U.S. Society

That Integrity Test Democrats Already Flunked? Maine Democrats and Women Flunked It Worse. Be Proud, You Hypocrites! “That’s Your Party! That’s Your Party!” [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

[The headline refers to this post.]

I keep hoping someone, maybe one of you, dear readers, will make a YouTube video of the moment at the end of “The Godfather” where Connie confronts Michael, now the new and soulless Corleone family mafia boss, accusing him of having her husband (who deserved it, but never mind) murdered. I want the three seconds where, sobbing, she rages to Diane Keaton as Michael’s clueless wife Kay to look at the newspapers: “That’s your husband! That’s your husband!”

I want to add it to the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive, because it has become the perfect metaphor for how the Trump Deranged and desperate Democrats are behaving as they try to take over the nation’s culture and government by any means necessary. Dear progressives and Democrats: “That’s your party! That’s your party!”

In particular, Maine’s female Democrats should have to wear their heads under bags. They had a woman as an alternative to vote for rather than the domestic abuser, sexting Nazi-admirer and didn’t. Why, you well may ask? Rotten values? Civic ignorance? Stupidity? Women don’t “read the papers”? It doesn’t matter why; this is res ipsa loquitur. Now we know #MeToo was a cynical partisan scam; we already knew, or should, that the now defunct “Times Up!”was a lie with a non-profit designation. No “feminist” who voted for Platner or who supports the political party trying to put this epic creep in the U.S. Senate should ever be taken seriously again. Former governor Janet Mills is no prize, but I can guarantee that she’s never sent anyone dick picks. I’m pretty sure she didn’t have a Nazi symbol tattooed on her chest either.

I just learned, from former Mainer commenter Arthur in Maine (below), that about 14% of Maine’s Democrats bothered to vote. That is also disgraceful.

Count on the New York Times to come up with fatuous rationalizations for why this damning primary result is a good thing. In “The Good That Can Come From Platner’s Candidacy,” intermittently conscious Times captive conservative Bret Stephens argues that two alleged boons may come from the Democrats chucking all of their alleged principles to present an absolute bounder to the public as an acceptable member of the Senate:

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Why Are Conservatives Trying To Get Blacks To Riot Over Karmelo Anthony? [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Black teen Karmelo Anthony, 19, was found guilty of murder today in the fatal stabbing of an unarmed white teen, 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, at a high school track meet last year in Frisco, Texas, in April 2025. Ahead of closing arguments today, the judge decided that jurors could also consider manslaughter, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. Jurors were not moved. The jury began deliberating today before and reached a verdict in only three hours, the mark of an open-and-shut case.

It always seemed like one. The victim was unarmed. Apparently he touched or pushed Anthony, and the defense argued that Anthony stabbed him in the heart in self-defense. None of the witnesses felt that Anthony’s actions were justified.

However, the news media and conservative pundits have been suggesting ominously that a guilty verdict would be likely to set off George Floyd or Michael Brown level, Black Lives Matter rioting. A recent piece in Red State is typical. Teri Cristophe writes in “Is This How Democrats Will Solve Their Graham Platner Problem?”:

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Graham Platner, The Human Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
@theroguednc

A Maine voter said they would not support Platner if he had an Israeli flag tattoo.

♬ original sound – RogueDNC

There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.

This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.

The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
The battleground

“Wouldn’t it have been funny if the all-the-way-to-Wisconsin plea had worked? Oh, yeah, poor you, going to Wisconsin, let me sit back down and yammer on with you, because you endured the ordeal of coming to Wisconsin. How many times has Trump traveled to Wisconsin in his political career? 40? 60? He’s put in the hard work of demonstrating to Wisconsin that we matter, and here’s Kristen Welker obviously irked to have had to touch down in a flyover state. I can’t believe I came to this hellhole for you!”

—-Wisconsin Bloggress Ann Althouse, mocking “Meet the Press’s” Kristin Welker for pleading to President Trump not to end his interview with her because she “traveled all the way to Wisconsin” to grill him.

Brava to Ann for picking pick up on Welker’s Coastal bias and thinly veiled disdain for “flyover country.”! I missed that: I only thought her pleading made her look foolish.

Maybe this is one more example of journalists’ obnoxious presumption of superiority and the pervasive arrogance of the news media finally sinking in. Boy, I hope so. Once you have concluded that a messenger is an untrustworthy asshole, it’s a lot easier to be properly skeptical of the message.

