U.S. Society

As Election Day Dawns…

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

In past years, EA (and its less active and now Dead on the Web predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard) would issue a list of “The Dirty Dozen” candidates on the ballot in approaching elections that were, by any reasonable measure, unfit for elected office. I always made a point of dividing the election blacklist evenly between Republicans and Democrats; it wasn’t hard, and wouldn’t be hard to do for this election, either. Policy positions usually weren’t the criteria, unless a particular position was especially dangerous or per se revolting. I haven’t checked if advocating “reparations” would get someone on the list; as I recall, no. “Defunding the police” is so idiotic that I now believe it would justify blacklisting, but in the past, my threshold for stupidity was higher: it took something like that GOP moron who asserted that the female body knew that rape wasn’t legit so it would not permit a pregnancy after non-consensual sex.

Here is the list of things that would not get a candidate on the list, as last stated in 2024:

  • Isolated verbal gaffes that are plausibly innocent mistakes.
  • Unsubstantiated accusations, rumors or suppositions.
  • Embarrassing private photos that pre-date the candidate’s political career.
  • Any conduct, statement or opinion that was not a crime or that did not cause genuine harm occurring in college or more than two decades ago.
  • Reversals in policy positions or actions inconsistent with campaign promises, that can reasonable be attributed to changed circumstances, new perspective, justifiable political strategy, or a good faith change in opinion.
  • Mere associations or friendships with individuals who have shady or questionable reputations.
  • Almost anything said in a private conversation that has been recorded or allegedly overheard, other than criminal conspiracies and admissions of corruption.
  • Any inappropriate action or comment for which the candidate apologizes freely, spontaneously, credibly and sincerely.
  • Representations of unpopular or unsavory clients in a candidate’s legal career.
  • Misconduct by the candidate’s family members that had not been denied, covered up, or enabled by the candidate.

Or membership in a particular political party. In short, the criteria was ethical, not partisan. In 2024, the “Dirty Dozen” became the “Untrustworthy Twenty,” because the quality of our elected officials and the candidates for office have, amazingly, gotten ethically and intellectually worse. Lauren Boebert was on the list, because she is a screaming embarrassment to democracy, the Founders, her state, the Congress, her sex, height and just about everything else. So was Mitch McConnell and Byron Donalds, President Trump’s favorite black Republican.

However, in 2026 it seems naive to even try to assemble a bipartisan blacklist when one entire political party has made it clear as quartz that its mission is to undermine our government for the foreseeable future, beginning with a repeat of the unethical impeachments and contrived investigations they have employed since 2016 to prevent the elected President of the United States from governing.

The Democratic Party has devolved into an unethical party, top to bottom, and it has corrupted a dangerous number of Americans. In a sane society, a party that has chosen to die on such metaphorical hills as open boarders, “good discrimination,” aka. DEI, the climate change scam, the Epstein files, allowing trans women in women’s sports, refusing to enforce “reasonable” theft, demonizing Israel and Jews, packing the Supreme Court, enforced viewpoint conformity in universities, turning the military into a sensitivity and social justice cult, permitting unassimilatable cultures to flood the country with the results we are seeing in Europe, and more would be trailing the Green Party in membership and support. But this is the Age of the Great Stupid, and Democrats leaped at the chance to be its engine: all the better to gain the power to crush dissent and opposition.

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Culture, Not Race

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I ran across two essays just as I was prepping for a rare, in-person live seminar for young lawyers focusing on basic non-legal, life-competence skills essential to the effective and professional practice of law. One of those is understanding the importance and the power of culture. We all have a responsibility to care for the various cultures we swim in: a bad culture will corrupt us; a good culture will ennoble us and make us more successful and virtuous. If you can’t change a culture, you have to get out. The upcoming election is about, about, other things, what kind of culture our nation will have. People who don’t understand culture (or who don’t make the necessary effort to know what their culture is, like Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book) create problems for everyone, especially themselves.

That infuriating video above prompted a racist substacker named Max Remington (maybe) who describes himself as an “America First, isolationist, unilateralist, shameless nationalist, and post-Christian radical right-winger” to post this long essay. It’s lucid, more-or-less well-written, and provocative, but also displays the logical and ethical fallacies typically embraced by racists who are made stupid by their bias. I know them well: my ex-Marine law school room mate was a racist (and anti-Semite) much like this guy. My room mate got himself killed, but I have another racist friend with similar views, and most of my Greek-American relatives on my mother’s side were racists, including Mom.

