I just rejoined “X” so I could pick off a post here and there, but I won’t be tricked into paying for a “blue check” again. That telling scene above just came to my attention. I was about to file it for a future “warm-up,” but decided to get it out of the way now.
At one of the stupid “No Kings” rallies Saturday, these two were asked if they supported the deportation of illegal immigrants. The guy, obviously the beta in the relationship, stutters, “Yes,” only to be admonished by his audibly sighing female companion. She then answers the same question with a “no” and explains, “It’s not illegal.”
Oh. Fascinating thought process there! Then the bearded guy, having been persuaded, almost, by her 1) dirty look and 2) her brilliant legal analysis, changes his answer to “I’m not sure.”
Which answer is worse, once we eliminate the ethical answer, which was “yes”? My vote goes to the weenie’s “I’m not sure”— stupid, cowardly, obviously insincere and still enabling law-breaking. That guy and his ilk are the ones who let the Left get away with its habitual “It isn’t what it is” strategy.
I hope the interviewer didn’t end that relationship. Those two deserve each other.
I started writing this as a comment to the lively thread that has followed last night’s post, but decided to make it a separate post because the discussion raises its own ethical issues.
The Kirk denigration since the Turning Point USA founder’s death resembles that old kids game “telephone.” You would whisper a statement into the ear of the kid next to you who would pass it along down a line of ten or more and finally compare the original message to what the last one in the line heard. Hilarity usually ensued, as the vagaries of oral communication and the reception thereof resulted in “Mikey has a crush on Sue Brandeberry” turning into “Nike is suing someone who smeared crushed berries on its brand.” “Telephone” is a benign interpretation of a lot of the slander and libel against Kirk’s character and legacy; the non-benign interpretation is that people are just lying.
In the thread, a respected commenter here sparked some angry responses by answering my repeated question in the original post [“What did Kirk do or say that could possibly justify these freakouts?”] thusly: “At a guess, it might be his statement that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake that might have been an issue. Or his highly uncomplimentary statements about Martin Luther King Jr and the approval of his assassination. Freedom of speech and all that.”
I have heard or read several equivalent versions of that answer since Kirk’s death, and they are worth clarifying and discussing.
Rep. Crockett—-remember, she’s considered a “rising star” in the reeling Democratic Party—actually said this:
“And so I do want people to know that just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn’t make them a criminal.”
Interesting. The definition of “criminal” is literally “a person who has committed a crime” or the equivalent in every dictionary in existence, but never mind: this is the totalitarian Left of 2025, for which Big Brotherish denial of reality—you know, like “War is Peace” “or “Biden is as sharp as a tack” or “Harris ran a flawless campaign” is foundational.
Lest you think I have pulled Crockett’s latest nonsense out of a context where it is defensible (I can’t imagine what that would be, though), here is her whole rant, from an appearance on the podcast “Getting Better with Jonathan Van Ness.” Incidentally, you know everything you need to know about Van Ness to avoid him and his podcast like the plague by the fact that her statement didn’t prompt him to say, “What? What the hell are you talking about?”
I posted about the “why I am a liberal” social media post that has been surfacing on Facebook and challenged the Ethics Alarms commentariate to dissect its rampant generalities, facile assumptions, and logical fallacies. As I wrote in the post, some previously intelligent people of my acquaintance have been reposting and praising the thing, attributing its authorship to Hollywood nice guy director Ron Howard. He didn’t write it, so this is a textbook “appeal to authority,” especially since the arguments “Ron” makes are flawed at best. They are, however, typical progressive talking points. There is no reason to believe the real Ron Howard has any political science or philosophical acumen or expertise, as he has spent literally his whole life in front of cameras or behind them.
Four EA comment stars took up my challenge, and they all shined. As promised, I am posting all four, each of which would make an excellent civics class topic, if there were high school civics classes that didn’t focus exclusively on leftist cant. (Are there any any?)
You can review Fake Ron’s manifesto here. Rebuttal #1 is by Gamereg; his numbered points correspond to “Ron’s”:
If you can read the crap the Times’ Peter Baker threw at us in “In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission” without getting the dry heaves and being tempted to destroy you computer screen with a hammer, you have a piece missing. Its subhead: “President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans.” KABOOM. Head exploded, brains on walls and ceiling. How date Baker write that? How dare the Times print it? This is simultaneous smoking gun evidence of Trump Derangement, incurable bias, and denial of reality. The gift link is here. Have a bucket nearby. Here’s the gift link. I don’t think the opportunity to read such malign, intellectually dishonest junk is truly a “gift.”
To state the obvious, Baker has the utter gall to make his fatuous assertion following a sort-of President who did this…
Back in 2017, when I first re-posted this essay from 2012,I noted that it was written in response to the reaction at the time from the Second Amendment-hating Left to the shocking murder-suicide of of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher. Nobody remembers the incident now, but the reflex reaction of the Axis of Unethical Conduct to virtually every mass shooting or nationally-publicized gun violence incident has remained constant. Now much of the “justification” for the assassination of Charlie Kirk has focused on his statement that mass shootings are the price we pay for the Second Amendment, and that the price is worth it. Maybe that position got him killed. His statement was 100% correct, of course, and when I was reminded that I had made almost the exact same assertion in the post below, I realized that I was ethically bound to repost it now. to Some of it is obviously dated (the reference to juvenile Carl in “The Walking Dead,” for example), but I have re-read it, and would not change a word of its substance.
