When you consider the many ways elections can be “rigged,” “fixed” or “stolen,” consider the subtle, often invisible ways search engines like Google prioritize sources of information, advocacy, and political opinion. There is plenty of evidence that this is occurring with increasing vigor (Ethics Alarms itself appears to be a target), and the recent experience of video journalist Matt Orfeala is particularly chilling.
Orfeala made and posted the video above that consists entirely of video clips, arranged to make the quite valid point that Democrats have “denied elections” for decades without being accused of criminal fraud or supporting insurrections, insurrection defined as “attempting to disqualify states’ slate of electors.” Nonetheless, the video was “demonetized” by YouTube, which is owned by Google, on the grounds that it advocated a “dangerous organization.” You know, like Joe…
…says the Republican Party is. Here’s the notice YouTube sent :
Since the utter corruption and lack of trustworthiness of journalists was the topic of today’s first post, it’s only fair to re-visit the other contender for America’s most corrupt alleged profession, educators. Deciding which of the two now virtually full-time Leftist indoctrination groups is more unethical makes an ethicist sound like Faye Dunaway being slapped by Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown”: “She’s my daughter!” <slap!> “She’s my sister!” <slap!>My daughter!” <slap!>“My sister!”
What sparked this sudden epiphany from the school board member (in the JeffCo Public Schools district in Jefferson County,Colorado) was this revelation: Teachers have been giving students surveys about their “gender identity,” because they believe that this is more important than, say, teaching them to add, write, and think. There are several parent lawsuits regarding the practice, so the Colorado affiliate of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, instructed its members to destroy any evidence of having given students a gender identity survey
On this date, September 1, in 1971, the Pittsburgh Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh wrote down the first all-black lineup in Major League Baseball history. It wasn’t noticed at the time, even by most of the players. The landmark was only quickly mentioned during the team’s radio broadcast of the game, which the Bucs won before a tiny crowd of 11,278 in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. The line-up was a completely natural occurrance, according to Murtaugh, who was not one to decide on personnel based on “diversity, equity and inclusion,” which had not yet begun its path of destruction across the culture and society. “When it comes to making out the lineup, I’m colorblind, and the athletes know it,” he said. “The best men in our organization are the ones who are here. And the ones who are here all play, depending on when the circumstances present themselves.”
Deciding on employment, opportunities and benefits based on merit! What a concept! Meanwhile, this month’s Harvard Alumni magazine featuring the university’s new President, who just coincidentally has spent her entire career career from college onward promoting “diversity” and writing about systemic racism in America, discusses the Supreme Court’s affirmative action knock-down by quoting her response to it, promising that the institution will continue to “believe—deeply—that a thriving, diverse intellectual community is essential to academic excellence and critical to shaping the next generation of leaders.” That is clearly code for “policies that make race and ethnicity a primary factor in admission when tangible and substantive measures of ability and achievement will not reach the desired result” are essential to academic excellence and critical to shaping the next generation of leaders. The obvious response to that is “Prove it!” There is no persuasive data demonstrating the benefits of “diversity” in a student body or in an education, certainly not to the extent that it justifies, as Justice Roberts wrote in the SCOTUS opinion, making race a negative factor in determining who gets admitted to an elite college. At Harvard, “diversity” is usually an illusion: there as everywhere else, student form their own peer groups and associations based on mutual interests and affinities. Justifying racial discrimination by extolling a factor’s benefits that literally no research confirms is the ultimate progressive conceit.Would that all-black Pirates team have been better with a couple of white players on the field—or better still, a proportion of white players matching the national demographics? Somehow I don’t think so.
Incidentally, the Pirates won the World Series in 1971.
1. And now for something completely different...was this unethical?
2. Huh. Tough question…Yesterday Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell froze for an extended period for the second time in less than two months. Possibly McConnell is experiencing one of the common effects of a concussion, which he suffered after a fall in March; that’s the current line of the Republican PR machine Meanwhile, Senator Diane Feinstein seems to be little more than a puppet being propped up by aides, and Pennsylvania default Senator John Fetterman is stumbling along with a brain damaged by a stroke. “What can be done to address the issue of a Senator who is unable to do the job?” asks legal commentator Michael Dorf.
