The New York Times started the New Year with a column by one of its more recently-hired progressive-biased columnist. His name is Carlos Lozada: the Times’s DEI office finally noticed in 2022 that it didn’t have a Hispanic pundit, I guess—and his self-written description is hilarious when compared to his column kicking off 2026. “I strive for fairness, honesty and depth,” he writes. “I believe that there is something called truth, and I do my best to approximate it. My overriding value is skepticism. Along with all Times journalists, I am committed to upholding the standards of integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook.”
Right. None of the journalists at the Times strive to uphold the standards of integrity outlined in the Ethical Journalism Handbook, and Lozada proves that he’s no different from the rest of the Times pundit stable. He begins with a deliberately disingenuous premise in today’s effort titled “How Did We Get to Such a Bad Question?” (Gift link). The “bad question” is “How did we get here?” which, of course, is exactly what Lozada’s column is about. How clever. This is like the guy who says, “I’m the last person to to say X” and then says it. At this paragraph, I stopped reading:
How did we get to the so-calledTrump era, for example? If your answer is about economic inequality and the forgotten man, then maybe start with the World Trade Organization or NAFTA or the decline of organized labor. If your answer is about race, then point to the backlash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction. If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh; if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party, then quote at length from Patrick Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. And so on, ad infinitum.
Yeah, I’m pretty used to that brand of bias by now. The amazing thing is that the Times is so accustomed to it as the norm that no editor saw how disqualifying Lozada’s rhetoric is. One of the major reasons for Trump’s rise was that Obama made the discriminatory philosophy behind affirmative action central to his approach to his Presidency, increasing racial division and making “Racist!” the fall-back response of the media and Democrats to any criticism of his leadership. Lozada follows suit by framing the reasonable response to Obama’s destructive eight years as…racism. “[B]acklash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction”…yeah, Carlos, white Americans who didn’t appreciate living in a culture where they were constantly vilified were expressing their hostility to the civil rights movement.
Then: “If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.” Funny, this truth-seeker immediately fingers two conservatives who correctly called out the one-way partisan bias in the mainstream media, not the complete partisan takeovers of CNN, NPR PBS and the network news. Not Obama’s arrogant “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” comment, not Hillary’s “deplorables” speech, or…
But the final smoking gun in the column is Lozada’s “if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party…” Dingdingdingdingding! The Republicans rejecting the Obama-Biden-Democrat embrace of open borders and “the good illegal immigrants” are nativists….you know, bigots. Like Bill the Butcher in “The Gangs of New York.” That assessment is Lozada’s idea of “fairness, honesty and depth.”
Well, bye, asshole. Now we know what your agenda is.
But I digress! You write about whatever ethics issues interest you as the new year dawns…
“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
—New New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his speech yesterday to too many ignorant voters who have no idea what he’s talking about and what they are in for.
Choosing that “Bananas” clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive was too easy; not only is it one of my favorites, but other pundits and social media wags has already made the connection to Woody’s Allen’s fictional South American country of San Marcos. And Mamdani’s open embrace of communism in that sentence was, indeed, bananas. I am sorely tempted to just leave the post at that: it’s res ipsa loguitur. It speaks for itself.
Yet it doesn’t speak for itself: that’s the scary part. That is what our education system’s collapse into incompetence and indoctrination has brought us. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana in his 1905 book, “The Life of Reason.” The average American not nearing retirement age is likely to say, upon hearing Mamdani’s seductive threat, “Collectivism! Sounds good to me!” as well as “Who’s Santayana?”
Right now I’m placing bets on which of my Stage 5 Trump-Deranged friends or relatives will bite first. Let’s see..
1. This logic is like that of the man who kills his parents and wants sympathy from the judge because he’s a orphan. Trump was impeached twice by Democrats in the House, in both cases without thorough hearings and with contrived accusations and dubious evidence. He was also acquitted in the Senate, and correctly so.
