If the administrators at the insanely expensive school (the parents of 1,700 students pay tuition for all grades of $65,540 a year) are not embarrassed by that headline, they should be. Morons.
The school told families this week that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” after the election can get excused from classes, and—I find this incredible—psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling for the tender souls who have presumably been told by their teachers and parents that they will be sent off to work camps and their parents will be executed in Trump wins.
The message to parents “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community. No matter the election outcome will create space to provide students with the support they may need.” Excused absences will be allowed on Wednesday or whatever day the election results are announced for those students who are unable to “fully engage in classes.”
Any student who doesn’t immediately recognize this as a “Get Out Of School Free” ticket is too dim-witted to be in school.
“…And that’s the millionth reason I’m fervently hoping and desperately praying that Harris prevails. I believe Biden to be a good man who has done much good for us…”
—Long-time progressive NYT pundit Frank Bruniin one of the “Harris must win, Trump is terrible” stories and columns in the Times today.
I counted 11 of the latter. Twelve. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Whatever would make you think that?
Bruni has been a member of the Times staff and editorial board for 25 years. Res ipsa loquitur. The Times has at least one (they have, in truth, many) columnist who had a regular platform to spread his biases and misconceptions, and he thinks (or says he thinks) Joe Biden is a good man. Right. There are few politicians of such longevity who have ever left such an unambiguous record of not being a good man, woman, or public servant. Since I’m not writing a book, I’ll just list the bits of Joe’s biography that stick out for me at the moment:
It was a competitive field to be sure, but O’Donnell, who once aspired to be a respected and trustworthy journalist, displayed how far she has fallen with her despicable performance on today’s “CBS Evening News.” You want bias? You want disinformation? You want unprofessional and unethical conduct? You want Trump Derangement? Norah had it for you. CBS should suspend her, or at least send her to a spa to calm the hell down. CBS, however, is a hack organization now employing hack journalists in complete lock-step with the Axis of Unethical Conduct. No, neither Norah nor CBS are quite as corrupt as MSNBC, but that is faint praise indeed.
Haven’t seen Geena around these parts recently, but her return is appropriate. And she was just worried about her boyfriend turning into a giant fly. Compared to what the nation may be facing, that’s nothin’!
The totalitarian tilt of the Democratic Party is undeniable, and Ethics Alarms has been making the case for months that its complete rejection of fair and responsible tactics and rhetoric for fearmongering, paranoia and propaganda is dangerous—not just dangerous, but ominous. I am certain that if Trump wins narrowly, perhaps even if he wins decisively, the freak-out deliberately seeded by the Axis will result in riots coast to coast.
An essay on the blog “Chicago Boyz,” which I have never encountered before, makes a persuasive case that we are facing much worse than that. Read it, please. Some excerpts:
“There has been a lot of criticism from the Right regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic “revealing” Trump’s affinity for Hitler. The critics says that the revelations are old and thinly sourced. The critics miss the point, which is that Goldberg’s article wasn’t so much meant to be an “October Surprise” as it was to give the Democrats the news hook they needed to launch their final argument that Trump is a fascist.The Goldberg article was merely the starter’s gun for that final argument.
“[T]he Democrats don’t much like the Constitution itself…It’s not just the elite either, with 49% of all Democrats thinking the document “should be mostly or completely rewritten.” The reasons vary, some Democrats believing that the document is tainted by its racist writers, other Democrats seeing it as a hindrance to the type of social change they wish to enact, and others just believing that a 240-year-old document is an archaic relic in need of a re-write. So the question I have asked those on the Right who see the 2024 Election through a normality bias is, on what basis do they believe that the Democrats will accept a Trump victory? The Democrats have spent the past eight years dismissing him as a legitimate part of the political system. They have turned that notion up to “11” over the past several years by explicitly calling him a threat to democracy and a fascist, and they have little attachment (among both elite and party identifiers) to the existing Constitutional order….”
“I haven’t even delved into the vast array of dirty, norm-breaking tricks that the Democrats have either engaged in or had revealed over the past four years, including lawfare, indictments, FBI raids, censorship, spying on campaigns by the security agencies, electoral chicanery, etc… All of which would lead to the understandable fear of the Democrats not relinquishing the White House to Trump. Take a step back and you see that every warning light is flashing red…”
The 2024 election is its own, massive ethics train wreck, as the tag will show you. It officially began with Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) spending too long lying to the public about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state and deciding to select a Presidential nominee Soviet-style bypassing all democratic norms and processes. The party broke all previous campaign records for hypocrisy by taking this course while already making the dangerous claim that Republicans are the threats to democracy, and that Donald Trump as President would never allow another free election again. Amazingly, the campaign has gone downhill ethically since that point.
But I did not foresee that a Don Rickles-style “roast comic’s” jab at an ongoing news story would or could, even in the Age of the Great Stupid, turn into a controversy dominating headlines when the election is so near and serious matters should be the public’s focus.
