Religion and Philosophy

J.D. Vance’s Wishy-Washy “Town Hall” On CBS

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Speaking of Vice-Presidents, yecchh.

Our current VP was subjected to a CBS “town hall” over the weekend where a series of generally none-too-bright questioners peppered Vance with questions that he hesitated to answer with the clarity and forcefulness necessary. I thought Vance’s strength was supposed to be communication. Maybe Trump can get rid of him…

You can read the transcript here, but my main nausea came from Vance’s weenie responses to two questions regarding illegal immigration. CBS set him up to some extent with the first one, asked by a nun, Sister Nancy Sylvester. The Veep is Catholic, of course, and spoke as if he felt he owed some kind of deference to Sister Nancy despite the fact that her question bypassed law and policy and went straight to toxic empathy. She asked…

“Mr. Vice President, we are sisters who minister at the southern border in the United States, as well as here around Detroit, and they are constantly seeing families who are affected by our immigration policies. They see the trauma of children who are separated from their parents, sometimes on a moment’s notice. They go to school and they come back and they’re not there. And they have to sort of fend for themselves. And so they, the sisters see the kind of effect, the fear and violence of the ICE behavior. We know the complexity of this issue, but what really pains us is how it’s being implemented in such ways. And so I’m going to, sort of know that both of us share the same faith. We may not always agree, ’cause I understand you don’t always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to, though, wonder what would you say, how would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who try to follow the gospel, how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified to, in terms of the kind of values we live, wanna live by, and also what policies would you advocate to try to promote more compassionate and respective behavior toward our immigrant sisters and brothers?”

Elected officials and responsible citizens can’t accept the false premises underlying such a question, but Vance did. He replied, after wasting time showing his concern for the Pope’s health and pandering to his fellow Catholics,

“So let me say, one, we’re trying to strike the right balance. And when you have a country where approximately 25 million illegal aliens have come in over the past 30 or so years, many of them completely unchecked and unvetted, we’re trying to strike a balance between how do we do law enforcement, but how do we also do it humanely, and how do we not do so little law enforcement that you actually empower some of the worst people in the world. And so—I think that it is constantly a work in progress. When you’re talking about millions and millions of people and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, you know, we’ve even just in the past year or so increased training protocols. Because I do think that men and women of ICE, by the way, it’s like the men and women of law enforcement. Most of them are amazing people who are patriots and they want to do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up. And obviously we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up.”

Clear as mud, and incompetent. His duty was to begin by saying, first, that the Sister was talking about illegal immigrants, and the “immigration policies” of enforcing the law. These aren’t “immigrant sisters and brothers,” but illegal immigrants who should not benefit from taking what isn’t theirs to take, It’s nice that she and her colleagues are trying to ease the burdens law-breaking illegals have inflicted on their own children, but that is not the fault of the United States or its primary concern, nor should it be. “Following the gospel” means, as the wonderful Pope has made clear, open borders, and the disastrous consequences of that are blazingly evident in Europe and increasingly in the U.S. You cannot govern competently and responsibly with faith and the the idealistic teachings from a culture 2,000 years ago. Law enforcement wouldn’t have incidents of overreach, bad decisions, accidents and mistakes if lawbreakers didn’t force the government to deal with their destruction.

I have a dear friend and occasional commenter on EA who thinks like Sister Nancy. This is the poison well of misplaced Christian charity that creates the “Good Illegal Immigrant” myth and the absurd parallels between Mary and Joseph and the millions of illegals the Biden administration encouraged to first break our immigration laws, and then to engage in further lawbreaking.

Then CBS host Tony Dokoupil introduced another questioner, a naturalized citizen named Niv Agarwal. Sister Nancy had just asked, “I’m interested in how, from your very core of your faith, how would you want to be, how do you want to treat immigrants? Because in many cases, we get, they all are called terrorists sometimes by people. They are—like, how does, what, what would you want? What would you want to do?” Great: Shut up, Sister, you ignorant slut. Tony segued to Niv, whose infuriating question was along the same lines. He said,

“Hey, my name is Niv. My family and I immigrated here about 20 years ago, and I became a citizen about five years ago. So you were the first person I voted for, actually….One reason, because of the reasons you just mentioned, I was concerned about border safety, as in the trafficking and the drugs, not because I think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, but after seeing ICE behave like military police, and you recently call H-1 visa workers foreign indentured servants. I think Americans are anything but safe. So I’m just curious, why, why are you scapegoating immigrants for the issues you’re supposed to be solving as a Vice President?”

