On his usually excellent blog, Prof. Jonathan Turley tells readers about Derek Lopez, a teacher’s assistant and graduate student at Illinois State University. This jerk—-signature significance!—was caught on video attacking a Turning Point USA table on his campus and verbally abusing the conservative students manning it. The 27-year-old Lopez says to the students as he overturns their table, “Well, you know, Jesus did it, so you know I gotta do it, right? Thanks, guys, have a great day!” Then he tears down a TPUSA flyer on a nearby bulletin board.
He was later arrested. Will he be fired? He should be, but don’t bet on it. He is a part of a dangerous ideological movement in this country that believes that violence and the abuse of political adversaries is justified as the “means necessary” to remake America. He is not an aberration.
JM Introduction: This excellent post arrived on yesterday’s open forum, and thus was immediately eligible for guest column status. It is especially timely, both because of this story from the legal ethics jungle and this more alarming one:
The top United States Army commander in South Korea revealed to reporters this week that he has been using a chatbot to help with decisions that affect thousands of U.S. soldiers. Major General William “Hank” Taylor told the media in Washington, D.C., that he is using AI to sharpen decision-making, but not on the battlefield. The major general — the fourth-highest officer rank in the U.S. Army — is using the chatbot to assist him in daily work and command of soldiers.
Speaking to reporters at a media roundtable at the annual Association of the United States Army conference, Taylor reportedly said “Chat and I” have become “really close lately.”
Great. What could go wrong? Now here’s Matthew…
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One of the problems with AI is how often it is confidently wrong. This manifests itself all over the place. One of the most troubling is in the news industry. The news industry under tremendous financial pressure, and the appeal of moving towards AI generated content opens them up to completely BS stories spreading.
Late first post again today, for a very good reason: I’ve been researching and pondering what to write about the sad, pathetic, useless (well, maybe not useless, as I will elaborate on later) “No Kings” protests today. It even took me a long time to settled on the most direct and simplest of the myriad hilarious memes on the topic, as you can see above. (Powerline has a bumper crop in its weekly conservative meme collection, here.)
I was originally going to feature a depressing photo posted on Facebook this morning by two of my favorite people, both retired lawyers, both learned, accomplished and intelligent, and catastrophically Trump Deranged. It shows them smiling in a gathering mob of D.C. “No Kings” protesters, as they hold one of the vague protest signs printed up with George Soros’s money. Sure, I was going to blur out their faces, but I don’t want them to take my criticism (or diagnosis) personally. It’s not their fault that they have lost their frickin’ minds. They live in a bubble, they have always been Democrats, they subscribe to the Washington Post, but they had no way of predicting that their powers of critical thinking could ever be so eroded by hate, bias, and misinformation.
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, involves the question of whether Louisiana’s congressional map violates the 15th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it clearly includes two districts with boundaries based on race. The objective was to create two majority black districts. In other words, use race as the reason for determining Congressional districts.
Justice Jackson’s head-exploding argument? Giving blacks special advantages in the matter of representation was like making special accommodations for the handicapped under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Black Americans, you see, are permanently handicapped because of the crippling effects of slavery (which ended 160 years ago) and Jim Crow (which ended 100 years later, about 60 years ago.)
“So going back to this discriminatory intent point, I guess I’m thinking of it, of the fact that remedial action absent discriminatory intent is really not a new idea in the civil rights laws. And my kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA,” Jackson said.
“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities,” the DEI Justice explained. “And so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings. And it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building or the person who owned the building intended for them to be exclusionary; that’s irrelevant. Congress said, the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities if readily possible. I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. The idea in Section 2 is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system. Right? They’re disabled. In fact ,we use the word ‘disabled’ in [Milliken v. Bradley]. We say that’s a way in which these processes are not equally open. So I don’t understand why it matters whether the state intended to do that. What Congress is saying is if it is happening … you gotta fix it.”
Got it! American blacks are permanently disabled. This is the rote justification for affirmative action forever, DEI (which Jackson understandably has an affection for), and reparations for slavery. It is a jaw-droppingly demeaning characterization of black Americans, and pure stereotyping.
Her “logic” also misses an obvious and crucial point: when the 1964 Voting Rights Act was passed, the U.S. was just barely leaving the Jim Crow era. Brown v. Bd of Education was only ten years old. Inter-racial marriage was still illegal in many states. Progressives and race-hucksters like Jackson refuse to acknowledge that there has been massive progress in race relations since 1964, and they deny that progress because it means giving up their own benefits from the phenomenon of presumed racism. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Jackson’s statement marks her as a racketeer.
