Ethics Dunces

FFF! First Friday Forum of 2026…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The New York Times started the New Year with a column by one of its more recently-hired progressive-biased columnist. His name is Carlos Lozada: the Times’s DEI office finally noticed in 2022 that it didn’t have a Hispanic pundit, I guess—and his self-written description is hilarious when compared to his column kicking off 2026. “I strive for fairness, honesty and depth,” he writes. “I believe that there is something called truth, and I do my best to approximate it. My overriding value is skepticism. Along with all Times journalists, I am committed to upholding the standards of integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook.”

Right. None of the journalists at the Times strive to uphold the standards of integrity outlined in the Ethical Journalism Handbook, and Lozada proves that he’s no different from the rest of the Times pundit stable. He begins with a deliberately disingenuous premise in today’s effort titled “How Did We Get to Such a Bad Question?” (Gift link). The “bad question” is “How did we get here?” which, of course, is exactly what Lozada’s column is about. How clever. This is like the guy who says, “I’m the last person to to say X” and then says it. At this paragraph, I stopped reading:

How did we get to the so-called Trump era, for example? If your answer is about economic inequality and the forgotten man, then maybe start with the World Trade Organization or NAFTA or the decline of organized labor. If your answer is about race, then point to the backlash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction. If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh; if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party, then quote at length from Patrick Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. And so on, ad infinitum.

Yeah, I’m pretty used to that brand of bias by now. The amazing thing is that the Times is so accustomed to it as the norm that no editor saw how disqualifying Lozada’s rhetoric is. One of the major reasons for Trump’s rise was that Obama made the discriminatory philosophy behind affirmative action central to his approach to his Presidency, increasing racial division and making “Racist!” the fall-back response of the media and Democrats to any criticism of his leadership. Lozada follows suit by framing the reasonable response to Obama’s destructive eight years as…racism. “[B]acklash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction”…yeah, Carlos, white Americans who didn’t appreciate living in a culture where they were constantly vilified were expressing their hostility to the civil rights movement.

Then: “If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.” Funny, this truth-seeker immediately fingers two conservatives who correctly called out the one-way partisan bias in the mainstream media, not the complete partisan takeovers of CNN, NPR PBS and the network news. Not Obama’s arrogant “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” comment, not  Hillary’s “deplorables” speech, or…

But the final smoking gun in the column is Lozada’s “if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party…” Dingdingdingdingding!  The Republicans rejecting the Obama-Biden-Democrat embrace of open borders and “the good illegal immigrants” are nativists….you know, bigots. Like Bill the Butcher in “The Gangs of New York.” That assessment is Lozada’s idea of “fairness, honesty and depth.”

Well, bye, asshole. Now we know what your agenda is.

But I digress! You write about whatever ethics issues interest you as the new year dawns…

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So It’s Come To This…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Today I woke up to a new year and made the mistake of allowing my screen to land on Fox News. The gang was seriously interviewing an astrologer. On a news show. She was enthusing about what a wonderful month January is, because the moon is in all kinds of “houses,” or something.

I refuse to watch the movie “Network” again because I know it would send me to the bridge. So many of the seemingly absurd programs screenwriter Paddy Cheyefsky concocted for his dark 1976 satire about a fictional TV network that abandons all integrity and only aims to entertain and inflame the public have come to pass—reality shows, sick competitions, ranting pundits and worse—that the famous film can no longer be amusing. It’s horrifying that the decline of the medium and its journalism particularly has come to pass when this seemed so impossible 50 years ago.

One of the shows on “Network” featured a mystic who predicted the news. Of course Fox News would go down that metaphorical sewer. A real psychic would have seen it coming…

Stop Making Me Sort Of Defend Trump’s Social Media Posts…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ugh. Yecchh. Blechh!

When I read that “People” headline, I genuinely thought that President Trump had deliberately decided to attack the Kennedy family in the aftermath of the tragic death of Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg. That would have been insane, of course, but after Trump’s Rob Reiner outburst, I was ready to believe the worst. Clearly, “People” wanted readers to believe the worst, to give Trump-Haters more fuel to inflame them and Trump supporters reason to switch sides.

