Government & Politics

Unethical Quote Of The Day: MSNOW Talking-Head Antonia Hylton

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“The other piece of this that I found really disturbing in the messaging around the war recently…is some of the language in the description of their opponent. “Sort of the way they seem to create this image of the Iranians and all of their sort of proxies or allies, the sort of imagery that they conjure up,. And I think that it takes a certain amount of arrogance and I’m also going to say it, a bit of racism, to constantly talk about people like they are savages. That is a word that we have heard Hegseth use.” 

—MSNOW hostess Antonia Hylton, during Saturday’s broadcast of “The Weekend: Primetime.”

Apparently all you have to do to justify being made a co-host of a show on MSNOW is to demonstrate enmity to one’s own country’s leaders and support for its enemies. Oh, before I forget, “enemy” is the proper term for a nation your country is currently at war with, not “opponent.”

Furthermore, calling Iran’s leaders “savages” is not racism but a fair and accurate diagnosis. Savage as a noun means one who is vicious and uncivilized. Iran is currently a brutal, murderous and ruthless regime that murdered many thousands of its own citizens for daring to protest their harsh treatment from their government. Since the Islamic takeover in 1979, 258 Americans were killed in a suicide bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, and a truck bombing in the same city in 1983. The Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah killed 19 U.S. Airmen in Saudi Arabia at the Khobar Towers in 1996. It is estimated that Iranian proxies have killed nearly 700 Americans between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 50 Americans were killed by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists during the attack on Israel that took place October 7, 2023, and that attack was as savage as one could be even if one ignores American casualties and only focuses on the Israeli civilians killed, raped and taken as hostages

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The UK’s Frightening Warning On Cultural Pollution From Assimilation-Adverse Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

There are some cultures and some immigrants, refugees and illegal aliens that a nation has good reason to avoid letting into its territory. Islamic culture and Muslims are a blazing example. Europe and the UK are learning this hard lesson—that cultural diversity is only a boon if a nation’s traditional culture is nurtured and protected—too late. It remains to be seen if the U.S. will.

The flashing neon sign that the Mad Left will pooh-pooh, shrug off, deny or refuse to acknowledge? This:

Nearly 70 dog breeds in the UK could be banned under proposed new legislation on the sham theory that they are “unhealthy.” A new 10-point checklist of “extreme” physical characteristics will decide which dogs will suffer from health problems due to certain physical characteristics. The excuses for banning the breeds include “mottled coloration,” “excessive” skin folds (like English bulldogs), “fat faces” (like pit bulls and mastiffs), “temperament,” bulging outward-turning eyes (pugs), drooping eyelids, being low to the ground (like Queen Elizabeth’s Corgis) and more.

Don’t kid yourself and believe that this assault on freedom and family has anything to do with canine health. This an assault on dogs by Muslims, who believe that dogs are “unclean,” as Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian Muslim New Yorker and activist, said in a recent social media post. This led Representative Randy Fine (R-Fla.) to reply, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” In response to that, Congressional Democrats are demanding that Fine be censured, because, after all, tearing down American culture is part of the current party’s mission.

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Ethics Dunce: Trump’s Justice Department

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Trump administration last week proposed a rule that would shield Department of Justice lawyers from independent ethics investigations and bar discipline from the states and the District of Columbia. My legal ethics lawyer association’s listserv virtually melted down over it. Almost all of the association’s members are Trump Deranged, but in this case they had just cause to flip out.

The proposed rule would violate a federal law known as the McDade Amendment, which holds government lawyers are still subject to the ethics rules of the states in which they practice, “to the same extent and in the same manner” as every other lawyer licensed in the state. In addition to that, the proposed rule makes no sense: the state bars giveth licenses to practice law, and they obviously can taketh them away.

The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) came into being as a compromise measure long ago when politically motivated state bar ethics boards were applying different standards to government lawyers based on partisan interpretations of the ethics rules. OPR has never been as zealous in enforcing ethical standards as local bar associations, and the bars aren’t particularly zealous either. The D.C. bar has had several high-profile spats with OPR over the years, insisting, and rightly so, that it shouldn’t be required to ratify an OPR hall pass for unethical conduct.

