U.S. Society

Inspired By “No Kings,” Sasha Stone Authors the Substack Essay of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

You’re damn right he is. Because you deserve to be mocked….as Sasha Stone devastatingly explains in the sharpest defenestration of the Axis of Unethical Conduct that I have read this year (current company excepted, of course.) 

You can read it all here. I have been burned all three times I subscribed to a substack, but Sasha Stone’s essay on the implications of the “No Kings” tantrum yesterday was so superb that I may subscribe just to reward her, even if she takes a multi-months long posting vacation like Glenn Greenwald did, or go nuts, like Ken White. Not only was her piece virtually exactly what I would write today, I almost thought I did write it.

Stone is a film industry blogger who has lived and worked in the Hollywood progressive bubble. Naturally she was a Democrat, but was red-pilled in 2020, as rational citizens should have been, and increasingly become a critic of her former party and fellow travelers.

These are some highlights from “No Kings: The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum,” but again, read it all…

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Open Forum, ‘Cause Ethics Is Goin’ Like a House a’Fire!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Sorry, late start today, which is unfortunate, because there are a lot of ethics fires breaking out…

That video above is a Halloween decoration, believe it or not. Amanda Peden and Sam Lee are a South Carolina couple who are obsessive about elaborate Halloween displays. Since 2023 they have been featuring a “burning house” theme complete with rising smoke; it’s completely safe, and their family goes happily about the day while passersby think there is real fire in the neighborhood. Apparently it fools a lot of people and the fire department is now accustomed to getting calls about a house fire. Amazingly, the firer chief says its all in good fun and he doesn’t mind. I almost made this an Ethics Quiz. The article I first read about the extreme “decoration” said that some members of the community think such a display should be illegal. I’m not far from that belief as well, but ultimately it’s art. As long as no one tries to claim it’s a symbol of democracy under Trump, I’ll support the impulse.

Now burn up the internet with your ethics commentary….

So Apparently Republicans Do Have a Nazi Problem…Or a Moron Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

I don’t understand this at all.

What’s going on here? Democrats just went through one of the worst public relations weeks (Imagine: this was one of the least of their embarrassments!) for their party imaginable. President Trump shined on the world stage. GOP candidates for governor in both Virginia and New Jersey were surging. So Republicans decide to say “Hold my beer!” and let their inner Nazis and racists frolic? What the hell?

The first incident is the most confounding. An image captured by Zoom in the background of a virtual meeting in the Congressional office of Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) showed the cubical wall below…

…with an altered American flag with a Nazi swastika in the stripes. Alongside the flag are pinned images of a pocket Constitution and a congressional calendar. Taylor, seemingly caught Heil-handed, naturally condemned the symbol as “vile” and said his office was investigating with the U.S. Capitol Police. “I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office,” he said in a statement. “The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms.”

Taylor called the flag “vandalism.” I call him an untrustworthy idiot if he isn’t a Nazi, and he needs to resign and then be stuffed into a barrel with fat Lithuanian midgets*, never to see the light of day again. This couldn’t happen if he didn’t have the management ability of the average dairy cow. Who has he hired to be on his staff? Were candidates screened so that anyone with an IQ over 70 was automatically disqualified? A. Someone puts that Nazi thing up. B. Nobody does anything about it. C. It’s visible to a third party during a Zoom call! This is res ipsa loquitur in throbbing neon lights. Taylor is responsible, there is no excuse for it, and however it happened, he should be jettisoned and back to Ohio, because it’s illegal to shoot him and too messy to have him tarred and feathered.

