Yes, Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, is an Ethics Villain to be sure, but St. Paul’s DEI mayor, Kaohly Her, is both unethical and ludicrous.

First, a digression: is it racist and sexist for me to designate an elected official “DEI” just because the individual is female, Asian, and a Laotian immigrant? Yes, except that 1) this female Asian is also bonkers, and obviously so and 2) this in the Twin Cities, Ground Zero for The Great Stupid. Her is a double “first,” meaning that this irrelevancy got her votes in wokism-addled Minnesota (to sensible people, being the “first” is irrelevant to whether one is the best) and her record as a state legislator screams diversity, equity and inclusion. She was a member of the Minnesota Asian Pacific (MAP) Caucus and the House People of Color and Indigenous (POCI) Caucus. She has advocated more diversity within departments, and supported a state House resolution to declare racism a public health emergency. She’s no dummy, certainly, with an impressive educational background and an impressive career in finance behind her. She’s just certifiable.

Normally, I would be inclined to be a fan of the Mayor because of her obvious Abbott and Costello parody potential (“Who’s the mayor?” “Her!” “Who?” “He’s on first…”). Unfortunately, she is approaching new records in the particular form of ethical misconduct I view as most disturbing in high offices, sexual harassment, followed by head-exploding excuse-making.

Her wrote text messages to Shirly (not a typo!) Yang in the spring of 2025, while serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives, that were later offered as exhibits in support of a Yang’s petition for harassment restraining order. She alleged that Her (“Who?”) engaged in a pattern of unwanted communications, intimidation and interference in Yang’s personal and professional lives. But the same month Her was sworn in as St. Paul’s first female and first Asian mayor, a Ramsey County court referee denied Yang’s petition, finding that the evidence did not meet the legal standard required to issue a harassment restraining order.

But now Her faces a separate investigation into allegations of sexual harassment following a complaint filed by St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry. Chief Henry alleges that the mayor sexually harassed subordinate city employees, including members of the St. Paul Police Department. In an April letter, Henry wrote that he decided to become a formal complainant after learning the alleged misconduct extended beyond isolated incidents. A letter by his attorney to St. Paul City Attorney Irene Kao alleges that Her sent “inappropriate, and, indeed, unlawful” text messages to city employees. That letter states Henry came forward because he believed employees could face retaliation if the alleged conduct went unaddressed and said his decision to file the complaint was based solely on principle as well as concern for city employees.

The Chief’s attorney included a screenshot of a text message by the mayor referencing “Weiner Wednesday” alongside a partially redacted image with an accompanying caption that reads: “When she wraps you up in her blanket after you gave her a good weinering,” followed by two laughing emojis.

Yikes.

I dived down Alice’s rabbit hole after seeing this head-exploder on Twitter/”X”. Planned Parenthood really is evil. It wants to kill as many unborn human beings as possible by bombarding vulnerable women with lies and euphemisms. I went to its website and couldn’t find the illogical nonsense above anywhere on that promotional and fundraising site, but there are many almost as absurd assertions:

• “The U.S. Supreme Court is now dominated by justices hostile to our freedom.” If anything, this Court is more determined to preserve individual liberty than any preceeding court in memory, notably by reining in the power of federal agencies.
• “[I]n June 2022, the court took away our federal constitutional right to abortion.” There never was a constitutional right to abortion, because Roe was a legally indefensible exercise of judicial activism and legislation.
• “[I]t goes against the will of the American people, 80% of whom believe that abortion should be legal.” The Court didn’t say abortion was illegal. The Court says it isn’t a right. The public is too ignorant to grasp the distinction, but Planned Parenthood is deliberately trying to make it dumber: they can have more babies killed that way.
• “This ruling robbed us of our power to make personal decisions about our own bodies, and gave that control to politicians.” No it did not. Women have the power not to get pregnant. No American has the power to take an innocent human life because it is inconvenient or its existence is badly timed. In a republic, the people delegate their lawmaking to elected representatives. That is the Constitution.
• “Reproductive freedom means every person gets to decide what’s right for their own body. No exceptions.” Ah yes, the big lie. “Every person”…except the vulnerable, genetically unique, innocent and powerless person who others get to decide that being dead is what’s “right for their own body.”