I assume, and hope, that the clearly impractical rule change is DOA, and like so many other proposals and floated options from the Trump Administration, it is more of a negotiating ploy than a serious proposal. The truth is that virtually all of the bar associations are dominated by progressives and Democrats, and consider a lawyer being willing to work for the Trump Administration as strong evidence of inherently unethical character. It is also true, as I have discovered to my horror over the past year, that many of the bar associations are untrustworthy and corrupt. This was revealed to me in part when the D.C. bar, whose legal ethics CLE I had been prominently and successfully teaching for three decades, fired me after I tried to open a legal ethics can of worms—the bar’s unique non-lawyer partner option—that would reveal a gross and wriggling failure on the bar’s part to police its members, resulting in nation-wide fraud and harm to tort victims.

A New York Times op-ed about the unethical proposed rule deceptively (and risibly) asserts,

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Unethical Quote of the Month and Axis Media “Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much” Tweet of the Century”: CNN

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Ethics Alarms had flagged CNN’s incompetence and bias too often already this week: it was getting boring. Then the network, damn them, forced me to write about its crummy ethics again, by posting that ludicrous protest above.

Here is the “journalism” CNN stands behind:

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March Madness Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3-14-2026

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

A brief “The Unabomber Was Right” update: yesterday I explained how changes to my Apple phone caused me to miss a planned appointment because I couldn’t figure out the new “improved” alarm setting process. Later, the phone creeped me out. I had intentionally not put my email account on my phone because of security concerns, because people scrolling through their messages when I’m with them annoys the hell out of me, and because I didn’t know how to install it even if I wanted to. At exactly 5:47pm, my email inbox appeared on my phone anyway, without any directive from me, at least not a deliberate one. I’m sure there’s a rational explanation, but I don’t think I’ll like it.

Meanwhile…

1. Professor Turley is alarmed at the quality of faculty members elite universities are hiring now. “Welcome to the party, pal!” He writes in part,

“Professor Muhammad Abdou, who until recently taught students at Columbia University, appeared online this week to spread calls for religious-based violence and glorify the murder of Jews. He did so as part of an event at the Union Theological Seminary, an institution associated with Columbia. While the university recently ended Abdou’s teaching, it is important to remember that this unhinged fanatic was previously chosen by Columbia faculty and administrators to teach their students. Those individuals remain at Columbia… The Islamic studies scholar called on students to “be a threat” as part of the event titled “Death to the Akademy: How to be a thorn in their throat amidst snakes in the grass.” …Abdou told the students: “Let us engage in jihad, and there are rules for jihad, and Muslims know that Allah has commanded rules. We don’t engage in wanton violence, but we don’t accept the negative peace either.”…He praised Elias Rodriguez, the man facing multiple charges for the murder of a young Jewish couple. In what Abdou called the “assassination of two Zionists,” Rodriguez is accused of murdering Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, the two Israeli employees in 2025 in Washington.

“He then reportedly praised their accused killer: “God bless him. He took action. … Take action. Not only that kind of action, just to be very clear, because there’s also building. We need to destroy. We need to create alternatives.” [His speech] is reminiscent of the speech of other radical faculty like Cornell Professor Russell Rickford, who celebrated the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7th. Their extremism was not a barrier to being hired. It was likely an enhancement.

“They are examples of why faculty members are unlikely to change the overwhelmingly liberal appointments. Conservatives and libertarians have been largely purged from most departments. While even a moderately conservative faculty candidate will often face organized opposition, radicals like Abdou and Rickford find an eager audience on faculties….Abdou offers just pure hate. There is no discernible intellectual content or insight. Just rage masquerading as scholarship.”

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Once Again, “The View” Raises the Issue of Whether There Needs to Be a “Stupidity Rule” For Professions

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Back in 2024, I posited, only half in jest, that “The View’s” resident lawyer on the all-female idiot panel, Sunny Hostin, had made such a stupid assertion on the program that it should trigger legal ethics Rule 8.3, which mandates that a lawyer who has knowledge of another lawyer’s conduct that substantially calls into question that individual’s fitness to practice law must—must—report that unfit lawyer to bar authorities for professional discipline. Hostin had surmised that “climate change” causes earthquakes and eclipses, and stated this cretinous conclusion on national television, on an ABC News program, which is what “The View” purports to be.

I wrote in part (and in disgust):

“[S]ome people with law licenses are demonstrably too stupid to be trusted by clients. Hostin is screaming proof of the validity of this conclusion, yet there is nothing in the disciplinary rules governing the minimal ethics requirements of lawyers that mentions basic, personal intellectual competence as a mandatory component of professional, legal competence.