The comments to Ann’s post are fascinating—many ascribe to my conclusions regarding election fraud— and a bit shocking, both in the nastiness between commenters and the language Ann’s moderation let through. It is also remarkable how red-pilled her commentariate has become, with just a few bitter, and in my view, hysterical Axis fans remaining.

For example:

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Trump Derangement Update: A Conversation With a Sufferer

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I had another long debate with a Trump Derangement victim whom I know well, love and respect. This individual is a lawyer, mostly informed, but, like an amazing number of Americans who should know better, gets most of her news and commentary from MSNow. I have explained that this is bats, is making her biased and therefore stupid, and that her favorite platform has no interest in conveying objective, fair news and cannot, must not, be trusted. I have pointed this out before, though she has a good retort: MSNow reports news that reflects badly on President Trump before almost all other outlets, and way ahead of Fox News. She was the one who pointed me to the unconscionable self-dealing IRS law suit settlement that I first wrote about here. Of course the partisan hacks at MSNow were on that in an instant: if all you care about is potential sticks to bash the President with, you are likely to find them first.

Other revelations from the conversation (yes, I believe my debate partner is typical of the Trump Deranged, except that she is more reasonable and analytical than most of them) :

1. The Trump Deranged are incapable of talking about the Administration without getting furious and shouting. Incapable! My friend almost never shouts, but the yelling commences immediately when the topic gets near the White House. It’s a Pavlovian response.

2. The discussion always ends up on non-substantive outrages. The Kennedy Center. The Ballroom. The reflecting pool. The proposed arch. None of these will be significant in the historical assessment of this Presidency. The Trump Deranged default to these because the smart ones know they are just wrong on the important policy issues, or no longer have metaphorical legs to stand on. They can’t defend illegal immigrants. They no longer have climate change hysteria and fake “science” to fall back on. They know DEI is illegal. They don’t buy the “men with naughty bits who call themselves women should be able to throttle biological women in sports” lie. They can’t defend the Biden dementia cover-up, and they know Kamala Harris was, in James Carville’s immortal words, “like a seventh-string quarterback starting in the Super Bowl.”

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I Would Say Graham Platner Poses An Integrity Test For Democrats, Except They Have Already Flunked

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The fact that the Democratic Party is rallying around an unequivocal scumbag like Graham Platner is damning. So desperate is our aspiring totalitarian party to pack the Supreme Court, add automatic Democratic states like Puerto Rico and D.C. to the stars on the flag, open the borders and lock up their political opponents that they are willing to betray their duty to the political system not to present untrustworthy candidates to voters. It doesn’t matter that Platner, about to be nominated as a Senate candidate in Maine, is a liar, a Nazi admirer, a serial sexual offender and has no qualifications for office. The Washington Free Beacon explains his current occupation: Platner runs…

“…a boutique hobby farm—whose main function is to supply oysters to a restaurant owned by Platner’s mother…Platner, who receives roughly $4,800 per month in VA disability benefits, did not take a salary from the company last year, though his wife, a schoolteacher, did, according to his personal financial disclosure. The filing lists one entity as paying Platner more than $5,000: the Ironbound Restaurant and Inn, a “casual fine dining restaurant” and “old world luxury” hotel owned by Platner’s mother, which is the primary purchaser of his oysters.”

Wow. Sure sounds Senatorial to me! So it doesn’t matter to Democrats that Platner has no business running for high office. What matters is that he might make it possible for the Democrats to defeat RINO Susan Collins and get a Senate majority. The ends justify the means for this party, always. But if it embraces the likes of Graham Platner, that should tell everyone all they need to know about the 2026 Democratic Party.

The New York Times this week quoted several women who suggested Platner engaged in domestic abuse. Huh! I’m so old I can remember when Democrats got rid of a sitting Democratic Senator because #MeToo was the rage. One long-time Platner squeeze told the Times that Platner knew his now-covered tattoo was a Nazi symbol, telling the outlet that Platner referred to the tattoo as “my Totenkopf.” Wait: I thought it was Republicans who were the Nazis. This is so confusing…

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Confronting My Biases, #29: Absurd Fake Eyelashes

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

This is really a “two-fer,” as in “two-for-one.” Here’s the bonus bias:

I visited the gloomy medical office in which I get my monthly blood analysis—I think I’ve mentioned here that the only decoration in the waiting room is a photograph of gravestones. This time I learned that the sad, monosyllabic tech who had manned the office alone for years finally had hired an assistant, and it would be she who would be sticking a needle in that prominent vein in my right arm.

