Has any conservative law professor—there aren’t many, but I can think of a few—ever argued that scholars, lawyers and legal commentators who advocate positions disfavored on the professor’s side of the ideological divide should be punished and “forced to recant” their stated opinion? If there has been any example of that, I must have missed it. Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, however, did exactly that after the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, held that the 14th Amendment protects birthright citizenship.
After the decision, Professor Pfaff went on BlueSky—I regard posting on that platform prima facie evidence that the poster doesn’t believe in pluralism and freedom of speech— to announce his contempt for and desire to discipline any law professor who disagreed with his obviously unchallengeable analysis of the issue, writing,
“There MUST be repercussions for the lawprofs who advanced such untenable arguments. Their behavior is — and I mean this literally, not dehumanizingly — parasitic. They exploit norms of collegiality and presumptions of integrity to advance trash. Which undermines the work of ALL of us.”
Those “untenable arguments” and “trash” were supported by four Supreme Court Justices in the minority, but never mind. The fascists of the Left believe that it is in the best interests of society to enforce “goodthink” and punish “wrongthink;” to prevent dissent and open civic discourse from threatening its power.
Pfaff was responding to similar sentiments posted by Georgia State University Professor Anthony Michael Kreis, and he’s an Associate Dean for Faculty Research & Development. In his BlueSky posting, Kreis wrote that he considered it loathsome that any Justices disagreed with what he, like Pfaff, considers the only position on birthright citizenship that it is honorable and legitimate to hold:
One way you can tell with 100% certainly brainwashed (or dishonest) progressives is if they complain about NPR and PBS losing their government funding. It is the watermark of “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” gaslighting. This morning I received an unsolicited and unwelcome exhortation in my email inbox from the propagandist above, insulting my intelligence by seeking my money by telling me…
A billion-dollar hit to our industry is enough to make any Chief Financial Officer sweat. And that’s exactly what happened to public media one year ago today, when Congress voted to eliminate federal funding. My job as NPR’s CFO isn’t just to balance the books; it’s to protect a vital public asset. Today, I’m asking you to take action with me.
The NPR Network cannot back down on our mission because we know that millions of people rely on this trusted journalism and programming. And, I am so grateful that we don’t need to back down because supporters like you stand with us. Our strength – and our independence – has always come from you, the public. The NPR Network continues because the public decides it will.
I can tell you firsthand: you can’t run a world-class, independent newsroom on hope. A free press doesn’t just happen. Public media needs growing, reliable financial support to fuel essential reporting and build what’s next. Now is the time to give. Not just for yourself, but for our collective right to know the facts. Your donation of any amount is needed. Every dollar makes a difference.
Power to the public,
Daphne Kwon
P.S. When you make a donation to support this essential public service, you declare that you value access to the facts, for all.
“Access to all the facts”!
By pure coincidence, shortly after reading that garbage I saw that Newsbusters had posted some of the transcript of NPR’s anchor A Martinez (he humbly doesn’t claim to be THE Martinez) interview Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn) regarding President Trump’s recent televised speech. Highlights, as the Axis hack repeatedly invited the Democrat to attack the President and provided no balance or skepticism whatsoever:
Every time I think about the fact that Chris Cuomo, once the golden boy of CNN, is a lawyer I want to burn my law school diploma. Every time I think of all the money “Fredo” was paid to make Americans dumber and more ignorant (as when he announced that “hate speech” was not protected by the First Amendment), I begin questioning the choices I have made in life that brought me to my current lowly position in life. And every time he opens his mouth on his podcast, I want to hold his empty head up to my ear so I can hear the ocean.
“In the eyes of the law, Dobbs was the right decision. Why? Roe created a legal rationale that did not exist! And if you do not create it constitutionally or legislatively, it should not exist. And legislation is where you fill in the hole between implicit and explicit, and that wasn’t done with Roe. The Congress should have codified Roe v. Wade. But they were never going to. Why? Because it’s such a useful device to divide us, so helpful to the parties. Dobbs was therefore the right decision. Well, then why didn’t the liberal justices [vote with the Dobbs majority]—because it’s political. Because they feel it’s political. They don’t want to say it, but they’re all female. I mean, now they’re all female on the left. And it’s political. Now, do I like their political position? Yes, I do. I believe that reproductive rights are a thing. And I think that they are obviously invested in women, and they should be. And that taking it from them was taking a right from women. And that’s the first time I’ve seen that done, except for prohibition. And I think it was wrong. But legally, I think it was the right decision.”
