You may have noticed that there has not been the same frequency of Christmas-related posts on EA this year. I’m sorry; it’s the most ethical time of year, but even hearing a Christmas carol depresses me right now, and I need to be in top form because challenges and crises are accumulating on all fronts, professional, familial, financial and personal. No tree, no decorations, no parties or festive social events…no fun. Sometimes life forces tough choices, and though this is one I never imagined I would have to make, here it is. It’s time to be a responsible adult. I hate being a responsible adult…

1. The City Journal (an excellent site) on the Harvard president’s scandal:

“…The hypocrisies are mounting at Harvard. The school’s academically undistinguished, DEI-happy, and arguably malevolent new president has been unmasked as a repeat plagiarist by Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, Isabel Vincent and her colleagues at the New York Post, and Phillip W. Magness. After apologizing for her words before Congress with the admission, “Words matter,” President Gay, along with the rest of the Harvard machine, went straight back to disregarding basic codes of conduct and acting as though words didn’t matter. No more legalese for this president or for the 11 other members of the Harvard Corporation: just a behind-the-scenes legal threat of defamation against the Post, which was poised already in late October to break the story.

Unlike the conflict in the Middle East, which even I—an ardent supporter of Israel—admit is complicated, academic dishonesty is rarely complicated. In most cases, including Gay’s, there is no middle ground: either you are a plagiarist or you aren’t.

Gay is guilty of plagiarism by the code of conduct of any modern academic organization, certainly including Harvard and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she went to school and was a trustee until this past June.

Gay’s record of dishonesty is extensive. At last count, incontrovertible examples of plagiarism have been uncovered in seven publications spanning 14 years, including her Harvard dissertation. Any one of even her less egregious infractions—shorter phrases lifted from cited works without quotation marks—would land a Harvard student in hot water. Any one of her larger infractions—paragraphs lifted from works not cited at all—would almost certainly result in suspension. And any student who displayed this full range of behavior would be expelled.

Everyone knows this. The members of the Harvard Corporation know this. The five living former presidents of Harvard who “offer[ed their] strong support” know this. Those scholars from whom she plagiarized but who inexplicably deny that she did so, or say that they don’t care, know this.…Gay herself knows this, surely, despite saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.”

As long as Gay remains president—indeed, as long as she remains a member of the faculty—Harvard is in greater trouble than its higher-ups appear to understand.

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Colorado Supreme Court yesterday became the first to declare former President Donald Trump ineligible to run for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. This removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, but the court immediately stayed its own order until the Supreme Court settles the issue for all time. With several Democratic operatives and allies trying this legal Hail Mary to remove the major threat to the party holding on to the Presidency, it was inevitable that SCOTUS would have to deal with the crack-brained theory eventually.

The reaction to the decision was something I’ve never seen before: the desperate Axis (the resistance, Democrats and the mainstream media) was giddy about the decision because it provides some hope that Joe Biden won’t have to face Trump in the 2024 election, while conservatives and Trump-supporting Republicans were high-fiving each other because they believe the decision provides smoking gun evidence that the Left is trying to win an election by keeping its most feared political opponent off the ballot “by any means necessary.” That certainly is the sense that was conveyed by Althouse’s mostly conservative (but not strongly Trump-supporting) commenters last night. Althouse called the 14th Amendment ploy a “wild legal theory.” Here are the first 19 comments (the 20th is too long, but it also rejects the decision…):

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Yes, it’s that time of year when Ethics Alarms will be announcing as many Best of… and Worst of…ethics awards as I get around to posting. A bit of background, in case you rely on the New York Times for your Washington. D.C. news (the Times up to now has ignored the embarrassing—to Democrats–saga completely):

The American Spectator was the first to reveal that a staffer for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md) regularly posted images and videos on Twitter (“X”) of himself having sex with a male partner. One such video was particularly provocative: the sex show was captured in a conference room in the Hart Senate Office Building, where his boss the Senator’s office is located. The star is shown naked except for a jock strap, on on all fours, facing away from the camera, with a cartoon of the Capitol Dome covering his posterior. The Daily Caller then posted the video, leading the Capitol police to investigate (Prof. Turley explains that the video may be evidence of a crime).

It wasn’t exactly a case requiring Columbo, since the staffer had made the video publicly available. He was identified as Cardin aide Aidan Maese-Czeropski, 24, and was quickly fired in a terse, “we don’t want to talk about it” statement from Cardin’s office.

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This supercut of Democrats and their mainstream media minions (well, and Liz Cheney, of course) flogging Big Lie #3 ( “Trump Is A Fascist/Hitler/Dictator/Monster”) is a really funny, or, if you are a member of the Democratic Party, sad. If someone you know thinks it’s genuinely scary, however, try to get them some help.

Behold…

Interesting! FireFox, my browser, is blocking this video from posting, though embed codes just like it have always worked. I’m sorry, you’ll just have to go here to see what this post is about:

https://news.grabien.com/story-media-warn-if-trump-s-re-elected-every-bad-thing-they-can-possibly-ima

Incidentally, that once responsible, respected Presidential historian who keeps showing up is Michael Beschloss, whose EA dossier is here.

It is stressful and irritating to have so many ethics stories dancing in my head like sugarplums, so I’m going to indulge myself in a quick exercise to get them out there and make room for the incoming stampede….

1. Yes, Michelle Goldberg really is this clueless. The scary part is that there are so many like her. The most irritating Times opinion writer—-not the worst, now, there are worse than her, like Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman and the inimitable Charles Blow, but she’s the one who irritates me the most—put her name under an op-ed titled, “What’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?” Gee, what a mystery! What could it be? “Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future,” she decides. What are those “excellent policy ideas”? Goldberg points to dismantling “capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy [and] the nuclear family” and concludes that doing these marvelous things are just too darn hard for the faint-hearted.

It’s easier to be conservative, see: “The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times.”

Yeah, that must be it, Michelle.

It couldn’t possibly be that after assessing the state of the nation since 2008 and watching the collapse of the education system, rot in the cities, a rise in racial preferences, rampant inflation and an out-of-control national debt, chaos at the border, riots across the country launched by a Marxist scam group, the explosion of state-driven censorship efforts in the name of fighting “misinformation,” the transformation of journalism into a Leftist propaganda network, the return of anti-Semitism, the gradual destruction of women’s sports by trans-madness, and—there is a lot more—cutting to the chase, this…

…that some progressives have done what rational adults do when they find that something they really wanted to work doesn’t: they try something else.

Nah. It couldn’t be that...

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