It may be that Spring is officially ten days off, but here in Alexandria, Virginia, Dogwoods are blooming, the Bradford Pears have exploded with brilliant blossoms, the cherry trees have popped, and I’m worrying about the Red Sox (who are undefeated after eleven Spring Training games, meaning that they must be really bad). Damn climate change!
I thought it was a rather turbulent week ethics-wise, and I know that, as usual, a lot was missed here. It was another one of those weeks that I found myself full of self-loathing for not figuring out how to make ethics more profitable without making it unethical—ye olde “ethical vs non-ethical considerations dilemma.
There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…
1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the MonthRep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.
2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”
These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?
3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:
Disney’s animated/live action feature “Song of the South” (1946) is, to say the least, not a metaphorical hill worth dying on. The animated sections are excellent, but Walt, for reasons known best to him, decided to ignore good advice from various members of the black community who advised him not to use the movie to romanticize plantation life, with happy slaves singing away in the Land of Cotton where old times are not forgotten. “Song of the South’s” version of the Old South makes “Gone With The Wind” seem like the “1619 Project” by comparison; shame on Walt, who spoiled any chance of Joel Chandler Harris’s American folk tales being preserved in our culture.
Of course, Walt’s lapse of judgment doesn’t mean, or shouldn’t mean, that people who want to see the movie (and the screen legacy of African-American actor James Baskett, who deserves to be remembered) ought to be prevented from doing so. 21st Century Corporate Disney, however, has fully embraced the paternalistic view that big media companies and the government know best, so “Song of the South” has been treated like those photos of old Soviet leaders who fell out of favor: erased, banished. Nope, sorry, can’t see it, folks: it will make you racist, or if you are properly woke, cause an aneurysm, or something.
I took three Tylenol, thought happy thoughts, and subjected myself to Tucker Carlson’s “opening statement”—I find the use of the term by a non-lawyer in a non-trial context precious and pompous, but then that’s Tucker—last night via YouTube this morning.
Observations:
When you are making a distinction between liars and yourself, you should probably eschew gross generalities like “people who get angry and wave their arms around are lying.” Tucker, meanwhile, remained calm, which is his style while lying. Yesterday we saw some of his email exchanges while he and the rest of the Fox News crew was giving support to then-President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent, like ,
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait…. I hate him passionately.” (Jan. 4, 2021), and “Trump has two weeks left. Once he’s out, he becomes incalculably less powerful, even in the minds of his supporters….He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.” (Jan. 7, 2021)
Of course, the New York Times article that revealed these (and others) also described the Jan. 6 riot as an”insurrection.” Continue reading →
It is well-established that when a mind lacks the linguistic tools to conceive of certain thoughts, those thoughts become impossible to conceive. This is why tight control of the language was so central to Big Brother’s control of the populace in “1984,” and, it seems clear, why current aspiring power-mongers on the Left are increasingly employing censorship and linguistic manipulation to herd a lazy, badly-educated and apathetic public into virtual pens where they can be controlled and relied upon to support their betters.
In the last couple of weeks we learned that woke-infested publishers have been stealth editing the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming; this week, “Goosebumps” author R.L. Stine announced that his popular series has been similarly edited “for sensitive readers” without his consent. Who knows what other classic books are having their original authors’ words, ideas and messages altered by anonymous political correctness hacks in the pursuit of “social justice”?
Now comes the news (via The Spectator) that a prime online news source and political analysis site is also in the business of restricting language. Here is a list of “non-inclusive words” that Politico’s reporters have been instructed to avoid using: Continue reading →
Having read more in the last 24 hours about this fiasco layered on a fiasco, I have reached the following conclusions:
1. I was right: Speaker McCarthy choosing Tucker Carlson as the vehicle to educate the public regarding the bias and slanted coverage of the January 6 Capitol rioting was a truly incompetent decision. If Rush Limbaugh weren’t dead, it was the equivalent of that, giving all of the Trump Deranged, progressive brain-washed and dishonest propagandists all they needed to spin the security footage into incoherence. Carlson is a proven liar and a cynical, untrustworthy charlatan who can’t even be trusted to believe in what he says on national TV. McCarthy walked into a cognitive dissonance perfect storm: if you wanted to ensure that no one who already hadn’t swallowed the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media (aka The Axis of Unethical Conduct) “insurrection” narrative would dismiss the new video, that was the way to do it.
2. Sure enough: Carlson and the Republicans are being widely accused of trying to excuse the riot, which was inexcusable. Chuck Schumer’s lie—on the Senate floor— that Carlson claimed the attack on the Capitol was not violent has more currency with those who don’t watch Fox News than anything Carlson said, and those who do watch Fox News already had concluded that the insurrection narrative was garbage. What is essential to begin clearing away the deception and corruption this episode epitomizes is to find someone whom the non-Fox News watchers will trust to carry the message. Handing the job to Carlson was simply dumb—but about what I expect of Kevin McCarthy.
3. The Big Lie is not that the 2020 election was stolen, but that the riot was an “insurrection.” Schumer and the Axis are using a Big Lie while accusing their adversaries of using a Big Lie. You have to admire the audacity: the 2020 election was a lot closer to “stolen” than the riot was to an insurrection.
Personally I don’t care who the video evidence was released to as long as it is released to the public in a responsible manner. I’m not a big fan of Carlson’s tactics but he’s the one who now has all the video. We can’t do a damn thing to change that fact so, so be it. He had better take this responsibility to the people of the United States very seriously.
