No.

Not that I can see.

Maybe it’s not their intent. Maybe bias has made 95% of all journalists so stupid that they don’t realize what they are doing, or how unethical and irresponsible it is. But doing it they are.

Yesterday was the metaphorical coin dropping. Even though it should have been obvious that Trump, a former President whose single term looks like the “Shining City on a Hill” from the perspective of the current Biden presidency ethics train wreck, would win in a walk over the wan GOP competition in Iowa, Trump-Deranged commentators acted as if the Hindenburg was blowing up before their eyes. So desperate were they to see some progress in their endless “Get Trump!” pursuit that they told readers and viewers that Nikky Haley was a rising star in the weeks before the caucuses, hoping her candidacy would catch fire. Then, as devoted practitioners of old-fashioned democracy were trudging to their meetings during some of the worst winter weather Iowa has seen in years, most national news organizations projected former President Trump as the runaway winner before many Iowa caucus sites even even had ballots to tally. Nice.

Now that’s the way to suppress Trump votes.

Hanlon’s Razor tells us this was stupidity rather than malice, but some conservative sites called the strange goings on “election interference,” and why wouldn’t they? Some polls indicated that a majority of GOP caucus participants believe that Joe Biden wasn’t legitimately elected, and the news media hammered on this “baseless” belief. Message: Republicans are morons. No, Republicans witnessed the Russian collusion hoax, the two contrived impeachments, the steady anti-Trump Big lies every day in the Post, the Times and CNN, the nicely-timed national shutdown that wrecked Trump’s economy, the Hunter Biden cover-up, the sudden transition to voting methods that minimized election integrity, and they have some justifiable suspicions.

As do I.

The narrative is now official: Trump is an existential danger to democracy, an aspiring dictator and an orange Hitler. No balanced coverage is in the offing: the news media, incredibly, is more openly allied to the Democrats and united against Trump than ever before, which is amazing. The objective is to terrify as many Americans as possible, so they will be panicked and desperate if and when the Republicans win the White House.

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Well, ugh. This is one of those complicated ethics issues that takes a long time to understand and write about, requires a great deal of my time and yours, and on a cost-benefit basis, seems like a misalignment of resources. However, I can’t ignore it, and it is an important case.

As you know, Substack has exploded in recent years as a profitable web platform for subscription opinion newsletters across the political spectrum and on almost every topic imaginable. (As a result, free blogs like mine are going the way of the Diplodocus.) In November, The Atlantic published a piece by Jonathan Katz titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” It’s behind a paywall, but the gist of the article is stated up front:

“…just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.

Substack, founded in 2017, has terms of service that formally proscribe “hate,” along with pornography, spam, and anyone “restricted from making money on Substack”—a category that includes businesses banned by Stripe, the platform’s default payment processor. But Substack’s leaders also proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ, albeit with spotty results, to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake….

Reacting to Katz’s article, nearly 250 writers hosted on the platform signed an open letter on the issue, beginning with “We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?” and concluding with, in part, “Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?… We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know — from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.”

The Substack management responded with this. The short version:

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That’s probably the most Dean Martin-ish of all Dean Martin records, and since I didn’t get to post it as I usually do during the holidays, since it snowed all day here yesterday, and since I miss Dean terribly, there it is. Speaking of snow, if I was like the climate change-obsessed (Science!) and had no shame, I’d cite the MLK Day storm along with the fact that it didn’t snow once the whole year when I first came to Northern Virginia over 50 years ago as evidence that Al Gore’s pet issue is a lot of over-hyped hooey. I’m not like Them, however, so I won’t.

Now, some MLK Day ethics notes:

1. Stop making me defend Joe Biden!

The conservative media and its pundit piled on President Biden for saying yesterday, of all days, “Even Dr. King’s assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd’s death did.” It is a strange and annoying statement to make on a holiday honoring King to be sure, but Joe’s brain-fog is likely to make him say all sorts of strange things. That statement is, sadly, spot on. Dr. King’s life had a historic impact on the U.S., but his assassination made less of a ripple world wide than the death of Princess Diana. Here, there were race riots in several cities (especially D.C.) following his death in April of 1968, but they were less destructive than the previous summer’s rioting. President Johnson used the riots to speed the passage of his signature legislative package, the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It probably would have been passed anyway, but that’s just speculation. MLK Day celebrates the importance of King’s life, a catalyst for civil rights advances, the end of Jim Crow policies in the South and the nation’s acceptance of integration. George Floyd, in contrast, had no positive effects on society while he was alive. It is absurd that his death, a non-racial episode exploited by activists, led first to the massive rioting it did and the subsequent rise of Critical Race Theory-inspired indoctrination in schools as well as intense DEI-fueled discrimination against whites across all sectors, but it is undeniable. Would some other incident have triggered the same response if moral luck hadn’t claimed the life of Floyd? Sure. Nonetheless, Biden was right, just as he would have been right to say the assassination of an obscure Austrian duke in Sarajevo had more “worldwide impact” than the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

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The Rice University Course Catalogue:

CHEM 125 – AFROCHEMISTRY

Long Title: AFROCHEMISTRY: THE STUDY OF BLACK-LIFE MATTER

Department: Chemistry

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Lecture

Credit Hours: 3

Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Level(s): Undergraduate Professional,Visiting Undergraduate, Undergraduate

Description: Students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S. and students will implement African American sensibilities to analyze chemistry. Diverse historical and contemporary scientists, intellectuals, and chemical discoveries will inform personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education. This course will be accessible to students from a variety of backgrounds including STEM and non-STEM disciplines. No prior knowledge of chemistry or African American studies is required for engagement in this course.