Immediately, Vance should have said,

“Let’s get two things straight once and for all, Niv. First, the issue is illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants like you. Stop letting open borders advocates confuse the issue by adopting their dishonest rhetoric. Second, if an illegal immigrant has a job in this country, by definition he or she is taking that job away from an American, because if that illegal wasn’t here, an American would have that job. So if you don’t think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, you’re confused. Nobody is “scapegoating immigrants.” Again, we are talking about illegal immigrants. I would think, as an immigrant yourself, you would insist on that distinction. We are correctly pointing out the harm done to the nation, society, the economy and law-abiding citizens when foreign citizens come here illegally, and ICE acts exactly as law enforcement has to act when criminals are being protected by rogue state and local governments and misguided Americans who have accepted pro-open borders propaganda as you have.”

If the Republicans get clobbered in the mid-terms, a main reason will be their incompetence and rhetorical cowardice.

Unethical Quote of the Week: James Talarico

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“The Bible is silent on the issue of abortion.”

Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas James Talarico, in response to a questioner (a Catholic theology professor) during CNN’s “town hall” featuring the Texas House member and divinity school student (he has yet to graduate despite starting at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 2018.

The answer was appropriately contradicted by the questioner, Jody Hunt, who shot back, “I just want to add that the Bible is not silent on abortion. There is the 10 Commandments: ‘Thou shall not kill.” She added, “And as Catholics, we take great insult, I guess sometimes, when [the Bible is] described that way.”

It didn’t take a theology professor to come up with that response: a relatively astute 12-year-old who has seen “The Ten Commandments” should be able to do it. Talarico’s answer is not only a lie, it’s offensive. This is the “invisible baby” dodge again. No one, nothing, is being killed! Abortion just involves the woman. It’s a choice, not a killing!

Talarico lied and flip-flopped throughout the session, with no push-back from the moderators. (“This is CNN!”) He denied saying that he wanted to abolish ICE, but Talarico is on video saying “It is time to tear down this secret police force.” Asked about the SAVE America Act, he said that he didn’t know enough about the bill to have a firm opinion about it. In August, he said, again on video, “With the SAVE Act, they are trying to rob our neighbors, strictly our black neighbors, of those God given rights.”

That’s a lie too. Just as Bernie Sanders assured radical progressives that Kamala Harris was just pretending to be moderate to get elected and then would show her true colors (you know, like “moderate” Abigail Spanberger in Virginia), Talarico’s woke pastor has said of her devout flock-member, “I can guarantee you that once he gets elected, he’ll change his tune back to where he was.” Have I mentioned that Democrats cheat?

Talarico isn’t even good at lying. I bet Bill Clinton is embarrassed for him.

Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part Two: For Jews, Zionism=Survival

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

[Part I is here.]

Let’s see: what happened in the World of Jew Hate in the past 24 hours? Admittedly, this will only cover stories that leftist mainstream media hasn’t successfully embargoed: it is fine for the Democratic Party to be anti-Semitic, see, it’s just a bad look if the positions and conduct are expressly anti-Semitic right before an election, except to Muslim voters, of course.

I see…

  • Jordan Bardella, a top figure in the French far right and Marine Le Pen’s top aide, authored antisemitic social media messages from 2013 to 2015. He had vehemently denied this.
  • Italy’s Democratic Party refused to take part in a parliamentary committee vote on a bill opposing antisemitism,…
  • Die Linke, Germany’s rising populist-left party, won 26% in elections to Berlin’s House of Representatives, its best performance ever. Meanwhile, a branch of Die Linke in Berlin recently welcomed Macklemore, the anti-Semitic rapper, and on election night a Die Linke MP was photographed with a representative of a pro-Palestinian group with terrorist connections.
  • Canada is experiencing a surge of Jew hate. The Jerusalem Post reports “a significant rise in antisemitism, threats, and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions…In 2025, 788 hate crimes targeting Jews were reported to police across Canada. Jews accounted for approximately 71 percent of all police reported hate crimes motivated by religion. .. During the most recent Rosh Hashanah, mezuzahs were torn from the doors of Jewish students’ rooms at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Days later, an armed man arrived at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville while worshippers were inside on Yom Kippur. A police officer protecting the synagogue was seriously wounded.

