Trump-Deranged Asshole Media Headline of the Day: The Economic Times

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I had to wrestle with myself about whether to post this first, or the next post.

Here’s the headline from The Economic Times:

“Trump’s Raised Fist: What the gesture means which is widely used by fascists, socialists, and communists”

…yeah, and also Rocky, Norma Rae, the much-lionized protesting American runners at the Olympics on the winner’s platform, baseball players after they have hit game-winning home runs, my Vietnam War protesting fellow students at Harvard,

and, oh, just about everyone in the past few centuries or so who wanted to symbolize defiance, victory, strength and resistance to forces that would abuse and persecute them.

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On the Trump Assassination Attempt

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

Ethics never sleeps. There I was, having a nice dinner cooked by a friend, my first dinner invitation in the four months since Grace’s death, and my night of escape from grim reality was shattered when my host informed me that someone took a shot at Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

I have some observations about that….

1. The Democrats, resistance and mainstream media are accountable for this. Of course they are. They have been saying and writing that Trump is an existential danger to democracy and the nation. They have said that if he wins there will be no more election, no more Constitution, that he is an American Hitler. They have gone further than mere fearmongering, to terror-mongering. What did they expect? The Left is full of hysterical, reality-challenged whack jobs that Biden, Pelosi, the New York Times and many, many others have been priming for violence. Trump is “dangerous,” said the Times today. What does a patriot do when someone or something is a clear and present danger, in Joe Biden’s words, to the nation? Eliminate the danger.

2. This is on the Axis. They built up the narrative that Trump was a demon from Hell, and suddenly all of the Democrats’ cheats, devices and conspiracies were failing. The effort to put Trump in prison was transparent and faltering. Trump’s opposing candidate had exposed himself as an empty, debilitated, prop leader. All of the Big Lies have been used, discredited, and debunked. What was left? Why, killing Trump, of course!

I expected this, didn’t you?

3. The blather from the Biden Cabinet and White House condemning violence should be metaphorically spat back in these villains’ faces. They are the same people who blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting of a random Congresswoman because Palin had “targeted” Democratic districts on her website. These are the same people who blamed Rush Limbaugh and conservatives for the Oklahoma City bombing because of their relentless attacks on “big government.” But the insane levels of hate and hysteria the Left has heaped on Donald Trump wasn’t general like those partisan attacks, but very personal and specific: one man was the danger to the continued existence of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. One single evil man. Biden and the rest said this over and over. The nation had to be saved from this monster, and it became obvious over the last two weeks that Joe Biden wasn’t going be able to do it.

4. Now, the fact that Trump was shot at doesn’t make the unethical, unforgivable nature of the unrestrained vilification of him over the last nine years any worse. That’s just moral luck: what the Axis has been doing would be just as wrong and irresponsible if no fanatic was moved to violence by it. The incident does have a way of sharpening one’s focus, however.

5. I’ll put it simply: the Democrats and their Machiavellian allies were asking for this to happen. They got it. They must not be allowed to duck responsibility.

Other observations:

  • Bravo to Trump for having the presence of mind to show defiance after he was wounded. Personally, I would have liked to see him go full Teddy Roosevelt and insist on giving his speech anyway.
  • It will be interesting if the assassination attempt in any way moderates the Democrats’ Trump-Deranged panic and the extreme rhetoric it has spawned. Out side of demonizing Trump and claiming that he will destroy the nation as we know it, what’s the case for re-electing the demented incumbent? Finding a way to kill more unborn children? Biden’s two state solution for the Palestinians?

Ethics Quiz: The Biden Campaign Model

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This one fascinates me the more I think about it.

Above is the model at the Official Biden-Harris Campaign Store advertising the Biden-Harris T-shirt. There are three other models to be seen at the home site: a kind of wimpy male-of-indeterminate-color modeling a “Free on Wednesdays” T-shirt (I don’t know what that means), a butch-looking female model who might be a stand-in for Lia Thomas, and a chunky middle-aged bespectacled guy, also of-some-sort-of-color, holding a “Color-Changing Mug.” This is clearly a DEI campaign site: apparently white models need not apply. But the model above is strikingly unattractive as well as sexually ambiguous. Unless the marketing industry no longer operates according to the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, the idea in advertising is still to connect the product with positive images.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What’s going in here?

