Education

Happy Birthday, George Washington From Ethics Alarms, And Thank Your Dad For Us Too…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s George Washington’s birthday. Nine years ago I wrote, in one of my annual posts on perhaps our most important President (George Will calls him “the Indispensable Man) that something has gone seriously wrong when one’s blog has 287 posts on Donald Trump and only six about Washington. I don’t even want to think about what the count is now, but here is another one in George’s column.

George Washington’s father Augustine had at one time or another run across a list of 110 virtues that young men should adopt and practice in order to be become civil, respectful and honorable members of polite society. He made George, and presumably all his sons (he had six of them) copy them by hand to aid in memorizing the list. George, at least, dutifully committed to memory “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,”  which was  based on a document composed by French Jesuits in 1595; neither the author nor the English translator and adapter are known today. The elder Washington was following the theory of Aristotle, who held that principles and values began as being externally imposed by authority (morals) and eventually became internalized as character.

Those ethics alarms installed by his father stayed in working order throughout George’s remarkable life. It was said that Washington was known to quote the rules when appropriate, and never forgot them. They did not teach him to be the gifted leader he became, but they helped to make him a trustworthy one.

The list has been available on Ethics Alarms under Rule Book since its beginnings in 2009. By all means read the whole list; I have used it often in ethics seminars but haven’t referred to it here for too long. The 90 rules omitted in the list below contain some gems too, and many that raise curiosity about what exactly the author was thinking of. For example, I find #2. “When in company, put not your hands to any part of the body not usually discovered” and #3. “Show nothing to your friend that may affright him” intriguing.

Below are my 20 favorite entries from the list that helped make George George, therefore helped George make America America:

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On Lincoln’s Favorite Poem, and the Poems’ We Memorize…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This topic is almost tangential to ethics, but not entirely. I give Althouse credit for raising it: she sometimes comments on crossword puzzles—I hate crossword puzzles and have never finished one in my life—and was set off into one of her tangents by the clue, “8 letters: “Poem so beloved by Abraham Lincoln that he carried it in his pocket and memorized it.” As it happens, I know the answer (Ann did not): it’s Poe’s “The Raven.” No surprise there: Abe was a depressive, and that dark poem about lingering suicidal thoughts fits his character and also his taste in poetry. I think “The Raven” is doggerel, and so were Lincoln’s poems: yes, he wrote poems, and was always puzzling to me that such a poetic writer would write such pedestrian poetry. He’s nt the only one who fits that description: Herman Melville’s poems, save for the one that ends “Billy Budd, ” is also shockingly bad. But I digress…

Ann guessed that the poem was “Invictus,” which would make sense if Abe favored a poem that inspired him, as, I believe, many of us do. That one ends with the famous verse,

“It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.”

Teddy Roosevelt loved that one, as you might guess. The topic got me thinking about how our schools used to teach ethics as well as literature, not to mention mental acuity, by requiring us to memorize poems. I’m sure they don’t do this now, and I’m also confident that the declining ethical instincts as well as literary competence of today’s youth are in part rooted in this sad development.

Poetry is becoming a dead genre. Althouse excluded songs from her musings about what favorite poems say about our values and character, and I find that strange. Song lyrics are poems, at least the best of them. No unscored poem touches me as much as Irving Kahal’s lyrics to Sammy Fain’s haunting melody, one of my late wife’s favorites….

I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through

In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children’s carousel
The chestnut tree, the wishing well 
I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you…

Similarly, the touching Longfellow poem about his depression during the Civil War over the death of his wife, the wounding of his son and the conflict dividing his country was set to music, making it classic Christmas song that has endured in the culture beyond most of his poems. Putting a poem to music shouldn’t disqualify the poem as a poem, though the melody can enhance its power and popularly.

My favorite poems were narrative poems the celebrated heroism, courage, sacrifice, devotion and nobility. I have written several times about my father’s favorite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s “If” : the lines “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster…And treat those two impostors just the same”; has become my credo over the years, and served me well. This past Halloween I posted my favorite poem, “The Highwayman,” which I memorized when I was 10 and have recited to audiences many times since. It is about a young woman who gives her life to warn her lover. I also memorized Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” an inspiring poem about an American patriot.

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Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown University Law Center…and May I Add: KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

From Ethics Alarms, December 10, 2023…

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

I just received this message as a Georgetown University Law Center alumnus:

Dear Georgetown Law Alumni,

It gives me great pleasure to share with you that M. Elizabeth (Liz) Magill has been appointed as the next Executive Vice President and Dean of Georgetown University Law Center, beginning August 1, 2026. President Robert M. Groves’ announcement is linked here.

