Post Thanksgiving Open Forum [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I’d be interested in anyone’s anecdotes from yesterday about their confrontations over dinner with family on political matters. At the (fantastic) Shirlington Dog Park in Arlington, VA, I chatted with a freind with whom I have never discussed politics (and never will), who said she was spending the holiday alone because she wasn’t speaking to any of her relatives. They feel, she said with a voice dripping with contempt, that “the public should respect an elected President even if he did probably rape a 14-year-old.” Hey! Look at that beautiful Vizsla!

Continue reading →

Thank Goodness For Experts, or “If You Can’t Figure Out This Is Wrongful Conduct By Yourself, You’re Not Trustworthy…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The New York Times has a column by a wellness expert who reveals that Kipling Williams, emeritus professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, has found that giving a loved one “the silent treatment” is cruel and constitutes punishment. So do a bunch of other experts quoted, but this guy has supposedly studied the effects of the silent treatment for over 30 years. That’s his big takeaway? Apparently so. As my old dead friend Scott Wheeler used to say (ironically, I lost contact with Scott because he engaged in conduct I could not forgive or forget so I cut him off, and he knew exactly why) “Who doesn’t know that?”

Slow day at the Times? From the article: “Some people think the silent treatment is a milder way of dealing with conflict, said Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. But it isn’t, she explained. ‘The silent treatment is a punishment,’ she said, ‘whether you are acknowledging that to yourself or not.’For the person who is being frozen out, it creates “anxiety and fear, and feelings of abandonment,” Dr. Saltz said, and it often causes a “cascade of self-doubt, self-blame and self-criticism.”

Continue reading →

Thanksgiving Trump Derangement, A Clinical Study

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A good friend and widely- (and justly) admired lawyer who has been displaying his Trump Derangement symptoms on his Facebook page all year just provided an excellent example of the malady with his Thanksgiving post.

He re-posted the following Occupy Democrats “X” entry attacking J.D. Vance for his speech to the troops this week, as if anything issued by that extreme partisan propaganda outfit is reliable, fair, or trustworthy:

Then my friend, a lawyer, someone who knows as well as anyone that hearsay is unreliable and that biased sources will make you look foolish, wrote:

“If this is accurate it is one of the most bizarre rants by an American politician that I have ever read or heard about. What other American vice president has ever taken on and dumped all over in such crass language the most sacred symbol of one of our most important national holidays? I guess it’s remotely conceivable that Vance was trying to be funny, but if so it seems he needs major schooling on how to amuse an audience of soldiers desperately sick for home at Thanksgiving. MAGAS? Any thoughts on this? Are you proud of this man?”

Never mind that Occupy Democrats is infamous for its distortions of reality to demonize Republicans. Never mind that the video of Vance’s remarks are easily accessible on YouTube. Never mind that a good lawyer like my friend would never dive in with an opinion after writing “If this is accurate” when he had every opportunity to determine on his own whether it was accurate or not. He wanted the biased assessment of Vance’s speech to be true, because he wants to believe the worst about President Trump and anyone who supports him, and he knows that nobody on Facebook, save, perhaps, me, and I have a sock drawer to organize, will call him out on his unethical post.

I did watch the speech, which is posted above. The bit about turkeys was a small segment of the speech as whole. It was not a “rant.” His point was that Americans celebrate Thanksgiving with a roasted turkey out of tradition rather than because it is the yummiest main course imaginable. Of course he was trying to be funny, and because we can’t hear the audience reaction, it is impossible to tell if his routine worked (I could give him a few tips on his delivery) but so what? That was a minor section of the speech. Nor was he using “crass language.” Vance ad libbed “You’re full of shit!” to the soldiers raising their hands as part of the gag, and anyone who believes using the common if vulgar phrase in front of military personnel will be regarded as crass doesn’t know that audience.

But this is Trump Derangement! Neither Trump nor anyone connected to his Presidency gets or is owed good will or the benefit of the doubt. Everything that is said or done or suggested by the President or his supporters is presumed to be terrible, and the Trump Deranged don’t want to be bothered by context, facts or perspective. Their minds are made up. I am watching previously fair, wise and rational people debase themselves without even realizing it, because, you see, the President is “deeply evil.”

