Prelude.

Well, here I am again, starting off the Ethics Alarms day with a post related to politics and government. This is not a political blog, and I strive mightily to prevent it from being one. However, I cannot operate an ethics information and analysis site that fulfills (or, to be realistic, attempts to fulfill) the mission I have set for it and ignore massive, serious, indeed historic events and issues that have ethics principles not only at their core, but at risk because of them.

Those who have followed Ethics Alarms for the past decade know that I had made up my mind to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election because I had concluded that Donald Trump lacked literally every character trait, instinct and qualification that my study of leadership and the American Presidency had taught me that a U.S. President must have. I knew that Hillary Clinton and, of course, her husband were corrupt, dishonest and untrustworthy, but I also knew that she had the intellectual ability and at least some of the experience necessary to handle the job. I wrote dozens of posts about how unfit Donald Trump was, and that doesn’t take into account the Trump critiques I had written years before he had announced his candidacy in 2015.

Then, mere weeks from the election, I realized that the Democratic Party had rigged the nomination process to ensure Clinton’s victory, and that Clinton and the Democratic Party were ready, willing and eager to cheat in order to obtain power. How far that party (and the rotted news media that conspired with it) would go, as we now know, was fully revealed over the next eight years.

I decided, a couple of days before I had to vote, that it was a choice between an unfit candidate—Trump—and a dangerous, anti-democratic party ironically called the Democratic Party. I voted for neither as a matter of principle. I found myself surprised when my emotional reaction to Trump’s stunning upset was relief. The American system had, once again, gotten lucky. The public had recognized what I had, though almost too late, recognized myself.

An arrogant, elite, ruthless political party had the culture, society and government by the throat, and by a miraculous confluence of unlikely and indeed accidental events, had been at least temporarily foiled. It was a result that I analogized to the “futile and stupid” rebellion of the Deltas in the finale of “Animal House,” when the expelled Faber College students demonstrated their contempt for the system that had mistreated them by disrupting a parade and humiliating those in power.

And, memorably, the most chaotic of the rebels ended up a U.S. Senator.

The next four years proved my analysis of the Democratic Party correct, in fact too generous. It marshaled its allies in the news media, education, the law, the judiciary, academia, Big Tech, the federal bureaucracy and, of course the news media to launch what I have tagged as “the 2026 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck,” denying an elected U.S. President the mantle of legitimacy as well as the basic deference, respect, honor and cooperation a POTUS must have to carry out his agenda and policies. This divided the country to a dangerous extent. It set terrible precedents that I concluded, correctly, would damage the office and the future functioning of democratic institutions.

Worst of all, perhaps—it is a close competition—I saw an entire political party representing a large proportion of the public actively seeking to weaken and distort the First Amendment, the metaphorical beating heart of the unique structure our Founders created. This was (and is) a party that not only supports but relies upon a journalistic establishment that does not keep the public informed, but rather seeks to manipulate it by withholding information and employing partisan bias and advocacy in what are supposed to be objective news reports. This mutated Democratic Party also endorses censorship, using the usefully vague terms “hate speech” and “misinformation” to justify quashing dissenting views, opinions and analysis that the party deems a threat to its primacy.

Continue reading →

Let me briefly re-state my unalterable position that it was unethical, disrespectful and foolish for the U.S. to reduce George Washington’s birthday (Feb. 22) to a catch-all excuse for a long weekend. I wrote at length about this here, three years ago. An excerpt:

“How many Americans of our rich national past have a birthday celebrated as a national holiday? One: Martin Luther King. That surely makes the anti-white racists and the “the most important aspect of the United States is its racial divisions” gang—you know, Democrats—happy, but it is also misleading and ridiculous. The most important single figure, black, brown, white or whatever it is currently acceptable to call Asians and Native Americans (I haven’t checked this morning), is George Washington. He was, as George Will likes to say, “the indispensable man”—no George, no U.S. His birthday absolutely should be a national holiday….. The only thing most children are taught about him, other than his many “firsts,” is that he was a slaveholder, which had no impact on the development of the nation he helped create at all. It has been crafted into a weapon to use against our nation, but that isn’t George’s doing: by the end of his life, he had come to realize how wrong slavery was, and unlike Thomas Jefferson, did something about it, freeing his slaves in his will. George Washington earned his own national holiday. Give him his birthday back, and move President’s Day to some other random Monday.”

