You just can’t do this.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama-appointee, has made her animus against Donald Trump clear for years. She ordered Trump ally Paul Manafort into solitary confinement and was cavalier about law enforcement against Roger Stone. How anyone, including the judge herself, could think it was appropriate for her to preside over the fates of any of the January 6 rioters, is beyond me.

Nonetheless, she did, and is, and just demonstrated what kind of justice any of them can expect.

Michael Sibick is one of the more egregious rioters. He was arrested and charged with assaulting and robbing a Metropolitan Police Department officer of his police badge and radio during the attack on the Capitol, and stands indicted on 10 counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, robbery, and engaging in physical violence on the Capitol grounds. Though most defendants with far more extensive charges are usually granted bail, he has not, and has been incarcerated since March.

Last week, lucky Sibick had his renewed motion for bail considered by Judge Jackson. In a groveling letter to her, he wrote, in a letter to Judge Jackson, Sibick wrote:

“January 6^th was a disgrace to our nation that left a scar Trump is ultimately responsible for, but we are strong and we will heal from it.  While many praise Trump, I loathe him.  His words and actions are nefarious causing pain and harm to the world. He is not a leader and should be ostracized from any political future, what he honestly needs to do is go away!”

Gee, Mike, why were you so upset about the election, then? Well, never mind: the whole idea of these prosecutions is to make the idiotic rioters blame Trump, so go ahead. The letter seemed to satisfy Jackson, even though the Biden Department of Justice wants to keep him locked up—domestic terrorist, don’t you know! Still, she had some special conditions if the now fully converted Trump-Hater was going to be able to breath free, even for a little while.

Jackson added conditions to the bail order that to gain release, Sibick had to agree not to watch “any news programs or political programs or talk shows” and not to attend any “political rallies.” Nor can Sibick “use any social media–including, but not limited to, Parler, Gab, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitter, SnapChat, TikTok, and any similar platform–on any electronic device (e.g, phone, table, computer, laptop).” By use, I assume that means “read.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution prohibits the government from directly imposing a particular ban on constitutionally protected activities, and the “unconstitutional conditions” doctrine means that it cannot ban simply taking in ideas (as in rallies, online or from TV) as a condition of of pre-trial release. Do notice how the first social media platforms Jackson mentions are the conservative ones.

This case would be an ideal one to challenge for an American Civil Liberties Union that, sadly, no longer exists. Once, liberals would find this totalitarian-style restriction on thought as offensive as conservatives. So far, the only pundits I see sounding alarms are the conservatives.

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Pointer: Legal Insurrection

This one is cross-filed with the Ethics Alarms “Fake News” stories, in the “Future News” sub-file. I would say it’s disgusting, but the mainstream media’s standards have become so disgusting that I don’t know what qualifies as disgusting any more. It’s like complaining, “This is a disgusting maggot-infested road-kill sandwich!!! I should be able to get a better maggot-infested road-kill sandwich than this!”

CNN dredged up Alyssa Farah, who previously served as White House communications director under President Donald Trump for a few months in 2020. She was a guest because apparently CNN was tipped off that she could be counted on to denigrate her former boss. We will be seeing more of this, as the mainstream news media embarks on its mission of trying to torpedo Trump’s 2021 Presidential prospects, since it is increasingly clear that a relatively bright GOP sea anemone will be able to defeat Joe Biden. Factual problems with Trump are obviously deemed inadequate, so now the media is stooping to getting predictions of dire actions from people with no more expertise or credibility than Alyssa Milano.

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On November 9, 1938, Hitler’s  Nazis began their campaign of terror against Jewish people by destroying their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. This was “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of Broken Glass,” which continued through November 10, and is now recognized as the beginning of the Holocaust. The carnage of hate left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. About 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, with many of them sent to concentration camps for several months until they promised to leave Germany. How many supposedly educated American know about the significance of this date? I’ll be watching to see where the news media notes it, and which sources do. The event is not generally taught in the public schools; I didn’t learn about it my school system back in Arlington, Massachusetts, which was then regarded as one of the best in the state. Sir Lawrence Olivier was my teacher, as my family never missed an episode of “The World at War” on Sundays.