Larry Bushart, Justin Carter, Josh Pillault: Martyrs To Anti-Gun Fearmongering and School Shooting Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today Greg Lukianoff, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has a guest column in the New York Times about the unethical persecution of Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tennessee, who ended up in jail for 37 days for posting a meme on social media post that some hysteric took to be a threat to shoot up a school. His was a particularly head-scratching case of the wild over-reaction to stupid and vicious comments about Charlie Kirk after his assassination. Lukianoff uses his column to condemn all negative consequences of all of those comments, usually by the Trump Deranged and Axis media-indoctrinated.

From the column:

Mr. Bushart’s case would be alarming even if it were the sole instance of institutional overreaction to a response to Mr. Kirk’s killing. But it is not unique. A recent review by Reuters of court records, local media reports and public statements found that more than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, investigated or disciplined by employers for comments about the Kirk assassination. Mr. Bushart, too, lost his job — because he was in jail.

At my organization, we have tallied 80 attempts to punish academics over their remarks about Mr. Kirk since his killing, resulting so far in about 40 investigations or disciplinary actions and 18 terminations.

The Bushart case is a poor one to send Lukianoff to his soapbox: he wasn’t arrested over what he said about Kirk. I don’t think he was fired, either, since the column begins by telling us he is retired. Moreover, FIRE’s absolutism is misplaced: there are very good reasons to fire teachers who celebrated a man’s death by violence for his political views. To begin with, they are terrible, hateful leftists who shouldn’t be corrupting young minds.

But the column did remind me that I had never learned (or written about…I’m sorry) the resolution of the far worse case of Justin Carter, a Texas teenager (above) who was arrested in 2013 for commenting on Facebook with a fellow gamer, “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts. lol. jk.” A Canadian jerk who read the exchange decided to report Justin to the Austin police, who then arrested him–he was 18 at the time—searched his family’s house, and charged him with making a “terroristic threat.”

I wrote a great deal about the case in 2013, beginning with this post, “The Persecution Of Justin Carter And The Consequences Of Fear-Mongering: If This Doesn’t Make You Angry, Something’s The Matter With You.” I just re-read it: I blamed the teen’s abuse on the Obama Administration’s exploitation of the Newtown school shooting to create sufficient anxiety among parents to move the metaphorical needle on gun control, and I was right. Where I was wrong was in not keeping Ethics Alarms readers updated on Carter’s fate, though I referred to his case as recently as 2018.

Continue reading →

Thanksgiving Eve Ethics Appetizers

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving this year because I can’t stop things I’m not thankful for imposing on my consciousness and making me miserable. “Get these memories out of this room!” says one of three collegial madwomen in a memorable scene from “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” “I won’t have them sitting around staring at me!”

Exactly.

But enough about me. My friends continue to be frightening in their mental deterioration: that cartoon above was just posted by one of them…with a wave of “likes” of course. How much has one’s critical thinking skills been corrupted to think that perspective is anything but woke garbage? The mind boggles.

Meanwhile,

1. Here’s Biden’s paid liar, (the competent one) Jen Psaki, sounding idiotic on a podcast (Who has the time and tolerance to listen to junk like this? I’d rather watch re-runs of “Three’s Company”) attacking current press secretary Karoline Leavitt:

JEN PSAKI: It’s a very good question. Here’s the challenge of that. If I would say Peter Doocy, bless his heart, is not as bad as Benny Johnson.This is the group we’re living in, we’ve got the rank order of options. Is that if the Associated Press and the Washington Post and the New York Times and ABC News say, you know what, we’re walking out of this White House briefing room. That’s the best thing that could ever happen to Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Because that’s what they’re trying to reshape without saying they’re doing it. And in that room, and this is what I find to be so challenging, is the things that are happening behind the scenes that you can’t always see or know unless you’ve lived it. And I think this is true in law firms, in the Department of Justice and places too, is that in that briefing room, the Benny Johnsons of the world are slowly but surely taking over more and more of the questions in the briefing, right?And having a greater and greater presence in these press pools where you have a smaller group of reporters in the Oval Office. And sometimes Trump and a foreign leader will take 45 minutes of questions. And it’s Benny Johnson and little Benny Johnson, whoever that may be.And yes, maybe there’s one or two other real reporters, but the problem is they’re taking up so much real estate. So if all of these other reporters leave, that’s all the real estate. And then you know what we have?We have what the Kremlin press corps is. And that’s the challenge. So if you’re these reporters, I don’t know what the answer is and what you do. There’s still very smart people in there. They’re just getting overtaken in terms of space and real estate by people the White House selects to say things like, Donald Trump looks so good in his workout. What is his workout?That was literally a question one day.

