Government & Politics

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The Trump Administration Asks For Universities To Be Fair, Open and Responsible, and The Teachers Union Goes Nuts

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

What does this tell you?

Is there a second way to interpret this exchange?

I’m not going to comment much on this post, because the raw reality shouldn’t require it. First I was going to frame this as one of the game show posts, with the title, “Who’s Nuts?” But I did one of those just a few days ago. The unions are Ethics Villains to be sure, but even that doesn’t do them justice based on their letter. I was going to use the “Apocalypse Now” clip “The Horror!” to mock the way the two radical Axis unions reacted to the most reasonable DOE requests imaginable, but this is too frightening to mock. The unions’ letter is an Unethical Quote to be sure, but a 6 page unethical quote is a bit…unwieldy.

According to polls, a large proportion of Americans are willing to put these totalitarian far-left extremists in power because gasoline prices have spiked while the United States confronts a deadly international enemy that it should have crushed 40 years ago. The frightening part isn’t Congress temporarily flipping. The frightening part is that so many Americans are so short-sighted, easily manipulated, ignorant.

Here is the first letter, as Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon calls for colleges and universities to actually educate students, stop being far-left indoctrination factories, ensure intellectual and ideological diversity on campus and not violate the civil rights laws. Let me know if you see anything radical, extreme or alarming there unless one is a committed ideological warrior determined to prevail “by any means necessary”…

Now here is the response of the recently combined American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), both organizations victims of total ideological capture. (Just to follow the theme of recent days, both unions have called for boycotts against Israel.)

Professor Turley, whom I credit with first alerting me to this nauseating open correspondence, writes in part,

“…The alliance with AFT and Weingarten [Me: that’s her, ranting above] is crushingly predictable. Weingarten personifies what I have called the “education cartel,” where teacher unions receive massive contracts and pension agreements from Democratic allies and then turn around and send massive political contributions to those same allies. The losers in this symbiotic relationship are of course the students and their families. Weingarten is “credited” with turning the teachers’ union into an extension of the Democratic Party, often appearing at political rallies with her signature high-volume screeds…As public support and revenue for both public education and higher education plummet, these figures are doubling down. The last thing that they want to see is the restoration of neutrality or balance. That is why a policy calling for such reforms is so anathema to them. These organizations are now political organizations that use their dues to pursue radical agendas.”

All true, but the professor’s main concern is the radicalization of a union that purports to represent his profession. My main concern is the crystal clear dishonesty in the second letter and its extreme “it isn’t what it is” arguments. Calling out and preventing institutional discrimination against men, whites, Asians and conservatives isn’t “a partisan concept of national interest.” It’s called “enforcing the law.” The most laughable is the teachers’ union call to make higher education “affordable.” The schools can make tuition more affordable by cutting administrative staff, salaries and construction. Their solution is more taxpayer funding for useless and misleading degrees, but also more reliable woke activists.

Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part Two: For Jews, Zionism=Survival

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

[Part I is here.]

Let’s see: what happened in the World of Jew Hate in the past 24 hours? Admittedly, this will only cover stories that leftist mainstream media hasn’t successfully embargoed: it is fine for the Democratic Party to be anti-Semitic, see, it’s just a bad look if the positions and conduct are expressly anti-Semitic right before an election, except to Muslim voters, of course.

I see…

  • Jordan Bardella, a top figure in the French far right and Marine Le Pen’s top aide, authored antisemitic social media messages from 2013 to 2015. He had vehemently denied this.
  • Italy’s Democratic Party refused to take part in a parliamentary committee vote on a bill opposing antisemitism,…
  • Die Linke, Germany’s rising populist-left party, won 26% in elections to Berlin’s House of Representatives, its best performance ever. Meanwhile, a branch of Die Linke in Berlin recently welcomed Macklemore, the anti-Semitic rapper, and on election night a Die Linke MP was photographed with a representative of a pro-Palestinian group with terrorist connections.
  • Canada is experiencing a surge of Jew hate. The Jerusalem Post reports “a significant rise in antisemitism, threats, and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions…In 2025, 788 hate crimes targeting Jews were reported to police across Canada. Jews accounted for approximately 71 percent of all police reported hate crimes motivated by religion. .. During the most recent Rosh Hashanah, mezuzahs were torn from the doors of Jewish students’ rooms at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Days later, an armed man arrived at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville while worshippers were inside on Yom Kippur. A police officer protecting the synagogue was seriously wounded.

