On the Results of the “Special Election” in Virginia…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

That deliberately misleading “proposed constitutional amendment” barely won yesterday, another in the mounting examples of how the Democratic Party will cheat and lie to gain power. I wrote about this unethical tactic here.

The stats show that the Northern Virginia suburbs, where the Deep State dwells, managed to vote so overwhelming for the antidemocratic provision that the rest of the state’s rejection wasn’t enough.

Observations and statements:

  • Gerrymandering is generally allowed if it isn’t based on race or other forms of discrimination. I disagree with that position that the courts have taken, but never mind: Virginians rejected that strategy, and properly so, when it made the tactic unconstitutional. 
  • If Virginians votes to allow the unethical practice again, that’s their prerogative. However, there is no way, in language or ethics, that what the Spanberger totalitarians are doing can be called “fair.”
  • The language that was on yesterday’s ballot was misleading and dishonest.
  • One of the lawsuits challenging the plot is based on the ballot language.
  • I offer my services as an ethics expert to submit documents and to testify that the wording above is misleading, and that by definition gerrymandering a state to disenfranchise members of a political party is not “fair.” It may be legal, but it cannot be fair. Defining “fair” is my business.
  • If the GOP does not include an ethicist, and it doesn’t have to be me, in its challenge to  this scheme, it is “incompetent.” It’s also my business to define that.
  • After voting for that unethical thing above, my Facebook lawyer friends are ethically estopped from lecturing about preventing “kings” and fascists, or protecting democracy. They voted to disenfranchise their supposed friends, and believe it is prudent to destroy democracy in order to save it.

I believe this election was illegal, and I believe the results will be overturned. I will believe it more if I am involved in the effort to genuinely be “fair.”

Ethics Villain: Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There is no honest way to spin this, but Murphy, truly one of the most despicable members of the Senate, tried anyway.

Democrats, like Murphy and the ethics-blind citizens who elected him (and many equally terrible people), really and truly hate the President of the United States so much that they are actively rooting for Iran to prevail in the current conflict. This is a half-century-long enemy of the United States that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans as well as terror attacks all over the Middle East, and that has made “Death to America” and the end of the state of Israel its openly stated mission, and that recently massacred tens of thousands of its own people because they demonstrated against Iran’s dictatorial theocracy.

Has any member of Congress publicly cheered the enemy during a U.S. war? Is that not, as Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution defines treason, “adhering” to enemies of the U.S. and, “giving them aid and comfort”?

Then, after the response to Murphy’s stunning declaration of pleasure in a setback for the U.S. and the success of an enemy’s efforts to defeat his own nation, Murphy managed to further prove his warped character by lying, and obviously so:

He really expects anyone to believes he was being “sarcastic,” and is trying to blame the public for not understanding his subtle wit. He’s an asshole, but that label is too good for him.

Murphy should be prosecuted, and if not, then rebuked by his own party.

He won’t be of course. He’s invoking Rationalization 55. The Joke Excuse, or “I was only kidding!”…

“This is a common backtracking strategy when someone has been caught making a hurtful, unfair, false or otherwise unethical statement… defenders of comedian Wanda Sykes apply[ed] the joke excuse to her purely mean-spirited comment about Rush Limbaugh at a White House Correspondents Dinner, when she said “I hope his kidneys fail.” What a knee-slapper! As a general rule, “I hope you die” is not a joke, no matter who says it. Even when it is a joke, the jokester is still accountable for how people react to it. When a Washington D.C.’s shock-jock  made the second of two racially-charged quips…he lost his job and his career, because his employers didn’t want somebody on their payroll who made those kinds of “jokes.” …Nobody should accept the defense that “it was a joke” if it wasn’t a good enough joke to compensate for the damage it did, the people it hurt, or the trouble it will cause. …[P]eople and organizations …make jokes in public at their peril. Professionals. Elected officials. Scholars. People who expect to be taken seriously and trusted.”

 

But he wasn’t making a joke or being sarcastic. You know, I know, and he knows he was pandering to the anti-Americans and Trump Deranged in his increasingly perverted party.

The Democrats have given Republicans and the voting public so much evidence of their party’s ethics rot that the campaign ads write themselves. If the GOP cannot convince its supporters and a wave of progressives with a conscience to reject what the Democratic Party has become, it won’t be able to blame gerrymandering in Virginia or anything other than its own incompetence and the self-destructive ignorance of the American people.