ANGIE “PUMPS” SULLIVAN, CO-HOST: It’s crazy. Yeah. Okay. And one thing. Okay. So I’m going to tell you what a big nerd I am.

PSAKI: We’re all nerds. It’s a safe place.

WELCH: So I get on social media. And then when I would get home after work, I would watch your press conferences when you worked for Biden.

PSAKI: Oh my God. God bless you. Thank you.

SULLIVAN: It’s just to see like, okay, what’s the real story before I got into the meat of it? Because I was like, okay, what’s the White House saying? Because I’m getting all this disruption. And I think that it’s a, you know, it’s precious for the United States to have a representative of the president to come out and talk about policy. You had a stack of books this tall. I couldn’t even believe all the crap you went through. Now I am enraged every time I see Karoline Leavitt who prays before she goes out there and lies her fat ass off. So she goes out there and lies and it’s propaganda after propaganda. Is there no check on that? Like, is there no, like, I guess there’s no law that the press secretary has to be honest, but like when she acts like, I can’t even believe you would insinuate Donald Trump would make money off of the presidency as the Trump watches are going. So is there no like rules or anything? I guess they don’t care about rules, but does that break your heart to see what it’s been turned into?

PSAKI: It does. And I say this as obviously I worked in Democratic politics for 20 something years. I’m not shy about my views, but even for people who like Dana Perino or dare I say even Sean Spicer, I don’t know if I should use him as an example.It’s a very different briefing room now than it was then. Dana Perino is probably a better example of this, right? I disagree with Bush on a bazillion things, right? But you had to go in there and answer questions from the same type of reporters and often the same reporters I had to answer questions from. And this is a part of how the United States is unique as a democracy is that you do have a person who goes out there at the White House and answers questions even on days and believe me, there are some days where before you walk out into the room, you’re like, “oh shit.” There’s no information. That’s not the reporter’s fault. It’s like, there’s nothing I can offer and they’re going to just yell at me for 45 minutes. It’s sad because there aren’t so many people who’ve ever done that job and what it feels like it is diminishing the job. It is diminishing the role of the press secretary, the honor of being in that job, which is speaking on behalf of the United States of America, which sometimes it’s edgy. A lot of times it’s not. Sometimes people think it’s boring, but it’s important and this is really changing what it is and what the expectations are around it. And that is sad for the White House. It’s sad for the institution. It’s sad for anyone who’s had that job. And it really takes it away as something that the American people can rely on as at least a source of information.

Where to start? Of course Jen thinks the Times, the Post and the rest are journalism gold, since they abdicated all journalistic integrity to cover for her White House and her party. Funny that she thinks Leavitt has debased the Paid Liar job when Psaki never criticized her pathetic successor, Karine Jean-Pierre. And needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, for any former Paid Liar to criticize another one for lying isn’t just hypocrisy, it is lying in a position where lying is unethical.

Then there’s the barely coherent Mean Girls banter. How does that illuminate or entertain?

Continue reading →

Bad Politics, Right Policy: No More “AIDS Day” Observance

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The State Department has instructed employees and grantees not to use government funds to commemorate World AIDS Day. It is now Trump Administration policy “to refrain from messaging on any commemorative days, including World AIDS Day,” the directive said.

Employees and grantees may still “tout the work” being done “to counter this dangerous disease and other infectious diseases around the world,” and are free to attend events related to the “day.” However, they should not “publicly promot[e] World AIDS Day through any communication channels, including social media, media engagements, speeches or other public-facing messaging.”

Good. It’s about time, but the move is guaranteed to trigger the Trump Deranged and angry progressives, who will say this proves that the President and his followers are homophobic, transphobic, all sorts of -phobic. “World AIDS Day” was yet another sop to the constantly aggrieved gay community, one that has hung on since the first Bush Administration even as AIDS became almost never fatal.

Is there an reason why AIDS victims deserve special attention in 2025 as opposed to those who perish from any other disease or medical condition? No, of course not. But now the “day” is part of the virtue-signalling celebration of non-heterosexual sex, so it is sacrosanct.