The government and the political left has had an absolute monopoly on the evidence to support their narrative since January 6th, 2021. It may be the tit-for-tat rationalization, but it’s fair political gamesmanship for an opposing narrative to be presented (using the video evidence) that completely contradicts the narrative that has been pushed by the political left.
You don’t need to hit this analyst over the head with a 2×4, no sirree! I’m on these things like a shot. It only took me two-plus years, a fake House investigation, Tucker Carlson and rote news media lies to put it all together.
Yes, the disgusting aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol is now one of those national ethics fiascos in which everyone who touches it (or boards the train) breaches ethical standards one way or another. The riot has been unethically distorted by Democrats for political gain, weaponized and spun by the Trump Deranged like Liz Cheney, used to justify a blatant violation of House tradition and bipartisanship by Nancy Pelosi, nauseatingly misrepresented and mis-characterized by most of the news media, frighteningly used to justify political show-trials by the Justice Department, exploited to execute an unconstitutional impeachment (probably rendering the process useless going forward), epitomized double standards in the treatment of the riot narrative and the rioters compared with the far more destructive George Floyd riots, and launched more demagoguery and anti-historical nonsense than any event in memory.
And what a passenger list! Donald Trump, Cassidy Chivers, Nikki Haley, Mitch McConnell, Tom Manger, Chief of the Capitol Police, Kevin McCarthy,prosecutors and defense attorneys, Pelosi, baskets of Senators and House members, enough talking heads and pundits to re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg, which, you know, was but dust in the wind compared to the cataclysmic rumble that had no substantive effect on anything except in the imaginations of Machiavellian partisans.
Yet it took smug, cynical, ethics-disabled Fox News fomenter Tucker Carlson to penetrate my thick skull and make me realize that this isn’t just an extension of the endless, disastrous, 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck but its own, ugly thing.
Last night Carlson decided to go “Nyah, nyah, nyah!” at the mainstream media hacks who treated his selective use of the security footage to bust at least part of some false narratives as if he had released another pandemic virus:
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 8, 2023
How absurd of them; how puerile of Tucker. But the most spectacular First Class train wreck boarder was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Read his entire rant from yesterday here; meanwhile, regarding some highlights:
In describing to lawyers what deceit is in my ethics seminars (it is amazing how many layers don’t know what deceit is, though it is forbidden in the ethics rules), I often say that deceit is the official language of Washington, D.C. It’s a reliable laugh line, but it’s not funny. Using linguistic tricks to deceive and mislead the public is a tool of dangerous and untrustworthy governments, movements, leaders and politicians. I don’t know if this age old practice has become worse in recent years; to me it seems that way, but it could be an illusion. In the Sixties, leftists like Abbie Hoffman liked to use “liberate” as a synonym for “steal.”
The success of “Black Lives Matter” relied on a linguistic disorientation, like the old gag about a lawyer asking a witness, “When did you stop beating your wife?” What has been dismaying is how few people have the wit and courage to call out the trick and refuse to back down. The use of “immigrants,” “migrants,” “undocumented workers” and other deliberately misleading terms to hide the reality that the subject is law-breaking aliens has also been largely successful in bamboozling the public. “Affirmative action,” a nice and deceptive way to say “racial quotas,” is finally going down, but it kept the Constitution at bay for half a century. The all-time most sinister linguistic cheat, perhaps, is the use of the benign word “choice” to describe the right to kill unborn children.
Lately, the most prominent verbal deceit is embodied in the “Diversity-Equity-Inclusion” mantra, with “equity” serving as the cornerstone of the cheat. Most Americans—hey, thanks, public education system!—think that equity is just another word for equality. Now that Democrats and progressives are fully committed to socialism (while denying it—that’s not deceit, it’s just lying) they have been bombarding the public with the word without clarifying its implications. Equality means equality under the law; it means that every citizen has the same opportunity to accomplish what his or her talents, effort, ingenuity, determination, laws and the vagueries of fate and fortune allow without obstruction by the government. Equity means that every citizen should be guaranteed the same success to the extent government power can make such “equity” possible. It is based on the socialist/communist ideal that it is unfair that life provides unequal benefits , ability and advantages, so central power must ensure fairness by artificially eliminating as many disparities in these benefits , ability and advantages as possible.
This is signature significance. I shouldn’t have to point out that such a public declaration of bigotry, hypocrisy and ethics duncery is signature significance for an utter asshole, so I’ll just add that it is also signature significance for anyone who reads Saltz’s Instagram post whose immediate reaction isn’t, “Wow. What an asshole.”
To be fair, Saltz is an art critic for New York Magazine. I personally think art critics are worthless, even more worthless than drama critics and movie critics, but as art critics go, he could still be as reliable and trustworthy as any despite this “I am a hateful idiot!” announcement. Stephen King has made an ass of himself repeatedly during his own descent into Trump Derangement; he’s still the best horror novelist around. Mark Ruffalo’s a fine actor; Rob Reiner might even still be a terrific director; presumably Bette Midler can still sing. If I don’t hold artists’ flawed character and Swiss Cheese brains against their art, I certainly am not going to going to let a blathering critic wildly out of his lane convince me that his astuteness in a dubious pursuit like art criticism is undermined….unless, of course, when he’s judging the art of a Republican. Based on that Instagram outburst, I presume Saltz can never again review the creation of a registered Republican.
Ethics Alarms 