I could see the same model being used in a satirical ad put out by the Trump campaign. Is this flagrant virtue signaling? (What’s the virtue?) Pandering to radical feminists? DEI madness? Gross incompetence?

Oh…here are two of the Trump campaign’s models:

Yeccchh.

“Ignorance Saturday” Continues: If This Survey Is Accurate (And I’m Sure It Is) What Good Is College?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni have released a survey titled LOSING AMERICA’S MEMORY 2.0,A Civic Literacy Assessment of College Students. It’s a follow-up to its earlier report, Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. None of the depressing results in either study surprised me, and, I presume, will surprise you, but they do raise obvious questions as well as compel some conclusions.

Among the findings in the most recent survey of more than 3,000 college and university students regarding their basic civic literacy:

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“Platforming Ignorance!” What a Useful and Descriptive Term….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The term, which I had never heard before or at least had never focused on, is featured in an essay by Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) titled, “Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance.” Indeed she is: I had written about how Owens has embarrassed conservatives by, as I put it last November, “being revealed as an ignoramus” by her embrace of Palestinina propganda after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. More recently I listed her as one of the political performance artists (Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, James Carville, Ann Coulter, yada yada) who cannot be trusted to provide genuine opinions because they calibrate what they say and write according to what they think will get them the most clicks, eyeballs, gigs, and cash. Clearly, I was giving Candace far too much credit.

She is a genuine, bona fide idiot, whose recent self-outing as a virulent anti-Semite ( the inspiration for the JNS piece) is just the tip of a really stupid iceberg. As conservative collective AG noted on “X,” Owens has recently declared that…

  • Israel was involved with 9/11
  • The earth may be flat
  • It’s absurd to believe dinosaurs roamed the earth and were killed by an asteroid
  • Macron’s wife is secretly a man
  • Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution and it was secretly a genocide targeting Christians that was worse than the Holocaust
  • The Holocaust is either fake or severely exaggerated
  • The crimes of the allies in WWII and post-WWII were worse than anything the Nazis did
  • The deportation of ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe post-WWII was worse than The Holocaust
  • US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki to target Christians
  • Israel/AIPAC/Jews were secretly behind the JFK assassination
  • A secret cabal of Hollywood Jews were behind the death of Michael Jackson and people around him.

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Hello. This Is Mira! She Used To Be A Successful Hollywood Actress Until Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductible Donation To Defeat This Terrible Disease?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Poor Mira Sorvino. She won an Academy Award once, but her career as an ingenue stalled and she’s 56 now: she’s officially on the celebrity has-been list. But that’s not what makes her epic post below on “X” memorable. It should be studied as a tragic example of what relentless Big Lie propaganda from the mainstream media and progressives, which are pretty much all Sorvino has been exposed to in Hollywood for at least three decades, can do a mind that was once capable of critical thought.

As you will quickly see, the late Paul Sorvino’s daughter is Trump-Deranged to a crippling degree. She’s not stupid, far from it; at least she didn’t used to be. She graduated from Harvard with honors back when Old Ivy was closer to being a respectable institution than today, and didn’t major in “Women’s Studies” or some other wokish area, but East Asian Studies after spending a year abroad learning Mandarin Chinese.

When you wonder how it can possibly be that so many people won’t abandon their determination to vote for Joe Biden even as the evidence becomes indisputable that one might as well elect a quahog as President, just reflect upon Mira’s lament below. She was willing to publish this, publicly, even though, to a functioning mind, doing so would be the equivalent of wearing a neon sign flashing, “I am a cabbage.” It’s sad. It’s tragic. But it shows what nearly eight years of being bombarded with lies and fearmongering can do.

I’ll interject periodically, as is my wont. Heeeeeere’s MIRA!

