It was Prof. Mayer’s head-exploding op-ed for USA Today that made me start thinking about how often alleged “authorities” stick their whole legs down their own throats. Unlike the late Cleveland Amory’s misfire regarding the Pythons, Mayer’s “expert” analysis of the current 2024 Presidential election scenario qualifies as malpractice, an abuse of authority triggered by an epic case of the Bias Makes You Stupid Disease. It is also another of what promises to be an accelerating stampede of panicked outbursts from the Trump Deranged in the news media and academia.

The headline signals this guy’s lack of perspective and objectivity immediately: “How Biden Can Save America From Trump’s Return To The White House: Drop Out of the Race.” The claim that Trump is an existential danger to democracy is a dishonest, despicable Democratic party talking point concocted on the theory that fear-mongering is the party’s best chance. It did the same thing in 2016, you may recall: I’ll never forget speaking with a formerly rational lawyer friend in Massachusetts who was near tears after the election, terrified for her year-old baby’s future, certain that the Orange Devil would start World War III. Funny: in four years, Trump didn’t get the U.S involved in any wars at all. Biden, however…

The screed continues with equally batty analysis, denial and gaslighting:

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Substantially correct, but rhetorically sloppy and needless inflammatory….in other words, typical of Trump.

Martha Pollack announced earlier this month that she will step down as the president of Cornell, running neck-and neck-and -neck-and neck with the other Ivy League indoctrination camps in seeding anti-white hate and anti-Semitism. She championed the Democratic Party led race-focused DEI initiative at Cornell in the wake of a non-racial incident in which a bad cop hastened the demise of a life-time petty perp and addict overdosing and resisting arrest in Minnesota. This, in turn, led to targeting of Jewish and pro-Israel students, to such an extent that Jewish students felt unsafe and threatened on their own campus; one student was charged with seriously threatening a Jewish massacre. Pollack has been weak and enabling toward the pro-terrorists even for an Ivy League president, resulting in terrible publicity for the school and many millions in lost donations.If she was “doing what she thought was right,” she didn’t even have the guts to follow-through on her misguided agenda: perhaps seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, she’s quitting before she can be fired.

But in the grand tradition of weenies and cowards everywhere, now that she is immune from consequences, Pollack took one last, disgusting swipe at her victims, praising the Hamas-supporting demonstrators in an email released on May 14. As Cornell professor William Jacobsen correctly noted, the message  amounted to gaslighting. “The entire statement was demeaning and insulting, except to the anti-Israel protesters,” he wrote. It praised the students who threatened the Jews on campus and expressed “gratitude” that the demonstrations weren’t worse. The missive to the campus read in part:

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At his weekly news conference two days ago, talking about New York City’s shortage of lifeguards for its public pools as the simmer months approach, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said,

“How do we have a large body of people that are in our city and country that are excellent swimmers and at the same time we need lifeguards? The only obstacle is that we won’t give them the right to work to become a lifeguard.”

He really said this. He did! I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that. That’s what the mayor of New York City said, and he wasn’t joking.

After the predictable response (well, Adams apparently is incapable of predicting it, but almost everyone with their cerebrum installed properly would be), the mayor’s attempt at “walking back” his idiocy only raised more doubts about his intellectual fitness (or rather, eliminated them). Adams suggested that illegal immigrants (he called them “migrants,” which doesn’t change what they are) could fill other key jobs in the city, in nursing and food service , for example. “Why people want to just hang onto swimming when I listed that we need to allow people to work,” he said. “Let people work.”

• Yup, let’s allow people to break our laws and defy our immigration procedures, and be rewarded for it. Good plan! Why should any American respect our laws when elected leaders like Adams take that position? Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) asked: “Do other Democrats like Joe Biden think breaking the law is qualification for employment in our country?” Why yes, Marsha, they do.
• Somebody explain to the mayor that attaching any skill or characteristic to an entire group is at the core of stereotyping and bigotry. May I assume that Adams, as a black man, has great rhythm and can play a mean banjo?
• Q: Since apparently wading or swimming across the Rio Grande is regarded as a career credential, why don’t our DEI obsessed Ivy League colleges extend swimming scholarships to these talented and buoyant “visitors”?
• A: Because “not drowning” doesn’t make someone an “excellent swimmer.”

The signature significance test: Would any public figure who isn’t an idiot say this in a public forum, even once, without intending to be funny?

I don’t think so.

Remember, Donald Trump and the Republicans are a threat to democracy….

Why the recent decision of the Shenandoah County School Board to restore the names of two local public schools previously stripped of their references to three Confederate generals is unethical is crystal clear to me, but apparently to nobody else, or at least nobody else whose opinion I can find in print.

The Board voted 5-1 to change the two schools’ names back to Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School, four years after the same board with different members changed the names to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School. The previous act of historical air-brushing had occurred because it seemed obvious to those members that a lifetime petty crook overdosing on fentanyl and dying under bad cop’s knee while resisting a valid arrest in Minnesota meant that the names of those schools in Virginia had to be purged. Such was the logic of the George Floyd Freakout.

The George Floyd-inspired re-naming was wrong for the same reason all of the Confederate statue-toppling was and is wrong, as Ethics Alarms has attempted to explain from the moment this destructive movement started. The Washington Post and others call it “a racial reckoning.” It really is a cultural self-lobotomy. Communities and societies honor significant individuals in their histories for many reasons, and the fact that they have been honored in a particular time period is as much a part of history as the individuals themselves. Communities and societies of a subsequent period removing such honors and memorials in periodic outbreaks of presentism actively prevents future populations from examining and comprehending the nuances and conflicts of their own nation and its developing values. It also erases complex individuals and their life stories from our collective memories, a loss no matter how one justifies it.

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