But “Abortion is gender-affirming care” is worst of all. Planned Parenthood is just parroting a deliberate euphemism for the ugly process of distorting an individual’s mind, organs, hormones and secondary sex characteristics to conform with the current social pathogen of gender-warping, the opposite of “gender affirming.” How could an abortion be gender-affirming? I guess the theory is that if you have an abortion you are female, so congratulations? But being pregnant (without some weird zygote implantation process worthy of Dr. Frankenstein) is also gender-affirming. Is Planned Parenthood saying that a woman who really wants to affirm her womanhood should have an abortion? It would be in character for the group, which is Machiavellian.

Lisa Carr, an abortion opponent writes in part at Victory Girls:

“The language is Orwellian, really. The language has gone from “women’s healthcare” to “choice”, to “bodily autonomy”, to “reproductive freedom” through the years. Now, abortion is “gender-affirming care”. Everything BUT what it actually is.Mutilation of body parts is “gender-affirming”. Murder of an innocent and perfectly-formed CHILD is also “gender-affirming”. Planned Parenthood is not only mutilating lives but language here and this is very dangerous and indicative of the depths to which we’ve lowered. May God help us.”

I think PP is playing cognitive dissonance games. It is working hard to find an metaphor for abortion that leaves out the icky unborn baby-killing part and paints a positive, appealing picture for the Woke and easily indoctrinated. Apparently the little matter of some actual connection to abortion is now dispensable, which is great for abortion promotion. Abortion is a romantic walk on a warm Hawaii beach! Abortion is a basket of golden retriever puppies! Abortion is sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows!

Meanwhile, according to the US Abortion Data Dashboard, the number of abortions—that is, deaths of human beings who would be alive today if given the chance—has increased each year from 2023. Last year’s total: 1,129,650. Oh, but if only it could have been more! (I’m channeling the ghouls at Planned Parenthood.)

If women want to keep killing the unborn, there’s nothing more that can be done about it, is there?

Another discouraging note: approximately 40% of abortions eliminate black babies, in a U.S. population that is less than 14% black.

When I left you in Part I, I was cataloguing the incompetence of the movie’s director, who some critics, probably all Batman fans, appear to regard as Orson Welles, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Spielberg and William Wyler rolled up in one.

Upon reflection, I need to mention another example at the risk of exposing my lack of fair reference since I never saw the second half of the movie.

Based on various reviews and analyses, I know that many aspects of the performances (Damon seems depressed and unengaged) and the unfolding story ( Why is Athena so passive?) are allegedly explained or justified by revelations in the film’s last scenes. However, with the exception of gimmick films like “The Sixth Sense,” in which fooling the audience is the central purpose of the movie, that is unconscionable story-telling, especially in a three hour movie. Finding out after Matt Damon has bored you stiff for hours and you’ve been wondering “Where the hell are all the gods?” the answer to the puzzle—“Oh! I see! Odysseus is depressed! Its complex PTSD! Now I realize in retrospect that I really enjoyed his nuanced portrayal of a serious human malady!” and “That’s it! There aren’t any gods, and “Athena” was just the hero’s way of dealing with the girls he saw beheaded!”—is unfair to the audience, to the actors, and to the source material. Rare directors, with the right material, can pull that trick off. If the first half of the movie loses the audience, it’s impossible.

2. Incompetence: The screenplay! The dialogue! Nolan is responsible for both, and shame on him. I don’t know that I have ever watched a major movie with such amateurish, hackneyed, stilted dialogue…when you could hear the dialogue. Here I have to also blame the actors as well. At least the stars have some control over what they say. Damon’s dialogue in particular was awful. He has the juice (so does Hathaway) to pull the director aside and say, “Come on. I can’t say that. Fix it.” This may be another example of how Nolan’s inflated reputation for being a genius harmed the film.

