Fortunately, a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans pay attention to TV award shows like the Oscars, Tonys, Emmys and the rest. That’s just moral luck, though: it doesn’t diminish the unethical nature of what they are trying to do.
This coming Saturday night, on Feb 26, BET will broadcast the 53rd Annual NAACP Image Awards. Presenters will include Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, LL Cool J, Morgan Freeman, Questlove, Tiffany Haddish, Zendaya, and others. Special honors will go to Samuel L. Jackson (the NAACP Chairman’s Award) and Nikole Hannah-Jones (the Social Justice Impact Award). The winners of the non-televised awards have been announced already: every winner, like every nominee is black. Continue reading →
The assault on free expression as well as the speech-chilling practice of seeking to publicly crush those who do not observe the social justice dictates of progressives in power advanced ominously yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the episode at issue occurred at an Ivy League University, as our educational sectors have been among the trailblazers in speech and idea suppression. Unsurprising to me at least was that it involved Twitter. Just like in the Illya Shapiro controversy at Georgetown Law Center, a scholar didn’t use quite the words he should have (to be safe, and safety is everything these days) according to the Democrats’ Little Red Book. This time, however, the hammer fell harder. Continue reading →
Binghamton University (NY) Professor Ana Maria Candela’s Introduction to Sociology syllabus originally stated that white students had to wait for “non-white folks” to talk before speaking up or asking questions, according to the syllabus.
In another charming section, Candela’s syllabus also included a quote from Chinese dictator Mao Zedong: “No investigation, no right to speak,” which she interprets benignly to mean, “Don’t speak until you know something.” I question the wisdom of quoting a Communist despot extolling “investigation,” but OK. Candela’s rules on class participation, however, embraced “progressive stacking,” which conditions “students’ participation and speaking based on their race and gender.” Continue reading →
A relentless Times apologist–you know which one—chides me for leaving out this from his interview in the New Yorker, which is the context for the “version of the truth” gaffe, when Baquet said the quiet part out loud (if the Times-enabler hadn’t begun his complaint with “Um,” I might have let it go):
The system of “objectivity” (and I know that’s going to be a bad word) was designed to create a system—Wesley Lowery is right when he describes that—in which the organization’s job was to make sure that whatever your perspective was it didn’t get in the way of reporting the truth. I believe in that very strongly. That’s not the job of every institution. But the job of the New York Times should, in the end, be to come out with the best version of the truth, with your own political opinion held in check by editors and editing. Not everybody believes that, but I believe that. And I think that if you come to work for the New York Times—if you really want to work for the New York Times—you have to embrace that, because that’s what the New York Times is.
In fact, I intended to include that outrageous and insulting lie, but felt it would have just muddled the more important point of the post. (That, and the New Yorker site blocked my access unless I subscribed…) Continue reading →
Past time, in fact. Some Ethics Alarms readers don’t comprehend it either, but they aren’t editing the so-called “Newspaper of Record.”
Dean Baquet, who is soon retiring as the Times editor-in-chief, and not a moment too soon, dropped this verbal smoking gun during an interview in the New Yorker:
“The job of the New York Times should in the end be to come out with the best version of the truth.”
No, he can’t be forgiven a “speako” on the fly: major media interviews aren’t like that. Baquet had an opportunity to fix that quote, but he didn’t. He didn’t because his ethics alarms, such as they are, didn’t twitch. That’s really what the Times editor, and his paper, and the vast majority of its reporters and pundits really think. The “best version of the truth” is, naturally, the version that serves the interests of the Times and its allies, because they know best.
1. Do you sense a theme here? Voters in San Francisco last week dumped three members of the city school board who led the way to prioritize taking the names of American Presidents off of schools over getting children into them. One of the properly exiled was board President Gabriela López, who opened her Democratic Emergency Excuse Kit For Any Crisis and found, of course, the Race Card. López blamed the recall results on “white supremacy.” López tweeted,
“So if you fight for racial justice, this is the consequence. Don’t be mistaken, white supremacists are enjoying this. And the support of the recall is aligned with this.”
