This ad has been around for a while and running frequently on Fox News. I never paid attention to it until this morning, because I was watching a debate among some legitimate legal experts about the birth-right citizenship issue.

KABOOM! Basically the ad directs donors who identify with the ethnic group behind the plea to be concerned about the victims of the Ukraine war with Russia who belong to one specific group (tribe, race, religion, whatever—pick your word) as if nobody else’s lives count. I know there are many, far too many, Americans who think like this, and the more Americans who do think like this, the weaker, more divided and more imperiled our nation, society, culture and democracy is.

The message is literally “Jews are suffering in the Ukraine, so please send money to help them. Let other groups take care of their own. They aren’t our problem.”

I am not picking on Jewish groups here, for a TV commercial calling for donations to poor black people or poor whites to the exclusion of everyone else equally in distress would be similarly unethical…and disgusting. So far, I’ve never seen such an ad. This thing compounds the offense by making the invalid appeal to emotion represented by playing the Holocaust card. The suffering of elderly Ukrainian Jews at the hands of Russia is particularly cruel today because of what Germany did 80 years ago?

Don’t insult my intelligence. I was a fundraiser for many years: I know the drill. This ad, however, is indefensible. Shame on The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews for creating it. Shame on Fox News for running it. Shame on anyone who gives the group a dime in response to it.

Yecchh.

I keep posting these because I regard them as snap-shots of how the combination of irresponsible biased journalism, bubble-bases ignorance, and peer reinforcement is warping our social discourse and pushing the public into foolish and dangerous misconceptions. Is it an ethical problem? Sure it is. Posts like the one below make readers upset and irrational. They create false framings that warp perceptions of reality. The activate cognitive dissonance, in which the people who like, admire and respect the writer are moved to feel postively about the absolute garbage that he has published.

The author of the screed below that arrived on my Facebook feed yesterday is a wonderful human being. He is kind and effusive in his positive rhetoric; he sends me a birthday card every year, and I have only spent time with him face to face twice in 30 years. He never posts political rants: he is a lifetime showbiz writer, scholar and producer.

I assume this was triggered by the latest “No Kings” lunacy. My friend is also virtue-signaling to his showbiz connections, including me; since he likes and respects me, he assumes that I must agree with his sentiments. My friend is way, way out of his lane.

Get this…

Alyssa Izatt and Kimberley Brownlee wrote in the paper titled “Justice for Girls: On the Provision of Abortion as Adequate Care” that abortions should be forced on young women—legal minors— even if it requires “sedation or physical restraint.” This in a journal recently published by the University of Chicago Press.

The adults responsible for an underage girl’s care “should never pressure or compel her to continue a pregnancy,” they opined. “Nor should they confront her with the three ‘options’ of abortion, adoption, or mothering, as medical professionals are currently advised to do. Instead, her adult caregivers should view her impregnation as a malady and take steps to terminate it.”

They recommend sedation or restraint if necessary. Forced abortions. Not to save the mothers’ lives, but to eliminate the human lives that pro abortion activists believe are mere obstacles that need removal in the best interests of the mothers.

My opinion as an ethics expert: HOLY CATS! This is the reverse of “The Handmaiden’s Tale”!

But write about whatever you feel is ethically urgent.

…which is terrifying.

At the beginning of this week, Chicago prosecutors charged an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Medina-Medina, with the murder-murder of Loyola freshman Sheridan Gorman. Medina-Median allegedly killed Gorman at a nearby beach early on the morning of March 19.

Loyola’s campus newspaper, “The Phoenix” first reported the charges in an Instagram post titled: “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved,” and referred to Medina as an “illegal immigrant.”

There was student indignation, however, that the paper called an illegal immigrant an illegal immigrant. The paper, being staffed by students that Loyola’s campus indoctrination and The Great Stupid have rendered incapable of coherent thought, quickly rewrote the report to refer to the accused killer as a “Rogers Park Resident.” Then, to guarantee their place in The Great Stupid Museum, which I am hoping to fund, with this head-exploding apology:

“On March 23, a post on The Phoenix’s Instagram page carried the following headline: “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved.”

That headline didn’t reflect the most important elements in the story, and it was taken down minutes later to prevent any further harm to affected community members.

Additionally, in the body of the original post, we described the man who was charged as an “illegal immigrant,” using language provided by the Department of Homeland Security. That language does not align with Associated Press style, nor does it align with the values of this newspaper.  No human’s existence is illegal, and we quickly changed our wording to reflect that.”

Wow.

Last night a client visiting D.C. took me to dinner at a local upscale restaurant. It was a nostalgic and bittersweet evening in addition to being, you know, yummy. (Stone crabs!) My late wife Grace loved going out to eat at a great restaurant, dressing up, feeling like this was an event and not just a meal. Since she died, my business crashed and my finances went to hell, I haven’t had a single meal at such an establishment. Oh, I’ve had some meals at decent places with excellent food, but the staffs are casual and a lot of diners—even me— are in jeans. That’s fine; it doesn’t interfere with the social experience or my enjoyment of the meal. And yet…

The Ruth’s Chris restaurant chain recently posted about the steakhouse’s dress code, reminding patrons that the desired atmosphere is “business casual” and “proper attire” is mandatory. Guests are to remove hats when entering, and if you have a baseball cap on, you will be stuck at the bar or the lounge.The main dining room will be off-limits. Dining rooms will not allow “gym wear, pool attire, tank tops, clothing with offensive graphics or language, revealing clothing, or exposed undergarments.”

Well, good. Civility, etiquette and respect for others are always victims of entropy, as air travel and theater-going have proven. Ruth’s Chris wants to hold the line, and that takes courage and a sense of responsibility. Being with other diners who care how they present to everyone around them is part of the positive experience of dining out at an excellent restaurant.