[Notice of correction: Because of the “People” headline, I didn’t realize that Trump personally had made no derogatory comments about the Kennedy family, and just reposted the comments of others. I apologize for that error, and have revised the post accordingly.]

It is crystal clear, even from the Truth Social posts quoted in the article, that the President’s re-posting of anti-Kennedy social media invective had nothing to do with Tatiana Schlossberg whatsoever. Yesterday the news was full of talk about artists and audiences boycotting the Kennedy Center because it now had Trump’s name on it, and Trump, predictably, was striking back, using the social media posts of others to do so.

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Steven Spielberg Sure Is One Ethically Confused Jew

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Steven Spielberg finally got the love he was seeking from the Hollywood establishment when “Schindler’s List” nabbed him Best Director and Best Film honors at the Oscars (despite being only the second-best film he made that year, after “Jurassic Park”). The Holocaust drama also established the director as a Serious Artist. He founded the Righteous Persons Foundation with his profits from “Schindler’s List,” saying that he wanted to educate Americans about the Holocaust.

“I could not accept any money from ‘Schindler’s List,’” Spielberg said, ” if it even made any money. It was blood money, and needed to be put back into the Jewish community. My parents didn’t keep kosher and we mainly observed all the holidays when my grandparents stayed with us,” the filmmaker explained at the time. “I knew I was missing a great deal of my natural heritage, and as I became conscious of it, I began racing to catch up.”

Ah, but Stevie lives in the Hollywood woke bubble, and intersectionality and progressive cant dictates that in the Hamas-Israel war, the Jews are the oppressors—they are white, see. Whites are always are oppressors.

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Observations on an Anti-Trump Meme That Will Be Posted By One Of My Trump-Deranged Facebook Friends Any Second Now…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Typical, desperate, ignorant and stupid.

Right now I’m placing bets on which of my Stage 5 Trump-Deranged friends or relatives will bite first. Let’s see..

1. This logic is like that of the man who kills his parents and wants sympathy from the judge because he’s a orphan. Trump was impeached twice by Democrats in the House, in both cases without thorough hearings and with contrived accusations and dubious evidence. He was also acquitted in the Senate, and correctly so.

2. The “34 felony convictions” have been effectively vacated. Though the convictions have not been overturned yet, no conviction is final until appeals have been exhausted. The fraud case in question was always pure lawfare, designed by New York Democrats and a partisan AG to “get Trump,” as that Attorney General campaigned on: she promised to “get Trump.” After all, he was threatening to win the White House. Those convictions were also for a single act that all authorities agree harmed no one, was standard business practice, and would never have prompted legal action had not Donald Trump been involved.

3. My favorite fallacy here, however, is that academic credentials have any relevance to leadership ability or successful Presidencies at all. For that matter, presumed intellectual ability hasn’t correlated with Presidential success either. To take the obvious example, Abraham Lincoln had no academic credentials. Harry Truman, an average intellect at best, proved to be a far better President than many with advanced degrees (or Harvard educations), such as John Adams, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.

4. Best of all comparisons with Trump is this one, authored by social media wit David Burge in response to that meme above:

He’s referring, of course, to the Second Worst President Ever, Woodrow Wilson.

Ethics Dunce: New Frenchman George Clooney

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

How ironic. The same week we learn that George, his un-American wife and their two children have fled the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave for the Land of the Snail and the Home of the Censored, “Variety” publishes a puff piece on the part-time actor presenting him as more than he is, which is a bubble-dwelling Hollywood progressive laboring under the delusion that he has something useful to contribute to the public discourse. He hasn’t. Neither does “Variety”.

We are told that when George was preparing to make his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his film about TV news icon Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” he invited “60 Minutes” to witness that cast’s their first read-through. Clooney ‘s angle was that there is a parallel between McCarthyism in the 1950s and the “political pressure that news organizations face in the second Trump administration.” There’s a parallel all right, but it is the Democratic Party’s adoption of McCarthy’s tactics (like guilt by association) to try to dominate American policy and politics through fear and hate. President Biden’s “Republicans are fascists” speech was pure McCarthyism. The progressive pattern of cancelling any truth-teller who informs the public of what the 21st Century Left is attempting to do to the government and the culture is McCarthyism.