In response, another substacker who goes by Sensurround Q Catgirl (or maybe that’s her real name) wrote this essay. Its main theme is that Max “provides absolutely ZERO evidence that race is the cause of the behaviors he’s describing.” “He provides statistics,” Catgirl continues. “He describes experiences. He identifies behaviors he finds objectionable, but then he makes an enormous logical leap from observing behavior to attributing that behavior to race.”

She’s right, Max is wrong

Watch the video, and read the essays.

I’ve got to get ready for my seminar…

Final Halloween Ethics Fouls

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

One doesn’t expect much in terms of intelligence, judgment and taste from a reality TV star, but McCall DePron, who is also an “influencer” so that’s two strikes against her before this conduct (Strike three!), is special. Her whole family is tasteless and clueless or being trained to be. That’s the photo above she posted on Instagram of her clan’s so clever Halloween costumes, evoking, celebrating, mocking, giggling at—I don’t know what to call it—one of the most shattering days in U.S. history

McCall is dressed as Jackie Kennedy the day her husband was murdered while sitting by her side. Her himbo hubby is supposed to be JFK before the front of his head was shot off, and her kids are supposed to be John-John, Caroline, and two Secret Service agents. Caroline Kennedy is still alive and surely thinks this trivializing of the day her world fell apart was a wonderful splash of Halloween fun. And, frankly, I’m alive too. November 22, 1963 was a generational trauma for members of my generation; 9-11 doesn’t come close. The fact that a social media “influencer” is so ethically and historically retarded is yet another cultural canary dying in the mine of U.S. society.

DePron took down her “Happy Halloween!” post that included the disgusting photo. Too late, moron. Attaching “happy” to anything related to that day is signature significance proving a porous brain and rotting soul.

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Scary Trump-Deranged/Wokified Facebook Friend Update

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

BOO!

With great sadness I post the following ignorant progressive crap I just saw on a cherished friend and long time professional associate’s Facebook feed. He’s a smart, caring, talented man who was the star of my wife Grace’s “Celebration of Life.” I will owe him forever, but he’s a professional musician and performer who is surrounded by dolts and knee-jerks most of his days, so he has some excuse for believing this garbage…

…since almost everyone he works with, talks to or cares about does. But Christ on a cracker, if I ever post or say anything that stupid, please, PLEASE, somebody come up behind me and cave in my head with a brick.

Don’t make me fisk that junk. “Empathy” has nothing to do with responsible voting in a democracy for any citizen over the age of six. And it’s ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS YOU MORONS!

As I just said, my bubble-dwelling, toxic empathy-infected, MSNOW talking points-poisoned musician friend has some excuse; another Facebook friend, who is a Stage 4 Trump Deranged retired lawyer referenced here before who should know better and once did before his brain asked to leave the building does not. He just posted that Cassidy Hutchinson, the irredeemable “star witness” of Nancy Pelosi’s Star Chamber, the rigged partisan inquiry into the J-6 riot, is a “hero”—you know, for flagrantly lying in her testimony after being coached by vengeance Fury Liz Cheney.

A DC grand jury just refused to indict Cassidy, proving exactly nothing. For any lawyer, regardless of partisan tilt, to call this weak, dishonest, unconscionable woman heroic is evidence of mental illness or creeping dementia. Her EA dossier is here. She’s disgusting. My friend the distinguished retired lawyer is just…depressing.

Democrats Cheat, Episode 72,679 (est.): The Alaska “Confuse the Voters!” Plot

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Cheating in elections isn’t just a traditional part of democracy, it is anti-democracy, totalitarian in fact. It is how bad people—yes, they are bad people— seek to gain power they don’t deserve (the fact that they will cheat proves that all by itself). Any candidate who tries to cheat is by definition untrustworthy, and any edition of a political party that supports such a candidate is untrustworthy as well. Both parties have unforgivable records of cheating behind them; perhaps the worst was Richard Nixon secretly sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks to improve his chances of willing the Presidency in 1968, but then he might have won the Presidency legitimately had not the Kennedy mob cheated so effectively in 1960.

