Government & Politics

Ethics Observations On Trump’s Dinner With Kanye (And Nick)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Last week Donald  Trump  had dinner at Mar-a-Largo with Kanye West—I’ll start calling him by his new name, Ye, once I’m convinced that it’s not just another gimmick, or in other words, “never”—as well as Nick Fuentes, a 24-year-old leader of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference, and Karen Giorno,  a veteran political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Never in my memory has the identity of dinner companions ever been used by the media as a supposed smoking gun against the dinner’s host. West, you may recall, had a much publicized meeting with Trump when he was President; he has recently been “cancelled” for making what seemed like anti-Semitic comments. (Kanye, it is fair to say, is mentally unstable and a publicity addict, and is likely to say anything at any time.) Fuentes dining with Trump, however, has been the focus of most of the criticism from the media, political figures, and others. The Times’ house anti-Trump specialist, Maggie Haberman wrote,

Even taking at face value Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency just 10 days into his third campaign for the White House.

She (and her co-reporter Alan Feuer) also quoted several figures who condemned Trump’s guest list:

  • “To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” David M. Friedman, who was Mr. Trump’s longtime bankruptcy lawyer and then his appointee as ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter. “Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”
  • “This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” said Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who is considering a candidacy of his own.
  • “Matt Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said, ‘We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.’”
  • Jonathan Greenblatt, the C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Fuentes, [saying], “Nick Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country…He’s a vicious bigot and known Holocaust denier who has been condemned by leading figures from both political parties here, including the R.J.C….[that  Trump ]“or any serious contender for higher office would meet with him and validate him by sharing a meal and spending time is appalling. And really, you can’t say that you oppose hate and break bread with haters. It’s that simple.”

Observations:

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Historical Ignorance Is Dangerous: This Isn’t The Low Point In American Political History

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while now.

I’ve been reviewing some Presidential history as I prepare to continue the Ethics Alarms search for the Worst President Ever, as more evidence of Joe Biden’s proper ranking accumulates. what has stood out is now much worse things have been in the past than they are now by any objective measure. The pundits and other hysterics currently opining daily that the nation is on the verge of unraveling either don’t know our turbulent history, or are deliberately trying to stir up fear and unrest.

They are underestimating the United States of America, and the intrinsic strength of its mission and values.

Take the 15 year period immediately after the Civil War—“Please,” as Henny Youngman would say:

  • Following a catastrophic conflict that left 2% of the population dead, the nation shattered, a whole region’s economy and society destroyed and the nation faced with somehow dealing with more than four million newly freed black slaves, President Lincoln, the one individual who had the brilliance and political skill to—maybe—navigate this confluence of crises was assassinated in a conspiracy that may have included powerful members of the government itself, or so it seemed.
  • The Vice-President who took over as President, Andrew Johnson, was a Southern Democrat who was distrusted and disrespected by the overwhelmingly Republican Congress. Worse, he was stubborn and averse to compromise. The nation’s work, at a critical time, with the nation divided and struggling,  quickly deteriorated into all-out political war between the Executive and the Legislative Branches, with Congress passing laws, some of which were unconstitutional, Johnson vetoing them, and Congress over-riding the vetoes. Members of Johnson’s own Cabinet, actually Lincoln’s Cabinet, were working with Johnson’s enemies in Congress and against him—talk about the “Deep State” !  Congress finally contrived reasons to impeach the President, who had no defenders in the press either, basing the action mostly on one of those unconstitutional laws. Johnson refused to follow it or obey it (the law prevented a President from firing a Cabinet member without Congressional approval, a clear breach of the Separation of Powers), and there it was: “High Crimes and Misdemeanors”! The Senate failed to convict Johnson by a single vote, with many believing that the pro-Johnson votes had been bought (and they might have been!).

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‘HA! You Fell For The Trap, White Boy!’

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I almost made this an Ethics Quiz, but then decided that there is only one ethical answer.

Star high school quarterback Marcus Stokes posted a video of himself in a car singing a rap song that used the term “niggas.” Or maybe it was “niggers.” We can’t find out, you see, because our infantile, unethical news media will only write  that he said the “N-word,” and the video has been deleted. Journalism!