Me! Call on me! What can be done is for parties to have the integrity to stop running candidates who are too old (if you will hit 80 during the term you are running for, you’re too old) and for politicians to have the respect for the public and their office not to offer themselves as candidates when the know, or should know (somebody tell them!) that their faculties and health are failing. Why is that so hard to establish as a “democratic norm”?
As is usual on holiday weekends around here, the tumbleweeds will be blowing through the cyber-streets no matter what fascinating ethical conundrums I can find. Nevertheless, perhaps the few, those happy few, can make up in quality here what EA will almost certainly lack in quantity.
Climate change hysteria, hype, propaganda and disinformation have become overwhelming lately, and with hurricane season upon us, it can be expected to get even worse. So is evidence that the spectacularly woke and incompetent Biden administration is so dedicated to the enviro-fascism this cult engenders that its priorities have become unhinged. For example, when the Pentagon needed to be devoting it full attention to minimizing the carnage from Biden’s disastrous snap withdrawal from Afghanistan in the two weeks between the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, and the final U.S. military flight out of Afghanistan on August 30, newly revealed emails show that top Pentagon officials were working to finalize the Department of Defense Climate Adaptation Plan, which declares climate change a major national security risk. After all, what’s a few dead servicemen and abandoned foreign allies along with the collapse of U.S. foreign policy credibility when the END OF THE WORLD looms?
Central to this international brainwashing and bullying effort—the U.N. recently ruled that children can sue nations that haven’t adequately wasted resources on anti-climate change measures that are likely to have no effect whatsoever on the climate—is the misleading claim that there is “scientific consensus” on the topic, when in fact there is not, and when even if this were true, “consensus” on scientific matters has been wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong, throughout history. The conclusions of this so-called consensus are being parroted by activists, politicians and journalists who couldn’t pass a 7th grade science quiz.
Meanwhile, President Biden is being urged to declare a constitutionally dubious “climate emergency” because of all this “certainty” regarding climate change doom, despite the fact that none of the models have panned out and predictions of deadlines to “save the planet” have been as accurate as the those of latter day prophets who have announced the exacts dates when Armageddon was arriving.
Notice the racist symbolism in that symbol above? No? That’s because there isn’t any, but never mind: Jayden Rodriguez, a 12-year-old middle-schooler in Colorado Springs, was kicked out of class at The Vanguard School, a local charter school, because he had a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack. Jayden was told he had to remove the patch before he would be admitted to the class again.
In an email, a school administrator claimed that the patch was “disruptive to the school environment.” Boy, do I ever remember getting upset over the patches fellow classmates had on their backpacks! This was, of course, an example of woke fascism by a teacher and a school, nothing more or less. Further emails from the school told the student’s mother that “some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate—or even racism.” Oh, well if “some” erroneously associate a historical symbol that had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery or racism as offensive, by all means punish the kid who knows what it really symbolizes. “Some” see the American flag as a symbol of white supremacy, imperialism, and systemic racism. They are welcome to their foolish opinion, but that doesn’t mean they should have the power to stop any sane American from displaying Old Glory.
Prof. Jonathan Turley has two excellent and revealing columns up right now, one dealing with the ongoing assault on Donald Trump from the Axis of Unethical Conduct that Ethics Alarms readers are familiar with (that’s the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance that set out to punish Trump for defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016), and the other, stunningly, advocating a House inquiry into the impeachment of Joe Biden.
I have a special interest in both columns, which I will explain while sending you, I hope, over to Prof. Turley’s site to read both of his essays. I want to begin by, not for the first time, saluting Turley. He has courageously maintained studied objectivity and a lack of partisan bias in his erudite commentary on the political horrors of the past nearly three decades, beginning with his guest appearances on cable and network news shows during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Because the George Washington Law School professor has not disgraced himself like so many of his academic colleagues by submitting to full-blown Trump Derangement and woke-polluter legal analysis, he is now widely derided on the Left (and presumably at GW) as knee-jerk conservative and Republican apologist, which he definitely is not. As a result, Turley, who once was welcome on all of the public affairs shows and had op-eds in the usual leftist-propaganda publications, is now reduced to offering commentary on Fox News and the conservative New York Post, with The Hill being his only remaining non-GOP leaning platform. He also feels required to place an “I’m not biased, I’m an objective and fact-driven analyst” litany in every blog post that points out that an Axis position is unethical or wrong. For example, here is one from yesterday’s column about the Washington Post’s misrepresentation of the Georgia indictment against Trump:
“When the Mar-a-Lago indictment came down, I was one of the first to say that I considered it a strong case. I have since noted that the case seems to be strengthening with time….I have long disagreed with Trump over his claim of systemic voting fraud. I criticized Trump’s Jan. 6 speech while he was giving it. I supported Vice President Mike Pence and his certification of the election of Joe Biden. I have also regularly criticized Trump when I felt that such criticism was warranted. This does not change my view of whether the call is compelling evidence of a crime….”