Since 2015, the Democratic Party has raised cheating in elections to a core value, adopting the Radical Left’s traditional “by any means necessary” commandment. There hasn’t been a party so corrupt in this respect since the Republican Party of the Reconstruction Era. Long-time readers here may recall that when I realized how much cheating Democrats had engaged in to elect Hillary Clinton, I changed my stated intention to hold my nose, wear a gas mask and keep my gorge from rising as I voted for her over the GOP candidate, whom I had declared unfit for the Presidency in every respect. (I wrote in a name on the 2016 ballot: the man the Democrats had cheated out the White House in 2012.)

The New York Times yesterday exposed their usual heartthrobs with a full report on the brazen Democratic plot to steal a U.S. Senate seat in Alaska. It was so flagrant and outrageous that the Times decided they couldn’t spin or bury the incident without looking like the print version of MSNOW. They deserve no credit for this, and anyone who claims this proves the Times isn’t an “enemy of the people” should get a pie in the face. The Times knows it has to periodically pretend to be an objective and independent news source or it wouldn’t be able to fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. The paper’s staff is unethical, but it ain’t stupid.

The whole article is here (all Times links now get past the pay wall), but a few highlights are in order:

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Some “Experts”Just Figured Out That Exploiting One’s Children Online Is Wrong and Bad For Them [Links Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Where’s that woodchipper? I’m thinking about sending a copy of “The New Face of Child Labor?” in The Harvard Gazette to child actor advocate Paul Petersen, but I’m afraid the essay will send him to a woodchipper too.

Leah Plunkett, the Meyer Research Lecturer on Law and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, is the author of the book “Sharenthood” (What a cute title! Yecchh!) warning of the risks of parents sharing their children’s lives online. She’s also the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Child Digital Entertainers Act drafting committee. Hillary Robinson, an associate professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University School of Law, is the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation research project on the digital platform economy. Both have suddenly had a “Eureka!” moment and want to let the world know that putting one’s kids’ images and activities online for all to see forever might not be responsible parenting.

Ya think? Ethics Alarms has been beating that particular metaphorical drum repeatedly over more than a decade.* A recent post (2024) on the topic is here. This is the Harvard Gazette today (in part) reporting on this sudden discovery as if the perpetual motion machine had finally been invented, beginning like this:

“A mother posts her toddler’s first steps on Instagram. Children gather around the kitchen counter to help their father make sourdough bread in a YouTube video. On TikTok, a young gymnast performs a backflip atop a balance beam. These intimate snapshots of family life may look spontaneous and wholesome, but they are also often the raw material of a $30 billion (or more) influencer industry — one in which children’s lives are packaged, promoted, and monetized, often by their own parents. When does sharing family life online become child labor — and what protections do children have when it does?”

My answers of long-standing: 1) Immediately, and 2) Ethics literacy, if the parents have any, and most don’t.

But those aren’t the two experts’ answers. They muse “whether a child being paid to play with a toy on camera should be regulated like manual labor in a factory,” pose “the alarming parallels between influencer culture and the adult entertainment industry,” and ponder “the real-world harms that can result when images and video of children are posted online — either by themselves or by adults.” Then—and here’s the path progressives follow as surely as night follows day, the two professors wonder “what what policymakers can do today to better protect kids.” They ask, “Does the platform economy upend one of contract law’s most basic assumptions? Traditionally, mutual assent precedes production. Online, however, people may create the product, generate its value, and expose themselves to its risks long before any contract — or meaningful consent — exists.”

Ugh. I answered those questions 16 years ago when PBS was peddling the child exploitation and abuse “reality show” “Kate and Jon plus 8.” That show’s EA dossier is here. The current social media abuse of children is the same social contagion, just on a different platform and a far more widespread infection. I was substantially guided in my posts by the genuine expert on the subject of show biz child labor exploitation Paul Petersen, my friend who was a famous child star himself.

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Now THIS Is a Progressive Double Standard…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

[Update: Amid some skepticism that the image above is genuine, commenter Edward’s research (below in the comments) seems to confirm that the signs are indeed on the Cornell campus.]

It is pure harassment and an effort to create a hostile environment on the Cornell campus for male students, targeting a vulnerable group unethically. There are no indications so far that Cornell is taking down these signs, which students have begun putting up on campus, though the school is obligated to do so. The signs are obviously professionally manufactured, and not cheap.

