Government & Politics

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/11/2022: Twitter Wars And More

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

But first, a cheerful song, because it’s all downhill from here…

Speaking of music, some opening notes are in order:

  • Yesterday was the anniversary of the much-heralded Scopes “Monkey Trial,” a 1925 ethics train wreck that I wrote about extensively last year, here and here.
  • Today, July 11, marks two of the most vivid examples of how random chance changes everything—history, culture, values, traditions– in ways that cannot be imagined. The first was the foolish duel in 1804 between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in Hamilton’s premature death (but ultimately in a boffo Broadway musical!). The second was Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s close-but-no-cigar assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in 1944.
  • Nearer to the present, the apparent collapse of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is disappointing, because it would make reporting on various Twitter-Twiggered ethics issues a lot easier if I could start an account again in good conscience, as I was prepared to do once the service got out from under the clutches of its current censorious and progressive-biased masters.
  • I also haven’t felt like participating in Facebook of late, as the Woke Hysteria among my once rational friends there over the recent SCOTUS decisions is too great a temptation–as in “target”— for me. Right now they just want an echo chamber to scream in, and that’s what they have. Someone somewhere on the web opined yesterday that late night talk shows,  “Saturday Night Live” and its ilk were no longer primarily about comedy, but rather therapy sessions for angry and depressed progressives and Democrats, with the shows using mockery and insults to reaffirm their convictions about “the others”—those dumb, evil, racist conservatives. I think that may be a perceptive analysis. “Saturday Night Live” is a particularly vivid example: the show that once reveled in portraying Gerald Ford as a bumbling klutz and George W. Bush as an outright moron week after week while they were in the White House now hesitates to exploit the comedy gold represented by Biden’s misadventures and Kamala Harris in general. It proves that SNL is more interested in hanging out with the cool kids than actually being funny—which is supposedly its mission. This is a conflict of interest, and the producer and writers aren’t even attempting to resolve it ethically.

1. Twitter Wars #1: @Ka1zoku_Qu0d, an idiot of the sort that literally clogs Twitter, posted this: “Hold on I want to make sure I say this carefully. Yeah Anne Frank had white privilege. Bad things happen to people with white privilege also but don’t tell the whites that.” This caused so much static on the platform that “Anne Frank” ended up “trending.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NYT Columnist David Brooks

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Compared to most of the mouth-foaming progressive activist and propagandists that make up the New York Times stable of pundits, I suppose you could call David Brooks a sort-of conservative, everything being relative. But he also poses as a public intellectual and “the adult in the room,” which is why his recent disinformation while serving as a guest on the PBS NewsHour last week is so damning.

In a discussion about gun control, Brooks responded to host host Judy Woodruff query, “You agree the likelihood of there being any more federal action on guns is very unlikely?” by saying,

I have never understood why an Australian-style gun buyback is an affront to anybody. It’s an open choice. You can sell your gun or not. But if we’re going to reduce 400 million guns, it would take something like that, not even just banning future purchases. I mean, we have got 400 million here!

Continue reading →

Follow-Up: “Observations On A Potential Supreme Court Ethics Scandal…” Yup, It’s Fake News. (Well, Mostly…)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Mark Tapscott is a veteran Washington, D.C. political pro and investigative journalist (who has weighed in at Ethics Alarms a time or two). Late yesterday he focused on clarifying the troubling Rolling Stone story I wrote about here. 

That Rolling Stone piece was headlined, “SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe,” an allegation that fed directly into the pro-abortion trope that the Dobbs decision was substantially motivated by theological fervor rather than legal analysis. In the Ethics Alarms post, I expressed skepticism that the story could be accurate because no mainstream media source had picked it up, and also because any Justices praying with a representative of a religious organization before ruling on a case in which  that organization had submitted a brief would create a neon-bright appearance of impropriety. On the other hand, I found it unlikely that the publication would drop such a “bombshell” without strong evidence, since its news reporting credibility was on lengthy probation after its phantom UVA “gang rape” story fiasco in 2015.

Now the verdict’s in, thanks to Tapscott: Rolling Stone apparently hasn’t learned anything about journalism ethics the last seven years. In a “Culture” column for PJ Media, Tapscott explains: Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: R.I. State Senator Tiara Mack

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I’m late to the party on this one, but it deserves a special post.

That’s Rhode Island state senator Tiara Mack’s Fourth of July video, showing her (as you can see) twerking upside-down in a bikini. Mack says to the camera, “Vote Senator Mack.” Classy!

