Ethics Train Wrecks

Another “Nah, Universities and Colleges Don’t Indoctrinate Students!” Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

[Note: Flushed with unexpected good health, I promised yesterday to post on the unraveling Fauci scandal. 1) I wasn’t quite as recovered from the previous day’s cold, especially energy-wise, as I thought I was, and 2) I realized that today would be the more appropriate day for that post given that the arrogant Ethics Villain is testifying before Congress and Sen. Rand Paul would be, as the saying goes, “tearing him a new one.” Fauci gets his EA excoriation next, I promise.]

Just as a depressing number of people, either captured by the fascists of the Left or intimidated by them, deny that the Axis news media manipulates, censors and distorts facts and events to gain their ideological allies power “by any means necessary,” so do similar victims refuse to acknowledge the ideological capture of our educational institutions, with a few exceptions. My own two almae matres (Miss Rounds would never forgive me for writing “alma maters”) are prominent and despicable examples: Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, as I have documented extensively on EA.

Now comes a particularly egregious example of this dangerous phenomenon from Mt. Holyoke, one of the cluster of woke private colleges in northern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont along with Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wellesley, Dartmouth and Bennington.

Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts mandates that student organization leaders complete Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, and that they must develop “anti-racist plans” before the college administration will recognized them and allow them to hold sanctioned events. Without proof that an organization will be a full participant in promoting the Left’s anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight discrimination agenda, an organization will not be eligible for college funding. Chess club, drama club, Young Republicans, football team…it doesn’t matter: all the leaders of student groups must complete the required training before receiving official recognition from the college.

After a minimum of two student officers complete the training, each organization must create or update an “anti-racist plan.” Seriously? Did I just accidentally type the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, like “1984” in reverse? I can’t believe I’m writing this.

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The Revolting Shiloh Hendrix Case

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

The last time I wrote about this Minnesota ethics train wreck more than a year ago, I began with “Yecchh! Pooey!” I would now like to add, “Ick! Barf!” I hate this story.

The latest revolting development is that a Minnesota jury convicted Shiloh Hendrix of a single charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct last week for repeatedly calling a black man who confronted and filmed her at a Rochester playground “nigger.” Hendrix also directed the slur at an 8-year-old black boy who had been going through her purse.

Because Hendrix’s speech was the conduct underlying the disorderly conduct charge according toMinnesota law, we have a controversy over whether using “nigger” as this awful woman did falls within the narrow “fighting words” exception to speech protected under the First Amendment.

The six-person jury returned its verdict after four days of testimony in Olmsted County District Court, finding Hendrix, 37, guilty on the count involving using “nigger” in her exchanges with videographer Sharmake Omar. She was not found guilty on the count involving the child. The full sentence: a stayed 90-day jail sentence, supervised probation, 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.

We are told Hendrix did not speak before sentencing. Good.

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The Smithsonian vs. The USA

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

EA discussed “ideological capture” earlier today focusing on the law and academia, but as Americans who were paying attention (and who don’t rely on the Axis news media for the news), we were introduced last week to the desperate straits of the Smithsonian Institution, saddled with a woke ninny who gives “land acknowledgments” at every opportunity, and who pretended, under oath, not to know just how obsessed with promoting racial division and public contempt for their own nation the museum under her charge is.

On July 4th, the White House released a thorough and nausea-producing report on just how much “ideological capture” has infected the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). Titled SAVING AMERICA’S STORY: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage, the report, which you can and should read here, presents a damning case.

I had written earlier about this monstrosity,

…on the Smithsonian website, but there is so, so much more. For example, here is the Smithsonian insinuating, in text-book fake news fashion, that Ben Franklin may have used “enslaved persons” (the new, approved woke-speak for “slaves”) in his research, though there is absolutely no evidence of it.

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In Madison, Anti-Cop Woke Virtue-Signaling Beats “The Show Must Go On”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The values and priorities of the people responsible for this display of warped ethics are so alien to me that they might as well come from a different dimension.