Professor Magill brings to Georgetown Law a wealth of experience leading some of our nation’s most prestigious universities and law schools, including serving as President of the University of Pennsylvania, Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, and Dean of Stanford Law School. I am pleased to share that, in addition to her role as Executive Vice President and Dean, Professor Magill will join the Law Center as a tenured member of the faculty. And her Georgetown roots run deep—her father and three of her siblings are Georgetown graduates.

Professor Magill is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was articles development editor of the Virginia Law Review. Following law school, she clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is an award-winning scholar of administrative and constitutional law whose research focuses on topics such as the separation of powers, standing, regulation, and judicial review. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the American Law Institute.

This is a critical time for the Law Center and the University. I am confident that Professor Magill is the right person to lead the Law Center into a new era marked by academic excellence, financial resilience, and national prominence. There will be many opportunities over the next several months for you to meet Professor Magill. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming her to Georgetown University and to the Law Center. 

Sincerely,

Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Interim Dean & Executive Vice President
David Belding Professor of Law

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Ethics Quiz: The I.C.E. Endorsement

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Sarai Jimenez, a special education teaching intern at in Pajaro Valley School District’s Watsonville, California-based MacQuiddy Elementary, endorsed the presence of I.C.E. officers in her town in a comment on Facebook last month.

“Yay!!! We need ICE in Watsonville!! It’s been getting out of hand,” Jimenez wrote, as you can see above. But the parents in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, where 84% of students are Hispanic and, given California’s sanctuary state aspirations, might belong to families with one or more illegal immigrants, considered Jimenez’s support for ICE….that is, enforcement of U.S. law…unconscionable. Many complained, and Jimenez was placed on leave from her job in Pajaro Valley School District. It appears that she will be fired, if she hasn’t been already.

“You can’t just tell the world how you feel and not expect repercussions from people because of how they feel about I.C.E.,” local parent Jorge Guerrero said. If I were awake completely, which I’m not, I would compose several alternate versions of this statement with provocative substitutes for “I.C.E.”

Jimenez tried to save her job by groveling a politician-style denial rather than an apology,“I’m sorry that the comment was taken out of context,” she told reporters. “But my actions speak so much louder than all those hateful bullies’ words.” The hateful bullies are the ones who bombarded her with threats and insults until she took down her Facebook page. “You are a shameful disgraceful disgusting woman,” one critic wrote.

Predictably, though apparently not by the interning teacher, the school administrators sided with the bullies if not their methods (although firing someone for supporting law enforcement is a lot more harmful than insulting her).

MacQuiddy Elementary Principal Sara Pearman said in a statement that Jimenez’s comment “does not reflect the values” of the school or district.

Hmmmm…

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is it ethical to fire Jimenez for expressing support for law enforcement officials doing their jobs?

I think this is a close call. Some points:

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Stanford Student Elsa Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“This should be the real message of the story: Stanford must reform its disability accommodation system so it is fair, helping only those who need it most. At the same time, the university should encourage students to live up to the greatest human attributes: hard work, honesty, perseverance and excellence. As things stand, it’s teaching us the worst lesson of all: cheaters always prosper while the good get punished.”

—Elsa Johnson, the Stanford student who wrote about how students there contrive “disabilities” to gain advantageous accommodations from the school.

This was the conclusion of “I exposed Stanford’s disability racket. I was stunned by the reaction on campus.” Ethics Alarms discussed Johnson’s original essay here. In her follow-up, she claims that the reaction to her “whistle-blowing” article (my term, not hers) were generally positive, that her fellow students were glad she exposed a culture on campus that encouraged students to cheat. She wrote in part,

“I braced for the worst — but when the story broke, I was floored.The piece did go viral, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. I was flooded with messages of support. “Was that your article on disability at Stanford?” a recent grad from Stanford’s Business School texted me. “THANK YOU for writing it and the courage to include your own story among the examples. I came straight from the army to Stanford and was initially deeply uncomfortable with the ‘gaming’ of the system I saw, for disabilities and other issues. And by the time I graduated two years later, I found myself playing some of those games. I didn’t know if I had lost a part of myself and my integrity, or if this was simply the real world I had to navigate.”

I am considerably cheered by that response, if indeed it was the general response and not one cherry-picked to make an interesting follow-up. I confess that I have my doubts.

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I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone, “Experts,” Researchers and Scientists Included: My Dan Ariely Disillusionment

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

We’ve had some interesting discussions here about “experts” here of late, notably this post. I am rapidly reaching the point where anyone who appeals to authority to justify his or her position, particularly if the authority is a study, a report, an “expert” or a scientist, immediately inspires my skepticism and even suspicion. Now what?