In the U.S.—remember, we’re just talking about today’s news—

  • The University of California petitioned a court to kick out the Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing UCLA of tolerating antisemitic harassment while seeking repayment of $2 billion in research grants. UC calls the case “political coercion” (how dare the government restrict a university’s right to allow the persecution of Jewish students on campus?) and argues that UCLA has made substantial changes since August of 2024, when a court ruled that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith” and ordered the university to guarantee equal access to campus. A battle between anti-Israel students and counter-protesters was allowed to proceed without significant action by campus police.
  • Close to me in Alexandria, a group of rabbis accused Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland of normalizing anti-Semitism. In a letter this week to the district’s [completely Democrat] leadership, they wrote in part, “Over the last three years, we have been on the front lines of the current crisis of skyrocketing school-based antisemitism. We meet regularly with students who are hurt and confused and parents who are angry that their children are experiencing harassment, isolation, and threats to their fundamental physical and emotional safety. We are alarmed that the lack of a meaningful response by MCPS has led to an increase in the normalization of antisemitic attitudes, language and behaviors in our schools.” Montgomery County is the most progressive and Democrat-dominated district in one of the most Democrat-dominated states in the nation.
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Ethics Quiz: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

At Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, 49-year-old condemned inmate Christa Pike got two full doses of pentobarbital when one was supposed be sufficient to kill her. The second was administered into her bloodstream after the first didn’t work, following state protocols. But she still maintained a distinct heartbeat, and began snoring.

There were no rules in Tennessee for what should happen when a prisoner survives both lethal injections, because it’s not supposed to happen and had never happened before.

The microphones were shut off and viewing curtains were drawn. Attending medical staff then entered the execution chamber to evaluate vital signals, confirm the presence of a heartbeat, and determine whether there as acute respiratory distress. Defense attorneys recorded the information to file an emergency motion with a federal court citing evidence that their client survived and suffered unconstitutional pain, citing the 8th Amendment against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Pike was disconnected from the IV lines, her condition stabilized, and she was transferred by secure transport to an off-site civilian medical facility.

I must confess, because I have watched way too much TV, a Western I must have seen when I was about 10 had me believing that when a condemned prisoner survives an execution, such as a hanging, the prisoner is deemed to have completed his sentence and goes free. My father had confirmed this, saying that the real punishment in capital cases was the waiting and anticipation. The dying part was a breeze, or was supposed to be. (Last words of British acting legend, 19th-century actor Edmund Kean: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”)

Well, that legend is not true; that has never been the case in the U.S., and it has rarely been the practice anywhere. Wikipedia has a just-updated list of botched executions going back to 1540. It’s a long (and probably incomplete) list, but there are only two examples where the condemned was set free, and only three where the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, none since 1885.

That last lucky guy was John Henry George “Babbacombe” Lee (1864 –1945), an Englishman famous for surviving three attempts to hang him in 1885. He had been convicted of murder. Lee was eventually released and supported himself by touring and speaking about his strange life. There have been several books about Lee including “The Man They Could Not Hang” (Holgate and Waugh, 2005) and a silent film. He’s buried at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.

So that’s what happens when you survive an execution. You end up in Milwaukee….

But I digress. The issue at hand is what is the ethical, fair and responsible way to handle such situations.

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Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part One: The Democrats Embrace Jew Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Funny, when Democrats ran in 2024 on the assertion that electing Donald Trump would turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany, I didn’t realize that the Left’s response to Trump’s election would be to embrace the most universally acknowledged evil of Hitler’s regime.

In case you haven’t noticed (and why haven’t you, if not?), the evidence of metastasizing anti-Semitism world-wide and in the U.S. as we approach the mid-terms it is alarming, or should be. Yesterday we learned that there was a nearly successful 9-11 style attack on Tel Aviv, foilded by the passengers. Anti-white racist director Spike Lee (everybody loves Spike Lee!) got in a confrontation at Yankee Stadium with a fan who told him “Fuck Palestine!” The acclaimed director of “Do the Right Thing” has revealed himself as a big booster of Hamas, along with a lot of prominent Hollywood progressives like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Saranden, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton. In a sane America, such anti-Semites would fear that expressing vile views would kill their careers, but, NPR tells us, the nation is “divided.” You know: let Israel be wiped off the map vs. let Jews live.

Huh. Tough choice; let me think.

The international community is substantially anti-Semitic as the United Nations has been demonstrating for a long time, but that condition has worsened substantially since Europe allowed its nations to be overrun with Muslims. And, of course, progressives perpetually argue that the U.S. needs to be more like the rest of the world. The U.N. has consistently condemned Israel as it has fought for its existence in Gaza and Iran. Here is the list of nations whose delegates walked out on Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly

  • Egypt
  • Jordan
  • Lebanon
  • Syria
  • Iraq
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Palestine
  • Qatar
  • Kuwait
  • Oman
  • Yemen
  • Sudan
  • Tunisia
  • Algeria
  • Libya
  • Mauritania
  • Somalia
  • Comoros
  • Turkiye (Turkey)
  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • Afghanistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Indonesia
  • Malaysia
  • Brunei Darussalam
  • Maldives
  • Myanmar
  • North Korea
  • Turkmenistan
  • Uzbekistan
  • South Africa
  • Senegal
  • Djibouti
  • Nigeria
  • Angola
  • Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • Spain
  • Brazil
  • Peru
  • Bahamas
  • Antigua and Barbuda
  • Botswana
  • Ghana
  • Cabo Verde

Nice!

