“Fox Giving” facilitates charitable donations using the donation management platform “Benevity.” The Fox News Corp. matches donations up to $1,000 to various non-profit organizations and charities that satisfy the the platform’s criteria. But…Oh Horror!... among the organizations Fox ends up contributing to under this system are the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood (and local Planned Parenthood branches), and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Fox’s donation policy states: “FOX will not match or provide volunteering rewards to : Donations to organizations that discriminate on the basis of a personal characteristic or attribute, including, but not limited to, age, disability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity characteristics or expression, marital status, … pregnancy or medical condition either in its selection of recipients of the organization’s services, funds, or other support; in delivery of services; or in its employment practices.”
I choose “disgusting.” The GOP Georgia representative embarrasses me as an American. And she’s incompetent and unethical.
A member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. Greene thought it was appropriate to use her allotted time during a hearing to display nude photographs of Hunter Biden in various situations that could not be put on non-porn television (except, in this case, C-Span, as in the photo above). A member of Congress was displaying graphic shots of the President’s son engaged in sexual acts with alleged prostitutes. “Here is proof Hunter Biden paid prostitutes through his law firm, OWASCO PC, and trafficked his victims across state lines in violation of the Mann Act,” she tweeted. “Not only that, IRS whistleblowers confirm Hunter Biden committed tax fraud by deducting payments to prostitutes from OWASCO’s taxes.”
The photos “proved” neither. In a trial, they would be excluded as prejudicial and irrelevant.
“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home know that parental discretion is advised,” Greene said. That was thoughtful. The obscene photos shed no light whatsoever on any of the matters regarding the President’s sad and corrupt son that are legitimate topics of Congressional attention: whether he engaged in influence peddling with foreign governments that benefited his father or influenced his actions, and whether he has been shielded from the legal consequences a non-Presidential family member would face who engaged in the same activities. Greene claimed the photos were important supporting evidence regarding a tax fraud coverup and special treatment that resulted in Hunter cutting a deal with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes.
The coverage of the recent rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard almost universally created the impression that they were further attacks on democracy by a rogue Supreme Court, foiling the will of the people. In particular, these decisions blocking institutionalized institutional racist discrimination, which is what higher education affirmative action is, were assailed as creating disastrous hurdles to black Americans as they strive to succeed in this nation plagued by systemic racism.
Two recent polls show that this narrative was fake news from the news media and misinformation from the Left. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found that 65% of “Likely U.S. Voters” approve of the rulings, with 49% approving “strongly”. Just 28% disapprove of the conclusion that the prohibition on discriminating by race means no discrimination by race. You can read how the questions were posed here. Another poll from YouGov/The Economist asked “Do you approve or disapprove of Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action?” Both sexes, all races, every age group, and every level of income approved more than not. (See here.)
Yeah, I know: polls. In this case, however, these easily manipulated surveys perform a service. The Supreme Court’s function does not and should not involve following the mob, but appealing to mob emotions has been a central strategy by progressives as they seek to de-legitimize the one branch of the government they don’t control. An accompanying myth is that the Roberts Court is an obstacle to “the will of the people,” even when, as in this case, the will of the people is supported by the Constitution and our laws.
Even after a concerted and ongoing effort to inflict Marxist goals, racial quotas and “good” discrimination on the culture, our core values have stood up to the propaganda siege—so far.
In a depressing AP story about a poll supposedly showing that a large majority of Americans don’t believe democracy is working as it should in the U.S. today, one disillusioned voter, a “moderate Republican,” singled out the GOP’s investigations of Hunter Biden as a prime example of misplaced priorities.
“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked, neatly demonstrating why the Founders decided that a pure democracy was dangerous, and that a republic was much safer in many respects.
