“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.
Medium, the pay-walled website for bloggers who don’t produce enough content for a blog of their own, sent me an alert about a new article called “When I Learned My White Friends Didn’t Care About Me” by someone named L.G. Ware. Well, foolishly, I decided to try to read it (I have a limited subscription to “Medium,” I don’t remember why.) When I realized the link was just a tease to get me to pay, I did a little checking around the web and found another version of post on a website I had happily been una-WARE-of before (I’m 11-years-old before my first cup of coffee) called Level. Not only was I presented with L.G.’s whining about how he knows white American hate blacks because they voted for Trump, I was introduced to many black writers who are under the same crippling (for them and for the nation) delusion.
Perusing the site is like having a window on what deliberate racial division-aimed rhetoric from the Left has done to the mind of black America, propelling race relations backwards. It isn’t just that you see either: the level of objective critical thinking these assorted essays—all aimed at black readers: less likely to be challenged that way—reveal also tells us much about how our politicized education system has handicapped large chunks of the public. “All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” wrote a wise man, but he was white, so I guess nobody reads him any more. The entire Level site is metaphorically yellow. Let’s peruse it a bit, shall we?
L.G. has several posts there, but “The Day My White Friends Betrayed Me” is representative. This was obviously the post his Medium screed was adapted from. Some quotes…
I woke up in the middle of the night and ended up watching the re-run of Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” which included someone doing a breakdown of the demographic groups that shifted toward Trump in the election. He kept emphasizing, however, that “college educated Americans” now strongly support Democrats. The implication was clear. Those are the smart voters, the educated and sophisticated voters. His analysis fed neatly into one of the most popular narratives the Axis is currently using to explain away last Tuesday’s wipeout. Trump voters are stupid. You know, in addition to being garbage.
College grads who voted for Harris naturally agree with that analysis: they think they are superior to those corrupt Trump voters and doubly superior to the large proportion of them who spent the years after high school earning a living and being exposed to the real world. After all, if they had sufficient IQs, they would have college degrees, right?
They had just issued another of their fear-mongering and academically indefensible Times op-eds, banging that same metaphorical drum with their (profitable!) argument that any genuine student of Presidential history (like they claim to be) knows is 100% hooey, and using the beat to argue for Democrats taking unprecedented measures to block Trump from the presidency….all of which defy previous democratic norms! The Levitsky and Ziblatt hypocrisy has nonetheless become, apparently, a standard weapon for the Axis to use against Trump, as increasingly absurd as it. That this is true shows just how dire the state of the Totalitarian Left is following Trump’s victory: they really have no unbroken arrows in their quiver, just noodles and boomerangs.
And so it is that the “Trump violates norms!” argument has resurfaced already. From CNN yesterday on “Newsroom with Fredericka Whitfield:
I have accumulated so many items, election-related and non-election related, that I am forced to get up one of the potpourri posts even though their work/response ratio is terrible.
I did have a moment of clarity regarding our Once and Future President, however. Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election, not just that it was rigged (as it was) against him, and not just that he should have won the Electoral Vote, but that he literally won it, as in getting more votes than Biden, has always been pretty embarrassing, especially since he never yielded on the point and repeated it ad nauseam. The claim certainly gave ammunition to the Trump Deranged, the Axis of Unethical Conduct, and the “Trump lies all the time” mobs. He couldn’t prove it, and it seemed like a scab that Trump kept picking at and wouldn’t allow to heal. I now think that it is possible that there was a method to his madness [“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it;” Act 2, Scene 2.] as there often is.
I realized this after writing the post about the history of Presidents winning elections after losing one. Only Richard Nixon won the Presidency after losing both the popular vote and in the Electoral College in a previous election. Usually losing Presidential candidates are permanently tarred after a loss; they are seen by both their parties and the public as “losers.” Why nominate or vote for a loser? Even in Nixon’s case, he felt the need to separate himself from his past: in 1968, he branded himself as “the new Nixon,” even appearing in a self-mocking cameo on “Rowen and Martin’s Laugh-in” (“Sock it to me??).
As a salesman and promoter, Trump had to know the toxic effect of being branded a loser, and “loser” is one of his go-to insults. I don’t think he really was convinced that he won the popular vote, but rather that he felt branding himself as a foiled winner rather than publicly accepting the reality that he lost was the right play. Trump could run as a winner, and if his obstinate insistence that he won in 2020 was a target for Axis ridicule and condemnation, so be it. It was worth it for him to never accept the label “loser.”
Dishonest? Unethical? Sure. But not crazy. And in the context of Presidential campaign framing, not very far outside the norm, if at all.
I am really trying to find ethics topics that don’t focus on Trump Derangement, the 2024 Post Election Freakout and the Post 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck. I am. I’m as sick of the idiocy and ethically-clueless (Accountability? Responsibility? Honesty? Fairness?) outbursts as much as you are. More than you are—I have to write about this crap. Then a story like this one slimes by my eyes. I can’t ignore something this stupid. So, it pulls me back in.
Before I get into this embarrassing muck: above is a clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive, listing the videos I use regularly to categorize a particular type of ethics tale. I considered commenting on this story by posting every video that applies. I think it’s an all-time record—go to the post and see how many you would include. I count nine.
Now hold on to your skull: The New York Post reports that students and alumni of Pomona College are furious with Donald Trump because…wait for it…he has ruined their favorite number for them.
