Branding all critics and opponents racists has been a standard progressive and Democratic Party ploy for a long time, though it shifted into high gear when that was the primary argument used to deflect legitimate observations that Barack Obama was poor POTUS with a great PR machine. Then it shifted into higher gear as the “Get Trump!” effort became an ongoing crusade. Trump didn’t oppose letting illegals cross the border with impunity because it was, you know, insane policy for any nation; his opposition was based in racism. The tactic is dishonest, unfair, divisive, despicable and indefensible, but as the late Harry Reid—forwarding address: Hell—explained cheerily as he defended the Big Lie he circulated about Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign, it works.
I am now noticing that the Race Card has been designated as the Axis’s official counter to the looming GOP recycling of Ronald Reagan’s effective question during the 1980 campaign: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” By almost every objective measure, as with Jimmy Carter’s failed Presidency, the unavoidable answer today is “Are you kidding? NO!” It’s a powerful weapon. So the Axis has declared it to be racist.
Commenter Dr. Emilio Lizardo revealed this morning in the comments to “At Princeton, Students Feel “Unsafe” in the Company of a Conservative Professor” that the policy at issue had already been reversed by the time I wrote about it:
“By April 2, the policy was reversed after an intervention from the club’s Graduate Board. In the seven days in between, debate over the policy rose from the club’s private GroupMe to the headlines of national right-wing publications. Club leadership maintains that the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny.”
So Ethics Alarms can’t claim even a smidgen of credit for the reversal. Nonetheless, the lesson here, as we have already seen elsewhere, is that when organizations and institutions install discriminatory and self-evidently unethical procedures and policies in the name of wokeness, political correctness, aspiring fascism of the far left, DEI or other perversions of core American principles and are quickly exposed, assailed and embarrassed, they usually back down. (Usually.)
A further lesson is that the organizations and institutions know that what they are doing is indefensible except from the “by any means necessary” perspective driving the Left in its crusade to re-make America. They know it, but they try anyway, hoping that any single instance will fly under the metaphorical radar long enough to become institutionalized. When they get caught, their reaction is, “OK, too soon. We’ll hold off on this one for now.”
Their assumption, and it is, frighteningly, probably correct, that the current DEI, Black Lives Matter, open borders, climate change hysteria, anti-free speech…freedom of association…equal treatment under the law and due process wack-a-mole contest it has forced our society into playing will inevitably result in a slow, steady ratcheting-up of anti-democratic practices that become accepted as norms. This is how the public education system became an indoctrination process. It is how the initially admirable goals of affirmative action became the racist practice of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It is how journalism in the US. became partisan propaganda.
The fact that only conservative publications and news sources treated the Princeton story as “fit to print” and necessary illumination to stop democracy from “dying in darkness” is also significant. This doesn’t mean that the story wasn’t important or objectively worth reporting on. The conduct of the mainstream media in ignoring it proves that its purpose is not to keep the public informed, but to assist the Far Left in laying waste to America’s traditional interpretation of democracy. The Princeton story is important, and the fact that only conservative sources publicized it (only Fox News among the news networks picked it up) doesn’t prove their bias. It proves the sinister, deliberate complicity of the mainstream media as it attempts to keep Americans from realizing what is going on right under their noses until it is too late.
The Princetonian wrote that a debate over the policy arose only after “headlines of national right-wing publications” exposed it. If the story sparked a debate, it means it was a story worth reporting. The MSM didn’t report on the story because the Far Left doesn’t want any debate. In an honest debate they lose, just as they lose on abortion, illegal immigration, and so many other issues. If they felt they could win on the merits, then they would want debate. Instead, their media tries to bury the facts. This isn’t a conservative “conspiracy theory.” It is reality.
Finally, the club’s claim that “the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny” is another damning piece of evidence. Gaslighting, denial, “Jumbo”-ism and “It isn’t what it is” (Yoo’s Rationalization,” #64) mania have become such reflex tools of the Left that comparisons with “1984” are unavoidable. The border is secure. Bidenomics is a success. Inflation isn’t a problem. The President didn’t extol the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter. He’s as sharp as a tack. The Trump prosecutions aren’t political. January 6 was an insurrection. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
The Princeton student club episode is an important one for American to understand. They can only understand it if they know about it.
Boy I wish I knew how to get the readership here back on the rising curve it seemed to be on in 2016...
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tried to speak at the University of Maryland at the end of last month on the topic of “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.” He was not permitted to get into the text of his speech, however. Raskin is one of the foolish Hamas-enabling, having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too Democrats who wants to make Israel stop its existentially necessary war effort to end the “violence and pervasive suffering in Gaza” and “provide for a massive surge in humanitarian aid”—to the region the U.S. is supposedly supporting the Israeli attacks on. Brilliant!…but I digress.