I’ll summarize the events as efficiently as possible to get to the main point:
On Twitter/”X,” the advocacy organization “Restore Childhood” documents the horrific case study of a little boy pushed into “gender affirming care” by his woke-lunatic mother, facilitated by unethical medical professionals. Below is the tweet series. You can watch the disturbing videos here.
1. The surprise move has sparked a “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” spectacular! Editor-at-large Robert Kagan, resigned in protest. “People are shocked, furious, surprised,” said an editorial board member. Wait: why does the staff care so much that the Post isn’t officially endorsing Harris? They care because they are partisan and biased. They want their paper to do everything it can to help Harris and defeat Trump, not to to report the news objectively, and not to be officially neutral. That the staff reacted this way tells us all we need to know about the Post’s trustworthiness, if we didn’t know it already.
2. Endorsements were justifiable when newspapers maintained some semblance of objectivity. In today’s rotting journalism, however, with “advocacy journalism” holding sway and the Post being a particularly flagrant offender (I cancelled my Post subscription because the New York Time was less biased!) an endorsement doesn’t mean what it once did. That was, “We have assessed the candidates and their positions. We now can state our measured conclusion: X is the responsible choice for voters.” Now, an endorsement only means, “We have been favorably reporting on the Democratic candidate while being relentlessly negative about the Republican candidate, and all our reporters and editors are Democrats and progressives. Of course we’re endorsing X.”
1. Are there any videos of Trump supporters acting like this? As with the many episodes of violence against citizens wearing MAGA caps: if the Trump supporters are the Nazis, why is it that the Democrats are the only ones engaging in violence and harassment?
2. I asked this question of a Trump Deranged relative today. The “But Trump…!” answer I got was “What do you call the Capitol riot?” I call it a bunch of idiots trying to remedy what they thought was an attempt to steal a Presidential election through a protest that got out of control. It was not Americans targeting those whose political views did not align with theirs.
It is time to call these two partisan operatives in the guise of professors what they are: hypocrites, hacks, abusers of authority and totalitarian enablers. Naturally, they are Harvard government professors, my college and my major. I already have my Harvard diploma turned face to the wall and on the floor; there’s not much else I can do is burn it. But I consider these two unethical academics—they shouldn’t be called “scholars”—and insult to me, and any readers who are capable of non-Trump-Deranged thought. The New York Times is complicit by repeatedly giving them a platform to sell books and mislead the public.
But that’s the Times: an institutional ethics villain assisting two individual ethics villains. Nice.
I’ve been flagging the indefensible dishonesty and scholarship-as-propaganda of these two since 2018, when they were lionized by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) for their Big Lie launching book, “How Democracies Die.” They’ve published more similar screeds since. I wrote in part (If you like, skip to the end of the long quote, but this is necessary perspective for the rest of the post):
I love this Comment of the Day. It is as perfect an example as we will ever see of a thoughtful, careful, articulate, and civil rebuttal of a post or position here. This COTD, by EA veteran Zanshin, focused on my disgust regarding the New York Times’ self-indicting and desperate attempt to cover for Kamala Harris’s claim that she worked for McDonald’s as a student (you know, part of that humble middle class upbringing) by criticizing Donald Trump for not accepting her word as Discovered Truth. Harris asserting that anything happened is not evidence, based on her well-documented proclivities. In particular, I pointed out that a Kamala Harris résumé that didn’t list her supposed stint as a burgermeister was deceitfully employed by the Times to imply that her claim is true.
I apologize for getting this up a bit late; I didn’t not expect subsequent events, like Trump’s master-trolling of Harris (and the Times) by doing a campaign stunt having him acting like a McDonald’s employee, the absurd tantrum thrown by the Axis over it, Tim Walz whining on “The View” that the stunt was “disrespectful” to Mickey D employees (How?), and still, neither the company nor the Harris campaign has produced any evidence that Kamala’s tale isn’t in the same category as Walz’s claim that he was in combat and Joe Biden’s claim (among others) that his uncle was eaten by cannibals.
The Times appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of “burden of proof.”
I love the comment and admire it, but as I stated in the thread, I don’t agree with it, though it is a “lucid, intelligent, well thought out” argument.
That was my first thought when I read Jack’s statement (promise? warning?threat?) “I have yet to ban a commenter for doing no more than saying the mainstream media isn’t flamingly, ostentatiously, democratically and destructively biased in favor of progressives and Democrats, but the day is coming, and it’s coming fast.”
But the part in above statement regarding Jack’s judgement about the mainstream media is rather broad and at some places even vague. (note 1) And therefore very hard to prove or disprove
So, I decided to set myself a smaller task. Can I find an example in this blogpost where Jack writes negatively about mainstream media while not warranted by the facts. An example that even might suggest that Jack is a little bit biased against the mainstream media.
I think I have found such an example. Bear with me. The example I want to discuss is the one where Jack discusses the text in the Times regarding Ms. Harris having worked at McDonalds or not.
Ethics Alarms 