In the U.S.—remember, we’re just talking about today’s news—

  • The University of California petitioned a court to kick out the Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing UCLA of tolerating antisemitic harassment while seeking repayment of $2 billion in research grants. UC calls the case “political coercion” (how dare the government restrict a university’s right to allow the persecution of Jewish students on campus?) and argues that UCLA has made substantial changes since August of 2024, when a court ruled that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith” and ordered the university to guarantee equal access to campus. A battle between anti-Israel students and counter-protesters was allowed to proceed without significant action by campus police.
  • Close to me in Alexandria, a group of rabbis accused Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland of normalizing anti-Semitism. In a letter this week to the district’s [completely Democrat] leadership, they wrote in part, “Over the last three years, we have been on the front lines of the current crisis of skyrocketing school-based antisemitism. We meet regularly with students who are hurt and confused and parents who are angry that their children are experiencing harassment, isolation, and threats to their fundamental physical and emotional safety. We are alarmed that the lack of a meaningful response by MCPS has led to an increase in the normalization of antisemitic attitudes, language and behaviors in our schools.” Montgomery County is the most progressive and Democrat-dominated district in one of the most Democrat-dominated states in the nation.
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Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part One: The Democrats Embrace Jew Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Funny, when Democrats ran in 2024 on the assertion that electing Donald Trump would turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany, I didn’t realize that the Left’s response to Trump’s election would be to embrace the most universally acknowledged evil of Hitler’s regime.

In case you haven’t noticed (and why haven’t you, if not?), the evidence of metastasizing anti-Semitism world-wide and in the U.S. as we approach the mid-terms it is alarming, or should be. Yesterday we learned that there was a nearly successful 9-11 style attack on Tel Aviv, foilded by the passengers. Anti-white racist director Spike Lee (everybody loves Spike Lee!) got in a confrontation at Yankee Stadium with a fan who told him “Fuck Palestine!” The acclaimed director of “Do the Right Thing” has revealed himself as a big booster of Hamas, along with a lot of prominent Hollywood progressives like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Saranden, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton. In a sane America, such anti-Semites would fear that expressing vile views would kill their careers, but, NPR tells us, the nation is “divided.” You know: let Israel be wiped off the map vs. let Jews live.

Huh. Tough choice; let me think.

The international community is substantially anti-Semitic as the United Nations has been demonstrating for a long time, but that condition has worsened substantially since Europe allowed its nations to be overrun with Muslims. And, of course, progressives perpetually argue that the U.S. needs to be more like the rest of the world. The U.N. has consistently condemned Israel as it has fought for its existence in Gaza and Iran. Here is the list of nations whose delegates walked out on Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly

  • Egypt
  • Jordan
  • Lebanon
  • Syria
  • Iraq
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Palestine
  • Qatar
  • Kuwait
  • Oman
  • Yemen
  • Sudan
  • Tunisia
  • Algeria
  • Libya
  • Mauritania
  • Somalia
  • Comoros
  • Turkiye (Turkey)
  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • Afghanistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Indonesia
  • Malaysia
  • Brunei Darussalam
  • Maldives
  • Myanmar
  • North Korea
  • Turkmenistan
  • Uzbekistan
  • South Africa
  • Senegal
  • Djibouti
  • Nigeria
  • Angola
  • Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • Spain
  • Brazil
  • Peru
  • Bahamas
  • Antigua and Barbuda
  • Botswana
  • Ghana
  • Cabo Verde

Nice!

