U.S. Society

Daryl Hannah Asks, “How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away With” Portraying Her As A Villainous Creep? Simple: Hollywood Has No Ethics, And Never Had Any.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Poor Daryl.

Nobody apparently told her about the industry she worked in for all those years. In an angry op-ed in the New York Times (gift link), Hannah, once one of the late John F. Kennedy Jr.’s girlfriends, protests that the FX TV series “Love Story” about the romance between John-John and Carolyn Bessette exploits her while warping the truth and marring her reputation.

“The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue,” Hannah writes. “I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s.”

I believe her, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Fictionalized versions of living people’s lives, when those people are celebrities, are immune from lawsuits unless they can be shown to have represented the falsehoods as true (by definition, a fictionalized series does not do that), and done so with malice. One of the show’s producers explained why Hannah’s character was cast as a villain: “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.” Oh. Then its all right to show her doing and saying things she didn’t do or say.

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Oopsie! I Forgot To Put Gavin Newsom On the Ethics Villain List!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Let me fix that right away. I knew I would forget someone on that update, but he deserves to be there more than most.

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, in an appearance in the Presidential primary state of New Hampshire, again used the term “apartheid” to describe Israel. When his interviewer claimed “every expert” had described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide,” Newsome, the epitome a human weasel, said nothing. When called out later on his “apartheid” smear, Newsom said that he was just quoting Axis New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, thus resorting to the rationalization, “Thomas Friedman does it!”When called out on his “apartheid” smear, Newsom said that he was just quoting Axis New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, thus resorting to the rationalization, “Thomas Friedman does it!”

The Democratic himbo also endorses the confiscatory plan pinko Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D. Calif.) have proposed for an annual 5 % wealth tax on billionaires.

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Comment of the Day: “’Is We Getting Dummer?’ The Primaries This Week Tell Us ‘Yes’”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Master commenter A M Golden had a stand-out week, with several COTD-worthy posts, including this one, and a Guest Post that arose out of yesterday’s Open Forum.

I am also grateful any time I’m given an excuse to re-post one of my favorite—and, sadly, most relevant—clips from the Ethics Alarms archive.

Here is A M’s Comment of the Day on “Is We Getting Dummer?” The Primaries This Week Tell Us “Yes”:

…

“Is We Getting Dumber?”

There is some evidence for that. Beyond statistical proofs that we are failing to properly educate generations of students in basic skills, there is a sort of – shall I write it? – malaise about being responsible adults in this country. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe it’s our high standard of living that emboldens it. Maybe is a misapplication of American individualism that has turned into the oft-unethical slogan, “My way or the highway.” It may, in fact, be a broader misapplication of the also oft-unethical slogan, “The customer is always right.” Because, in fact, the customer is not always right.

It is a rationalization that encourages a form of classism (customers consider themselves socially, educationally, financially above the ones who are tasked with serving them), incentivizes unethical behavior, such as fraud, theft, demands for special treatment and, occasionally, results in horrific behavior like sexual harassment, assault and/or battery.

We have started to commoditize large aspects of our lives. Whatever you may say about poorly-educated, biased teachers, there are plenty of good teachers out there who cannot run their classrooms because the administration acts like the store manager who allows customers to abuse the employees under some misguided notion that this is how to run a successful business. The teachers who can teach but are expected to look past misbehavior and abuse while still doing their jobs eventually leave and what are left are the ones who can’t and won’t teach. That’s what happens in a poorly-run business such as the one I described above. Eventually, you have only the employees who don’t care about their jobs.

Some reasons for this lack of maturity and growth include what (commenter) Steve Witherspoon pointed out above – laziness. We have large swathes of the population who can’t be bothered to do very basic things. They are manchilds and womanchilds, prioritizing their shallow wants over their very real responsibilities. Expecting them to pick up a broom and sweep the floor rather than playing four hours of video games per night is tantamount to crushing their souls. Expecting them to be fiscally aware, to save, to monitor spending, means they can’t spoil themselves with destination weddings and pricey vacations.

