[This is CNN! I had to find an excuse to post this, but it is relevant to Paragraph 7 below.]
All over Facebook, my Trump Deranged friends have been egging me on to stuff their metaphorical heads up their metaphorical asses after they have used Dolly Parton’s demise to justify their own biases. My favorite was the one that began, “I don’t want to talk about Trump, but isn’t it interesting that the vile, bigoted asshole wrote nice things about Dolly even though she was woke and an LGBTQ supporter.”
Note: This woman doesn’t want to talk about Trump, but immediately turned an appreciation for a recently deceased, non-political country music superstar into an excuse to attack the President.
Remind me: how did I end up with so many friends like this?
Lie #1: Dolly Parton was not by any stretch of the imagination “woke.” She consistently refused to take political or culture war positions. “Live and let live,” “Trust in the Lord,” Love your Neighbor” are not woke talking points.
Lie #2: She was not an LGBTQ “supporter” other than to say she loved everyone. Claiming that Parton was a member of the Pride mob is now a viral near consensus on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook, and even the bots on Google and “X” will confirm that non-fact. It’s the reverse of “If you’re not for us, you’re against us”; in Dolly’s case, that she didn’t support active bigotry against gays etc. and believed they should have the same rights and acceptance as everyone else, made her an LGBTQ+ activist.
Let’s examine this one a bit more. shall we? Dolly Parton never directly advocated same sex marriage. She once joked about gay marriage, “Why can’t they be as miserable as us heterosexuals in their marriages?” Bob Hope might have made that joke. (Maybe he did.) Bob was not “woke.” She gave the obligatory lawn sign pablum “I think love is love and we have no control over that” when pressed. I guess she also supported the Man-Boy Love group, then. “I think people should be allowed to marry,” was another of Dolly’s carefully worded ambiguities. Donald Trump’s comment was, “I have no problem with the gays.” Did that make him “woke”? An LGBTQ activist?
Yes, this news made my head explode. I will be picking up pieces of skull and bloody lumps of gray matter for the rest of the day.
Sarah Miller Espinosa, an arbitrator, ordered The Washington Post to rehire anti-white, racist, biased and dishonest opinion columnist Karen Attiah, whom the paper properly fired in September because of her social media posts regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Post has to compensate her with back pay too.
The Post, Espinosa wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Attiah and violated its labor agreement. “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” she concluded.
Oh, really?
In its report on this gob-smacking ruling, the NY Times cites Appiah’s BlueSky post that read, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” as representative of the offending chain that the columnist issued after Kirk’s assassination. In the EA report on the episode, I focused on this one:
Oooh, damning! Racist! Except that Kirk never said that, despite the fact than Attiah put the statement in quotes. What he said, according to Attiah’s source, The Guardian, was…
“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
The quote was not about black women at all, but referring to four specific and named black women who Kirk believed had demonstrated that they were not qualified for the positions they occupied. (I’d say that three of the four clearly warrant Kirk’s assessment; I’m not sure about Michelle. I would have used Kamala Harris).
Attiah, then, rewrote the quote to make Kirk seem prejudiced against all black women. She used quotation marks, though what she wrote was not what he said. She intentionally lied to readers to make Kirk’s assassination seem deserved. That’s why she was fired by the Post, and the only point of contention is why, as an anti-white, racist hack with no regard for journalism ethics (not that the Post wins any prizes in that area either), she was working for the paper in the first place.
The Washington Post, in defending Attiah’s sacking, maintained that her rant about Kirk injured “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” the Post’s opinion editor wrote after her outburst. The arbitrator disagrees! A columnist lying on a public platform, fabricating a quote and using it to support a racist “opinion” isn’t a black mark on the integrity of the newspaper that employs her. Good to know.
To be fair, the Post was irresponsible to hire the woman in the first place. She should never have been hired, and should have been fired—well, except according to the strange standards of Espinosa—in 2023, when Attiah made as ass of herself by opining that a newly unveiled sculpture (in Boston) celebrating the marriage of Martin Luther King and Coretta “perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK.” Oopsie! The sculptor was black and the commission that approved the design was mostly black. I wrote at the time,
“Appiah is a ridiculously careless and dumb racist. How could someone publish a diatribe like she did without checking to see whether the artist was white? She could because she is such a racist that it never occurred to her that something she objected to wasn’t the fault of whites. This is the apex of racism, its most ugly form. To the KKK, everything wrong with their nation was the fault of blacks, Catholics and immigrants. To Hitler, all of Germany’s ills were attributable to Jews. To people like Attiah—and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them—whites are the enemy, evil and a human pathogen on society. That’s bad enough that it should disqualify her from a position of authority and influence at the Washington Post. But she also has exposed herself as frighteningly lacking basic reporting skills and journalistic integrity. She is doubly untrustworthy. No apology, no excuse-making can erase this debacle. I am eager to see if the Post has the courage and professionalism, as well as respect for its readers, to do what has to be done. My guess? No.”
