One of the many benefits of the Trump Administration and the concomitant 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck, one theory goes, is that it has exposed the ethical rot and lack of integrity of so many previously admired and trusted professions.
Among those that have thoroughly disgraced themselves in their rush to enamor themselves before their progressive, President Trump- loathing colleagues and friends—you know, the good people—have been journalists (of course), academics, psychiatrists, doctors, epidemiologists, ethicists, historians, teachers, judges and lawyers. Thus it shouldn’t have been a surprise (though it was to me, as always an optimistic sap) when efforts to prevent the Trump campaign from having the best possible legal advocates as it pursues challenges to the 2020 election results would bear ugly fruit.
The NeverTrump Lincoln Project joined the anti-Trump Democrats in targeting the law firms hired by the campaign. Election law specialists Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur and its lawyers were threatened with professional ruin. The theory went that daring to support the President of the United States constitutes a “dangerous attack on our democracy.” The firm, showing a dearth of legal ethics and integrity withdrew, whining that the assault on its reputation created a conflict of interest, was disrupting the firm, and had prompted at least one lawyer’s resignation. Since then other firms have dropped the campaign as a client, and the reason was fear—of losing clients, of being shunned in the legal community, of losing money. Mostly the latter.
This is only the latest progression in the decay of basic law firm ethics that began during the Obama administration. The reason is—broken record here—bias.
I don’t understand this development at all. Perhaps I should say that I hope I don’t understand it. The move feels like another canary dying in the Free Speech mine.
A week after the 2020 Presidential election, The Conservative Treehouse received this from WordPress, which, as you know, hosts Ethics Alarms:
…”given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.
It means CTH is being kicked-off the WordPress website hosting platform because the content of our research and discussion does not align with the ideology of those who define what is acceptable speech and what is not.
What was our violation? After ten years of brutally honest discussion, opinion, deep research and crowdsourcing work -with undeniable citations on the events we outline- there is no cited violation of any term of service because CTH has never violated one.
The WordPress company is not explaining the reason for deplatforming because there is no justifiable reason for it. At the same time, they are bold in their position. Perhaps this is the most alarming part; and everyone should pay attention. They don’t care.
Truthful assembly is now the risk. CTH is now too big; with a site reach of 500,000 to a million unique readers each day; and with well over 200,000 subscribers; our assembly is too large, too influential, and presents a risk… we guard the flickering flame.
The Conservative Treehouse is a professionally operated blog. I don’t visit it often; the tone is too ideologically rigid for me, and the lionizing of the late Andrew Breitbart, who proudly engaged in unethical journalism, signals to me that ethics is not high on the blog’s priority of values.
However, unless there is something more behind this event, it is ominous.
1. To channel Scarlet O’Hara…If one more Trump-Deranged individual accuses me of adopting right-wing media conspiracy theories, I will get angry, and they won’t like me when I’m angry. I accept analysis from no one, especially from the likes of (the former version of) Fox News, Breitbart, Mark Levin and others of note. If I like a legitimate authority’s analysis (like, say, Andrew McCarthy, Ann Althouse or Jonathan Turley), I will credit them for it. “It sure is suspicious that your points agree with theirs” I was told today. It’s no more suspicious than the fact that their stated analysis agrees with mine. I’m not tolerating this insult. I’m at least as informed, educated and intelligent as those I am accused of “parroting,” and I’m considerably more informed, educated and intelligent than the typical knee-jerk progressive water-carrier who tries to win arguments they have neither the wit nor the facts to support by calling me incapable of forming my own opinions.
2. An update! The original collection of movie clips that Ethics Alarms uses repeatedly to illustrate certain points has been expanded considerably.
3. “Run away!” I see that conservatives are “fleeing” Facebook and Twitter for the allegedly more accommodating and less censorious environs of Parler and MeWe. EVERYONE should bolt from Facebook and Twitter if they have any concern about the social media platforms manipulating public opinion and possible tilting the election by partisan censorship, not to mention the mendacity of both platforms’ CEOs and their basic lack of trustworthiness.
Every now and then a comment on Ethics Alarms that I have not answered personally sticks in my brain like a musical earworm, literally keeping me awake at night. This was one of those times. That proclivity is one reason I have made over 50,000 comments on my own blog among the 300,000 here in the decade Ethics Alarms has been in existence. The vast majority of bloggers don’t do that; most don’t comment at all. I do it because, in addition to the biological need for sleep, I designed this forum to be a colloquy and an ongoing ethics seminar as much as a platform for my own analysis.