Unethical Headline of the Week: Mediaite

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Jeffrey Epstein Lawyer Alan Dershowitz Registers as Republican After 67 Years in Democratic Party”

It’s hard to get blacklisted on Ethics Alarms. Snopes, MSNBC, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, The Smoking Gun, Media Matters and The Daily Beast all managed to do it through repeatedly dishonest, biased and misleading stories. In other words, a site has to be even more biased and untrustworthy than Fox News, the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post to end up on mu blacklist.

Mediaite was once barely tolerable when the able Joe Concha worked there as a counter-balance to the mostly knee-jerk leftist propagandists like–-yecchh—Tommy Christopher. Joe is long gone, however, and what is left is unethical human dreck like whoever approved that headline.

The technique is called “poisoning the well,” and it is recognized by journalism ethicists, if there are any now, as a slimy tabloid tactic. Dershowitz authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal announcing that he was leaving the Democratic Party and why, despite pretty much opposing most conservative and Republican positions—even, he says, “immigration.” The Dersh” likes open borders? Wow. He also things abortion is swell.

The GOP might want to throw him back, like a three-eyed fish.

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Schadenfreude Isn’t Unethical BUT…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

…It is often an indicator of malfunctioning ethics alarms.

My late wife, who loved all creatures great and small, would have openly rooted for the bull in a bullfight. Therefore the tragic result pictured above would not have upset her at all. I, on the other hand, blessed with a sophomoric sense of humor, a taste for slapstick, and an attraction to the macabre find value in that photo from different sources.

As Ethics Alarms frequently reminds readers, feelings, thoughts and motives do not make actions ethical or unethical, hence the verdict that “He meant well” is a rationalization. However feelings can have signature significance, or at least provide disquieting clues to an individuals priorities and character.

Relaying feelings also is conduct, and thus can be ethical or unethical. Nelson Muntz’s trademark…

…for example, would be cruel in the presence of the victim.

How do you react to de la Puebla’s misfortune? Would it be different if you were among the spectators?

And now…a song:

Open Segregation And Discrimination In A (Of Course) California School District

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I want to hear someone try to defend this.

The Daily Caller reports that the Albany Unified School District in California hosted a trip to Virginia for “young men and women of color.” They visited Historically Black Colleges and Universities, while discussing “social justice,” according to documents obtained by parental rights group Defending Education. The local Board of Education trip approved the trip at a cost of $42,845.

“This unique mentoring program encourages Albany High School young men and women of color to develop social, personal, and academic success skills,” the Board’s statement announced. “Students gather in a safe, supportive, and empowering environment to voice their needs and challenges. The students engage in enriching discussions on social justice, education, leadership, mental well-being, and self-awareness. This mentoring program is transforming the lives of young men and women of color to make a significant global impact in society.”

The favored students also visited the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial and the Black Heritage Trail. But wait! There’s more…

“AUSD’s 2025-2026 Local Control and Accountability Plan names “Young Men of Color and Young Women of Color Programs” that aim to “provide social emotional supports to most underserved students.” The programs are part of a $1,257,234 “social emotional/mental health” support effort.

“The same plan details the district’s intention to provide staff with “professional development” programs centered on “culturally responsive/anti-racist pedagogy.” These teaching practices are necessary to support “student groups who are persistently and historically underserved,” the document states.

“Another document from 2026 includes a goal of “Recruit[ing] and Retain[ing] a Diverse, High Quality Staff,” DE found. The Superintendent Report detailed plans to “strengthen inclusive hiring,” expand “equitable recruitment pipelines,” and implement “affinity-based supports.” The report mentioned a “Black Teacher Project” to help in these race-based hiring and retention efforts and suggested the district would track staff demographics as an indicator of success.”

Questions:

  • How can a school district get away with flagrant racial discrimination like that in the 21st Century?
  • Are there no white families at all in that district? If there are, what the hell is the matter with them? Why would they permit such biased treatment of their children…in a program they are paying for?
  • Are there no “parents of color” in that district with the integrity to protest a policy that is divisive, illegal and discriminatory? 
  • Does California secretly lobotomize its citizens? Is Weenie juice secretly put in the water?
  • How can educators so smugly described a purely discriminatory educational exercise without any ethics alarms ringing?

