And it’s a really funny Jumbo, almost as funny as Jimmy’s (“Elephant? What elephant?”), if you ignore how sad, scary and pathetic Biden saying that now is.
Biden last night: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
Biden today: “I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.”
Ah, so many things jump into my fevered brain…
Some Big Lies die hard…particularly if the mainstream media is committed to keeping them alive. The “Trump is a fascist” smear was one of the first out of the box when the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance”/Democrats/news media) reacted to being foiled in the glorious post-Obama re-making of America they had assumed was assured by setting out to cancel the verdict of the electoral system and sabotage a legally elected President of the United States. (Nah, nothing undemocratic about that!) The claim that Trump and his supporters are crypto-fascists has been nonsensical from the start (as President, Donald Trump eliminated many kinds of government control over individual liberties, and opposed others), and the absurdity has exploded as the Biden Administration and the Democratic Congress have embraced so many markers of totalitarianism, like legally favored groups, censorship by a captured media, political show trials, politically manipulated science and a “truth agency” (which, fortunately, never got off the ground. Then we have the attempted government intimidation of political opposition, lock-step partisan indoctrination in the universities and public schools, official disinformation (“Recession? What recession?”), the effort to punish judges for opinions that go against the party, demonizing the opposing party and, most notably, the targeting of political opponents for prosecution and imprisonment. Tonight, the President of the United States will give a national address accusing the opposing party of being a threat to democracy.
I still see it almost every day: a reference to Donald Trump’s stolen election “lie.” Trump, as is his wont, makes this slur too easy by his usual sloppiness of expression. First, he employs the language of certainty to express a belief that cannot be verified, and second, he keep focusing on voter fraud. However, as Ethics Alarms had indicated on many days in in many ways, there is a substantial likelihood that Trump’s second term was stolen from him (and the nation), not by fraud but by the continuous series of deliberate and unethical acts of sabotage committed against his Presidency, administration and campaign by Democrats, progressives, the news media, social media, popular culture, Big Tech, NeverTrump Republicans and the “Deep State.” (As an aside, the denials by the Left that the Deep State exists remind me of the once commonplace denials by Italian-Americans that the Mafia existed.)
This week, two bits of evidence supporting this position emerged:
A much-esteemed member of the Ethics Alarms commentariate alerted me yesterday that he would be eschewing the blog indefinitely because it was making him anxious and depressed. I’m glad he won’t be reading this post. It made me anxious and depressed.
Fresh off of yesterday’s note about the woman who asked “The Ethicist” whether she was ethically obligated to “out” a friend at work who harbored horrible conservative opinions—you know, like not believing that there is a Constitutional right to kill human fetuses—and news of another study showing that Democrats increasingly don’t want to associate with anyone not buying into their progressive, crypt-totalitarian world view (I can’t locate the recent one right now; a similar study from last December found that “5% of Republicans said they wouldn’t be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats,” and “71% of Democrats wouldn’t go on a date with someone with opposing views, versus 31% of Republicans.”), comes more evidence that hate-mongering and Big Lies are working for the Left. They will destroy the democracy in order to save it, and promoting incurable divisiveness and distrust is just the way to do it.
The tough conservative blogger who writes The New Neo reported on a Washington Post opinion piece from last week headlined, “No, Trump voters aren’t incapable of changing their minds about him.” I confess: I saw the article and jettisoned it after this section in the third paragraph:
—Dr. Anthony Fauci, architect of the disastrous Wuhan virus response, to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto’s question, “In retrospect doctor, do you regret that it went too far? … Particularly for kids who couldn’t go to school except remotely, that it’s forever damaged them.”
How Clintonian of the good doctor, picking up on Cavuto’s awkward “forever” and adding “irreparably” to make it seem especially extreme. Maybe the lockdown forever damaged people, but it didn’t forever irreparably damage people. The lockdown caused more than 200,000 small busineses to shut down during 2020 alone. Gee, is that “forever enough”? It murdered the economy, the arts, and sports; it was significantly responsible for the George Floyd riots. The education and social development of young children were indeed retarded permanently by the isolating experience of remote schooling, as increasing numbers of assessments indicate. The corruption of US elections in 2020 arising out of the lockdown did long-term damage to the public trust in elections; whether it is “forever permanent” is yet to be seen.
It wrecked our small business, our savings, and our development permanently.
What an asshole.
Now THAT was an insurrection! On August 22 in 1831, Nat Turner, an educated slave, killed his owner and escaped withe seven followers, planning on recruiting a slave army and capturing Virginia’s Southampton county armory. His strategy was then to march 30 miles to Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, where his army could hide out and strike at will. Turner and his recruits attacked homes throughout Southampton County, killing about 60 white men, women and children. The Virginia state militia, with greatly larger numbers, ended the rebellion while killing many of those who had joined him. The episode resulted in vengeful lynching of many slaves, even those who were not involved in Turner’s revolt
Nat Turner eluded capture until the end of October. Unrepentant, he was tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged on November 11.
I noticed, in researching this story, that apparently the word “slave” is now taboo, and the politically correct term is “enslaved people.“
They were slaves. That is what I will continue to call them. Next we will be commanded to refer to them as “non-volunteer unpaid employees.” The only way to stop creeping Orwellian linguistics is to refuse to tolerate it.