It’s an indictment of the state of our public discourse that Turley feels compelled to do that—he issues comparable disclaimers several times a week—but that’s what honest pundits they have to in these times of intimidation and cancellation by the totalitarian left. (Last week, I was asked to delete the reference to Ethics Alarms in my CV accompanying my expert opinion in a court case because “the judge is very progressive.”) Here are my brief comments on the two recent columns.
Upset by Donald Trump’s mugshot, one of MSNBC’s racist hosts (it has several), Joy Reid, indulged herself in a full hate-rant meltdown, saying on the air,
“As a teenager living in New York, I’ve said it before, this is why I never watched ‘The Apprentice.’ I despised Donald Trump. He signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me. I still remember he made five teenagers my age take a mug shot. I despised Donald Trump because to me he signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me, my cousins, my friends”…So, people like Giuliani, and people like Trump, persecuted black and brown people in New York. It’s what they did for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed lording over people who had nothing, who had no million-dollar lawyers. Who couldn’t change lawyers at the top of a hat and get a different hip-hop lawyer in the next day when they’re tired of one. Who couldn’t go to make their case on Fox, or a Newsmax, who had nothing, and who Donald Trump loaded his everything over. And still, people who looked like them, put him in rap longs. It was indignity, to me, that something I loved, a culture I loved, lionized that. To me, this is justice. The fact that Manhattan didn’t give him a mugshot, I thought was offensive. I thought that the feds, we know it looks like, he was the president of the United States. Okay, offensive. Everyone else had to take them. This case, and I think Fani Willis is a hero, she’s a national hero, because she, more than any other prosecutor in this country, and I respect Jack Smith, and I respect all the prosecutors that are doing this. She is the only one who said, these wealthy, powerful, privileged men and women are just American citizens and when they break the law, they will take that picture.”
No hate, bias, and fantasy here! Say what you may about Fox News and CNN, the other two outrageously untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical broadcast news outlets (NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS are merely untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical), at least they eventually dumped Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter. There was a time when MSNBC had standards too: it fired Keith Olbermann when he went too too far (he always went too far), Melissa Harris Perry, another toxic anti-white racist, and Martin Bashir, but that was before Donald Trump ran for President, and MSNBC became the “anything goes” channel.
The most recent nut-ball casting ethics lunacy that finds something anti-Semitic about prosthetic noses makes my brain hurt. It is such fanatic political correctness and woke “gotcha!” extremism that led to this recent post, in which I mused about owing vile radio talk show host Michael Savage an apology for condemning his claim years ago that liberalism is a mental disease.
Everything I wrote about the complaints that casting eminent non-Jewish actor Bradley Cooper as composer Leonard Bernstein and having him wear make-up (including a fake nose) to look more like Bernstein applies to the wacko criticism of casting Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in “Golda” (that’s Hellen on the right above) and having her outfitted with a big nose. In fact, you could just read the Bernstein post substituting “Golda Meir” for “Leonard Bernstein” and “Helen Mirren” for “Bradley Cooper.” In fairness, Mirren requires more make-up than Cooper because she is an attractive woman, and Golda was anything but (big nose notwithstanding, Lenny was a handsome man), and it would take a prosthetic nose to make almost any actress be a credible Golda Meir on screen. Mirren is perhaps the most distinguished actress in her age range right now, and a complex and historic figure like Meir deserves no less for her film biography. Never mind, though: what matters in these days of woke madness isn’t good acting or good movies, but racial, ethnic and gender spoils, all executed with the integrity of Calvinball.
Ethics Alarms 