“When the other three estates fail — when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us — the fourth estate has to succeed,” Clooney tells “Variety.” I’m sure he really believes that, because George, while intellectually ambitious, just isn’t very bright: bias has made him stupid. If he was alert and capable of objective analysis, he would realize that journalism has already failed, unless one calls abandoning journalism for partisan propaganda is “success.”

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The Kennedy Center Boycotts

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

My Facebook friends are almost unanimously calling for audiences to boycott Kennedy Center performances because they hate Donald Trump so much, and view his name being added to the Kennedy Center facade a just cause to…What? Destroy the arts in order to save them?

The boycott, which is taking hold because D.C.’s arts patrons are overwhelmingly wealthy, woke Democrats, is certain to have negative effect on audiences and artists. The National Symphony Orchestra, to name one boycott target, is hanging by a thread financially already. It has no other venue open to it. But the boycotters literally don’t care. Their aim is to grandstand, signal their virtue, and declare their intractable opposition to the elected President of the United States.

Artists are also engaging in this destructive and illogical protest. The Cookers, an “all-star jazz septet that will ignite the Terrace Theater stage with fire and soul” and a New York dance company canceled scheduled appearances at the Kennedy Center on New Years Eve, so as with the annual Christmas Eve jazz concert hosted by Chuck Redd that also canceled at the last minute, audiences looking forward to the event are being punished as proxies for the hated POTUS. How these protests have any impact on President Trump has yet to be explained.

The Cookers, in a statement, said, “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice.” Oh. Doug Varone and Dancers, a New York dance company, announced that it was canceling two performances in April. Varone, the head of the company, said it would lose $40,000 by pulling out, but that “It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating.”

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Unethical Quote of the Day: LA Mayor Karen Bass

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“Well, in a way, I think it’s sad….”

—-Astoundingly incompetent LA Mayor Karen Bass, on CNN’s  “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer

She was responding to a CNN report about Hispanic-Americans joining I.C.E. in record numbers. Knowing Bass (see this infuriating idiot’s EA dossier here) and the pro-illegal immigration party she belongs to, can you guess why LA’s woke Mayor thinks the development is “sad”?

Why, they’re betraying their own kind, you see! You know, like when inner city blacks tell police about murderers, muggers and rapists in their neighborhood who are the same color they are. Imagine doing that to your “own kind”!

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“Incompetent and Irresponsible State of the Decade” Nomination: Minnesota [Expanded!]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

What, not New York? California? Oregon? Washington? Oh, they are all in the race too: “failed states” we might call them if they were foreign countries. But lately the enormity of how badly Minnesota residents have exercised their voting rights has been throbbingly obvious.

Of course we already know that the state has Keith Ellison (EA dossier here) as its Attorney General. It also has a criminal and anti-Semitic House member, Rep. Omar, who committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother and lying about it, who has stated that her loyalties are to a foreign nation (Somalia) first, and who has, among other outrages, attempted to minimize the international crimes committed on 9/11/2001 (“some people did something”). But look at the clowns— figuratively, not literally, but it’s a close call [Added: but see below] —Minnesota has elected as its governor and lieutenant governor.

Minnesota’s lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, a Catholic, wore a hijab to express solidarity with Somalis in a local TV appearance. Massive fraud in the Somali community has stolen taxpayer funds to the tune of at least $9 billion. “I know that things are scary right now,” said Flanagan, alluding to the fact that ICE is correctly cracking down on a deliberately unassimilated community rife with members who have broken the law to get here, and then broke the law some more.

It was exactly Flanagan’s kind of pandering that appears to have led Democratic politicians like her to avoid interfering with the Somali scammers, because it is such a large voting bloc. Eh, so they are taking money that was supposed to help struggling, law abiding citizens. Corruption is a tradition in Somalia! Multiculturalism!

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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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