I am also going to add distraction to the list. Prior to mobile phones, we had to memorize important telephone numbers. Now, there are people who cannot even provide their own numbers without looking them up. The internet and the capabilities of the internet have made brain muscles weak. It has also contributed to the collapse of the work ethic and civility in general. Restaurants routinely have to put up with people on their phones while ordering in person which often leads to miscommunication and to the aforementioned abuse of staff when the order is wrong. Increasing numbers of restaurants will not serve customers until the phone is put down.

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Another Unethical, Misleading and Biased Anti-Trump Hit Piece In The NYT: When Will Americans Recognize This For What It Is?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Note: That graphic illustrates the context of this post, not the topic.

Peter Baker, who has “covered Presidents at war since Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s,” delivers a jaw-dropping example of dishonest Axis journalism in “Trump is the First Modern President to Take US to War Without Public Support.”(gift link). That’s its title on the Times home page: someone must have realized how slimy it was after the “analysis” was first posted, so now the article itself is headlined, “Wars Often Lose Public Support Over Time. Trump Started This One Without Much.” Either way, the sense that the Times, like the rest of the Axis of Unethical Conduct, is actively rooting for the President to fail is palpable. True, has been trying to make him fail regarding, well, everything, for a decade.

Baker’s rigged analysis hides the clear reason why Trump’s public approval of a bold military response to a rogue international evil-doer is low: “Traditionally, Americans stand behind their president when he first orders troops into battle,” he writes. Yes, he doesn’t write, and that was before, for the first time in American history, a President’s opposition and the mainstream media set out to strip a newly elected President of the traditional public approval of whomever is in the office from the moment this President was elected. Usually a new President has overwhelming support when he is inaugurated. Not Trump, in either term. Democrats and the media declared him an illegitimate President (that Electoral College thingy, and everyone knows Putin gor him elected) in 2016, and he had been tarred as Hitler and a “convicted felon” before his second term in 2024. That cloak of respect and honor had been a key feature in every President’s power since George Washington, and the Axis stripped it from Trump and, I believe, the office itself, permanently.

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Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

One thought, which many have been expressing: The Axis of Unethical Conduct—the “resistance,” Democrats and their captive media—are hoping that the United States loses the war against Iran. If the U.S. prevails, the party will have to defend its openly anti-American stance across the country. Right now, its only position is “We hate President Trump.” That was also its message in 2024.

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, consider that DHS ad above, which seems to have helped get Kristi Noem fired. It’s moronic, pandering and manipulative, but to my eye, pretty much routine campaign ad stuff. Surely that clip-show didn’t cost $220 million, which is what you might think watching news reports.

The floor is yours…

Remembering the Alamo, Davy Crockett, and the Butterfly Effect

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Alamo fell just before dawn 190 years ago today. An estimated 220 men died in the furious attack by would-be Mexican emperor Santa Ana’s army of 5,000: once it breached the walls of the fortified mission, a massacrec commenced that was over in 20 minutes.. The defenders had come from many states, territories and nations, and eventually they knew they were going to die if they stayed. Only one of them, Lewis Rose—maybe—decided to leave. Even the messengers sent out by William Barrett Travis to seek rescuing troops returned to the Alamo knowing hope was lost, and they they would be killed. After 13 days, during which the Alamo was pounded by cannon fire, forcing the men to spend the night making repairs, the battle was over. But those 13 days gave Texas General Sam Houston time to raise the army that would defeat of Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto.

Ethics Alarms has posted ethics essays about the Alamo almost every year since the blog began. It is my favorite U.S. historical story, mixing drama, legend, ethics lessons and fascinating personalities, notably Jim Bowie, Travis, and, of course, Davy Crockett. Here is my first post about Davy, from March of 2010, posted to mark the passing of Disney legend Fess Parker, whose portrayal of the frontiersman on TV brought Crockett out of the historical shadows.

Crockett was the most important casualty of the battle, because at the time of his death he was the first modern celebrity, famous in part for being famous, celebrated by dime novels and sensational, and fictional, stage plays. His death focused public attention on Texas as nothing else could. Actress-singer Zendaya is the most popular celebrity in the U.S. today: imagine what the public reaction would have been if an Iran-backed terrorist attack had eliminated her. (Try to imagine it without reflecting on the relative values of a nation whose top celebrity is Zendaya as compared to a nation whose children idolize “The King of the Wild Frontier”). In that 2010 post I wrote in part,

“Like another iconic figure who once portrayed him, John Wayne, what Davy Crockett symbolizes in American culture matters more than his real life story. He built a reputation for being the perfect example of the rugged American individualist, standing tall for basic values, especially honesty and courage, while keeping a sense of humor and an appetite for fun.  In his doubtlessly ghost-written 1834 hagiography, “Narrative of the life of Colonel Crockett,” Crockett stated his credo as

“I leave this rule for others when I’m dead: Be always sure you’re right–then go ahead.”

