President Donald Trump was caught on camera “flipping the bird” and shouting “Fuck you!” to a heckler who called him a “pedophile protector,” presumably referring to the contrived Epstein files obsession being used in desperation by Democrats. Of course the White House flacks are defending this latest indefensible outburst by the Vulgarian in Chief, but there is no defense. (The stated defense is just Rationalization #2A, Sicilian Ethics, or “He had it coming!”)
Further observations:
Hello everybody! I’m your ethics game show host Wink Smarmy, and welcome to “Worth Confronting or Too Trivial To Bitch About?”,” the popular ethics game show where our contestants try to decide whether clearly unethical conduct is worth only a shrug and a giggle, or is serious enough to try to stop.
Here’s our special guest, Touchy McCrankface, with the problem he encountered recently…
“Hello, panel. My name is is Touchy McCrankface. For some reason I am still a Facebook user despite that platform banning my favorite blog Ethics Alarms for almost two years because one of their censors decided that it was racist to even discuss the topic of blackface’s appearance in some classic movies. When a Facebook friend I actually care about has allowed his or her birthday to be announced on Facebook, I will sometimes, as I am prompted, wish that friend a “Happy Birthday.”
“I do not use the stupid and juvenile pre-programmed emojis Facebook tries to stick on my message, the little cakes, candles and party hats. Recently I sent just such a birthday message to an old friend. Let’s call him “Mike.”
After I sent my “Happy Birthday”, Facebook sent me the equivalent of a receipt. I have no idea why. Maybe it has always done this, but I’ve never noticed one before, or if I have, I never bothered to read one. The message to me read,
“You wished Michael XXXXX a happy birthday on their profile.”
—-Astoundingly incompetent LA Mayor Karen Bass, on CNN’s “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer
She was responding to a CNN report about Hispanic-Americans joining I.C.E. in record numbers. Knowing Bass (see this infuriating idiot’s EA dossier here) and the pro-illegal immigration party she belongs to, can you guess why LA’s woke Mayor thinks the development is “sad”?
Why, they’re betraying their own kind, you see! You know, like when inner city blacks tell police about murderers, muggers and rapists in their neighborhood who are the same color they are. Imagine doing that to your “own kind”!
What this says about her party and its ideological moorings is obvious. So is what it tells us about anyone who would vote for someone like this to have any power or influence over our society. We have had the “gotcha!” privilege debate here extensively in the 20-teens, and it was insufficiently slapped down to prevent the DEI and “presumed racism” pathogens.
The ethics mystery is why anyone white swallows this crap? I can see the advantages to minorities, since they can, by accepting it, absolve themselves of all failures, misdeeds and shortcomings. However, whites (and men) who fall for this argument are agreeing to be metaphorically hobbled, like Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” Worse, they are endorsing the hobbling of their children too.
I get why extreme, ruthless, unethical progressives push such garbage: it’s a means to an end, and the end is power. I do not understand why anyone privileged with a functioning brain and critical thinking skills tolerates officials like Stalker, never mind actually voting for her.
The Los Angeles Angels (it’s a baseball team. Sheesh…) are in talks with long-time disappointment third baseman Anthony Rendon about buying out the final year of his contract. Rendon wants to retire, but doesn’t want to forfeit the final year, $38 million bucks of it in his seven-year, $245 million long-time contract that has become an albatross for the Angels and a bonanza for him. Rendon spent the entire 2025 season recovering from hip surgery, as was typical of his Angels tenure. He was paid all the same.
The 35-year-old has been limited to playing in only 205 of a potential 648 games since 2020, due to injuries to his left groin, left knee, left hamstring, left shin, left oblique, lower back, both wrists and both hips. He has never played as many as 60 games in any of the four 162 game seasons. When Rendon was able to play, he wasn’t very good. The Angels had made Rendon the game’s highest-paid third baseman in December 2019, whereupon he performed well in the pandemic-shortened 2020 MLB season (which I don’t think counts) and that was the end of his productivity.
Rendon has famously stated that he doesn’t really like baseball, he just happened to be good at it. It’s just a job to him, not a passionate pursuit that he cares about; he doesn’t care about the accolades or attention either. Did his lack of passion contribute to his failure to suit up and take the field because of all the injuries? Nobody can say.
President Trump sat down for a full interview with “60 Minutes” yesterday, and was grilled by CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell (as I was once, though not on that show). The transcript and the video are here. Under the new regime of CBS News Czar (“Editor-in-Chief”) Bari Weiss, there were no deceptively edited sections as in the infamous and unethical (and, I believe, illegal) Kamala Harris interview a year ago when the network switched around her responses to try to deceive voters into believing that the Democrat isn’t, you know, a babbling idiot.
This post’s purpose isn’t to critique O’Donnell’s questions. She was appropriately respectful, aggressive and professional except that her facial expressions conveyed her hostility, which is unprofessional but now common practice among Axis broadcast journalists. The shot above was typical: she looked at the President of the United States as if he were a six-foot talking cockroach. Nor am I going to praise or criticize the substance of Trump’s responses, though I note that he showed an excellent knowledge of American Presidential history when he pronounced Joe Biden as our Worst President Ever.