(World AIDS Day is also on December 1, my birthday. I have things I’d prefer to think about on that day, thanks. Several close friends have died of AIDS, and I don’t need the Feds telling me what day to remember them. I do miss you Jeffrey, Thorne, Dallas, yes, even youTom…)

Nobody would have noticed if World AIDS Day went on as usual, whereas the new policy is guaranteed to be used as another “Get Trump” whomping stick. Nevertheless, these special interest “days” are obnoxious and divisive. (I discussed the blight of commemorative months and days in October.)The President is gutsy to address the problem, even if it isn’t a big problem. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” (#33) is clearly not among his rationalizations.

No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t “Racist”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Long ago, Jimmy Carter led a public embrace of the bonkers fallacy that all cultures are equally admirable and that the United States needed to become more “multi-cultural.” That was a disastrous turn in the American journey, and I am happy to say that I recognized it immediately at the time, along with many others of course. Carter’s fact-free conceit, one of his many disastrous moves in his rotten Presidency, gave us the illegal immigration wave, Spanish language prompts in phone trees, DEI, McDonald clerks who can’t speak understandable English and persistent ethnic underclasses, among other maladies.

Christoper Rufo, in his City Journal entry, “It’s Not “Racist” to Notice Somali Fraud: The recent scandal reveals an uncomfortable truth: different cultures lead to different outcomes,” writes clearly, persuasively and correctly about a truth that American once grasped but increasingly do not thanks to poor education and “it isn’t what it is” propaganda.

He writes in part,

“First, a description of the facts should not be measured as “racist or not racist,” but rather as “true or not true.” And in this case, the truth is that numerous members of a relatively small community participated in a scheme that stole billions in funds. This is a legitimate consideration for American immigration policy, which is organized around nation of origin and, for more than 30 years, has favorably treated Somalis relative to other groups. It is more than fair to ask whether that policy has served the national interest. The fraud story suggests that the answer is “no.”

Second, the fact that Somalis are black is incidental. If Norwegian immigrants were perpetrating fraud at the same alleged scale and had the same employment and income statistics as Somalis, it would be perfectly reasonable to make the same criticism and enact the same policy response. It would not be “racist” against Norwegians to do so.

Further, Somalis have enormously high unemployment rates, and federal law enforcement have long considered Minneapolis’s Little Mogadishu neighborhood a hotspot for terrorism recruitment. We should condemn that behavior without regard to skin color.

The underlying question—which, until now, Americans have been loath to address directly—is that of different behaviors and outcomes between different groups. Americans tend to avoid this question, rely on euphemisms, and let these distinctions remain implied rather than spoken aloud. Yet it seems increasingly untenable to maintain this Anglo-American courtesy when the Left has spent decades insisting that we conceptualize our national life in terms of group identity.

The reality is that different groups have different cultural characteristics. The national culture of Somalia is different from the national culture of Norway. Somalis and Norwegians therefore tend to think differently, behave differently, and organize themselves differently, which leads to different group outcomes. Norwegians in Minnesota behave similarly to Norwegians in Norway; Somalis in Minnesota behave similarly to Somalis in Somalia. Many cultural patterns from Somalia—particularly clan networks, informal economies, and distrust of state institutions—travel with the diaspora and have shown up in Minnesota as well. In the absence of strong assimilation pressures, the fraud networks aren’t so surprising; they reflect the extension of Somali institutional norms into a new environment with weak enforcement and poorly designed incentives.

The beauty of America is that we had a system that thoughtfully balanced individual and group considerations. We recognized that all men, whatever their background, have a natural right to life, liberty, property, and equal treatment under the law. We also recognized that group averages can be a basis for judgment—especially in immigration, where they can help determine which potential immigrant groups are most suitable and advantageous for America.

Well, bingo. Continue reading →

CNN’s Outright “It Isn’t What It Is” Propaganda To Support The Democratic Party’s “Affordablity” Scam (Or “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias”)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Hundreds of people sent it in, but nobody sent it to Ethics Alarms. Come one, you guys, I’m depending on you!

