President Donald Trump was caught on camera “flipping the bird” and shouting “Fuck you!” to a heckler who called him a “pedophile protector,” presumably referring to the contrived Epstein files obsession being used in desperation by Democrats. Of course the White House flacks are defending this latest indefensible outburst by the Vulgarian in Chief, but there is no defense. (The stated defense is just Rationalization #2A, Sicilian Ethics, or “He had it coming!”)
Further observations:
Let us pause for the nonce from observing the seditious and dangerous conduct by Minnesota radicals, including its governor and mayor of its largest city, to ponder the completely predictable conduct by another sanctuary city’s mayor, in this case, New York City’s. I’m speaking, of course, of Zohran Mamdani, the Communist tyro who convinced New York vast mass of clueless voters to give communist a chance, as John Lennon would be singing now. I knew my once wise retired lawyer Facebook friend’s brain had done a Fonzi and jumped the metaphorical shark when he wrote that the completely inexperienced and naive anti-American huckster’s inauguration speech extolling “the warmth of collectivism” was a “breath of fresh air.” It was as much of a breath of fresh air as if he had proclaimed, like Dorothy Parker, “I an Marie of Romania!”
What Zohran did this week, however, was even nuttier than that. He appointed the ridiculous Cea Weaver to run the Mayor’s “Office to Protect Tenants.” Now charged with overseeing housing policy in the city with the most rental units in the U.S. is a Far Left racist, sexist lunatic who…
The Trump Administration, I.C.E., and those standing for the enforcement of the law are in the right, with the ethics of this incident and its context entirely on their side. The pro-open borders Left, including the “resistance,” radical progressives (but I repeat myself…) and the Democrats as well as the leadership of sanctuary states and cities, are entirely wrong in theory, practice and conduct. The group in the wrong, which includes much of the news media, is primarily responsible for the tragic death of Renee Nicole Good. However, she was part of that group herself, and bears some of the responsibility for her own death.
—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?”
This is the season of holiday wishes, reflections and aspirations. Do you know what my Ethics Alarms wish is? I wish that at least one reader, ideally one of our five commenters, would finally write in saying something like,
“I have to confess, I’ve been denying your regular, almost annoyingly repetitious assertions that the mainstream media is biased, that it is a member of what you call the Axis of Unethical Conduct, that the major legacy media sources now practice progressive, Democratic Party propaganda to the exclusion of balanced and fair (that is, ethical) journalism, that this results in a profound warping of the Democratic process, that the news media is in fact dedicated to promoting the power of the Democratic Party and its anti-American policy agenda, and that Donald Trump was correct when he pronounced the news media the ‘enemy of the people.’ But I can’t in good conscience deny this any more. You are right, and have been right all along.”
Actually there is one kamikaze commenter who should write this but who is banned and I still won’t let his comment stay up even if he does. With that single obnoxious exception, however, yes, that admission would make my year…not that the conclusion shouldn’t have been screamingly obvious to everyone for years.
I was thinking about this as I observed the current unethical news media self-indicting efforts to pretend that the unfolding Minnesota fraud scandal in the Somali community and elsewhere is a footnote to the “real” news. The Times did a relatively thorough report a full month ago; it has been fairly silent since, however, as the full expanse of the fraud scandal has unfolded. Network news has largely ignored the story too. Incredibly, the Minnesota Star-Tribune did not include the scandal in its 2025 list of top news stories. Today in CNN’s list of “Five things” readers should know about, developments in the Minnesota story is nowhere to be seen.
According to Axios, the Somali 9 billion dollar scamming wasn’t one of the top search topics, unlike Bad Bunny and Stephen Colbert (See, you have to know about a topic in order to search for it…well played, “journalists”!) The Hill gives us another classic example today of the oft-mentioned phenomenon that when Democrats have been caught in scandals or misconduct, it is the Republican/MAGA reaction that is the news: “MAGA World zeroes in on Minnesota over fraud scandal.” Other examples this month: The Guardian: “The right wing has seized on fraud cases in the state” and ABC News: “Trump has seized on the ballooning controversy in recent days …”
Other diversionary framing include the panic in the Somali community as ICE cracks down on Minnesota’s large unassimilated community consisting of people whose native culture regards cheating the government as a good thing. “ICE pounces!” is that theme. This is CNN: Anxiety grips Minneapolis’s Somali community as immigration agents zero in on the Twin Cities.
It isn’t only the Somalis: Minnesota, under the watchful eye of knuckleheaded Governor Tim Walz, has a fraud problem throughout its social welfare system. Why is an amateur Youtuber, Nick Shirley, making headlines with his Boy Scout merit badge-level investigative reporting? Where are the pros? Why wasn’t “60 Minutes” on this story like bees on a honeypot? CBS news reported the Somali scandal on December 11, but it’s been crickets since. But Shirley uncovered another Minnesota fraud, a hilarious one, last week: a Somali-owned daycare center with no children and a sign reading “Quality Learing Center.” The Quality Learing Center received $4,000,000 from Minnesota taxpayers.
—-Astoundingly incompetent LA Mayor Karen Bass, on CNN’s “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer
She was responding to a CNN report about Hispanic-Americans joining I.C.E. in record numbers. Knowing Bass (see this infuriating idiot’s EA dossier here) and the pro-illegal immigration party she belongs to, can you guess why LA’s woke Mayor thinks the development is “sad”?
Why, they’re betraying their own kind, you see! You know, like when inner city blacks tell police about murderers, muggers and rapists in their neighborhood who are the same color they are. Imagine doing that to your “own kind”!
