Ethics Dunce: Stephen King

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Stephen King is a talented writer and master of his genre. He is also a typical knee-jerk New England Democrat whose political and social commentary has exactly as much value as Cliff’s at Cheers after four or five beers. He really stepped into the metaphorical “it” with the tweet above, for which he was roundly pummeled on social media and had to grovel an apology after Ted Cruz launched a particularly harsh attack, called the author a “horrible, evil, twisted liar” in his response.

King’s slur was in reference to comments Kirk made on his podcast in 2024, in which Kirk criticized children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel for citing God’s wish for Christians to “love thy neighbor” in Leviticus, and added that the exhortation should include gay people. Kirk pointed out that citing scripture as authority had obvious drawbacks, noting, “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.”

He did not, obviously, advocate stoning gays to death.

Caught, King tried to lie his way out of his own unmasking. “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [without] fact-checking. Won’t happen again,” King wrote after deleting the tweet. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” the 77-year-old author wrote.

But King already knew what Kirk meant, and has issued the lie anyway. How do we know that? We know because he mocked Kirk’s “just saying,” which means King knew what Kirk had said, and misrepresented it anyway as part of the Left’s desperate efforts to spin away the significance of Kerk’s assassination.

Boy, are they terrified of a tipping point! Good. They should be. Watching fish struggle when hooked is repulsive: it’s why I never could stand fishing. Watching the Axis thrash around now? Wonderful.

King and the rest, are showing the nation who they are.

Ethics Alarms Encore: “The Inconvenient Truth About The Second Amendment and Freedom: The Deaths Are Worth It”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Back in 2017, when I first re-posted  this essay from 2012,I noted that it was written in response to the reaction at the time from the Second Amendment-hating Left to the shocking murder-suicide of of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher. Nobody remembers the incident now, but the reflex reaction of the Axis of Unethical Conduct to  virtually every mass shooting or nationally-publicized gun violence incident has remained constant.  Now much of the “justification” for the assassination of Charlie Kirk has focused on his statement that mass shootings are the price we pay for the Second Amendment, and that the price is worth it. Maybe that position got him killed. His statement was 100% correct, of course, and when I was reminded that I had made almost the exact same assertion in the post below, I realized that I was ethically bound to repost it now. to Some of it is obviously dated (the reference to juvenile Carl in “The Walking Dead,” for example), but I have re-read it, and would not change a word of its substance.

Do I fear that this position puts me in the cross-hairs? No, because EA has relatively small circulation, and I don’t matter. But even if it did put me in personal peril, I could not and would not allow that possibility to stifle my opinion or my willingness to state it. That is what the bad guys want, and have been working to accomplish for many years. That is one of the reasons Charlie Kirk was killed.

Here, once again, is that 2012 post: Continue reading →

Ethical Quote Of The Month: “Outkick” Founder and Podcaster Clay Travis

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

“You caused this.”

—Clay Travis, the founder of conservative sports site Outkick and co-host of “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” responding to former President Obama’s statement on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in which he deplored political violence.

Obama’s insincere and typically carefully-crafted public statement on the assassination of Turning Point USA founder and activist Charlie Kirk was this: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.”

Suuure, Barack.

Travis’s whole response:

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Attention Should Be Paid: The Ethical Response to Those Cheering Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Returned EA commenter jdkazoo (Welcome back, Professor!) has correctly pointed out that it is unfair and illogical to cite individual social media users expressing glee or satisfaction at the assassination of Charlie Kirk as representative of the Axis (“the resistance”/Democrats/ left-based mainstream media—aka. journalists generally) as a whole.

That is sage advice and undoubtedly true. However, those reactions—and the entire alternate “X” where progressive fled to avoid having to defend their cant is teeming with them—are still significant and should not be ignored because:

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Comment of the Day: “Regarding the Charlie Kirk Assassination”

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

Glenn Logan, an experienced and excellent blogger now fortunately ensconced at Ethics Alarms, contributed the Comment of the Day in response to “Regarding the Charlie Kirk Assassination”… and here it is:

***

We never know at this point what kind of inflection point this moment is, or where it will lead. I have often thought that events like the Trump shooting would be the match that lit the fire. I have thankfully been wrong about most of this, so I will decline to try to read the tea leaves.