As for the screenplay, whoever got Nolan hooked on “Zeus’s Law” should be stuffed in a barrel filled with fat Lithuanian midgets. The best take-down of this thematic conceit comes from Emily Wilson appropriately enough, the scholar who wrote the translation of Homer that Nolan allegedly adapted for his movie, and who wrote, by far, the most thorough and intelligent review of it as well. (She hated it.)

After noting the obvious, that it’s weird how everyone blathers on about Zeus’s Law but Zeus is nowhere to be seen, and Odysseus doesn’t believe in the gods anyway unless they hang around as surrogates for headless girls, Wilson writes,

(See, Alizia? That’s an ethical “appeal to authority,” the opinion of a Homer scholar who has read the work in Greek and wrote the translation the film she’s critiquing was based on.)

Bingo! The movie, characters and plot as envisioned by Nolan are ethically incoherent. (I had the same complaint about Nolan’s Batman movies.)

Remaining notes:

It seems like a good time for one of these. I was working throughout the weekend and couldn’t take the time to ponder several interesting and important ethics developments. I’m also thinking a lot about the future of EA. Both my accountant and my gratis office consultant excoriated me last month for spending the two to three hours I devote every day to researching and writing posts as well as replying to comments (19, 722 posts since late 2009 and 69, 698 personal responses) and demanded that I figure out a way to monetize my work, especially since I have rather serious financial problems that have only become worse since my wife dropped dead in early 2024 (ProEthics is at least a two professional job, and my cloning experiments have failed). Neither understands that Ethics Alarms exists to fulfill the mission of both my business and me personally, which is to inspire, educate, and engage willing people regarding the important role societal ethics must have in the United States, and to do so in a style that isn’t pedantic, academic, or flaccid.

If I could find a way to monetize the website without significantly reducing its readership (“Surely nobody’s going to quit if you had a $50 a year subscription!,” my accountant said. Really? I only have five commenters now when the blog is free…**) My office consultant quit over the matter (and some other things), and hasn’t spoken to me since the discussion about EA.

Well, I’m not going to solve that conundrum today: I have promises to keep, and before I sleep I’m going to see “The Odyssey” tonight, primarily to assess the validity of the political complaints, and I had to wrestle my fingers to the floor to stop a post about people who condemn the film based on hearsay (you know, like I did).

OK, enough about me. Here are my briefer thoughts about…

1. Trans activist insanity. “Jeopardy!” nerd-turned-host Ken Jennings is being attacked on BlueSky for being “transphobic.” Why? Apparently the New York Times is unpopular with the radical pro-trans mob because the paper hasn’t been as aggressive in its pro-woke propaganda efforts on their behalf as with other issues. Jennings had written on the censorious, intolerant, left-wing alternative to Twitter/”X” that he plays the online Times game “Wordle” with his wife every day. This was typical of the BlueSky outrage: “I wish people who care about trans people could understand that playing NYT games is still an insult to trans people.”

To his credit, Jennings has so far refused to dignify the insanity with a serious response. “This may be true of others but I actually got express permission from the trans community to keep NYT games and recipes,” he replied to the lunatic. “I also have a news subscription, which is arguably worse, so I had to specifically send in a written request. Took 30 days but I got it approved. They were like ‘trans people are not a monolith’ and ‘like-minded allies may disagree on specific media boycotts’ and stuff like that. It was a huge load off my mind!” Naturally, this just triggered the crazies more, and Jennings is now under daily attack, with calls for boycotts of the iconic quiz show he hosts and for him to be fired.

As of today, Jennings has refused to grovel an apology (or to stop playing Wordle). But why would he have an account on BlueSky if he weren’t hostage to The Great Stupid’s bubble?

