U.S. Society

Stupid Cognitive Dissonance Tricks: Who Cares What Nicki Minaj Thinks? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Nicki Minaj, the most successful female rapper in music history (a distinction in my book that ranks right up there with Eddie Gaedel being the only midget to play Major League Baseball), made a surprise appearance at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest convention, walking out hand-in-hand with CEO Erika Kirk, to close the conservative organization’s annual event in Phoenix, Arizona yesterday. The conservative media and blogosphere was ecstatic. (The Axis media was shocked and horrified.)

Minaj is a woman, black, and not native-born: she’s supposed to hate Trump, MAGA, conservatives, Republican, the whole basket of deplorables. But there she was, gushing on stage, “I have the utmost respect and admiration for our President. I don’t know if he even knows this, but he’s given so many people hope,” adding that Trump was “handsome,” “dashing” and a good “role model.”

So what? The news media presuming that Nicki Minaj’s opinion on anything should matter one iota to anyone is endorsing the fatuous delusion of the Harris campaign, which paid out millions to get endorsement from celebrities who have no policy credibility whatsoever. Nevertheless, the Right is celebrating Minaj’s endorsement for the same reason Democrats became Liz Cheney fans: these are Cognitive Dissonance Scale games, the most cynical kind imaginable. Minaj figures to have a fan base made up of demographics that tend to favor Democrats, but cognitive dissonance theory dictates that if someone high in their estimation embraces the MAGA cult, Trump, Turning Point and the rest will be forcefully pulled up the scale, maybe even into positive territory!

(Of course, the scale also dictates that Minaj’s popularity will take a major hit as well.)

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The Progressive Nonsense Gene

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Madison Wisconsin Ann Althouse, who tries admirably hard to suppress her natural left-leaning biases and I admire her for that, wrote a statement over the weekend that perfectly encapsulates what is so seductive and destructive about the progressive mindset.

I didn’t know what to do with it. I was temped to make it an Unethical Quote of the Month, but it’s not really unethical; it’s just dumb. (Also Trump’s outrageous attack on Rob Reiner locked up that distinction. I’m pretty sure it is also the most unethical quote of 2025.) It is so dumb, however, that I am tempted to say Althouse failed her duty of influence and expertise. Smart people who are expected to provide intellectual and emotional guidance have to take care that they don’t mislead the people who trust them.

Her statement was…“It shouldn’t be possible to become famous through murder, but it very clearly is.”

What a silly, utopian, “Imagine”-esque thing to say, out loud or on a blog (the internet is forever). It is, however, a near perfect example of the how the progressive delusion gene makes people believe in, advocate, and administer terrible policies that can’t possibly do anything but backfire horribly, and can’t possibly work.

It is one thing for someone to think along those lines in a moment of panic or stress. That’s excusable, though my late wife, “E2” in the EA comments, was always annoyed when characters in movies or TV shows would scream, “This can’t be happening!” The political Left is constantly gulled into thinking the realities of life can somehow be banished by a well-meaning program, law or policy. That’ where communism and socialism ooze from: surely there’s a way for everyone in a successful society to be happy, healthy, safe and having the benefit of sufficient food, living space and employment!

Uh, no.

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Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part II: The Important Stuff

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

 

Yes, I’m feeling this hopeless right now.

Contrasting in gravitas and significance this week have been at least three revelations that the Axis of Unethical Conduct will try mightily to keep out of the public eye and our consciousness. Instead, we will be bombarded with Rob Reiner’s wonderful movies, “the collapse of the Trump Presidency,”and, of course, Epstein. With an ethical Fourth Estate, however, and a POTUS who wasn’t determined to destroy himself, these stories would be leading the news:

1. Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified, then included in the final Georgia Presidential vote tally. This obviously places Trump’s claims that the election results were corrupted in a new light, especially his controversial appeal to Georgia’s governor to “find” the votes necessary to flip the state into Trump’s column. The margin in Georgia was a whole lot less than 315, 000.

The startling admission came during a Dec. 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board. Before that, as we all know by now, Trump had been accused of trying to “overthrow” the election and his lawyers have been disciplined for trying to halt the certification of what they believed was an unconstitutional election. No, Georgia alone couldn’t have stolen the Presidency, but this additional information certainly undermines the five year narrative, as well as the already dead-in-the-water state prosecution of Donald Trump.

The Federalist is covering the story. I have not seen any report in the Washington Post, the networks, or the New York Times.

