When ethics fails, the law steps in. In teaching, like a whole range of human endeavors, just a modicum of functioning ethics alarms would make restrictive laws superfluous and even unneeded. But too many people in positions of authority, power, influence and with the opportunity to do harm don’t possess functioning ethics alarms.
And here we are.
Trafalgar Middle School (in Cape Coral, Fla.) art teacher Casey Scott is a proud pansexual. I don’t see why that’s something to be especially proud of, any more than being left-handed or being a Yankee fan, but OK. Casey says her students were curious about her sexual orientation. This was none of their business, and her response should have been along those lines, but no: she felt inspired to explain to them that she was pansexual during a lesson in March, and that she was sexually attracted to pots and pans. Or something. It doesn’t matter what being a pansexual is, she wasn’t hired to teach students about it. (Pansexuals are attracted to all categories of people regardless of their sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.)
As discussed here many times, the abortion issue is an ethics conflict, meaning that there are legitimate and important interests at stake on both sides of the controversy. One way advocates or activists signal their lack of qualifications, intellect and integrity to discuss the issue is by denying or ignoring one interest or the other. That’s proving a benefit of the current freak-out over the leaked draft of what might be a total reversal of Roe v. Wade (and Casey, but that’s intrinsic in overturning Roe). People are revealing who and what they really are–phonies, idiots, liars, demagogues, hypocrites, opportunists, irresponsible fools, or nascent totalitarians.
The depressing, indeed frightening aspect of the freakout is the degree to which it demonstrates that most Americans (and a shocking number of the people whose job it is to inform and guide them through complex issues) are so ignorant of the basic civic facts about what the Supreme Court is. Thus the Dobbs leak freakout is to a great extent another indictment of our public school system, its teachers and administrators, and education in America generally. It should, but won’t, make the point to school boards and legislators that before students are instructed in the complexities of gender dysphoria and critical race theory, the priority should be instructing them in the essentials of the Constitution so they can function as citizens.
Apparently so, at least for some members of the teaching profession whose judgment parents are supposed to trust blindly, according to President Biden and others.
Just a few days ago, Ethics Alarms discussed [#3] the vile treatment of a social studies teacher by the San Francisco’s Creative Arts Charter School, which suspended her and forced her to grovel an apology for bringing cotton bolls, into her class as part of a lesson on the cotton gin and its impact on slavery and the Industrial Revolution. Commenter Curmie, a teacher himself, properly condemned the school’s reaction in a post on his own blog, here.
However, a Rochester, NY white middle school teacher told his class of mostly black students to pick seeds out of cotton bolls during his lessons on slavery in a seventh-grade social studies class. In another fun exercise, the same teacher brought in handcuffs and shackles for the black students to put on. White children were allowed to opt out of the cotton-picking, reportedly, while black students were not. When a black child balked at putting on the shackles, the teacher threatened her with punishment.
Steve-O-in NJ was inspired by the EA commentary on the Washington Post editors’ batty contention last week that Joe Biden was a “huge” upgrade over President Trump to write this Comment of the Day. I was reminded of it—I had intended to give Steve’s opus COTD honors earlier, but got distracted— when I realized that MSNBC was pushing the same gaslighting, prompting the previous post. The historical truth is that Joe Biden’s White House tenure so far wouldn’t give him a claim to being as a “huge upgrade” over any President using objective standards rather than partisan ones, as in “all Republican Presidents are worse than all Democrat Presidents,” which is the kindest way to explain the Post’s absurd assertion.
I am always interested in the topic of Presidential rankings, so after Steve-O has had his say, I’m going to follow up with an examination of how to assess who is the Worst POTUS Ever. Remember, leadership is also an official area of concentration for Ethics Alarms.