This time, the comment that stuck in my brain like “Thank-You Girl,” the Beatles’ all-time earworm, began,
“How is rewarding unethical behavior ethical?”
The comment came as a response to yesterday’s post explaining why it would be best for all concerned if President Trump would stop claiming that the election was “stolen” or “rigged” (though it was both) and concede with graciousness and honor now that the chances of his prevailing in the Electoral College are vanishingly small.
I could answer that question in two sentences, or with a book. I will try mightily to come much closer to the former than the latter.
Steve, this is a grim comment to be sure. I doubt if I can elevate your mood, but I will make a couple of observations:
“There are so many openly anti-Constitutional, anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-civility and anti-rule of law things being done and said by political leaders and common citizens across the USA and it’s been going on for so long now that I really am to the point that I truly and actually believe that all the societal signs are showing us that the United States of America is on its way towards some form of totalitarian styled socialism/communism and it will likely happen in my lifetime.“
I don’t totally agree, but I do agree that this is a danger. I am heartened by the resurgence of the Republicans in the house and the conflagration of so much Democratic money attempting to unseat Republican incumbents. The Democrats burned almost 70 million dollars in the senate race in Kentucky alone (against 30 MUSD for McConnell) only for the pleasure of being curb-stomped. McGrath posters and ads blanketed the media and the streets, outnumbering “Team Mitch” 100-1 even in the most conservative areas of Kentucky, and that money might as well have been dropped in a bottomless hole for all the good it did.
That tells me the signal of freedom is still getting out there, and being heard.
The flood of new subscribers to Parler, MeWe and other alternate social media is heartening. The defenestration of Fox News after its sudden left turn is heartening. The bare margin of the presidential election even after rampant fraud and a non-stop 4-year fully-paid-for media campaign commercial for the Democrats is heartening. There are silver linings to be found, dark as the clouds may be.
There is more than just a little hope, but your point is not unworthy — there is also grave danger.
“Biden’s statement’s about unity, Republicans are not our enemies and working together in peace are a rhetorical smoke screen from an empty suit puppet of the extreme political left.“
The reason for the choice of song will reveal itself at the end of the post…
1. No 2020 Election Train Wreck update this morning, because there are only a few items to report. One stinker from yesterday: the New York Times had an across-the-front page, “This is important!” headline that read, “ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD.”
How did the Times’ ethics fall so far, so fast? That headline is pure propaganda, deceitful on its face. Do the editors think even the most partisan of their readers are that gullible?
2. Then there’s the Washington Post. I almost hate to post this after trying to talk commenter of the day Steve Witherspoon off the ledge in the previous Ethics Alarms entry. USPS whistleblower Richard Hopkins has demanded Tuesday that the false Washington Post story claiming he ‘recanted’ his sword statement regarding directions he was given by his Erie, PA postmaster to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day. He did not recant. In a video, the veteran says,
“My name is Richard Hopkins, I’m a postal employee who came out and whistleblew on the Erie, Pennsylvania postal service, postal office. I am right at this very moment looking at an article written by the Washington Post—it says that I fabricated the allegations of ballot tampering. I’m here to say that I did not recant my statements, that didn’t happen, that is not what happened. You will find out tomorrow, and I would like that the Washington Post recant their wonderful little article that they decided to throw out there, out at random.”
He has been placed on non-pay status by the Erie Post Office, which seems like a violation of whistle-blower laws to me, but I haven’t checked. GoFundMe, based on the Post story, erased the effort to provide him and his family financial support while he is being punished by the USPS.
Steve Witherspoon gets a Comment of the Day nod for a frank expression of his current state of mind, which I’m sure mirrors that of many citizens right now. He’s wrong to be so despairing, because despair is always wrong, and more importantly, it has not been the American way, even in times far, far darker and more ominous than these.
“Hope is dead” he writes. Hope is dead? “That way madness lies,” King Lear said, and the crazy old coot was right for once. Sure, there’s a lot to worry about; there always is. But the American spirit is strong. As long as this race—the American race, which comes in all colors—refuses to be pushed around, and it does, Steve’s gloom will be unwarranted.
I have written too many posts perhaps, and I know regular readers notice a few stories I have cited more than once. This one I am sure I have referenced before, if not in a post then in a comment (incidentally, Ethics Alarms passed 300,000 comments this week!), but when I’m feeling like Steve is this morning, it’s one of American moments that reminds me that there is hope, and why.