1. Here’s another reason I pay obscene amounts to read the New York Times: it is astounding how extreme Left the Times Sunday Book Review section is. This is the part of the paper that makes no pretense of being written for anyone but the New York City intellectuals, and it is fingerprint evidence of just how smug, biased, anti-capitalism and contemptuous of their own country this toxic group is. The Times just published a compendium of notable reviews during the publication’s 125 year history, and the brie and Chablis Democrats loved it, especially novelist Mario Puzo’s snide review of conservative William F. Buckley’s 1968 collection of essays, “The Jewelers Eye.” Here was the passage that spattered brains on my bathroom ceiling:

“Buckley is as royally condescending to his betters as he is to peasantry. He derides Arthur Schlesinger for talking such nonsense as that the best defense against Communism may be the social welfare state. Again this is surely innocence at work. He doesn’t quite get Schlesinger’s drift, which is, obviously, that when a force stronger than yourself says, “Your money or your life,” you hand over the money, and if you’re really smart you hand over some of your money before anybody gets tough about it. It would seem unnecessary to simplify in such a fashion, but Buckley still thinks he is being begged for a handout; Schlesinger knows it’s a stickup. I do not mean to cast aspersions on the welfare state with this analogy; after all, a stickup within the legal framework of our society — via the vote, etc. — is the last word in exercising individual freedom.”

Yes, Puzo is advocating socialism as a wise and necessary capitulation to the inevitable march of Communism. Gee, I bet he was surprised when the Wall fell. And while Buckley was annoying, Puzo calling Schlesinger his “better” is more than biased, it’s ridiculous. Schlesinger was the Kennedys’ court liar, successfully draping the sociopaths in glory for decades until their corruption was undeniable. He also warped the American historical record for half a century by, among other things, declaring Woodrow Wilson a great President and Eisenhower a weak one. But of all the reviews of the past the Times chose to reprint, guess which one came in for the most praise in the next Review’s letter section.

2. Speaking of The Times on Sundays, “The Ethicist” covered a dilemma that I bet social media has made disturbingly common. A woman wrote to Appiah (that’s the Ethicist’s real name) explaining that she had an affair with a cad who, unbeknownst to her, was in a supposedly committed relationship with someone else all the while. He dumped the inquirer (and had taken up with another back-up lover), and then she discovered that her ex-‘s partner was one of her Facebook friends, though one she had never met. Now the FBF was visiting her city, and wanted to finally meet.

The question: should she tell her that her love is really a cheating heel? The Ethicist gets it right (he usually does): Of course. Why wouldn’t she? It’s the Golden Rule all the way. The fact that she also gets to stick it to the bastard is just a collateral benefit.

3. Who are those 15%? Yesterday CNN was reporting on yet another depressing poll of Joe Biden’s approval (I know, polls). This one said that “only” 15% of those polled strongly felt that the President was doing a good job. Who are these idiots? What is it that they like so much?

The lies? The dementia? The gas prices? Afghanistan? Hunter’s paintings? The flood of illegal immigrants? The College Fix found an unexpected answer: somewhere in that 15% of mouth-breathers are Brown University professors. Professor Wendy Schiller of the Brown political science department, for example, praised Biden for bringing a restoration of “stability” and “predictability” to the Presidency: “He seems to me to have a moral fortitude where he is really certain that what he’s trying to do is the right thing to do for as many people as possible.”

Ivy League professors who reason like that are teaching our best and brightest.

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1. [Insert boring double standard comment here] This was already mentioned in another comment thread today, but attention must be paid: on MSNBC, “The Cross Connection’s” host Tiffany Cross brought on African-American lawyer and pundit Ellie Mystal, who has one of the more disturbing Ethics Alarms rap sheets. Mystal finally got too extreme for “Above the Law,” as difficult as that is, and now hangs his web shingle out at the far, far Left “The Nation.”