It is as good an exhortation to live by the ethical virtues of integrity, accountability and courage as there is, and it gained great credibility when Crockett remained in the Alamo to die defending a nascent Texas republic, in complete harmony with his stated ideals. Battling for right against overwhelming odds,remaining steadfast in the face of certain defeat, never complaining, never looking back once he had decided to “go ahead,” Crockett’s legend is a valuable and inspiring, if not always applicable, example for all of us when crisis looms. Nobody who ever saw the final fade-out of the Disney series’ final episode, with Fess Parker furiously swinging “old Betsy,” Crockett’s Tennessee long rifle, like a baseball bat at Santa Anna’s soldiers as they swarmed over the walls, ever forgot the image, or mistook what it meant. Davy knew he was going down, but he would fight the good fight to the end….”

They don’t teach the Alamo in schools any more except in Texas, and the woke historical revisionism of the battle casts it as a minor event and even a shameful one, since many of the Texas settlers Mexico invited to settle its Texas territory brought slaves with them. In our “1619 Project” World they were fighting for white supremacy against a brown army.

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“Is We Getting Dummer?” The Primaries This Week Tell Us “Yes”

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

I have written a couple of times about “IQ 83,” by science fiction author Arthur Herzog. A man-made virus escapes a lab and begins reducing the intelligence of Americans to idiot levels. “Is We Getting Dummer?” shouts a typo-filed New York Times. The scientist responsible for the disaster desperately tries to come up with a cure before his own IQ drops so far that he is endorsing Kamala Harris and losing Scrabble games to Joe Biden. (OK, that last a part isn’t true; the book was published in 1978. The scientist would have become a Jimmy Carter supporter.)

This past primary Tuesday gave us more cause to wonder if the Founders’ audacious experiment is nearing a bad end. We may not be smart enough to keep a republic. In my previous IQ 83 post, I revealed that Michelle Wu, then a Democratic City Council member in Boston, argued that because use of the crumbling public transportation infrastructure of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority was dropping and rush-hour traffic was increasing, the solution would be to let everyone ride buses and subways for free. She explained that the system was too expensive to repair, see, so the solution was to stop getting any revenue from it at all, because public transportation “is a human right, like health care and education.” It was pointed out by some above an 83 IQ level that a free bus that doesn’t run very often isn’t worth much, but never mind.

The Rest of the Story: Wu was elected Mayor of Boston.

Six years later, the signs are no more promising:

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Apparently A Majority Of Younger Americans Think The U.S. Invented Slavery. I’ll See You At The Wood-Chipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

A few days ago, I saw a chart showing what U.S. demographics believed that the United States invented slavery. I noted it for a future post, and now I can’t find it, but I found plenty of authority that supports that assertion. Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, has been making this point for years. Way back in 2016, The College Fix wrote in part,

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”…

The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.

“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix….

Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.

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Can We Trust Wikipedia? Should We? No and No, Of Course…But What’s The Alternative?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ethics Alarms hasn’t pointed out what a biased, often incompetent, purveyor of progressive and Democratic propaganda Wikipedia is for a while, and I regret that. I am reminded of Wiki’s key role in hammering woke propaganda into the brains of unsuspecting users (like students) virtually every day, however, when I choose to use the crowd-written web encyclopedia for basic facts (when did Jerry Lewis die was the latest) and am irritated both by what the badly curated articles leave out, and the dunning for contributions. The promise of AI Grokipedia as a more ethical alternative has been dimmed by my dawning realization that I can’t trust bots either, and that Grokipedia uses Wicki among its sources.