2. The “34 felony convictions” have been effectively vacated. Though the convictions have not been overturned yet, no conviction is final until appeals have been exhausted. The fraud case in question was always pure lawfare, designed by New York Democrats and a partisan AG to “get Trump,” as that Attorney General campaigned on: she promised to “get Trump.” After all, he was threatening to win the White House. Those convictions were also for a single act that all authorities agree harmed no one, was standard business practice, and would never have prompted legal action had not Donald Trump been involved.
3. My favorite fallacy here, however, is that academic credentials have any relevance to leadership ability or successful Presidencies at all. For that matter, presumed intellectual ability hasn’t correlated with Presidential success either. To take the obvious example, Abraham Lincoln had no academic credentials. Harry Truman, an average intellect at best, proved to be a far better President than many with advanced degrees (or Harvard educations), such as John Adams, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.
4. Best of all comparisons with Trump is this one, authored by social media wit David Burge in response to that meme above:
The last of the famous Dionne Quintuplets died last week. Annette Dionne, who seems to have been the strongest of the five identical sisters from the very beginning, was 91. The New York Times has an obituary that is also an excellent feature on their unusual lives (Gift link!)—this is the kind of thing the Times still does well. There isn’t a single slap at President Trump anywhere, at least that I noticed.
The article begins by noting that Annette, like all of her sisters, “resented being exploited as part of a global sensation.” I get it: the five girls were celebrities from the second they were born, and their fame was such that they never really escaped it: thus the last surviving quint being deemed worthy of a Times obituary more than 60 years after her birth. But resenting something that any objective analysis would find unavoidable is not just pointless, it’s unfair. In this case, the resentment was unfair to the quints’ parents and the public.
In 1934, the birth of surviving quintuplets in Ontario, Canada was considered, justifiably, a medical miracle. All five of them together weighed only 13 pounds, 6 ounces. Yes, in a way they were freaks and treated as such, extraordinarily cute little freaks. Medical miracles give people hope; they suggest that the world is getting smarter, safer, more beneficent. This miracle happened in the pit of the Great Depression, when celebrities like Babe Ruth and Shirley Temple became icons because they made Americans forget their troubles.
To the girls’ parents, Oliva and Elzire Dionne, the arrival of five babies to a family living in poverty was a looming catastrophe. The parents and five children already lived in a run-down farmhouse lit by kerosene and serviced by an outhouse. The new babies were nursed on water and corn syrup until the family started receiving breast milk donations. The fact that the public was so interested in the quintuplets was a blessing that saved the family from disaster.
They were indeed exploited. The parents for a time surrendered custody of the girls and they were cared for by a government-appointed guardian, the doctor who had delivered them. The were housed and cared for by the doctor and a staff at “Quintland,” where they were displayed several times a day on a balcony as 6,000 spectators watched them through one-way glass.
[Good morning!Was Santa good to you? I might as well repost this essay about the Christmas truce; since I only have published it on Christmas Day, some readers might have missed it, and EA, believe it or not, sometimes gets new followers from time to time…]
One of the weirdest events in world history took place on Christmas 1914, at the very beginning of the five year, pointless and stunningly destructive carnage of The Great War, what President Woodrow Wilson, right as usual, called “The War to End All Wars.”
World War I, as it was later called after the world war it caused succeeded it, led to the deaths of more than 25 million people, and if anything was accomplished by this carnage, I have yet to read about it.
The much sentimentalized event was a spontaneous Christmas truce, as soldiers on opposing sides on the Western Front, defying orders from superiors, pretended the war didn’t exist and left their trenches, put their weapons and animus aside, sang carols, shared food, buried their dead, and even played soccer against each other, as “The Christmas Truce” statue memorializes above.
The brass on both sides—this was a British and German phenomenon only—took steps to ensure that this would never happen again, and it never did.
It all began on Christmas Eve, when at 8:30 p.m. an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles reported to headquarters that “The Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” The two sides progressed to serenading each other with Christmas carols, with the German combatants crooning “Silent Night,” and the British adversaries responding with “The First Noel.“ The war diary of the Scots Guards reported that a private “met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them, they would not fire at us.”