I don’t understand this story at all.

Stop Making Me Defend Jeff Bezos To Totalitarian Progressives! [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

UPDATE: I had multiple sources for this post, none of which, apparently, were accurate. Plus, the announcement above appears to be false. At this link, the paperback version of the book is indeed available at Amazon. I’m going to wait a bit, and leave this post up until I am confident that the whole thing is a hoax, or figure out what is going.

I apologize for the confusion. Right now I hate everybody and everything.

***

See, all you Jeff Bezos haters and Amazon boycotters? There wasn’t anything to get upset about after all. Jeff still cares about your values and the Democratic party, and Amazon is on the right side of the angels after all!

Amazon just censored “Camp of the Saints,” first published in 1973,that portends the destruction of the West as a result of third-world mass migration. Yes, it’s apparently a “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory book.

Never heard of it. However, for Amazon, the most popular and easily accessed book merchant, to refuse to sell a book like “Camp of the Saints” is undeniably viewpoint censorship. Yes, yes, I know, the First Amendment only applies to government censorship. That’s been the go-to rationalization by progressives to control the distribution of ideas they don’t like and find “dangerous” on social media, at college campuses and in the news media for a long time now. But freedom of speech, communication and thought is a core value in this country, or is supposed to be.

All my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends who announced they were boycotting Amazon, and the Washington Post staffers who resigned in protest when Bezos, the owner of the D.C.-based Democratic Party propaganda mouthpiece, refused to endorse Kamala Harris for President, should beg his forgiveness. Bezos is part of their club: he just didn’t want a paper he publishes to look ridiculous by endorsing an idiot.

By the way, I find Kamala’s ghost-written memoir of her run for President to be “offensive content.”

One wag writes on X: “I’m sure all the people who whine about ‘book bans’ when a school board prevents 6-year-olds from reading about gay sex” will be just as upset about this development. Funny, but I doubt it.

This also looks like an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to the unschooled how the Streisand Effect works. As I just noted, I never heard of the book, and wouldn’t have read it I had been aware of it. However, for the real defenders of democracy and our individual rights as Americans, making this book, whatever it says, into a runaway best seller now might teach the totalitarian Left a lesson. Here is what it looks like:

Nah, what am I thinking? The totalitarian Left hasn’t learned anything since it memorized Big Brother’s mottos—you know, like “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,” which explains the state of both our educational institutions and our journalism.

Gee, I Wonder Why We Haven’t Had a Female President Yet…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

…and aren’t like to have one any time soon?

Item: Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer (above) is resigning from the Trump administration, the White House announced today. She was facing an internal investigation into allegations that she used agency resources for personal trips, and that she was having an affair with a member of her security team.

Item: Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General, was forced to resign after multiple botches, a series of episodes of unethical conduct in the Justice Department, and being responsible for one of the most unprofessional appearances before a Congressional committee of any Cabinet member within memory.

Item: Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had to be fired in the midst of another sexual misconduct scandal as well as blatant misuse of department funds and making inflammatory and inaccurate public statements regarding I.C.E. activities in Minnesota.

Item: Hillary Clinton…well, do you need more? This week bipartisan scumbag (and longtime Clinton pollster) Dick Morris confirmed that the Bill & Hillary was pretty much a sham and a marriage of political convenience well before Bill was elected President. Admittedly, there is always reason to doubt Morris as well as the blog that first published this “bombshell” last week, but is anyone surprised? Hillary also launched the fake “Russian collusion” hoax after lying about her secret server, and had the “Worst Loser Ever” title for failed Presidential candidates locked up until Donald Trump dethroned her.

Item: Kamala Harris managed to unseat Hillary for the title of “Most Incompetent Presidential Candidate of a Major Party,” after being a babbling, useless, DEI Vice-President for four years.

Then consider how objectively awful the most prominent female elected officials around the country are. Nancy Pelosi…the Squad…Marjorie Taylor Greene…Jasmine Crockett…Lauren Boebert. Not only the elected officials either: this week we learned that the one qualified, intelligent woman making up the woke division on the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan, was a ringleader in the plot to delay the Dobbs decision’s release, even though the politically motivated stall put the lives of the conservative Justices at risk.