There should be. One would think that the challenge of graduating from law school and passing the bar exam would be sufficient to ensure that a lawyer is at least smart enough to come in out of the rain, but in extreme cases like Sunny, one would be wrong….believing that climate change causes solar eclipses is signature significance. You can’t come to such an idiotic conclusion and not be an idiot. This delusion [shows] a crippling deficit in critical thinking skills. One cannot be a trustworthy lawyer without minimal critical thinking skills. When a lawyer demonstrates such a deficit beyond a shadow of a doubt, that ought to be considered a legitimate reason for disbarment.”

Remember, professionals are special members of society whose important roles require that they be trustworthy. True professionals include the clergy, doctors, lawyers, judges, law enforcement officials, military leaders, public servants, accountants, psychiatrists, and teachers, and though it sounds absurd today, journalists. Really, really stupid people are not trustworthy, in fact it is dangerous to trust them. If they are sufficiently stupid, they should not hold any of those societal roles and positions.

Ethics Alarms, as those of you who have read the commenting rules here know, has among its provisions that the moderator, that’s me, may at his discretion ban a commenter who has demonstrated to my dissatisfaction that said commenter is too intellectually deficient to contribute substantively to the discussions. I believe that I have only had to invoke it twice.

Which brings me back to “The View”…

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The Ignorant Axis “Lobstergate” Nonsense

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I’m going to rely heavily on Michael West’s commentary on this morning’s Open Forum, because 1) I was all set to post on this when my computer crashed 2) when I finally got it up and (sort of) running, I saw that he had covered the topic well in the first entries on our weekly ethics free-for-all.

The National Review, still a pit of NeverTrump die-hards, did a good job covering the latest desperation Axis bile, the petty criticism of the Trump War Department for giving the troops steak and lobster dinners. A disgusted veteran on the staff wrote in part,

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AI Robocall Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This has to be illegal. If it isn’t, it is certainly unethical.

I got a call this morning with a caller ID that stated it was from a hospital. If I say “hello” and there is an odd pause, usually followed by a telltale <click> and voice saying “Hello?” I hang up immediately. because it’s a robocall. This time, however, there was no click, and a clear, unaccented, assertive voice called out, “Hello!” I was curious, so I responded,”What do you want?” “We’ve been trying to reach you,” the cheerful young woman said. “Have you been made aware of Medicare cash paybacks?” THEN I hung up. I know an AI bot when I hear one.

The problem is, most people over the age of about 40 do not. This one was good, the best I’ve heard yet. Way back in 2015, Ars Technica wrote about the then-new use of interactive robocalls, but that was before the AI revolution. Last night I had been watching a new streaming series starring Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis in which a character is addicted to conversing with an AI version of her dead wife. These fake people are improving at a logorhythmic rate, and in about a week the non-humans calling me will be undetectable. That doesn’t mean they will be the same as real callers, which means neglecting to announce to an individual that the voice on the other end of the line is AI-generated is fraud, dishonest, a lie, and, of course, unethical.

There needs to be a tough law or regulation against this practice. Now.

The Rest of the Story: CNN’s Abbe Phillip Forced To Issue On Air Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

As chronicled here, CNN’s talking heads lied repeatedly in an attempt to blame the attempted terrorist bombing in New York City on anti-Muslim, right-wing bigots. First Abbe Phillip repeated the Big Lie that had already been proven false, then she deceitfully continued it with a misleading “clarification” on X, and then “The View’s” fake conservative Ana Navarro repeated the fake Axis narrative a day later. The criticism of Phillip’s lie was so loud on social media that CNN apparently told their incompetent (but black and female, so she will be hard to fire) to do an on air apology, so we got this:

Verdict: 1. Too late. 2. Not good enough. She’s still lying.

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Addendum to “Yet More Evidence [That]…Our Journalists Are Disgustingly Biased and “Enemies of the People”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It’s even worse than that. Abby Phillips, the openly biased and incompetent host of CNN’s “NewsNight,”repeated the dishonest Axis media spin that the ISIS attack against a group of protesters outside Gracie Mansion was against NYC’s Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani last night.

ABBY PHILLIP: Up next, two Republicans say Muslims don’t belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the House Speaker Mike Johnson says nothing, really, to condemn those comments.

This lie, as discussed in the earlier EA post,had been debunked far and wide by that time, but never mind! It was apparently too good a Big Lie for a dedicated Axis propagandist like Phillip to surrender. Nobody spoke up on CNN (of course not!) to correct her, but enough abuse was heaped on Phillip that she issued a foxy “correction”…

Not “specifically” targeting the Muslim mayor, Abbe, you irredeemable hack?

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