Well thank-you, Chris, for that anala…wait, WHAT?
That dog’s breakfast of Authentic Frontier Gibberish makes one of Jackson’s dissents seem like Oliver Wendell Holmes at his best. Reproductive rights “are a thing”? What the hell is that supposed to mean? The reason Roe made no sense is that there is no such thing as a foggy “reproductive right” that includes killing unborn children. Prohibition took away a real right as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, as getting drunk is clearly, for some, “the pursuit of happiness.”
Neither Roe v. Wade nor Dobbs were designed to “divide us,” and the reason Congress didn’t codify it under Carter, or Clinton, or Obama, Chris, you moron, is because they didn’t think it was necessary. They thought (as did I) that the issue was settled by Roe, at least legally. Abortion was still always going to be divisive; no law was going to change that. Remember the Defense of Marriage Act? Abortion is squarely in the category of an ethics conflict, and ethics conflicts are always divisive by nature. Roe was shoehorned into the law by the Supreme Court to settle the issue and end division, just as Chief Justice Taney foolishly thought the Dred Scott ruling would end the controversy over slavery.
Oh, and would someone point out to Chris that there weren’t three women dissenting in Dobbs, because Justice Breyer hadn’t retired yet?
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.
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.
There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.
This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.
The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)
Ick, yuck, pooey! In the EA “Stop making me defend…” series, there has never been a subject more revolting than Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). She’s noted in past posts for her unethical quotes, her multiple scandals (here, too), her ignorant speech patterns (also here) and her lies. She was the main miscreant in Hillary Clinton’s rigged Presidential nomination in 2016. The only reason I haven’t focused on this awful, unethical woman lately is that the Democrats have so many younger recruits who are as bad as she is or worse.
However, the one thing I will never criticize DWS for is her color.
After Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation last month creating a new congressional map in Florida, Rep. Wasserman Schultz decided not to run for re-election in her altered 22nd Congressional District, where she lives and where the voters are apparently morons since they have voted for this ethics-free creep for 11terms. Instead, Wasserman Schultz opted to run in the now more Democratic-leaning 20th District. Ah, but that district has long elected black members of Congress. So, true to their party’s baked-in racism, black leaders and candidates in the 20th are furious that a white bitch is daring to encroach on their domain.
“I would not have expected the call would come from inside the house,” said Elijah Manley, a teacher and activist who was the first candidate to enter the primary race for the district’s seat. “I didn’t think a white Democrat would be the one to take away a black seat.” Rapper Luther “Luke” Campbell, also running for the seat, said, “If her strategy is to come in because there are multiple Black candidates and hope we ‘split the vote’ … that’s the same old playbook — divide and conquer.” “At a time when aggressive redistricting has already weakened minority voting strength across Florida, the preservation of Black political representation is not optional,” the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida said in a statement. “It is essential.”
I keep trying to imagine a political party throwing a fit on the grounds that a black candidate is daring to run for a “white” seat. That would be seen, correctly, as racism straight up. But Democrats have programmed their black supporters to embrace “good racism” while maintaining that all blacks are cookie-cutter clones who will think and behave as their color demands, rather than as objective and patriotic Americans seeking what is the right course for all.
I would vote for a block of cheese over Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but black Democrats opposing her based on her race shows how warped, corrupted and bigoted their party has become.
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.
In Part I, I published Bill Maher’s surprising slap at Democrats and progressives for their unethical drift into anti-Semitism. It’s pretty good—for Bill. The 18 paragraphs are numbered so I don’t have to repeat them here, especially since WordPress nearly sent me to the woodchipper when I was trying to compose the first post. I’m sorry that you’ll have to jump back and forth, but so do I, to write this.