I have seen a lot of online anger, but it has been mostly modulated anger. That in itself is a significant distinguishing characteristic between the rhetoric of the right and left in such cases. If Charlie Kirk had been a high-profile leftist, we’d most likely be hearing calls for violent vengeance. I have seen none of that — not saying it doesn’t exist, it probably does, but it is neither common nor pervasive.

But that does not mean that the anger will not blow up, especially if the shooter is caught and turns out to be what most of us fear.

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Ethics Proposition: Someone Who Would Write, Say or Think This Cannot Be Trusted To Teach Children…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Fair?

Kristen Eve is a Pre-K teacher. Among her deficits is that she doesn’t understand the Bill of Rights. Or irony: I have no doubt that Kirk had sufficient integrity to understand that even an abuse of the right to bear arms resulting in his own death isn’t sufficient justification for removing that right from law-abiding citizens.

How many teachers like her do you think are out there indoctrinating kids? My guess: a lot.

Regarding the Charlie Kirk Assassination…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

First and foremost, this was an assassination. Part of the furious effort by Democrats, the news media and their dupes (or converse) to spin this crime into something other than what it obviously was is to tie it to mass shootings (It’s the guns’ fault!), and most despicably of all, the Capitol riot. The last was the tactic of Illinois’s Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker. See, if it’s all Trump’s fault. But while riots are certainly political violence, none of the drunken fools who descended on the Capitol were there to kill anyone, and indeed did not kill anyone.

Because this was a political assassination, just as the two attempts on Trump’s life were assassination attempts, and the “Bernie Bro” attack on the GOP Congressional Baseball Game team on June 14, 2017 was an assassination attempt. We’ll be hearing whataboutism spin using the Gaby Giffords shooting in 2011: you know, the one where the mainstream media blamed Sarah Palin because she used a crosshairs graphic on her map of vulnerable Democratic House seats? Eighteen people were shot and six were killed: that’s a mass shooting, and the shooter was bug-house crazy, believing the government was trying to control his thoughts. (He was, after all, a schizophrenic.)

Other things to ponder:

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Charlie Kirk, the Founder of Turning Point USA Has Been Shot

/ Jack Marshall / 63 Comments

He is unlikely to survive, but whether he does or not, it is not a coincidence that there have been assassination attempts on Kirk and Donald Trump while the Democratic Party and “the resistance” has claimed and is claiming that conservatives now place democracy at risk, with Democratic leaders calling for violent opposition, and large swathes of the political Left cheered the assassination of an insurance executive.

If this is not what the Left really wants, it is still what they have encouraged with their irresponsible fear-mongering and reckless rhetoric.

Believe It or Not! The Murder Wasn’t The Most Disturbing Aspect Of The Charlotte Stabbing

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

It seems incredible, but Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’s murder on a Charlotte light rail train was not the most disturbing aspect of her murder by a deranged man who just decided to kill her for no discernible reason. Nor is the fact that the killer had been arrested 14 times and turned back into the streets as part of the Mad Left’s urban “de-incarceration” agenda the worst aspect of the story, or even the deliberate burying of the event by the mainstream media, which felt that the public didn’t need to know this occurred because it undermines so many Axis narratives (gun control, how safe Democrat-run big cities are despite all evidence to the contrary, “Black on white crime? What black on white crime?,” the virtues of public transportation). And it isn’t the fact that so many Americans have been brainwashed that many (including commenters on this blog) have defended the media’s censorship of inconvenient reality.

No, I have concluded upon watching the various surveillance camera videos that the worst aspect of the incident is that even after the young woman was stabbed and was bleeding out in her seat, not one of her fellow passengers lifted a finger to try to save her life.

That’s some community you have there, Charlotte. Be proud…

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Ethics Quiz: Noem v. Perdomo

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

The Supreme Court this week overturned a federal judge’s order prohibiting ICE agents in Los Angeles from stopping people and questioning them about their immigration status based solely on factors like their ethnicity, their appearance, their language or accents and their places of work. If this isn’t “racial profiling,” which courts have found to be a breach of the 4th Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches an seizures, it sure is awfully close.

The 6-3 decision wasn’t signed and had no majority opinion. Justice Sotomayor, predictably (joined by the two other progressive women on the court) said in her typical dissent that “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.” And…

” After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent.”

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