Stokes’ video caused the University of Florida to rescind its scholarship offer. Stokes is white; there is little question that if he were the right color, singing the song and posting it would not have raised any issues at all. But as Yahoo!’s Murjani Rawls observes, “Saying the N-word as a white person goes into another territory,” at least in the hypocritical, race-obsessed worlds of sports and academia. Continue reading →

Ethics Leftovers, 11/25/22: Macy’s, Police Brutality, Giving Thanks For Genghis Khan, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I have now seen three gags online using that introduction above. All of them were really mean; one made me laugh out loud, and I was sorely tempted to use it. However to do so would be neither ethical nor in the spirit of the season, so I’ll just encourage readers to use their imaginations.

I was especially tempted after hearing President Biden and the First Lady call into the NBC broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—I wasn’t watching at the time, but someone sent me the video yesterday. First, it was an intrusion into what is supposed to be a completely non-political holiday event  for the President to try to exploit it. If Biden had even attempted to be the unifying leader he claimed to be while campaigning in 2020, I’d give it a pass, but at this point anything he does or says has to be taken as purely partisan, not to mention calculated and managed by his “handlers,” as in puppeteers. The phone call also went as you might expect: there were about 20 seconds of dead air time, which is an eternity on TV, as the Bidens could be faintly heard speaking incomprehensibly while NBC weather reporter Dylan Dreyer, smiling like a zany, went through a classic “Can you hear me? I can’t hear you…” routine. Finally, after Joe told  Dreyer that she was doing a “good job” and giving  credit to her for the good weather—she’s the weather girl, see; I think that bit was old by 1964—the First Couple replied  to Dreyer’s invitation to say something of substance to the audience,

Mrs. Biden: “We just want to say we’re so grateful for the people, for this opportunity, for the health that we have now in America, and Joe, what do you want to say?”

Joe: “I want to say thanks to the firefighters and police officers, first responders. They never take a break.”

Mrs. Biden:  “And God bless our troops for sure.”

Joe:  “And by the way, we’re going to be talking to some of our troops later in the day, both here and abroad. I hope everybody remembers. We remember them every single day. God bless our troops for real.”

1. More Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade ethics.…On the one parade broadcast I did watch for a while, the commentators used the buzz-word “diversity” three times in less than fifteen minutes, explaining at one point that a marching band was wonderful because it was “diverse.” Bands are good when they look and sound good; it shouldn’t matter what colors it is or whether there is a nonbinary flute player. Then I remembered that Macy’s had just dropped the Salvation Army and will no longer allow its Santas and bell-ringers to solicit seasonal charity contributions, because the conservative religious organization isn’t sufficiently all-in with Macy’s political and social pandering mission to “grant funding to advance human rights, racial justice, workforce development and economic opportunity.” This despite last year’s embarrassing attempt by the Army to jump on the Critical Race Theory bandwagon. The government/media/corporate alliance to mandate beliefs and opinions and punish dissenters brooks no deviation.

The last metaphorical straw was when some female pop star I had never seen, heard or heard of before serenaded the viewers with the brain-numbing Christmas song, “What Christmas Means to Me”:

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San Francisco: “You’ve Done An Exemplary Job, John, And You’re Out, Because You’re A White Male…” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

You have to hand it to the San Francisco Elections Commission. It was open, transparent and honest, and presented its compensatory racism without shame or obfuscation. This is, however, because in the Bizarro culture of San Francisco, “good” discrimination because of race and gender is nothing to be ashamed of. From the moment that “diversity-equity-inclusion became the latest woke buzz term, this episode was inevitable. The question, after the heads of all rational Americans stop exploding like Krakatoa, is “Now what?”

San Francisco Department of Elections director John Arntz has run the elections for the county and the city for 20 years. The San Francisco Elections Commission praised Arntz for his “incredible leadership,” but voted 4-2 not to renew his contract. Though all twelve election directors signed a letter requesting that Arntz be reappointed, he is now out of a job. Election commissioners were clear that their decision to dismiss him had nothing to do with inadequacies in his effectiveness in performing his duties, but, it was explained, there are more important things than being good at your job.