Hunter Biden is not important at all isolated from what he represents, which is strong evidence that the President of the United States is 1) lying 2) abusing power and influence to assist his pathetic ne’er do well son 3) possibly benefiting from his son’s influence peddling 4) corrupting the justice system to protect his family, and 5) untrustworthy, because he is willing to place other priorities above the interests of the United States of America. The fact that the “moderate Republican,” whose argument is that the President’s son has “nothing to do with the economy,” can’t comprehend this, is a perfect example of how most U.S. citizens don’t understand the basic concepts of ethics, government and law.
Consider the White House cocaine fiasco. A white substance in a plastic bag was found in the White House library and identified as cocaine. Hunter Biden had been to his father’s abode three days before the discovery. Hunter has been a cocaine user in the past, and there is video and photographic evidence of that. From the beginning, the White House made every effort imaginable to keep the public and the media’s suspicions going to the obvious place. On July 5, less than 72 hours after the discovery, a law enforcement source leaked to Politicothat the owner of the drugs would likely never be known. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the drug could have belonged to construction workers renovating the West Wing Situation Room, and Joe’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre flipped into indignant “How dare you!’ mode when a reporter asked if the envelope might have belonged to a Biden. She also said, laughably, insisted that the Secret Service would never allow the President to dictate how they handled delicate matters at the White House. “We are not involved in this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is something that the Secret Service handles. It’s under their protocol.” Sure. Who believes this?
On July 13, the Secret Service concluded its investigation without naming a suspect, saying that it could not narrow the group of people who had access to the area to “a person of interest.” Hunter was never questioned. The Secret Service briefed members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on its findings.
Senator Tom Cotton had an amusing analogy to this narrative.”This is like if the Hamburglar lived in the White House, all the hamburgers disappeared, and they said they didn’t have any suspects or no one they could question,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative pundit and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino says that his former colleagues are furious, and that they know who brought the cocaine into the White House, adding,
“So there’s probably less than 200 people who could have left this cocaine, by the way, in a bag which is plastic, which is non-porous, meaning it’s probably not that hard to pull a latent print. They’ve got to know who did it. The question is, who’s pressuring them to not find out who did it? Andit’s gotta be coming from this White House. This is terrible. Don’t destroy this agency like the FBI. It’s really unbecoming. A lot of my former colleagues at the Secret Service who retired, they are absolutely furious about this. Oh yeah, yeah, I can tell you, I got 50 emails, communications, texts from people. ‘This is embarrassing, humiliating.’ These are good guys, man, guys who worked for Obama and Bush, non-partisan guys, most of them aren’t even political. This is embarrassing. They know exactly who it was.”
And sports bookies are releasing odds on who owned the drugs.
You have to feel a little bit sorry for Media Matters. The far-Left propaganda outlet that specializes in spinning for progressives while supposedly flagging “fake news” on the right has to restrict itself primarily to Fox News, though it does participate enthusiastically when it wants to assist the mainstream media in burying stories like the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the mysterious <cough!> discovery of cocaine in the White House. NewsBusters, in contrast, has almost the entire mainstream media spectrum to mine for outrageously biased and unethical news coverage, even with its own conservative bias in full operation. And the alleged giants of the once honorable field of journalism keep churning out frightening examples like this:
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! And sure, journalism is a profession! You can always trust journalism icons!
No…no…and no.
Business Insider published an alleged news article headlined, “More people actually moved out of Florida than New York or California in 2021.” Part of the ongoing effort on both the political Rights and the Left to sink Florida Governor Ron DiSantis’s chances of keeping Donald Trump off the GOP 2024 Presidential ticket, the story claimed to debunk the conventional wisdom that the ultra Woke states are bleeding residents while DiSantis’s state’s population is growing. 674,740 residents left Florida, BI told us, exceeding the total of 433,402 residents who had fled California and the 287,249 residents moving out of New York.
Sometimes an ethics story defies my ability to devise an appropriate headline. The AP story “Black Lives Matter movement marks 10 years of activism and renews its call to defund the police” is a prime example. The story is even worse than the headline (“activism” is a deceitful and deceptive euphemism for violence, lies, divisiveness and fraud), with the once-trustworthy news organization displaying the worst of U.S. journalism’s ethics rot.
