I know I should be writing about the college campuses revealing to administrators and faculty that they have successfully indoctrinated their students into being anti-Semites, bigots, and fascists while remaining ignorant of history and ethics. I’m really tired today, however, and for a while, at least, I’m going to indulge myself elaborating on an earlier ethics mess: the revelation that National Public Radio has become a malign force in American culture, and will lie, obfuscate and spin to disguise its true nature and objectives.
I found two notes worth pondering. From the Times (I’m not making this up)—
Ugh. This gets the Steve Buscemi foot-in-the-woodchipper GIF from “Fargo,” because that’s what stories like this make me want to do: dive into one and end it all.
The Heisman Trust announced today the formal “reinstatement” of the 2005 Heisman Trophy to former USC college football star Reggie Bush 14 years after he had been stripped of it. That 2010 decision was made when the NCAA sanctioned USC for multiple rules violations, which included Bush receiving “improper benefits,” as ESPN coyly puts it, during his Trojans career from 2003 to 2005.
USC and Bush cheated, you see. They cheated, and nothing has changed regarding their guilt. They broke the rules. But because the NCAA, the Heisman Trust, football, American sports organizations generally and the American public that supports them all have the approximate ethical literacy of dung beetles, Reggie’s cheating doesn’t count.
The almost unanimous mainstream media mockery of former President Trump briefly snoozing during the kangaroo court “hush money” trial isn’t the most noxious example of biased, hostile news media coverage as the Axis attempts to, again, clothesline the American leader so many of them have pledged to destroy (Hi there, NPR!) , but it’s particularly contrived and ignorant. Attention should be paid: these are the people crippling democracy while claiming that they want to save it.
The idea, of course, is tit-for-tat: Republicans and conservatives (along with anyone with eyes and ears who isn’t so biased they can’t think) have been pointing out the obvious crisis that the man supposedly overseeing our government is failing mentally and physically, unable to keep a full schedule or speak coherently, almost certainly operating with a metaphorical hand shoved up into his suit and head to give the (barely credible illusion) that he is really calling the shots, in thrall to a dangerous far left cabal, and too old to be safely entrusted with the Presidency even if all of the forgoing weren’t true. Therefore the counter argument, juvenile as it is (“So’s your old man!”) is to default to “wahataboutism” (as well as the usual anti-Trump Big Lies). Trump’s too old! Trump’s no more able than Biden!
“Whereas, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessonslearned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us. Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”
I have argued vigorously on Ethics Alarms against toppling the statues of important historical figures associated with the South’s disastrous and misguided attempt to secede from the Union and the bloody war that resulted. That is because erasing history is a form of public mind-control and totalitarian to its core. Moreover, many of the figures now being denigrated and “cancelled” with their memorials defaced or eliminated and their names erased from buildings and institutions had complex lives and careers worthy of honor, study and memorializing despite their participation in the rebellion.
Most of all, perhaps, the practice creates a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope: today Robert E. Lee, tomorrow Thomas Jefferson. When I first posted that warning here, many ridiculed it. Not long after, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and even Washington became targets of the statue-topplers.
But those were human beings. The Confederacy was a movement, deadly and and unethical, rooted in a theoretically legal defense of an inhuman and evil practice. There is no way to commemorate the Confederacy’s “heritage” without appearing to justify and celebrate the slavery it represented, as well as the scars it left on America. Declaring Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi might not be intended as coded racism, but then again it might.
Starting the tradition was tone deaf and suspicious in 1993. It is divisive and offensive to continue the tradition in 2024. The next step down the same slope would be “Jim Crow Heritage Month,” wouldn’t it? After all, we can “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” and “come to a full understanding” of “the lessons learned yesterday and today” from the South’s post-Civil War system of apartheid and discrimination too.
Frankly, I am amazed that Mississippi is still romanticizing the Confederacy.
For some unfathomable reason, veteran Hollywood producer Carol Baum (that’s her on the right) felt compelled to gratuitously insult the current Hollywood “It” girl, Sydney Sweeney (on the left) in an on stage interview with New York Times film critic Janet Maslin. Baum said, “There’s an actress who everybody loves now: Sydney Sweeney. I don’t get Sydney Sweeney. I was watching on the plane Sydney Sweeney’s movie [‘Anyone but You’] because I wanted to watch it. I wanted to know who she is and why everybody’s talking about her. I watched this unwatchable movie — sorry to people who love this … romantic comedy where they hate each other.”
The adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, added: “I said to my class, ‘Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?’ Nobody had an answer.”
Huh. What could it be? And nobody had an answer! It’s a mystery. What is it about Sydney Sweeney that anyone would possibly find “hot”? Wow. That’s right up there with the “Mary Celeste” and the Lost Colony. Incomprehensible!
