Ethics Train Wrecks

J.D. Vance’s Wishy-Washy “Town Hall” On CBS

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Speaking of Vice-Presidents, yecchh.

Our current VP was subjected to a CBS “town hall” over the weekend where a series of generally none-too-bright questioners peppered Vance with questions that he hesitated to answer with the clarity and forcefulness necessary. I thought Vance’s strength was supposed to be communication. Maybe Trump can get rid of him…

You can read the transcript here, but my main nausea came from Vance’s weenie responses to two questions regarding illegal immigration. CBS set him up to some extent with the first one, asked by a nun, Sister Nancy Sylvester. The Veep is Catholic, of course, and spoke as if he felt he owed some kind of deference to Sister Nancy despite the fact that her question bypassed law and policy and went straight to toxic empathy. She asked…

“Mr. Vice President, we are sisters who minister at the southern border in the United States, as well as here around Detroit, and they are constantly seeing families who are affected by our immigration policies. They see the trauma of children who are separated from their parents, sometimes on a moment’s notice. They go to school and they come back and they’re not there. And they have to sort of fend for themselves. And so they, the sisters see the kind of effect, the fear and violence of the ICE behavior. We know the complexity of this issue, but what really pains us is how it’s being implemented in such ways. And so I’m going to, sort of know that both of us share the same faith. We may not always agree, ’cause I understand you don’t always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to, though, wonder what would you say, how would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who try to follow the gospel, how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified to, in terms of the kind of values we live, wanna live by, and also what policies would you advocate to try to promote more compassionate and respective behavior toward our immigrant sisters and brothers?”

Elected officials and responsible citizens can’t accept the false premises underlying such a question, but Vance did. He replied, after wasting time showing his concern for the Pope’s health and pandering to his fellow Catholics,

“So let me say, one, we’re trying to strike the right balance. And when you have a country where approximately 25 million illegal aliens have come in over the past 30 or so years, many of them completely unchecked and unvetted, we’re trying to strike a balance between how do we do law enforcement, but how do we also do it humanely, and how do we not do so little law enforcement that you actually empower some of the worst people in the world. And so—I think that it is constantly a work in progress. When you’re talking about millions and millions of people and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, you know, we’ve even just in the past year or so increased training protocols. Because I do think that men and women of ICE, by the way, it’s like the men and women of law enforcement. Most of them are amazing people who are patriots and they want to do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up. And obviously we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up.”

Clear as mud, and incompetent. His duty was to begin by saying, first, that the Sister was talking about illegal immigrants, and the “immigration policies” of enforcing the law. These aren’t “immigrant sisters and brothers,” but illegal immigrants who should not benefit from taking what isn’t theirs to take, It’s nice that she and her colleagues are trying to ease the burdens law-breaking illegals have inflicted on their own children, but that is not the fault of the United States or its primary concern, nor should it be. “Following the gospel” means, as the wonderful Pope has made clear, open borders, and the disastrous consequences of that are blazingly evident in Europe and increasingly in the U.S. You cannot govern competently and responsibly with faith and the the idealistic teachings from a culture 2,000 years ago. Law enforcement wouldn’t have incidents of overreach, bad decisions, accidents and mistakes if lawbreakers didn’t force the government to deal with their destruction.

I have a dear friend and occasional commenter on EA who thinks like Sister Nancy. This is the poison well of misplaced Christian charity that creates the “Good Illegal Immigrant” myth and the absurd parallels between Mary and Joseph and the millions of illegals the Biden administration encouraged to first break our immigration laws, and then to engage in further lawbreaking.