Do I fear that this position puts me in the cross-hairs? No, because EA has relatively small circulation, and I don’t matter. But even if it did put me in personal peril, I could not and would not allow that possibility to stifle my opinion or my willingness to state it. That is what the bad guys want, and have been working to accomplish for many years. That is one of the reasons Charlie Kirk was killed.
It seems incredible, but Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’s murder on a Charlotte light rail train was not the most disturbing aspect of her murder by a deranged man who just decided to kill her for no discernible reason. Nor is the fact that the killer had been arrested 14 times and turned back into the streets as part of the Mad Left’s urban “de-incarceration” agenda the worst aspect of the story, or even the deliberate burying of the event by the mainstream media, which felt that the public didn’t need to know this occurred because it undermines so many Axis narratives (gun control, how safe Democrat-run big cities are despite all evidence to the contrary, “Black on white crime? What black on white crime?,” the virtues of public transportation). And it isn’t the fact that so many Americans have been brainwashed that many (including commenters on this blog) have defended the media’s censorship of inconvenient reality.
No, I have concluded upon watching the various surveillance camera videos that the worst aspect of the incident is that even after the young woman was stabbed and was bleeding out in her seat, not one of her fellow passengers lifted a finger to try to save her life.
That’s some community you have there, Charlotte. Be proud…
The White House published a list of Smithsonian exhibits, programming and artwork it considered objectionable on Thursday, one week after announcing that eight of the institution’s museumsmust submit their current wall text and future exhibition plans for a comprehensive review.
The list borrows heavily from a recent article in The Federalist that objected to portrayals at several museums. It argued that the National Museum of American History promoted homosexuality by hanging a pride flag; overemphasized Benjamin Franklin’s relationship to slavery in its programming; and supported open borders by depicting migrants watching fireworks “through an opening in the U.S.-Mexico border wall.”
Other grievances were previously enumerated in an executive order that President Trump authorized in March, which criticized the National Museum of African American History and Culture for a 2020 worksheet that describes aspects of “whiteness” as “hard work,” “individualism” and “the nuclear family.” The worksheet was part of an online educational portal called Talking About Race; once it drew criticism, Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian, had it removed.
The White House list also featured complaints that were not part of the Federalist article or the president’s executive order. Those include a stop-motion animation at the National Portrait Gallery about Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a government leader during the coronavirus pandemic, and a series at the African American museum that it says “featured content from hardcore woke activist Ibram X. Kendi.”
The New York Post reports that a Manhattan rally in support of “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert drew about 20 protesters yesterday. The NYPD police who were there to prevent violence (I can’t believe I am writing this!) quickly left when the indignant Trump-haters dispersed after just a few minutes. The leaders of the stupid “We’re With Colbert” rally outside the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan’s West Side had said that the protest was part of a nationwide call for “integrity.”
As we all know, late night network talk shows go with integrity like sushi goes with Turkish taffy and ketchup.
“Our country is not perfect, never has been,” said the event’s organizer, whose name isn’t worth mentioning since he is clearly, you know, a moron. “But we’ve always had the First Amendment, and now Mango Mussolini is trying to take that from us.” Right. The party this guy obviously supported actually set up a federal agency to restrict speech, conspired with the news media to embargo facts, statistics and news that it found inconvenient to its aspirations, conspired with that news media to feed partisan propaganda to the public, employed a White House spokesperson who routinely spewed disinformation, and pressured social media platforms to censor critics. Then it ran a ticket that openly promoted censorship of “hate speech,” which means, as always, “whatever the Axis of Unethical Conduct doesn’t like.” “Mango Mussolini” (Nice!) is anti-First Amendment because he correctly sought to hold CBS accountable for a brazen act of election interference as it surreptitiously tried to make Kamala Harris seem less like the babbling fool that she is and was caught red-handed.
Meanwhile, another clear example of how the President’s weaponizing of tariffs is defying the doomsayers cannot attract any positive coverage from most of the “enemies of the people”, nor, of course, the “my mind’s made up don’t confuse me with facts” Trump Deranged like whatever his name is above. The EU trade deal announced yesterday “will likely not do much for economic growth on either side,” sayeth the Times, despite confessing elsewhere that the European Union had agreed to purchase $750 billion of American energy over three years and to increase its investment in the United States by more than $600 billion above current levels. How could that possibly be a bad thing? How could critics not give the President some credit for the deal? That’s easy: whatever President Trump does or says is by definition bad.
The fact that my leg appears to be rotting off seriously impeded my Ethics Alarms activity this entire week, so a round-up of lingering ethics tales is desperately needed. The stupid wound, complete with a giant blood-blister the size and color of an eggplant, isn’t going to hurt any worse if I sit at my desk a bit longer, so here we go…
1. That painting above, “American Progress” by John Gast in 1872, was posted on the Homeland Security Facebook page with the message, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Right, and right. Some Americans weak in citizenship are apparently offended by the statement and the painting. What’s wrong with them, and how did they get this way? The U.S.’s saga is objectively an inspiring one. I do not blame Native Americans for being bitter about how things worked out for them, but a Stone Age civilization was going to fail eventually one way or another, and the resulting culture, society, government and civilization has been a blessing to humanity. My only cavil with the painting is that it might be deliberate trolling. I think government departments and agencies shouldn’t troll. Neither should Presidents.
Ethics Alarms 