The Internet

Stop Making Me Sort Of Defend Trump’s Social Media Posts…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ugh. Yecchh. Blechh!

When I read that “People” headline, I genuinely thought that President Trump had deliberately decided to attack the Kennedy family in the aftermath of the tragic death of Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg. That would have been insane, of course, but after Trump’s Rob Reiner outburst, I was ready to believe the worst. Clearly, “People” wanted readers to believe the worst, to give Trump-Haters more fuel to inflame them and Trump supporters reason to switch sides.

[Notice of correction: Because of the “People” headline, I didn’t realize that Trump personally had made no derogatory comments about the Kennedy family, and just reposted the comments of others. I apologize for that error, and have revised the post accordingly.]

It is crystal clear, even from the Truth Social posts quoted in the article, that the President’s re-posting of anti-Kennedy social media invective had nothing to do with Tatiana Schlossberg whatsoever. Yesterday the news was full of talk about artists and audiences boycotting the Kennedy Center because it now had Trump’s name on it, and Trump, predictably, was striking back, using the social media posts of others to do so.

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Ethics Quiz: The Teenage Anti-Semite

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Catherine Almonte Da Costa resigned from her post as NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s director of appointments. The Anti-Defamation League dug up comments she made as a teenager that registered as anti-Semitic; this happened just a day after Mamdani announced her appointment. Da Costa, 33 (above) is married to a deputy city comptroller, and he is, ironically enough, Jewish. When she authored the social media posts in question, however, she wasn’t married and couldn’t imagine that her dumb posts would come back to sideline her career.

“Money hungry Jews smh,” she wrote in one 2011 post, when she was 18, using the abbreviation for “shaking my head.” “Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” she wrote in another post. “I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Da Costa said in her resignation statement. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”

Long-time readers here may remember Ethics Alarms posts about the “Hader Gotcha,” named for a young Major League Baseball pitcher of note (he’s still pretty good) who was forced to grovel an abject apology for tweeting offensive things when he was in high school that almost nobody read. I wrote in one of the early EA posts on the phenomenon,

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Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part I: 4 Self-Inflicted Wounds

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I began by titling this depressing post “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: President Trump,” but that seemed inadequate somehow. Maybe there’s no heading that could adequately express what an awful week the President had, how it was entirely unnecessary, how all of his deep political wounds were self-inflicted (okay, his clueless Chief of Staff helped), how much harm it did to his administration, influence and prospects of success, and how much he helped the Axis of Unethical Conduct when without his assistance the serious news would have had it staggering. <Breathe, Jack, breathe!>

EA covered three of the epic fiascos, but now I have to cover the fourth. The others were, in chronological order,

1. Trump’s petty, cruel, stupid attack on beloved director Rob Reiner immediately after he and his wives were stabbed to death by their son. I believe that his infamous Truth Social post may prove to be the tipping point in his administration. Recall that the Bush II Presidency was sent into a death spiral even before the 2008 economic crash because he was vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and flew over the devastation. Then the inept Democratic mayor of the city, with help from Kanye West, successfully created the narrative that Bush shrugged off the disaster because he “didn’t care about black people.”

2. Trump’s presumed-competent Chief of Staff inexplicably gives interviews to a 100% anti-Trump Axis member, Vanity Fair, in which she dished about colleagues, suggested chaos in the White House, and opined that the President resembled an alcoholic even though he is a lifetime abstainer.

3. Trump allows his hand-picked Kennedy Center board to add the President’s name to the landmark, launched as a memorial to President Kennedy in the wake of his nation-shattering assassination, and to quickly plaster it on the front of the building. This was so stupid and gratuitous that I don’t want to think about it, but it sure gave my Trump Deranged theater friends on Facebook ammunition.

But wait, there’s more!

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Prof. Turley Calls “False Light” on House Democrats Sleazy Epstein Photos Smear

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I hate that I am tempted to write this every day now, often several times a day, but how can anyone of good character and admirable values continue to support a political party, whatever its claimed beliefs are, that behaves this way?

