Unethical Tweet

“Social Media Is An Idiot Detection Service,” Episode #789K

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Today’s episode, from “X”:

Sharmine Narwani, we are told, is a well-known journalist and political analyst specializing in West Asian geopolitical issues. She believes that Islam was around six centuries before Muhammad was born. She wants to spread her ignorance far and wide.

The tweet has 25,000 “loves.” I regard it as a pre-holiday “Coming Attractions” feature, warning us of the fatuous Jesus=Illegal immigrants analogies we will be getting from our woke friends (and a lot of pulpits) all too soon.

(Pointer to Glenn Reynolds, who accurately notes, “Actually, of course, it was a Jewish kingdom when Jesus was born. And it didn’t become Arab or Muslim until the Mohammedan invasion of the 7th century. Today’s inhabitants of “Palestine” are settler-colonialists. Israel is fighting a war of indigenous resistance to colonization.”

Hypocrisy Watch…

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

And people wonder why Trump beat the Democrats in 2016. Bernie is, to his credit, open and unrepentant about his hypocrisy, but it is kind of amazing that he still gets away with statements like this. He’s multimillionaire communist who rants about income distribution, and not only has a private jet but who mocks the little people who have to wait in lines for commercial air flights, and he fear-mongers about cliamte change while spewing more carbon into the atmosphere than any random 1000 Americans.

He can get away with this because he correctly assesses the IQ (low) and ethics alarms ( busted) of the average progressive.

And then there is Hillary Clinton. Saying, in effect, “Hold my beer!” the sad, bitter and irrelevant almost-first female POTUS (I feel sorry for Hillary, I really do) went for hypocrisy gold with this post on “X”:

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Ethics Dunce: Stephen King

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Stephen King is a talented writer and master of his genre. He is also a typical knee-jerk New England Democrat whose political and social commentary has exactly as much value as Cliff’s at Cheers after four or five beers. He really stepped into the metaphorical “it” with the tweet above, for which he was roundly pummeled on social media and had to grovel an apology after Ted Cruz launched a particularly harsh attack, called the author a “horrible, evil, twisted liar” in his response.

King’s slur was in reference to comments Kirk made on his podcast in 2024, in which Kirk criticized children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel for citing God’s wish for Christians to “love thy neighbor” in Leviticus, and added that the exhortation should include gay people. Kirk pointed out that citing scripture as authority had obvious drawbacks, noting, “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.”

He did not, obviously, advocate stoning gays to death.

Caught, King tried to lie his way out of his own unmasking. “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [without] fact-checking. Won’t happen again,” King wrote after deleting the tweet. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” the 77-year-old author wrote.

But King already knew what Kirk meant, and has issued the lie anyway. How do we know that? We know because he mocked Kirk’s “just saying,” which means King knew what Kirk had said, and misrepresented it anyway as part of the Left’s desperate efforts to spin away the significance of Kerk’s assassination.

Boy, are they terrified of a tipping point! Good. They should be. Watching fish struggle when hooked is repulsive: it’s why I never could stand fishing. Watching the Axis thrash around now? Wonderful.

King and the rest, are showing the nation who they are.

Addendum to “On the Damning Birthday Doodle….”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was going to add this to the previous post, but decided that it deserved a special highlight. Red-pilled former Axis pundit Matt Taibbi is exercised over the apparent documentation showing the the whole Obama administration, including Barack, deliberately promoted the Russian collusion hoax as a way to cripple the incoming Trump Administration. That is part of an angry tweet sent his way.

Note the attempted equivalencies: on one hand we have a high level government conspiracy by Democrats to violate the Constitution while framing a President of the United States, and on the other, at worst, a raunchy gag birthday greeting from two decades ago.

This is how unhinged from reality, proportionality, sanity and common sense the American Left has become. That poor fool who tweeted Taibbi is not an isolated instance: I bet most of my Facebook friends would agree with that tweet. It really is beyond unethical to pathological.

The Ethics Verdict on the President’s “No Kings” Trolling [UPDATED and CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wonderful. Perfect.

Unfortunately, this was a hoax that fooled the mostly reliable source I found it posted on, with no hint that it wasn’t authentic. Twitter/X cheated me out of my blue check payment and blocked me from my account for no discernible reason and I am not going to follow Truth Social any more than I am likely to hang out at Bluesky.