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Peak Lindsay Clancy Ethics Train Wreck Insanity! “The View’s” Sara Haines Can’t Understand Why Clancy’s Husband Divorced Her

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
@juice5news

🚨 THE VIEW HOST QUESTIONS PATRICK CLANCY FOR DIVORCING LINDSAY CLANCY ‼️ Sara Haines questioned how Patrick’s marital love ended so quickly after Lindsay killed their 3 children. Patrick has since remarried. Do you agree with Haines? #LindsayClancy #PatrickClancy

♬ original sound – Juice 5 News – Juice 5 News

[Sorry for stooping to using TikTok, but it had the only suitable clip that WordPress would let me embed…]

“The View” is trying to get its own private dining car on the Lindsay Clancy Trial Ethics Train Wreck. First Sunny Hostin uses the issue to declare that she was the “lone juror” who got a man declared not guilty after he killed a woman and made her into a delicious soup…and it turns out that she was lying about the whole thing and wasn’t the “lone juror” after all. Now Sara Haines—how can anyone determine which of these opinionated, wokeness-infected, ignorant women is the dumbest?—expressed her shock that Lindsay Clancy’s husband (now remarried) would divorce the woman who murdered his children. After all, Haines says, don’t the marriage vows state “in sickness or in health”?

Well yes, Sarah, but at least the vows I took didn’t have a “whether one of us murders our kids or not” clause in there.

Haines really and truly asks, “How did the marital love end so quickly?” Gee, that’s a real brain-teaser. Domestic abuse activists argue that “marital love” has been abandoned once a husband punches his wife in the face, but that’s obviously bad and inexcusable. Murdering the children is more nuanced. Good question, Sara. I’ll have to think about that….

How is someone as dumb and confused as Haines on television anyway? The inconvenient truth about all journalism is that the vast majority of reporters just aren’t very bright, and certainly not as smart as they think they are. Nonetheless, we allow them to have public platforms and exposure that consistently accomplish the opposite of what our Founders believed made “the press” essential to a functioning democracy. Heck, we allow them to manipulate elections. Haines and her colleagues—not just the confederacy of dunces on “The View” but reporters and pundits generally—make the public less informed, less astute, less ethical and less responsible. Somehow this stupid woman—yes, I hold that asking why a man would divorce his wife after she murdered three children, especially their three children, is signature significance: no intelligent person even thinks that’s a puzzle, never mind announcing it on national TV—managed to be a correspondent on NBC and ABC. What does that tell us about the competence, judgment and trustworthiness of broadcast news?

Related questions:

Will anything cause ABC to recognize that calling “The View” a news program is a disgrace, and that the network metaphorically soils itself and the culture every time it gives this coven of morons gets another hour to lobotomize the public?

How do Democrats continue to get votes when siding with progressives means associating oneself with the likes of Sara, Sunny, Whoopi and Joy, never mind Bernie, Kamala, AOC, Fredo, Ayanna, Jasmine, Gavin, and Zohran?

When did American woman lose their ethical bearings?

Can they be saved?

Ethics Meme of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I wish I had the gust to post this on Facebook. And the fact that I know that it would upset so many of my long-time friends is itself an indication of how ethically warped the political Left has become. In fact, “ethically warped” is a euphemism for a far more damning and accurate term.

[This one is pretty funny too, but it’s not really an ethics meme…]

Kant=Can’t: The German Philosopher On Ending War

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The recent discussion on the uselessness, and hence unethical nature, of advocating the impossible sent me back to Immanuel Kant. All Kant did was think and write: in 1795 he decided to muse about how there could be an end to war. Kant was not one to accept “Do something!”; he would always try to figure out what would or might accomplish the desired result. Of course, being a philosopher, he left it to others to execute his plan for the betterment of humanity.

His essay “Toward Perpetual Peace” proposes structural and moral conditions necessary if war is going to be eliminated from civilization. Kant, not being deluded, did not believe peace natural to humanity, rather he argued that peace must be carefully constructed through a clear legal framework. His six Preliminary Articles (immediate steps to prevent conflict) and three Definitive Articles (the long-term foundations required for permanent peace) were the magic formula.

The Six Preliminary Articles (Immediate Steps)

These are immediate prohibitions of legal, financial, and military conditions that make future wars inevitable.