And away we go…
1. Everyone has a right to be anti-Semitic, just as everyone has a right to lie, or commit adultery. Advocating anti-Semitism, promoting it, and acting on it is still unethical. These ethical nuances, rights vs. law vs. ethics, are beyond Maher’s comprehension.
2. See? Bill immediately defaults to a Rationalization #22 defense of Israel. It isn’t the worst country! Wow. Talk about a back-handed compliment!
3. Not quite as bad as China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, and North Korea, eh? Way to make anti-Semites feel ashamed, Bill….
4. Ezra Klein is nothing to be proud of. He has been a leader of Axis bias for a decade.
5. A “They’re just as bad” (Rationalization #2) cheat by Maher, and he’s cherry-picking. Carlson has been excoriated by conservatives for his anti-Israel stance. He is not representative of the Right at all, and I, for one, never thought he was.
6. Bill managed not to mention the Times’ “dog rape” libel.
9. Maher likes the #22 rationalization so much he comes back to it. This is because Bill doesn’t get ethics. He also evokes “Everybody does it!” here, the hoariest rationalization of all. Jeez Bill…read a book.
10. The “new rule” is about Democratic Party anti-Semitism, but the candidate he writes the most about is an obscure anti-Semitic Republican. Huh.
11. Israel overwhelmingly has the “right-wingers” on its side, and it has the President of the United States on its side in particular. Maher never mentions President Trump at all. He’s only willing to infuriate his audience so much, apparently.
12. Trying to continue his false equivalence argument regarding anti-Semitism on”both sides,” Maher pairs two typical leftist academics with…Candace Owens? She is persona non grata among conservatives, a true embarrassment, and she is the opposite of an academic, as she is illiterate.
13. Again with the rogue Republican joke in a statement about Leftist anti-Semitism, and again, Bill is cherry-picking. There is a reason that Margery Taylor Greene isn’t in Congress any more. Representing her idiocy as mainstream Republicanism is despicable. Rep. Fine’s sharp quip after one of Mayor Mamdani’s Muslim minions derided dogs was, in my opinion, undiplomatic but defensible. No dogs in the U.S. have engaged in any mass shootings or terrorism.
14-18. Bill finishes very strong, almost making up for his rationalizations and weasel words on the way to his conclusion
Giuliani is one of the lawyers hit with bar association discipline for representing Donald Trump in the wake of the highly suspicious 2020 Presidential election, or perhaps I should say the way they represented Trump and his contention that the election was “stolen” or “rigged.” I have written two posts about the D.C. Bar and New York Sate Bar’s proceedings against Rudy here and especially here. My conclusion in then latter piece, in part. :
“This case has been the subject of much debate by my legal ethicist colleagues of late, with a depressing near-consensus that Rudy is getting what he deserves. This is because, I detect, the vast majority of lawyers cannot see through their political biases and Trump hate. At the most simple level,… contrary to the Court’s certitude, all of the evidence is not in, though the claim that there was widespread election fraud and that the election was “stolen” has for many months been pronounced “a lie” by Democrats and the mainstream media with suspicious vigor. While the opinion makes a convincing case that many of Giuliani’s statements, including some made to courts and government bodies, were careless, sloppy, badly sourced, unprofessional and wrong, it cannot know at this point that his (or Trump’s) general claim is false. If it is not false, then raising doubts among the public cannot be called dangerous to the public. It is more dangerous to keep opinions, arguments and ideas from the public’s awareness “for their own good.”…Giuliani, like so many other victims of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is being punished by a double standard predicated on the hatred of Donald Trump. That’s unethical.”
Esteemed law professor Brad Wendel, who belongs to the same, almost totally anti-Trump legal ethics specialist association that I do, has published a contrarian analysis following California’s disbarment of John Eastman (above), who was one of the principal architects, along with Kenneth Chesebro (who was disbarred in New York after pleading guilty in Georgia to charges of election interference), of President Trump’s legal assault on the 2020 election. There are plenty of tells in Prof. Wendel’s essay that he is far from a Trump admirer (for example, he refers to the “scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”) However, he writes,
Ethics Alarms 