This kind of confirmation bias-driven sliming of law enforcement has become the norm since the Obama Administration and its leader’s unforgivable sanctification of Trayvon Martin as his crypto-offspring because Martin was black and got himself shot. The news media loves it, however, and you know, Freedom of the Press.
Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez (above) died in February after starting a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana. His last stand lasted only a few second, because two police officers who were crack shots put him down quickly and safely despite others being close to the exchange. Yet that rather straightforward cause-and-effect result generated this headline from WNDU-TV, the NBC-owned affiliate in South Bend, about 20 miles from Elkhart, two days after the shooting:
The deliberately anti-law enforcement and pro-deadly punk story continued,
“The family of a 17-year-old killed by Elkhart police is calling for state investigators to take over the case as the community grapples with three separate shootings and a stabbing in a 48-hour span. Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez died Sunday around 2 a.m. in an officer-involved shooting. A memorial now sits at High Dive Park where he was killed. Alfredo Ramirez-Gomez, the teen’s brother, spoke at a vigil for Bryan on Tuesday afternoon and demanded the release of police footage: “Bryan was a bright kid, he was a member of this community, this is where he grew up,” Ramirez-Gomez said. “As for his cause of death, we can’t really point fingers yet. We just ask and demand that the footage comes out from the car and from the vest.”
Right. “We can’t point fingers yet” but Ben Crump is on our auto-dial. The response is reflex: the family is angling for a big settlement from the city. Blogger Robert Stacy McCain points out:
NBC's Raf Sznchez claims the Spanish border crisis is "becoming a global political flashpoint" and goes with the old Republicans Seize angle "the images of chaos have rattled Europe and been seized on by President Trump."
It is axiomatic that whenever a news event casts legitimate shadows on Democrats, progressives or their allies, the story is framed by the Axis media as a partisan attack by the political Right (Republicans, conservatives, President Trump) with the event itself de-emphasized. “Republicans pounce!” is the short-hand name for the phenomenon.
Of course the practice is unethical and deliberately misleading. The news media’s coverage of the Fauci hearings was a classic of the genre. For example, ABC’s correspondent Jay O’Brien said on Wednesday’s Good Morning America that the retired scientist would, at “85 years old,” have to face “a fiery hearing” because he “has long been a target of” Rand Paul, who obtained his “private diary.” Later, on World News Tonight O’Brien described Fauci as “the man millions of Americans turned to for answers during the COVID pandemic” now being “needled” by Republicans even though he “served in government for 54 years and has testified in more than 200 hearings.”
That commentary is revolting in its mendacity. People who do bad things need to be held responsible, and how old they happen to be when the piper must be paid is irrelevant. Citing Fauci’s age was a pure appeal to emotion: “Aw, poor old guy, can’t they just leave him alone?” The diary, legally and factually, was not private because it was created on a government platform. Yeah, sure, millions of Americans turned to Fauci for answers, including the President, and he lied to them all, repeatedly, or gave wrong answers.
I believe, and have believed for as long as I can remember—Shut up, I remember more than most people—that everyone in our society has an ethical obligation to know as much as possible about the society and culture we live in. This takes time and effort, as well as humility. For the young, it means showing an interest in what had transpired before they were born, if it had a significant effect on history and culture.
I have related here my interaction with a professional woman, ten years my junior, who revealed that she didn’t know who Jackie Robinson was. I told her that was inexcusable, and sent her to some sources. A lawyer I worked with at one point, even younger, couldn’t come within 70 years of the dates of the Civil War, despite graduating with honors from Cornell and being an associate at Skadden Arps.
The case was made powerfully in the Eighties by J.D. Hirsch in his best-seller “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” and he updated his book several times. His main declaration was that without a shared cultural knowledge, communication and understanding between generations becomes impossible, and society’s connective tissue is eventually degraded and destroyed. Analogies and metaphors no longer work; patterns are no longer detected; “presentism” becomes epidemic. Jackie Robinson was on Hirsch’s list; so were John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Sen. Joe McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, James Watson, Will Rogers, Elvis Presley and Fred Astaire.
Older generations have obligations too. As a child who watched more television than anyone I know (or knew), I became convinced that TV was an essential cultural literacy tool. My parents, one a lawyer and Harvard College grad and the other a career Harvard administrator, had many friends who boasted of either never watching TV or only deigning to watch PBS. Even when I was ten, I regarded them as arrogant and foolish, which they were. They didn’t see the Sixties coming, or comprehend the culture that was its catalyst when it fell on then like a rock squishing Wile E. Coyote.
I acknowledge that keeping up with current culture, while in some respects easier than it used to be due to technology, is overwhelming, and to some extent even impossible. We have many parallel cultures trying to coexist today, and some are antithetical to each other. At very least, I believe, all of us have to try to keep abreast of popular culture, which includes important societal developments that drive that relentless engine.
Last week EA expressed disgust that Sen. Jim Clyburn had revealed that he only recently became aware of ChatGPT. He’s 80: it’s no excuse. It would be almost as inexcusable if Clyburn announced that he didn’t know who Taylor Swift is. President Trump was recently dragged in social media for apparently conflating a kids’ TV host from the Fifties with Eighties star Paul Reubens, aka. Peewee Herman. At least Trump is aware of Peewee’s existence; that fulfills his cultural literacy obligation.