I have also come to believe that Abraham Lincoln deserves a national holiday as well. Abe would have had one if his birthday wasn’t so close to both George’s and Valentine’s Day. I’d give Abe his day on the anniversary of his Gettysburg Address, but November 19 is too close to Thanksgiving. April 14th? That’s Abe’s assassination, which would be a ghoulish way to honor him. The best date, I think, would fall on March 4, when Lincoln was sworn in as President. We would have no United States of America as we know it without either George or Abe. Let’s show a little respect.

In other ethics news…

Continue reading →

Guest Post by Martin Bishop

Every day now, we are drowning in Conspiracies. And we always have theories about what really transpired.

From whether there was election fraud in 2020 to thinking you saw the fast food guy dropped your sandwich on the floor, they’re a daily part of life.

But if you ask the kid behind the fast food counter, and he said “Nah bro!” with a smirk, few of us would say “welp, he is the one in the paper hat!”

Yet that is exactly what many do when people wear shiny suits and have makeup and studio lighting, or wear glasses and have “doctor” or an Ivy League school affixed to their name. Those are uniforms – the fast food chain’s paper hat of the modern Oracle we come to for our answers.

Now, we have a POTUS who not just promised but signed Executive Orders demanding the release of some of our favorite Conspiracy Theory subjects: the murders of JFK, RFK, and MLK. This same President went on Joe Rogan’s podcast for his last big media appearance before the 2024 Election – a podcast widely known for discussing UFOs, alternate realities, and Bigfoot. So it seems a good time to bring up my position that it is not only in our personal interest, but our ethical duty to be a Conspiracy Theorist.

Let’s review some things we were not only told to accept, but many of us have been threatened with the loss of our jobs if we publicly questioned them:

• Epstein Island is a sick right wing fantasy
• COVID originated in Bat Soup
• That 99 cent masks filter viruses
• 6 feet safe!
• 100% safe and effective
• That 7-year-olds understand the implications and can consent to having a doctor cut up and rearrange their genitals
• Joe Biden was of sound mind
• Hunter’s laptop was a fraud

I could go on but I imagine there’s a word limit on this thing (J6, George Floyd, RussiaGate/Steele Dossier, Diddy, Twitter files, and Jussie Smollett – okay I’ll leave it that and let your memories hum… there’s gotta be a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” parody in there).

The phrase  “conspiracy theorist” has been tossed around like hand sanitizer in 2020 – and speaking of COVID, the other popular term flung around  is “pseudoscience”.

Mathematician and hyper-rationalist Eric Weinstein refers to this rather brilliantly as “Weaponization of Stigma”. My favorite example of the WoS is Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847, he proposed that the postpartum infection in new mothers could be drastically reduced by —gasp!— the doctors washing their hands, especially after handling dead bodies.

In his experiments he reduced mortality rates from 18% to 2%, a phenomenal decrease. His reward? Being run out of his profession by other doctors and getting referred to an insane asylum, where he died of septic shock.

His pre-germ theory idea that there were “cadaverous particles” transferring to vulnerable mothers was declared pseudoscience. Never mind his studies, that’s crazy talk! Trust the Science!

This exact concept was also brilliantly dramatized in Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” (I highly recommend Arthur Miller’s wonderful distilled adaptation).. The added element was the local politician being bullied into condemning the scientist because of money, similar to keeping the beaches open in Jaws, but I’m getting away from my point here.

We watched the one of the largest transferals of wealth occur as people living paycheck-to-paycheck and running small businesses got shut down, while pharmaceutical companies and the “approved” big companies made billions.

We watched thousands of medical professionals lose their voices if not their jobs. We watched the science be “settled,” one censored account after another. All the while telling us we were crazy for questioning things… this is the definition of gaslighting.

Now since the Truth is never sharper than when it’s embedded in good comedy, I’d like to share this brilliant bit by Ron Funches:

The key section:

“How do you not believe in conspiracy theories? I understand not all of them, not most of them, but you don’t believe in ANY conspiracy theories? You just think the government is batting 1.000 and telling us the whole truth? That’s a strong stance to take.”

Continue reading →