There were two major stories with ethics implications that arrived last evening after I had closed down Ethics Alarms for the night. Both involved institutions that involve lifetime connections for me. I’d prefer to write about the astounding $700,000,000 contract baseball’s biggest star Shohei Otahni signed—and will—but first I must again deal with another Harvard issue.

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth, the third inept president, had performed slightly better than her two counterparts at the Ivy League schools, though not by much. MIT leadership quickly gave her a public vote of confidence, reflecting, I think, the school’s calculation that its non-humanities and non-social sciences focus as well as its traditional position as only the second most famous university in Cambridge, Mass. would allow the controversy there to calm down sufficiently so it could get back to what the institution really cares about: technology, ones and zeros, and engineering. It is a cynical response, but a safe one.

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The Republican National Committee announced yesterday that it would be holding no more primary debates. It’s about time. The debates presented nothing, literally nothing, more than dart boards for Democrats and progressive pundits to aim at. Few watched the things other than desperate NeverTrumpers. If Donald Trump had participated, the four events might have been consequential. It would have been ethical and responsible of Trump to stand on the same stage as his competition and allow them to challenge him, but it also would have been stupid. He could only lose by taking that chance.

To celebrate the demise of this completely pointless exercise, Ethics Alarms offers a few observations on the final installment.

1. It began with a lie. Moderator Megyn Kelly: “On stage tonight, four candidates all vying to become their party’s nominee and given the state of affairs in our political system right now, one of you might very well do it.”

2. Ronald Reagan memorably said that it was a “commandment” that Republicans “shalt not” speak ill of any fellow Republican. RR was astute: these kind of scorpions-in-a-bottle displays only weaken the party and give aid and comfort to Democrats. Reagan’s “11th Commandment” seems especially relevant because a full half of the debaters last week were only there to troll the other Republicans on stage and, in bitter Chris Christie’s case, Donald Trump too. Neither the disgraced former New Jersey governor nor class clown Vivek Ramaswamy have a slice of an iota of a scintilla of a micro-chance of getting the Republican nomination, so they are wasting time, diverting attention, and indulging their egos to the detriment of everyone else.

3.Nikki Haley, sadly, is a weasel. Ramaswamy accurately characterized her bone-headed suggestion that anonymous statements and aliases should be forbidden on social media, and Haley denied it, then changed the subject. She could have simply said that she was wrong. That would have been refreshing. She can’t be trusted.

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Apparently all of the pro-terrorism vibes coming from the American Left these days prompted someone to finally reveal that Sean McDermott, head coach of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, told his players at the 2019 training camp to emulate the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. After all, he explained, they “were all able to get on the same page to orchestrate attacks to perfection.” The coach led his player through the exercise of considering that daunting obstacles the attackers faced. “What tactics do you think they used to come together?” he asked.

I wonder why he didn’t use the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor instead. The Japanese really did a terrific job in achieving their mission. Or the way Santa Ana carried out the pre-dawn massacre of the men in the Alamo: that was quite a well-executed plan too. Come to think of it, I’d save that one until he has a coaching job in Dallas or Houston…

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I would think that the forum should be roiling today. It will also give me some time to finish a post about the aftermath of the humiliating performance by the three college presidents before Congress this week..

Call it “ethics dominoes.”

Long ago I added Snopes.com to the Ethics Alarms blacklist of untrustworthy websites for a series of dishonest and pro-Left “fact-checks” that were nothing of the kind. (You can see the once “urban legends” site’s Ethics Alarms dossier here.) For some reason—-maybe they want to restore their tarnished reputation before the 2024 campaign so they can be an effective Democratic Party hit squad again?—the site did a fact-check on this anti-Trump tweet, another volley in the current Big Lie #3 assault by the Axis of Unethical Conduct as it shifts into first gear in its “by any means necessary”effort to save Joe Biden and defeat Trump:

Snopes concluded that the Biden-Harris claim was contrived and false:

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Amazing.

Dr. Pepper held its annual, silly, Dr. Pepper Tuition Giveaway at halftime during the game between the Texas Longhorns and the Oklahoma State Cowboys over the weekend. Two college students had to toss as many footballs as they could into their respective Dr. Pepper-branded bins five yards away within the allotted time, with the winner getting $100,000. It was a close contest, with the two tied at 10 successful tosses each at the end, forcing an overtime 15-second period. And they tied again, at 16, forcing a second overtime period.

