The latest revolting development is that a Minnesota jury convicted Shiloh Hendrix of a single charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct last week for repeatedly calling a black man who confronted and filmed her at a Rochester playground “nigger.” Hendrix also directed the slur at an 8-year-old black boy who had been going through her purse.
Because Hendrix’s speech was the conduct underlying the disorderly conduct charge according toMinnesota law, we have a controversy over whether using “nigger” as this awful woman did falls within the narrow “fighting words” exception to speech protected under the First Amendment.
The six-person jury returned its verdict after four days of testimony in Olmsted County District Court, finding Hendrix, 37, guilty on the count involving using “nigger” in her exchanges with videographer Sharmake Omar. She was not found guilty on the count involving the child. The full sentence: a stayed 90-day jail sentence, supervised probation, 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.
We are told Hendrix did not speak before sentencing. Good.
EA discussed “ideological capture” earlier today focusing on the law and academia, but as Americans who were paying attention (and who don’t rely on the Axis news media for the news), we were introduced last week to the desperate straits of the Smithsonian Institution, saddled with a woke ninny who gives “land acknowledgments” at every opportunity, and who pretended, under oath, not to know just how obsessed with promoting racial division and public contempt for their own nation the museum under her charge is.
On July 4th, the White House released a thorough and nausea-producing report on just how much “ideological capture” has infected the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). Titled SAVING AMERICA’S STORY: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage, the report, which you can and should read here, presents a damning case.
I had written earlier about this monstrosity,
…on the Smithsonian website, but there is so, so much more. For example, here is the Smithsonian insinuating, in text-book fake news fashion, that Ben Franklin may have used “enslaved persons” (the new, approved woke-speak for “slaves”) in his research, though there is absolutely no evidence of it.
The values and priorities of the people responsible for this display of warped ethics are so alien to me that they might as well come from a different dimension.
It all begins with the fatal shooting of Corey Ruiz this week in Madison, Wisconsin. At this point, it’s difficult to get the facts of the shooting without it being framed by anti-law enforcement and pro-perp narrative. As far as I can determine, Ruiz was another habitual thief, thug and scofflaw: Wisconsin public records show that Ruiz had 40 misdemeanor and felony convictions from 2009 to 2025, including robbery by force, strangulation, drug possession, vehicle theft and battery of a public safety worker, according to the records. He was most recently convicted of resisting law enforcement and drug paraphernalia possession.
[The source I was able to get that information from adds, “Jazzman Brown, a community organizer in Madison, said Ruiz was a father who was experiencing homelessness and mental health struggles.” Oh! Well, that means he can rob and beat up people then. Never mind. Seriously: I don’t care how much of a troubled life the deceased may or may not have had.]
Police officers were dispatched to Madison’s Marquette neighborhood in response to reports of someone stealing bicycles and checking vehicle doors. It was Ruiz. When officers attempted to approach him, he fled on a bicycle, riding through backyards to escape, Ruiz either fell or was pulled off the bicycle, then fought with officers to resist arrest. During the struggle, Ruiz pulled out a substantial fixed-blade knife and injured one of the officers. Ruiz was tazed, but it appeared to have no effect. Then an officer fired three shots into the man, killing him.
I have no sympathy for the deceased at all. Anyone who believes his death justifies a protest (or worse, a law suit, or worse still, the prosecution of a police officer) is crippled by poor logic, bias, and absurd anti-law enforcement attitudes.
The decision in Louisiana v. Callais represented a straight, non-liberal activist reading of the Constitution, which prohibits racial discrimination for any purpose. Naturally, brain-washed progressives pronounced the SCOTUS ruling this year an abomination, a claim based in bias and ignorance as I explained here.
Never mind: the news media and legal websites have overwhelmingly attacked the decision, as has the legal academia sector. The latter is especially ominous. The SCOTUS ruling was the right one, I believe, but certainly one that can support serious, good faith debate. On the scholarly side, however, the analysis of the issues only go one way. Is that the kind of expert “consensus” the climate change hysterics maintain exists on that topic? How could that be?