The same deal was struck spontaneously at other locales across the battlefield. Another British soldier reported that as Christmas Eve wound down into Christmas morning, “all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: ‘English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!’” He wrote in a letter home that he heard,
This is one of those Christmas songs with multiple verses, like “Away in a Manger.” The first time I heard it was on one of the Christmas somg slection albums my father used to get free when he worked for Sears Roebuck in the Sixties. There were all sorts of strange selections on those records, like Mike Douglas singing “O Holy Night.” (He wasn’t bad, either.) Johnny Cash’s version of “I Heard the Bells” was on the same album as Mike, I think.
The song began as a poem by the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Do they still teach Henry’s poems in the schools? I bet not; I bet he’s a cancelled Great White Man now, and they teach Maya Angelou. Henry wrote a lot more memorable poems than Maya: “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Excelsior,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” “A Psalm of Life,” “The Village Blacksmith” “The Children’s Hour,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Arrow and the Song.” among others. Like other great American artists, it is Christmas that keeps his memory flickering, at least for those who know he wrote the words to “I Heard the Bells.”
The poet’s oldest son Charles, a lieutenant in the Union Army, he was seriously wounded in November of 1863 during the Battle of New Hope Church. Longfellow had begged his only son not to enlist to fight the Rebels. When the terrible news arrived, the poet was still mourning the death of his second wife in a fire two years earlier.
It’s the day before Christmas, and all though my house, there’s no sign of Christmas, but I’ve no right to grouse…
…because it’s my choice to be solitary and miserable this season. Two days ago my adult heir gratuitously sent me a hate bomb that was the most hurtful communication I have ever received from anyone. Given that this individual lives rent free in an apartment in my house and is over 30, I expected just a teeny-weeny bit of, if not gratitude, respect. Uh, no. This was only the latest joy-extracting event this holiday season: I also just wounded my leg (the same one that put me in the hospital in July and hasn’t healed completely yet), I was fired from my oldest ethics gig (as with the unexpected attack from downstairs, the reason is obscure) and the number of administrative Swords of Damocles hanging over my head since Grace died last year have increased rather than diminished, as was my grand plan for 2025. So I’m taking pleasure in other people’s Christmas, including yours. So you better have a great one. Tonight I expect to be playing bridge with three ghosts.
Or heading to the bridge, like George Bailey.
Below is an updated and rewritten version of my earlier post about my favorite modern Christmas song, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” When I still had a professional theater company to oversee, I wrote and directed a musical revue called “An American Century Christmas.” It was staged like one of those old-fashioned TV Christmas specials, with the set decorated like a Christmas living room, and celebrity guests arriving with gifts.
I stuffed everything I loved about the seasonal entertainment into the thing: the scene in “The Homecoming” when John-Boy gets his tablets from his father; the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when George gets emotional realizing that he’s in love with Mary while talking to Sam (Hee-haw!) Wainwright on the telephone; Danny and Bing standing in for the Haines Sisters and singing “Sisters:” a reading of “The Littlest Angel;” the Peanuts kids and Snoopy decorating Charlie Brown’s sickly tree. I don’t think anyone liked that show as much as I did, but so what. It made me happy. Even remembering it now makes me happy.
The first act finale was a rousing rendition of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” The song means a lot to me, and I’ll be blasting the original version tonight.
Before you make a public statement that will guarantee that you will become a poster-mayor for the usual “War on Christmas” battles, it might be wise to check legal history regardless of which position you take.
Mayor Miko Pickett, the “historic” first black mayor of Mullins, South Carolina, ordered this season’s Nativity scene removed from a public parking lot due to “separation of church and state.” The town happily ignored her. Not surprisingly, she had based her decision on “diversity” and “inclusion” principles and the “separation of Church and State.”
Naturally, she opted for the politically correct “Happy Holidays.” But the mayor may have had a point.
Madison Wisconsin Ann Althouse, who tries admirably hard to suppress her natural left-leaning biases and I admire her for that, wrote a statement over the weekend that perfectly encapsulates what is so seductive and destructive about the progressive mindset.
