What is the ethical way to handle a serious mistake for which you are completely responsible?
Hint: it isn’t what the radio station’s employee did in this fiasco.
Yesterday, the British Office of Communications (Ofcom) issued its report on an incident in May that was not covered very thoroughly in the former Colonies across the pond. The U.K. radio station Radio Caroline had aired three pre-recorded statements during “The Barry Marsh Show” announcing that King Charles had died. He hadn’t died. Nevertheless, the third statement said “news media” had confirmed that the King was dead. “God Save the King” was then played, the announcement was repeated, and there were 16 minutes of dead air. When regular programming resumed, Barry, whoever he is, apologized to listeners.
“I’ve just been informed that we’ve played in error some information a little earlier, I didn’t hear this myself, but it is incorrect, it’s a technical issue, and of course we apologize,” the host said. To the station’s audience, King Charles had been “dead” for about a half an hour.
How did this happen, you well may ask. Here’s how: Radio Caroline, which plays music from the 1960s to today, was streaming from a remote location. A staffer was performing maintenance on a studio computer and found the three files prepared for King Charles’ death.
Although the files “are accompanied with a set of strict instructions to presenters and managers to follow before being aired,” the staffer played the files “out of curiosity.” This stopped the stream from the presenter’s remote location, and broadcast the pre-recorded announcement on the air. Barry was on a call and didn’t immediately notice that his show was telling people that the King had died.
And the staffer responsible for this mess? He or she (the sources say “they,” which is stupid and useless…but woke!) panicked…and ran away, leaving the office.
Brilliant.
Radio Caroline says it “took the matter very seriously, and much activity was taking place during those 30 minutes leading up to the apology.” Yet the station says that the staffer responsible was “reprimanded” and has “apologized.” That is not taking the matter seriously.
A staffer who has otherwise performed well in a job can legitimately and ethically be given a second chance after a major error like this, but the staffer’s reaction is not pardonable. The individual lacks the character, composure, judgment and sense of responsibility to justify a second chance. “They” cannot be trusted.
It is workplace management like Radio Caroline’s that is creating an epidemic of incompetence across the United States, including in national, state and local governments, and apparently worldwide. Falsely telling the British public that the King is dead is a minor inconvenience compared to all the expense, inefficiency, frustration and damage this kinder, gentler approach to management causes.
Gates is one of the contract film reviewers on Roger Ebert.com, a website I find slightly unethical for the same reason I regarded the Sirius-XM Sixties Channel running old tapes of the Wolfman Jack radio show unethical. The Wolfman was long dead ( the show did not make that clear), and Roger Ebert died in 2013, but the website he once issued reviews from has continued to use his name to make readers think what appears there is, like Ebert was, perceptive and competent. As Gates’s bitter review proves, that is a misrepresentation.
As every other review and the trailer seem to indicate,“One Night Only” is a standard issue romantic comedy with a contrived set-up. Never mind: Gates decided to use her film review as a platform to spew pure partisan bile. Political bias tainting reviews is a long held target for me: the 20-year run of my professional theater company was a constant victim of it because the Washington Post reviews dismissed almost all of our productions of classic American works as insufficiently supportive of 21st century progressive values. I particularly recall our revival of Gore Vidal’s political satire “The Best Man” being panned because the concept that a Presidential candidate’s “private sexual conduct” was relevant to his fitness to be POTUS was absurdly “dated.”
Guess who was President at the time?
Pauline Kael of the New Yorker soaked her otherwise astute reviews with her leftist bias. For example, she panned every John Wayne movie because he was too conservative for her. To be fair, she was one of my earliest introductions to New York City liberal media group-think. Kael wrote that she was shocked when George McGovern lost to Nixon in 1972 because she knew literally no one who wasn’t voting for the Democrat. (George lost in a landslide.)
As the silly reviews for “The Odyssey” recently demonstrated, reviewers reading politics into films that have nothing to do with politics is obnoxious and unprofessional, but Marya Gates is under the misapprehension that she has the standing and intellect to use her reviews to rant about politics like a smug, Trump Deranged college sophomore majoring in Critical Race Theory.
I love it when, completely by accident, a day’s posts sync up. Today began with two posts about my assertion that until very recently the dominant template for the American Presidency was the “blue-eyed white guy with an American-sounding name,” which had the unintended consequences of making it nearly impossible for anti-Americans like Mayor Mamdani, Rep. Omar, and and Michigan Senatorial hopeful Abdul El-Sayed to gain power. Stating that fact got me accused of racism right here on my own blog.