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I Just Signed An Open Letter. This is Why:

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Last week, professors, lecturers and academics across the country began signing the “Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration.” It is an open letter that calls on universities to restore free speech, academic freedom and institutional neutrality. The open letter asks universities and professors to adopt and implement the “Chicago Trifecta” — the Chicago Principles on unilateral free speech, the Kalven report that requires institutional neutrality on political and social topics, and the Shils report, making “academic contribution the sole basis for hiring and promotion.”  It is picking up metaphorical steam: several hundred new signatures have been entered since I first saw the document last night. One of them is mine: I qualify as a former adjunct professor of legal ethics.

Stanford economist and co-author John Cochrane is the first name on the list and presumably launched the letter. He told College Fix:

The larger hope is to bring back academic freedom on campus and in the academic enterprise more generally. Only with robust academic freedom, the ability to investigate ideas and bring out uncomfortable facts, does scholarship bring about new and reliable knowledge, especially on crucial issues to our society.

Who knows if this will have any impact or persuasive power? I am dubious about the use of such protest tools, but at least this one causes no harm even if it like the lonely tree falling in a forest. Trying to ensure that the letter has no effect is, of course, the mainstream media, which so far, at least, hasn’t deemed the effort newsworthy for a week. In the meantime, several news sources have devoted space to the fact that in China, a massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight. Priorities!

I’m grateful for the opportunity to do something proactive about this problem, which I view as an existential threat to American culture and society. Boycotting the recent class reunions of my college and law school was mandatory for me but also the equivalent of Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds. My  Harvard reunion book essay explaining my position did attract a few kudos in the mail, all of which opined that there were many other class members who felt as I do but were afraid to make their views public.

Wow. Harvard apparently has graduated a lot of weenies. But I knew that.

I’ll be circulating the letter to my friends and associates who can sign it. It’s awfully open, which mean that if someone wanted to muck it up with fake names, gag names and other graffiti, they could. Right now, I’m the last name on the list, number 1,241. It will take about a hundred times that to make a ripple, I know.

It’s worth a shot.

Sunday Afternoon Ethics Reflections, 11/20/2022, Part I: The Nuremberg Trials And Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This time I’m separating the usual intro to these ethics potpourris with the enumerated stories. I began by noting that this is the anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, as notable an ethics milestone as one could imagine, from several perspectives. The trials were an admirable effort to make grand statement about the line of inhuman evil that even war could not justify and that a world would not countenance. They were also significantly hypocritical, just as the post-Civil War trial of Andersonville Prison commander Henry Wirz, the sole judicial precedent for Nuremberg, was hypocritical, punishment inflicted on the losers of a terrible war that could easily have been brought against the war’s victors if the results had been reversed.

There really was no enforceable international law to base the Nuremberg Trials on, making the trials illegal if not unethical. Did they stop genocide? No, and one could argue that the show trails didn’t even slow genocide down. They did, I guess, make people think; one important result of the trials was that the films of liberated death camps, made by U.S. troops and supervised by the great Hollywood director George Stevens, were finally shown. How much the trials made people think is much open to debate. I have always been fascinated by the issues raised by the Nuremberg Trials, and Abby Mann’s 2001 stage version of “Judgment at Nuremberg” was one of the productions I oversaw at The American Century Theater. Directed by Joe Banno, it included post show discussions after every performance, some with D.C. area historians, lawyers and judges as guests. Incredibly, I felt, the show had never been produced in the Washington D.C. area, professionally or professionally. Disgracefully is perhaps the better word. TACT’s was a professional, thoughtful and excellent production, yet the Washington Post refused to review it. “Dated,” was their verdict on most of my theater’s productions. The apathy about “Judgment at Nuremberg” was a major factor in persuading me to end my theater’s 20 year-long mission of presenting neglected American stage works of historical, cultural, theatrical or ethical significance.

But I digress. While I was checking to see whether I had noted this anniversary before (I had not), I found the following post, which was the earliest Ethics Alarms entry featuring a reference to the Nuremberg Trials. Written in 2012, it makes fascinating reading today, so here it is. One nostalgic note: Among the commenters on that post more than a decade ago were Michael Boyd (last heard from on this date ten years ago), Brook Styler (final comment), Chase Martinez ( left in 2015), Julian Hung (last heard from in August of last year), Danielle (who wished me a Merry Christmas in 2016, and vanished), Modern Knight ( final comment in 2017), and several one-time commenters who never returned. But Michael Ejercito was among them, speaking of loyalty. The good kind.

