in-your-face blot on the U.S. Legislative Branch wasn’t done. When her false innuendos were raised in a CNN interview, Crockett exploded in double-talk to try to weasel out of her indefensible conduct:

“Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein. Just so that people understand, when you make a donation, your picture is not there. And because they decided to spring this on us in real time, I wanted the Republicans to think about what could potentially happen because I knew that they didn’t even try to go through the FEC,” this awful woman humina-humina-ed. “So my team, what they did is they Googled. And that is specifically why I said, ‘a Jeffrey Epstein’. Unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies.”

Somebody pleas explain to Crockett what a lie is.

” Because it was not the same one, that’s fine,” she continued, spinning like Dorothy’s cyclone. “But when Lee Zeldin had something to say, all he had to say was it was a different Jeffrey Epstein. He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein. So at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people. Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is? I have not. So I will trust and take what he says is that it wasn’t that Jeffrey Epstein, but I was not attempting to mislead anybody. I literally had maybe 20 minutes before I had to do that debate.”

Right. Of course she was trying to mislead.

Kaitlin Collins responded (more equivocally than she should have): “Yeah, but people might see that say, well, you’re trying to make it sound like he took money from a literal sex offender.”

“But I literally did not know,” Crockett answered.

Jasmine Crockett is a walking, jive-talking insult to the nation.

Here’s How You Get Mamdani, DEI, Open Borders, and Totalitarianism

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Federalist reports that Michigan State University’s elementary education program, ranked, who knows how or by what criteria, as the top elementary teacher’s program in the nation, mandates its aspiring teachers to attend a “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education” class. The class teaches that free market principles, meritocracy, and American values are toxic, and that understanding this must be conveyed to elementary school students. The indoctrination class is described on MSU’s website as “understanding self, schools, and society; emphasizing racial justice, equity, and social identity markers.”

Course materials show that one of the class units is an interview with radical, terrorist and Communist Party member, former Berkeley professor Angela Davis, who was an active collaborator with the violent Black Panther Party. “Racism is integrally linked to capitalism,” Davis says in the video, “and I think it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place….This is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism,” the video concludes. Another required video claims that “America can never be a meritocracy” until it provides “an equal starting point and equal resources.”

Which, if you think about it for a second or two, is bonkers.

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The Unethical Party: Update

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Item: The Democratic Mayor of Chicago hits the zenith of Orwellian NewSpeak and progressive “It isn’t what it is” gaslighting. Plus he’s an idiot.

Asked about “illegal aliens” in Chicago by a reporter, Mayor Brandon Johnson actually said, “We don’t have illegal aliens. I don’t know if that’s from some sort of sci-fi message for which you’ve had.”

Chicago has lots of illegal aliens, which is the accurate term for non-citizens (aliens) who are on U.S. soil illegally.

The reporter explained that he was using the accurate legal term, and Johnson, against all odds, made an even more ridiculous remark. “Listen, the legal term for my people were slaves,” he said. “You want me to use that term, too?”

Well, yes, if one is to referring to the period in which “his people” were, in fact, slaves, called slaves, sold as slaves, and referred to themselves as slaves.

“Let’s just get the language right,” the mayor continued. “We’re talking about undocumented individuals that are human beings. The last thing that I’m going to do is accept that type of racist, nasty language to describe human beings.”

Just as calling slaves “slaves” isn’t racist, calling illegal aliens “illegal aliens isn’t “racist.” “Undocumented individuals that are human beings” (Catchy!) are, in fact, illegal aliens.

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