That quote from Jackson is damning (and it bolsters the EA case that Joe Biden was the worst POTUS ever, since he appointed this partisan hack) and should be headline news, but it’s not. Gee, I wonder why… Over at SCOTUS blog, the new proprietor, Amy Howe, provides what she represents as a thorough analysis of the oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais without mentioning Jackson’s outrageous theory at all. So far, I have only seen it mentioned on conservative blogs and news sites. In fact, I was driven to Breitbart, a site I banned for being biased and untrustworthy, to find the full quote.
Is Jackson the worst SCOTUS Justice ever? I think she’s worse than Sotomayor, which is pretty amazing, but no, I’m sure there have been worse ones in the Courts dim past. But she is pretty assuredly the worst Justice in my lifetime, and that would include the execrable Harry Blackmun, who inflicted Roe v. Wade on the nation as well as the indefensible majority opinion declaring that baseball, alone among professional sports and billion dollar private businesses, should be immune from the antitrust laws. Harry was an mediocre judge in over his head thanks to a Peter Principle Nixon appointment, but he was at least smart enough not to claim that being black was the equivalent of being disabled.
Ugh. Yesterday, President Trump posthumously awarded Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom. That was an appropriate way to express admiration and appreciation for the martyred conservative activist. (MSNBC, alone among the networks, didn’t feel the ceremony was newsworthy. Now, a newsworthy ceremony for the network was President Biden giving the Presidential Citizen’s Medal to Liz Cheney for running a Star Chamber against American citizens tand her own party o make sure the public understands the difference between bad rioting—the half-day Capitol embarrassment by conservative morons—and good rioting—the nation-wide, May through December 2020 Black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful protests” by Democrats—at least according to”MS.” Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias…).
The State Department said yesterday that it had determined the six unidentified foreign nationals from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay and South Africa should lose their visas after reviewing their online social media posts and clips about Kirk. “[We]will defend our borders, our culture, and our citizens by enforcing our immigration laws,” the State Department said. “Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed.”
Celebrating.
Next up from this weirdly thin-skinned gang: prosecuting whoever celebrates LA Dodger victories in the baseball play-offs. The move hands a metaphorical spiked club to the Trump-Deranged who claim this President wants to cancel the First Amendment. Dumb. Abuse of power.
It is stunning how the Axis-biased legal analysts attacking the recent indictment of NY Atty General Letitia James for mortgage fraud manage to forget, or ignore, or intentionally omit how James campaigned as AG on a promise to somehow, some way, “stop” Donald Trump, meaning to lock him up or cripple him financially so he couldn’t run for President.
The day after she was elected in 2018, Letitia James was asked by a community activist if she was gonna sue President Trump. She said, “Oh, we’re definitely gonna sue him. We’re gonna be a real pain in the ass. He’s gonna know my name personally.” James didn’t hide the fact that she would be emulating Stalin’s henchman Beria, who infamously said, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” She wasn’t the only Democrat looking for ways to use political lawfare against Trump: it was basically the primary strategy of the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party as the 2024 election loomed. (Back up strategy: Claim Trump is Hitler.)
James ultimately settled on charging Trump with loan fraud, alleging that he inflated the value of his properties to get bank loans. It was classic selective prosecution (at the trial, the banks agreed that indeed “everybody does it”) and the evidence showed that there were literally no damages: Trump’s organization paid back the loans with interest, the banks made money, and nobody was harmed. Never mind: thanks to a flagrantly partisan judge, Trump was hit with more than a half-billion in damages, which was ridiculous. As every objective commentator predicted, they were thrown out as “excessive.“
Meanwhile, as James was doing her party’s bidding, she was tweeting statements like this: “Roses are red. Violets are blue. No one is above the law. Even when you think the rules don’t apply to you. Happy Valentine’s Day!” How professional. Then there was this:
Boy, talk about putting a “Kick me!” sign on your own back!
The headline raises an interesting question: can an ethics villain be an ethics dunce, since ethics villains by definition don’t care about ethics, so how can they be judged stupid for ignoring them? Ah well, a topic for another day. Ann Althouse would ask Grok to resolve the issue…if I ever start quoting AI here regularly, someone please come up behind me and bash in my head with a brick.
