Unethical Tweet

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).

Unethical Tweet Of The Week: President-Elect Donald Trump (Sigh!)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I didn’t see this until I had already put up the previous post about “Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks.” If I had, it would have been included. Above all else, the tweet is stupid.

I know, I know…this may be Julie Principle territory. Still, the conduct of the President of the United States is always of special significance, so I am loathe to declare before the second roller-coaster Trump term begins that he will be given an Ethics Alarms pass for the inevitable social media outbursts to come. What is so discouraging, not to mention unethical, about Trump’s Thanksgiving Day tweet is that it shows, again unfortunately, that our soon-to-be 47th President has a flat learning curve, at least in the area of public statements.

There is no reason for Trump to issue a back-handed  “Happy Thanksgiving” message, and so many reason not to. He certainly knows that somehow managing to at least alleviate the toxic partisan divisions in America is not only an important task he must face and treat seriously, but also essential to the success of his administration. Trump Derangement is also approaching national health emergency status. What ethical objective can a tweet like that possibly accomplish? The answer is, I hope all can agree, none. Well, none except making Trump feel good. How juvenile and self-indulgent, in addition to selfish. The tweet is essentially gloating, a “Nyah, nyah, nyah!” to his foes. All it does is make them angrier, more hateful, more irrational, and more convinced that all Trump wants to do is inflict revenge on “Radical Left Lunatics.” The substantive goals he has claimed to be seeking will require his full attention; there is no time for such pettiness.

Yet there is it. No self-control, no hint of appropriate priorities, no sense of “I could tweet this, but it would be wrong.” No nation will be respected whose elected leader behaves that way.

 

Ethics Observations on the Unethical Tweet of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Wowsers.

No denial and Trump Derangement here! 

Jed Handelsman Shugerman is a renowned and respected law professor at Boston University. A credentialed legal scholar specializing in constitutional law and governance, he is a co-author of “Amicus briefs on the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases,” among other publications. Yet the professor is apparently a Trump-Deranged, woke bigot no longer capable of rational and objective analysis.

Observations:

1. This guy blogged on Election Day that Harris would win easily. Such a declaraion was the result of inexplicable delusion for a government scholar, unless the explanation is that he is a fraud with no business teaching anyone. I regret my decision not to be more emphataic in my learned and informed conclusion that Trump would win the election and quite possibly in a landslide. I hinted at this belief in many comments, but never stated it in a post. I was discouraged from my previous failed predication that Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama. I shouldn’t have been: I was a weenie. I was much more certain that Trump would win than of my prediction in 2012. Romney was running against Obama, a skilled campaigner and incumbent President; Trump’s opponent was a terrible campaigner and a Vice-President. Romney was knee-capped by the biased news media, but its power and credibility was much stronger then. Romney never had enthusiastic support from conservatives, who rightly regarded him as technocrat with flexible principles. Not being willing to come out and predict that Trump would defeat Harris was wrong, but anyone stating from a position of authority that Harris would win is unforgivable. The polls that showed a dead heat made no sense, as many pointed out. Trump was running confidently, while Harris was running a desperation campaign, and running it badly, depending on voter amnesia and gullibility. By any objective observation and unbiased analysis of the issues around the election, the conclusion that Trump was a likely victor was unavoidable if one had to choose one result or another to predict. Predicting that Harris would prevail demonstrated an “It isn’t what it is” mindset and an abuse of authority by a presumed “expert.”

2. Blaming Harris or Walz for the most incompetent campaign in modern Presidential history is “missing the point”? It’s the only point anyone needs. The partisans who defend that campaign, with Walz being a walking, talking joke except that opposing free speech isn’t funny, and Harris resolutely refusing to answer direct questions directly while “protecting democracy” by using fascist tactics against her opponent can be fairly described as gaslighting.

3. Back to Romney in 2012: I predicted Mitt would win because, I wrote, Americans want strong Presidents. Obama was weak and feckless, but he played strong well. American still want strong leaders. Both Harris and Walz projected weakness. Indeed, the whole woke movement embraces weenyism. Strength is bad, toxic. Men tend to be more assertive, confrontational and agressive than women, so being a male is toxic. The United States was founded on risk-taking, defiance, strength, confrontation and willingness to fight for principles, so the United States itself is toxic.