Once again, Duke professor and researcher Dan Ariely is in the news, and not in a good way. Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business is named 636 times in the more than 3 million additional Epstein files released on January 30. He may be innocent of any wrong-doing and he and Epstein may have just played in a Fantasy Baseball league together, but the problem this creates for me is that I have been using Ariely’s work as authority in my ethics seminars for as long as I can remember.

For more than a decade, I told incoming members of the D.C. Bar as part of their mandatory ethics training that such sessions as mine were essential to making their ethics alarms ring. To support that thesis, I related the finding of research performed by Dan Ariely when he was at M.I.T. Ariely created an experiment that was the most publicized part of his best-selling book “Predictably Irrational,” giving Harvard Business School students a test that had an obvious way to cheat built into it and offering small rewarde for the students who got the highest scores. He tracked how many students, with that (small) incentive to be unethical, cheated. He also varied the experiment by asking some students to do simple tasks before they took the test: name five baseball teams, or state capitals, or U.S. Presidents.

None of these pre-test questions had any effect on the students’ likelihood of cheating, except for one question, which had a dramatic effect.  He discovered that students who were asked to recite a few of the Ten Commandments, unlike any of the other groups, never cheated at all. Never. None of them. Ariely told an NPR interviewer that he had periodically repeated the experiment elsewhere, with the same results. No individual who was asked to search his memory for a few of the Ten Commandments has ever cheated on Ariely’s test, though the percentage of cheaters among the rest of the testees is consistently in double figures. This result has held true, he said, regardless of the individual’s faith, ethnic background, or even whether they could name one Commandment correctly.

The classic moral rules, he concluded, reminded the students to consider right and wrong. It wasn’t the content of the Commandments that affected them, but what they represent: being good, or one culture’s formula for doing good. The phenomenon is called priming, and Ariely’s research eventually made me decide to start “The Ethics Scoreboard” and later this ethics blog.

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“Everybody Does It”or “Just Playing the Game”: Being Disabled At Stanford

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I found the London Times story “Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them” so annoying and rife with cultural and ethics rot that I decided not to post on it for the benefit of my own mental health. Now I see that it is getting a lot of attention all over the web and on social media, so I am ethically obligated to weigh in.

In the article, the poor, disabled student above reveals that she decided to claim endometriosis as a disability at Stanford, which would bump her to the head of the line for the best housing on campus. Her reasoning: a friend told her that Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation. “She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it,” Elsa Johnson writes. “But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as ‘disabled.'”

“Everyone was doing it,” she continues. “I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.”

That’s lying. It’s also cheating. At a college. “The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage,” she writes.

Elsa cites how much everybody does it to justify her embrace of corruption.

“The Atlantic reported that 38 percent of undergraduates at my college were registered as having a disability — that’s 2,850 students out of a class of 7,500 — and 24 per cent of undergrads received academic or housing accommodations in the fall quarter.

At the Ivy League colleges Brown and Harvard, more than 20 per cent of undergrads are registered as disabled. Contrast these numbers with America’s community colleges, where only 3 to 4 per cent of students receive disability accommodations. Bizarrely, the schools that boast the most academically successful students are the ones with the largest number who claim disabilities — disabilities that you’d think would deter academic success…at Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough. Another student told me that special “accommodations are so prevalent that they effectively only punish the honest”. Academic accommodations, they added, help “students get ahead … which puts a huge proportion of the class on an unfair playing ground.”

Conclusion here: Colleges and universities are not merely indoctrinating students in Leftist ideology, political theories and world view, they are also teaching students to accept cheating, lying and corruption as “the system” that they would be fools not to master.

This does not come as a surprise to me, as I saw this slippery slope coming when President Bush the First signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, saw it roll out of control, and watched it lead to lawsuits, employees who were impossible to fire, drags on organization budgets and productivity, and now students at colleges and graduate schools getting special privileges and advantages if they can make administrators feel sorry for them.

First, this trend is antithetical to individualism, one of the cornerstones of American values, and explains why the culture is becoming increasingly hostile to the idea that citizens are responsible for their own success, failures, advancement, and achievement. Second, it benefits the least ethical rather than the principled among us.

I had two epiphanal experiences with this ethical dilemma, and I’ve written about both on Ethics Alarms.