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Again: Progressive Hysterics Over A Responsible Trump Policy Change

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I thought the clip from “Poltergeist” fit here: Welcome back, Dana!

The New Republic, biased and dishonest as usual, bleats, “Trump Moves to Cut Off Student Loans for Tons of Degrees: Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money, you won’t be able to get a student loan.” It terms this as “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.”

Oooh, banning students! Sounds like a mad dictator to me!

The President isn’t “banning students” or degrees. This is a financially and educationally responsible move that should have been done decades ago. If a student wants to waste a college education on majoring in “Queer History,” or “Slavik Literature” (Plymouth State University allows students to major in “Adventure Education” by taking “Rock Climbing Fundamentals,” “Canoe Paddling Fundamentals,” “Wilderness Expedition,” and “Whitewater Kayaking”) that’s swell: they just can’t use taxpayer funds they will never be able to pay back to do it.

The Department of Education, or what is left of it, tweeted in response to that unethical New Republic analysis,

“This is fake news at its finest. First off, we’re not ‘banning’ any program. The federal government doesn’t set curriculum or programs. Here’s the truth: we are holding colleges accountable for leaving students worse off than if they never enrolled. Too many graduates report delaying major life milestones like buying a home or starting a family. Why? Because low return-on-investment programs saddled them with unmanageable debt that was never going to translate into a real-world job. Federal student loans are not a welfare program for failing college programs. American students deserve education and training pathways that prepare them for the workforce – and transparency about programs that will never pay off.”

There is a strong case to be made that college itself is now a high-cost scam that doesn’t prepare students for the work force, just anti-Israel rallies and pro-illegal immigration riots, but okay, let’s go with the hoary myth that college is essential to life success. The student debt crisis in this country has reached levels that never should have been permitted, and higher education is as expensive as it is because the schools realized that could charge absurd tuitions and the US government would enable it by backing bigger and bigger loans. Taxpayers and the government subsidizing degrees only makes sense if it incentivizes the development of skills from which the the nation and society will derive tangible, quantifiable, practical benefits. Those are also skills that have a fighting chance of translating into jobs with sufficient compensation to allow reasonable loans to be paid back.

Declaring that the government will only back a student’s loan when 1) that loan is likely to be repaid and 2) when the loan is paying for a benefit to society rather than a self-indulgent frolic is responsible leadership. Unique among U.S. Presidents, Donald Trump sees his most responsible acts reflexively condemned through a combination of misrepresentation, bias and animus. I’m surprised there isn’t a college major in that.

Comment of the Day: “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting deserving “Comments of the Day,” and I apologize. It’s not that there haven’t been worthy submissions, its just been a fact that getting content up on EA at all has been especially challenging of late. The last Comment of the Day was almost a month ago. Yikes.

Below, after a brief observation on the specific incident inspiring the post, Charles Abbott segues from the CEO fired for trolling the Trump Deranged in social media with a photo saluting “Lake America” to the ideological grandstanding that has taken over Facebook, at least based on what I am reading there.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”:

It seems the safest thing to do is simply to shut up. That will be a post for another day.

I want to redirect this comment to the topic of your experiences on Facebook. I’m not an expert on the the topic but I’ve had a Facebook account for approximately 20 years now. Like many of us.

You often post that you are surprised by the sorts of posts and comments and behaviors you see on Facebook from people you know personally and/or professionally.

Here’s the way it looks to me. If Facebook has ever been a place where people went to debate things in good faith, or to seek the truth, or to strive after correcting error, that time is long gone.

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Ethics Villain: Arlington County (VA) Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

With this post, I am belatedly adding “Ethics Villain” to the Ethics Alarms categories. I should have done it before: frankly, properly adding categories and tags to each post after I have finished it is a chore, and I often wonder whether it is worth my time. I’ve posted around 20,000 essays, and the tagging and categorizing process takes about 3 minutes, which means I have spent 5 days worth of waking hours doing it already with no end in sight. I could really use those 60 hours right now.