1. Careful…whatever it is that Liz Cheney has might be contagious. Cheney’ s vainglorious self-celebration and presumption of martyrdom after being justly crunched by Republican primary voters in Wyoming was quickly followed by an even more outrageous display of imagined virtue by the ridiculous Brian Stelter, now looking for some other news organization to help pervert. Among a myriad of other flaws, Stelter’s fake journalism watchdog show, “Reliable Sources,” had finally tanked in the ratings (along with CNN in general), perhaps because it no longer even pretended to report informatively on how well (and ethically) the news media was doing its job, and was only repeating anti-Trump, anti-conservative talking points and attacking Fox News.
In his final show, instead of leaving in an ethical and dignified manner, Stelter decided to perform a Cheney on steroids. Among his gagworthy declarations was that “teachers use segments from this show all the time in classrooms, in lessons, guiding and teaching the next generation.”
lf you are not familiar with Sam Harris, who has gained a fair amount of visibility (hear-ability?) as a result of his podcast, you might want to listen to the first 35 minute or so of the interview with him above, but the important part comes afterwards. As soon as your hear that, assuming you’re not Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff or George Conway, you will realize that you wasted your time, because the man is not worth taking seriously.
He is completely, thoroughly, through-and-through ruined by the hatred of Donald Trump, and so biased that his reasoning cannot be relied upon for anything. It doesn’t matter that he’s a neuroscientist, New York Times best-selling author, a genuine philosopher, and credentialed public intellectual. He’s useless. He’s a fraud. Trustworthy people simply don’t hold such opinions—not only hold them, but eagerly broadcast them. It’s a signature significance orgy!
The interview is outright scary, and should make people seek psychiatric attention when they sense they are nearing the point that Harris has, tragically, reached. Harris is honest and clear-eyed enough to recognize the (still running) 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck for what it is [“Taking down the New York Post’s [laptop article]? That’s a Left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. But I think it was warranted.”] but not ethical enough to realize that as an authority and scholar lesser mortals rely upon for enlightenment, he has an obligation not to sink into mob mentality just because he is surrounded by peers and friends who are consumed with unthinking fear, anger and hate.
After expressing his approval of Liz Cheney’s announced determination to use any means necessary to prevent Donald Trump from running for President, Harris is asked “You’re content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically elected President?” He responds with a flaming rationalization stew (and a terrible analogy) that belongs in the “Bias makes you stupid” Hall of Fame: “If there was an asteroid hurtling toward earth and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation of what we could do to deflect its course, is that a conspiracy?”
Ah! See, if Trump is the same as an extinction-threatening asteroid, so “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford,” “It can’t make things any worse,” “It’s for a good cause,” “These are not ordinary times” and more rationalizations all apply. But Trump is just a politician and a human being, and even our politicized scientists cannot declare him an extinction event. Nor is planning a conspiracy: there are no laws declaring that blocking the path of an asteroid is wrongful. When someone as intelligent as Harris once was hears something that stupid leaping from his mouth, he must be able to recognize it, or something is seriously amiss.
—Rep. Liz Cheney (NeverTrump-MT) in her head-exploding, self-glorifying, beyond satire concessions speech after being crushed in the GOP state primary.
And there you have it: candor and saying the secret part out loud, though the anti-democratic motives of the “the resistance”/Democrats/ mainstream media cabal (the “Axis of Unethical Conduct”)is hardly a secret at this point, and was stated on Ethics Alarms, beginning, oh, nearly six years ago.
This is a woman (a Republican official who is aping Democratic Party talking points) who claims to be trying to save democracy by interfering with democratic processes and institutions. Does “anything it takes” set off an ethics alarm? If you’re Trump Deranged, it probably doesn’t. Cheney’s mad logic is that Donald Trump is an exception to the laws, rules and principles of democracy: he doesn’t get the benefit of them because he’s bad….mostly because he’s not in lock-step with the entrenched elite political class like the Bidens, Cheneys, Bushes and Clintons, and also a bit because he’s an unmannerly boor. Another crazed Trump hater, the Washington Post’s self-parodying Jennifer Rubin, writes in today’s Post that “Taking the Fifth should disqualify a politician from taking office.” Continue reading
I can only find out about EA post-worthy tweets second-hand, as I killed my Twitter account after the platform censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. I actually followed Tribe’s tweets before that, because his public descent into demented hackery after such a distinguished legal and academic career had the tragic fascination of gruesome car wreck as well as conveying a useful lesson in mortality: I have asked my wife to bash in my head with a brick from behind should I ever jump the cognitive shark as obviously as Tribe has.
This time, Ann Althouse was my tweet source, though her post’s subject was another, slightly less whacked-out tweet re-tweeting Tribe by author Joyce Carol Oates. Tribe’s tweet, in turn, only quoted a typical piece of furious Trump-Deranged venom from Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Before his brain started to melt, the idea of Prof. Tribe appealing to the authority of the likes of Dowd would be like imagining Henry Kissinger quoting “Mark Trail.”
All clear now? Observations: Continue reading
The PDF of the unsealed search warrant and attachments is available here.
Ethics Alarms 