1. No flawed peace treaties. No treaty of peace is valid if it is signed with a secret reservation or loophole that could restart a war in the future. A treaty must represent a genuine end to hostilities, not just a temporary truce.

2. Don’t treat states like property: An independent state must never be acquired by another through inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift, because a state is a society of human beings with its own right to self-determination.

3. No standing armies, because, Kant argued, keeping standing armies threatens neighboring states and ensures a never-ending arms race, making pre-emptive wars more likely.

4. Governments must not create national debts to fund military buildup or foreign intervention.

5. No forcible interference in other nations, because violating a nation’s sovereignty is an offense against the independence of all peoples.

6. “Dishonorable tactics” during war must be banned. Atrocities that destroy the underlying trust required for future peace.

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Unethical Tweet Of The Month, Stupidest Question of the Year, and What The Hell Is Wrong With ABC?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

WSYX is the Columbus, Ohio ABC affiliate, and the reaction to that head-exploding tweet was so negative that the station took down the tweet as well as the article it was linked to. That doesn’t change the fact that to even suggest that U.S.schools shouldn’t teach the single most important event in the 21st Century and one of the most transformative events not only in U.S. history but modern world history is signature significance. To even ask the question demonstrates fealty to propaganda over truth, and a conviction that generations must be taught by withholding any information that might provoke non-conforming thoughts and belief.

The U.S. has a major broadcasting network—several, if we’re being honest— that employs people who want to manipulate the public, lying about the past through omission. Every now and then the aspiring totalitarians of the Left slip up and tell us who they really are. This is one of those times.

Yes, the 9-11 attacks should be taught in schools so Americans learn that Islam is not “a religion of peace,” and that unrestricted, unvetted immigration from Muslim nations poses an existential threat to our values, culture and democracy. It also should be taught in the schools because it is history, and those who want to obscure history never have good intentions.

[As an aside, my harsh response may have run off commenter kawaii65c843be72 after he compared the Left’s tearing down statues of Confederate generals with the fact that there are no statues of Hitler’s henchmen in Germany. I certainly hope so.]

An Ancient Viewpoint on Modern Ethics and Our Current Ethics Train Wreck Environment

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Guest Post by James Rogers

[Note: I am abashed that over the years Ethics Alarms has neglected formal ethics theory far more than it has focused on it. Thus I was thrilled to receive this excellent guest post, submitted by faithful Ethics Alarms reader James Rogers. JM.]

It is evident to many, perhaps even a majority, that we have been living through and are still in a substantially unethical period in US and world history. How can we objectively determine if this is true? The multiple ethics train wrecks highlighted by our blog host is certainly one. Another reasonable and slightly less subjective method would be to consider how an eons-old founder of our civilization measured ethical people and behaviors generally and in the realm of politics.

Recently, I took the opportunity to read two books on the matter by Aristotle (4th Century BC), ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ and ‘Politics’. In those readings Aristotle directly addressed both the individual and societal perspectives on ethics and ethical government. This perspective has additional appeal as it isn’t tinged by modern religious biases.

Since we are humans, tackling individual ethics seems foundational as societal ethics comprises humans behavior and interactions regarding governance and broader economic and social commerce. Starting there, Aristotle points out there are three essential reasons for human action:

  • Pleasure (personal gain or goal achievement),
  • Honor (public recognition, affirmation, or reputation), and,
  • Virtue (for the benefit of another or others though it may also benefit you) without expectation of any recompense or acknowledgement.

These are universal in our human motivations, regardless of a person’s status, wealth or education.

Finding a truly or purely virtuous person or people to interact with is more than tough to find. In fact, it is fairly certain that person or set of people do not exist. Potentially someone independently wealthy, who needs nothing, who simultaneously is pursuing virtue is possibly out there,  but it would be more than challenging to find and identify them. If this is an accurate assumption, the human race is likely facing tough choices individually, as they strive to be virtuous themselves while finding others to engage with who will behave, at least in part, virtuously. As a result, we often make our own personal ethical compromises and also in our associations.

This is not promising.

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Dolly Death Aftermath Ethics: If You Have To Be A Knee-Jerk, Fact-Resistant, Virtue-Signaling Progressive Shill, FINE, But Stop Lying

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

[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?

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