“Reason” has posted an exposé of sorts on the Axis ally, here. Nothing in it unseats what I had already included, but the brief against Wikipedia is damning. As we would assume, the site reallt went over to the dark side, and violated its alleged mission, when Donald Trump shattered the Left’s dream of forever power in 2016. Reason notes, describing the page on the current President,

“He’s described as an “American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States.” Biographical details include his time as a real estate developer, reality show host, and his 2016 presidential victory over Hillary Clinton. So far, no disagreements.

But the first policy mentioned is a travel ban against seven Muslim-majority countries, expanding the border wall, family separations, rolling back environmental and business regulations, downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, refusing to concede the 2020 election, and getting impeached. Then comes a recounting of his legal battles, his second term involving “mass layoffs of federal workers,” “targeting of political opponents,” the “revers[al] of pro-diversity policies,” and “persecution of transgender people.” 

The final paragraph concludes that “many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racist or misogynistic” and that “he has made many false or misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics.” It also states that his  actions “have been described as authoritarian” and “historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history.”

Even more revealing is the reaction of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose response to Reason’s query about that biased alignment, replied, “If you get a negative view of Donald Trump from reading it, that’s not our fault.” Wow. No bias there!

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Hump Day Ethics Dumps, Bumps and Clumps, 3/4/26

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I’m accumulating too many topics, so it’s time for another inventory dump. Above is one: Hakeem Jeffries delivers an epic “huminahumina” response to a simple question with a clear answer because he doesn’t have the integrity to admit the real answer. There is no way to distinguish Obama’s bombing of Libya from Trump’s attack on Iran, other than American interests are far more tied to Iran’s fate than Libya’s.

I am reaching the point where I have to reset my brain any time I learn that another freind is inclined to support the Democratic Party, meaning the current version, the one, in 2026, that apparently bases its entire justification for its existence on blind hate for the President of the United States, and seems to think that makes sense as well as make them heroic. And they aren’t even embarrassed about it, no matter how many times they are shown that Trump is finally pursuing courses they advocated not long ago.

The NeverTrump conservatives are arguably even worse. Bill Kristol, who a month ago tweeted out that it would be a disgrace if Trump didn’t take decisive action to “help the brave people of Iran overthrow a cruel and terrorism-sponsoring dictatorship,” yesterday tweeted that “Maybe Rubio should stop inventing ‘imminent threats’ to justify the war his administration started and get to work doing his department’s job of helping Americans in the war zone they created.”

The apparent 50-50 split in the public over the Iran war, coming—let’s see—47 years after it should have, isn’t surprising. One nice, kind, smart, religious freind posted a meme on Facebook showing Jesus destroying a missile. That’s nice. Stupid, but nice. Too many Americans are weenies, too many never have the stomach for necessary military action, too many think guns are icky and “if it saves just one life” to sit back and keep saying “Don’t!” like Joe Biden, that’s being compassionate. Not enough Americans have served in the military or have loved ones who have. Too many don’t want America to shoulder the job of stepping in to fix the biggest problems and crush the worst international evildoers even though the choice is us or no one.

That’s still better than a culture that wants wars.

Meanwhile…

1. At least one furious Trump-Hater, George Will, can demonstrate integrity. In his column “At last, the credibility of U.S. deterrence is being being restored: The perhaps 30,000 protesters who perished in Iran’s streets in early January did not die in vain,” Will endorses the bold action of the President he despises. He wrote,

“Some say that U.S. involvement in Iran constitutes a “war of choice.” That too casually bandied phrase rarely fits untidy reality. America’s Civil War was a choice: Lincoln chose not to heed those — they were not few — who agreed with the prominent publisher Horace Greeley. He said of the seceding Southern states, “Let the erring sisters go in peace.” Lincoln chose against such national suicide. Donald Trump’s administration has chosen not to wager U.S. safety on Iran’s abandoning its multi-decade pursuit of nuclear weapons, or on Iran’s acquiring them but not really meaning “Death to America.”

For Israel, the death of Iran’s self-proclaimed genocidal regime was a choice only in the sense that Israel chose to believe the regime when it called Israel a “one-bomb country.” Tyrants lie promiscuously, but occasionally are candid. In 1939, Adolf Hitler said a world war would mean “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Israel exists because Hitler meant that. Israel’s survival depends on forever thinking that nothing is unthinkable.

