Why have I used the old Carol Burnett Show soap opera satire to describe such a serious issue? What we are witnessing, as discussed in the previous post, is literally sickening (it has made my stomach turn for the past week), and our choices are to be furious, terrified, depressed, or mordantly amused. I’m always at my best when my sense of humor is working. Hence “As the Stomach Turns.”

Coming up is author Michael Shellenberger’s tweet stream continuing Twitter’s record of sabotaging speech and democracy. My god, it is nauseating. These are children; power-drunk, arrogant, irresponsible juvenile activists who talked themselves into violating the ethical principles of fairness, honesty, competence, and civic responsibility. They were so biased they were stupid, and so stupid they couldn’t tell they were biased.

It is terrifying that people like this, across social media, Big Tech and the mainstream media presume to decide what the American people get to read, see and hear, and equally terrifying that so many with power and influence are now attempting to justify it, minimize it, deny it, or, worst of all, continue it. Anyone who does any of these things or who supports those support them need to be recognized as having virtual “T’s” tattooed as scarlet letters on their foreheads, and treated accordingly: condemned, mocked, neutralized and shunned. The “T” stands for totalitarianism enabler. An “E” for “enabler” or “enemy of the people” would also work. Come to think of it, so would the more literary “A”…for “Asshole.”

What has been revealed in the four installments of Twitter records released by Elon Musk so far…and how I wish they had been released in readable form so that I, among others, didn’t have to spend unbillable time making it so…is that the interference with the 2020 election as well as the manipulation of political discourse before and after it was far worse, and far more sinister, than the Russian fake news inflicted on Facebook (and believed by only the dimmest of bulbs who happened to see it) that led Hilary Clinton to claim her defeat in 2016 was illegitimate. Blocking the opinions and dissent of one side of the national political debate while applying double standards to “amplify” favored progressive claims (many of which were as false as the Russian fake news) while burying, “shadow banning” and otherwise hamstringing conservatives is a far more powerful and destructive practice. And that is what Democrats and the mainstream media (and, I bet, many of your friend and relatives) are defending. Now we know just how corrupt they are. We know just how much freedom of speech, expression, dissent and political discourse as well as public information and understanding has been and is under attack.

America finds itself in this existential fix because its citizens were apathetic, blind and in denial as one institution and sector after another—education, academia, law, journalism, social media, the scientific community, entertainment, and the Democratic Party itself— were gradually captured and corrupted by ruthless ideologues. They didn’t even try to hide it either. The nation has no more excuses for pretending all is well. The Twitter scandal is not an isolated example of ethics rot, but a case study to be heeded and acted upon. Quickly…

Finally, here is Part 4, from Michael Shellenberger’s Twitter account. The earlier installments are here, here, and here.

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I know I used this clip from the Ethics Alarms movie clip archive yesterday, but I really can’t think of anything more appropriate. The exploding fireworks factory is the mass of evidence coming to light about how Twitter deliberately set out to silence conservatives and Republicans on the platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, how the FBI and Justice department was complicit, and how a prime objective of the scheme was to “get Trump,” with partisan staff and executives relentlessly pursuing that objective. Lieutenant Frank Drebbin (Leslie Nielson) is the mainstream media, except that there is nothing funny about the media’s astoundingly brazen conduct in this case. It is sinister, and yes, shocking, even to someone like me, who has documented the accelerating ethical deterioration of the journalism profession in America for years now and who thought the depth of its descent into pure propaganda and anti-democratic deception had no deeper to go.

I was, obviously, wrong. Either through coordination or individually, the main progressive?Democratic allies who substantially control what information the public receives has decided to do everything it can to bury the Twitter scandal, because it implicates them as well. It could be the last stand of the unethical legacy media, or it could be the end of democracy as we know it. These organizations—the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CBS, CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC,  Google, Facebook, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and many others, the majority of the sources of news and commentary available to citizens—really are “the enemy of the people” as Donald Trump said, earning their hatred forever. He has never been more right. Now they are proving it. Continue reading →

No time to do a full potpourri, not ready for a full post, Spuds wants to go out and all hell is breaking out, and meanwhile, this Saturday seems even deader than usual, but still, ethics developments are ethics developments, soooooo…

1. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety during what we are gradually learning was a full-bore effort to stifle opinions and information the Democrats and progressive community didn’t want to deal with, tweeted out things like this during the Trump administration:

Bias? What bias? Who wouldn’t trust someone like that to decide what’s “hate speech” and not fit for Twitters?

2. NBC News reported that “The Kremlin gave the White House the choice of either Griner or Whelan — or none.” Then, after the White House, Biden, Karine Jean-Pierre, and CNN said that the white ex-Marine being held in a Russian prison for four years already was never an option in trade for the deadly arms dealer, only the black, gay, anti-US “icon,” NBC quietly changed its website to match that narrative, changing the line to say, “the Kremlin ultimately gave the White House the choice of either Griner or no one after different options were proposed.”  (This is known as “stealth editing,” and is both unethical and suspicious).