I didn’t know what to do with it. I was temped to make it an Unethical Quote of the Month, but it’s not really unethical; it’s just dumb. (Also Trump’s outrageous attack on Rob Reiner locked up that distinction. I’m pretty sure it is also the most unethical quote of 2025.) It is so dumb, however, that I am tempted to say Althouse failed her duty of influence and expertise. Smart people who are expected to provide intellectual and emotional guidance have to take care that they don’t mislead the people who trust them.
Her statement was…“It shouldn’t be possible to become famous through murder, but it very clearly is.”
What a silly, utopian, “Imagine”-esque thing to say, out loud or on a blog (the internet is forever). It is, however, a near perfect example of the how the progressive delusion gene makes people believe in, advocate, and administer terrible policies that can’t possibly do anything but backfire horribly, and can’t possibly work.
It is one thing for someone to think along those lines in a moment of panic or stress. That’s excusable, though my late wife, “E2” in the EA comments, was always annoyed when characters in movies or TV shows would scream, “This can’t be happening!” The political Left is constantly gulled into thinking the realities of life can somehow be banished by a well-meaning program, law or policy. That’ where communism and socialism ooze from: surely there’s a way for everyone in a successful society to be happy, healthy, safe and having the benefit of sufficient food, living space and employment!
[Johnny Mathisfinally announced his retirement this year—he’s only 90. His has been one of the most recognizable, enjoyable, seductive voices in American popular music for almost 70 years. My college room mate always had his records on hand to create the proper mood for his dates. An old time crooner’s chances of being remembered rests now on whether there is a Christmas standard he can be associated with. Johnny’s best shots are “It’s Beginning to Lot Like Christmas,” and “We Need a Little Christmas” from “Mame.” He sings all the others beautifully too, but they are taken.]
I was informed by a fellow Christmas movie fan that it is almost impossible to watch the original “Miracle on 34th Street” film on streaming services or the networks. They prefer to show the various remakes, all inferior in every way. What made director-writer George Seaton‘s movie (it won him an Oscar) so superb in addition to the casting, his straight-forward style and his obvious love of Christmas is that it instantly felt perfect despite its many suspension of disbelief challenges. Why do they feel this film has to be remade? Is it the lack of color? (“Miracle on 34th Street” was one of the first movies Ted Turner colorizes, and that version is unwatchable.)
As I’ve stated here before I believed in Santa Claus until I was 12. I didn’t want to give the fantasy up: I loved magic, and my parents always tried to make the season magical. My late wife Grace and I tried to do the same with Grant, now “Samantha,” but he was a non-believer by the third grade. Is there anything more joyful to see than the look on a child’s face as he or she wakes up to find what Santa has delivered? Will anything feel that wonderful again?
“Miracle on 34th Street” is an ethics movie in many ways. The movie is about the importance of believing in good things, hopeful things, even impossible things. The movie reminds us that wonderful things can happen even when they seem impossible, and that life is better when we believe that every day of our lives. I’m engaged in that right now: all of 2025 has required it. I’ve had serious injuries, successes, new projects and setbacks. My father taught me to be ready for the worst but to never to give up on the best.
One thing this film does well is to concentrate on the secular holiday without any allusions to the religious holy day, but not being obnoxious about it. “It’s a Wonderful Life” also straddles the line very cleverly: it begins in heaven, after all. All the “A Christmas Carol” films include Bob Cratchit telling his wife that Tiny Tim mused about how his disability reminded people of Jesus’s miracles at Christmastime, and that’s Dickens’ only reference to Jesus in his story.
On the offensive side is the Rankin-Bass animated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—I can’t believe they still show that thing—when the “stormy Christmas Eve” causes Santa to decide to “cancel Christmas.” I’d say that’s above Santa’s pay grade, wouldn’t you agree? It also suggests that Christmas is only about gifts and children. (Do parents today explain that the singing snowman who narrates the story is based on, and looks like) the real person who also sings the most memorable songs? They should. Burl Ives had a fascinating life and a varied career, and those kids will probably be hearing him sing “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” for the rest of theirs.