Then CBS host Tony Dokoupil introduced another questioner, a naturalized citizen named Niv Agarwal. Sister Nancy had just asked, “I’m interested in how, from your very core of your faith, how would you want to be, how do you want to treat immigrants? Because in many cases, we get, they all are called terrorists sometimes by people. They are—like, how does, what, what would you want? What would you want to do?” Great: Shut up, Sister, you ignorant slut. Tony segued to Niv, whose infuriating question was along the same lines. He said,

“Hey, my name is Niv. My family and I immigrated here about 20 years ago, and I became a citizen about five years ago. So you were the first person I voted for, actually….One reason, because of the reasons you just mentioned, I was concerned about border safety, as in the trafficking and the drugs, not because I think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, but after seeing ICE behave like military police, and you recently call H-1 visa workers foreign indentured servants. I think Americans are anything but safe. So I’m just curious, why, why are you scapegoating immigrants for the issues you’re supposed to be solving as a Vice President?”

Immediately, Vance should have said,

“Let’s get two things straight once and for all, Niv. First, the issue is illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants like you. Stop letting open borders advocates confuse the issue by adopting their dishonest rhetoric. Second, if an illegal immigrant has a job in this country, by definition he or she is taking that job away from an American, because if that illegal wasn’t here, an American would have that job. So if you don’t think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, you’re confused. Nobody is “scapegoating immigrants.” Again, we are talking about illegal immigrants. I would think, as an immigrant yourself, you would insist on that distinction. We are correctly pointing out the harm done to the nation, society, the economy and law-abiding citizens when foreign citizens come here illegally, and ICE acts exactly as law enforcement has to act when criminals are being protected by rogue state and local governments and misguided Americans who have accepted pro-open borders propaganda as you have.”

If the Republicans get clobbered in the mid-terms, a main reason will be their incompetence and rhetorical cowardice.

What’s The Matter With Washington State School Officials And How Did They Get This Way?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In Washington, the ultimate reductio-ad-absurdum scenario occurred in the ongoing woke insanity of allowing male athletes to compete against females once they “identify” as female. At Camus High, boy’s cross-country team member Logan Mihailoff, a junior, finished 76th in a boys’ JV cross-country race on September 15th. So on September 29th the same kid, with no changes in his anatomy or physiology, joined the varsity girls’ team. He had “identified” as female, see. And miracles of miracles, he went from 76th to first in a track meet against Union High!

The school later took legal action against a father who held up a protest sign against this obvious cheat that was enabled by the woke lunatics in charge of overseeing athletics at the school, and they took legal action against him. He chanted, “Keep boys out of girls’ sports,” and now is banned from campus for a year. OutKick reporter Matt Calkins interviewed parents at Camas High and tried to interview an assistant cross-country coach. “Nobody wants to talk to you,” the coach said. “I’m trying to be nice.” The logical and ethical contrast between the parents trying to protest their daughters’ rights to compete in a fair contest and the woke defenders of an indefensible policy was striking.

“We’re about as liberal as it gets,”said parent Kent Lake. “I just don’t agree with that [boys competing against girls]. I mean, if they find your body in 300 years, what are they going to say you were? Look, you can live any way you want. You got my blessing. But I mean come on, in competitions? It’s like stock car racing. It’s gotta be even, and it’s gotta be fair.”

Not especially articulate, but still clear enough. “When I first heard about this story, I was like, ‘Is this real? That can’t be real’,” said a mother of a cross country runner, who requested anonymity because she was probably was afraid that the woke mob would storm her house with torches and pitchforks. “We have daughters, and it’s robbing them of an opportunity to compete.”

Follow-up question, ma’am? Why do you live in this crazy state?

On the pro-letting boys magically turn themselves into girls so they can win races, games and scholarships side—you know, morons—Outkick got responses like “There are more important things in sports than that” from one experienced progressive rationalizer. (I have heard and read that dodge regarding everything from open borders to DEI discrimination.) There is, in fact, no good defense of what the blurry kid above did. Can you guess which one is the boy?

After the September 29th travesty, a dozen female cross-country runners on the Camas High School team refused to compete against the cheat on October 13. About half of the girls competing in last week’s race walked off the field in protest while the newly minted “Miss” Mihailoff took of with the remaining of female runners. (And what brainwashed woke weenies those girls are on the way to becoming!) The 11 protesting female students slowly walked past the starting line with their arms linked and left the field.

There is hope.