2. Speaking of fearless truth-tellers who refuse to be intimidated…J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author who has been vilified world-wide for simply expressing common sense and logic regarding trans insanity, posted a masterpiece on “X” along with a frighting video of a rant by a self-declared woman who not only looks and sounds male, “she” looks and sounds like a male maniac. This is not going to get Rowling off the LGBTQ+ hate list:

If you don’t think he’s a woman, you’re transphobic. When he claimed to be a woman, he became a woman. He now belongs in women’s changing rooms, bathrooms, hospital wards, prison cells and rape support centres.

If you try and differentiate between him and a trans woman who looks more convincing as a woman, you are promoting patriarchal beauty norms. If you admit to seeing an aggressive and possibly unbalanced man in this video, you’re saying all trans people are mentally ill predators. If you refuse to let him into female-only spaces, you’re removing his right to exist. If you suggest he could comfortably use male facilities, you secretly want him assaulted. If you refuse to call him ‘she’, you are guilty of unpardonable cruelty. If you’re a woman who wouldn’t want to share a locker room with him, or a man who wouldn’t want your daughter, sister or mother to get undressed in close proximity to him, you belong to the far-right. If you point out that there is no objective difference between his claim to be a woman and that of any other biological male claiming a trans identity, you are too stupid to understand the circular arguments explaining why he’s not really trans whereas other men who say they’re women are really trans.

If you’re righteous, you must argue that this man’s self-declared identity overrides any consideration of the safety and rights of females. To be godly, you must agree he’s as ‘valid’ as every other trans woman, because people are who they say they are. No matter what your eyes, ears and common sense are telling you, if you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of history, you must pretend to believe that this angry, intimidating man is actually a vulnerable, oppressed woman.

You know…when Dr. Fauci revealed himself to be a narcissist, a coward, a fick, and an all-time American villain.

The Fauci Ethics Train Wreck is yet another integrity test for the American Left and the Axis of Unethical Conduct. It has flunked the others, so it is not surprising that it is flunking this one. The ethical course would be to admit the truth:

“Yes, they were thrilled with the pandemic lockdown, because it wrecked the Trump economy and gave them a chance to install a puppet President who could be manipulated by extreme left unelected functionaries. Yes, that made us especially willing to accept Dr. Fauci and Co.’s draconian measures, especially since it gave Democratic elected officials an opportunity to play dictator and constrain Americans’ civil rights in the name of “safety.” Yes, we sanctified Dr. Fauci beyond all reason to enhance our irresponsible “follow the science” grift, which has been so successful in the climate change policy debate. Yes, we were complicit in installing ruinous and unnecessary policies, based on panic that our media sowed, that retarded a generation’s education and social development, ruined businesses, permanently damaged whole industries, and killed people.”

Nah! That’s not how the American Left rolls in 2026. How much better it is to deflect, lie, ignore multiple metaphorical elephants, and maintain a position that has become completely untenable.

The op-ed titled “What We Really Learned From the Fauci Hearing” (gift link, but this is no present) from the New York Times could have been designed by an AI bot with the instruction, “write an op-ed denying that the Fauci hearing was what it was, using the topic to blame Republicans while avoiding inconvenient facts.”

This paragraph, near the end, is a masterpiece of dishonesty and sophistry:

“Dr. Fauci is a complicated man who has been both elevated and reduced to a symbol. His legacy after a decades-long career at the intersection of science and politics is now defined by incompatible, contested accounts of his pandemic-era impact. There is little hope of resolving that contest any time soon.”

“Complicated”! The smoking gun of brazen sophistry, prevarication and equivocation. There’s noting complicated about Fauci. He’s a lifetime bureaucrat who became intoxicated with power when the opportunity arrived, and abused that power for the benefit his own ego, his political party, and the detriment of millions. It is an old story. Faucis have been analyzed by historians, playwrights and novelists for centuries. “Complicated” is an anodyne, toothless word used to excuse wrong-doers.

Lesson: It’s a joke.