I originally wrote in part, “Yes, this is a violation of “norms” except for Trump’s norms, of which this is a familiar example. No other President would issue such a sarcastic jibe at passionate protesters against his leadership and policies no matter how ell-earned. That, I believe, would be their failing. President Trump is the perfect person to deliver the devastating coup de gras to these foolish, hysterical, unhinged boobs. Only he can say with such vivid authority, “You didn’t lay a hand on me!”

Alas, it was too good to be true, and I should have realized that. The real Real Donald Trump could not resist writing something much cruder and insulting.

I’ll just end with my obligatory statement that deliberately posting false information on the web is unethical even if one isn’t a journalist.

Special thanks to my friend James Flood, who was the first one to flag my gullibility.

Addendum to “Ethics Dunce : President Trump. Again.”: Ethics Dunce: V.P. J.D. Vance

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ugh. Then conservative pundit at Townhall writes, “JD Vance Absolutely Wrecked an Anti-Trump Commentator Over This Trump White House Post.“

No, Matt, that is not a witty, persuasive or devastating reply to poor, useless Bill Kristol’s tweet. Vance’s retort is the equivalent of “Oh, yeah? Well, your mother is fat!” or You suck!” or “Your favorite President, Bush, would make an even worse Pope!” Or George Costanza’s immortal, “Oh, yeah? Well, I had sex with your wife!”

True, there are some mitigating elements here. Vance, as Veep, is obligated to defend the President even when Trump’s words or conduct are indefensible. It is also true that Bill Kristol, who became so Trump-Deranged that he has turned against principles his entire career was dedicated to advocating and defending, is such an embarrassment that the response he deserves would be, “Bill, nobody cares what you think about anything any more, including me. Go away.”

But Vance resorting to flagrant deflection and “whataboutism” further corrupts civic discourse by endorsing logical fallacies and rationalizations. And for Vespa to cheer such lazy argumentation on compounds the sin.

Unethical Tweet of the Month: CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Could we possibly have more irresponsible, untrustworthy, detestable broadcast journalists than we have now?

CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins supported the assassin of UnitedHealthCEO Brian Thompson in the “Twitter/X” post above, directing readers to a site set up by the shooter’s lawyer that featured a prominent link to a GoFundMe for the murderer’s defense. Luigi Mangione, who strains the use of the term “alleged” as he was caught on camera shooting the victim in the back and arrested with incriminating evidence on his person has become the darling of the sickest of the sick among progressives. Leftists ranging from Elizabeth Warren to the most unhinged of my Facebook friends have rationalized Mangione’s cowardly crime as “understandable.” “You can only push people so far. And then they start to take matters into their own hands,” slimed Warren (BOY she’s horrible!) Mangione faces charges of first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism.

After the disgusting tweet attracted appropriate criticism ( “This is @CNN — pimping the GoFundMe for a left wing assassin,” tweeted Ace of Spades, completely accurately) Collins took it down–this is known as “subsequent repairs” in negligence law—and then employed manifest deceit to defend herself. “In no way did I share a fundraising link for him,” she protested.

No, she posted a link to a website that had the fundraising link displayed at the top of its page. Her claim that the fact the website existed was “newsworthy” does not explain or excuse her promoting it on social media. Jorge Bonilla on Newsbusters rightly asks what the reaction would have been to a Fox News journalist who posted the address of a site that linked to a GoFundMe for J-6 rioters.

The Trump White House has opened the long overdue debate over whether openly biased, partisan, unprofessional and untrustworthy journalists should continue to have press credentials at White House briefings. I would expand that discussion to whether people like Kaitlan Collins should be recognized as journalists at all.

Doxxing, “Big Balls,” J.D. Vance and “The Racist Tweeter Principle”: A Tragi-Comedy With a Twist

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Like my old law school roomie who left “Gone With the Wind” at the intermission thinking it was over, I almost posted on this ethics mess too early. There were three acts, and there might be a fourth. I thought the ethics show was over after Act II.

Act I. The news media’s tantrum: Upon finding that Elon Musk and DOGE were serious about uncovering government waste, that he was employing some of his young computer nerds from SpaceX to do it, and that they had brought down USAID, a foreign aid, woke slush fund icon by exposing just how profligate and irresponsible it was, Katherine Long, a progressive reporter on the Wall Street Journal, targeted the young geniuses who may all be on the autistic spectrum (like Musk). One of them, a 19-year-old, she embarrassed by revealing that his social media handle when he was in high school was “Big Balls.” She also doxxed Marko Elez, writing that he was a “25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending” and had published troubling social media posts like, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he wrote on “Twitter/X” in September. Long revealed that his account declared, “Normalize Indian hate,” in the same month, expressing his disapproval of the large numbers of tech workers from India in Silicon Valley.