The scam that is Black Lives Matter has done nothing but damage since its emergence in 2013, but to hear the AP tell it, this is a movement for Americans to honor. Let’s see…I haven’t checked yet, and I promise to reveal what I find: is the AP’s reporter who wrote this junk, Aaron Morrison, an African American?
Why yes, he is! What a coinkydink. This piece of propaganda could only have been written by a devoted supporter; the AP rigged the story. That’s American journalism in 2023.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that lawyer James Saunders, who previously worked for the Internal Revenue Service, violated the law by voting twice in both the 2020 and 2022 national elections. His public defender Scott Roger Hurley—he’s on the right above— is arguing that his client should be acquitted because it was “an accident.” “Mistakes do happen, accidents do happen,” he told the court.
Suuuuure.
Saunders voted in two separate locations in two separate states: Cuyahoga County in Ohio, and Broward County in Florida, and in both elections. “The fact that you do that in consecutive general elections I think takes ‘accident’ to the land of imaginary doubt, and not reasonable doubt,” the prosecutor said.
UPDATE:A critical Ethics Alarms reader informed me that in his view the text of this post was too similar to that of its main source, The Daily Signal, in an article by Jay Greene. Although I linked to the piece and also credited Greene with a quote, upon reviewing the post I agree that it included too many substantially similar sentences and phrasings. I apologize to the Daily Signal, Jay, and Ethics Alarms readers. I was using several articles in preparing the piece (including one from another source that was also extremely close to the Signal article), and for whatever reason, did not notice that I had leaned so heavily on Green’s phrasing. It has happened before over the past 13 years, though not often, and never with the intention to deceive. Thus I have revised the post; in the future, if anyone feels that an Ethics Alarms article does not properly credit sources or seems insufficiently original, the favored response is to alert me, rather than to accuse me in obnoxious terms of “plagiarism.”
Fans of affirmative action reacted to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s depressing defense of racial discrimination by praising her remarkably hypocritical dissent in the recent 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court declaring Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admission policies unconstitutional. Those who believe that Justices should base their analyses on law rather than group loyalties were appropriately critical. Both, however missed some really ugly trees for the metaphorical forest, as Jackson injected false statistics into her dissent. They were, of course—we’re used to this phenomenon—uncritically accepted and used in subsequent media propaganda condemning the decision.
“Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance andtreat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”
Wow! Racial discrimination saves lives! The problem, or rather problems, are that as Jay Greene of the Daily Signal points out, 1) the claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians attending is based on a misleading analysis 2) Even if the results of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study were as Justice Jackson claimed, they are unbelievable and 3) even if Jackson had described the results of the study accurately, and even if those results were credible, they still wouldn’t justify the use of racial preferences in medical school admissions.
This is a different sort of Ethics Quiz. Usually we consider whether particular conduct is ethical or unethical, but not in this instance. The conduct this Ethics Quiz examines is unethical by definition.
Ethics Alarms last looked at the nauseating saga of little Navy Joan Roberts [Biden] in January, here. She is the 5-year-old love child (or at least one of them) of President Biden’s wastrel son Hunter, of laptop and Burisma fame. That means she is also President Biden’s granddaughter. There is no way around it: that’s a fact, established by science, which we know Joe worships.
This week, the lawsuit and paternity dispute regarding Hunter, Navy Joan and her mother, Lunden Roberts were resolved in a settlement that involved Hunter agreeing to a new level of child support and Lunden agreeing not to legally change Navy’s last name to Biden. Everything about this case reveals new vistas in Hunter’s creepiness, but really, we knew that, and the fact that a Presidential offspring is an embarrassment is neither relevant to assessing the character of the father nor especially unusual. What is unusual is Joe Biden’s cruel treatment of a little girl who has done nothing to deserve it, and that does reflect on the President’s character.
Ethics Alarms 