— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) July 8, 2026
Exactly.
The President acceded to a “cease fire” that only gave America’s sworn enemy time to regroup, and Iran an opportunity to demonstrate that it cannot be trusted to meet the terms of any treaty or agreement, as Barack Obama cynically and foolishly pretended when he sold out our country and Israel’s in the “palettes of cash for lies” deal.
Iran is in the grip of a sick culture that cannot accommodate the modern world. I’m sure Trump will be assailed by the usual suspects for calling the Iranian leadership “scum,” and probably the Pope as well, because, you know, humanity, redemption, yada yada.
Islam is a religion that celebrates lying to the enemy as a virtue. To trust the current Iran regime is a death wish.
If you know anyone from Minnesota or is unfortunate enough to have to live in that ethically-addled state today, pause in your appropriate contempt for the blight on the Republic the Land of Lakes has become in recent years. Express your gratitude for their state, whose brave soldiers in this day in 1863 may have quite literally saved the United States of America and made this 250th celebration possible.
I know, I know. Minnesota has gone completely nuts. It has an incompetent, silly, uber-woke governor; its Attorney General is an anti-white racist and probably a criminal, the Mayor of Minneapolis is an Ethics Villain, it has an anti-Semitic Congresswoman who has openly admitted that her first loyalty is to Somalia, its opposition to ICE operations represents more of a genuine insurrection than anything that occurred during the 2021 Capitol riot, and the state is in a tight race with California, Washington, Oregon, New York and Maryland for the booby-prize of “Most Embarrassing State .” But ’twas not always thus.
July 2 was the second day of the decisive Civil War battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the most complicated and wide-ranging day in the conflict. So much of desperate significance was going on at Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge, on Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den and a half dozen other key features on the battle field that whether an instance of heroism was recorded or forgotten is as much a matter of chance as anything else. Even determining what was the turning point in the day’s conflict, which ultimately was won by the forces of the North, is an exercise in searching for order in chaos.
There is no question, however, that the First Minnesota Volunteer Regiment’s astonishing heroics stand out even among the many other examples of gallantry on that day. The battlefield monument to the First Minnesota is the largest erected to any Union regiment, and yet it has not guaranteed our cultural memory of the epic sacrifice those soldiers made. Other second day exploits, due to sometimes arbitrary choices made by historians and film makers, have taken up the limited space available in the public’s attention to the details of the Civil War.
This is a massive injustice. As the battle raged for Cemetery Ridge, crucial high ground occupied by Union forces but under siege by the Grays, General Winfield Hancock saw a serious breach in the Union line. He realize, in horror, that Wilcox’s Alabama Brigade was on the verge of breaking through, possible dooming Meade’s army to defeat. The attack had to be blunted and and its advance stalled until he could round up sufficient reinforcements to repel the rebels.
Hancock ordered the First Minnesota to charge the brigade and hold the position, even though its 262 men was outnumbered by a force of more than 1200. It wasn’t quite the hopeless odds face by the defenders of the Alamo, but the regiment’s prospects were grim enough.
Today is July 1, which is always treated across the United States as the gateway to a long weekend and the Fourth of July, and little more. This year, it is the run up to the 250th Anniversary of out nation’s founding. July 1 is also, however, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the most important and most deadly battle of the many important and deadly conflicts in the American Civil War. The two American armies that clashed in the Pennsylvania town sustained more than 50,000 casualties on the Gettysburg battlefield, which may be the saddest and noblest place in America. It is also reputed to be the most haunted, which considering the number of souls lost between July 1 and 3 in 1863, shouldn’t surprise anyone.
[Digression: The Gettysburg Hotel is allegedly haunted, and the proprietors designate specific rooms as haunted. The rent for those rooms is less than the other rooms because, I was told when I called to inquire regarding reservations, “guests tend not to stay the whole night in those rooms.]
Our 250th celebration is an appropriate time to remember Gettysburg, because it is one of those landmark events in American history that could have so easily turned out differently, and if it had, we would never have made to the Centennial, never mind the 250th. The fact that the North prevailed was due to a confluence of random events, the essence of moral luck.
If you have not made at least one pilgrimage to the battlefield, you owe it to yourself, to your family, and to the memory of the combatants, to go. You need not swelter in July. Gettysburg is just as inspiring in the Spring or Fall.
