“The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.”

—Libertarian pundit Ken White, in the introduction to his annual retelling of personal July 4th reminiscence.

What happened to Ken White over the last several years or so? Once a frequently-praised, reliable advocate of free speech and responsible analysis, he has slowly morphed into a standard issue “resistance” hack, although better writer than most. As Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds might say (and maybe he has), “Ken White morphed into Charles M. Blow so slowly I almost didn’t notice it.”

Ken was the main blogger at the now defunct libertarian blog Popehat. Now he periodically issues his Popehat Report newsletter, which you can subscribe to for free. That’s a good thing, because the most recent edition was the first one in 2025. He also has a podcast, like virtually everyone breathing but me.

Apparently every Fourth of July Ken posts some version of his “Fourth of July story,” a personal reminiscence about an incident he says was “epiphanal and . It describes “a formative experience in my life and in my identity as an American.” It’s a nice story about a naturalization ceremony the judge he was clerking for at the time performed for some aging Filipino veterans. However, White feels compelled to introduce it this year with the same kind of lazy, reflex, Trump-Deranged snark that infests so many of the less erudite post of my Facebook friends these days. A favorite approach of their posts is the “Everything is Terrible” Big Lie (#5), which has been, as I wrote in “The Big Lies of the Resistance,” “has been a veritable mantra of the ‘resistance,’ Democrats, progressives and the mainstream news media from the second Donald Trump had been declared the winner of the 2016 election.” You read this in social media and hear it from all over, the side comments about “the way things are now,” “these difficult times,” and “with what’s going on.” This is how the Trump Deranged signal that they’re not a deplorable: it’s like a secret handshake. If I wanted to have whole days wasted by arguments with people who don’t care about reality, I would ask these TDS sufferers, “What exactly is that supposed to refer to?” Then their answers would make me lose respect for them, because they would be regurgitated talking points, massive hypocrisy, or proof positive of crippling ignorance and gullibility.

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The Axis of Unethical Conduct, the Trump Deranged, and the Galactically Stupid either don’t know this or don’t want anyone else to know it. That is unpatriotic and unethical. But first, a song! The singing comes at the end, words by, of course, John Phillip Sousa…

Now on to the inventory. I will try to post more up-beat stories tomorrow…

1. This, of course, is autocracy: The Environmental Protection Agency today placed 144 employees who signed a letter accusing the Trump administration of politicizing the agency on administrative leave and opened an investigation into their their conduct. Good. There is no workplace where an employee publicly criticizing and attacking his or her employer isn’t likely to be fired and shouldn’t be fired. “Current and former E.P.A. employees, lawyers and advocates expressed alarm at the development, saying the agency appeared to be ignoring the employees’ First Amendment rights.” Of course they do, because undermining their own Executive Branch is their objective, and they think they should be allowed to do it. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” the E.P.A. press secretary, Brigit Hirsch wrote in an email. OK, that’s unnecessarily bombastic, but basically correct. The suspended employees signed the letter using their official titles. They don’t have a metaphorical ethics or legal leg to stand on.

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I want to get a July 4th weekend Ethics Alarms multi-issue post out, and this probably belongs there, but for the love of God, I can’t wait.

I just heard one of the MSNBC talking heads agree with a typical guest on the network (“you know: morons”)by pointing out that Joe Klein, the “legendary TIME columnist” (who wrote “Primary Colors,” the best-selling roman a clef about the Bill Clinton cabal and lied about his authorship), had written on his substack that ICE deporting “innocent illegal immigrants” who have been living here for many years and “only came here to have a better life” “makes the country weaker.”

Will we never be able to sound the death knell for that hoary, dishonest rationalization? How can anyone still be saying that, and worse, how can anyone be so cretinous as to quote it as if it is some kind of revelation?

ONE: There are no “innocent illegal immigrants” who are adults. It is impossible to “innocently” enter the United States illegally. This is so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be repeated or explained.

TWO: The fact that one of these illegals has been living here for “many years” means that a non-innocent individual has been violating our laws that entire time, even if they haven’t engaged in drug-dealing, rape or other felonies. They are just as culpable as they would have been in they were nabbed in the act of breaking out immigration laws.

THREE: ALL thieves, embezzlers, traitors, adulterers, bigamists, identity thieves, extortionists, blackmailers, frauds, drug dealers, counterfeiters, tax cheats and even murderers commit their crimes to “have a better life.” If that’s an excuse for illegal immigrants, it’s a mitigation for illegal immigrants too, and it’s not.

The next person who says any of that garbage in my presence had better be ready to duck, because I’m going to train myself to projectile vomit at will as my automatic response to “innocent illegal” or “They just want a better life.”

