The overall lesson: “You can’t win, you can’t break even, so you might as well stop trying to pander to the woke at all and let the metaphorical chips fall where they may.”

Believe it or not, that innocuous ad has triggered controversy from the racial offense and grievance mob. Apparently it promotes negative black stereotypes! That’s strange: the problem in the U.S. black community is that most children are born without their parents being married at all: this happy photo rejects that reality. It also looks like a rather affluent family wedding: isn’t the negative stereotype that black families are poor? (Although, come to think of it, what up-scale wedding reception would serve spaghetti with Heinz tomato sauce from a jar?) And aren’t whites supposedly to be racists? How is an inter-racial marriage perpetuating that negative stereotype? Wait, is the stereotype that the older balck woman is wearing a hat?

No, the complaint seems to be that the ad shows the groom’s white parents and an older black woman who represents the bride’s mother. See, the ad “erased” black fathers: it implies that the bride’s black dad is off whoring, or something, and that Mom is a single mother. Who would see the ad that way, except those who embrace the negative stereotype with their own confirmation bias?

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With a month to go, I am cautiously optimistic that the American public will reject the cynical, dishonest, undemocratic candidacy of Kamala Harris and the inexcusable Tim Walz. I am pessimistic about the nation avoiding another Electoral College-elected President who trailed in the popular vote.

Right now, it sure looks like this is where he are headed, and such an unfortunate result will almost certainly spark violence, again give Democrats an excuse to deny Trump’s legitimacy as President, lead to further assaults on the Constitution (which Democrats increasingly want eliminate or marginalize), and guarantee another four years of escalating unethical, divisive, dangerous partisan warfare. Trump, of course, will not help matters as he will not be able to resist gloating and trolling, as is his pattern. Great. I can’t wait.

The popular vote/ Electoral vote conflict is almost entirely California’s fault. Harris votes will overwhelm Trump votes by nearly 2-1 in our most populous state, and that is because California has become more of a cult than anything else. Its voters are bat-crazy over climate change hysteria, increasingly don’t like enforcing laws, sympathize with shop-lifters, extol illegal immigrants, and enable censorship. Significantly, California is the only state seriously contemplating the very unserious, irresponsible and racist policy of reparations, even though slavery was never legal in the state. On my cognitive dissonance scale, winning the popular vote in California is an indictment, not an accomplishment.

In other matters…

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There was a time when I thought I would have enjoyed the job of being the New York Times advice columnist, “The Ethicist.” In the last year or so, however, the questions the current column-holder has answered have tended to indicate basic ethics problem-solving skills among the public have fallen to an abysmal level. And these are supposed to be the best questions received by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at NYU. Heavens to Betsy, what are the other questions like?

This week’s top question was this:

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I hate to append that corny clickbait “Exclusive” to this post’s headline, but I want to be clear: nobody else has noticed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s latest, and in my view, most unethical and blatant effort to influence the election in order to elect Kamala Harris.

I just searched online: I appear to be the only one who has noticed so far, or at least who has written about it. Not Fox News, the devoted mob of conservative pundits at PJ Media, the Washington Free Beacon, Joe Concha—of course not the Times, WaPo, CNN et al., which are are pretending PBS is beyond reproach and as unbiased as…they are.

On October 1, the Public Broadcasting System premiered an episode of “The American Experience” titled, “The American Vice President: Rethinking a political afterthought.” Like the other installments in the long-running educational series, it was a mini-documentary about an aspect of American history, using historical footage and interviews to tell an enlightening story. I began watching it from my point of view as a student of American history, government history and the Presidency in particular. Halfway through—-it shouldn’t have taken that long, but it was 5 am. this morning—I realized what the real message was: “Kamala Harris is qualified to be President of the United States.”

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The Bellevue School District in Washington, like so many others as well as our college campuses, has experienced a plague of anti-Semitism since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. The phenomenon has been particularly ugly there, with students taunting Jewish classmates in one episode by chanting “Gas the Jews!” Phantom Lake Elementary in the district discovered a swastika drawn on one of its walls on campus. , someone tagged the west wall on campus with a swastika. Principal Heather Snookal sent a reassuring email to parents about the incident, but then felt compelled to send a woke DEI disclaimer so no swastika-lover from another culture would be offended. She really did this. No, I’m not making it up.

“While the symbol is often associated with hate and intolerance due to its use during World War II, it is important to acknowledge that the swastika has deep historical and cultural significance in other parts of the world,” Snookal wrote. “I apologize that I didn’t acknowledge this in my previous communication.”

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