It all begins with the fatal shooting of Corey Ruiz this week in Madison, Wisconsin. At this point, it’s difficult to get the facts of the shooting without it being framed by anti-law enforcement and pro-perp narrative. As far as I can determine, Ruiz was another habitual thief, thug and scofflaw: Wisconsin public records show that Ruiz had 40 misdemeanor and felony convictions from 2009 to 2025, including robbery by force, strangulation, drug possession, vehicle theft and battery of a public safety worker, according to the records. He was most recently convicted of resisting law enforcement and drug paraphernalia possession.

[The source I was able to get that information from adds, “Jazzman Brown, a community organizer in Madison, said Ruiz was a father who was experiencing homelessness and mental health struggles.” Oh! Well, that means he can rob and beat up people then. Never mind. Seriously: I don’t care how much of a troubled life the deceased may or may not have had.]

Police officers were dispatched to Madison’s Marquette neighborhood in response to reports of someone stealing bicycles and checking vehicle doors. It was Ruiz. When officers attempted to approach him, he fled on a bicycle, riding through backyards to escape, Ruiz either fell or was pulled off the bicycle, then fought with officers to resist arrest. During the struggle, Ruiz pulled out a substantial fixed-blade knife and injured one of the officers. Ruiz was tazed, but it appeared to have no effect. Then an officer fired three shots into the man, killing him.

I have no sympathy for the deceased at all. Anyone who believes his death justifies a protest (or worse, a law suit, or worse still, the prosecution of a police officer) is crippled by poor logic, bias, and absurd anti-law enforcement attitudes.

Nonetheless, AtwoodFest, an annual music and crafts festival with free admission featuring 3 stages, and 30 bands with food and craft vendors, was cancelled by organizers with this nauseating announcement:

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“Ideological Capture”: How Academia Suppresses Conservative Thought

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais represented a straight, non-liberal activist reading of the Constitution, which prohibits racial discrimination for any purpose. Naturally, brain-washed progressives pronounced the SCOTUS ruling this year an abomination, a claim based in bias and ignorance as I explained here.

Never mind: the news media and legal websites have overwhelmingly attacked the decision, as has the legal academia sector. The latter is especially ominous. The SCOTUS ruling was the right one, I believe, but certainly one that can support serious, good faith debate. On the scholarly side, however, the analysis of the issues only go one way. Is that the kind of expert “consensus” the climate change hysterics maintain exists on that topic? How could that be?

In his essay “The case for Callais” on SCOTUSblog [“This publication has been inundated with essays by academics critical of Louisiana v. Callais, but has not published a single one in defense of it. So I decided to take it on in my column”] Brian Fitzpatrick explains how. He writes at the start,

“When I was thinking about becoming a law professor – I am sorry to say this was something like a quarter century ago now – I went to go see one of my favorite former law professors, Elena Kagan, for advice. She was then the dean at Harvard Law School, but I had known her merely as my Administrative Law professor. She asked me what field I wanted to pursue and I told her race discrimination law. It was the reason I went to law school to begin with. It was what I had written my law school thesis on.

“Her response: don’t do it. She explained that, in order to get a job as a race discrimination scholar at any school, I would have to win over the other scholars at that school who worked in that area. Kagan said that at every school the scholars who worked in that area all supported racial preferences. The problem was that I was against racial preferences. She said for that reason alone no one in the field would support hiring me. She told me to choose something else.

“So I did. I decided to pursue class action litigation instead. It’s been a perfectly pleasant career. But it also explains why the academy is monolithic – and, frankly, untrustworthy – on race issues: you aren’t allowed to specialize in these issues unless you toe the party line. Today, we call this “ideological capture” of the academy. I think it’s a pretty sad state of affairs and I am not the only one.”