Yesterday EA discussed the desperate Democratic Party tactic of picking 19 photos (out of thousands) that showed a young Donald Trump (and other progressive hate-objects, like Alan Dershowitz and Steve Bannon) in the company of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he was known as just another billionaire on the celebrity party circuit or in the company of unidentified women. These were described in some of the Axis media as “bombshell” and “explosive” photos, though it is unclear when and where most of the photos were taken, many of them had been publicly released before, and none of them suggested any criminal, illicit or even unethical activity.

Despite that, political hack Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) had the gall to say, “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth.”

He might as well have added, “And we won’t stop lying about this phony Epstein scandal either until we Get Trump!”

Today Professor Jonathan Turley, a one-time Democrat who is obviously disgusted with Democrats, pointed out that what his former party has done with the photos is a classic example of a tort known as “false light,” where true photos are presented in a misleading and harmful way to damage a reputation or otherwise harm an individual via innuendo . It is essentially photographic deceit. He writes,

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Another Dispatch From the Trump Deranged….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is persuasive anti-Trump data, don’t you think?

Yes, the same lawyer friend who posted the previous Occupy Democrats attack on I.C.E. to Facebook just endorsed that brilliant analysis. Scandinavian nations gorging on anti-American propaganda have decided to boycott the U.S. for vacations because they don’t like the government Americans elected? Brilliant. Bite me. Nobody’s telling you to dump your character-suffocating nanny states. You want to eschew the glories of the USA to make some kind of ideological point? Go ahead. It’s your loss, Sven

I don’t think I’ve ever vacationed in a foreign nation whose government I did like. Great Britain is rotting on the vine, but I’d go to see Westminster Abbey, the Tower, the Lake District and the British Museum in a heartbeat if I could afford it. All of Africa is a hopelessly corruption-crippled mess, but I’d go to see landscape and the wildlife. I’ll visit Broadway even after Mamdani turns the Big Apple into worm-eaten mush.

Or maybe the gentle Swedes et al. don’t want to be killed and raped by our illegal aliens, after so many of them have been victimized by their legal ones. Just spitballing here.

I am worried that sooner or later one of these moronic posts is going to cause me to snap and lay out in unrestrained terms how stupid and offensive I find this bombardment of intellectually dishonest and biased garbage by someone whom lots of people look to for enlightenment and perspective. It is an inexcusable misuse of influence and status, and worst of all, it’s boring. Every day, it’s the same thing. He’s still talking about Epstein, for heaven’s sake.

If I snap, I will instantly see my list of friends crater to 12, and probably lose more clients. But I won’t…

I’m trying real hard, as Samuel Jackson says in his epic monologue in “Pulp Fiction,” to be the shepherd here. But I don’t know how much longer I can stand this…

More on Trump Derangement and I.C.E.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I still am noodling about how exactly to define Trump Derangement beyond listing the symptoms. I’d say, for example, that a retired and distinguished lawyer re-posting with favor a typical Occupy Democrats Facebook rant qualifies as one. This particular Occupy Democrat post—is that group worse than Move-On, better, or the same?—expressed outrage over “US citizen and Army veteran George Retes'” testimony to Congress over (if he is to be believed) a mistaken arrest and abusive treatment by I.C.E., as it mistook him as an illegal immigrant. Naturally, since he was recruited by Democrats to impugn the agency, my friend (and a somewhat famous classmate who has been engaging in what I would call borderline unethical conduct by regularly attacking his former client, President Trump) automatically accepted his account over that of Homeland Security, which in a release rebutted Retes’ claim as well as that of others who have been cited by critics as being falsely detained or arrested.

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Larry Bushart, Justin Carter, Josh Pillault: Martyrs To Anti-Gun Fearmongering and School Shooting Hysteria [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Larry Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tennessee, who ended up in jail for 37 days for posting a meme on social media post that some hysteric took to be a threat to shoot up a school. His was a particularly head-scratching case of the wild over-reaction to stupid and vicious comments about Charlie Kirk after his assassination.

The Bushart case reminded me that I had never learned (or written about…I’m sorry) the resolution of the far worse case of Justin Carter, a Texas teenager (above) who was arrested in 2013 for commenting on Facebook with a fellow gamer, “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts. lol. jk.” A Canadian jerk who read the exchange decided to report Justin to the Austin police, who then arrested him–he was 18 at the time—searched his family’s house, and charged him with making a “terroristic threat.”