As I went into the blood-letting area, I greeted her, said hello, introduced myself, cheerfully said that I was looking forward to her expertise, and basically tried to be cordial and friendly to a new acquaintance. The youngish African American woman wouldn’t answer, smile, or look me in the face; she just grimly went about her business. She did it well, too: I barely felt the needle, which is more than I can say for her boss’s performance at least 50% of the time.

However, I resent the sullen freeze-out conduct from service providers, clerks and those in similar jobs, and maybe this is my bigoted imagination, but I seem to get this treatment from young black women more often than not. It is the result of poor training, poor manners, and a rotten attitude. My current house guest, who is much younger than I, says this is a Gen Z thing, “pretending to be autistic.” I don’t care what it is: it makes life and society less pleasant, and there is no excuse for it. In the past, there have been instances where I have forced the issue and confronted such jerks, but I sure wasn’t going to try that approach with a woman about to plunge a needle into me.

Now on to the main bias…

The rude tech also was wearing the longest, thickest, fakest looking false eyelashes I have ever seen in my life. I’ve been checking the web about this phenomenon: it’s apparently part of current “black culture,” so no white person is supposed to question it, because to do so is racist. Whatever. We are doing black women no favors by being afraid to point out that this werewolf look is unprofessional, unattractive, makes women of any race look like not just hookers, but cheap hookers, and is a career handicap.

True, a tech in a back office can dress up in a mushroom suit if she wants, but I wouldn’t hire any woman wearing those lashes for a job requiring her to represent me and my company, even if the woman had the charisma of Gladys Knight. My instant reaction to a woman in eyelashes that would make Bambi self-conscious is to assume that she is not too bright, has bad taste, is inclined to blindly follow fads, and therefore untrustworthy. My conclusions about establishments that hire such woman are also uncomplimentary.

Yes, it’s a bias, just like my bias against young black men a while back who wore their pants slightly above their knees. And, as in that ridiculous case, the bias is absolutely justified.

I Played My Lawyer Card Today, and I Shouldn’t Have To

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

My father once told me that everyone should have a law degree to protect them from being cheated or scammed by other lawyers. He also said law school was the best way to be trained in rhetoric and logic as well as societal ethics, since the schools had abdicated those fields. As someone who seldom practiced law, Dad proved his claim that a law degree qualifies someone for lost of non legal jobs; for better or worse, people assume that lawyers are competent at management, negotiation, governing, and problem-solving. My experience has been the same as my father’s: I’ve been hired for lots of jobs requiring non-legal skills because I’m a lawyer.

This depressing episode, however, validated my father’s original endorsement of a law degree.

A couple of weeks ago, the News Mix channel on Direct TV suddenly disappeared. It was weird: first the message said I wasn’t subscribed, then it flipped to the message I get from the MLB channel when a Red Sox-Orioles game is blacked out, except instead of mentioning a baseball game, it said “News Mix” couldn’t be found, then said it was searching for another channel that had that “game.”

So I took a deep breath, knowing the horrors I would soon face, and called customer service. First the woman I finally reached after fighting with an AI bot gaslighted me and pretended that I was doing something wrong, because, she said, the channel was really there. Then she “checked” and said I wasn’t subscribed to the channel, which I knew was untrue: I have regularly checked it every morning to see how Fox News, CNN, MSNOW and BBC America were spinning the same stories, and what news each is deliberately ignoring or lying about. Channel 71 or 200 gave me access to those four stations and two weather channels. It’s part of my package. And it was gone. “Poof!”

After arguing with the agent, who had an indecipherable accent, she transferred me to a supervisor, who suspiciously sounded like the same person—could she have been pretending to be her own supervisor? But her clone was clearly smarter and spoke a bit clearer and slower. But this supervisor also tried to deny anything was wrong. After I argued with her for a while, she said, and I’m not kidding, “OK, I’m going to be honest with you: I received a complaint about NewsMix right before this call.”

OH! NOW you’re going to be honest and not pretend I’m making this up? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Asshole.

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Ethics Quiz: The Graduation Split

/ Jack Marshall / 63 Comments

Chicago Tech Academy student Tyvion Campbell, 18, performed a split as she walked across the state to get her diploma during her graduation ceremony last month the Harold Washington Cultural Center in Chicago. The exuberant display got cheers from the crowd, but the young woman, a gymnast, was refused her diploma as a result, and subsequently reprimanded by school officials.

“The principal [Zataya Shackelford] told me that ‘I need to think of a way to make up for what I’ve done. This was supposed to be a celebratory moment and I made it about myself,’” Campbell told reporters. She was escorted out of the ceremony and still hasn’t received her diploma.  “It was disappointing,” Tylon added. “It really hurt my feelings. I cried and I couldn’t even continue the graduation.” Apparently the school has no specific policy prohibiting celebratory gymnastics.