Cross asked Ellie about the gun-rights case currently before the Supreme Court [Item#2], where the question is whether a state (New York) can forbid citizens from carrying guns outside the home. Somehow, he used the question to justify stating that white people primarily care about “using their guns on black people and getting away with it. That’s what they want. That’s what they actually are in it for.” Cross, who had the same responsibility as any TV host whose guest makes a flat-out racist statement about any race or group, didn’t object to Mystal’s despicable assertion or question it. As Sir Thomas More reminded his jurors during his trial for treason, the maxim of the law is that silence denotes consent.

Anti-white racism is more or less routine on MSNBC, but this was more flagrant than usual, especially after Cross introduced Mystal as “our audience favorite,” and her “pal.” Remember, Mystal is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, They sure did him a lot of good.

2. Speaking of that gun rights case, the questioning from the justices last week had all listeners convinced that New York’s law requiring those seeking a license to carry a handgun in public to show a “proper cause” would be struck down, as a majority of justices felt that it imposes an unreasonable restriction on the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Essentially, Barbara D. Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, was unable to make a convincing argument that the right of a citizen to arm himself or herself for self-defense was more pressing in the home than out of it. “If the purpose of the Second Amendment is to allow people to protect themselves,” Chief Justice Roberts said, “that’s implicated when you’re in a high-crime area. It’s not implicated when you’re out in the woods.” This exchange was part of the discussion over whether a permissible law could limit gun possession in “sensitive areas.” But what’s a sensitive area? And, as Justice Roberts summarized the question, “You don’t have to say, when you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that, you know, your speech is particularly important, so why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?”

That also addresses one of the standard arguments of those who would ban semi-automatic weapons: a citizen doesn’t “need” such a powerful firearm. Yet the essence of liberty is that the citizen gets to decide what is needed in an individual case.

The guess here is that the Court will try to craft some narrow exceptions where a state can legitimately allow a gun ban, like sports stadiums. That, however, will not be an easy line to draw…

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I don’t know why this particular op-ed brought the headline above vividly into my mind; it would easily have been dozens of other episodes. But as I was reading the standard issue, progressive censor essay in the Times by Jennifer Finlay Boylan (not to be confused with the Boylan who first accused Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment), my mind flashed back to turning on the lights late at night in the kitchen of an Arlington, VA. house I was renting with four law school classmates in my first year at Georgetown. There were more than a hundred roaches in that room, all over the counters and floor, and they scattered and vanished in seconds. We had seen perhaps one roach in our first weeks in the house. The sight made me physically ill. How did the owners allow such an infestation to happen?

Boylan is a left-wing ideologue who has been outed here before. She’s an English professor at Barnard who periodically spreads her bad ideas in the Times op-ed pages after injecting the poison into the brains of her trusting students. The essay in question was titled, “Can We Separate the Art From the Artist?,” and in it she raises, gingerly, seductively, the question of whether works of art should be torn down like Thomas Jefferson statues if the artists who created them behaved or thought in ways that the progressive thought police found offensive.

Boylan writes,

The past several years have seen a reassessment of our country’s many mythologies — from the legends of the generals of the Confederacy to the historical glossing over of slaveholding founding fathers. But as we take another look at the sins of our historical figures, we’ve also had to take a hard look at our more immediate past and present, including the behavior of the creators of pop culture. That reassessment extends now to the people who wrote some of our best-loved songs. But what to do with the art left behind? Can I still love their music if I’m appalled by various events in the lives of Johnny Cash or Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis? Or by Eric Clapton’s racist rants and anti-vaccination activism?

Of course, there is no easy answer here.

Of course there damn well is; Boylan and her censoring, culture-strangling fellow bullies just refuse to acknowledge it. The ideas, innovations and artistic creations that have advanced society, human knowledge and inspiration remains exactly as valuable and deserving of honor, circulation and, often, immortality regardless of the personal transgressions of the thinkers and creators. Frankly, I’m sick of writing about this topic and even got bored wading through my own posts about it. Here: in this one about Disney World denying the worth of Bill Cosby’s contributions to humor and entertainment because he is a rapist, I begged,

Stop airbrushing your history, your heroes, your geniuses and your trailblazers, America. It is wrong—dishonest, incompetent, unfair, irresponsible, destructive….and so, so short-sighted and stupid.