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has asked for $70 million to care for illegal aliens after already spending upwards of $150 million to make sure defiant border-crossers know they are welcome. Or, as the late johnny Olden used to say on “The Price is Right,” “Come on Down!”
The budget committee voted 20-8 this week to advance the proposal to the full City Council. The money will come from a discretionary fund, because, apparently, there is no good use for it involving the citizens of Chicago. The idea is so irresponsible that even some Democrats are willing to say so. “Here we are begging for more money when we don’t have money for the people here!” said 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale. “When we don’t have money for after school programs. We don’t have money to help our kids get off the street. But yet, we would just blow money left and right.”
Ethics Villain? “Bias makes you stupid”? “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”? Unethical Quote of the Month? Oh, let’s start with that one:
“Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”
—-The New York Times editorial board, in yesterday’s biased, manipulative, Trump-Deranged misinformation-fest titled,“Donald Trump and American Justice”
This is no more and no less that a “WE HATE YOU TRUMP! HATE HATE HATE!” statement. As President, Trump never did anything to “deny fairness and due process” to “others.” The claim to the contrary not journalism and it’s not punditry. It is just hurling accusations without support. Yet the Times editorial board never protested when President Obama used his “bully pulpit” to suggest that American citizens were guilty of crimes before they had been tried or even charged, as in the case of George Zimmerman. The editorial provides no examples or evidence to support the statement, because there aren’t any.
I know, we’ve been seeing a lot of Sidney Wang lately.
Ja’han Jones is the blogger for Reid Out, the MSNBC race-baiting show (well, one of them) starring Joy Reid. As such, the fact that he has such a bone-headed and biased position regarding diversity is like finding out that water is wet, but it is still surprising to see anyone who can put his shoes on (I’m assuming Ja’Han can) write something as ignorant and idiotic as “The decline of Black players in MLB should be a warning about the war on DEI.”
If DEI proponents keep making arguments this bad, eventually even the dimmest members of the public will figure out that it’s a hustle. (Won’t they? Don’t they have to?) Another rule Ja’Han seems to have missed is “Don’t write about subjects you know nothing about when a lot of your readers do, because they will figure out that you are a fake.”
To summarize one of the worst published screeds I have read in a long time, this supposed “futurist,” journalist and pundit argues that Major League Baseball needs DEI programs to increase the percentage of black baseball players. (Baseball’s number of black players has been declining for a welter of cultural, financial and attitudinal reasons, none of which involve discrimination.) It’s difficult to know where to start a rebuttal of an argument that is only worthy of “What the hell are you talking about?” Might as well just dive right in…
Let’s see if the tax-payer funded progressive propaganda network has even Harvard’s survival instinct, or is even more arrogant. Amazingly enough, this story has gotten worse since I posted about it just four days ago.
You will recall that veteran NPR journalist, Uri Berliner, frustrated that his concerns about blatant progressive and Democratic bias reaching destructive proportions in the workplace he loved, blew a harsh whistle with an article on Substack headlined “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” Nothing in the article was surprising, certainly not to me, except that a current and prominent staffer wrote it. NPR, also hardly unexpectedly, circled its wagons while pretending Berliner didn’t write what he wrote, but rather a criticism of NPR’s DEI obsession. In fact he was writing about the lack of diversity at NPR of the kind that matters: viewpoint diversity and political diversity. One smoking gun he cited in his piece was the infamous tweet by NPR’s former public editor, now the Editor-in-Chief at USA Today:
Yes, in the world of “advocacy journalism,” being wrong gets you promoted, as long as you’re wrong while helping Democrats.
Then, incredibly, proving how deluded the organization is regarding both its own bias and the right way to respond to Berliner, NPR’s newly appointed CEO lied, spun and erected straw men. That’s sure to bolster NPR’s credibility!
Oopsie! Adidas was shocked..shocked! to discover that its soccer jersey customizing kit made the number 44 due look exactly like the symbol used by Nazi SS units during the WWII. That was, as you know but apparently no one in the chain of command at Adidas did, the brutal section of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich that carried out “The Final Solution.” A German historian, Michael König, first pointed out that the kit’s design was “very questionable.” That’s called an “understatement.”
An Adidas spokesperson insisted that the kit’s resemblance to the SS thunderbolts was unintentional. [Notice of correction: I originally left out the “un.”] “We as a company are committed to opposing xenophobia, antisemitism, violence and hatred in every form,” he said. “We will block personalization of the jerseys.”
Nobody in Germany found that design objectionable until a historian pointed it out?
Ethics Alarms 