2. Newly-declassified documents show that President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice pressured the FBI to conduct its 2022 raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home while the FBI repeated warned that such a raid was not justified.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced in an X post, “Received shocking new docs 2day from DOJ & FBI showing FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway.” “Based on the records Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice. Read for yourself,” Grassley added, linking to the documents posted online.

It was not a “miscarriage of justice,” it was a deliberate political hit job using law enforcement as a means to taking a Biden political rival out of the 2024 race. Who was the threat to democracy, again?

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Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part I: 4 Self-Inflicted Wounds

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I began by titling this depressing post “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: President Trump,” but that seemed inadequate somehow. Maybe there’s no heading that could adequately express what an awful week the President had, how it was entirely unnecessary, how all of his deep political wounds were self-inflicted (okay, his clueless Chief of Staff helped), how much harm it did to his administration, influence and prospects of success, and how much he helped the Axis of Unethical Conduct when without his assistance the serious news would have had it staggering. <Breathe, Jack, breathe!>

EA covered three of the epic fiascos, but now I have to cover the fourth. The others were, in chronological order,

1. Trump’s petty, cruel, stupid attack on beloved director Rob Reiner immediately after he and his wives were stabbed to death by their son. I believe that his infamous Truth Social post may prove to be the tipping point in his administration. Recall that the Bush II Presidency was sent into a death spiral even before the 2008 economic crash because he was vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and flew over the devastation. Then the inept Democratic mayor of the city, with help from Kanye West, successfully created the narrative that Bush shrugged off the disaster because he “didn’t care about black people.”

2. Trump’s presumed-competent Chief of Staff inexplicably gives interviews to a 100% anti-Trump Axis member, Vanity Fair, in which she dished about colleagues, suggested chaos in the White House, and opined that the President resembled an alcoholic even though he is a lifetime abstainer.

3. Trump allows his hand-picked Kennedy Center board to add the President’s name to the landmark, launched as a memorial to President Kennedy in the wake of his nation-shattering assassination, and to quickly plaster it on the front of the building. This was so stupid and gratuitous that I don’t want to think about it, but it sure gave my Trump Deranged theater friends on Facebook ammunition.

But wait, there’s more!

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Two More Reasons Why We Can’t Have Nice Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

1. Once, a guilty pleasure of surfing the web and social media was seeing amusing videos of dogs and cats, and other animals too, behaving anthropomorphically, spectacularly, or adorably. Now, “thanks” to artificial intelligence, no such video can be trusted. The more remarkable it seems, the less trustworthy it is. Unethical people seeking views on Facebook and elsewhere post these fake videos as real, because viewers knowing they are staged and manufactured robs them of most, if not all, their entertainment value.

Above is a screen shot from one of the suddenly ubiquitous videos showing dogs frightening other dogs with Halloween masks. The link to the video, which WordPress wouldn’t let me embed, is here. It’s fake. Dogs, in my experience, are seldom fooled by masks. No dog would tolerate having a mask like that fastened to its head. No dog would go along with the gag and creep up on a sleeping canine companion. And no American Bully could leap like that all the way to the sofa.

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Ethics Dunces: The Kennedy Center Board…No, Wait, I Mean the TRUMP Kennedy Center Board!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Oh come ON.

“The Trump Kennedy Center?” As one of my Trump Deranged friends posted on Facebook, quite appropriately, “What’s next, The Trump Washington Monument? The Trump Lincoln Memorial? The Trump Jefferson Memorial…?”

I don’t even want to think about what’s next. Ugh. Ack. Yecchh.

You would think that after his Rob Reiner fiasco, the President would be just a teeny-weeny bit wary for a while. Clearly not.

If President Trump had any sense at all, he would thank the board but turn down the wildly inappropriate honor. But he doesn’t have any sense at all, not in these kinds of things.

I am aghast.

Cognitive Dissonance Games and Tipping Points: President Trump Made Rob Reiner the Greatest Hollywood Director Ever and Himself Into an “Ogre.”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Among the many reasons that President Trump’s attack on Rob Reiner before the shock of his murder at the hands of his own son had subsided was stupid (as well as unpresidential and cruel) was its ignorance of the Streisand Effect. The completely predictable reaction of the Trump Deranged, always seeking a new metaphorical drum to beat, and the similarly inclined Axis of Unethical Conduct, ensured that the President’s gratuitous Truth Social post would trigger an eruption of outrage that will fuel attacks on the President’s character for months, perhaps reaching into the mid-terms.