Just more proof that a lot of folks are so blindly partisan that they would not only vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to it, but wouldn’t vote for God Himself if He didn’t. Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46. Grant probably no longer occupies the bottom of the ratings list. Harding was a corrupt, philandering son of a b****, but he had the wisdom to stand back and let the economy correct itself after the Panic of 1921. Obama was pretty feckless, but thankfully didn’t face any big new crises. Clinton was a pig, but the economy didn’t crash on his watch. So far, I can only compare Biden to Carter, the only president in recent history and even not so recent history who I can honestly and truly say has no strengths. Continue reading →
Yesterday on her MSNBC show, Tiffany Cross featured Fernand Amandi, a Democrat pollster and adviser, and a regular on hers’s over-heated far-left hysteria orgy. Just think, the New York Times spent 6+ full pages today calling for the metaphorical life boats because Tucker Carlson’s monologues criticizing the Times and its pals for their anti-democratic efforts are getting longer, while Cross is part of an entire network that deals in toxic narratives and bias from dawn til dusk that the Times barely never criticizes at all.
The Democrats have a wonderful story to tell! And I think it could be distilled to something as simple as: the Democrats saved your life. They saved your job. They saved the economy. And now they’re trying to save democracy from a Republican party that no longer believes [in] it.
Isn’t that great? Who besides Rob Reiner could say something so ridiculous on television and not have to leave with his head in a sack? Yes, Democrats really are going to continue arguing that if you vote Republican you’re going to die, that a tanking economy is a great economy, that the pandemic deaths (or deaths attributed to the pandemic to achieve maximum fear) under Trump were “blood on his hands” and the even greater number of deaths under Biden’s watch were still “blood on Trump’s hands,” and that the party trying to crush free speech, cripple the rule of law, weaken the integrity of elections, pack the Supreme Court and criminalize Democratic opposition is going to “save” democracy.
The bet is that progressive-dominated educational institutions and news media has left the public so ignorant and incompetent that this might sound reasonable.
Then Amandi provided the totalitarian strategy: to beat the GOP in the coming elections, all Democrats have to do is arrest them!
[I]t’s one thing to try and disqualify a Republican party that no longer believes in democracy, but you need a little bit of help. If the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General Merrick Garland, do not start issuing indictments, not to the front line of Proud Boys and picknickers of January 6th that led an insurrection, but to the perpetrators of the crime, the Members of Congress who we now know through text messages wereplotters, the ringleaders at the top echelon of the Republican party, up into an including the Republican president, Donald Trump, voters are not going to believe that, they’re gonna just think that it’s political back-and-forth. The Justice Department needs to hold the perpetrators accountable….If these Republicans gain control, they will not give it back. We will lose democracy. And if you lose democracy, it’s not the sort of thing that you get back…You may not see it again in your lifetime in this country.
Why of course! Why didn’t we think of that before! The way to win elections is to arrest the leaders of the opposing party! That will save democracy!
And Tiffany Cross said, ” Yeah! I think that is the message that voters need to hear.” Continue reading →
There’s vintage Disney—back before it decided it had a stake in having young children instructed in sexual matters by teachers, and when innocence was considered worth protecting. Yes, I recognize the irony in saying that about an “Alice in Wonderland” clip, given that Lewis Carroll was unhealthily obsessed with little girls, often asking their parents for permission to photograph them nude…and got it! (Alice was his favorite model.)
That’s the very strange and great Jerry Colonna voicing the March Hare, and Ed Wynn, of course, as the Mad Hatter.
Today is my “un-birthday.” My 94-year-old aunt, the last surviving member of her generation in my extended family called me up this morning to wish me a happy birthday. Since my real birthday is December 1, I was faced with an instant ethical conflict: was the right course to tell the truth, risking embarrassing her, or to play Birthday Boy, lying but being kind in the process? I opted for honesty, both using the Golden Rule—I wouldn’t want to be patronized—and deciding that my aunt, still sharp and always with a sense of humor, could, like Tom Cruise, handle the truth. She could; she laughed, wondered how she has the wrong date on her calendar, and we talked for an hour. SHE mentioned “un-birthdays,” causing me to recall the song.