The slobs, as well the progressives, socialists, working class heroes and aspiring termites in the foundation of society, of course, do not agree. One critic on social media wrote, “Ruth’s Chris isn’t fine dining, it’s like one step up from Outback. This is going to make a lot of people not go.” I agree the restaurant is not The Prime Rib, but it’s about five steps up from Outback or Applebee’s. What’s the matter with classing up the joint a bit? The whole idea of maintaining levels of personal deportment is that it makes everyone feel better and behave better.

Thne some marketing whiz at Chili’s (which I would place a notch below Applebees’, but it’s close) saw an opportunity to virtue-signal man-on-the-street virtues. “The only dress code at Chili’s is that you have to be dressed,” it tweeted, setting off a tweet war.

Victory Girls, the right-ish blog, notes that “a general disdain about dressing for the occasion is a bit more indicative of an illness our culture cannot afford to ignore” and quoted writer Robert Heinlein, who once observed,

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”

Bingo.

Oh perfect.

Unfortunately I don’t have a YouTube clip of someone singing, “Our laws are in the very best of hands.” This is indefensible.

An Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Rudy Renfer, was caught red-handed submitting a court filing containing fabricated quotes, misstated case law, and even fake regulatory language. Magistrate Judge Robert T. Numbers II issued an order after being alerted to made-up quotations and misstatements of case holdings in the government’s submissions. The court said it had uncovered multiple defective cites to case law and at least two invented quotations attributed to the Code of Federal Regulations: these were not mere typos.

Renfer told the court he had accidentally filed an unfinalized draft. Judge Robert Numbers, however, said both the accuracy of the brief and the Renfer’s excuse were dubious. The issue became whether a government lawyer could be trusted to explain how his brief was prepared.

Judge Numbers ordered senior leaders from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the E.D.N.C. to appear at a show cause hearing, warning that the office itself could be sanctioned unless it could prove this was a single breakdown, not the result of chronic supervision failures.

Of course it was the result of supervision failures, because the Justice Department is incompetently run, has hired too many inexperienced lawyers, and obviously isn’t training the legal staff properly, including in the matter of legal ethics.

At the show‑cause hearing, Renfer told Judge Numbers that after feeling like he had botched a draft, he “felt panicked” and had an AI bot rewrite the brief, then filed it “believing he had reviewed it.”

Give me a break. How do you “believe you had reviewed” a court document when you haven’t? I can’t even make that claim when I post a typo-filled essay on Ethics Alarms. The peril of not sufficiently reviewing something you submit to a court under the implied guarantee that it is truthful and accurate is Professionalism 101, and doing so when you have used artificial intelligence to generate content is a clear ethics violation.

Renfer said the decision to use AI was the worst of his career. Ya think? It isn’t as if these episodes of AI hallucinating cases haven’t been well-publicized, especially in legal publications. I’ve been teaching lawyers about the problem since the summer of 2024! There are websites that track these episodes, but never before has a Justice Department lawyer been so unethical and incompetent as to be caught engaging in such misconduct. Government lawyers are supposed to be governed by higher standards. This was the standard of a desperate DEI-admitted first-year law student.

NYU canceled 13 culture, identity and faith-based graduation ceremonies last week.

This was a sane and necessary move, though NYU’s weenie administrators blamed the decision on the “current political climate” rather than making the important,unequivocal statement that all graduating students are the same in the eyes of the school, and that splitting up graduations by tribes, nationalities, races and sexual orientation is divisive, destructive and irresponsible.

Now student groups are demanding that NYU rescind the order. Good job, NYU! You did this. You indoctrinated them to think this way.

As it stands, there will be a single graduation celebration at the school’s Paulson Center.“There can’t be stoles or alumni speakers, all of these things that would typically be part of a graduation can’t be a part of that end-of-year celebration,” a member of the affected LGBTQ+ Affinity Group. “To me, that’s a pretty startling restriction of student speech.” 

That’s because you haven’t learned what restricting student speech means. Go look up the Supreme Court decisions. Show us the rulings that say a university has to promote the fragmenting of the graduating class in official group, tribe, or religious ceremonies.

Students who don’t want to celebrate their graduation with those evil whites, those bigoted straights, those mean Christians, those genocidal Jews and toxic males have organized an activism group called “Our Stories, Our Stage” to lobby the school to reinstate the events. There is also a petition with garnered 1,400 signatures, claiming that the cancellations are an attempt “to appease the current administration.”

“Whether you’re in your first or last year of your undergraduate or graduate degree, faculty, alumni, or ally, the cancellation of the affinity groups is setting a dangerous precedent for anyone associated with NYU, or other higher educational institutions,” the petition reads. “NYU has now shown it is willing to throw its students under the bus in exchange for money.”

Boy, what a damning, biased, illogical petition. Showing students that the school supports unity, comity and mutual respect among all Americans and human beings is “throw[ing] its students under the bus.”

NYU did not respond to requests for comments. My comment is that this sick and corrosive culture has been allowed to flourish on campuses for decades, and purging it is a massive if not a hopeless task.

A Facebook friend posted the above dishonest, fallacy and false-fact riddled meme as if it was discovered truth. I broke my recent rule of not responding to such garbage by saying, as nicely as I could, “You know, re-posting illogical appeals to emotion like this doesn’t help.” I almost wrote, “I know you’re smarter than this. Why did you post it?” I then listed a few of the logical and factual disconnects in the screed, but didn’t have the energy to be thorough.

I’m hoping one of you does. I think I count 14 factual and logical fallacies, but there may be more. This is how social media makes the public dumber and makes productive discourse impossible.

Another challenge: which is the most ludicrous of those statements? My vote, I think, goes to “If people being executed in the street is fine, it was never about pro-life.” It’s hard to make dumber statement than that.