Five years ago, I wrote a discouraged post about how my cultural literacy commitment was failing, Confession Of A Life Competence Failure. I am obviously over-due for an audit, so I went to the same source for a pop quiz: WeSmirch, a web aggregator of celebrity news. In 2021, I regarded my performance as a failure, writing in part,
“It was horrifying. I never heard of most of these people. Those I have heard of seem completely irrelevant to me. Almost all of the important people in these stories seem to be morons, famous for being famous, illiterate, notable mostly for being rich. The so-called “news,” breathlessly shouted from various headlines, seemed less than inconsequential. And yet this is what a rising generation cares about. Here is a typical headline from this morning: “Vanessa Morgan’s son is called River.” Who is Vanessa Morgan? Who cares what her son is named? It turns out that she is an actress on “Riverdale,” a TV show based on the comic book whose appeal I never understood (but I read the damn thing so I knew what my friends were reading). My score was 15 celebrity names recognized, with 17 complete mysteries. My conclusion: “When all the celebrities are strangers, I will have reached the dreaded stage of my uncle, who got the Beatles mixed up with the Rolling Stones, and the codgers today who talk about the internet like it’s some new-fangled fad. And at that point, I will be useless.”
Let’s see what my score is today. The “celebrities”…
I don’t understand this at all. Even for Seattle, the current controversy over the ex-chief of police is nuts.
The city’s far left Mayor Katie Wilson is under fire for the city’s botched handling of the Bite of Seattle mass shooting, which saw seven people shot with three dying. A toddler was among those wounded. Seattle Police issued a brief report to the public shortly after the shooting, urging everyone to stay away from the area, but nothing more for five hours, when a press conference was called. The city’s emergency alert system wasn’t activated, though this is exactly the kind of situation it was designed for.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town, as he is remarkably frequently. He was at a police convention in Dallas; since March, he’s also attended police gatherings in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. Barnes doesn’t reside in Seattle full time, you see. He lives part-time in Chicago, where his family is. Over the last six months, Barnes has been out of town for about seven weeks, including four trips to Chicago.
When he got back to his place of employment, Barnes got in the face of a reporter who dared to ask him whether reports were accurate that Barnes planned to be away from Seattle until mid-August, and whether his travel schedule might be a bit problematic. Barnes stepped into his questioner and said, “I don’t have to tell you where I go…,” before a city employee pulled the chief away from the reporter and out of the room. At another news conference, Barnes denied that he frequently travels or is routinely absent from the city, and said that he doesn’t travel as much as he would like to. He really said that.
Subsequently Mayor Wilson announced that Barnes had “resigned.” Incredibly, the Seattle City Council was troubled by that. City Councilman Bob Kettle said working with Barnes was going well—yeah, it all seemed to be going swimmingly!—and that firing him would just increase the city’s feeling of insecurity. Barnes lasted a year, and the city has had four police chiefs in just two and a half years.
Wait, let’s back up a bit. Why would any major city—Seattle is one, or at least used to be until it was engulfed by The Great Stupid—hire a police chief who wasn’t prepared to reside full time in that city, or at least nearby? Unless the individual was some kind of miracle worker, it makes no sense. Based on his biography Barnes is an anti-policing police advocate, a social justice warrior, and, of course, he’s black:
One of my oldest (in both senses of the word) friends is a history professor at a major university here in the D.C. area. The things he posts on Facebook are head-exploding: like the mutation of his former rational self that EA expatriate Curmie has morphed into under the gamma rays of Trump Derangement, my scholarly friend frequently makes arguments I would expect from Ben Stiller’s character in “Tropic Thunder.”
Today he posted several defenses of Anthony Fauci, who is literally indefensible, comparing Rand Paul’s correct, factual and fair evisceration of the villain to a Soviet show-trial. Before that, the Professor posted with approval the following attack on the late Lindsay Graham by professional snot Andy Borowitz. I knew Andy in college. He was a standard issue Harvard Lampoon guy, overly convinced of his own wit and a sucker for a cheap shot. Whatever formula he developed over the years obviously works: he’s created and written successful sit-coms, has been a successful stand-up comic, and his satirical columns have been syndicated all over. That his major employers have been The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and The New Yorker should tell you all you need to know about Andy’s biases, and partially explains this effort which my Trump Deranged friend found so trenchant.
I think I’ll footnote it to make my commentary more accessible…
[Note: Flushed with unexpected good health, I promised yesterday to post on the unraveling Fauci scandal. 1) I wasn’t quite as recovered from the previous day’s cold, especially energy-wise, as I thought I was, and 2) I realized that today would be the more appropriate day for that post given that the arrogant Ethics Villain is testifying before Congress and Sen. Rand Paul would be, as the saying goes, “tearing him a new one.”Fauci gets his EA excoriation next, I promise.]
Just as a depressing number of people, either captured by the fascists of the Left or intimidated by them, deny that the Axis news media manipulates, censors and distorts facts and events to gain their ideological allies power “by any means necessary,” so do similar victims refuse to acknowledge the ideological capture of our educational institutions, with a few exceptions. My own two almae matres (Miss Rounds would never forgive me for writing “alma maters”) are prominent and despicable examples: Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, as I have documented extensively on EA.
Now comes a particularly egregious example of this dangerous phenomenon from Mt. Holyoke, one of the cluster of woke private colleges in northern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont along with Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wellesley, Dartmouth and Bennington.
Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts mandates that student organization leaders complete Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, and that they must develop “anti-racist plans” before the college administration will recognized them and allow them to hold sanctioned events. Without proof that an organization will be a full participant in promoting the Left’s anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight discrimination agenda, an organization will not be eligible for college funding. Chess club, drama club, Young Republicans, football team…it doesn’t matter: all the leaders of student groups must complete the required training before receiving official recognition from the college.
After a minimum of two student officers complete the training, each organization must create or update an “anti-racist plan.” Seriously? Did I just accidentally type the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, like “1984” in reverse? I can’t believe I’m writing this.
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.
Ethics Alarms 