“Black life-matter!” Get it?

_________________

Pointer: Stephen Greene

Ethics Alarms put the much-admired (by conservatives) website Breitbart on its black list at least as far back as 2016. It might even be earlier, but finding the exact date when I got disgusted isn’t worth the time it would take away from my sock drawer inventory. It would be nice if the site were trustworthy, but Breitbart is as biased and devoted to manipulating public opinion to view conservative agenda items (and conservative figures, especially Donald Trump) in a positive light as the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast are in the opposite direction.

The latest example appeared two days ago at the links provided by Citizens News Daily, the popular conservative news link farm that has taken over the position on the Right once held by the Drudge Report, which was sold, or taken over by Trump-haters, or something. The CND link (still) reads, “Nikki Haley — Climate change is causing Illegal Immigration, ” and went to this story at Breitbart. The typically Breitbart-y headline reads, “Nikki Haley Parroted Leftist Talking Point Suggesting Climate Change to Blame for Mass Immigration.”

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“So… it didn’t work to change the culture temporarily, to deal with Trump, that horribly abnormal President. The old culture didn’t just pop back into place when Trump was gone. You have to take care of a culture and maintain its values in good times and bad.”

—Retired law professor and active blogger Ann Althouse, reflecting on how the cultural norms violated by the Left to “get” Donald Trump didn’t recover once he was out of the White House.

Ann warrants a Super Bingo for this. It neatly fits in with the EA post about what we are facing once the courts make it official that Presidents can be prosecuted for their acts while in office. Her observation—spot on—was prompted by the Politico piece, “Bosses in the Biden admin are pressed over young staffers’ anonymous letters/Protest letters, like those over Israel, were rare in past administrations. White House veterans can barely contain their disdain over how times have changed”. Ethics Alarms posted many articles about how members of Trump’s staff and other officials in his administration, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, behaved unethically by abusing their positions of trust, leaking confidential information, and working behind the scenes to sabotage their superiors. The government simply cannot function without government staff and subordinates accepting the basic principle that while they are employed, as Paul Begala (the loyal Clinton henchman) says, “If confronted with a decision that crosses one’s ethical, moral, social, political lines, the choice is clear: Shut up and support it, or resign.”

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Last March, Ethics Alarms reported on the stunning lack of ability and expertise being demonstrated by some of President Biden’s appointments to federal judgeships. At least Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) had some fun exposing their incompetence, though Democrats and pundits in the mainstream media mocked him for what they termed his “gotcha!” questions….you know, horribly unfair queries like “What’s a Brady motion?,” which any first year law student should know.

The worst of Biden’s dim legal bulbs was probably Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren, nominated to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Washington. Kennedy’s questioning revealed her to be almost completely unfamiliar with the U.S. Constitution. Kennedy asked her, “Judge, tell me what article V of the Constitution does?”  “Article V is not coming to mind at the moment, she replied.  “How about article II?” he asked, Her response: “Neither is Article II.” I wrote of the judge’s performance a year ago,

This is more than evidence of incompetence, it shows arrogance. The woman is going to be vetted in a Senate hearing; wouldn’t you think she would at least do a little bit of preparation? Nah…she knows she’s assured of being confirmed, because no Democrat would dare vote against a female nominee “of color” no matter how unqualified she appeared to be, After all, as Senator Murray said, Murray said, what matters most is “a judiciary that reflects the diversity of this country.”

And indeed,  Sen.  Murray really did say she was very qualified for the job and “truly exceptional”—as in exceptionally not-white and exceptionably female. Well, it turns out that Murray was wrong, and so was I. Bjelkengren was informed that she wasn’t going to make it after all, and is one of five nominees whose nominations to the bench expired at the end of 2023 who was not among 18 nominees the White House resubmitted to the Senate this week.

Good.

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“If debates had been forums where legitimate policy differences were explored in a long-form, meaningful way, then I’d probably be frustrated by this chaotic turn. But they weren’t, they sucked, and now they’re (mostly) dead.”

—Reason’s Liz Wolfe reviewing the Haley-DeSantis debate along with Trump’s counter-programming “town hall” on Fox News

She adds elsewhere in her article,

“Has the old-school debate format been broken? In the past, debate stages were crowded, debates were relatively few, and nobody really dared opt out of them—even during primary season. Now, it’s all just chaos… if you didn’t watch any of the debates or counterprogramming, you probably made a good choice.. it’s actually kind of awesome how the pageantry of debates has been cracked open, how more formats than ever before are being experimented with…and how candidates such as Trump are making unconventional campaigning choices—opting out of all primary debates—in lieu of playing the game.”

It’s too bad, but Wolfe is right. From the very beginning, debates have injected random, misleading factors into the election process. For every instance where a debate legitimately illuminated something important about one of the candidates, there have been 20 where they had a disproportionate effect on public opinion. The main problem is that debating skill, or even public speaking skills, are not necessarily markers of leadership competence. Vivek Ramaswamy has been giving a master class on that.

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