The mind boggles. Elected officials are obligated to represent high standards of decorum and respect for their office. Does it really have to be explained why this conduct is irresponsible and disrespectful, as well as civically incompetent? If twerking half-naked on one’s head is acceptable public behavior by a legislator, what isn’t? This is, in the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defining deviancy down.” Continue reading →

More Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid: “Urgency Is A White Supremacy Value”

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Many years ago, I was charged with running a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study on rising Hispanic business in the U.S. I worked with many Hispanic scholars and organizations, including the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. One of the recommendations in the draft report, written by a Cuban-American diplomat and scholar, was that Hispanic-Americans needed to purge their culture of toxic habits and traditions that undermined business success, and the primary example was tardiness and a lack of concern with meeting deadlines and appointment times.

The point was especially vibrant because the meetings of the group were almost always delayed while we waited for several key members who wandered in anywhere from 30 minutes to more than an hour after the designated time.

There was some animated debate over this, because some members—not just the habitually tardy ones—tried to argue that impugning the “manyana” attitude tradition would be an insult, allowing “white” values to erase “brown” ones, and declaring non-Hispanic culture “superior.” Continue reading →

The Drudge Report’s Lying Headline, And Related Attacks On The USA On Independence Day 2022

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I wanted to keep all of today’s posts positive and appropriately celebratory of the official birthday of the greatest country on earth. It’s impossible, unless I just pretend “it isn’t what it is” out there, and I am distraught.

Let’s start with the shock headline that bannered the Drudge Report last night. Here is what it looked like:

GALLUP SHOCK: ONLY 38% PROUD TO BE AMERICAN

The information is pure clickbait of the worst kind. The headline on the linked Gallup article is “Record-Low 38% Extremely Proud to Be American” (my emphasis). The piece goes on to say that an additional 27% were “very” proud to be Americans, making the “extremely/very proud” number 65%. In fact, only 4% of those surveyed said they were not proud to be Americans.

I found that part of the poll surprising. Not surprisingly, Democrats lead the not-very-proud group, and since the party’s entire thrust recently has been to try to transform the nation into a European-style socialist nanny state while denigrating the U.S. as racist to its core. I would have expected the un-proud, as in “ashamed,” to be much higher. Continue reading →

Pre-Independence Day Ethics Warm-Up, July 3, 2022: What Might Have Been [Broken Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Typically, Ethics Alarms has highlighted July 3 with reflections on the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, for which the 3rd was the dramatic last and decisive day. I know it must be hard to believe, but I do get tired of writing the same things over and over again, an occupational hazard of being an ethicist during a mass ethics breakdown in our democracy and among the increasingly corrupt people we have put in power to protect it. I still can’t ignore Pickett’s futile charge and Custer’s charge as well, so I direct you to last year’s post on both events and their ethics implications.

However, this year I am introducing the July 3 warm-up with another crucial anniversary, one that may have had even more impact on the history of the United States, its prospects and its values than Gettysburg. July 2, 1776 is when the Continental Congress finally agreed to take the leap and forge a new nation (John Adams thought the 2nd would be the day we celebrated) and July 4, 1776 was the date the document was signed. But in-between those more noted dates the Continental Congress began debating and editing Jefferson’s draft Declaration, eventually making 86 edits that cut the length by about a fourth. 

Because the Declaration of Independence is the mission statement of America, framing and sometimes compelling what followed, especially the Constitution, the editing decisions of July 3, 1776 affected our laws and culture in many ways that are unimaginable after more than 200 years. You can read the original here. It is this deleted paragraph, however, that most inspires reflections on what might have been (and what might not):

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Now on to the present day’s ethics concerns...

Continue reading →

New York’s New Gun Law To Counter The SCOTUS Bruen Ruling Is Unconstitutional, The State’s Democrats Know It, And They Don’t Care

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Conclusion: this is not a political party (nor are is progressivism an Ideology) that supports or respects democracy or the Rule of Law.

In the process of passing a restrictive law that bans legally-licensed guns in “many public settings such as subways and buses, parks, hospitals, stadiums and day cares…[and] Times Square Guns as well as on private property “unless the property owner indicates that he or she expressly allows them,” New York legislators included this language in the law:

THE APPLICANT SHALL MEET IN PERSON WITH THE LICENSING OFFICER FOR AN INTERVIEW AND SHALL, IN ADDITION TO ANY OTHER INFORMATION OR FORMS REQUIRED BY THE LICENSE APPLICATION SUBMIT TO THE LICENSING OFFICER THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION: (I) NAMES AND CONTACT INFORMATION FOR THE APPLICANT’S CURRENT SPOUSE, OR DOMESTIC PARTNER, ANY OTHER ADULTS RESIDING IN THE APPLICANT’S HOME, INCLUDING ANY ADULT CHILDREN OF THE APPLICANT, AND WHETHER OR NOT THERE ARE MINORS RESIDING, FULL TIME OR PART TIME, IN THE APPLICANT’S HOME; (II) NAMES AND CONTACT INFORMATION OF NO LESS THAN FOUR CHARACTER REFERENCES WHO CAN ATTEST TO THE APPLICANT’S GOOD MORAL CHARACTER AND THAT SUCH APPLICANT HAS NOT ENGAGED IN ANY ACTS, OR MADE ANY STATEMENTS THAT SUGGEST THEY ARE LIKELY TO ENGAGE IN CONDUCT THAT WOULD RESULT IN HARM TO THEMSELVES OR OTHERS; (III) CERTIFICATION OF COMPLETION OF THE TRAINING REQUIRED IN SUBDIVISION NINETEEN OF THIS SECTION; (IV) A LIST OF FORMER AND CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS OF THE APPLICANT FROM THE PAST THREE YEARS TO CONFIRM THE INFORMATION REGARDING THE APPLICANTS CHARACTER AND CONDUCT AS REQUIRED IN SUBPARAGRAPH (II) OF THIS PARAGRAPH; AND (V) SUCH OTHER INFORMATION REQUIRED BY THE LICENSING OFFICER THAT IS REASONABLY NECESSARY AND RELATED TO THE REVIEW OF THE LICENSING APPLICATION.

What the hell is “good moral character”? Is any Constitutional right dependent on “good moral character”? The answer is no, because first, citizens have certain guaranteed rights regardless of their character, second, the right to bear arms is one of those rights, and third, opinions on what constitutes good moral character is subjective. For example, I think elected legislators in the United States who deliberately pass unconstitutional laws have terrible character. Could voting or freedom of speech be made contingent on a government agent’s judgment of a citizen’s character? No—it’s not even a valid question. No. Obviously no.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Secret Service Defies Orders!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

As soon as I saw the headline to Prof. Turley’s latest post on his blog, “Res Ipsa Loquitur” I knew we had an ethics quiz: “Presidential Protection or Abduction: Why Secret Service Wrong for all the Right Reasons on Jan. 6.”

Turley’s article was prompted by one aspect of the Jan. 6 Commission testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson that President Trump ordered his official SUV to take him to the U.S. Capitol to be on hand with his supporters as they rallied (it turned out to be a “mostly peaceful” rally) against what Trump had told them was the stolen 2020 election. According to the witness, that she was told that T his Secret Service security team refused, causing the President to become furious.

Turley’s take, in brief:

…the Secret Service is trained to take immediate action to protect a president. On the other hand, it cannot effectively control the presidency by controlling a president like a modern Praetorian Guard. In the end, if this account is true, the security team was likely wrong in refusing the order of the President to be taken to Capitol Hill….Trump intended to do exactly what he promised and ordered the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol. But Tony Ornato, White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and Bobby Engel, who headed Trump’s security detail, reportedly refused.

…If true, the security team’s motivation certainly was commendable. It probably prevented Jan. 6 from getting much, much worse…what was the authority of the security team to refuse a direct order from a sitting president to go to Congress?

…The Secret Service has always assumed discretion in seizing a president to protect him from immediate harm [but there was no immediate harm threatened]…Trump reportedly decided he wanted to lead the protests to the Capitol and didn’t care about the security uncertainties — and he actually had a right to do so. Presidents can elect to put themselves in harm’s way… The Secret Service has no authority to put a president into effective custody against his will… In Trump’s case, he reportedly said he did not want to go back to the White House but was taken there anyway.

…This act of disobedience may have saved the country from an even greater crisis…

In the end, the security team was correct on the merits but probably wrong on the law. This was not an unlawful order, and a president must be able to control his own travel. In other words, the agents were wrong for all the right reasons.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is: Continue reading →

From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur” (“The Thing Speaks For Itself”) Files

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In addition, this is also signature significance.

What kind of political party in America over its long history, other than the American Communist Party, would think it would be appropriate to post such a thing, even once? What kind of political party would have such Bizarro World American values that it would think, even for a second, that its members and potential recruits would appreciate such a sentiment? What kind of political party would hire someone, even one employee—I don’t care if he or she is a teenager—who would lack the ethics alarms to know such an announcement would be a national insult?

As I’ve mentioned before, one supplementary benefit of the Dobbs decision is that it has caused a lot of activists, politicians, celebrities and organizations to show the world just how ruthless, corrupted and vicious they are.

The tweet was deleted.

Too late!