NBC couldn’t slip it by, though, because people noticed, so hours later it added, “an earlier version of this article misstated the choice the Biden administration was given over hostages. It was to swap for Griner or no one, not a choice between Griner or Whelan.”

Of course, the Biden administration would never pressure NBC to assist  a White House PR cover-up, right? And even if it did, NBC, being an ethical and trustworthy journalistic organization, would never agree to do so, right? It’s just a coincidence that NBC News also suspended national correspondent Miguel Almaguer after he reported facts about the Paul Pelosi attack that didn’t follow the official pre-mid-term elections Democratic talking points and has never explained why, and Almaguer has been missing from the network ever since—right?

Seeing anything fishy or sinister in such conduct by a major news network is just wacko conspiracy stuff. Yes? Right?

It was awfully gutsy of Michael Bublé to set up that time-traveling duet with Bing, especially with that song. But he’s so obviously moved by the whole concept of singing with his idol, it works. Bing sings rings around him, of course.

I skipped mentioning the significance of the last two December dates on the calendar, both of which are days that shall live in infamy: the attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th, and the assassination of John Lennon by a lunatic on December 8. There’s enough going sour right now without looking for bad memories.

1. I can’t justify naming Arizona Senator Kristen Sinema an Ethics Hero for it, but the news this morning that  Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and changing her party affiliation to Independent has some ethical resonance. It’s just too early to tell what she intends the practical effect of the change to be. It sure looks like a shot across the bow of an arrogant party that has consistently clashed with he principles regarding how a republic should work. As Ethics Alarms has held before, an elected official who switches parties is ethically obligated to resign and run again under her new designation, otherwise this is a betrayal of the voters. The only time a politician did this the ethical way that comes to mind was when Phil Graham of Texas resigned when he left the Donkeys for the Elephants, and that was a long time ago. One result of Sinema’s defection: while Republican have 49 Senators under their banner, Democrats now have only 48, with three Independents padding their forces. Democrats have lost the House, and their President is a bumbling, manipulated failure. In other words, they have a mandate!

2. Ron Burgundy smiles… Diverse but incompetent White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre embarrassed herself again  when she  read the wrong scripted response to a question this week during a White House press briefing. The really disturbing part was that it took her so long to realize it. She is, indeed, an idiot, but a female, black, lesbian immigrant idiot, so as Tony the Tiger would say, “Sheeee’s GREAT!”  A reporter asked for the White House’s reaction to Sen. Jean Shaheen (D-N.H.) claiming that moving South Carolina ahead of New Hampshire in the Democratic primary schedule would make her state “vulnerable for her party.” The Most Inept Presidential Paid Liar Ever checked her pre-scripted notes and said,

So, look, we honor — we honor the Hatch Act, as I mentioned many times before, here, as we are talking about a potential election — a 2024 presidential election. But, looking backward, it is the ultimate irony, you know, that the 2020 election was — was proven by the Trump administration’s Homeland…

Then perhaps tipped off by the reporters looking like the audience in “The Producers” at the conclusion of “Springtime for Hitler,” Jean-Pierre called an oopsie, and said, “Oh, sorry, I think I got ahead of myself there,” and giggled. This isn’t funny, though. It’s tragic and insulting.

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Who IS that guy? He’s flat! I sure hope there really aren’t four of him. This particular traditional carol has been largely skipped over on YouTube, limiting choices severely.

1. ” I didn’t say what I said!” Donald Trump’s idiotic and alarming outburst after the Twitter censorship revelations has attracted the horrified reaction anyone could have predicted (but him, apparently) the second the words tumbled from his brain onto Truth Social. Now he’s denying that he suggested terminating the Constitution, hearkening back to such episodes as his claiming he opposed the invasion of Iraq. “The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES,” Trump wrote yesterday on his social media platform. Sure. By what rules of English does “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” mean that the speaker isn’t proposing exactly that? Yes, yes, we all know that Trump just says stuff and that his version of language is approximate and fleeting in meaning. Lord knows I’ve written that enough times. But when your political adversaries are winning elections by saying that you want to be a dictator, using that diversion to hide their own totalitarian machinations, that statement is still unforgivable.

Buried in his original statement is Trump’s calling the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story a “fraud.” Whatever it was, it wasn’t fraud. This is just a word Trump uses. Meanwhile, Politico, in the article linked above, dutifully parrots the mainstream media line that Trump is “falsely asserting that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.” Politico doesn’t know Trump’s fraud allegations are false; it’s unknowable. Then it says, again as scripted by the Axis, “Trump, who was impeached twice and regularly denies his loss in the last presidential election, perpetuated the untrue claim in both Truth Social posts that 2020 election was stolen.” What do his two partisan and illicit impeachments have to do with anything? And again: Politico doesn’t know that the election wasn’t stolen; indeed the laptop cover-up is strong evidence that it may have been.

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