Once again, the position at EA is that the Pope—it doesn’t matter which Pope—is unethically abusing his authority and serving as gum in the works while fostering confusion when he presumes dictate national policy based on idealism and utopianism
A guy I never heard of who was an executive editor of The National Catholic Reporter and who, we are told, “directed coverage of the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV,” was awarded an op-ed in the New York Times (Gift link, though it’s not much of a gift) to explain why he thinks the Pope thinks that “the age of artificial intelligence undermines the moral criteria for just war.” Ramalama ding-dong! Why is anyone listening to guys who have the luxury of dealing with the abstract and never having the responsibility of keeping a nation and a population safe and secure as they pontificate about the right way to do it? Why is anyone reading the analysis of an obscure functionary who has also never had to face the harsh human, military, geopolitical and practical realities of war as he rationalizes the basis for a Pope’s irresponsible interference with serious international matters?
The New York Times has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is fully committed to undermining President Trump, his policies and his popular support. The “just war” blather, another phase of arguing how many angels can gather on a pinhead, suddenly became useful to the Axis of Unethical conduct when it wanted to root for a murderous, anti-Christian Islamic regime while it was fighting the United States of America. Popes never support wars, and it isn’t news when the Vatican condemns one. Infamously, the Vatican refused to take sides in World War II, or take any substantive steps to try to end the extermination of Jews in Europe. Now the Pope doesn’t think a war that has among its goals making as certain as possible that Iran doesn’t have the ability to do what it has been promising to do for decades—destroy Israel— is a “just war,” or to be more precise, that we should redefine “just war” to eliminate Israel’s and the U.S.’s justification for neutralizing Iran.
This is the EU Commission in Brussels. “It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont told POLITICO, making a justifiable analogy since the upper floors, where housing commissioners worked, kept their air conditioning running while the proles in the lower floors sweltered
Americans wouldn’t stand for this.
Not yet, anyway.
1. Could there be a more throbbing example of the unethical “Let them eat cake!” attitude, though it is more like “Let them jump into rivers and drown!”?
2. Why would anyone trust the EU if its leadership could even consider something like this? Yet this is the same orientation that Communism inflicted on its populations. I saw the end results as well as the brainwashing of the public it required when I had (and I do mean had) to be in Moscow in the Nineties for two weeks.
3. Bernie Sanders honeymooned in Moscow. What does this tell you? And he’s being credited with remaking the Democratic Party, along with fellow useful idiot AOC.
4. Yet young voters in droves rushed to the polls in New York to elect exactly the kinds of candidates who hold the “government knows best” and “Know your place, serfs!” world view that is antithetical to American traditions, values and thought.
5. The Democratic Party, now being increasingly dominated by socialists and Communists, is counting on Trump Derangement to let it triumph in November, while its policies, and the even worse policies supported by the Democratic Socialists, are ostentatiously irresponsible and anti-American. Good plan!
For a long time, I have been sick of writing about Anti-Trump bias, anti-Trump hate, Trump Derangement and “Get Trump” indoctrination and propaganda the Axis media, I really have. After all, it has been more than a decade since the Post 2016 Election Ethics Train Wreck first jumped the rails. But these awful, unethical fanatic unethical people keep getting worse, lying, and saying increasingly crazy things. Among the worst of the worst, ex-CNN hack Jim Acosta, who CNN elevated to White House Correspondent during Trump’s first term, compared the court ordered erasure of the President’s name from the Kennedy Center to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He really did. These people don’t even realize how insane they sound to normal people. Wrote one wag on “X”: “I missed the time when people were SHOT DEAD trying to get into the Kennedy Center for 40 years.”
The Trump Outrage Du Jour yesterday was the Flag Day UFC cage match on the White House lawn. On PBS—BOY am I glad not a penny of my taxes go to that propaganda machine!—erudite professional intellectual David Brooks provided Exhibit A of the class snobbery that has always been the root of so much Trump hostility. Asked about the event, Brooks huffed,
“Well, I first thought of, like, who are the artists John F. Kennedy brought to the White House? It was like W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein. And now we have got cage fighting. Don’t anybody say America’s in cultural decline!”
Got it. Because Brooks doesn’t enjoy the UFC, the White House hosting a popular sports event means America is in decline. I don’t care for either, but if I had an Uzi at my head and was forced to pick one, I’d take a UFC cage match over one of President Obama’s hip-hop artists he hosted when he was President. Funny, Brooks didn’t mention JFK’s preference for Robbins and Bernstein. Let’s see: Barack and Michelle feted Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe: Common, Queen Latifah, Big Sean, and Chance the Rapper, among others.