In his essay “The case for Callais” on SCOTUSblog [“This publication has been inundated with essays by academics critical of Louisiana v. Callais, but has not published a single one in defense of it. So I decided to take it on in my column”] Brian Fitzpatrick explains how. He writes at the start,
“When I was thinking about becoming a law professor – I am sorry to say this was something like a quarter century ago now – I went to go see one of my favorite former law professors, Elena Kagan, for advice. She was then the dean at Harvard Law School, but I had known her merely as my Administrative Law professor. She asked me what field I wanted to pursue and I told her race discrimination law. It was the reason I went to law school to begin with. It was what I had written my law school thesis on.
“Her response: don’t do it. She explained that, in order to get a job as a race discrimination scholar at any school, I would have to win over the other scholars at that school who worked in that area. Kagan said that at every school the scholars who worked in that area all supported racial preferences. The problem was that I was against racial preferences. She said for that reason alone no one in the field would support hiring me. She told me to choose something else.
“So I did. I decided to pursue class action litigation instead. It’s been a perfectly pleasant career. But it also explains why the academy is monolithic – and, frankly, untrustworthy – on race issues: you aren’t allowed to specialize in these issues unless you toe the party line. Today, we call this “ideological capture” of the academy. I think it’s a pretty sad state of affairs and I am not the only one.”
“Sad” doesn’t begin to describe what is wrong with this phenomenon, but it does explain the process whereby colleges and universities slowly but relentlessly eliminated objectivity and balance in entire fields—education, of course, but also history, journalism, political science, law, and, based on what I have experienced this year, ethics. The consequences of that strategy are readily apparent, but how to undo the process and return to independent and ideologically diverse thought essential to a democracy is not so clear.
A really, really smart friend whom I respect a great deal just posted on Facebook that the President, on one of his sophomoric name-calling jags, had mocked Sen. Ossoff (whom I just posted about today, coincidentally) as “Pinky Herman.” My friend wrote that Trump was obviously mixing up Peewee Herman with Pinky Lee, a vaudeville kids TV star in the Fifties. “More proof of dementia,” my friend wrote.
I never thought of it before, but it seems to me that Pinky Lee might well have inspired Paul Rubens’ decades later kids’ show character. Pinky and Peewee are pretty similar names. Confusing the two is hardly evidence of dementia, unless the one making the mistake is Donald Trump.
But as usual, everyone on Facebook laughs, likes, and acts as if this stupid smear is a profound diagnosis. Fifteen years ago, I confused Aaron Burr and Raymond Burr while teaching a seminar and didn’t even realize it. Another time I said “Helen Keller” when I meant to say “Anne Frank.” I have mixed up my Jacksons on occasion: Jesse, Reggie, Andy, Michael and Stonewall. I assuredly do not have dementia. I think claiming that Trump does based on mixing up two fey comic kids show stars with similar names is more evidence of mental decline than anything either Trump or I have done.
I really detest this stuff. It is so petty, disrespectful, ungenerous and obnoxious. And, you know, Trump might have deliberately merged Pinky and Pee-wee, which would have been clever. Nah, it couldn’t have been that…
I remember Pinky well. I even remember the words to his song:
Yoo hoo, it’s me! My name is Pinky Lee. I skip and run bring lots of fun To every he and she! It’s plain to see That you can tell it’s me! With my checkered hat And my checkered coat, The funny giggle in my throat And my silly dance Like a billy goat!
Clyburn is already presumptively a blight on the body politick since he is widely regarded as responsible for “saving” Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2020. And didn’t that work out well!
Even aside from his role in the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck, Rep. Clyburn has one of the worst Ethics Alarms dossiers of any politician. Most recently, EA noted that Cliburn told the dim-bulb ladies “The View” that Republicans were trying to restore slavery, and that isn’t even necessarily the dumbest thing he has said in public over the years. Cliburn is neither honest, ethical, fair or bright, but he did walk shoulder-to-shoulder with the sainted Martin Luther King in civil rights protests, and that is sufficient justification, according the the Left’s addled value system and his South Carolina district, to guarantee the man a lifetime sinecure in Congress.