It’s too easy to imagine equivalent signs denigrating women, blacks, Muslims, gays or other minorities currently the objects of progressive pandering, so I won’t. It shouldn’t be debatable that neither Cornell nor the political Left would tolerate any of those hypothetical messages. This sign also is defamatory, stating as fact that rapes have occurred on campus, leaving the implication that the students accused by Lucy Craig in her lawsuit were perpetrators.

How many of these signs are currently being displayed? One is enough, and one is too much.

Young men have joined American Jews as a group that can only justify voting for Democrats next month with a medical diagnosis of temporary insanity, or substantial brain damage.

“The Great Stupid” Headline Of The Month: TMZ

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

TMZ, the celebrity news site, has always been pretty stupid (along with its readers), but I thought this headline had to be a joke. When have you ever heard of a news story involving someone who isn’t famous saying a word? Apparently TMZ’s audience is so woke and unfamiliar with the core value of freedom of speech that a stranger uttering the two-syllable word “nigger” is as news worthy as an actual crime. Readers are expected to react with horror: “How could this happen? What is the country coming to? What can we do to halt this unbearable assault on our sensibilities?”

What ever happened to “Sticks and stone can break my bones but words will never hurt me”? TMZ never even reveals to whom the dangerous word was addressed, if anybody.

The story goes on…

A Delta passenger was caught on video using the n-word while being escorted off a flight by cops … after allegedly screaming “death to America” and pretending to shoot fellow travelers. Video circulating on X shows the unruly passenger being removed from a Delta flight Thursday, which was scheduled to travel from New York City’s JFK International Airport to Atlanta.Law enforcement sources tell TMZ … the passenger has been identified as Jerome Anixter, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man, who was arrested and charged with assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. We’re told Port Authority Police responded after Delta reported a disruptive passenger who appeared intoxicated while the plane was at the gate preparing for departure. ..

And so we see what TMZ considers, in order, worst, bad, and least bad: the uttering of a word, “Death to America,” (a threat) and “pretending to shoot fellow travelers.” (With what, his finger? But that still can constitute criminal assault).

TMZ is also deliberately trying to get the man, whose disruptive behavior seems to have fallen well short of actress Selma Blair’s recent flying freakout, attacked or killed by some anti-hate speech vigilante by branding him as a racist. Nice. If that word is the lead, then presumably simply using the word would justify a TMZ story if the guy didn’t do anything else. Perhaps we can look forward to future news flashes like “DoorDash delivery man says “Poopy-head”! and “Dog-walker says supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” If the non-famous are going to be publicly shamed for mere words now, the least TMZ could do is start headlining real affronts to communication with headlines like “Woman on bus says “Statue of limitations!” or “Teacher uses “Irregardless”!

This is The Great Stupid, my friends. Banishing it from the culture will be like trying to get rid of bedbugs.

[WordPress suggests that I tag this story “Art.”]

Stop Making Me Defend Sydney Sweeney!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
Thank heaven for little girls...

The degree to which progressive and Democrat hysterics have decided that Hollywood sex symbol Sydney Sweeney is evil.,.EVIL! has truly exposed the festering insanity of the Left. Now the comely and curvy actress, who has nothing to fear at this stage of her career, can happily troll these fools while making the whole liberal end of the ideological spectrum reveal how completely its occupants will reverse its stereotypical endorsement of all things sexual if it can be weaponized against the Right.

Sweeney’s unforgivable crime is that she is suspected of being conservative, or something, as a result of her cheeky “good jeans/genes” ad. You know, white supremacy. Only a black bombshell is allowed to make such a commercial or play on words. Sydney refused to apologize, then had the audacity to make a sexually provocative sports commercial that was no more offensive that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues have been since the Sixties.

Now the Political Correctness Furies have descended on Sydney with their talons out again. What did she do this time? In the latest video for her SYRN lingerie line, she was costumed as a character from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (above).

Quick, now: who is that supposed to be?

Social media condemned the portrayal as“disgusting” because the actress was allegedly sexualizing a “beloved child character.” “Is she actually turning Cindy Lou, the [purest] sweetest child into a sex symbol!?!? Fire that creative director and get a brain Sydney Sweeney,” one person wrote. Another asked, “Why is she posing as child characters in a lingerie ad?”

Let me clarify some things that reveal how strained this outrage is…

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I would think there is a lot to talk about ethics-wise, but I have been wrong estimating the volume of novel topics EA’s five commenters can generate before. Let’s see what happens…