I wrote a great deal about the case in 2013, beginning with this post, “The Persecution Of Justin Carter And The Consequences Of Fear-Mongering: If This Doesn’t Make You Angry, Something’s The Matter With You.” I just re-read it: I blamed the teen’s abuse on the Obama Administration’s exploitation of the Newtown school shooting to create sufficient anxiety among parents to move the metaphorical needle on gun control, and I was right. Where I was wrong was in not keeping Ethics Alarms readers updated on Carter’s fate, though I referred to his case as recently as 2018.

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The Obligatory Joke Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Today a Facebook friend who is addicted to posting about the most mundane and prosaic matters on her page. Today, the press had to be alerted to this revelation: “For some reason my phone no longer recognizes my thumb-print.” Talk about the problems of the privileged! I’m sure it’s Trump’s fault. She added, “Does anyone else have this problem?”

A comment read: “Yes. My phone doesn’t recognize your thumbprint either.”

I hope, if I had seen the query first, I would have issued the same mandatory response. When Fate, or God, or whoever is in charge of cosmic humor delivers to you through the mouth or text of an agent a slow, hanging curve-ball of a straight-line that begs to be knocked out of the metaphoric ballpark and you let it go by, you have violated a sacred obligation to the human race. It needs as much mirth and merriment as it can get, and if a perfect opportunity to get a laugh like that set-up goes unrealized—because of fear, lack of attention, witlessness or self-absorption—a grievous ethics offense had been committed. Shame. Shame.

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WaPo: “Republican Overseeing Alamo Renovation Ousted After ‘Woke’ Social Media Post” Ethics Alarms: “Better Safe Than Sorry.”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I know, I know: Ethics Alarms’ annual “Remember the Alamo!’ posts usually don’t start until February. But an important Alamo story with ethics lessons reaching beyond the legendary Texas battle is in the news, and attention should be paid.

Kate Rogers had been leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick reviewed a copy of her 2023 PhD dissertation on museums affecting history is taught in schools. “Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time,” her dissertation stated. Patrick asked her to resign as CEO of the Alamo Trust based on that sentiment, and Rogers refused. declined. The next day, Patrick publicly called for her resignation. This time, Rogers complied.

This week, Rogers sued, alleging wrongful termination. The theory: forcing her to resign for what she wrote in her dissertation was a violation of her free speech rights. The dissertation wasn’t the whole story, however. On her watch, a social media post from the Alamo Trust had prompted this letter…

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Comment of the Day: “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In “Pulp Fiction,” leading up to the film’s memorable twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurmond tripping the light fantastic for a prize at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Uma notes how great it is to visit the rest room at a resturant and come back to your table to find that your order has arrived. Now in my case, I find it similarly wonderful to wake up bleary-eyed with my brain in second gear to find a qualified Comment of the Day waiting for me.

That was the case today with DaveL (one of Ethics Alarms’ five regular commenters) depositing on my metaphorical Ethics Alarms table an excellent debunking of the DEI “sales pitch,” as he described it, in the fake “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon above.

DaveL uses facts to rebut Calvin. The wokeness-crippled progressives who approvingly post such garbage on my Facebook feed are, in contrast, just insisting they are certain of their warped world view because they have willed it so. I have given up arguing with such people: I used to link Ethics Alarms essays (and sometimes comments) on Facebook, but all that accomplished was losing “friends” and having the posts ignored. People don’t like having their faith challenged by ugly reality. They wouldn’t consider the post and went off somewhere to sing “Imagine.”

Sigh.

Get well soon, my friends.

Here is DaveL’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

***

What Calvin says in the comic strip, like the words that DEI stands for, are the sales pitch. Just as there wasn’t a whole lot of genuine Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité to go around in the early years of the French Revolution, these slogans are a lie.

This is perhaps most plainly seen anywhere you have a years-long, multi-stage selection process. Take for instance the admission of new lawyers to the bar. There’s the SAT and undergraduate admissions, undergraduate performance and graduation, the LSAT and law school admissions, law school graduation, and finally the bar exam. What do these show us? That at every stage, DEI philosophy prioritizes the passing of low performers from favored demographics over higher performers from disfavored demographics.

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