Next came the tale of how an autobiography about to be published and authored by a disgraced Cambridge professor has already been pretty thoroughly shown to be fantasy, with the Left and the lying, now ex-prof, claiming that he is the victim of racism like every other person “of color” on the planet. This latest post is about a black criminal on “the fringes of hip-hop” standing trial for murder because he self-published a book that said he was involved in one. His defense: he made it all up.
Thus comes the fascinating legal conundrum raised by the prosecution of Duane Davis, who wrote in 2019 that he was part of the plot to murder the rapper Tupac Shakur. The 215 page book, published with a co-author (actually a ghostwriter who authored all of it), was largely ignored until a detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department started working on the cold case, discovered “Compton Street Legend,” and used it as his primary evidence to persuade a grand jury to indict Davis on one count of murder in the famous rapper’s killing. Davis, now 63, has pleaded not guilty and denies guilt.
This is another ethics story that I delayed writing about. The Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck is yet another of the sub-wrecks under the umbrella of the long-running DEI Ethics Train Wreck, and a particularly gob-smacking one.
Jason Arday became the Cambridge University’s youngest black law professor in 2023 (remember what I wrote yesterday: in the DEI era and the plague of The Great Stupid, beware of “firsts”). Recently, however, as Simon & Schuster prepared to publish Arday’s memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” allegations of everything from plagiarism to outrageous lies about his background began emerging. In some respects, his sudden fall from academic rock-star status mirrors that of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s underqualified DEI president who was forced to resign after being exposed as engaging in the level of plagiarism that would get any Harvard student expelled. Arday, however, is in his own disturbing category.
It was a series of seemingly incredible claims about his background that drew attention to his scholarly work. He claimed in a 2022 interview that he had been part of the British documentary series “The Seven Ups,” which began before he was born. He claimed in interviews to have raised millions for charities over a 20-year period by running 30 marathons in 35 days He also once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days. When asked about his seemingly impossible fund-raising prowess Arday “clarified” that the money was raised with the help of “many fundraising collectives over a two-decade period.” He said he couldn’t name any names to corroborate his claims because he had signed NDAs preventing him from disclosing that information.
Ethics alarms ringing!
Arday had fake credentials on his faculty web page. He claimed to be a visiting professor in Glasgow’s School of Education, but a school spokesman said that Arday “was never a visiting professor here.” He said he was a visiting professor at the University of Ohio. A university spokesman said the school had “no record of an employee by that name” and that “visiting professors appear in our employment records.”
He had a fake book listed too. Arday claimed that he was the author of “Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse,” exploring stereotypes about black masculinity, and included the title in his biography’s list of publications as well as in promotional material for speaking events. No such book was ever published.
There is so much more—too much to list in one post. He claims to have been so autistic that he didn’t speak until he was 11 and couldn’t read or write until he was 18. Several experts in the field have opined that nothing in his speech patterns suggests neurodivergence. My favorite may be the “Pig’s Head Story.” Arday claims a pig’s head was sent to his parents’ home and that he intercepted the package and threw it away. He said that the police had investigated and identified the source, a local butcher shop in south London. When reporters checked those details with the local butchers Arday had named and the police, they were told by the butchers that the story was mistaken and by the police that no investigation had taken place.
I just left my hot cup of French Roast coffee and a Tastycake downstairs because a comment to the post “On Abdul El-Sayed” ruined my morning.
Somehow, I left out “except Richard Nixon” in the paragraph that was supposed to note that every U.S. President except Obama and Nixon had blue eyes. I don’t know how that happened: I thought I had written it. But while the comment, from a good friend, should have offered a correction (as is, sadly, often necessary especially when I write one late at night), instead the commenter accused me of being racist. The eyes bit was mentioned in a section about American leadership templates, which, while I might have written it slightly differently has it been mid-day and I were a bit fresher, I stand by it nonetheless Here’s the corrected version:
“Not too long ago, it would be impossible to imagine a serious candidate for the U.S. Senate named Abdul El-Sayed. Americans just didn’t elect people who had non American-sounding names. It was a silly bias, but a comforting one. When I wrote my thesis hypothesizing an American Presidential type, I noted that no American President had been elected who didn’t have an American-sounding name. (No, nobody thought of Dwight Eisenhower as German, for obvious reasons.) Not only that, every American President from Washington to Bush except Richard Nixon has had blue eyes. Barack Obama blew that template to bits, both in name and in eye-color.”