I have concluded, over the past year of almost constant disillusionment, that the public is being deliberately deceived regarding the legal profession’s “self policing” duties. To watch TV or legal-themed movies, one would think that any significant violation of a lawyer’s jurisdiction’s Rules of Professional Conduct is likely to result in disbarment. That isn’t true. It isn’t close to true. The overwhelming majority of unethical lawyers, even flagrant, criminal unethical lawyers who prey on trusting clients, are never disciplined. Not only that, lawyers use their bar associations to make certain that is the case.

I have two clients who have been victimized by the same D.C. lawyer. A detailed and fully competent complaint by one of those clients, a non-lawyer, was ignored. I am a recognized legal ethics expert, and after I learned the facts regarding a second client’s victimization by this predatory lawyer, I realized that as a D.C. lawyer myself, I was ethically obligated to file a complaint to the D.C. bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, as well as the lawyer’s other bar association. Rule 8.3 in almost all U.S. jurisdictions requires lawyers to file complaints when they know that another lawyer has engaged in conduct calling into question his or her honesty, integrity, or fitness to practice law in other respects.

A third bar association in a jurisdiction where this unethical lawyer has practiced law without a license refused to receive my complaint, arguing that since this crooked lawyer wasn’t licensed to practice law there, they had no jurisdiction. I’m not making this up.

In undertaking this task, I was shocked at how deliberately burdensome it is in every jurisdiction. You are forced to use websites which are written in jargon, with unduly verbose instructions and explanations. You are forced to fill out on-line forms which freeze and often don’t work. It is almost impossible to get anyone in the appropriate offices to answer the phone, so questions are not answered. The process is confusing for lawyers; non-lawyers are likely to find it impossible.

I believe this is intentional. I know the contempt lawyers have for client complaints; they are open about it. And it is true that a lot of clients think lawyers must be unethical because they didn’t prevail in a case. Therefore there is an institutional bias against complaints against bar member by non-lawyers, and that presumption that they are just a nuisance. Apparently the complaint system has been made so confusing and user-unfriendly in order to make all but the most determined victims of lawyer misconduct give up, throw up their hands and say, “Oh, the hell with it.”

But I am a lawyer and an ethics expert, and I was and am determined to get this spectacularly unethical lawyer where he belongs, ideally in prison, but at the every least in some other occupation where he will do less damage.

It was suggested that I lead this post off with this now well-circulated meme…

…but to me, it is too kindly and trivializes the villainy of the man. The old Ethics Alarms reliable, the unmasking of Lon Cheney in “The Phantom of the Opera,” better expresses just how repugnant his conduct has been.

If you are shocked—shocked!—to learn that Fauci is a celebrity-obsessed liar and unapologetic villain, you haven’t been paying attention or you just aren’t very bright. You certainly haven’t been following Ethics Alarms very long. I’m embarrassed that it took me as long as it did to write a full post about how despicable Fauci was, though by mid-summer 2020 I had figured it all out thanks to the photo of him maskless with two companions at a Nationals baseball game, where he had ostentatiously thrown out the first pitch (like a little girl) while wearing his virtue-signaling mask at least 60 feet from any other human being.

Here is Fauci’s EA dossier, more negative than that of almost any public figure, including the Clintons. I already took a victory lap for pegging Fauci for what he was this April, so I will spare you another “I told you so.” That month, Anthony Fauci’s former adviser David Morens was indicted and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and two counts of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records relating to the origins of the Wuhan virus. He faces up to 51 years in prison. I wrote, “If Morens is guilty so is Fauci, who denied under oath that he funded ‘gain of function’ experiments that modified bat coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started.”

Sen. Rand Paul came to the same conclusion, not that it was elusive. In his excellent recitation of Fauci’s betrayal of trust and the public this morning as the doctor who proclaimed himself the personification of science was called to account, Paul said in part,

“There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis. And there will again be officials that insist uncertainty must be hidden for the public’s own good. They will demand obedience. They will invoke science. “I am the science!” as though it were a commandment. They will argue that government officials cannot be questioned, because questioning them would undermine public trust. They have it backwards. It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy.”