Listen to this babbling idiot, the head of the state’s school system, try to defend the school policy:

Yikes. He also is employing the apparent desperation fall-back position of the pro-trans cheating cabal as Initiative 638 comes up for a vote on November 3. It would keep cheating males like Logan Mihailoff out of the women’s competitions in K-12 sports, so opponents say it will require “invasive” checks. No, it wouldn’t. If the dude didn’t decide he was a she until after puberty, then he’s out. Too bad abut that “inclusivity” thingy, but there’s always the chess team. Also being a member of the boys team two weeks earlier is also a big clue. No ‘nads checks required.

How can Americans vote for these people? I don’t get it.

Ethics Hero: Former ESPN Producer Nicole Noren

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Noren, an ESPN employee for two decades, revealed in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review that her resignation in 2023 was provoked by the network’s decision to launch its own branded sports gambling app, ESPN Bet. Noren said that she knew first hand the dangers of gambling, and had good reason to believe encouraging or enabling it, and certainly profiting by it, was unconscionable.

“My brother died thirteen years ago on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas,” she said. “It’s a stark reality, but it illustrates the tragic arc of being brought there as kids so our dad could gamble at sportsbooks, to then surviving on the streets there as a homeless person and dying at thirty-six.”

Her grandfather and father, as well as her brother “were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction,” Noren told the publication. “I grew up in Ventura, California, and multiple times, we suddenly had to move because of extreme financial ups and downs. I mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn’t go to museums and typical places kids go to. We were dragged to Las Vegas in the eighties and hanging out in the Hilton and Caesars sportsbooks, when kids weren’t supposed to be around there. I remember going to the horse track, going to the dog track.”

So when ESPN decided to embrace legalized sports gambling in’23, “I was out,” she says. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”

Noren also accused the network of suppressing stories critical of the gambling industry.“What was telling to me was that I had pitched numerous stories that would take a harder look at some of the gambling companies and addiction, and none of those stories were greenlit,” she told the Review. “They ended up doing a show on it around that time, but it became very neutered. Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable. Let’s just say the final product didn’t end up doing that.”

There was even an interactive primer on point spreads, totals, and parlays for new bettors with animations that were “pretty much made for kids.” “What bothered me most was a seeming disregard for the dangers and not thinking about the ramifications of ESPN normalizing gambling for an audience that looks to ESPN as sort of their sports guide, essentially—not looking down the road at the parallels between gambling and other addictive things in our country that have been normalized, such as opioids and cigarettes, that ended up becoming major public health crises.”

Brava, though Noren’s resignation was until now only a personal statement with no broader impact on society or this expanding ethics problem, which EA has been discussing for many years. ESPN Bet is dead, lasting only through last year, but that’s just moral luck. Noren was right: her employer willing to get “blood on its hands” in exchange for money in its metaphorical pockets, so the ethical course was to refuse to be a part of a corrupt organization and its culture.

What are desperately needed now are executives, broadcasters, celebrities and athletes who are willing to take similar stands against teams and sponsors. A politician or two would be nice too.

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

And completely consistent with the previous post.

The most frightening thing is that they are so open about it, as if there is nothing wrong with a party saying, “When we get in power, we’ll make sure no one feels safe opposing us.”

Santa Rosa City (Cal.) Schools: Unethical, Illegal, Unconstitutional, Un-American—Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck just made a nasty stop.

The captain of the Piner High School football team posted the phrase “Free the Cornell Seven” on Instagram.

So what? That post is entirely, completely, protected free speech, and any semi-informed American dolt over the age of 18 should know it. That message does not involve the school or its students in any way. It is pure opinion.

Never mind. Santa Rosa City Schools officials announced last week that the student had been punished. So far, all we know about the punishment is that the player was barred from attending a team dinner. It doesn’t matter if the punishment was a reprimand in the principal’s office. A school can’t do that.