The U.S. action for regime change in Iran is not sufficient to produce regional tranquility. It is, however, a necessity for beginning to reestablish a precondition for a more peaceable world: the credibility of U.S. deterrence.”

Welcome back to the real world, George! The Ivy League, buttoned-up class snob couldn’t bear being in a nation with such an unmannerly peasant at the metaphorical helm, but at least his principles aren’t completely subject to bias. I may even start reading him regularly again….Nah.

2. Megyn Kelly, on the other hand, is a depressing reminder that a disproportionate number of the “Ew! Violence!” Americans in that 50% are women. Here was her embarrassing take on the U.S. attack:

“First and foremost, I, Megyn Kelly, am praying for the troops. That’s where my mind immediately went. The guys in the and the gals who have to actually carry out this mission… why again? And put their lives on the line… for whom, again? [Those] are the ones who are on my mind, and I prayed for them mightily yesterday and the day before, and I hope you have and will continue to as well. There are massive divisions over what we’ve done here, and people are going to change their minds over the coming days and weeks, one way or the other.

“But my own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States. I think they died for Iran or for Israel. I understand how this helps Iran perfectly well. I get it. I mean, I hope, long term, we’ll see… But they seem rather jubilant, 80% of the country does not support the Ayatollah. He was a terrible, terrible man. No one is crying that he’s dead, no normal person, but our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or for Israel. It’s to look out for us.”

a). The “praying for our troops” virtue-signaling is nauseating and manipulative, as well as pretty close to being signature significance for an untrustworthy pundit. b) Preventing a nation that has been screaming “Death to America” from becoming a nuclear power is looking out for the U.S. So is giving oppressed people a chance to be free, because that, after all, is what this nation stands for. c) So Kelly is another “the Jews really run everything” conspiracy theorist! Good to know.

3. I should have posted this on Founders Day on Ethics Alarms. The scene was the oral argument before the SCOTUS Justices. In the course of arguing that heavy marijuana use was a constitutional reason to have one’s Second Amendment rights curtailed, the government, taking an anti-drug position that morphed into an anti-gun position, cited the colonial “habitual drunkard” laws that imposed certain restrictions on individuals who were raging drunks. Justice Neil Gorsuch made a surprising point to respond to the analogy. Gorsuch said, “The habitual drunkard, the American Temperance Society [said] back in the day, has eight shots of whiskey a day. [That] only made you an occasional drunkard,” he said. In the Founding era, Gorsuch said, “you had to do double that. John Adams took a drink of hard cider with his breakfast every day. James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day. Thomas Jefferson said he wasn’t much of a user of alcohol; he only had three or four glasses of wine a night!”

“Are they all habitual drunkards who would be properly disarmed for life under your theory?” Gorsuch asked.

Americans used to drink much more before Prohibition than they do now, and drunkenness was far more common as well as less stigmatized until it reached extreme proportions. That doesn’t mean 19th century standards should control ours, but if an advocate for curtailing gun rights is going to cite 18th and 19th century authorities, that advocate is obligated to know the cultural context.

4. From the “These people are crazy” and “Res Ipsa Loquitur” files...

5. Imagine: This Atlantic puff-piece is actually talking about Pete Buttigieg, the failed small city mayor who became the most ineffective and incompetent Secretary of Transportation ever while taking long breaks from his job at the worst possible moments. Head Explosion Warning!

“Buttigieg’s critics seem to fault him for the vaguest reasons, many of which come down to: he’s too perfect; he’s not authentic; he’s not a man of the people. It’s an odd line of attack. Is it possible to be too perfect? Is perfection a flaw? Social psychology has documented something known as the “pratfall effect”: the distrust of people deemed too perfect.”

This is, again, Pete Buttigieg getting such fawning treatment, a man whose only qualification for office is that he’s gay at a time when for some reason in the Age of the Great Stupid where and into whom you choose to insert your patootie is deemed a credential.

Too perfect? Here’s this jerk’s Ethics Alarms dossier. Almost as disheartening as Ethics Alarms’ AWOL columnist Curmie’s deterioration due to Trump Derangement is Popehat’s Ken White joining The Atlantic as a pundit. Few publications have disgraced themselves more. I expected better from Ken.

Note: Now WordPress’s page break is malfunctioning again. I give up!