Interestingly, all of the perennial Christmas movies have been made into stage musicals of varying success—“White Christmas,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story,” “Elf”—- but “Miracle on 34th Street” flopped so badly when Meredith Willson [“The Music Man”] adapted it as “Here’s Love” on Broadway that nobody has tried again. The show included the song, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” which Willson wrote long before the show was assembled. But as with all the movie remakes, the show missed Edmund Gwynn, the best Kris Kringle of them all. He was a distinguished classical actor until that movie: he complained that after the film he wasn’t allowed to get rid of his bushy white beard and was type-cast as jolly old men.
I decided to post the Companion earlier this year; I also was moved by the fact that a number of EA readers had sought out the 2024 version today. When I’ve posted it on Christmas Eve, it has lacked views for the obvious reasons.
The 2025 companion reflects some additional thoughts upon my re-watching “Miracle on 34th Street” last week—I even took notes. Mostly, I though about how important the holiday, the stories, the music, the movies and what they signify taken as a whole is to our nation, our society and our culture. Thus it was that I decided that here was a good place to re-post “Christmas, the Ethical Holiday” Besides, I need to read it myself.
Christmas: the Ethical Holiday
Benjamin Franklin recognized the importance of regularly focusing one’s attention on ethical conduct rather than the usual non-ethical goals, needs, desires and impulses that usually occupy the thoughts of even the most virtuous among us. He suggested that every morning an individual should challenge himself to do good during the day. In the 21st century psychologists call this “priming,” a form of beneficial self-brain-washing that plants the seeds of future choices.
The Christmas season operates as an effective form of mass population priming, using tradition, lore, music, poetry, ritual, literature, art and entertainment to celebrate basic ethical virtues and exemplary conduct toward other human beings. Kindness, love, forgiveness, empathy, generosity, charity, sacrifice, selflessness, respect, caring, peacefulness…all of these are part of the message of Christmas, which has become more universal and influential in its societal and behavioral importance than its religious origins could have ever accomplished alone. Secular and cultural contributions have greatly strengthened the ethical lessons of Christmas. “It’s A Wonderful Life” urges us to value our ability to enrich the lives of others, and to appreciate the way they enrich ours. “A Christmas Story” reminds us to make childhood a magical time when wishes can come true. O. Henry’s story “The Gift of the Magi” proves that it is not the value of gifts, but the love that motivates them that truly matters. Most powerful of all, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” teaches that the admirable conduct the spirit of the season can inspire need not be short-lived, and that if we use Christmas properly, as Ben Franklin used his morning exhortation to good conduct, it can make all of us better, happier, more virtuous human beings.
At this point in civilization, the religious context of Christmas almost does more harm than good. Though the day chosen to celebrate Jesus of Nazareth’s birthday has been spectacularly successful in promoting the ethical and moral ideals he taught, the idea that Christmas is indistinguishable from the religion he founded has made it the object of yearly controversy, as if celebrating Christmas is an affront to other faiths.
This is a tragedy, because every human being, regardless of religious belief, can benefit from a culture-wide exhortation to be good and to do good. “Happy Holidays!”—the bland, generic, careful greeting of those afraid to offend those who should not be offended—does nothing to spur us toward love, kindness, peace and empathy. “Merry Christmas!” does.
This is not just a religious holiday; it is the culture-wide ethical holiday, the time when everything should be aligned to remind us to take stock of our lives, think about everyone else who lives on earth with us, and to try to live for others as well as ourselves. Christians should be proud that their religion gave such a valuable gift to humanity, and non-Christians should be eager to accept that gift, with thanks.
It is foolish and self-destructive for there to be a “war on Christmas.” Charles Dickens understood. There is hardly a word about religion anywhere in his story. There doesn’t need to be. Christmas is the ethical holiday. Christians and non-Christians can celebrate it or not as they choose, but whether they do or not, the Christmas season is more important than any one religion, even the one that gives the holiday its name.
Christmas is important because it primes us to be good, be better, be more ethical, for the rest of the year. There should be nothing controversial about that.
Ethics Alarms 