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…

Continue reading →

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.”

Continue reading →

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:

Continue reading →

1. Ethics Alarms gets to criticize “Let’s go, Brandon” as an uncivil, gutter taunt that should not be wielded against the President of the United States. CNN doesn’t. This appears to have become ethics estoppel day, with EA noting the absurdity of mainstream media journalists like Greg Sargent and and Rachel Maddow whining about Fox News providing aid to Republican candidates. The same principle should mute CNN hypocrites like John Berman and Briana Keilar tut-tutting over the coded “Fuck Joe Biden” chant. CNN was silent when Congresswoman and “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib called President Trump a “motherfucker,” didn’t find it newsworthy when Robert de Niro used similar language before celebrity audiences in multiple venues, and didn’t express worries about the state of political discourse when Kathy Griffin posed with a model of Trump’s severed head. Now, however, they are offended because”their” President is the target. Journalists aren’t supposed to consider one President as more “theirs” than another, and the same principles of respect and civility should apply to each POTUS equally.

2. Speaking of civility, during a Supreme Court argument yesterday, the issue was whether elected bodies can censure their members for incivility or other inappropriate rhetoric or expressive speech without violating the First Amendment.Are censures, which are formal reprimands and a kind of punishment, a form of free speech or a threat to it? The case was brought by David Wilson, a former elected trustee of the Houston Community College System. Wilson sued the system’s board, orchestrated robocalls and hired private investigators to look into whether another trustee had lied about where she lived. In 2018, Wilson’s fellow board members had enough of his criticism and censured him. “The board finds that Mr. Wilson’s conduct was not only inappropriate, but reprehensible, and such conduct warrants disciplinary action,” the resolution said. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed the case to proceed, ruling last year that punishing an elected official for his speech might breach the Constitution.

Stay tuned.

Continue reading →

Additional Observations (Part I is here):

1. Is there any more useless and dishonest profession than professional political polling? 538 came closest to predicting the actual margin between Youngkin and McAuliffe going into yesterday, but only because it included Fox News’ outlier poll showing Youngkin 8 points ahead. Even then, the margin was 100% larger than 538’s average, 2% over .9%. Fox’s shocking call emerged after several conservative pundits complained that the network’s past polling always over-counted progressives….a coincience, I’m sure. I knew that Youngkin was going to win by the desperate way McAuliffe was campaigning in the last two weeks, with flagrant lies, shrill ads and an absurd obsession with Trump. Youngkin, meanwhile, looked and sounded like a candidate who was getting good news from the field. Internal polling is intelligence and tends to be more accurate, but the stuff the newspapers and TV shows publicize are shot through with bias and hidden agendas–Will this get more of “our” voters to the polls? Will this discourage the deplorables?

2. Hanlon’s Razor alert. Answering questions from reporters at the climate change summit, President Biden actually said that he saw nothing suggesting that “how I’m doing” would have any effect on how his party’s candidates fared at the polls. Was he lying, or have his IQ points dropped into single digits? Nah, those soaring gas prices, inflation, mask mandates, and supply chain interruptions overseen by a proud daddy who left his post, and all the Americans left to fend for themselves against the Taliban didn’t influence voters! Why wouldn’t they vote in more members of the same party responsible for it all?

3. The talking point that Critical Race Theory is a myth and isn’t taught in the public schools is such an audacious and insulting lie when the evidence to the contrary is everywhere. The “1619 Project” is taught in schools all over the country, and is rooted in critical race theory ideology. On the Virginia Department of Education website, “Critical Race Theory in Education” is highlighted as a “best practice” and the site’s definitions of “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “education equity” are derived from CRT. Outgoing Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s public education officials openly endorsed the anti-white, “Racist America” theory as an “important analytic tool” to “further spur developments in education.” Yet McAuliffe claimed in the last days of the campaign that CRT was just a “racist dog whistle” used to panic those bigoted Republican voters.

Continue reading →

Last night, a Republican no one ever heard of a year ago won the right to occupy the Governor’s Mansion in Virginia, which Joe Biden had won by 10 percentage points less than a year ago. A Democratic incumbent governor generally assumed to be a shoo-in for re-election in New Jersey until recently was trailing his Republican challenger in a race too close to call. Back to “Ol’ Virginy,” Republicans also took the Lt. Governor and Attorney General slots. Minneapolis’s referendum seeking to replace the police department with an Orwellian “Department of Public Safety” was soundly defeated.

Good. The Democrats were begging for a rebuke like this, and they got it. A better example of what George Will, back when I respected him, called “condign justice” could hardly be imagined. More ominous still for Joe Biden’s party, it is difficult to see how the carnage of last night doesn’t make an epic wipe-out in the 2022 mid-terms in 2022 a near certainty, except that Republicans are fully capable of lousing up a sure thing.

While all this was going on, those objective, professional, unbiased analysts on MSNBC, CNN and just about everywhere else but the jubilant Fox News were freaking out; presumably the pundits and reporters in the Post and the Times will be emulating them. They were all complicit in the Democratic wipe-out, refusing to report just how bad the Biden Presidency has been for the first ten months (with the occasional exception, like the Afghanistan debacle), continuing to bash Donald Trump as if he was still tweeting, and generally insulting any American who wasn’t ready to do their his or her impression of Winston Smith.

Continue reading →