1. Ethics lesson: Integrity should trump Loyalty. Elon Musk, responding to to the absurd ad hominem attacks from progressives calling him a fascist, a white supremacist and, worst of all, a conservative, provided this handy dandy sketch via, of course, Twitter, explaining that his beliefs have remained relatively stable, while his critics’ perspective has shifted:
2. And we trust these people with educating or rising generations…The University of Southern California former dean of the University of Southern California asked the law firm Jones Day to investigate allegations that its education school directed administrators to omit information from its U.S. News & World Report rankings submission to boost the school’s placement. at least as far back as 2013, According to the just-release investigation results, former dean Karen Symms Gallagher made sure that the Rossier School of Education only included information on its Ph.D. program, which has a lower acceptance rate than its Ed.D. programs, despite explicit instructions in the questionnaire to include both Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs. Gallagher stepped down in 2020 after 20 years as dean. She’s now a professor at Rossier.
The probe turned up what Jones Day referred to as “irregularities” in how the education school calculated and reported research expenditures, and it identified other possible misreporting of faculty metrics, online program enrollment, graduates’ job-placement rates and more. USC had pulled the school from consideration in the U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings prior to the report.
Will she be sacked as a professor? What’s your guess? Continue reading →
The New York Times this morning had no reports whatsoever on the emerging truth that the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s ominous-sounding “misinformation and disinformation” board, Nina Jankowicz, has not only been a purveyor of “disinformation” (aka. “intentional lies”) herself, and also, in the blunt words of the editorial board of the New York Post, “a partisan hack,” but also a narcissistic whack-job, as the TikTok video above clearly shows.
The fact that the Biden Administration would be so dense as to appoint a woman like this to head an agency that was guaranteed to set heads exploding everywhere but in the anti-free speech community called Wokeville (see “evil” hidden in there? Huh? HUH??)is just one more indication that common sense and basic competence have left the building, the building being the White House. And Ethics Alarms mocked Trump for not hiring “the best people” as he had promised on the campaign trail! I owe Donald an apology. Even Omarosa, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon weren’t any more untrustworthy than Jankowicz, and they hadn’t been put in charge of a censorship operation.
That sound Jeff Goldbloom and Sam Neill hear at the end of that clip is a newly freed Tyrannosaurus Rex, which I would much prefer having in my back yard than have what Democrats want to inflict on the nation.
I was all set to vote for Hillary Clinton, disgusting oozing metaphorical warts and all, a few days before Election Day 2016 when some new revelations sunk in, and I concluded that her party was an ideological outlaw, bent on destroying the basic foundations of our nation to ensure their power while using that power to corrupt the culture further. Boy do I hate being right about that—but I was.
The most chilling T-Rex roar yet may be the revelation during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing this week by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkashas. He revealed that his department is setting up a new board designed to counter what it deems to be “misinformation and disinformation” “Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers is co-chair with our Principal Deputy General Counsel, Jennifer Gaskell, in leading a just recently constituted misinformation disinformation governance board….the goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat.” New director Nina Jankowicz’s focus will reportedly be on “irregular migration and Russia.” That’s supposedly the “threat.”
Biden’s minions are so stupid, and so contemptuous of the public! True, many of them are as illiterate and badly educated as Democrats want and need them to be, but Mayorkashas might as well have announced that he was setting up a Ministry of Truth. This is why the news media have been almost completely silent on this (except for Fox News). They realize it sounds ominous. Right now what we know is ominous is only that Biden’s lackeys are so casual about throwing around the idea of the State determining what is “misinformation” and acting on the determination. They also didn’t think people would notice that the new “misinformation and disinformation” czar, Jankowicz, pushed the Biden false narrative that “50 national security officials, and 5 former CIA heads” were certain that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian influence op.”
It’s hard to be terrified of would-be totalitarians who are this incompetent, but what progressives these days lack in brains they make up for in arrogance and ruthlessness.