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Nick Saban

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“One thing that would change all of our spirit and all of our society is if we would just change one thing. Instead of coming up to somebody and saying, ‘How are you today?’ Why don’t you say, ‘Who did you help today?'”

—Former NFL and college coach Nick Saban, now ESPN broadcaster, in his speech after receiving the “Icon” award at the ESPY’s the sports networks annual awards show.

Ugh. Maybe ethics instruction should never be left to amateurs.

No, Coach, that’s a terrible idea. It’s not friendly or uplifting to challenge everyone you meet to prove how kind and virtuous they are to your specifications. I don’t want to live in a society where every encounter is going to require me to validate my existence by proving that I have met some kindness quota.

The appropriate response to that gratuitous and obnoxious challenge is “None of your damn business!” or better still “Bite me.” Similarly, I don’t care to have a stranger, associate or friend begin a conversation with “Have you given to the homeless today?,” “Have you smiled at a stranger?,” Have you hugged your child?,” or “Have you thanked the Lord for His bounty?”

Sure, I know what Nick was trying to say, but if you can’t say what you mean to say more effectively than that, then don’t say anything. His heart may have been in the right place, but his brain and his tongue weren’t.

A “The Fish Rots From The Head Down Cultural Note”: Now You Can’t Even Trust Hot Dog Eating Contests

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The President of the United States cheated in several ways last night, and we have been watching cheating become an accepted norm in the worlds of government, politics, law, academia, and sports. And so it has come to this: there was either cheating or an “appearance of impropriety” at Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest over the Fourth of July.

When competitor Nick Wehry finished the 10 minute contest, judges ruled that he had eaten 46.75 hot dogs and buns, placing him 4th. But Wehry asked to have the officials check his results and they determined that there was an additional empty plate in his “finished” stack, which is how judges determine how many wieners an individual has eaten. The recount gave him a new score of 51.75.

Then the New York Post published “Buns of Steal”, reporting that witnesses accused Wehry of tampering with the empty plate total to add to his score. On EatFeats, an anonymous commenter posted links to videos with timestamps seeming to show that Wehry illicitly added to his empty plate count.

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An “Enemy of the People” Indictment

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Over at PJ Media, conservative writer David Strom provides a vivid overview of just how complicit the mainstream media has been in assisting Democrats and the White House as they deceived the public, both to elect Joe Biden President and protect him from suspicions that he was not able to do his job. “A Short History of the Coverup” should have been published in the New York Times; if that paper were a serious pursuer of ethical journalism and “all the news that’s fit to print,” it would make a thorough investigation of this scandal its top priority. It didn’t and it won’t, however, because that would involve implicating itself.

Strom writes at one point, “We can’t let them off the hook. We need America to face the fact that the media really IS the ‘enemy of the people.’ I hated that phrase in 2020; I think it is 100% true now. I was wrong.” Good for him; at least he admits it. This comment of Trump’s, one of his most important, is regularly used by the “Trump is Hitler” chorus to show that he’s an enemy of democracy. To the contrary: the enemy of democracy’s enemy is democracy’s friend. Ethics Alarms flagged Trump’s undiplomatic remark as spot on immediately, I will point out, patting myself heartily on the back.

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Friday Open Forum: OK, Write All You Want About the Worst Government Cover-Up Since Watergate

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

…or anything else, of course.

Today’s relevant story: a Milwaukee radio station admitted late yesterday that it edited a taped interview with President Biden when his campaign asked them to, because two of Biden’s responses were, in turn, embarrassing and incoherent. The station apologized and came clean, because now the mainstream media allies of the progressive and Democratic Party are dedicated to dumping Biden rather than pretending he’s a great President.

How many media outlets were working with the White House to deceive the public about Biden’s cognitive problems before his debate disaster? How much smoking gun evidence has been “scrubbed” over the past four years, including during the 2020 campaign?

It’s all truly disgusting, and Biden has the gall to claim that Trump is the threat to democracy.

Don’t get me started. Write about whatever ethics issues intrigues you.