You know who would have lovedthe cage match? Teddy Roosevelt. He was the first President I thought of when Trump’s spectacular was announced. Young Teddy was a boxer and a lieftime fan of “manly arts.” His most famous speech is titled “The Man in the Arena,” which I wrote about here.
Progressives don’t much care for Teddy, one of Trump’s favorite Presidents (and mine). They keep waxing poetic about Kennedy, who has a large mausoleum that holds cultural events for the rich glitterati of D. C. memorializing his largely negligible Presidency. Kennedy was also maintaining sexual affairs with the help of the Secret Service as he and Jackie posed as the ideal couple, but he pretended to be admirable well. And he went to Harvard.
Ann Althouse reports that, contrary to how the UFC event was reported as Trump celebrating himself (Flag Day is his birthday) didn’t have any birthday celebration vibe at all:
“The event was called UFC Freedom 250, and, true to that name, it turned out to be about the UFC and the United States of America. Three days before his birthday, Trump had said — quoted at USA Today — “You don’t have to wish me happy birthday because I’m not happy about that birthday that I’m having. That’s a number that I never thought really too much about. It’s not a number I like, but I’m here, nevertheless.” And at that huge event on the White House lawn on the evening of his birthday, last night, I don’t think there was even a passing mention of his birthday.”
Fact Don’t Matter, however. All that matters is to denigrate President Trump for anything and everything. What kind of nation has a news media that devotes itself to projecting hate on its elected leader? Answer: a very, very sick and confused one. Here is the current headline at Salon, the virulently leftist site:
And she was supposedly a rising star of the Democratic Party. Well, she’s better than Graham Platner…
Crockett, who lost her attempt to run for the U.S. Senate and now is a lame duck in the House, was in fine form this week. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the evidence that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the “hate groups” it railed against. One of the witnesses called by the Republicans on the committee was Dr. Alveda King. Her father is Alfred Daniel King, the younger brother of Martin Luther King Jr., and she has broken ranks to be a GOP supporter and an advocate for President Trump.
After King’s statement, Crockett began shouting about how how “white men” had invited Alveda to the hearing and that those white men from the GOP wanted to “tell people of color who is fighting for who. People of color do not feel comfortable or welcomed within your party.”
“That’s why you have to parade someone who has the name ‘Dr. King’ attached to them, so that people can be confused,” she continued. “Because I have been reading the comments online, and people are like, ‘Who is this Dr. King’ because you want them to believe that she somehow espouses who Dr. King was.” Crockett didn’t give this Dr. King an opportunity to respond, but the next speaker, Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.), allowed her to do so.
“Congresswoman, I am a bit emotional,” King began. “I’m going to watch what I say, but it seems as though you have suggested that I am a bastard to the King family legacy. I am legitimately the daughter of the Rev. Alfred Daniel Williams King and Dr. Naomi Ruth Barber King. We are a family who loves God. And I love you. God bless you.”
She was just getting warmed up, though. Later that day, after the Karmelo Anthony guilty verdict was announced, the loud-mouth Congresswoman went on her “Clock It With Crockett”podcast and wildly distorted the facts of the case. She argued that the victim Austin Metcalf’s family couldn’t understand the pain black women have to endure daily. Crockett said that was made clear to her again while talking about the case to a friend who is a black mother. “Black women — especially black women who have black male children — live in fear and agony every single day,” Crockett said. “A fear and agony that I promise you, the Metcalfs probably never spent a day living that way.”
How ironic that their unarmed son was the one who was murdered, not the worried black mother’s son who stabbed him in the heart.
Crockett then expressed the revolutionary idea that Americans need to have “real conversations about race in this country,” as if such conversations aren’t usually hijacked by race-hustlers like Jasmine Crockett, making them divisive and useless.
Crockett, ignoring the evidence at trial, insisted that the stabbing was self-defense. “If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I’m not limited to fists,” Crockett said. She must have been thinking of Mike Brown. “Cuz I’m telling you right now, if you were twice my weight and got way more strength than me and you got me pinned down, I don’t believe I’m going to survive,” Crockett ranted. It was reported that Metcalf was 6’0, 200 pounds, and Anthony is 5’11 and 162 pounds. The latter was never “pinned down” nor was he in danger of being pinned down. Witnesses said that Anthony dared Metcalf to touch him, and stabbed him to death when he did.