It is simply to point out that the Trump Derangement narrative that this President is mentally failing and as cognitively disabled as Joe Biden (“Just in a different way” as one sufferer told me on Halloween) is either delusional or deliberately dishonest. The interview was slam-dunk proof of that, and yet this slander/libel is Axis cant now. I regard the claim as evidence of a genuine disruption of thinking ability. Bias makes you stupid, and in this case, bias is making these poor people ridiculous.
On his usually excellent blog, Prof. Jonathan Turley tells readers about Derek Lopez, a teacher’s assistant and graduate student at Illinois State University. This jerk—-signature significance!—was caught on video attacking a Turning Point USA table on his campus and verbally abusing the conservative students manning it. The 27-year-old Lopez says to the students as he overturns their table, “Well, you know, Jesus did it, so you know I gotta do it, right? Thanks, guys, have a great day!” Then he tears down a TPUSA flyer on a nearby bulletin board.
He was later arrested. Will he be fired? He should be, but don’t bet on it. He is a part of a dangerous ideological movement in this country that believes that violence and the abuse of political adversaries is justified as the “means necessary” to remake America. He is not an aberration.
Ethics Observations:
“Not the Bee” is a conservative commentary site that, in the spirit of The Libs of TikTok, highlights supposedly outrageous news from the political Left. It is already on thin ice with me as a source of ethics stories, in part because its tendency to mix politics with Christian proselytizing is an irritant. Another problem, which the issue at hand illustrates, is that apparently in the proprietors’ jaundiced eyes, the Right can do no wrong.
In this story, much discussed in the Axis media (of course), it was revealed that a disturbing number of leaders in the Young Republican organization are preening, juvenile assholes who think praising Hitler, joking about rape and killing Jews, and making racist slurs is funny or acceptable. These were captured in a leaked series of group chats that, it is fair to day, did not cast the future leadership of the GOP in an encouraging light, nor did it help disabuse progressives of their incessant narrative, highlighted by the previous sort-of President…
…. that Donald Trump, MAGA, conservatives and the Republican Party are aspiring fascists driven by “toxic masculinity.”
I wrote of the revelation in part, “Smoking guns are no less damning whenever they surface. Politico writes, “The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.” I don’t see how anyone can quibble with that.”
So Not the Bee, said, in effect, “Hold my beer!” “The primary point of debate is not whether the comments were morally wrong, but whether or not it should be a national news story,” it intoned. What? It certainly is a national news story, as it casts a harsh and appropriate light on the culture in some of the dark corners of the conservative movement and the mind of its participants as well as its leadership. So did the reaction of NTB, which mirrors the reflex instinct of the Axis, which is that any scandal involving Democrats is a “nothingburger.” You know, like Hunter Biden’s laptop, evidence that Obama helped orchestrate the Russian Collusion hoax, evidence of witnesses called by Liz Cheney et al. to suggest Trump incited the J-6 riot being coached, Fulton County’s DA using her pursuit of Donald Trump to fund a tryst with her adulterous lover, Joe Biden being accused of rape by a Senate staffer, more recently the astounding number of progressives who cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and so on, ad infinitum.
Not The Bees’s device? Why, go right to #22 on the Ethics Alarms Rationalization List:
Yikes. Fortunately she is also a fired nurse, and, I presume, a permanent ex-nurse.
Crystal Tadlock (that’s not her above; it’s the late Louise Fletcher as nightmare nurse Rached in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), who worked in the intensive care unit at Memorial Hermann Greater Heights Hospital in Houston, had a Mel Gibson moment abusing the police who arrested her for DWI last week on October 11.
“I’m a fucking nurse!” Crystal began, in a drunken rant that was duly recorded. “When you come through my hospital, don’t worry, I’ll let you die,” she went on. “All your family members, and this is all on recording. Greater Heights, bitch. Don’t go there.”
Oh, don’t worry, Crystal, I’m sure they won’t. I don’t know who in their right mind would, after listening to that threat. So the hospital hires medical professionals who are drunks and who are capable of killing patients as revenge, eh? Good to know.
It may be time to become a Christian Scientist.
Does anyone want to bet against my conviction that Crystal, like Mel, Michael Richards and others who have sunk their careers and reputations with similarly outrageous outbursts, will resort to the Pazuzu Excuse in her inevitable groveling apology? That she will swear that what she said doesn’t represent who she really is or express her true feelings, that those frightening threats just tumbled out of her mouth from who knows where, that “something came over her”?
Either the Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT on yesterday’s post on “tit for tat” needs to introduction, or I’m not awake enough to write one. I was just made nauseous by catching Letitia James’ shrill, shouted address declaring her self a victim of a politicized Justice Department. How does anyone that hard to listen to get any votes at all? I would rather listen to Kamala Harris until they hauled me off to padded room before I’d endure a whole James speech even once.
Ah! This reminds me of how most women in politics desperately need to seek vocal and public speaking training if they are going to successfully compete with (competent) men in elections without depending solely on pro-female voter bias. Don’t giggle, ladies, and don’t shout in a strident high-pitched tone! That’s the short version: give me two hours of coaching, and I might make one of you President.
But I digress. Here is CEES’s Comment of the Day on the post, Let’s Begin With The Comment of the Day, Shall We? In Response to “On The Axis Hypocrisy Re Letitia James, Tit-For-Tat, and Trump’s ‘Revenge'”(that’s clip #24 from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive above.)
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Ethics Alarms 