“Progress in history requires not just reasoning, which is certainly necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because it also requires the addition of the pro-social emotions, as the psychologists call it, of solidarity, empathy, love and the political virtues of justice and equality and freedom,” Raskin began. Then pro-Palestine protesters began shouting at Raskin, accusing him of being “complicit in genocide.” You know: morons. Student morons.
The progressive congressman pleaded with the pro-Hamas mob to have a dialogue with him rather than “heckling,” and that tactic worked as well as it always does. Raskin stopped his speech, pivoting to a spontaneous question and answer format, but the protesters’ chants and jeers made that approach impossible too.
University of Maryland President Darryll Pines (seen grinning above) stepped in and declared the event over as Raskin was effectively silenced. Pines then issued a disgraceful statement to the media, representing the shouting down of a member of Congress as a good thing, either because he was terrified of criticizing the far left on his campus, or because he’s an unethical fool. I suspect the latter.
President Joe Biden’s apparently radical nominee to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Pakistani-American lawyer Adeel Abdullah Mangi, looks doomed after Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada became the latest Democrat to publicly announce that she could not support him. Earlier, the other Nevada Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto had joined lame duck maverick Joe Manchin of West Virginia in opposing the nomination, a DEI pick if there ever was one.
In addition to having no judicial experience, Mangi supports two radical organizations that have signaled some rather alarming values, indeed he helps lead them, by serving on the advisory boards of Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights and the Alliance of Families for Justice.
The Rutgers center, which Mangi has contributed thousands to support, is under investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee for hosting an event on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks featuring pro-terrorist Sami Al-Arian, who was convicted of providing material support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Center’s director, law professor Sahar Aziz, regularly enlivens his Twitter/”X” feed anti-Semitic rhetoric. Now, these issues could be addressed, explained and defended (though perhaps not successfully), but the aspiring judge used the excuse that he had no knowledge that either of these had occurred in the organization he serves in an advisory capacity when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) asked him about the group’s programming and Aziz’s anti-Semitism.
Ok, we need a new rule, as Bill Maher likes to say.
Politicians who don’t have the integrity, energy, tech savvy or whatever else it takes to run their own social media accounts may not deny that what was posted in their names, with their permission, by their paid agents, are their true sentiments. I regard the practice of proxy tweeters and Instagrammers per se unethical anyway: the message says it’s from, say, “Joe Biden,” but it’s really from 22 year-old Ohio State grad Stanislaus “Blinky” Furbusher, a former circus geek whose uncle is a big Democratic donor, and whose opinion about anything would normally not get the national attention a typical Oakland A’s day game gets. That makes such a ghost-posted message a lie, flat out. Say what you will, and I have, about Donald Trump’s often stupid and obnoxious tweets, at least he’s the one who sends them, and he accepts full responsibility for them too. (And he knows how to send them, which admittedly isn’t much, but I bet Joe Biden hasn’t sent a tweet in his life.)
This is all by way of noting that when asked about the political and religious controversy about Biden proclaiming Easter Sunday “Transgender Day of Visibility” [Item #3] (the ridiculously named and conceived “day” pandering to the tiny minority represented by the “T’ in LGBTQ and dedicated to destroying women’s sports), the President, who doesn’t lie like Donald Trump and has a mind like a steel trap (we are told) denied that he had done it.
For the record, the 18 are U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, and U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
They all signed a letter urging the Biden Administration “to take all available actions to streamline pathways to lawful status for undocumented immigrants.” “Undocumented immigrants” are illegal immigrants, and that is all you need to know to assess the unethical and irresponsible nature of the letter, as well as all the signatories to it, which is pretty much a Rogues Gallery of the most radical and destructive Senators in the upper House, with a few surprising exceptions.
Sarah B. submitted this Comment of the Day over the weekend, and it dovetails neatly with today’s post on the immediate politicizing of the Baltimore bridge disaster. Of course, that most recent incident is but a fractal of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck, which saw both misinformation spread by the news media and our supposedly non-partisan, trustworthy health organizations, agencies and institutions, cripple the economy, damage our children, turn large swathes of the population into fearful, mask-clutching weenies, and damage the integrity of a national election. That’s where Sarah’s cautionary tale begins.
My mother, an RN (and massage therapist) became livid at all her TDS suffering friends and patients repeatedly calling Ivermectin a “horse drug”. She went and got documents discussing the usage of Ivermectin in certain patients with various types of issues, and how the drug was routinely used to treat certain infections.