Jasmine: “And when you look at like George Floyd, like George Floyd died, and they never took out a quote-unquote weapon. So this idea you can’t die is wild, right?” Wait, was Metcalf kneeling on Anthony’s neck? What was she talking about?
Then Crockett claimed the murder weapon (it was a knife with a five-inch blade) was too small.
“Well, I would have argued the size of it alone, you wouldn’t even think it’s a deadly weapon,” she reasoned. By definition, if the knife penetrated Metcalf’s heart and killed the kid, it’s a deadly weapon.
Jasmine then said that Metcalf confronted Anthony because “this is the culture that is being instigated,” where white people are “gettin’ real bold with us right now.”
I guess the solution is to kill more white people when they get too bold.
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, announced today that the Justice Department was withdrawing the $1.8 billion fund to compensate people claiming to be victims of unfair prosecution, supposedly the result of the settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit against his own Treasury Department. “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, told lawmakers during a congressional hearing.
First of all, GOOD!, but second and most importantly, how in the wide, wide, world of sports did anyone think this offensive, conflicted, half-baked, stupid idea would be anything but condemned, attacked, ridiculed, mocked and ultimately blocked in the first place?
Any idiot could have figured out how unethical this thing was, so it should have been laughed out of the room the second it was suggested. I’m certainly any idiot, and I wrote three posts pointing out what shouldn’t have had to be pointed out at all. Here, I wrote in part:
“[T]his deal stinks, and should be challenged ethically if not legally. The whole Justice Department and the Treasury Department too had irresolvable conflicts, and should not have been allowed to make a settlement with their own boss.”
“If you can process this whole astounding ethics debacle and come out anything but but disgusted and disillusioned, you apparently are capable of rationalizing anything…How can anyone defend any of this?…It needs to be widely condemned and stopped.”
“I continue to think, or at least hope, that this abomination will be stopped. As I already wrote when asked in a comment, this, unlike the artificial offenses behind the two purely partisan impeachments in Trump’s first term, is a genuine impeachable offense.”
This conclusion didn’t require an ethicist, or any special expertise, or an IQ above 100. So how did this outrageous thing get to the public announcement stage? The fact that it did should shake public confidence in the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the IRS, President Trump, Vice-President Vance and the entire White House staff. Did no one have the sense God gave a mushroom to tell everyone involved in this fiasco, “That’s ridiculous! It will make this administration look foolish, untrustworthy, corrupt and incompetent! It will undermine the President’s authority and the public trust! It will endanger the GOP majority in Congress and be a self-inflicted wound with no counterbalancing benefits! You can’t be this stupid! Come on! Think, dammit!” ???
I realized that Blanch’s statement was a perfect embodiment of Gilda Radner’s iconic catch phrase as addled “Weekend Update” commentator Emily Litella, which somehow had not been listed already in the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive. But do you know what? Most of the 46 clips listed are appropriate to describe some aspect of this aborted, disgusting, self-indicting betrayal of trust. For example, here’s #18:
And #20…
And of course #15…
…as well as…
Let’s tote up all the clips that are directly applicable in one respect or another. We have twenty-seven, more than half: 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38,39, 43, 44, 45, and, of course, 46. This episode was that bad, that unethical, that indefensible, and Ethics Alarms called it immediately, or as Fredo said in #16,
When Trump and Company do things this reckless and unethical, it humiliates everyone who try to oppose the Trump Deranged.
I haven’t written much about the Graham Platner debacle in Maine. I will have to now, because he is a walking, talking, lying human ethics train wreck, and strong evidence of the contempt our political parties have for both the Republic and its voters. Democrats think they have a real shot at defeating long-time “centrist” Republican Senator Susan Collins, who is pretty much a NeverTrumper. The fact that Platner is running unopposed in the Democratic primary to be the party’s choice to oppose her has been looking for some time as if the Mad Left is whistling past the graveyard, and incidentally, desperate, deluded and nuts. I summarized Platner’s virtues exactly a month ago here, writing in part,
“He has said women who are raped are at fault. He said that blacks don’t tip. He has called called white, rural Maine dwellers stupid. He uses “fag” to describe gays. Platner praised Hamas, rationalized urinating on corpses, and has denigrated police officers. He once referred to Jesus as a “zombie” and the Virgin Mary as a “skank.” He also had a Nazi tattoo on his chest and defended it for years. On the plus side, Platner approves of political violence, so at least in that sense he’s a mainstream 2026 Democrat.”