I must confess, if you had told me even ten years ago that this was possible in the U.S., I would have laughed heartily. I certainly underestimated the damage to American culture about to be wreaked by the Democratic Party’s open borders lunacy.
The mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Brian DePena requested the assistance of a translator during a court appearance last week.
UPDATE!
Well this is all I needed on a busy day that just included me re-injuring my leg after being pulled off my feet by Spuds. The post below is based on a hoax, and damn the hoaxers to hell. Spreading false stories on the web is unethical, and satire sites are obligated to signal when a post is intended as parody. A few notes:
1. Thanks to the crack EA commentariate for flagging this.
2. The fake story is still up on the usually reliable conservative commentary site Victory Girls, which linked to the fake story I used.
3. I was fooled because first, none of the quotes sounded unlikely given what we have heard and witnessed in Portland in the recent past, and
4. I had never seen a “butt plug” before.I apologize to Ethics Alarms readers and the City of Portland. I try to be careful, but this time I was fooled.
5. Apparently the hoax was inspired by Portland’s city officials this year referring to their annual tree lighting event as just “the tree” or “winter tree,” deliberately omitting the word “Christmas.” Typical dumb Portland wokeness at work: if the hoaxers had only made it clear what they were spoofing, I’d call it a successful and well-deserved satire.
6. I apologize to all, including the City of Portland, for my error.
***
I missed this, which happened about a week ago, in part because I view Portland as a lost cause. You know those zombie apocalypse movies where the survivors will say, sadly, “Boston’s gone, San Diego’s gone”? Portland’s gone, and has been for a long time. I would say it’s Patient Zero for Trump Derangement, woke insanity, anti-Americanism and The Great Stupid, except there are so many other candidates: New York City, California, Minnesota. None of them, however, have descended so far into incompetent cultural madness as Portland, as exemplified by the Christmas, sorry, Holiday Thing the city unveiled this month.
Portland officially replaced its traditional Christmas tree—to be fair, it’s so hard to find evergreen trees in Oregon these days—with that whatever it is above. Officials described the holiday display as “bold,” “inclusive,” and “a meaningful departure from tree-based expectations.”
How far gone do you have to be to utter the words “tree-based expectations” without feeling ridiculous?
City leaders, presumably the same ones who let Black Lives Matter take over parts of the city five year sago, explained the traditional Christmas tree ultimately failed to reflect Portland’s “evolving” relationship with holidays. Thus the “inclusive” replacement, officials said, is intentionally ambiguous, streamlined, and designed to invite interpretation.
I, for example, interpret it as “meaningless, joyless crap.”
I began by titling this depressing post “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: President Trump,” but that seemed inadequate somehow. Maybe there’s no heading that could adequately express what an awful week the President had, how it was entirely unnecessary, how all of his deep political wounds were self-inflicted (okay, his clueless Chief of Staff helped), how much harm it did to his administration, influence and prospects of success, and how much he helped the Axis of Unethical Conduct when without his assistance the serious news would have had it staggering. <Breathe, Jack, breathe!>
EA covered three of the epic fiascos, but now I have to cover the fourth. The others were, in chronological order,
1. Trump’s petty, cruel, stupid attack on beloved director Rob Reiner immediately after he and his wives were stabbed to death by their son. I believe that his infamous Truth Social post may prove to be the tipping point in his administration. Recall that the Bush II Presidency was sent into a death spiral even before the 2008 economic crash because he was vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and flew over the devastation. Then the inept Democratic mayor of the city, with help from Kanye West, successfully created the narrative that Bush shrugged off the disaster because he “didn’t care about black people.”
2. Trump’s presumed-competent Chief of Staff inexplicably gives interviews to a 100% anti-Trump Axis member, Vanity Fair, in which she dished about colleagues, suggested chaos in the White House, and opined that the President resembled an alcoholic even though he is a lifetime abstainer.
3. Trump allows his hand-picked Kennedy Center board to add the President’s name to the landmark, launched as a memorial to President Kennedy in the wake of his nation-shattering assassination, and to quickly plaster it on the front of the building. This was so stupid and gratuitous that I don’t want to think about it, but it sure gave my Trump Deranged theater friends on Facebook ammunition.
But wait, there’s more!
Except me.
It used to be that I could count on a tsunami of comments and clicks when I aired my unalterable conviction that pot, weed, cannabis, marijuana, what ever you want to call the junk, was a blight on civilization, that legalizing it would be a big net loss on society, and that the elite advocates for legalization were selfish, irresponsible creeps who wanted their little highs at the cost of kids, the poor, and the less-than-bright harming themselves, their families, their employers and their future prospects. Once the states started giving up after the culture had pushed them into the mendacity that the drug was as harmless as Junior Mints, I gave up too. I was right, they were wrong, the embrace of stoned kids and adults would be one more malady in a nation where we have too many already, but the metaphorical genie was out of its bottle and there is stuffing it back in.
At this point in my life, the whole subject just ticks me off.
Now comes “expert” Aaron E. Caroll to explain that yes, well, we really did legalize grass before we really knew what the hell we were doing. [Gift link!] Huh! Who would have thought it? He writes,
“…we should acknowledge that policy moved faster than the evidence on public health effects. The challenge is whether we are willing to adjust course when we encounter unintended consequences…”
I wouldn’t call consequences that were completely predictable and likely “unintended.” The spoiled grown-up (sort of) college kids who just wanted their bongs had plenty of people—like me—telling them that siding with Cheech and Chong was irresponsible and reckless, but they didn’t care about kids, the workplace, side-effects, any of it. Next he writes in part,
Ethics Alarms 