But wait…there’s more! The day before, Politico revealed these…

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The Confederacy Rises Again: LA Country Thinks Federal Law Enforcement Creates “An Emergency”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The progressive/Axis/ Democratic Party/bleeding heart support for illegal immigrants is, I must confess, a mystery to me. The sentiment makes no sense from a basic principles of civilization perspective, nor a legal perspective, a rule of law perspective, a historical perspective, and definitely not an ethical perspective. It is all emotional, as in “How can you punish these poor people for just wanting a better life?,” which reminds me of Woody Allen’s crazy father in “Annie Hall,” who berates his wife for firing their cleaning woman. “She’s colored! She’s been oppressed! She has a right to steal!,” he shouts in a flashback. In 1977, everyone, literally everyone, knew that exchange was a joke. Today, thank to almost 50 years of woke brainwashing, a substantial segment of the population thinks it makes sense. “They have a right to get the benefits of citizenship! They’ve had a tough life! ” or, just as bad, “Ok, but since they came here illegally, they’ve been good! ” Right. How dare we take away from them what they took illegally in the first place, since we didn’t catch them sooner.

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The Latest Orwellian “Newspeak” From The Mad Left: “Loyalty Oath”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I am ever watchful for Trump Administration ethical and legal overreach. We know this man by now (though he is still full of surprises, some good, some frightening) , and if any leader has ever been prone to get cocky when flushed with success, leading him to breach rules, laws, ethics and common sense, Donald Trump is. So when I read in some Axis news source that university professors are “up in arms” over Trump pressing colleges and universities into signing a “loyalty oath,” my ethics alarms imitated Big Ben. Oh-oh. Loyalty oaths are anathema to democracy and the United States of America, but it sounds like something Trump might find appealing.

But upon research that took me about 15 minutes but that the members of the public this lie is aimed at deceiving won’t do, there is no “loyalty oath.” The unethical academics and activists trying to ensure that American universities remain leftist indoctrination camps came up with that label because they knew it was inflammatory and would make the Trump Deranged, their tending-toward-Trump Derangement family, friends and co-workers, and the intellectually lazy and gullible certain that a fascist takeover is approaching.

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Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias! TIME’s Despicable Cover…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments


A nice but naive (and Democrat) Facebook Friend posted the cover above, which Time says is slated for November, writing, “This is how you get to be an “enemy of the people” and musing that the motive behind Time publishing such an unflattering image was “puzzling.” Bless his heart! The motive isn’t puzzling at all, and it is why Time and the rest of the Axis propagandists are “enemies of the people.” Even after this President’s unequivocal triumph in getting Israel and Gaza to agree on something at least resembling a peace treaty, TIME had to find a way to slap at Trump in the process of reporting it.

The photo is ugly and makes Trump look ugly. It emphasizes age, and doesn’t even look like him. An equivalent photograph of Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, capturing every sag, wattle and wrinkle, would be condemned as sexist. Deliberately using unflattering photos is one of the oldest and most juvenile of media bias techniques. Regular readers here may recall the Ethics Alarms mea culpa for using so many terrible photos of Hillary Clinton, who had a lot of them…

and my pledge to stop doing it, which I did (until just now). The only President who approached Trump in having his worst looks gleefully circulated by the press was Richard Nixon, and even he never was subjected to a cover shot like that.

Naturally, the President, who cannot control himself—not a good quality in a President—and apparently has never heard of the Streisand Effect had to complain about the cover on Truth Social, guaranteeing that the headlines will be about Trump’s vanity, making certain that 10 times more people see the thing, and letting the despicable TIME editors pat themselves on their backs for a cover that will, at least briefly, make the dying magazine relevant again.

The cover is mean-spirited, unfair, disrespectful, and indefensible, except to Trump-Haters who will react by saying that he deserves it.

Ethics Alarms Encore: “Unethical (And Stupid) Columbus Day Quote of the Decade: Kamala Harris”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

[ This was last year’s Columbus Day post, and I decided that I couldn’t improve on it, so up it goes again. It is, after all, the proverbial two-bird stone: a straight reminder of how much we, and the world, owe to Chris, and how narrowly we avoided electing a pandering idiot as President. Another Columbus Day Ethics Alarms post worth visiting is this one, because it has the link to Stan Freeberg’s immortal Columbus riff on his “Stan Freeberg Presents the United States of America,” one of the most inspired pieces of musical satire ever.