As I wrote just now in a correction prompted by that comment:
“I certainly knew about Nixon’s eyes: there is a controversy over their color: he is stated in some sources as having black eyes, and others call them dark brown. But he and Obama are the only brown-eyed boys: Trump restored the Presidency to its blue-eyed tradition. The Name Game has a chapter in my honors thesis, which was,indeed a controversial one: three chair-holding professors in the Harvard Government Department reviewed it, and couldn’t agree on the grade; eventually they compromised on magna cum laude. The observation about Presidents’ names was not original, and I had it thoroughly footnoted to a historian who specialized in the narrow field of Presidential character. Perhaps today’s DEI, bias-over-reality, conservative thought-suppressing Harvard College would have slapped me down for that section, but then it no longer is a top tier, trustworthy institution.”
I completed the correction this way:
“Fact: the template for the American Presidency in the minds of Americans is powerfully influenced by another fact. Every President before Barack Obama was white, male, born on the mainland and raised by Christians. He changed that mold, and if he had been a good President and better human being, he would have changed it more. I have reached the end of my patience with progressives and Democrats, yes, even Trump-Deranged friends, stooping to race-baiting when they have neither the information, the integrity nor the wit to counter opinions (and facts) they find inconvenient, as they appeal to emotion or worse. I wrote in the reply to an old and cherished friend’s accusation of racism in the comments to this post, ‘Shame on you.’ Shame on all of them.”
Abdul El-Sayed speaks during a news conference at the Spirit of Detroit shortly after winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Democraic-Socialist, also anti-Semite, Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democrat Senate primary last week. This is remarkable for many reasons, few of them good. I have waited this long to post about it because I have been trying to keep my gorge down.
1. Not too long ago, it would be impossible to imagine a serious candidate for the U.S. Senate named Abdul El-Sayed. Americans just didn’t elect people who had non American-sounding names. It was a silly bias, but a comforting one. When I wrote my thesis hypothesizing an American Presidential type, I noted that no American President had been elected who didn’t have an American-sounding name. (No, nobody thought of Dwight Eisenhower as German, for obvious reasons.) Not only that, every American President from Washington to Bush except Richard Nixon has had blue eyes. Barack Obama blew that template to bits, both in name and in eye-color.
[Notice of Correction:Somehow, I left out “except Richard Nixon.” I don’t know how that happened: I thought I had written that. Well, it was too late I guess: I finished the post at one in the morning. But I certainly knew about Nixon’s eyes: there is a controversy over their color: he is stated in some sources as having black eyes, and others have them as dark brown. But he and Obama are the only brown-eyed boys: Trump restored the Presidency to its blue-eyed tradition.I apologize for the error, but a commenter who should know better accused me of being “racist” for #1 above. To be blunt, that pisses me off. The Name Game has a chapter in my honors thesis, which was,indeed a controversial one: three chair-holding professors in the Harvard Government Department reviewed it, and couldn’t agree on the grade; eventually they compromised on magna cum laude. The observation about Presidents’ names was not original, and I had it thoroughly footnoted to a historian who specialized in the narrow field of Presidential character. Perhaps today’s DEI, bias-over-reality, conservative thought-suppressing Harvard College would have slapped me down for that section, but then it no longer is a top tier, trustworthy institution. Fact: the template for the American Presidency in the minds of Americans is powerfully influenced another fact. Every President before Barack Obama was white, male, born on the mainland and raised by Christians. He changed that mold, and if he had been a good President and better human being, he would have changed it more.
I have reached the end of my patience with progressives and Democrats, yes, even Trump-Deranged friends, stooping to race-baiting when they have neither the information, the integrity nor the wit to counter opinions (and facts) they find inconvenient, as they appeal to emotion or worse. I wrote in the reply to an old and cherished friend’s accusation of racism in the comments to this post, “Shame on you.” Shame on all of them.]
In retrospect, I have concluded that Obama was not (and is not) a cultural American. Abdul El-Sayed being the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator in Michigan would be impossible without Obama’s toxic influence.