You see, 47 is Pomona’s lucky number. Now, I would think that one of the purposes of an institute of higher edication is to disabuse its eventual graduates of the idea that there are such things as lucky numbers, but never mind. The number 47 has eerily appeared repeatedly in the 137-year history of the private liberal arts college, located in Claremont, California. Exits on the 10 and 210 freeways to get to Pomona College are both number 47. The organ at the college’s music auditorium has 47 pipes in the top row. There were 47 enrolled students at the time of the first graduating class in 1894. The largest dorm on campus, officially known as Florence Carrier Blaisdell and Della Mullock Mudd Hall, has 47 characters in the title and was completed in 1947. The dorm’s staircase contains 47 balusters. So, naturally and completely reasonably, alums of the school have a “47 Society.”
No I’m not making this up. See?
But the evil…EVIL! Donald Trump is the 47th President, damn him, so now it’s all ruined…
Graduate Terril Jones told reporters taht he fears that he can’t wear his Pomona 47 hat in public, lest he be identified as a Trump supporter in public. “I definitely feel that the Trump campaign has co-opted it in a way that makes it difficult for all people who love 47 to display it.” Another alumni scratched his number 47 car sticker off of his rear window. Yet another has reconsidered getting an honorary 47 tattoo since Trump’s win. Trump’s victory “is the worst thing to happen to our beloved number, possibly ever,” one graduate wrote on the “47 Society’s Facebook page.
Trump now sports a MAGA hat with the numbers 45-47 on the side. His campaign platform was called Agenda 47. An LA Times assistant editor complains in an op-ed “It feels like Trump and his followers have appropriated my favorite number,” he whines.
It feels to me like you’re a Trump Deranged idiot.
On the evening of November 7, scenes of Jews being ambushed and beaten on the streets of Amsterdam were appearing on social media. Most of the news media couldn’t be bothered to report this until days later, however. After all, colleges and public schools were worried about the mental health of their delicate students, traumatized dangerously by the outbreak of democracy in their country and a result that didn’t please them (or their parents, in the case of 10 years olds).
Georgetown, one of the universities that has a diploma with its name on it turned face to the wall in my office, invited students to a “self-care suite” while its McCourt School of Public Policy offered milk and cookies, hot cocoa, Lego blocks and “Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises” to keep students from plunging into the depths of despond. Harvard, the other school with a front-to-the-wall diploma in my office, cancelled classes in mourning along with other elite universities, aka progressive indoctrination camps. So reporters and talking heads were focusing on the real news—you know, how racist, sexist, stupid, uneducated and irresponsible voters were not patriotic enough to embrace the empty and dishonest candidacy of Kamala Harris. Social media videos showed distraught and panicked Americans screaming, crying, and vowing vengeance.
I missed the Amsterdam story entirely because the headlines I glanced at, always well below the election freakout headlines if they were there at all, made it look like just another European soccer riot. Ho hum. It was a lot more than that.
This one is by novelist Anne Lamott. At least it’s well-written. It still is evidence of what the Axis propaganda has done to many previously rational minds, though Lamott is a long-time woke activist (she lives in California, naturally) so she probably is more a purveyor of anti-Trump hysteria than a victim of it.
She contributes to Salon, which is pure leftist propaganda 90% of the time. She called the Tea Party “hateful.” She actually praised Harry Reid, at last report being butt-raped by flaming demon water buffalo on a bed of spikes in Hell.
Her cry of pain is all emotional argle-bargle with very little paranoid progressive fantasy, but some. Nonetheless, treating the electoral defeat of a candidate as irredeemable as Kamala Harris as if it were the death of a lover is evidence of warped priorities and historical naivete, as well as far too little diversity in thought among one’s friends. Aren’t people like her supposed to be champions of diversity and inclusion? I have diversity and inclusion among my friends: that’s why visiting my Facebook feed is like watching a performance of “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade” usually shortened to Marat/Sade.
Sky News has been running a funny and disturbing program since the election highlighting the hysterical reactions of both anonymous Trump Derangement victims and some whose faces we know, unfortunately…
As discussed in earlier posts, those propagandists, fearmongers, irresponsible journalists, academics, “experts” and Machiavellian politicians who intentionally induced such unhinged reactions to a Presidential election are cruel Ethics Villains all. They should be exposed, mocked, shunned and disgraced.
I have followed every Presidential campaign and election since I was 10 years old. I have always carefully tracked the issues, competing policies and personalities. I have never been so emotionally involved that any result could or would cause me to behave like these poor people. I have also studied the history of campaigns, Presidencies, and the men who became President before I began watching and reading about history as it happened.
The Americans who are reacting with such extreme emotion, fear and hysteria are doing so first, because they have been deliberately deceived, and second, because they don’t understand our culture and the deep resiliency of our traditions and values.
The United States is better and stronger than these deficient citizens think. It is better and stronger than the unethical people who unhinged them.
In truth, I’m hoping that here we can find fascinating ethics discussions that don’t involve the election at all, but maybe that’s expecting too much. Over at the asylum that once was my Facebook feed, several of my once rational friends appear to be genuinely investigating where to move, you know, like Spain or England, where there is less freedom of speech even than usual. Well, these people have turned into morons, and I’ll miss them, but moron are a burden in a democracy, so “Bye!”
The Project 25 hysteria was one of the Democrats’ more despicable gambits. I keep seeing that list above or similar ones posted as Trump’s agenda. The list is hilarious, and anyone who believes that’s what’s in the document thinks the Constitution was written by Donald Duck and begins, “There once was a man from Pawtucket….” The website of the exercise , essentially a brain-storming session among many conservative groups, is easy enough to check, but know, the Trump Deranged hysterics would rather use a phony meme designed to demonize the Right than discuss the real thing. They deserve to live in Spain.
There’s got to be something less stupid to discuss…..
Ethics Alarms 