…because now Carlson is promoting a “historian” who says that Hitler was just trying to be kind when he tried to wipe out the Slavs and the Jews.

No, I am not exaggerating.

Back in May, I wrote about how despicable it was for Tucker Carlson, whom Ethics Alarms flagged as a self-promoting, unprincipled creep years ago, to interview Alex Jones (who claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax) as if the conspiracy peddler was a legitimate journalist. Ethics Alarms described Carlson as “a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it.” More:

“…since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has. Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power.

Now, I can’t explain exactly how Carlson’s latest example of irresponsible journalism will help him in the power department, but his latest interview subject makes Alex Jones seem like Lowell Thomas. This week Carlson chose to interview Darryl Cooper, and introduced him as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Best! Most honest! Cooper explained to Carlson’s audience that Winston Churchill was arguably “the chief villain of the Second World War” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.” After all, Churchill could have made a separate peace with Adolf, who didn’t want to fight Great Britain, and maybe then the war would have peacefully concluded with Hitler taking over the rest of Europe and the U.S. never having to get involved at all!

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A few preliminary comments to frame this story:

• Again, this is how the news media sets out to fix a Presidential election.
• Like so many of these incidents, by the time it has been spun, distorted and manipulated, the typical voter has no idea what really happened and lacks the time or interest to find out.
• The double-standards applied to smear Donald Trump in service of the Democratic party can only be described as nauseating, because it goes beyond unethical and beyond corrupt to truly sickening. This sort of thing has been going on for most of a decade.
• Because Ethics Alarms has to cover this [insert word for disgusting substance here] this blog and its author have to put up with constant accusations of “supporting Trump” and pushing right-wing narratives. I resent that, and I resent having to take time to discuss stories like this. I, along with everyone else (except that many of those everyones like the Left’s trashing of democracy) have been watching the mutated Left, also called the Axis of Unethical Conduct here, breach all previous standards of fair politics and journalism ethics in its determination to destroy and defeat Donald Trump. After all,  he is, due to some warped cosmic sense of humor, the major obstacle to its ultimate triumph. This assault on the public’s ability to know what is happening around it is, as I have said repeatedly, the worst, most dangerous and most important national ethics scandal since Jim Crow, or maybe McCarthyism.
• I don’t want to write about this crap; I don’t have time for it, and doing so confers no benefits on me whatsoever.

With that off my metaphorical chest, here are the key points in the story. Characterizations may differ, but I am confident that what follows is accurate:

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It was scary.

I was engaged to moderate a “talk back” on ethics and the issues raised in the British drama “A Number” last night. I may write about the play here later: it is an ethics story involving a failed father who sends his disturbed son away and replaces him with a clone, thus providing the father with a “do-over.” One of the main issues we discussed was whether the father evoked any sympathy as he tried to cope with the serial disasters his conduct had triggered, including the original son murdering his clone.

After the discussion, I was chatting with audience members as they filed out of the the theater. An elderly woman, her face flushed and contorted in anger, came up to me and said, “I completely agree with you that the father is a sociopath. He reminded me of Trump! I wanted to go up on stage and strangle him!” By the end of her statement, she was almost shouting.

“Thanks for coming!” I told her.

The character of the father has absolutely no resemblance to Donald Trump in any respect, not attitudes, actions, manner, appearance…nothing.

It’s not enough that Kamala Harris deliberately placed on the ballot to be elected one heartbeat from the Presidency a Democratic governor , Tim Walz, who has been lying about his military combat record for more than 20 years. (Well, that was just “bad grammar”…). Nor that Richard Blumenthal, the senior United States Senator from Connecticut, also a Democrat, was cheerfully elected by Connecticut voters in 2010 (and re-elected in 2016 and 2022) despite repeatedly lying about being a Vietnam war veteran. For “Wait, there’s more!”…Wes Moore to be precise, the Democratic governor of Maryland.

Moore, shown above as he gave a highlighted speech for the Harris-Walz ticket at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (he did not have a piece of the application for a prestigious White House fellowship in which he lied about receiving a Bronze Star hovering over his head, though) has been dispatched by the Harris campaign as a surrogate to defend Walz on cable television! What a good choice! After all, who better to try to rationalize lying about military service than someone who has done it himself!

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Ugh. I meant to include this in the previous post.

In September of 2019, Kamala Harris, then a Senator, wrote to Twitter on official Senate stationery that it should censor then-President Trump. CNN’s Jake Tapper challenged her on the suggestion. (She also tweeted that position.) “You wrote to Twitter and the CEO Jack Dorsey and asked him to take away the president’s Twitter handle. How is that not a violation of free speech? The President has the same rights that you have, that I have, how would that not be a slippery slope where they have to ban half of the people on Twitter?”

Harris’s totalitarian reply: “A corporation has obligations. Their Terms of Use dictate who receives the privilege of speaking on that platform, and who does not. And Donald Trump has clearly violated the Terms of Use, and there should be a consequence for that. Revoke someone’s privilege, because they have not lived up to the advantages of the privilege.”

There’s a Harris “value” for you, and the Biden Administration’s “value” as well. When the government applies pressure on a corporation to ban a political figure’s speech, indeed a sitting President’s speech as he seeks re-election, the “privilege” of communicating with the public on social media becomes a right being infringed by the government. Does Harris believe freedom of speech is a right or a privilege? That’s a “values” question Dana Bash should have asked Harris.

Nah. Too hard. She might have flubbed it.

“My values have not changed.”

—-Kamala Harris last night, repeating an obviously memorized response to anticipated questions by CNN’s Dana Bash about the many policy flip-flops she has executed since becoming the Democratic Party nominee.

This mantra was repeated three times in various forms, once prefaced by “let’s be clear.” To me the statement makes it clear that Harris’s “values” don’t include integrity or honesty. (I know: we already knew that.) Like her spectacular pretzelism of simultaneously running on “change” while maintaining that the Biden Administration she is part of has been all aces, this weasel-phrase is another transparently devious device to have it both ways.

Read her exchange with Bash about her sudden embrace of fracking. It makes no sense, especially in light of her later response that “her values have not changed” regarding the environment and that she still supports the Green New Deal, which mandates banning fracking.

A public official with consistent, sincerely held values does not and can not reverse herself on major issues unless significant new information and evidence has changed the problem. The significant new information that has caused Harris to flip-flop like the Flying Wallendas is polling that tell her that her previous positions on those issues will cost her votes. The values that have not changed are Harris’s ambition and her willingness to say and do anything to be elected. Those are not ethical values.

[I want to mention here that I took a break to have a cup of coffee and heard on the DirecTV NewsMix Channel that Trump and Vance are “pouncing” on Harris’s values line. This is why people accuse me of following Fox News talking points. Hey, if others come to the same conclusion I do, that just speaks well for them; it doesn’t mean I needed their help to figure it out.]

More on the interview:

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