That clip above, in which CNN’s supposed stat guru Harry Enten deliberately (or impossibly incompetently) misinterprets a Fox News poll about what proportion of Americans think prices are higher than a year ago for various consumer products as showing how much prices have risen for those products. Nobody in the segment pointed the error out. Nobody screamed from off-camera. There has been no CNN correction or retraction.

Enten, in his usual hyperactive mode, said, “I mean, your costs are up vs a year ago!” and begins underlining to the products and reads the percentages aloud, implying costs are up by that much. Then he says, “The bottom line is this: Americans feel prices are rising in every single part of their lives”—implying that they “feel” it because just look at how much those prices are rising!—“rising ever higher and they just don’t feel like, Kate Balduan, that they can catch a break.” Well, how could they? Just look at those percentages!

Are Americans so clueless that they would believe this nonsense? Apparently the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the news media (“the Axis of Unethical Conduct” ) think so, or they wouldn’t try to get away with it every day, all over the news media. The Biden administration goofs its way into a period of 9% inflation, prices soar, the rate of inflation comes down dramatically in the Trump Administration but the same party responsible for raising the prices uses the inevitable fact that they aren’t coming down (prices as a whole never come down, they just go up more slowly) as proof that the current administration is failing. Yes, Trump shares some blame for this by saying that he would bring prices down during his campaign. He was being his usual careless talk self and meant (I guess) that he would bring some prices down, but as usual his habitual hyperbole got him into trouble. That error does not excuse lies like Enten’s, however.

If CNN was a real practitioner of journalism, which it is not (I don’t think there is a single trustworthy news organization anywhere today), Enten would have used the Fox News poll the way it was explained on Fox: to show the large gap between the reality of U.S. prices and the public perception of it, in part because of Axis lies. To take one obvious example, gasoline is down from a year ago and anyone who drives a car knows it. But Enten implied that the cost of gas is up “54%”!

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: “Good Illegal Immigrant”Rahel Negassi

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told him. “The only thing I’ve done is that I am Eritrean.”

—-Illegal Eritrean immigrant Rahel Negassito to her son, in the latest “Feel badly for illegal immigrants who finally get what they deserve” feature by the New York Times.

Rahel looks smug and defiant in the photo, as indeed she is. She did nothing wrong, but the (revoltingly) sympathetic story of her problems relocating to Canada from the U.S., where she has been residing illegally for 20 years, reports that she got into the country by

  • “…paying a smuggler who eventually got her to Britain, where she bought a fake British passport” to get her into the U.S.
  • …getting caught by ICE when the passport was recognized as fake
  • …being released after her application as a refugee was rejected, as a “paroled undocumented migrant.” 
  • ….living with her citizen sister for 20 years, counting on America’s slack and, for most of the period, law-ignoring immigration process to protect her.

Then as the story tells us, cruel Donald Trump was elected and set out to fulfill his campaign promise to clear as many illegal immigrants out of the U.S. as possible. A gift link is here.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations on “Seditious” Video’s Unethical Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Pentagon has announced that it is investigating Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona regarding possible breaches of military law when the former Navy pilot joined other Democrats in the recent video calling for troops to defy “illegal orders.” A federal law allows retired service members to be recalled to active duty on orders of the Secretary of War for possible courts martial. Kelly’s statements in the video may have interfered with the “loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces…A thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures,” the statement said.

Ethics Alarms already explained what was unethical about the video. It was a cheap political stunt, unethically implying that what had not occurred and will not occur had occurred or was in danger of occurring. It was clever, Machiavellian and, as the late Harry Reid would say, “It worked!” The stunt lured Trump into behaving like an ass, overstating the issues involved, and giving the Axis more metaphorical sticks to beat him with. Even with the admissions by some of Kelly’s co-conspirators that they didn’t know of any illegal orders by Trump that justified the “public service announcement,” it still was a net public relations loss for the President, who doesn’t need any more of them. Now Pete Hegseth is joining the botch. Terrific.

Observations:
1. Haven’t Republicans heard of the Streisand Effect? Making such a fuss over the video is just guaranteeing that it stays in the news, along with the typically biased and inflammatory news coverage, like “Trump calls for EXECUTION of members of Congress!” Hegseth’s investigation could be justified, but with an irresponsible and partisan news media, there is no chance, none, that the public will understand the issues involved. With those as the conditions that prevail, the announcement of the investigation is incompetent.

Continue reading →