The first was as an administrator at Georgetown Law Center when a college applicant asked me whether she should note on her law school application that her grandfather was Japanese, making her a minority in the eyes of GULC’s (then and now) affirmative action obsessed admission process. She said she didn’t want to apply as a minority student, since she was from an affluent family, nobody knew she had Asian ancestry, and was not in any way “disadvantaged” by it.

I told her that the admission process was already arbitrary. Her grades and scores indicated that she was qualified for Georgetown Law, but borderline for a white female in the tough pool of applicants. As a minority, however, she would be guaranteed admission: her scores were in the top 20% of that pool. And by the school’s own rules, she was a minority. I told her I agreed with her, that applicants like her should not get any special advantages, but that the school’s policies were its policies. She wouldn’t be cheating or lying to take advantage of them, since her competition would be.

The other episode was when, as a law student, I had a lazy, jerk of a professor who gave us a Constitutional Law exam that was take-home, and self-timed.I followed the instructions and stopped writing when my alarm clock went off, failing to complete the last essay question. I then learned that almost nobody else in the class did. I complained to the professor, who didn’t care. My reward for not indulging in the “Everybody Does It” rationalization was a C+.

Our culture, of which educational institutions are a major and crucial part, increasingly send the wrong messages to our rising generations. We are seeing the results in the caliber of our elected leadership, in policies like DEI, and in the empathy being lavished on law breakers and illegal immigrants.

Elsa writes, “The students aren’t exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them?” My answer: yes, I can and do blame them, because they are cheating. I also blame the parents, teachers and society that allowed them to reason they way they do.

Here’s Absolutism At Work: Nobody Should Ever Die As A Result Of Hazing, And The Only Way To Make Sure Is To Ban Fraternities.

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

Those three college assholes made a “pledge” drink himself to death, or helped him end his life in some other foolish way. Nice.

An Arizona college student was found dead over the weekend after attending a fraternity rush event the previous night. The 18-year-old student couldn’t be revived at a residence near the campus of Northern Arizona University, even after bystanders in the home had performed CPR on his lifeless body. The student was pronounced dead at the scene despite their efforts.

Interviews with witnesses revealed that the student was a pledge candidate at Northern Arizona University’s Delta Tau Delta fraternity. Police arrested three students who were members of the fraternity’s executive committee: Carter Eslick, 20, the chapter’s “member educator” (that pledge sure learned his lesson, right?) Ryan Creech, 20, the fraternity vice president; and Riley Cass, 20, its treasurer. They were booked and charged with hazing.

Northern Arizona University issued a statement announcing that it had suspended Delta Tau Delta and pledged to support the police investigation.”We want to be clear: The safety and well-being of our students remain our highest priorities,” the university said. “Violence hazing or any other behavior that endangers others has no place at NAU. The university has robust hazing prevention training and requirements, and has high standards for the conduct of all NAU-associated organizations and individual students.”

Not “robust” enough, though, right? This is garbage. Where there are fraternities there is a risk of hazing. (Sororities engage in hazing too, but it’s usually not fatal. Only two verified sorority hazing deaths have been recorded. That’s still two too many.) The latest death means that therehas been at least one hazing death every year from 1959 to 2026, and more than one in many of those years. 2026 is a good bet now to be a multiple death year. That’s more than 87 needless deaths.

The all-time total is, counting from the mid 19th Century, is believed to be more than 330 deaths from hazing.

Delta Tau Delta International also issued a statement, saying,”The Fraternity is aware of an ongoing investigation into the incident and encourages its members’ cooperation with local law enforcement.Our position on hazing is clear: it is the antithesis of brotherhood and a violation of the values of Delta Tau Delta.” The organization “vigorously supports the implementation of anti-hazing legislation” in Arizona and federally.

Well, legislation wouldn’t be needed if fraternities voluntarily accepted that they are archaic and dangerous relics of a more ignorant time.

Harvard has done a lot of things wrong, but it was astute enough to get rid of fraternities in the 1850s. There is no record of any Harvard student ever dying from hazing, which strongly suggest that the solution works. What benefits do fraternities confer on an educational institution and society to justify sacrificing one or more young lives every year?

Isn’t the clear answer “None”?

The DEI Slippery Slope Goes Here:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Suraj Bhaskar, 20, from Uttar Pradesh, one of the Indian states, failed the NEET medical school admission exam twice. Determined to become a doctor, however, the plucky young man wouldn’t give up. Indian law mandates a 5% set aside in admissions for people with disabilities (PwDs) in government-aided higher education institutions, including medical colleges.

So he cut off his foot.

A police investigation indicated the violent assault on Suraj that his older brother reported was in fact a carefully planned ruse. The aspiring doctor was indeed found unconscious with a severed foot, but the plot fell apart rapidly.