2. Abdul El-Sayed is by far the most radical and repellent candidate to emerge from the primaries yet. He makes Graham Platner look like Hans Christian Anderson. Hassan Piker ‘s pal** pledged support for the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in a 2011 article on HuffPo titled “Why the U.S. Should Support the Protesters in Egypt” in which El-Sayed argued for allowing the terrorist organization to grab control of Egypt. He campaigned with Amir Makled, who praised the terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran. He wants to end U.S. military aid to Israel, which he says is committing genocide in Gaza.
As far as state matters go, the aspiring Senator supports raising taxes on working-class Michiganders including waitresses, delivery drivers, and senior citizens receiving Social Security to pay for his “Medicare for All” agenda item. He supports defunding the police, saying on social media that “The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people” and that police funding is influenced by “systemic racism.” Naturally he advocates abolishing I.C.E., aka. “open borders.”
He has never held elective office.
3. So how did this guy win a primary in rock-ribbed American Michigan? Thank higher education indoctrination. The vote was close, just 1% separating the candidates with the margin of victory coming from college towns and Gen Z. El-Sayed didn’t win a single district dominated by voters without college degrees, supposedly the “working class” that crypto-Commies like El-Sayed claim to be standing up for.
4. About that margin of victory: pre-vote polls had El-Sayed crushing the incumbent. Lesson: our pollsters are still biased, incompetent, and untrustworthy, and most are loyal members of the Axis of Unethical Conduct.
That meme above appeared on the Facebook page of my Trump Deranged history professor friend. I’m starting to suspect that he’s not just Trump Deranged: I think he genuinely hates the United States of America and has for decades. It wasn’t today’s post…today he’s writing about how the United States knew it didn’t need to drop atom bombs on Japan to win the war, it just nuked all those Japanese citizens to scare the Russians. Between hating his own nation and hating its President, my friend has a lot of material.
Today he writes to introduce the latest Orwellian exercise from his fellow radicals on the left,
“Slaveholders’ Rebellion” has the ring of authenticity about it.
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” (Analects, XIII.3.5; James Legge, trans.)
He sounds like a professor, doesn’t he? Ironic, since his fellow Leftists who dominate the higher education scene and have poisoned the minds of generations by teaching them the exact reverse of the “truth of things” in so many ways, embrace the tactic of misleading names, especially deceitful names. You know, like “pro-choice” for abortion. “Undocumented workers” for illegal immigrants. “DEI” for anti-male, anti-white discrimination. “President of the United States” for Joe Biden…
My friend’s whitewashing of rhetorical dishonesty was his hand-off to the Facebook post by fellow left-biased historian Eric Gubelman, who, in turn, extols the New York Times essay, “It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” It is so, so crucial to the crypto-totalitarian Left to emphasize slavery in all discussions of the United States. The author of the Times propaganda, of course, is young and black: Anthony Conwright also a writer for Mother Jones and The Nation, and you can’t get much more Left than that.
Where to begin? Oh, let’s start with the argument that’s it’s urgently important to stop calling the Civil War the Civil War.
Conwright begins with a wholly irrelevant discourse on how various factions argued over what label to slap on the conflict that fit with a regional narrative and supported demonization of the other side. Yeah, yeah, so what? It’s been called the Civil War for a very long time, and the name is properly descriptive. Conright, I will assume based on his biases, would furiously defend tearing down the statues of Civil War generals and slaveholding Founders. He writes in part,
Yes, Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, is an Ethics Villain to be sure, but St. Paul’s DEI mayor, Kaohly Her, is both unethical and ludicrous.
First, a digression: is it racist and sexist for me to designate an elected official “DEI” just because the individual is female, Asian, and a Laotian immigrant? Yes, except that 1) this female Asian is also bonkers, and obviously so and 2) this in the Twin Cities, Ground Zero for The Great Stupid. Her is a double “first,” meaning that this irrelevancy got her votes in wokism-addled Minnesota (to sensible people, being the “first” is irrelevant to whether one is the best) and her record as a state legislator screams diversity, equity and inclusion. She was a member of the Minnesota Asian Pacific (MAP) Caucus and the House People of Color and Indigenous (POCI) Caucus. She has advocated more diversity within departments, and supported a state House resolution to declare racism a public health emergency. She’s no dummy, certainly, with an impressive educational background and an impressive career in finance behind her. She’s just certifiable.
Normally, I would be inclined to be a fan of the Mayor because of her obvious Abbott and Costello parody potential (“Who’s the mayor?” “Her!” “Who?” “He’s on first…”). Unfortunately, she is approaching new records in the particular form of ethical misconduct I view as most disturbing in high offices, sexual harassment, followed by head-exploding excuse-making.
