I love this! It’s got everything you want in a smoking gun biased news media reveal, and best of all, there’s only one way to interpret it. Once again, the lesson is, “When these people show you who they are, pay attention, and believe them.

In the December 12, 2022 Washington Post story discussed in the previous post—this is the Post’s effort to spin the recent revelations by Elon Musk as the opposite of what they are [Item #2]—the Post’s reporters Cat Zakrzewski, Joseph Menn and Naomi Nix originally wrote, its editors passed on, and the Post published,

But Taibbi and Weiss are not “conservatives.” Taibbi was a reporter and pundit for the very progressive “Rolling Stone” until he became disgusted with the unethical and biased trend in his profession. Bari Weiss was a New York Times editor until she left in a similar demonstration of independence and integrity. If fact, the very reason Elon Musk chose them to be among the analysts and reporters of the Twitter documents he is releasing was precisely because they were not “conservative,” but journalists who have protested and exposed exactly the kind of unethical and anti-democratic conduct the “Twitter Files” reveal. Referring to Weiss and Taibbi in this way was an effort to discredit them and to imply that they are the biased and unethical ones.

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12. Well, that’s one...Rep. Ro Khana (D-CA) on Fox Business:  “It is wrong to censor newspapers. It is wrong to censor journalists. Look, The New York Post hasn’t written a kind thing about me in my six years in Congress. They’re a conservative-point-of-view paper. But that doesn’t mean that you can stop publishing their pieces or articles or censor their journalists from sharing stories…it just offended the basic principles that our country is based on…”

See? That wasn’t so hard, was it? [Pointer: Other Bill]

11. Let’s boycott this unethical restaurant for Christmas...I object to boycotts, but the Metzger Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Virginia should be run out of business in the public interest. The non-profit Christian lobbying organization Family Foundation of Virginia was refused service after making a reservation for a private event because members of the service staff said they were made “uncomfortable” by the group’s political and religious beliefs as stated on its website. The religious discrimination is illegal, the political discrimination is unethical, and the restaurant’s explanation is moronic:

“Metzger Bar and Butchery has always prided itself on being an inclusive environment for people to dine in. In eight years of service, we have very rarely refused service to anyone who wished to dine with us. Recently we refused service to a group that had booked an event with us after the owners of Metzger found out it was a group of donors to a political organization that seeks to deprive women and LGBTQ+ persons of their basic human rights in Virginia…Many of our staff are women and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community. All of our staff are people with rights who deserve dignity and a safe work environment. We respect our staff’s established rights as humans and strive to create a work environment where they can do their jobs with dignity, comfort and safety.”

Fine them, boycott them, bankrupt them. In this country, being able to support political organizations and lobby for laws and policy is a basic American right; aborting living human individuals is not. The claim that this is an “inclusive” environment is a lie. Even religious bigots have a legal right to eat in restaurants, but restaurants have no right to discriminate against them. The principles, if you can call them that, advocated by the Metzger Bar and Butchery is poisonous to democracy. The complaining staff should have been given the choice of serving the group, or learning to code. [Pointer: RB] Continue reading →

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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