I’ve been putting off the National Football League announcing that its now iconic halftime show during the 2026 Super Bowl in Santa Clara will star Bad Bunny, a performer I was mercifully unaware of before the announcement. After all, I could write this post any time between now and February 9, 2026, the day after the national sports event that I will not watch again because the sport it involves is deadly.
Today, however, I am in a bad mood, so it’s time. The Super Bowl has evolved as cultural phenomenon that is one of the rare yearly American events that unifies the nation, families, races and commerce. It is supposed to be non-partisan, non-political, and G-rated so families can watch the game and its surrounding hoopla with their children. When Janet Jackson exposed a nipple during a halftime performance, you would have thought that she has performed a human sacrifice by the reaction in the news media.
But now it is 2025, the Great Stupid still stalks the land, Trump Derangement reigns in the corporate suites, and thus the National Football League, which happily pays its players to become brain-injured, has chosen as its star attraction during the Super Bowl half-time show…
As the American Bar Association amply demonstrates, the American legal profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning and left-biased, not because lawyers are especially informed or intelligent, but because they overwhelmingly graduate from law schools devoted to progressive indoctrination, with law journals that actively discriminate based on viewpoint bias. State and local bar associations are governed and staffed by similarly aligned individuals; reading these organizations’ flagship magazines is an exercise in wading through progressive propaganda. Fighting for the rights of “migrants.” Celebrations of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” White men are a minority among bar association presidents.
I belong to association of legal ethics lawyers, including ethics partners, professors, CLE ethics trainers, those who defend other lawyers accused of malpractice or professional misconduct. Most of the time, the topics discussed on the group’s listserv are interesting and pertinent to my practice (legal ethics experts don’t agree on much). Since 2016, however, the Democratic Party bias of the group and its attendant Trump derangement has increasingly raised its ugly metaphorical head. The conservatives on the list as well as those who realize the inappropriateness of political topics generally stay silent (those ethics referrals are lucrative, after all) until the screaming at the sky gets ridiculous, and the moderator steps in to remind everyone that the discussion is supposed to be confined to legal ethics.
I just renewed my membership, and almost immediately a topic titled “Desperate Times” popped up, launched by (of course) the California lawyers in the group. After waking up to another long post about how “we lawyers” needed to organize to fight all of these terrible policies, I replied,
“This topic has nothing to do with legal ethics, and reinforces my conclusion that the legal ethics profession, like so many others, has deteriorated into a partisan, biased, bubble-dwelling cabal increasingly incapable of objective and trustworthy analysis. The furious effort to spin Fani Willis’s flagrantly unethical conduct was one of many dead canaries in the mine. Is this listserv moderated, or not?”
If you can’t trust ethicists to be objective and unbiased, who can you trust?
I had four ethics stories all lined up last night, and then this ugly episode forced its way to the front of the line. I hate that. Still, attention must be paid.
Zohran Mamdani, the presumed next New York City mayor based on polls and the fact that his only viable competition for the job had to resign as New York governor in disgrace, posted a statement on the anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. You can see it above.
To his credit, the “Democratic-Socialist” (that is, communist) was crystal clear about who and what he is, and honest observers from both sides of the partisan divide have not been reluctant to react with appropriate disgust. (The statement should not come as any surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Mamdani, the latest example of a charismatic politician emulating Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957).
Two permanent fixtures of the Trump Derangement narrative are:
President trump has no sense of humor.
President Trump is slipping into dementia (like Joe Biden), and should therefore be removed via the 25th Amendment.
Both of these are demonstrably false, even absurdly false. Demented people don’t have the quick wit to pick up on a straight line like that. And Trump even had the sense to “go out on the big laugh,” as the old vaudevillians used to say. When you get a big laugh, it’s time to end your appearance.
That incident today doesn’t prove that this President is wise, right, responsible or even well-intentioned. But the fact that the Axis of Unethical Conduct that has been working without pause to destroy Donald Trump since 2016 may be explained by another fact: that their hate and bias makes it impossible for them to avoid underestimating their foe.
As Sun Tsu said (but in Chinese), “There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent….Never underestimate your opponent or your enemy. Looks can be deceiving. You really don’t know what your opponent knows or what kind of skills he or she may have.” In the same vein, Machiavelli’s writings also repeatedly warned against underestimating an opponent, and to assume that your adversary is “always capable and cunning.”
The ethics values at issue here are competence, prudence, objectivity, professionalism, respect, fairness, and perspective.
Ethics Alarms 