For this to really work, of course, Reiner must be elevated to near saint-like status, and sure enough, that’s what is going on. The higher Reiner (he was a wonderful, flawless man, we are now being told) and his films ( one of his movies is a favorite movie of everyone, one article claimed) can be pushed up the Cognitive Dissonance scale, the lower Trump goes by attacking him. Trump is first and last a salesman; how could he not know his gratuitous outburst would deeply wound his “brand”?

Among other gifts to Trump’s political enemies. this Cognitive Dissonance Scale botch makes defending or even continuing to support the President perilous. If you link yourself to President Trump (based, as it must be based, on his policies and actions rather than his character) by defending him you are simultaneously proclaiming your opposition to “The Princess Bride,” “Stand by Me” and “When Harry Met Sally” and the unassailable murder victim who made them.

This, in turn, poses the real danger that Trump’s revolting post will prove to be a tipping point, that last, tiny, thing that makes the Jenga tower fall or Mr. Creosote’s stomach explode as it does after eating the “wafer thin” morsel offered him in the clip above from “The Meaning of Life.” Trump’s stupid, mean words may well tip public opinion against his whole Presidency permanently and completely. If so, it will undoubtedly be the most trivial verbal tipping point in U.S. political history. By comparison, George Romney saying he had been “brainwashed,” President Ford saying in a debate that the Soviet Union did not dominate Eastern Europe, or President Carter claiming in his debate with Ronald Reagan that he consulted daughter Amy on nuclear weapons policy seem positively earth-shattering.

And yet if attacking a recently slaughtered director crushes Trump’s chances of holding off the Far Left’s siege on American values and core individual liberties, it may prove to be the most consequential moment in his Presidency.

Additional points:

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The Crucial Ethical Values the Trump Team Lacks

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This is serious. The last week or so has been disastrous for the Trump Administration, almost entirely because of its own foolishness, recklessness, and lack of competence. As I have noted more than once in this period, its missions are too important to be placed in jeopardy by hubris and stupidity, but that is what is happening. This is a phenomenon for which the President himself is entirely at fault. I have scant hope that he is capable of either recognizing the peril he is placing the nation in, or reforming. The President and his hand-picked loose cannons aren’t just shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot. The photo above is more accurate.

First, of course, we have the President’s own cruel, useless, gratuitous post insulting Rob Reiner after the director and his wife were murdered. Trump might as well have hit himself in the face with a cast-iron frying pan on national TV. It gave people who already hate him ammunition to say, “See?” It made moderates question his stability, self-control and character if they already didn’t, and it put his defenders in the position of defending the indefensible, thus diminishing their credibility and influence.

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Comment of the Day: “Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part I: The Artist”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This elegant Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT is short by COTD standards, but I had to honor it. Yes, the comment echoes a theme that has been covered on Ethics Alarms many times, because I am an artist myself as well as a critic and connoisseur of art, and because I feel passionately that art of all kinds has an independent life from that of the artist. It is a Cognitive Dissonance Scale challenge, to be sure, when an artist’s horrible words, views, conduct or character are underwater on one’s personal CD scale and that artist’s creative output is high in positive territory. But one has to try, and try hard, to separate the two. So much of my favorite music was written by flawed, cold, even sick people. So much of the literature I love, and that has formed a great deal of my perspective on life, was authored by terrible human beings, except for that spark of brilliance. I believe with all my heart in Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America, democracy and liberty, but find his personal conduct and hypocrisy nauseating. And don’t get me started on the performing arts: to take the most prominent example, I have spent a large chunk of my life celebrating, admiring, interpreting and promoting the talents and artistic output of Danny Kaye, who was, as I discovered late in the process, a misanthropic sociopath. That did not change however, the joy he brought to millions, his delightful performances in “The Court Jester,” “Hans Christian Anderson” or “White Christmas,” or the glory of Danny’s dazzling renditions of “Tchaikovsky” or “Anatole of Paris.”

Here is CEES’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part I: The Artist,” which begins with a quote from Chris Marschner’s comment:

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Unethical Quote of the Month, Unethical Tweet, Incompetent Elected Official: President Donald J. Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Also res ipsa loquitur.

There is no excuse for this and those tempted to defend it should staple their lips shut and super-glue their fingers together.

Quick points that should be obvious:

  • Trump has a political death wish exemplified by his determination to make his most irrational foes look like they have a good point about his character.
  • The man literally doesn’t know how a President of the United States should act, or if he does, doesn’t care, which is worse.
  • His administration’s many missions are too important for him to jeopardize them with petty, ugly, breaches of decency and dignity like this, just to satisfy a personal grudge against a man who just had his throat cut by his son.
  • What an asshole.