And the hits just keep on coming for Platner. Today we learned that his supposed occupation as a small town Maine harbormaster—-See? He’s a real Maine-y blue collar guy!—is a rather wan resume item. The Washington Free Beacon reports,
“Platner’s town of Sullivan got by without a harbormaster from February 2022, when Platner’s predecessor resigned, until September 2023, when town officials tapped Platner to serve as “an interim Harbor Master until one could be hired,” records show. Platner had volunteered for the role in case Maine law required Sullivan to have one, though the town’s Harbor Committee noted at the time that it was “not clear” he was needed because “operations in the Harbors are handled by those who use the Harbors without dispute” and because the role’s “largest challenges are clerical” and “can be handled by the Harbor Committee.”Platner dropped the “interim” title in March 2024, when he completed the basic training required to be considered a “qualified Harbor Master.” He served in the role until the summer of 2025, when he launched his candidacy, according to Sullivan town manager Ray Weintraub, who told the Free Beacon that being town harbormaster generally consisted of collecting rent fees for Sullivan’s fewer than two dozen permitted moorings, where boats can anchor offshore. “We don’t really have any working waterfront, so to speak, other than a couple of boat launches,” Weintraub explained.”
Wow, this guy is really qualified to be a U.S. Senator! You wonder why “the country’s in the very best of hands” and ends up with idiots, crooks, fakes, poseurs and dolts in Congress? You know, like Republicans George Santos, Lauren Boebert, Margery Taylor Greene, and (oh, let’s pick a Democrat out of the hat) Ex-Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida, who resigned from Congress moments before the House Ethics Committee was going to sanction her, among other offenses, stealing nearly $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds for her campaign? It’s because parties keep nominating ridiculous, untrustworthy, unqualified people. Platner, however, is special.
He’s also been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders and AOC, another unqualified, incompetent boob.
The juiciest revelations about Platner came from his wife, who, the New York Times revealed, warned his campaign that her lovey-bug has a habit of sexting other women during their marriage. Classy! An Anthony Weiner wannabe! But that’s not all! Here is the transcript of the cringe-worthy video the Platner campaign persuaded his wife to post (hold onto your head!):
There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt), but the contest for the Worst First Lady Ever is settled. It’s Jill Biden, easy. Edith Wilson hid her husband’s stroke from the nation but at least she wasn’t complicit in letting an unfit and mentally declining man run in the first place. Woodrow was a terrible human being, but until his stroke he wasn’t an incompetent one. Michelle Obama was and is loathsome, but she didn’t do much substantive damage while she was in the White House. She left that to her husband.
I’m going to give you a gift link to the New York Times’s notably uncritical report on Jill’s new spin on her husband’s crack-up during that fateful debate with Donald Trump, when the mentally declining President descended into authentic frontier gibberish. The Times:
“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing ‘View From the East Wing,’ a memoir of her time as first lady.”
I call bullshit, and so should everyone else. There is so much wrong with that fake narrative if boggles the mind:
1. She’s lying. Everyone had seen Biden freeze, become disoriented, mumble and get confused repeatedly for nearly four years. Months before, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material. In opting not to bring charges, Hur said that Biden would appear to the jury too befuddled to find guilty of the requisite intent. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Sure sounds like a man every American should feel secure having his finger on the nuclear button! Yet the Axis chorus of partisan hacks continued to tell the public that Joe was “as sharp as a tack.”
2. After Biden’s embarrassment in the debate, Jill went into full cover-up mode. “You answered every question!” she exclaimed, treating the President of the United States like a second-grader. His gibberish was bad enough that she thought he had a stroke, she says now, but not bad enough to have him checked out. Biden had refused to have a cognition test: after this episode, wouldn’t a caring wife be obligated to insist on a medical examination? Of course she would, except that the reality was that Biden’s debate performance was not out of character at that point. His staff and family were thinking, “Oh no. I was afraid this would happen.” Their response after the debate, joining in the agreed upon narrative that “he had a cold…he was tired….he just had a bad night…it could have happened to anyone…he’s always had a stammer…Trump rambled too!” proves that there was no new concern for Biden’s well-being, only concern that the jig was up.
Ethics Alarms 