In four graphs, here are the result’s of Gallup’s latest survey…

Here is Gallup’s (weak, superficial, misleading, cowardly) analysis…

“At the beginning of the 21^st century, U.S. adults were nearly unanimous in saying they were extremely or very proud to be Americans. But that national unity has eroded over the past 25 years due to a combination of political and generational changes. Democrats today are much less likely than in the past to express pride in their country; in fact, their national pride has hit a new low. Additionally, Generation Z and millennials are much less proud of their country than their elders are.

These changes have occurred mostly over the past decade, and have done so amid greater pessimism about the economic prospects for young people, widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, greater ideological divides between the parties, unfavorable images of both parties, and intense partisan rancor during the Trump and Biden administrations.”

Gee, what happened at the beginning of the 21st Century that could have triggered a down-turn in pride in the nation? Well…the nation was slowly coming out of a slimy sex scandal in the White House in which the President lied to the nation (“I did not have sex with that woman”…because, see, where I come from blow-jobs aren’t considered “sex,” see…), his wife enabled the lie (“a vast right-wing conspiracy”), and an entire political party reversed its supposed concern for feminism and women’s rights to deny their POTUS’s flagrant sexual harassment guilt, nominating as his successor the Vice President who had participated in that gaslighting. Meanwhile, the opposing party nominated a weak. mush-mouthed candidate whose main credential was being the amiable son of his former President father, and the election ended in a virtual tie with the key state’s popular vote confounded by multiple instances of incompetence (the “butterfly ballot”), and the subsequent recount marked by Florida (partisan, Democrat-dominated) courts ignoring the state’s laws, with the resulting mess having to be fixed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The election ended up with the winner losing the popular vote for the first time since 1888, which meant to large chunk of the under-educated American public that Bush was an illegitimate President. Then the Democratic Party began a still-running false narrative that the election had been “stolen” with the complicity of the Supreme Court.

THAT’s what.

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This is so disillusioning. I supported Elena Kagan’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. She was obviously qualified, had the right experience for the job, and seemed capable of objective, non-partisan analysis unlike Barack Obama’s disastrous “historic” first nominee to the Court, the dim bulb Sonia Sotamayor, and Biden’s arguably worse choice, DEI Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. I have tried to cut Kagan a break for so often sticking to her less able woke female colleagues like the Three Little Maid from School in “The Mikado” in 6-3 decisions. I understand why loyalty to the team might have its long-range advantages. Often I can imagine Kagan rolling her eyes at one of the fatuous Sotomayor dissents based on feelz instead of the law. I get it.

But this time Kagan’s collegiality with her intellectual inferiors led to a breach of integrity. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., last week was much needed, greatly deserved, and necessary to stop an egregious abuse of judicial power for partisan agendas. The decision struck down the sudden fad of nationwide injunctions by lower courts, the Trump II weapon of choice employed by Democrats seeking not to allow the elected President they hate do the job he was elected to do. The “wise Latina” issued another one of her amateurish dissents. It was Kagan, however, joining with Jackson in endorsing that dissent, who really disgraced herself.

In 2022, when conservatives were the ones seeking injunctive relief from his President Biden’s Executive Orders (if in fact they were his EOs), Kagan expressed disapproval of nationwide injunctions.  “This can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stuck for the years that it takes to go through a normal process,” she said. 

So she’s a partisan hack then, cutting the cloth of her supposedly objective legal analysis to match the dictates of the Democratic Party. Good to know.

(The ethics password is integrity.)

Justice Kagan doesn’t have it.

I have an early morning legal professionalism seminar I am holding on Zoom (yuck!), so I don’t have time to put up a competent post. I’m opening up the floor for topics, debates, whatever: just be civil and brilliant.

Here’s party favor: I discovered a free GAI detector, here. I haven’t tried it, but then a bot may have written this…

Here you go…

How do you like that one?

1.3 thousand “likes” and all those re-posts, including by three of my soon-to-be-lobotomized Facebook Friends. Outside of “We’ve bombed Iran,” nothing in the post is true or even logically supportable. About 2,000 FBI agents are assisting ICE out of more than 13,000, and 37,000 FBI employees over all. Calling Hegseth a “drunk guy” is certainly fair, don’t you think? And the grand finale is the head-exploding “it isn’t what it is” fiction, part of current DNC cant, that the only reason Kamala Harris lost is because of her sex rather than her myriad other problems, like being an inarticulate idiot, picking an even bigger idiot as her ticket mate, running a spectacularly inept campaign, and representing a Soviet-style puppet government that loused up virtually everything it touched.

Now here’s one of the approving responses it attracted:

Wow.

Wow. The only way anyone could write that Hillary Clinton was “one of the most qualified’ Presidential candidates is to have literally no knowledge of the American Presidency at all, which raises the question of why one would make an assertion like that in a public forum knowing you had no basis for it whatsoever. Saying the same about Harris is, against all odds, even more absurd.