But back to Columbus Day: its cancellation in some woke-lobotomized states (Indigenous Peoples Day) was part of the “America is evil and we should all be ashamed” cultural poison that the Mad Left has been trying to choke our society with for a long time. President Trump has more pressing challenges as he takes on the herculean task—it compares to Herc cleaning out the Augean Stables, the last and most disgusting of his Twelve Labors—of repairing our culture, but clarifying the significance of Columbus finding the New World is part of it. Let’s be clear: by any utilitarian analysis the European migration to North America was a very good thing indeed, probably inevitable, and beneficial to the entire world. Thank-you, than-you, thank you, Columbus. ]

“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”

—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party  in a Columbus Day address.

Boy, what an idiot. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations on That “Racist” Winsome Earle-Sears Cartoon

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Observation #1: it’s not racist.

Conservatives and Republican pundits in Virginia and elsewhere are “pouncing”on an online political cartoon re-posted by the Powhatan County Democrats, who were transparently trying to change the subject after their party’s candidate for Virginia Governor looked like a coward and sounded like a fool in her recent debate with the Republican candidate, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears.

“The Democrat party of Virginia everyone. Open racism, open hatred, and endorsed violent fantasies. Where is the bottom of their depravity? This is disgusting,” quoth one social media wag in a tweet widely quoted by critics. Twitchy, the conservative website that focuses almost entirely on goings on at “X,” called the cartoon “blatantly racist.”

Much as it gives me pleasure to see Democrats and progressives “hoist by their own petard,” the petard in this case being reflex race-baiting, it’s still an unethical tactic. Here is the real Sears…

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Dan Rather May Be The Most Ethically Estopped Critic In Human History

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Saying it is a “dark day in the halls of CBS News,” Dan Rather, the disgraced CBS anchor who was fired after trying to use a forged document to kneecap President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, went straight into Fantasyland as he condemned the selection of Bari Weiss to oversee CBS News.

“The former opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times is not a reporter. She has never worked in television news and she has never led a staff larger than a few dozen,” Rather ranted on his substack. “That all changed this week when David Ellison, whose Skydance Media recently acquired CBS, installed Weiss in a position created for her. She will not report to the president of CBS News — as one might expect — but to David Ellison directly.” Rather finds it horrific that Weiss would even consider criticizing Democrats and Republicans with equal intensity, since everyone knows that Trump and the Republicans are evil. “While one must keep an open mind, it is hard to do so when such a statement portends a push for ‘bothsidesism’ and arguments reliant on false equivalences. There can be no equivalences drawn between the two political extremes in this country, especially when one extreme is led by a man who rarely speaks without lying.” Got it. “Bothsideism” is nothing but a deliberately pejorative term for “objectivity.” If you have decided that one side is always right and the other side is by definition wrong, you end up like Dan Rather, a biased, untrustworthy hack.

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Ethics Quiz: The Riyadh Comedy Festival

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Whitney Cummings, Bill Burr and other popular U.S. stand-up stars accepted large fees to fly to Saudi Arabia and make people laugh at the first Riyadh Comedy Festival. The organizers claimed it was the largest comedy festival in the world, which it may well have been with over 50 international comedians performing stand-up, sketch, and improv.

The Saudi government paid for the event as a part of an effort to increase investment in the local economy and to improve their global image, which is, as you probably know, less than sterling. Other performers such as Marc Maron (funny) and David Cross (bitter asshole) attacked their colleagues for accepting “dirty money,” performing for ‘bad people”—you know, like anyone who performed at President Trump’s inaugural balls—and putting “a fun face on their [Saudi Arabia’s] crimes against humanity.”

Then there is the perceived hypocrisy, since many of the comedians who attended the festival have complained in the past about risking being “cancelled” for touching on unpopular topics in their routines. A Saudi is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for tweeting jokes about the Saudi government. The comics participating in the festival had to agree to certain restrictions on their content as part of their 7 figure contracts.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Did the comedians do anything unethical by appearing at the festival?

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