Her wrote text messages to Shirly (not a typo!) Yang in the spring of 2025, while serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives, that were later offered as exhibits in support of a Yang’s petition for harassment restraining order. She alleged that Her (“Who?”) engaged in a pattern of unwanted communications, intimidation and interference in Yang’s personal and professional lives. But the same month Her was sworn in as St. Paul’s first female and first Asian mayor, a Ramsey County court referee denied Yang’s petition, finding that the evidence did not meet the legal standard required to issue a harassment restraining order.
But now Her faces a separate investigation into allegations of sexual harassment following a complaint filed by St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry. Chief Henry alleges that the mayor sexually harassed subordinate city employees, including members of the St. Paul Police Department. In an April letter, Henry wrote that he decided to become a formal complainant after learning the alleged misconduct extended beyond isolated incidents. A letter by his attorney to St. Paul City Attorney Irene Kao alleges that Her sent “inappropriate, and, indeed, unlawful” text messages to city employees. That letter states Henry came forward because he believed employees could face retaliation if the alleged conduct went unaddressed and said his decision to file the complaint was based solely on principle as well as concern for city employees.
The Chief’s attorney included a screenshot of a text message by the mayor referencing “Weiner Wednesday” alongside a partially redacted image with an accompanying caption that reads: “When she wraps you up in her blanket after you gave her a good weinering,” followed by two laughing emojis.
Is it really so hard for officials in the Womens National Basketball Association to come clean and admit “Of course we don’t think males who just decided one day “POOF! We’re females!” should play against women in sports. We were just virtue-signaling to knee-jerk progressives and we don’t want to publicly agree with anything the Trump Administration supports. That would put the WNBA out of business!”?
Apparently. Now the league looks like silly bunch of hypocrites and woke morons, which it is. Permit me to mock and excoriate them.
White, 35, a Republican candidate for US Senate, announced, “I’m transgender! I’m a woman… I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purposes of… professional basketball,” to Fox News. “I think I’d be unstoppable,” White continued, tongue sort-of in his metaphorical cheek. “But I’m a team-first guy. I’m a pass-first kind of player. I do the little things. I led my team in all five major stat categories at Iowa State University, so I do a little bit of everything. I’ll do whatever the coach needs me to do. I’ll do whatever the girls need me to do.”
Freedom, in his own “POOF!” moment, had been all technical and stuff, which is no fun. He said he had reviewed the WNBA’s eligibility criteria, and and that he meets all the requirements. Article XIII of the WNBA’s 2026 collective bargaining agreement says, “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” but the 409-page document diesn’t define “women” and has no policy on transgender eligibility, including never stating whether self-identification alone is sufficient sufficient to make everyone call a player “she” or “they” and allow the biological male to change in WNBA locker rooms and smash the girls on the court.
Royce took the pass and scored. The WNBA just has to be honest about the absurdity of biological men playing in women’s sports, Royce said. “I think the WNBA could come out and make a definitive statement about guys with a pair of balls playing in the Women’s Association,” he said. His plan: he is serious about wanting to be drafted and will proceed until the WNBA’s leadership stops trying avoid throbbing reality.
If he isn’t drafted, Royce says, he vows, he’ll sue. “I have to file a discrimination lawsuit, right? I mean, that’s, that’s ridiculous,” he told the Fox New. “We’re gonna have to have a huge legal battle about discrimination if I can’t play.”
Gotcha!
The WNBA only ethical and practical option now is to admit it, but its pusillanimous leadership doesn’t have the integrity, intelligence, courage and respect for the public to do it. Instead, it released a rare example of official “huminahumina.”
“I know many of you have received questions in recent weeks regarding transgender athlete participation in women’s basketball, and I expect this topic will continue to receive significant attention. I wanted to reach out to share how we are approaching these conversations at the league office and to thank those of you who have responded to questions from the media with thoughtfulness and professionalism. [The WNBA will] always approach this topic thoughtfully, respectfully, and in alignment with the longstanding values of our league. Second, our player eligibility rules, unlike the eligibility rules of some other leagues and governing bodies, are collectively bargained. Lastly, preserving the integrity of our game and ensuring fair competition will always remain among the league’s highest priorities. We recognize that this is a complex and nuanced topic, and we will continue to have important conversations with all of you and the Players Association in the weeks and months aheadWe also plan to convene additional discussions and offer listening sessions for any team leaders who would like to participate. Your perspectives and feedback are invaluable, and I appreciate those who have already reached out to share their thoughts.”