Not punished, however, were the approximately 200 students—nobody bothered to take names or count them— who walked out of class to protest the fact that their school hadn’t sufficiently punished a fellow student for making a statement of opinion that could not be legally, ethically or constitutionally punished. This is bonkers. The conduct of those students must be punished. Not only that, the teachers and administrators responsible for them not comprehending the essentials of free speech, the First Amendment and the Constitution at such an advanced age should be sacked.

The protesters demanded “accountability” for the football team captain. So did many parents, who complained to the school district that the message “makes light of sexual assault and should not be tolerated.” Not be tolerated? The school’s principal’s answer to the parents should have been,

“Mind your own damn business and get out of my face. You need to go back to high school yourself. You don’t know what you are talking about. First, anyone, including a student here, is free to post any opinion on a controversy in New York on his or her personal social media accounts any time they choose. We have to “tolerate it.” Second, there is no evidence that a sexual assault occurred, despite your fellow travelers on the Left seeking to wreck the lives of young men as a show of solidarity with the worst of American feminists.”

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Comment of the Day: “Help! My Ethics Conflict…”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

My recent post about an extreme Trump Deranged friend whom I have so far refused to disabuse of the false notion that I am a solid progressive Democrat, in her view the only people worthy of her company, attracted many excellent comments; several are Comment of the Day worthy. I’m giving CD-VAPatriot the honor, in part because I know her, and know how accurate her self-description is. It would be hard to imagine someone less fairly called “immoral” or less deserving of derision from the Trump Deranged.

Below is CD-VAPatriot‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Help! My Ethics Conflict…” for your reading pleasure and edification. But first I would like to recommend that you track down Season 7 of “American Horror Story” on Amazon Prime. This brave, creative, often satirical, subversive, genre-savvy anthology series using a spectacular repertory company took on both political extremes in 2017, and many of its plot points proved disturbingly prophetic. It would not be unfair to say the theme of the season was the horror of Trump Derangement, triggered by the fury of progressives, especially feminists, who were emotionally broken by Hillary’s defeat. (We see a lesbian couple’s marriage deteriorate in part because one partner blames the other for Hillary’s defeat after she voted for Jill Stein. This is even funnier today than it was then.)

I had direct experiences with women exactly like the protagonists in “Cult,” the title of the season’s ten installment tale. They told me, one with tears running down her face, that they were terrified of the impending Trump Presidency, and, of course, the Democratic party exploited that irrational fear. Fear is the sub-theme of the season; ironically, it is the crazed conservative cult leader who preaches the power of fear in promoting political change, but we have seen that it is the political Left that has sown fear most relentlessly since 2017: fear of climate change, fear of the Wuhan virus, fear of AI, fear of “fascism,” fear of “The Handmaiden’s Tale,” fear of law enforcement, and fear of Donald Trump in general. The show makes all extremes of the political spectrum look bad without taking sides, an approach that is difficult, wise and in today’s Hollywood, courageous.

Now here’s CD…

***

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Speaking of Cheating Democrats…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The New York Times revealed yesterday that a group called Frontier Media has paid TikTok “influencers” to post pro-James Talarico content on social media. Talarico is the Democratic challenger for an open Texas U.S. Senate seat deemed crucial to his party’s chanced of taking the Senate in November. But Talarico’s campaign told the Times regarding the discovery,

.

…so I guess they are as innocent as little lambs. You will recall paying for celebrity endorsements was part of Kamala’s “we go high” campaign strategy. Just for the record since I’m sure you don’t need to be told, this is lying. Such conduct falsely represents to the public that a trusted individual has independently concluded that a candidate deserves to be elected, while the payers do not reveal their influence and the payees don’t reveal their incentives.

This latest cheating to elect Talarico has surfaced nearly a month after an employee for a pro-Talarico PAC was caught on video explaining that the group was “paying people for their votes” through a “paid relational program.” The undercover video resulted in the employee’s firing (for getting caught).