Well…WRONG. These qualities have made the nation what it is, and what it is is brash, cocky, intolerant of weakness and anti-weenie. it’s a guy thing, but that doesn’t mean women can exhibit the same essential leadership qualities. There is a lot wrong with Hillary Clinton, but being a weenie isn’t one of them. “Toxic masculinity” is nothing better than a pejorative way to describe the unique character of the nation. I prefer American exceptionalism, and weenies need not apply. John Wayne lives, metaphorically of course. Good. Shugarman doesn’t understand or like his own country: why is he a professor anywhere?

4. Oh, fine, here it comes: “white supremacy.” Wouldn’t you think a scholar could come up with something more original (and true) than racism to explain Harris’s defeat? It’s insulting, but worse, it’s stupid. If Trump ran a campaign like Harris, ducking all substantive questions, basing his election on how bad Harris was rather than on what he wanted to do, he would have lost. If Harris hadn’t insulted young men, had she taken the interview with Joe Rogan, were she able to speak off scripts without sounding like Gabby Johnson, she would have won the election. If everything else were the same, but Trump were black and Harris was a white female weenie like, say, Amy Klobuchar, do you think the result would have been any different? I don’t.

5. This is a useful tweet, simultaneously indicting the competence and trustworthiness of academia, lawyers, law professors, law schools, Democrats and progressives.

Unethical Tweet of the Month: Actor Bradley Whitford

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Just remember, the Ethics Alarms position is to strive as much as possible to remain unbiased regarding a performer’s art regardless of his or her demonstrated political orientation or revealed personal character flaws. I enjoy Bradley Whitford as an actor.

But only an unethical, bullying asshole would write a tweet like that.

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Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.

Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,

  • “Trump is a racist.”
  • “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
  • “white silence is complicity”
  • “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”

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Why Nikki Haley Can’t Be Trusted, Continued [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Haley posted this support for mass rioting (what else could it mean?) about a month after the bad cop Derek Chauvin helped an overdosing career crook to his demise (or not) while George Floyd was over-dosing on a cocktail of drugs, including fentanyl. Three days earlier, the mass Black Lives Matter protests had begun under the unjustified assumption that Floyd’s death was a racial crime. In Minneapolis on May 26, 2020, the “mostly peaceful” protests turned to vandalism and arson. Her tweets were also among the many statements from public officials that predetermined Chauvin’s guilt, making certain that he would not get a fair trial (and he didn’t.)

To Haley’s credit, she hasn’t take down either pandering tweet (yet), but I regard it as further evidence that she is a weasel, and will say and “believe” whatever seems beneficial to her career calculations at the time.

Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Barbra Streisand

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I thought Barbra was smarter than Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner and Joy Behar.

I’m sure she is, or once was; dementia creeps up on you. I really don’t know how to explain this.

Is she being cleverly deceitful? Yes, some prices are falling, like gas, but prices as a whole are not. They are still rising, the effects of Biden’s inflationary policies are still hurting the middle class and the poor, and the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction” Act: has had slightly more salutary effects than Gerald Ford’s W.I.N. button, but nothing to boast about. Inflation “coming down” means that the rate of prices going up is lessening, not that prices are actually less than they were. Does Streisand really not know that?

The claim about Trump is definitely deceit. The mainstream media helped with that one,using the pandemic lockdown results that savaged the American economy to conclude that, as CNN, that scrupulously unbiased news source, wrote in September 2020 as part of the media’s push to elect a mentally-declining President because the public thinks he’s a nice guy, “Trump’s job losses are the worst of any American president on record.”

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From Trump Crony Roger Stone, New Vistas In Shameless Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The fact that Roger Stone supports Donald Trump and that Trump regards him as a friend, advisor and ally is almost enough, all by itself, to justify refusing to vote for Trump no matter who or what he runs against next. Stone, about the slimiest denizen in a scum-filled profession that includes such slimy practitioners as Dick Morris and Lanny Davis (that is, political consultants and operatives), stooped to a new low by calling the wife of Trump rival Ron DeSantis a “cunt” in the coded Twitter/X message above.

I did not know, prior to this incident, about the social media-speak “SeeUNextTuesday,” which means “cunt” like “Let’s go Brandon!” means “Fuck Joe Biden.” It’s pretty obvious, once you think about it, and gutter-level political rhetoric (though HBO allowed Bill Maher to use the term outright when GOP women were the target.). Stone, however, human fungus that he is, added to his ethics foul by denying that he called Casey DeSantis a “cunt,” tweeting ““NOT what I said! Typical @mediate smear.” (The mostly left-leaning political website had stated that “Stone Calls Casey DeSantis a C***,” though it wasn’t the only news source reporting the slur.)

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