Once again, we have the conservative news media hammering at what it believes is a damning story while the mainstream media hasn’t reported on it at all.

Recently declassified documents have raised legitimate questions about whether the Trump-Russia collusion “Get Trump!” project was a deliberate, Barack Obama-approved plot in coordination with Clinton’s 2016 campaign and engineered by the “Deep State” intelligence community. This is being investigated, and it will be interesting to see if the Axis of Unethical Conduct can protect its heroes from the legal accountability they deserve. I thought it was pretty clear that this was what transpired long before Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard got involved, but of course, this makes me vulnerable to confirmation bias.

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Invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, President Trump has deployed National Guard troops to D.C. and is taking over the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to “help reestablish law, order and public safety” in the city. The President has the power to do this for 30 days; anyone calling it a frightening use of autocratic power is in the revolting camp of those who believe that any legitimate exercise Presidential power is fascistic and dangerous if this President is the one exercising it.

Naturally, Trump being Trump, he has been exaggerating the extent of D.C.’s problem. PBS, which, to its enduring shame, used phony factchecking site PolitiFact to challenge Trump’s hyperboles, noted that Trump’s stats were from 2023 and that “at least 49 other cities in the world had higher homicide rates” in that year. Oh! Then what’s all the fuss about? Here’s one: none of those cities is the capital of the United States of America. D.C.’s crime and murder rate are above the national average. The nation’s capital should be a model of safety, public civility and fealty to the law, not a city that’s “not as bad as it used to be and you can find others that are even worse.”

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This is excellent.

The letter is hard to read, but a quick summary would be this: The Trump Administration is threatening to seize Harvard’s patents for discoveries and inventions developed with federal funds because Harvard failed to disclose them as required by law, commercialized them abroad before doing so in the U.S., or in other cases failed to convert them into practical use. The university, which has metastasized into an weapon of Leftist indoctrination and pursued the corruption and politicization of higher education for decades while using its aura of virtue and superiority as a shield against accountability, has been relying on the Axis of Unethical Conduct, notably the news media and its manipulation of public opinion, to insulate it from the Administration’s long-overdue intervention.

It chose…poorly.

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This post sparked several excellent comments, but the exchange between Holly A. and Cees Van Barnevelt was particularly outstanding. Holly’s comment was more political analysis than ethics (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but CVB’s response touched on two ethics issue that get short shrift today: 1) the fact that Donald Trump is indeed a patriot, is addressing matters as he promised to address them, 2) his popularity and power is mostly due to that, and not some kind of mindless cult of personality. (That was Obama.)

Here is Holly’s Comment of the Day on the post “Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?,” followed by CVB’s retort:

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CVB: “My first question is what you mean about the Republicans unraveling today? I see the Trump administration getting quite a lot of work done, and fulfilling the promises made during the election. Are you referring to Congress?”

ME: Good question. I see the Democrats as unraveling externally, the Republicans as unraveling internally. Hence the disintegration of the former is easily observable, while the latter still looks quite sound. Congress has managed to pass legislation in record time and with a slim majority, which is a considerable feat! And yes, the Trump administration has also been busily at work with some clear accomplishments in line with campaign promises. What I see as the structural unraveling at the core of the GOP is the transformation of what used to be a party with a reasonably coherent set of values (as articulated by JM) into a personality/strongman cult in which loyalty/submission to the leader trumps adherence to values and attention to the priorities of their constituents. While they are in power, this looks like unity and strength. But what will things look like in the post-Trump era? Succession issues are one of the ways empires fall apart and companies fail. However, whether this supposition is correct will await the next chapter.

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My Saturday mission is to get two posts up by 10:20 am, E.S.T. So much for that. I had a bad night with my leg, which is now sitting undressed with the 4″ X 2″ giant infected wound looking less inflamed but still feeling sore. I’m trying to type on a new laptop that is driving me crazy, while a traumatized pit bull lies happily snoring on my other leg. Everything is taking me five times longer than usual, and the usual WordPress quirks that are just irritating under normal conditions now prompt me to scream a versatile epithet so loudly that my house guest keeps running over to see if I’m all right.

I hate this.

EA is blessed to have so many sharp, erudite, informed an creative participants in the commentariate (Curmie, Curmie, wherefore art thou, Curmie?) that I know this space will be well used, so I know I’m leaving the blog in good hands, but still. There is so much I want to post about, and I expected to be much closer to normal by now.

Well, enough self-flagellation. Go do that voodoo that you do so well.

Ethics Alarms conflict resolution guru Extradimensional Cephalopod purports to believe that that there really are two (or more) legitimate points of view on all policy and political disputes. He expounds on this utopian vision in a comment here. I am pretty confident that he knows otherwise, but that he thinks this fantasy is worth embracing in the interests of societal comity, which is another topic.

In reality, many political and social policy positions are indefensible. Such positions are typically supported entirely by appeals to emotion, deliberate distortion of reality, and dishonest use of “facts” and “statistics.” No dispute illustrates this better than illegal immigration. Pro-illegal immigration advocacy should be accorded no respect at all.

Fact: No nation in the 21st Century can survive with open borders, especially a wealthy, free, superior nation like the US. The Woke rebuttal to this is that open borders aren’t really open borders, or “It isn’t what it is.”

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I’m sorry to have to default to this format now; I’m really and truly feeling better, but getting posts up has been more laborious than I imagined. Up here in my office I can’t elevate my wounded leg, and I still haven’t mastered my new laptop sufficiently to where posting there isn’t frustrating. Everything, it seems, takes five times longer than it should right now.

Meanwhile, the ethics topics I should be writing about, like the sudden battles over gerrymandering with the Democrats being shocked—shocked!—that Republicans would consider such treachery, require the kind of nuance and detail I can’t muster for a while.

I will make an ethics observation about today’s Trump Deranged freakout over the President’s decision that we need a new census. Of course, like everything he has done or will ever do, this proves the President is an autocrat and violates the Constitution.

I very much doubt that the ultimate decision will be that the U.S. can’t have a census for good cause more frequently than every ten years. The Constitution’s requirement of one every ten years can be (and should be) read as a minimum. If I decide to have a physical six months after my last one, should my doctor forbid that, saying that the best practices limit me to only one a year?

Trump’s larger problem is the inclusion of illegal immigrants in the census. This is an anomaly ( there were no such things as illegal immigrants when the Constitution was written), but the courts have upheld the counting of illegals; it would take a Constitutional amendment to fix this, or maybe a law declaring that illegals do not “reside” in the U.S.

It is wrong that states and cities defying federal law by their “sanctuary” status should benefit from it, but that’s what the current system permits. If Trump thinks we can deport sufficient numbers of illegal immigrants to make a difference in the apportionment of House seats, ICE has got to get a lot bigger, and fast.

I swear, I’ll get back to the traditional 3-4 posts a day soon…

Quote #1: “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL). She added to this declaration of disloyalty her assessment that the U.S. has been characterized by “imperialism, militarization, conquest, control, competition in its attempt at domination.”

Quote #2: “Listen, Donald Trump is a piece of shit, OK? We know that! Yes, he is! He is! He is!” You can guess this one, right? Yes, it’s Dunning-Kruger victim Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx), once again descending into vulgarity as a lazy substitute for reasoned discourse, of which she is incapable.

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