But despite the high usage of the drug on humans in these papers from reputable medical journals dated over decades, she was told that she was too simple to understand that this was misinformation and that Ivermectin was only a conspiracy theorist’s solution. She was told that she needs to check with people with real medical degrees, not just crunchy folks in massage therapy school. Her bachelors in nursing with decades of experience was ignored in this discussion.
My mother’s insistence that people should look at the evidence lost her friends and clients, many of whom no longer contact her at all and haven’t since 2020, despite being friends for decades prior.
—President Biden responding to pro-Hamas and Palestinians protesters at a campaign event in North Carolina yesterday after they shouted “What about the health care in Gaza?” before being ushered out by security.
This wasn’t Biden’s senility on display. Nor was it one of his lies. That statement demonstrates this President’s complete ethical and moral void as well as his cowardice, the result of which is to render him incapable of analyzing any situation requiring coherent views of history and a commitment to do the right thing regardless of political fallout.
Biden wants to avoid alienating any voter block, This profound lack of integrity prevents him from leading, leaving him only with the task of unprincipled pandering.
The protesters did not “have a point,” any more than protesters shouting “What about health care in Berlin?” during the Allies’ bombing of the city during World War II would have had a point. “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza,” Biden said. Why? The United States is providing weapons for Israel to conquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas, which is supported by a large majority of the population there. Another protester, apparently as clueless as Biden, called out that health centers in Gaza were “being bombed.” Yup, sure are, and that’s because Hamas is hiding in tunnels under such places so that civilians have to die for Hamas to be subjected to the punishment it deserves and dim bulb weaklings like Joe Biden can claim that pro-terrorism, anti-Israel protesters “have a point.”
I have recorded many statements by Donald Trump that I have ruled should, under normal circumstances, disqualify him from office. None are as disqualifying as those four fatuous, offensive words from Biden yesterday.
I know what many of you are going to say. The Washington Post is an unalloyed ethics villain. It has distorted facts and editorialized in news reports. It employs indefensible partisan propagandists like Philip Bump. It even “stood by” Bump’s false reporting when Prof. Turley exposed it.The paper played a substantial role in rigging the 2020 election by deliberately slanting its reporting against then-President Trump and in favor of Joe Biden. It is unquestionably an unethical, biased, partisan news source.
That, however, makes its editorial titled “Donald Trump deserves his day in appeals court” all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. The ridiculous and obviously politically-motivated New York civil case verdict against Trump that originally required him to post an unprecedented $464 million bond in order to appeal it has been mocked and condemned in the conservative media. It should have been, for it is transparent effort to cripple the putative GOP Presidential nominee financially so he is handicapped in his campaign against President Biden. Most of the Trump Deranged, in contrast, have cheered the result. As a certifiable Trump-detesting news organization, however, the Post’s call for fairness and due process for their frequent target carries more weight and persuasive power than any argument appearing in the New York Post, the Washington Free Beacon or Fox News.
We, the undersigned Cornell faculty, staff and alumni, strongly support the student activists who have disrupted business as usual to protest the University’s conduct amid the horrifying, ongoing assault on Palestinian populations. The students who have mobilized under the banner of the Coalition for Mutual Liberation have fulfilled the best principles of global citizenship, engaged learning and social justice. We applaud their principled struggle.
Commending the studentsfor opposing the wanton destruction of Palestinian lives and territories does not go far enough. These young people are, quite simply, the best of us. They have shown tremendous courage in a climate of fear and repression. We thank them for their commitment and integrity. We will do what we can to ensure that they are not unduly targeted.
The CML activists have made significant personal sacrifices to publicize the demand that Cornell divest fromcorporationsthat are linked to Israeli militarism, occupation and collectivepunishment. Their nonviolent demonstrations have provided a moral compass at a time of official hypocrisy.
In countless ways, the leaders of our society and our institution have signaled that silence is the only acceptable response to the profound suffering within and beyond Gaza. Cornell administrators have exacerbated campus anxiety by attempting to stifle student dissent with a draconian “Interim Expressive Activity Policy,”bypassing the faculty senate. In a moment of anguish for many members of our community, the University has chosen the path of intimidation and bureaucratic aggression.
The crackdown on student protest at Cornell is part of a disturbing trend throughout our society. Efforts to smother critiques of the state of Israel have dovetailed withattackson Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, ethnic studies and other vital dimensions of modern education. Wealthy elites and reactionary forces wish to deepen the atmosphere of conformity, social apathy and narrow careerism on campus.
The names of more than 300 faculty signatories to the letter can be seen here.
Ethics Alarms 