Anyway, back to Ethics Villain: I have used the term to indicate sort of a super-Ethics Dunce, but that that’s not quite right. Ethics Villains are more like ficks, the EA designation for the people who know what they are doing is wrong and shamelessly do it anyway. In March, I posted an incomplete inventory of Ethics Villains, leaving off Dr. Fauci, who was properly branded with the designation later. Upon reflection, the list was very incomplete, omitting, for example, both Clintons and Barack Obama.

It did include “Virginia Democrats,” however, and that’s from whence today’s Ethics Villain oozed.

***

Local news reports here in Virginia and newly released transcripts from a House July deposition reveal that Arlington’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Taftiac admitted that her office follows a policy in which a DUI charge may be reduced to a different Class 1 misdemeanor when the drunk driver holds DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status. After all, these drunks are special: they are “good illegal immigrants” who face severe immigration penalties for serious law-breaking in addition to the penalties for drunk driving. An office memo urges prosecutors to consider lesser charges when a DACA recipient is arrested for endangering legal, law-abiding citizen drivers and their families as well as pedestrians who looked both ways and waited for “WALK” before crossing a street in what they assumed would be a safe crosswalk. Hey, all they want is a better life!

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Unethical (And Infuriating) Quote of the Month: Fake Conservative Pundit David Brooks

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And I get — we get to go, or at least to dinners, sometimes off-the-record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say, over the last two years, used to be, when you were at a dinner, an off-the-record dinner with the Democratic politician, there was distance between the journalists and the Democrats, because they’re politicians.

But if I could vent one pet peeve about us, starting in 2015, we in the mainstream media learned that, if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up. It became the business model. And I’m not saying we’re — we play it straight. We do our job, but it’s become the business model.

Our job is to keep some distance. In my view, at many places and in many of the dinners I have been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is a problem for the media. And that is our problem. We have got to reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover. They’re not people we root for. They’re not people we’re spin doctors for. They’re people we cover. And I do think we have done a not ultimately excellent job at maintaining as much distance from the Democrats as we keep from the Republicans.

—-David Brooks, the New York Times’ Stockholm Syndrome fake conservative pundit, on PBS, further amassing Ethics Villain points with wild equivocation as he whitewashes the news media’s leftward and pro-Democratic Party bias by purporting to criticize it.

Pardon my Portuguese, but what an asshole.

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Ethics Verdict: The Public Is Too Stupid and Ignorant For A Republic To Function

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Great. Now what?

And those responsible?

  • Parents
  • The education system
  • Teachers
  • The news media
  • Political parties, politicians and candidates, and
  • The lazy, incurious, complacent public itself.

More than a third of U.S. adults (35%) can’t name all three branches of the government. The 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,034 U.S. adults from August 6 to 9. Only 65% can name the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The results of that poll were 70% in 2025 and 65% in 2024.

Parents have an obligation to teach such basic civics, if they know it themselves. That any high school lets a student graduate without being able to name the three branches of government is disgusting and constitutes the negligent killing of democracy. I wonder how many teachers are in the 35%? I probably will be happier if I don’t find out.

Other news in the Annenberg poll are ominous but have fewer real consequences. When asked in to name the specific rights protected by the First Amendment, 73% cited Freedom of Speech, less than the 79% who got it right in 2025. Under one-half (43%) could name Freedom of Religion (because, I surmise, less than half care much about religion in today’s America), fewer than one-third (31%) named Freedom of Assembly and, surprisingly at least to me, only 29% named Freedom of the Press (29%). Almost nobody, just 12%, remembered the right to petition the government. In all, only 9% of respondents could correctly name all five rights in the First Amendment, while 24% could name none of them. A similar number, 25% thought the Right to Bear Arms, the Second Amendment, was part of the First.

You know. Morons.

The poll helps explain the infuriating campaign ads I have been seeing during the telecasts of Red Sox games this month. Democratic House member Chris Pappas (Mass.) is the most flagrant villain, telling two-digit IQ voters that he will “fight I.C.E” (Congress can’t fight I.C.E., which is an Executive Branch agency) and “block abortion bans.” If there are abortion bans they are at the state level, so Congress has no say. Nobody has seriously proposed an abortion ban at the national level, which would probably require a constitutional amendment, and that’s not happening.

“Ignorance is costly,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have.”

Bingo. And that’s exactly why aspiring totalitarians like the state of U.S. civic competence just the way it is.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Choice: Performative Ideological Grandstanding Over Parenthood

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Nikole Hannah-Jones is shocked, shocked that her teen-aged daughter resents the fact that her rich black (racist…but don’t get me started on adjectives for this race-hustler) mother sent her to a crummy public school as performance virtue-signaling. What exactly did the creator of the fake U.S. history “The 1619 Project” expect? Hannah-Jones, surely one of the least qualified tenured professors even in the DEI infested academic world, writes in “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.”…

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked…“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”

Gee, ya think?

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