But based on this arbitrator’s ruling, there is literally nothing Attiah could write that would disqualify her from having a platform for her hate, ignorance, dishonesty and stupidity on the opinion pages of the Washington Post. The mind boggles: Castrate all men! Put the Jews in camps! Kill Trump! “I am Marie of Romania!” Attiah’s lawyer called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”
Over the past year, I have been professionally involved in several cases involving arbitration. In too many of them (and one is too many), the arbitrator’s decision was incomprehensible and incompetent. Many arbitrators are ancient retired judges; others are incapacitated by unstated biases. Arbitration clauses exist to save the immense costs of litigation, but when the result is a howler like this one, it demonstrates a triumph of finances over logic.
I also want to mention that almost all of the Times readers who commented on this declaration that no columnist’s opinions are so repulsive and biased that they are grounds for firing for cause thought it was wonderful.
There should be lots of topics to discuss on today the Friday Open Forum, which is going up next, but first, despite having promised to never post on the nauseating Jason Arday mess again, events dictate that I have to break that promise, because not doing my job regarding the EA mission would be more unethical than breaking a promise based on a premise that turned out to be false. It’s an ethics conflict. (I wonder why MAGA types have so much trouble with the concept. President Trump has delivered on a higher percentage of his campaign promises than any President since James K. Polk, and yet defectors like Tucker Carlson and Margery Taylor Greene—who would want to be a member of that club?— are furious because he started a necessary war that should have been started about 50 years ago. Morons.)
But I digress. Over in Europe, which stands as a frightening example of how quickly cultures can lose core values, Nathan Cofnas, who was the first to extensively expose Arday an academic fraud, announced that he has been suspended by Ghent University in Belgium and expects to be fired. His offense? “Discrimination”—-meaning that pointing out that a black academic star that Cambridge University had created out of DEI nothingness was in truth a serial plagiarist was racist. The school rector, Petra De Sutter issued a statement on l’affaire Arday asserting that freedom of speech “is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.”
Tell us more about the freedom to lie to the public and jump in line in front of genuine scholars because of one’s color, Petra!
Segers had taken to social media to posted his views on transgender athletes playing in women’s sports. “I don’t see transgender people becoming oppressed or being oppressed … life is unfair” he posted, along with, “I’m not against anyone living out their lives the way they want, but I am against their rights superseding the rights of other people. That’s a little bit foul.” He also mocked the posting of preferred pronouns: “If you asked me what my preferred pronouns are and it’s not obvious to you that I’m a he/him, that I’m good with he/him — Surely you don’t need any help. I’m not wearing a dress.”
The social media Furies descended on the actor with a vengeance, accusing him of being transphobic, homophobic, yada yada. You know the script.
Prof. Turley believes that the performer’s human rights have been unfairly and hypocritically “curtailed,” writing in part,
“Other actors have expressed support for transgender players without any response other than praise in the latest example of the rising McCarthyism on the left.This is only the latest termination over the political views of artists in New York. As the song states in Hadestown, “It’s an old song. It’s a sad song. But we’re gonna sing it anyway.” We have previously discussed how private companies can fire employees for public conduct or statements that bring controversy to their business or products. However, even though the First Amendment does not govern such controversies, there remains a free speech issue. Free speech goes beyond the confines of the First Amendment and private companies can engage in censorship that curtails this human right. The question often comes down to consistency in companies enforcing content-based standards. I did not like some of the comments of Segers, but there is little question that equally strong comments against “cisgender” athletes or for transgender athletes would not result in such termination…Whether it is actors, athletes, or academics, there is a demonstrably different level of tolerance for controversial views on gender. Take Segers’ statements, swap the nouns or pronouns, and ask yourself if there would have been a cancel campaign, let alone a termination. It is not the fact of the controversy but the lack of consistency that is so problematic in these areas.”
Yes, but. This is Broadway, and a Broadway musical. Broadway’s audience pool is shrinking and its ticket prices exclude all but the relatively wealthy. Musicals are especially dependent on the the affluent LGTBQ demographic: I would wager that the percentage of gay Americans who have heard of “Hadestown” is double or more the percentage of non-LGTBQ members of the public. Having a prominent cast member in a Broadway musical making public comments that are likely to offend its core audience is unacceptable, and the producers were only protecting their show, their investment, and the rest of the company by sending Segers packing.
This kind of confirmation bias-driven sliming of law enforcement has become the norm since the Obama Administration and its leader’s unforgivable sanctification of Trayvon Martin as his crypto-offspring because Martin was black and got himself shot. The news media loves it, however, and you know, Freedom of the Press.
Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez (above) died in February after starting a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana. His last stand lasted only a few second, because two police officers who were crack shots put him down quickly and safely despite others being close to the exchange. Yet that rather straightforward cause-and-effect result generated this headline from WNDU-TV, the NBC-owned affiliate in South Bend, about 20 miles from Elkhart, two days after the shooting:
The deliberately anti-law enforcement and pro-deadly punk story continued,
“The family of a 17-year-old killed by Elkhart police is calling for state investigators to take over the case as the community grapples with three separate shootings and a stabbing in a 48-hour span. Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez died Sunday around 2 a.m. in an officer-involved shooting. A memorial now sits at High Dive Park where he was killed. Alfredo Ramirez-Gomez, the teen’s brother, spoke at a vigil for Bryan on Tuesday afternoon and demanded the release of police footage: “Bryan was a bright kid, he was a member of this community, this is where he grew up,” Ramirez-Gomez said. “As for his cause of death, we can’t really point fingers yet. We just ask and demand that the footage comes out from the car and from the vest.”
Right. “We can’t point fingers yet” but Ben Crump is on our auto-dial. The response is reflex: the family is angling for a big settlement from the city. Blogger Robert Stacy McCain points out:
“Vang’s actions 20 years ago were awful, but so were the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6, 2021, and those folks received Presidential pardons.”
—–The Minnesota Star, cheering on Gov. Tim “Knucklehead” Walz’s sick decision to pardon a serial child rapist in an attempt to foil efforts to deport him.
No one can trust a news source capable of putting such illogical, unethical garbage in print. Defense by non-sequitur! “Sure, he raped a child repeatedly for years, but Jeffrey Dahmer ate people!” There is no basis for comparison between the J-6 rioters, all citizens and jailed, some for a couple of years, for a single act, and a non-citizen who never spent a day in prison despite pleading guilty to multiple child rapes. The Star’s bizarre logic doesn’t even rise to the level of the worst of all rationalizations, Rationalization #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things.” Is the idea that Walz trying to let a child molester stay in his state is good because Trump’s pardon of the rioters wasn’t? What is the Star trying to say? Do the editors even know?
Then the Star’s grand finale is to quote with approval another one of Walz’s idiotic outbursts. “Taking them out with no due process”? Vang received a final order of removal in October 2006! There was due process to spare.
Not for the first time, I find myself wondering how the once great state of Minnesota came to such a precipitous decline in values and common sense. Once represented by the likes of Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, it is led by a principle-free, incompetent fool, with an addled newspaper like the Star warping the news to disguise his incompetence. Minnesotans used to be smart, creative, rational. They had standards, they had pride. What happened? Now they are sitting by while their state’s #1 paper applauds their Governor for pardoning a child rapist, and one who made it clear that he doesn’t think raping children is anything to get upset about. Americans are just weirdly prudish about such things!
So the citizens of Minnesota just nod their heads as their governor first pardons the man who rapes little girls and pays them to keep quiet, because Kamala choice’s to be VP wants to foil efforts to remove criminal non-citizens. They keep nodding as that governor describes years of multiple rapes as the rapist’s “worst day” [Vang didn’t think they were bad days at all], and nod some more as the Star calls Walz a hero for trying to inflict a sexual predator on their state permanently.
Trinity College has the gall to charge over $72,000 per academic year to students, and yet passes woke, divisive, fact-free mumbo-jumbo (aka. Authentic Frontier Gibberish) off as “education.”
“White supremacy and racial capitalism structure our world, setting in motion the systems of domination that Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly describes as a ‘racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation’…Students will learn to turn their anthropological gaze upon whiteness itself and understand its insidious modes of self-and-other construction thus destabilizing its ocular power to define others. We will pay special attention to how the white colonial gaze has operated in the liberal discipline of anthropology and explore ethnographic methods for studying whiteness and white supremacy,”
Oh. What??? And who the hell is Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, and why should what she says matter to me any more than what, say, Adam Sandler says? [I just checked. It shouldn’t matter. She’s an obscure anti-white ideologue. Dropping in an appeal to authority using an obscure race-baiting academic is pretty desperate; then again, would any respectable scholar say something like “racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation” ?
Not to pile on too much, but gaze at her faculty photograph. A professor choosing to radiate such ‘tude—“Bring it on, whitey!” is to be avoided at all costs.
Ugh.
Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot,Assistant Professor of Anthropology, teaches “Unsettling the White Gaze,” and she is obviously an Authentic Frontier Gibberish master herself. She describes herself as a “white, disabled, trans anthropologist whose work focuses on how criminalized people who use drugs envision and experiment with abolitionist horizons of transformation, healing, self-determination, and solidarity beyond incarceration and forced-cure.” She also explains that she “participates in abolitionist, harm reduction, and transformative justice organizing projects in NYC and beyond.”
Okaaaaaay…
If students are willing to sign up to take such self-evident crap and parents will pay for it, there’s not much that can be done. There were really silly, obscure courses at my college too, but they weren’t political indoctrination courses. These offenses to common sense and democratic society won’t dry up and blow away until there is sufficiently competent secondary and primary education to ensure college freshman have a sufficiently solid foundation in critical thinking to recognize a course like this one for what it is: pseudo-social science contrived to fulfill a political agenda.
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?
Ethics Alarms 