Ramalama ding-dong! The statement means absolutely nothing. Ralph Kramden’s famous “huminahumina” is actually more articulate. It isn’t a complex or nuanced topic at all, and Engelbert’s league epitomizes why, as Royce and Freedom make crystal clear. If males can be female just by deciding that they are, the WNBA is toast. If men can’t do it, boys can’t do it. She is defaulting to the infamous but ancient tactic of avoiding an inevitable conclusion with unpleasant ramifications (like admitting that people she hates are right, and obviously so) by calling for “discussions” when there isn’t anything to discuss other than “How the hell do we get out of this?”
Players who have responded to questions from the media with thoughtfulness and professionalism number exactly two: Caitlin Clarke, who said she didn’t want to talk about it, and the now iconic Sophie Cunningham, who has repeated her opposition to biological males playing against women in all sports because it is unfair, dangerous and stupid. The rest, if they said anything at all, echoed Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White, who blathered that she didn’t have the scientific background to have an opinion on the issue. Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said earlier this month, fatuously,”We need to protect trans kids. To me, it’s a human rights issue. Every kid has a right to sports.”
Are you willing to let biological men squash your female players flat to “protect trans kids,” you idiot? Are you willing to wipe out women’s basketball and sacrifice girls to protect them? Do you think before you speak?
The WNBA players union also resorted to self-contradictory gibberish:
“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion .Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”
Translation: “We embrace slogans that keep us aligned with the radical progressive bubble, but have no interest in living up to them when they are adverse to our own self-interest. We know we can’t simultaneously protect women’s sports and allow trans-women top dominate them, but we’re hoping the public is so stupid that they won’t see the obvious hypocrisy in our rhetoric. As with the rest of the ideological Left, we’re going to attack the messengers who carry the facts that reveal our absence of integrity, and hope it works for as long as possible. We trying the “pawns” analogy because it distracts from reality, which is that we leaped into this hopeless cause to signal our virtue, and made the WNBA combatants on the losing side of one of the Left’s dumbest obsessions.”
Popcorn popped, as the saying goeth. I can’t wait to see how the WNBA tries to extricate itself from its self-made mess.
There are about 20 friends and relatives I am dying to send this clip to, but I won’t. Probably.
‘There was no progressive Deep State secretly working to undermine Trump and conservative policies!’ they have all told me for years, in varying degrees of certitude and exasperation. ‘That’s just a Fox News conspiracy theory!’ One close relative in particular, a career government lawyer, is insulted by the very suggestion. After all, he worked diligently and loyally for administrations under GOP and Democratic control. I believe him. I also followed the astounding numbers of leaks in the first Trump administration, the outright defiance by many holdover administrators, the FBI’s efforts to “Get Trump” during the Russian Collusion investigation, the betrayal of confidences by White House aides, staff and Trump appointees, and more. Remember former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor, who authored the anonymous Times op-ed on September 5, 2018 titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”? He stated that he and others in “the Resistance” were working from within to thwart the President’s impulses. Remember how this creep was cheered on by the Times readers?
The Axis complained and still complains bitterly about how Trump 2.0 has made absolute loyalty and trustworthiness by his extended team a priority. To that, I say, “Good. He gave Democrat career government workers a chance to prove they were professionals and could be trusted to respect and advance the policy agenda of the elected President of the United States. Instead many—one was too many— used their positions to “resist.”
There have been consequences of that necessary reaction in the second Trump Administration. The talent pool available to the Trump Administration is vastly diminished because of it, leading to too many incompetents, true believers, sycophants and “yes men” (okay, okay, “yes persons”). That is affirmatively bad for the nation. But it is the Left that has rejected the key principle of our democracy that once a President is elected, all commit themselves as Americans to allow the voters’ choice to govern. Democrats, with Hillary playing a lead role, broke that “democratic norm” in 2017 (and had the gall to accuse Trump of “breaching democratic norms”). It is broken still. It is probably beyond repair.
Clinton fears “Deep State” sabotage from Trump’s federal work force because she knows that is how her “resistance” behaved. She is pledging to do exactly what President Trump knew he had to so when he was elected a second time…because of Hillary, “the resistance,” and unethical Democrats.
Ethics Alarms 