“Sad” doesn’t begin to describe what is wrong with this phenomenon, but it does explain the process whereby colleges and universities slowly but relentlessly eliminated objectivity and balance in entire fields—education, of course, but also history, journalism, political science, law, and, based on what I have experienced this year, ethics. The consequences of that strategy are readily apparent, but how to undo the process and return to independent and ideologically diverse thought essential to a democracy is not so clear.

‘Nah, The Smithsonian Isn’t Run By A Woke, Fanatic, Anti-American Cabal!’

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Earlier this week, EA discussed how Rep. Brandon Gill exposed the horrifying wokey nonsense the head of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has inflicted on the museum during her tenure. It turns out that I was too kind, and that this silly, biased and indoctrinated woman is even more intolerable than I thought.

Before she was eviscerated by Gill, Rep. Tim Burchette’s introduction was res ipsa loquitur stuff, so inherently damning that further questioning of Anthea Hartig was unnecessary. The pièce de résistance comes at the 1;35 mark, when we get a montage of Hartig dutifully giving prayer-like “land acknowledgment” grovels to Native American activists. The list is long, but near the top of mockery-requiring leftist rituals that mark practitioners as unworthy of trust, power or responsibility has to be these ahistorical claims that the United States is an illegitimate sovereignty built on “stolen lands.”

It is bad history, bad law and bad logic, transparent virtue signaling to those who don’t know what virtue is. If someone is really so shattered by working and living on “stolen lands” nothing stops such an addled individual from tracking down some member of the Patawippumkokavackimminy tribe and handing over the keys to his or her home. Hartig won’t do that, of course, because she’s either a hypocrite, a pandering fake or more likely both.

Believing it is appropriate for a representative of the U.S.’s national museum to begin every speech or public appearance emphasizing one of our nation’s two alleged “original sins” as if that is the defining feature of the nation should have marked Hartig for swift removal long ago—in fact, how did such a fool get hired in the first place? I can on;y conclude that it is because her political party likes anti-Americanism and wants our country to be seen as a villain, not just by the rest of the world, but by its own citizens.

Another post script on presentation skills: I hate to keep harping on this, but people whose living involves communication have an obligation to learn how to communicate. Burchette is terrible; I found it hard to focus on his content, so annoying was his vocal placement, droning tone and lack of engagement with the camera. Again, this isn’t hard to fix; all it requires is the will to fix it. I resent having to listen to public figures like Burchette. He is either too lazy or stupid to make an effort to help people understand and focus on what he is saying.

The ABA’s President Displays Why Every Non-Lawyer Doesn’t—and Shouldn’t— Trust Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“This is embarrassing,” Rep. Brandon Gill said, as Michelle A. Behnke ( from Madison, Wisconsin—of course she is), the president of the American Bar Association (ABA) repeatedly refused to answer direct questions, was infuriatingly evasive and displayed nauseating hypocrisy and dishonesty as Rep. Brandon Gill questioned her regarding DEI, bias and discrimination. It was embarrassing, for Democrats, progressives, fans of permanent anti-white discrimination, members of the ABA (the largest American bar association, which I refuse to join expressly because of the organization’s lack of integrity ) so flamingly displayed by Behnke, and especially all lawyers. How can the public trust a “profession” that allows such a shifty, pusillanimous, dishonest individual to represent it by leading its members’ largest and most prestigious organization?

I say this as a legal ethicist: It can’t.

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Train Wreck Update, In Which the Complicit and Corrupt NYT Journalists and Pundits Can’t Bring Themselves To Be Honest About Graham Platner”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Graham Platner seems like old news now that the Maine Democrats have another working-class hero to run against Susan Collins: a temperamental logger instead of a part-time oyster fisherman, Troy Jackson. I meant to post this Comment of the Day a week ago but got distracted: never mind. Ryan Harkin’s observations are still relevant, and, as always, he does a thorough and articulate job. This is the first half of a Ryan Harkins Comment of the Day double-header, with the second half arriving tomorrow morning.

Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Train Wreck Update, In Which the Complicit and Corrupt NYT Journalists and Pundits Can’t Bring Themselves To Be Honest About Graham Platner”:

***

I think the observations from various conservatives is correct about the Democratic Party’s embrace of Platner: they are looking for the Democratic answer to Donald Trump, and thought maybe they found him in Platner. The problems here are manifold, though. First and foremost, they don’t understand what makes Trump popular to conservatives. Second, in searching for a masculine model, they have no idea what actual masculinity is. They took Trump’s crass behavior and somehow reasoned that they needed someone crass. (As though all their foul-mouthed, guttersnipe-turned-millionaire grifters weren’t crass enough!) They noticed Trump’s promiscuity and thought they needed someone who treated women dirty. They saw Trump’s businessman persona, and they thought they could create a businessman aura around their candidate. The problem in all of this is the Democrats cannot (and have for a generation at least) see anything beneath the surface. They are so caught up in superficial details and labels that they cannot even fathom there are depths that have to be considered.

Conservatives don’t like Trump’s promiscuity or narcissism; they tolerate it for Trump’s other characteristics and Trump’s record. Trump professed a love for the United States, which Democrats can never do. Trump identified the problems conservatives have, especially the hostility they have felt at values that have underwritten the United States since its founding: faith in God, self-determinism, and hard work. They have felt repressed by governments who catered to anyone but them, and especially to those groups who specifically weren’t them. Faith in God was derided; self-determinism was racist, violent, and toxic; hard work was treated as something to be punished. They have been struggling with the feeling of being replaced by foreigners, all the while being told they were imagining things. They were forced to observe, and call phobic if they didn’t support, every alternative lifestyle they had always believe was detrimental to a healthy family life. The list goes on and on.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: The Minnesota Star Tribune

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Vang’s actions 20 years ago were awful, but so were the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6, 2021, and those folks received Presidential pardons.”

—–The Minnesota Star, cheering on Gov. Tim “Knucklehead” Walz’s sick decision to pardon a serial child rapist in an attempt to foil efforts to deport him.

No one can trust a news source capable of putting such illogical, unethical garbage in print. Defense by non-sequitur! “Sure, he raped a child repeatedly for years, but Jeffrey Dahmer ate people!” There is no basis for comparison between the J-6 rioters, all citizens and jailed, some for a couple of years, for a single act, and a non-citizen who never spent a day in prison despite pleading guilty to multiple child rapes. The Star’s bizarre logic doesn’t even rise to the level of the worst of all rationalizations, Rationalization #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things.” Is the idea that Walz trying to let a child molester stay in his state is good because Trump’s pardon of the rioters wasn’t? What is the Star trying to say? Do the editors even know?

Then the Star’s grand finale is to quote with approval another one of Walz’s idiotic outbursts. “Taking them out with no due process”? Vang received a final order of removal in October 2006! There was due process to spare.

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering how the once great state of Minnesota came to such a precipitous decline in values and common sense. Once represented by the likes of Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, it is led by a principle-free, incompetent fool, with an addled newspaper like the Star warping the news to disguise his incompetence. Minnesotans used to be smart, creative, rational. They had standards, they had pride. What happened? Now they are sitting by while their state’s #1 paper applauds their Governor for pardoning a child rapist, and one who made it clear that he doesn’t think raping children is anything to get upset about. Americans are just weirdly prudish about such things!

So the citizens of Minnesota just nod their heads as their governor first pardons the man who rapes little girls and pays them to keep quiet, because Kamala choice’s to be VP wants to foil efforts to remove criminal non-citizens. They keep nodding as that governor describes years of multiple rapes as the rapist’s “worst day” [Vang didn’t think they were bad days at all], and nod some more as the Star calls Walz a hero for trying to inflict a sexual predator on their state permanently.