López also retweeted a post alleging the recall “was funded by republican billionaires, led by […] “reopen the schools” moms that used id politics and anti-blackness to turn out votes within the conservative asian immigrant community.”
If people like Lopez aren’t rebuked and shunned hard, American minorities risk growing to adulthood incapable of accepting personal responsibility for anything they do, and spending life as perpetual victims in their own minds.
2. Everyone is circulating this, but it deserves to be circulated. One more reason to sat off Twitter, especially if you’re not too bright:
3. Boy, they’re strict! The Florida Supreme Court imposed a public reprimand of an attorney after it found that she made “unprofessional” and “sarcastic” remarks in multiple matters. For example he sent emails to multiple different people involved in litigation in which she referred to opposing counsel as “out of control,” and “overly hostile.” In other emails with opposing counsel, she stated that the depositions of two of the witnesses in the case were “going to be epic” and great “entertainment.” What do you think, Marlon?
Nobody can recall any other lawyer being disciplined for such mild rhetoric. If we had a functioning ACLU, which we do not, it would be a good free speech case. Continue reading →
I don’t know if it’s possible for a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives to prove herself less trustworthy and responsible than Oklahoma “Congressional hopeful” Abby Broyles.
Let’s see…while dropping in to visit a friend holding a sleep-over for eight girls aged 12 or 13, Broyles…
drank wine and got smashed
swore at one girl
made fun of another’s acne
made a derogatory remark about one girls’ Hispanic heritage along with other abusive remarks
I don’t understand this at all. Lately, I’ve been wondering if Biden is deliberately trying to lose any lingering, mouth-breathing, drooling supporters he might have who aren’t total ideologues impervious to reason, like…well, Minyon Moore.
Three weeks ago, CNN reported that Biden had selected “three key outside advisers” to guide his still unnamed nominee—though we do know what color and gender she is— through the nomination process. “Minyon Moore, a veteran Democratic strategist and political director for former President Bill Clinton, will lead the efforts to activate outside advocacy groups in support of the nominee,” we were told. We were not told, however, that Moore was sitting on the board of directors of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation when she was appointed, and was so sitting as recently as four days ago.
“It is alarming that our own President has not spoken out against Justin Trudeau’s militaristic power grab, or against his violence against peaceful protesters using their lawfully protected freedoms of speech and assembly. It is even more alarming that the Biden administration is seeking to extend our own state of emergency.”
You should read it all. Wolf is troubled by the continuation of the “state of emergency” in the U.S. regarding the pandemic, which she weaves into her protest about the dangers of martial law and the risks when democratic nations start justifying dictatorial powers.
I ran across her piece as I was preparing to write a post titled, “Stop Making Me Defend Justin Trudeau.” The trucker protest may involve free speech, the right to protest and the right to assemble; I guess it is peaceful, or was until Trudeau called in the cops. However, no protest is lawful if it involves breaking laws, and using huge trucks to block highways and commuter access to where they need to go is not legal anywhere. Geraldo Rivera and Sean Hannity got into an angry tiff last week, which Hannity telling Geraldo that his criticism of the trucker protest was an affront to liberty and human rights, and Rivera responding that innocent people and businesses were being harmed by the protest, and it needed to end. For one of the first times in my life, I’m with Geraldo. Continue reading →
Today is our first President’s real birthday, and if anyone deserves two celebrations, it’s George Washington. One way to celebrate this unique and essential man is by refreshing oneself on the principles that guided his moral and ethical development from childhood to adulthood, George Washington’s 110 Rules, one of many ethics resources in the right hand column that nobody reads. The best is #110: “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.“
Unfortunately I did not see this fatuous and obnoxious article on Politico before I had posted regarding President’s Day. Writes John Harris, a veteran political journalist who simply does not know what he is talking about:
A democracy really shouldn’t be mythologizing presidents at all. From the left it seems obvious that we don’t need a holiday honoring 46 presidents, all of them men. From the right it seems obvious that we don’t need to be honoring the aggrandizement of Washington-based politicians.