Every now and then Clyburn says something so outrageous that it even has to make progressives and Democrats doubt the wisdom of letting the 86 year-old hang around to make Congress dumber. This week, he was asked by a Vox reporter about artificial intelligence and its tremendous influence on the workplace, education, and the economy. Not only did Clyburn answer that he’s never used AI, he admitted that he hadn’t heard of ChatGPT before this month.The exchange in part:
Reporter: “No ChatGPT, no Claude for you?”
Clyburn: “Believe it or not, I didn’t know what that was until about a week ago. ChatGPT, or whatever it is.”
Reporter: “You didn’t know ’til a week ago? Wow. I mean, I’m jealous. You’ve kept yourself in a bubble.”
Clyburn: “That may sound strange to you. I didn’t know what that was.”
…
Reporter: “How do you effectively legislate as a member who is distant from some of those technological shifts that are affecting folks’ lives right now?”
Clyburn: “I have a great staff. I wish I could know everything. I don’t know everything, and I don’t spend my time trying to learn everything. What I spend my time doing is trying to surround myself with people who do know stuff. I know how to legislate. I know how to build relationships, and I hire people to bring knowledge into the game that I can put to practice.”
Give him credit for one thing: Clyburn is at least transparent about how clueless and incompetent he is. He wishes he knew everything? How about knowing that massive technological changes are occurring right now and that the AI revolution erupted in 2024? Clyburn really said that he knows how to legislate while admitting that he doesn’t keep informed of what he needs to legislate about.
Nobody who pays any attention to the news, the culture, social media, the law, education, the economy…anything current, really, could have missed “ChatGPT, or whatever it is.” Ah, but Rep. Clyburn still marched with MLK Jr., and that’s what really counts in 2026.
🚨 WATCH: Chairman @RepTimBurchett exposes the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Director by playing a compilation of her own remarks implying Americans are illegitimately occupying their own country.
Earlier this week, EA discussed how Rep. Brandon Gill exposed the horrifying wokey nonsense the head of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has inflicted on the museum during her tenure. It turns out that I was too kind, and that this silly, biased and indoctrinated woman is even more intolerable than I thought.
Before she was eviscerated by Gill, Rep. Tim Burchette’s introduction was res ipsa loquitur stuff, so inherently damning that further questioning of Anthea Hartig was unnecessary. The pièce de résistance comes at the 1;35 mark, when we get a montage of Hartig dutifully giving prayer-like “land acknowledgment” grovels to Native American activists. The list is long, but near the top of mockery-requiring leftist rituals that mark practitioners as unworthy of trust, power or responsibility has to be these ahistorical claims that the United States is an illegitimate sovereignty built on “stolen lands.”
It is bad history, bad law and bad logic, transparent virtue signaling to those who don’t know what virtue is. If someone is really so shattered by working and living on “stolen lands” nothing stops such an addled individual from tracking down some member of the Patawippumkokavackimminy tribe and handing over the keys to his or her home. Hartig won’t do that, of course, because she’s either a hypocrite, a pandering fake or more likely both.
Believing it is appropriate for a representative of the U.S.’s national museum to begin every speech or public appearance emphasizing one of our nation’s two alleged “original sins” as if that is the defining feature of the nation should have marked Hartig for swift removal long ago—in fact, how did such a fool get hired in the first place? I can on;y conclude that it is because her political party likes anti-Americanism and wants our country to be seen as a villain, not just by the rest of the world, but by its own citizens.
Another post script on presentation skills: I hate to keep harping on this, but people whose living involves communication have an obligation to learn how to communicate. Burchette is terrible; I found it hard to focus on his content, so annoying was his vocal placement, droning tone and lack of engagement with the camera. Again, this isn’t hard to fix; all it requires is the will to fix it. I resent having to listen to public figures like Burchette. He is either too lazy or stupid to make an effort to help people understand and focus on what he is saying.
The American Bar Association’s own website says, “All of us have implicit biases.” I asked its president which groups she holds bias against. pic.twitter.com/Pebduv8lVL
— Congressman Brandon Gill (@RepBrandonGill) July 22, 2026
“This is embarrassing,” Rep. Brandon Gill said, as Michelle A. Behnke ( from Madison, Wisconsin—of course she is), the president of the American Bar Association (ABA) repeatedly refused to answer direct questions, was infuriatingly evasive and displayed nauseating hypocrisy and dishonesty as Rep. Brandon Gill questioned her regarding DEI, bias and discrimination. It was embarrassing, for Democrats, progressives, fans of permanent anti-white discrimination, members of the ABA (the largest American bar association, which I refuse to join expressly because of the organization’s lack of integrity ) so flamingly displayed by Behnke, and especially all lawyers. How can the public trust a “profession” that allows such a shifty, pusillanimous, dishonest individual to represent it by leading its members’ largest and most prestigious organization?