The Donald’s Dangerous Ethics: Loyalty Trumps Honesty On “Celebrity Apprentice”

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The Great Stupid, Global Edition: Ethics Observations On The New U.N. Climate Change Fund

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’ve let Major Clipton (from the Ethics Alarms TV and Movie Clips collection, #9 of 27) make the first observation, which is that this is nuts, and that it ought to be obvious to everyone that it’s nuts.

In case you missed it, ” Nearly200 countries concluded two weeks of talks early Sunday in which their main achievement was agreeing to establish a fund that would help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the pollution spewed by wealthy nations that is dangerously heating the planet,” according to the New York Times.

The United States has reportedly “agreed” to contribute a billion dollars to the fund. Well…

1. The U.S. diplomats can’t “agree” to give away a billion dollars. Only Congress can do that. If you want a single reason to be glad the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives while falling on their collective, incompetent faces during the “pink ripple,” this is it. If…and it’s a big if…the new Speaker of the House can keep his troops in line, the U.N.’s Robin Hood Fund should be DOA.

2. The Biden Administration has exploded the National Debt like no other peacetime administration in history, and seems to be under the mistaken belief that taxpayer funds are just cryptocurrency—you, know funny money. The bigger the debt the more interest the U.S. pays on it, and the same regime that has exploded the debt has also created inflation that makes the debt more expensive. In fiscal 2022 alone, the federal government made $475 billion in net interest payments. It was “only” $352 billion the prior year, according to the US Treasury Department. That is more than the government spent on veterans’ benefits and transportation combined. But hey, why not just give away a billion dollars that will be mostly used to line the pockets of the corrupt and incompetent leaders of those “poor, vulnerable countries.”

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At Last! A Systemic Racism Accusation That I Almost Agree With. Almost.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

CNN suddenly discovered this week that state lotteries are regressive and overwhelming exploit poor people and minorities. Too bad these inquiring, always-alert-to-new-issues journalists don’t read Ethics Alarms (but then, few do). I raised this issue in many posts, notably here (in 2010), here (1n 2012), here (also in 2012), and here (in 2016). The news media being shocked–-shocked!—that lotteries are cynical, unethical devices to deal with state budget deficits by legislators who don’t have the guts to raise taxes is like anyone who is surprised to see the cryptocurrency scam come crashing down. Welcome to the party, pals! (You incompetent morons…)

The CNN piece this week interviewed critics calling lotteries in general and PowerBall in particular a form of systemic racism that targets poor black and brown communities across America. Researches told wide-eyed CNN talking heads that despite the extreme low chance of winning, state lotteries aggressively market the lottery to sell tickets at higher rates to low-income communities, who are vulnerable to get rich quick without working schemes. Well of COURSE they market the lotteries: it makes the state millions of dollars! Why would they have a lottery and not market it? CNN also noted a report from 1999 finding that black Americans, high-school dropouts, and low-income citizens played the lottery on a more frequent basis. 

Gee, I’m stunned. Who would have suspected that, except for the fact that everyone knew this would be the case before the first state lottery was approved many moons ago. State lotteries are just the old, illegal numbers racket nationalized. Who played the numbers? Poor people. For heaven’s sake, the dirt poor denizens of Catfish Row in “Porgy and Bess’ are shown playing the numbers (and singing!) What a shock: the linear descendants of those player are also the primary targets and market for today’s lotteries.

CNN needed researchers to point this out to them?

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Ethics Hero: Adam Frisch

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Adam Frisch, the former Aspen city councilman running to defeat hard-right, Donald Trump-backing (and Trump-backed) GOP Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, once again raises the contentious question on Ethics Alarms of whether someone can be an ethics hero by simply doing what was once understood by all to be the right, proper and civilized thing to do.

The policy here is that such conduct is not only heroic but important. Ethical societal and cultural norms are being challenged all the time, altered, edited, mutated, distorted and destroyed. It requires courage, responsibility, integrity and resilience to hold to a standard that is under attack. Once upon a time, before Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams and, of course, Donald Trump and mail-in voting, it was understood in American politics that the way our system was supposed to work, and how it would work best, was for losing political candidates to graciously concede after they had lost an election, however close it might be.

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