It is particularly destructive in the field of popular music, because musicians, like comedians, are typically maladjusted social misfits who are too often unfit for civilized society when they aren’t doing what they are best at. Boylan’s totalitarian reasoning leads directly to bad art by politically-approved artists supplanting transcendent art by creeps. And people like her really and truly believe that’s the better choice. Continue reading →

In Minnesota on November 5, 1862, more than 300 Santee Sioux were sentenced to hang for their part in an uprising that was justified by outrageous mistreatment by the U.S. government. A month later, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences and granted a last-minute reprieve to one more, but the other 38 were hanged on December 26 in the largest mass execution in our history. This, of course, makes Abe a racist and a purveyor of genocide, so that memorial in Washington just will have to be blown up, that’s all. Fanaticism doesn’t do nuance, or even utilitarianism. But as Ethics Alarms explained here, Lincoln had a civil war to win in order to re-unite the nation and end slavery. The Sioux were collateral damage in a very difficult trade-off but an unavoidable one.

1. In coincidental ethics news relevant to the above...An Oct. 27 New York Times story , perhaps motivated by the fact that Kamala Harris got her law degree from the school, revealed Serranus Clinton Hastings role in Native American massacres during the late 19th Century. Somehow, either the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco’s administrators and donors weren’t aware of their institution’s founder’s sordid history, or chose to ignore it. Now they want California lawmakers to change the school’s name. A press release explained that the Hastings name “is written into state law” and a name change requires legislation, the press release said.

This is called “restorative justice.” But the school also owes its existence to Hastings, who donated $100,000 to start the law school in 1878. Hastings was a politician, lawyer, landowner and California’s first chief justice. What Hastings donated is worth between $2,836,711.48 and $39,924,610.20 today, depending on what standard you use, but whatever it’s worth, Hastings gave a lot of his money to establish the law school. Where’s his justice? The University and its law school graduates have benefited from his generosity greatly, indeed existentially, but the reasoning is that his misdeeds unrelated to the school justify its taking his money and explicitly dishonoring him. This is exactly the logic being used to justify airbrushing Thomas Jefferson out of our history.

2. More on the unacceptable failure of pollsters: In a column for NJ.com, pollster Patrick Murray says that he “blew it” and expresses his own doubts about whether election polls now do more damage than good.

“The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the [New Jersey]governor’s race,” he writes. “So, if you are a Republican who believes the polls cost Ciattarelli an upset victory or a Democrat who feels we lulled your base into complacency, feel free to vent….I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign — and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter — because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”

In related news, Ciatarelli is refusing to concede, though the election has been called for incumbent Murphy.

Murray concludes that it might be time to quit polling. “Some organizations have decided to opt out of election polling altogether, including the venerable Gallup Poll and the highly regarded Pew Research Center… Other pollsters went AWOL this year. For instance, Quinnipiac has been a fixture during New Jersey and Virginia campaigns for decades but issued no polls in either state this year,” he says. “Perhaps that is a wise move. If we cannot be certain that these polling misses are anomalies then we have a responsibility to consider whether releasing horse race numbers in close proximity to an election is making a positive or negative contribution to the political discourse.”

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As reported a few days ago here, Item#6, the Biden Administration is reportedly considering compensating illegal immigrant families separated at the southern U.S. border by the Trump Administration as a result of the  latter’s “zero-tolerance” policy. The program could theoretically pay out more than $1 billion, with payouts of around $450,000 per person or $1 million per family. The American Civil Liberties Union has been championing this crazy idea, though how paying taxpayer funds to illegal aliens lines up with the organization;s mission is a mystery.

Apparently nobody told Joe Biden about this compassionate plan. When Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked Biden if the payments, which were first reported last week could incentivize even more illegal immigration—gee, ya think?—the POTUS replied, “If you guys keep sending that garbage out? Yeah. But it’s not true…$450,000 per person — is that what you’re saying? That’s not gonna happen.”

This came as a surprise to the ACLU. “President Biden may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department,” the ACLU responded.

There are all manner of ethics violations at work here: pick one:

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