President Donald Trump had a statue of Thomas Jefferson placed in the Rose Garden last week, bringing to five the number of sculptures he has added this year. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, and a sculpture honoring Revolutionary War soldiers preceded the one honoring our third President and the author of the Declaration of Independence.
Naturally the Washington Post is sneering at the project, even going to the trouble of finding an expert, Maxwell Anderson, the former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, to sniff that the statues statues are of “negligible artistic value.” You know, not like the Obama Presidential Library…
…or the obscene thing supposedly representing the Kings embracing
…or the King Memorial, which makes me think of Han Solo hanging on Jabba the Hutt’s wall.
The Jefferson statue is of “negligible artistic value” because President Trump selected it, just as the Reflecting Pool upgrade has to be mocked and sabotaged because it is this President’s project. Trump Derangement is pure Cognitive Dissonance Scale craziness: the President’s endorsement of dogs—fortunately he is the only POTUS in memory who hasn’t put a dog in the White House as a political prop—would have much of the Left siding with Mamdani’s anti-canine Muslims.
The statues are also irritants to the Axis and pals because the Rose Garden sculptures that arrived before Tom’s are on loan from Harland Crow, the conservative billionaire who has lavished gifts on Clarence Thomas. That’s also cognitive dissonance at work where it doesn’t belong. The owner of artwork has no relevance to the quality of the art, just as the character of the artist is irrelevant to any assessment of the artist’s work. There should be nothing controversial about the White House honoring patriots and Founders on its grounds, and there isn’t. No Chief Executive in our history has been so absurdly attacked over non-substantive matters. President Trump’s real offense is that he dared to persevere into the headwinds of presumed leftist dominance and prevailed. How dare he?
Today Stephen Kruiser, a conservative gadfly, began his daily with “The GOP Midterm Theme Should Be ‘Joe McCarthy Was Right'” and later writes, “Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media are… still badmouthing Joe McCarthy after seven decades and he was right about everything.”
That is offensive and ignorant. Ann Coulter has made similar claims over the years. Joe McCarthy was right about just one thing: there were Communists and communist sympathizers in the U.S. government then and there probably are now. He was wrong in his methods, he was dishonest in his tactics, he was hostile to freedom of speech and freedom of thought, he was an anti-Semite and an anti-gay bigot, he weaponized guilt by association, and his response to criticism or opposition was exactly the same as so many minority politicians and women like Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reflexively respond to opposition today. They cry “Racist!” or “Sexist!” Joe cried “Communist sympathizer!” It’s the same tactic.
Senator McCarthy waved papers in the air that he said contained confirmed Communists, but never revealed the names. The consensus is that the papers were probably blank. He wanted all homosexuals fired from sensitive positions because they were, he said, vulnerable to blackmail by Communist agents seeking to recruit them to undermine the United States. (So was being an alcoholic, like Joe.) He cynically exploited Cold War tensions to build his political influence and power, and aligned himself with the same forces in the nation that created blacklists.
McCarthy was the epitome of the patriotic demagogue. “McCarthyism,” which denotes the practice of wielding unsubstantiated accusations and the defamation of political opponents through calculated fear-mongering, was a fair description of the Senator’s methods, and is a perfect description of what the Left’s Axis of Unethical Conduct has been practicing since 2016. You know, like…
Extolling Joe McCarthy, an all-time Ethics Villain and a blight on our political history, is as repulsive as defending Graham Platner, Tim Walz or New York’s Mayor Mamdani. It is historically and ethically ignorant.
Post Script: As much as I view “iconic” Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block as an over-rated partisan hack, he certainly had Joe McCarthy pegged early on. “Herblock” habitually portrayed McCarthy with a bucket of tar and a dripping paint brush, a vivid image of his methods.