Ryan Georgian, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania finally defeated Gavin White, a junior at Ohio State University, for the big prize. The students had been chosen for the stunt based on their video submissions to Dr. Pepper.

But wait!

A review of the video showed that Georgian only was successful in five tosses in the first overtime, but was somehow credited with six, forcing the final show-down. I see five “refs” in the picture. Apparently one of them can’t count, and the others weren’t paying attention. Were these real football referees, or just guys dressed up as refs? Was anyone paying attention? The mistake wasn’t flagged until after the game, on social media.

How hard is it to count to six?

Dr. Pepper, which had no choice really, decided to give both students $100,000. So far, no one has taken responsibility for the botch.

Apparently terrified that there is a real chance their team will lose power in the 2024 elections, media pundits are abandoning all restraint already. You see, they want everyone to believe that the President who delivered that most fascist speech in American political history—that’s him above—has to be re-elected to “save democracy” from Donald Trump. The last few days have seen a wave of these screeds, and their audacity and palpable whiff or panic is remarkable. There were three especially notable ones, two from the New York Times and and one from the Washington Post. All three use Big Lie #3 from the Ethics Alarms directory, just recently updated: “Trump Is A Fascist/Hitler/Dictator/Monster.” Apparently a talking points memo went out from the Biden White House or the DNC to the Axis allies in the media as President Biden’s poll numbers have sunk to new lows (though still ridiculously high, given his performance and, well, you know). The theme in all three is the same: there is a “clear and present danger” that if elected, Trump will take over the government and install himself as a dictator. I wrote this three years ago:

David French’s primal scream in the Times, “It’s Time to Fix America’s Most Dangerous Law,” is the most insidious: his theory is that a President Trump would use the Insurrection Act, a federal law permitting the President, in a sufficiently dire emergency, to deploy military troops as a domestic police force under his direct command. The other two pieces (with suspiciously similar headlines), “Trump attempts to spin anti-democracy, authoritarian criticism against Biden” (the Post) and “Trump’s Defense to Charge That He’s Anti-Democratic? Accuse Biden of It” (NYT) spin out Big Lie #3 in more general terms. Isaac Arnsdorf and Marianne LeVine quote cherry picked “expert,” Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University, for example: “Trump’s Iowa speech continues his use of fascist rhetoric: it’s us versus them, he tells his supporters, and ‘they’ are enemies who cheat. Authoritarians have a lot of rhetorical tricks for explaining away anti-democratic actions as actually ‘democratic.”

The Times piece, by Michael Gold, states, “While Mr. Trump shattered democratic norms throughout his presidency and has faced voter concerns that he would do so again in a second term, the former president in his speech repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of corrupting politics and waging a repressive “all-out war” on America.” It’s versatile of Gold to bring Big Lie #6, “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy,” into the discussion, but like David French and the Post’s Biden campaign soldiers at the Post, #3 is still the weaponized lie of choice.

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That song is a high;ight from the film of Broadway musical “Li’l Abner,” based on what was once the most popular political satire comic strip in the funny papers. I immediately thought of it (I’ve staged it many times in musical revues, and written parody lyrics in various decades) when I read the gob-smacking story of Christian Ziegler and his wife, which could have been made up by an evil AI bot dedicated to making Republicans look as hypocritical and ridiculous as possible.

Ziegler has been accused of sexual assault, but that’s just the tip of a very messy iceberg.

CNN obtained a search warrant affidavit from the Florida Center for Government Accountability. It indicates that Ziegler and his wife Bridget planned a “three-way” with the alleged victim and complainant on the day of the alleged assault. “When the victim learned that Bridget could not make it, she changed her mind and canceled with Christian,” the document says.

Well, that’s perfectly reasonable! Let’s not be prudes: Should kinky sex disqualify someone from being the head of a state political party that strives to appeal to conservative values? Only if the public finds out about it: call this the “Kinky Republican State Official Principle.” If you are going to engage in private conduct that will pull you down on the public’s cognitive dissonance scale, you had better make certain the fun stays private, and if you can’t, don’t do it or resign first.

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