Two related notes:

  • Lest you be overly impressed that the Times reported this story (“SEE?” I can imagine banned commenter and loyal Times bias-denier “A Friend” bellowing in his bunker), the paper buried the lead as best it could. The headline was “On Texas TikTok, it’s all about Talarico,” and there was no mention of the pay-offs until 18 screens into the article.
  • The Times piece also revealed that despite TikTok’s emergence as a social media power (and that young voters increasingly use it as a primary source of news), Republicans lag absurdly behind Democrats in using the videos as a marketing tool. Morons. Being slow to embrace technological and web innovations is how the party managed to lose the 2012 Presidential election. For these mid-terms Democrats have handed them so much ammunition that the GOP should be lapping them in the polls. “The Stupid Party” sobriquet remains as accurate as ever.

And “The Great Stupid” Crawls On: White Female Executive Fired Because Her Hairstyle Was Too Black

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I can’t believe I even wrote that.

That’s Kelly Carnes above, the recently-hired executive director of the apparently insane Baltimore Rock Opera Society. After the blonde, white female returned from Burning Man with newly braided cornrows (above), her organization began receiving complaints from the staff regarding her choice of hair style. Cultural appropriation, you know. Can’t have that.

Carnes, who apparently has a habit of exploring daring hair displays…

…was fired, being told only that she and her new job were “not a good fit.” She had adopted the cornrows, she says, to deal with the desert where Burning Man is held annually. I wouldn’t regard a white woman’s cornrows as especially daring almost 50 years after “10” —Hello, Bo!

but The Great Stupid is full of nasty surprises.

The society’s board was especially stupid, publicly acknowledging “concerns” over their organization’s new executive director’s cornrows and that it was “taking the matter seriously.” It also said it planned to revise its anti-discrimination policy and require anti-racism leadership training, which apparently means that whites are racist when they adopt styles, behavior or dress that emulate our African American brothers and sisters. The board advised her not to attend a town hall that was called to discuss the controversy. That’s always a bad sign: they said that to Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers” when the town was meeting to fire him as the high school basketball coach for trying to teach the kids team play. Then the town’s star player got up and said he would only play if they let Gene keep coaching…wait, where was I?

Oh, right: the cornrows.

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“Indefensible Awards Day” on Ethics Alarms Continues With The Nobel Peace Prize

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Norwegian Nobel Committee today named Navi Pillay, as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. She is a pro-Palestinian (hence pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism) South African human rights lawyer and international judge who led a U.N. commission last year that held that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Pillay’s native South Africa has also a prominently accused Israel of genocide in the international court system, which neither the U.S. nor Israel recognize.

Peace. Anyone who can’t figure out that vilifying Israel encourages terrorism and violence against Jews worldwide as well as forcing Israel to aggressively defend itself and its ally the U.S. to engage militarily as well is either brain-damaged or 12. This would be a more serious ethics outrage if the Nobel Committee hadn’t already destroyed the Peace Prize’s prestige and credibility by such throbbingly political stunts as handing Barack Obama one for just being Barack Obama and giving Al Gore a Peace Prize for spreading panic and misinformation about climate change. The award has no integrity and is another institutional victim of “ideological capture.”

Was I dreaming to recall how the Peace Prize was respected and admired across the dieolgical spectrum when I was growing up? When did it jump the ethics shark? It was before the Obama debacle. Frankly, at this point it isn’t worth my time to research the answer now; the Nobel Peace Prize has rotted to the point of irrelevance. What it needs next is a recipient rejecting an award with a rousing speech declaring the prize worthless, and the committee fatally hypocritical.

Unethical Quote Of The Month: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s October 7th Message

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.

The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.

To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”

New York’s anti-Semitic, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his official statement on the anniversary of the unprovoked and ambush Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel that included the murder of unarmed civilians, rapes, infanticide, and the taking of over 200 hostages, mist of whom died.

I could have had a much longer headline, and had to restrain myself to avoid posting one. Anyone who agrees with this vile man is an Ethics Dunce, as is anyone who voted for him or would argue that such votes can be justified. Mandani qualifies for an EA “Incompetent Elected Official” designation, because condemning the victims of terrorism while supposedly memorializing those victims is incompetent and irresponsible, unless one is an Ethics Villain, which Mayor Mamdani certainly is.

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