I’m amazed that any school would do this. All of the graduations I participated in were handled with restraint and decorum by the graduates (think of the ceremony in “An Officer and a Gentleman”) and any student performing even mild “Hooray for me!” gestures would have looked like a buffoon. However, students parading across the stage like they had just won an Olympic gold or a “Best in Show” ribbon has been standard graduation practice for decades now. In fact, the amount of grandstanding seen in high school ceremonies has increased in inverse proportion to how much a diploma means. The excessively proud high school grad with the screaming family in the audience probably can’t read. Tylon graduated with a 3.5 GPA and plans to study Business Administration at Georgia State University, we are told by the news media, meaning that she at least thought she had something to split about. Sadly, everybody on the stage probably had that high a grade point average or higher.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was it fair for the school principal to punish the student for her split?

Now, other cases where students were punished for crossing metaphorical lines during their graduation ceremonies are easy calls. For example, Leen Hijaz, a senior at North Carolina’s Clayton High School, had her mic cut off during her commencement speech when she stated to rant against I.C.E. Good! She had no right to hijack the proceedings. In my fantasy world, her diploma would have been revoked and and she would be sent back to the fifth grade to learn about the rule of law and civics.

Professor Turley Sells His Book…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

There is nothing inappropriate about Professor Jonathan Turley using his own blog to sell his recently published book. However, his recent posts are, as he would say in his restrained professorial way, “concerning.”

Turley has, along with former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, notable in recent years for his estrangement from the political party almost all of his academic colleagues give their unconditional love. It is clear that Turley has been “red-pilled” by the gradual (and sometimes not so gradual) transformation of the Democratic Party into a “by any means possible” political descendants of the radical Weatherman of the Sixties, embracing violence, socialism, anti-American propaganda, control of the news media, and intolerance of opposing political views. Although he makes a consistent effort to try to criticize both extremes of the political spectrum (In a post condemning a politically motivated Democratic attack on acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanch, he writes, “It is fair to note that the Trump Administration has undermined its own position in denouncing lawfare by pursuing past critics, including dubious prosecutions over seashell threats against James Comey” for example), the drift of his blog to the right has been impossible to miss. 

I am certainly sympathetic. It is difficult to find anything close to the anti-democratic statements and acts by members of the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the unethical mainstream news media on the conservative side; I face this problem every day.

A digression: listen to this clip from retired New York Times columnist Paul Krugman…

He was repeatedly flagged as an Ethics Dunce and worse here at Ethics Alarms, but maintained a prominent platform on the Times op-ed pages all through the first Trump term and most of the Biden years. Has any prominent Republican pundit ever called for the “purging” of progressives? The Democrats keep claiming that President Trump has secret plans to do so, but that is their favored partisan defamation. The Democratic Party in deed and word had embraced totalitarianism as their favored approach to the “greater good.” Turley sees it, as do I. Moreover, Krugman isn’t alone by any means: former Clinton minion James Carville is regularly heard ranting about using extreme measures to ensure permanent domination by his party. MSNow’s hard left propagandists, who, depressingly enough, are favored by the current Democrat mainstream as if they were real journalists, repeat these aspirations hour by hour, day by day.

Back to the topic: Turley now promotes his book, “The Age of Rage” in post after post. He finds ways to link his blog post topics to his baby relentlessly. In today’s post about a bonkers woke church on Nantucket cancelling its traditional Fourth of July celebration to prompt an examination of “whiteness,” he writes, “This type of pandering and posturing has become the norm today. In a time when the American flag is denounced as a divisive and “triggering” symbol, a refusal to celebrate our Independence is yet another way of proving one’s bona fides to the perpetually enraged.” Yesterday, in a post about NYC’s Communist mayor threatening to take property from landlords and transfer them to tenants, he writes, “In my book Rage and the Republic, I discuss this trend in Western countries toward socialist policies. It is what I refer to as the “economic factionalism” that has been used in prior years by figures ranging from Huey Long to Bernie Sanders.”

I am an admirer of Professor Turley’s courage in bucking the cookie-cutter leftist scholarly community, and frequently find his blog posts a source of ethics news. However, he is undermining his credibility by appearing to choose topics that support his new book’s thesis, and tailoring his prose to point to “The Age of Rage.” It is self-defeating. Turley should certainly be able to recognize his own conflict of interest. Unfortunately, bias even makes the wisest and smartest of us stupid.