Ethics takeaway: Doxxing is unethical; so is using old social media posts to make a newly prominent figure a victim of the “cancel culture.”

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Unethical Quote of the Month: CNN’s Brian Stelter

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here is Brian Stelter, making a fool of himself, and CNN, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct, again:

This is the depth to which this cosmic hack will stoop to bolster his propaganda-spewing pals in the Axis. Censoring free speech is the equivalent of putting out deadly fires! Brilliant, but telling. This is CNN!

And this is CNN: CNN “factchecker” Daniel Dale rushed to try to defend the incompetence of L.A. and California Democrats, saying “There is no shortage of water in the LA area,” and babbling that reports of fire hydrants being dry were due to “technical logistical infrastructure,” whatever that means. You can’t check facts before the facts are known: a major investigation will be required to determine exactly what went wrong, what public officials were at fault, and what factors were in play regarding the devastating Palisades fires. Never mind, though: to those brave factcheckers, a lack of facts won’t dissuade them from rushing into debates and drowning opinions that might singe the Woke and Wonderful.

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the fire response put immense strain on the water system. That would seem to suggest a shortage of water, no? Or the fact that many fire hydrants were dry, according to the firefighters who tried to use them. The Santa Ynez Reservoir the Pacific Palisadeshas been out of commission since February 2024, meaning 117 million gallons of water was missing, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, desperately saying anything he could come up with to preserve his presumed status as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s 2028 Presidential nomination, told NBC News that the state’s reservoirs are full. He also said, more accurately, there will be an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

It should come as no surprise that these essential public servants, the Axis factcheckers, didn’t choose to factcheck shameless Biden paid liar Jan Psaki, now a paid liar on MSNBC, who told viewers. completely without facts, that the California fires weren’t the fault of anyone in California at all, but Donald Trump for not doing enough to combat climate change. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (that’s the “resistance,” Democrats, and the left-biased mainstream media for those unfamiliar with the Ethics Alarms term) sense that accumulated incompetence and bad progressive policies on display as homes burn might be a tipping point for ridiculously woke California, causing millions of voters to suddenly slap their foreheads and exclaim, “Why have we been voting for these liars and idiots?” I have my doubts that anything short of mass deprogramming can achieve that result, but still what we are getting from Stelter, Psaki and others reeks of panic and desperation.

Unethical Tweet of the Week: “The View” DEI Hispanic, Ana Navarro-Cárdenas 

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Navarro, a fixture on ABC’s “The View,” has been an embarrassment to all of her media employers; they have just been too foolish to realize it. She’s a fake Republican/conservative, initially hired by CNN as a token so she could bash Donald Trump and claim objectivity. She isn’t witty, analytical or smart and has a speech impediment: if she were a white male, she would be defending DUI cases.

That tweet is special. She’s allegedly a lawyer, and she doesn’t know what a precedent is? The precedent is a President giving a suspiciously extensive pardon including crimes that haven’t been charged yet that the President might have directly benefited from to his son. That’s never happened before because it directly benefits the President and has the appearance of impropriety.

The whole tweet, moreover, is based on a passel of rationalizations falsely applied, like “Everybody does it” (#1) and “There are worse things” (#22). “Every President” doesn’t pardon their immediate family. The closest analog was Bill Clinton pardoning his half-brother for a cocaine conviction, but Roger’s crimes were neither as numerous nor as serious as Hunter’s, nor did anyone think Bill had any connection to them.

Saying that Trump also appointed his father-in-law as French ambassador is as relevant to Navarro’s argument as writing, “And he has bad breath, too!” That factoid has nothing to do with the pardon.

Additionally, citing Wilson, Clinton and Trump as Presidential role models in a matter of ethics is idiotic strategy. They are three of the most ethically-inert of all our Chief Executives, and those pardons match their proclivities. Defending Biden by comparing him to that trio is desperate.

I saved the best for last, though: Navarro-Cárdenas is making Americans dumber by spreading Presidential fiction. Woodrow Wilson had no brother-in-law named “Hunter DeButts,” so he couldn’t have pardoned him.

This pure fiction, the results of Navarro being hoaxed or the victim of an AI “hallucination”: either way, it’s irresponsible journalism. She obviously didn’t check her facts before making a false statement, one that impugned a President (though one who earned a lot of impugning).