Could someone possibly be a worse big city mayor than Karen Bass in Los Angeles? Can anyone imagine D.C.’s Black Lives Matter pandering Mayor Muriel Bowser as Presidential material? Rep. Katie Porter, who once poured scalding mashed potatoes on her husband’s head and who held a “Fuck Trump” sign at her state party’s convention, is the leading Democratic female candidate for California Governor. NY Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani: I can’t wait to hear how she tries to talk her way out of that one. Stacey Abrams was supposed to be rising star, but she proved to be a Machiavellian opportunist. On the GOP side, that description fits both has-beens Nikki Hailey and even has-beenier Sarah Palin.

I could go on—Susan Rice, Lori Lightfoot, the Massachusetts Woke Twins, Gov. Martha Healey and Boston Mayor Michelle Woo, and speaking of the Bay State, fake Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren— to just top off the iceberg—but the point is that the XX side of our society isn’t generating talent that justifies all of the wishing and hoping for a female POTUS.

I have theories about why our system and culture doesn’t produce competent and trustworthy female leaders in sufficient numbers, as well as why those it does produce tend to be corrupt and incompetent power-abusers. I will leave those theories for another day.

Ethics Quiz: AI Jesus

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

We all knew this was coming, as sure as God made little green idiots. Nonetheless, it poses an ethics conundrum. Several, in fact.

First, though: “What’s going on here?” What’s going on is that once again, someone has figured out a way to profit from human desperation, sadness, and gullibility, or, as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” P.T. was being conservative in his estimate.

For just $1.99 per minute, or $49.99 for 45 minutes (what a deal!) anyone can have a spiritual conversation with a digital avatar of Jesus Christ, whose appearance is modeled on actor Jonathon Roumie’s portrayal on the TV show “The Chosen.” This courtesy of the Just Like Me website, which explains, “Jesus AI is an artificial intelligence tool designed to offer comfort, encouragement, and timeless wisdom inspired by teachings of love, compassion, forgiveness, and personal growth. It is not Jesus Christ himself, nor does it possess divine authority.”

We can cross off dishonesty from the list of possible ethics breaches, I guess. But historians and anthropologists believe that Jesus probably looked like this…

I still have questions, however.

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Gavin Newsom’s Book Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In November, California Gov. Gavin Newsom offered donors to his political donors a “free” copy of his forthcoming book: “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.” “Make a contribution of ANY AMOUNT today and I will send you a copy,” he wrote.

67,000 supporters bit, and the book those donors received accounted for roughly two-thirds of the print copies of the memoir that have been sold so far. Federal records reveal that Newsom’s political action committee paid $1,561,875 to buy and distribute copies of his book through the donation program. Newsom gets no royalties from the book, avoiding the trap other politicians have fallen into. Meanwhile, the New York Times, which has, surprisingly, been alert to this long-standing slimy tactic, still listed Newsom’s book on its Best Seller list, even though the paper has elsewhere explained that the books were not “sold.”

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokeswoman, kind-of explained, “When The Times has reason to believe that sales of a book include a mix of organic and bulk sales, the book’s best-seller ranking is accompanied by a dagger. That’s what we did with the Newsom book.”

Oh. What?

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Smoking Gun Evidence That Democrats and Progressives Seek One-Party Rule, Not Democracy: The Virginia Special Election

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is another integrity test for your woke friends who claim that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.

Tomorrow, Virginians (like me) will go to polling places to decide whether to vote for a “proposed constitutional amendment.” Note that the proposed amendment isn’t included on the ballot. This is because Democrats, who dominate the state government cheat. There is no other way to explain this.

Constitutional amendments, which must be approved by Virginia voters, have to be on the ballot with a full explanation of the amendment available to the public at least 90 days before the election. Virginia Code 30-19.9 provides,

“The explanation shall contain the ballot question, the full text of the proposed constitutional amendment, and a statement of not more than 500 words on the proposed amendment. The explanation shall be presented in plain English, shall be limited to a neutral explanation, which may include a brief statement on the effect of a “yes” and “no” vote on the question but shall not include arguments submitted by either proponents or opponents of the proposal.”

How has it been “made available”? I don’t know: I hadn’t seen it, and I’m fairly informed on such matters. Maybe it was in something I thought was junk mail. Maybe Democrats think posting something on a website nobody is likely to visit is sufficient advance notice. The alleged required explanation of the current proposed amendment is here. In addition to the deceitful and misleading language on the ballot above, we see:

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