I’m not going to weigh in on Jankowicz’s ministry until I know what it really will be doing, but Prof. Turley, in his most recent article for USA Today (its there because none of the real newspapers like his focus on the Left’s ethics rot) does a superb job of blowing the whistle on Democrat-driven State censorship efforts that are exactly what they appear to be. Read it all, but here’s an excerpt…
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has declared Musk’s pledge to restore free speech values on social media as threatening Democracy itself. She has promised that “there are going to be rules” to block such changes. She is not alone. Former President Obama has declared “regulation has to be part of the answer” to disinformation.For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking to Europe to fill the vacuum and called upon her European counterparts to pass a massive censorship law to “bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”
For years, the First Amendment distinctions have been the focus of liberals who discovered a way to circumvent constitutional bans on censorship by using companies like Twitter and Facebook. Now, that successful strategy could be curtailed as shareholders join figures like Musk in objecting to corporations and media acting like a surrogate state media.
Faced with that prospect, Democrats are falling back to their final line of defense – and finally being honest about their past use of corporate surrogates. They are now calling for outright state censorship…
As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”
Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical…her call for censorship came just weeks after special counsel John Durham offered more details about the accusation that her campaign manufactured a false Russian collusion theory. One of Clinton’s former lawyers is under indictment for the effort. Clinton personally tweeted out the disinformation that is the subject of the federal prosecution. And the Federal Election Commission recently fined her campaign for hiding the funding of the Steele dossier. Given that history, it would be easy to dismiss Clinton’s calls as almost comically self-serving. However, the 27-nation EU just did what she demanded. It gave preliminary approval to the act, which would subject companies to censorship standards at the risk of punitive financial or even criminal measures.
If implemented, it might not matter if Musk seeks to restore free speech values at Twitter. Figures like Clinton are now going to the EU to effectively force companies to continue to censor users.
Faced with liability across Europe, the companies could be forced to base their policies on the lowest common denominator for free speech…
“I said it in my role as an advocate to make a rhetorical point.”
—-ACLU lawyer Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, nominated by President Biden for the federal judiciary, in response to a question by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La) about why she told a Princeton audience that police kill unarmed blacks “every day.”
In the exchange you can see in the video clip above, Choudhury’s excuse for lying outright to a student audience at Princeton is that she did it to “make a rhetorical point.” Oh! That’s all right then!
Sen. Kennedy was quite appropriately aghast, as should any professional, citizen, lawyer or judge should be. The President’s nominee to sit on the bench for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York quite literally is saying that a lawyer can lie in public for a reason she deems appropriate. No, she can’t, not ethically, not if she wants to be trusted, and lawyers, like judges must be trustworthy. Her answer to Kennedy is signature significance for an unprincipled ideologue (her employer, the ACLU, is full of them, but that’s no mitigation) who is unfit to be a judge (and in my view, unfit to be a lawyer.)
The push to cancel student loan debt is another example of the Left embracing a terrible, foolish, indefensibly unethical policy for no better reason than hope that it will allow them it to gain political power. Word around Washington is that President Biden is “seriously considering” canceling up to $50,000 in student debt for all. Translation: Biden’s puppeteers/handlers/advisers are probably trying to get him to do it, insane and irresponsible as it may be, but Joe may be inclined to do it on his own, because 1) he’s just not very bright; 2) he’s not very bright and his cognitive functions have been deteriorating in front of the whole nation; and 3) he never had any integrity anyway.
The late Rush Limbaugh, commenting on Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, lamented that “You can’t beat free stuff!” He said that Democrats were always willing to buy votes by promising to pay for more or making “the rich” or private business do so, from living wages for jobs not worth them, to national health, to free college degrees and more. Tilting the U.S. to socialism and a “nanny state”? If that’s what it takes to win, sure! Turning the national debt into a ticking time bomb that future generations will have to suffer for? Why not? Student loan forgiveness is as good an example of Rush’s point as I can imagine.