“The accused tried to mislead the investigation with a fabricated story, but his claims did not stand scrutiny during sustained questioning and examination of evidence,” a police spokesperson told local reporters. A diary belonging to Suraj conatined an entry that read, “I will become an MBBS doctor in 2026,” and his girlfriend testified to Suraj’s obsession with getting into medical school. He had unsuccessfully tried to obtain disability-related documents a few months prior, but was foiled. The medical report determined that Suraj’s foot had been cleanly cut off, most likely with a machine, and the incision was too clean to have been inflicted with a violent knife attack as the two brothers claimed. The syringes found in a field near where Suraj lay strongly suggested that used a drug to numb his legs before performing the self-amputation.

His foot is still missing.

There appears to be some doubt as to whether any charges or punishment will follow with this scheme, which is widely seen as self-punishing. If nothing else, Suraj’s medical career has definitely gotten off on the wrong foot.

I’m sorry, but I regard it as unethical to pass up an obvious punch line like that.

Should It Matter If a Children’s TV Hostess Is a Virulent, Lying Anti-Semite?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is remarkable the things you learn while searching for ethics topics that have nothing to do with President Trump.

For example, I had never heard of Ms. Rachel, perhaps because my ‘kid’ is 31. Ms. Rachel is the professional moniker of educator, YouTuber, and singer-songwriter Rachel Accurso. She created the YouTube series “Ms. Rachel” (originally known as “Songs for Littles”), a children’s music series that focuses on language development for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

That’s nice! Unfortunately, she can’t resist exposing the fact on social media that she hates Jews . Last week, she “liked” a post by one of her followers on Instagram that said “Free America from the Jews.” Oh-oh. Then she posted a video in which she wept pitifully and claimed that she had meant to delete the thing but inadvertently “loved” it.

Oh. Well, anyone can make a mistake, though I don’t see how someone could make that one. The problem is that this kiddie educator has been ranting on social media about Israel “genocide” in Gaza for quite a while now. Earlier, she posted on Instagram, ‘”Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Iran.” Last year she filmed a ‘Letter of the Day’ video with Palestinian journalist, Motaz Azaiza. Azaiza has praised Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, in which infants and children were massacred among other victims. He once posted online, “May God curse the Jews themselves.”

Call me judgmental, but hosting an anti-Semite like this guy seems like an ominous sign for a child educator. Yet Ms. Rachel appears to be uncancellable. Over at “Unspiked,” Brendan O’Neill speculates why. He writes in part,

“The Damocles sword of cancellation dangles precariously over all of us for such trifling speechcrimes as wondering if the Koran is bollocks (Islamophobia) or thinking immigration should be curtailed (racism). And yet you can openly rub shoulders with anti-Semitic people or anti-Semitic posts and the cancellers will look the other way.

“Be honest: what fate would befall a kids’ entertainer if they hosted on their show a man who had once said ‘Fuck all black people’? And if they then liked a post on Instagram that said ‘Get all blacks out of America’? We know exactly what would happen. They would be savagely cancelled. The only time we’d ever see them again would be in a Netflix documentary 20 years hence about the much-loved kids’ clown who lost it all by chumming about with racist scum.

“…The exact opposite has happened with Ms Rachel. She may have exposed the kids who follow her to a man who once said ‘Curse the Jews’, and she may have liked a post calling for the mass expulsion of Jews from the US, but she will survive. And thrive. Cancel culture will lay not one finger on her. And we all know why: because Jews enjoy none of the protections of ‘political correctness’. Jews have not been granted access to the kingdom of liberal concern. Offending Jews is seen as a lesser crime than offending any other group. Ms Rachel will suffer no consequences so long as her blunders only touch on the lives and feelings of Jews.

“The real problem is not Ms Rachel, who’s fundamentally just another celeb building a virtuous self-image from the rubble of Gaza. It’s the politics of identity. It’s that ideology’s ruthless demotion of Jews to the bottom of the league of identities. Scuff a page of the Koran and you’ll be had up for Islamophobia. Film a kids’ video with a man who said ‘Curse the Jews’ and you’re grand. There it is: the merciless neo-racialism of the woke era….”

This is another Cognitive Dissonance Scale issue at heart. Maybe a competent online children’s educator can still be regarded as effective and trustworthy as long as she keeps her vile political and social views out of her videos, songs and books. On the other hand, as Captain Hook would say, I’d rather have someone who isn’t a lying anti-Semite entertaining my children if I have a choice.

You?