Here’s a smoking gun: Records uncovered in the recently settled lawsuit by police sergeant Charlotte Djossou showed that D.C. police department leadership ordered the staff to file theft and violent crimes as lower-level offenses.

The sergeant accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics. Police superiors told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, as shown by internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts.

Djossou’s suit was filed in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. She accused MPD brass of deliberately to “distort[ing] crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.” She also provided records proving that police leaders instructed their subordinates to under-classify varieties of theft to keep the crime statistics artificially low.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico all used data from the Metropolitan Police Department to argue that the District is as crime-free as Oz and that Trump’s takeover is really just an early stage of his dictator aspirations. Did their coverage mention Djossou’ s suit? Naw. Did they disclose that a D.C. police commander is currently on leave after the city’s police union accused him of manipulating crime stats? Of course not. Can the public trust the mainstream media to fairly report on any initiative by the Trump Administration? Can the public trust any politicized institution to tell the truth about their effectiveness?

There are more details here.

If we can’t trust the statistics to be honest and true, then all the indignant claims about crime rates dropping are unreliable. That alone is justification for a federal takeover of the D.C. law enforcement operation.

Typical of the “If Trump does it, it’s bad” mania has been the attacks on his choices for the Kennedy Center Honors program this year. The list includes the band Kiss, “Phantom of the Opera” star Michael Crawford, country music legend George Strait, actor Sylvester Stallone and disco legend Gloria Gaynor. I have had insider intelligence regarding these choices in the past (it’s sausage-making), and I’ve also reviewed the history of the honors. The only major departure from tradition this time is that there are no “high culture” awardees on the list, no classical composers, opera singers, ballet dancers or serious novelists. But past honorees have included such legends as “The Flying Nun” star Sally Field, Neil Diamond and Big Bird: if the list had come from the typical progressive cabal that has run the Kennedy Center since its inception, nobody would have blinked. It’s a little like baseball Hall of Fame choices: it is easy to find past honorees who were equally or less deserving.

Is Trump deliberately poking progressive culture in the eye with his takeover of Kennedy Honors? Sure he is, and I’m glad. The honorees and the previous regime insulted him and his office by cutting Trump and Melania out of the gala in his very first year of his Presidency. I condemned this at the time, writing that the threatened boycott of the ceremony by some of the awardees in 2017 should have been responded to by a curt “Fine, we’ll give the honor to someone else, then. Good luck in your future endeavors.”

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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:

***

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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