What is that? Brain damage? Hypnosis? Insanity?

I just don’t understand.

Yikes! An Entire State Supreme Court Flips Out And Attacks The U.S. Supreme Court! (Yes, That Is Unethical)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Several Ethics Alarms reader alerted me to this gobsmacking story, further evidence that the political left in this country is in the process of suffering a nervous breakdown. I am still not certain I am glad they did.

The court alluded to in the title is the Hawaii Supreme Court. That state needs to be given a bit of leeway for its excesses and delusions: Hawaii, even after more than half a century as our 50th state, is still a very different culture from the other 49. That’s part of its charm when you visit there, but it also has allowed a problematic mindset to linger. Hawaiians just don’t think the usual rules should apply to them, even in relation to the Constitution. Two years ago, in State v. Wilson, the Hawaii Supreme Court wrote that “[t]he spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons,” and that Hawaii would read the Second Amendment “differently than the current United States Supreme Court.”

Oh. Except that a state can’t do that.

More recently, the same justice who wrote that defiant legal nonsense authored a full-on attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, tacked onto a rather mundane case about prosecutorial misconduct. I will re-publish the whole amazing section below, but KABOOM! It is head-exploding. The diatribe, because that’s what it is, covers voting rights, campaign finance, abortion, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, the major questions doctrine, Chevron deference, the spending power, the removal power, and birthright citizenship, while accusing the Roberts Court of being racist.

Such tangential rhetoric is known as dicta, parts of a legal opinion that carry no substantive legal weight at all since it is pure opinion without definitive case authority. Even dicta, however, is subject to certain professional and ethical constraints. The Hawaiian Supreme Court rantis a bright line breach of several tenets in state’s Code of Judicial Conduct.

Canon I states, “A JUDGE SHALL UPHOLD AND PROMOTE THE INDEPENDENCE, INTEGRITY, AND IMPARTIALITY OF THE JUDICIARY AND SHALL AVOID IMPROPRIETY AND THE APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY.“

Under that banner are three mandates: Rule 1.1. Compliance with the Law, Rule 1.2. Promoting Confidence in the Judiciary, and Rule 1.3. Avoiding Misuse of the Prestige of Judicial Office. A statement that announces that a judge does not feel bound by U.S. Supreme Court decisions violates Rule 1.1. A judge attacking the integrity and motives of the U.S. Supreme Court undermines confidence in the judiciary, as prohibited by Rule 1.2. A judge using the prestige of his office to impugn a higher court is by definition an abuse of office, breaching Rule 1.3.

But wait! There’s more!

Canon 2 states, “A JUDGE SHALL PERFORM THE DUTIES OF JUDICIAL OFFICE
IMPARTIALLY, COMPETENTLY, AND DILIGENTLY.”

The anti-SCOTUS section shows a judge giving priority to his partisan and political beliefs over his duties as a judge, violating Rule 2.1. His unhinged attack on past SCOTUS jurisprudence indicates that he is incapable of “upholding the law,” and that he is also incapable of “impartial” conduct. Moreover, the opinion constitutes a flagrant bias based on political affiliation, breaching Rule 2.3.

The outburst is even worse than the many rules violations suggest. The logic is tortured, the law is bad, and the arguments are hysterical as well as not based in reality; worst of all, the Hawaiian judges appear not to understand how SCOTUS fits into the Constitutional governance formula. The core goal underlying the tantrum is an arrogant belief in judicial activism and judges usurping legislatures, as the Warren court did habitually.

As a final rotten cherry on this putrid sundae of unethical judicial conduct, The National Review noticed that a bot probably wrote the text. Nice. My position is that judges using AI to write their opinions is impeachable conduct, but then so is issuing such an attack on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here is the section, and I must add, having just read it through again, the naked Trump Derangement and partisan extremism is shocking. This isn’t just unethical. It is judicial insurrection. Luckily, progressives don’t read court opinions…

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