When Jimmy Carter, a President we elected when America was momentarily sick of Presidents, lectured the nation in a televised address about sacrifice and doing with less, he told everyone to lower their thermostats in the dead of winter (I don’t recall how low, but the idea was “wear a sweater”). This was because the U.S. was running out of oil and at the mercy of the Middle East cabal, or so we were told. (Windmills and solar panels would solve it all, of course.) All of the media talking heads were nodding like those stupid plastic dogs people used to have in rear windows of their cars. Then a local reporter went into the public square to interview a “man in the street,” who was NOT run down by a lorry like the “man in the street” interviewed on a Monty Python episode. This particular man was asked if he was going to lower his thermostat as President Carter asked/begged/commanded.
The answer was vociferous. “Lower it? Hell, I’m going to raise it. Who the hell is the President to tell me what I can do in my own home?” The interviewer was stunned, and my father started applauding and laughing.
“There it is!” he said. “That’s what I was fighting for! How does someone become President who understands so little about his own country?”
Good question, Dad. Donald Trump, for all of his flaws, gets that aspect of the American spirit at least. The Axis of Unethical Conduct’s four-year Operation Get Trump may have succeeded, smashing ethical principles left and right, but the Democrats and progressives got clobbered in this election. If they don’t heed the obvious warning, they will be clobbered worse in the next one. The sane Democrats know it. Yes, the news media is a big, big problem, perhaps most of the problem, but the fact is that the people who run these news organizations just aren’t very smart: the whole profession of journalism has always attracted mediocre minds. Look what Fox News has done to itself in a single year. Don’t worry too much Steve. They are mostly morons.
“Maybe a couple of cups of coffee will lift this morning’s veil of darkness and improve the psyche.,” Steve concludes. That usually works for me—that, a stirring rendition of a Sousa march, Judy singing “Zing Went The Strings of My Heart” in Carnegie Hall, or seeing the Duke tell Lucky New Pepper, “Fill your hand you sonofabitch!” as he jams the reins of his horse in his mouth and charges, guns blazing.
1. Incompetent headline dept. Someone at a newspaper has to be alert enough to catch a risible headline like this:
A Great Tit is the pretty bird above.
2. Who believes that MSNBC didn’t know this? (I don’t.) MSNBC was shocked—shocked!—to discover that the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jom Meacham, who had been a regular on MSNBC’s 24-7 anti-Trump barrage, never told them that he was working for the Joe Biden team. on speeches, including his victory address. Meacham appeared on MSNBC following the speech to comment on the speech he had written but didn’t disclose to viewers that the speech he loved cane from his own laptop as he said, “Tonight marks — the entire election results mark — a renewal of an American conversation where we’re struggling imperfectly to realize the full implications of the Jeffersonian promise of equality,” said Meacham. “It’s taken us too long, our work has been bloody and tragic and painful and difficult and, Lord knows, it is unfinished, but at our best we try.”
MSNBC announced that due to this “discovery. Meacham would no longer be a paid contributor, but he would be welcome to appear on future panels, thus showing the high regard for integrity for which the network is famous. If Meacham lied to MSNBC and its viewers while withholding a crucial conflict of interest, why would he be allowed back on the air in any capacity? Why would anyone trust him?
I believe that MSNBC knew that Meacham was working for Democrats while he was bashing Trump. And this is yet another example of how unprofessional the profession of historian has become.
Frankly, this is an easy conclusion. It is overwhelming likely that the first is correct: President Trump has lost the election, and the #1 reason was the four year strategy by the Axis of Unethical Conduct—the Democratic Party, the “resistance,” the mainstream news media, and more recently, the tech giants and social media platforms—to employ unconscionable, unethical means to accomplish that end.
If, by some miracle, the attempted theft fails, it will only be as a result of moral luck. The destructive and democracy-wrecking actions of the AUC are already completed. Their culpability is the same whatever the final election result is. This is why in criminal law an attempted crime often carries the same penalty as a completed crime. What the criminal did was just as wrong whether he or she was ultimately successful or not.
Before President Trump even took office, a full-on campaign to remove him by any means possible was underway, along with a similarly relentless effort to make it impossible for him to function as the nation’s leader. This continued with no respite from the 2016 election right through to the 2020 election. No President of the United States has ever been sabotaged and savaged in such a manner; indeed I am going to add the denial of this fact to the Ethics Alarms list of the Big Lies of the Resistance. It will be #10, right behind the lie that President Trump caused pandemic deaths in the U.S. (Andrew Cuomo definitely killed people, but not President Trump.) The lie: “Progressives treated President Trump no worse than conservatives treated President Obama.”
Big Lie #10 is different from the rest because it usually is used by ordinary citizens rather than Democratic Party officials, flacks and pundits; the reason is that the statement is so false that even Trump’s worst critics won’t go that far. Their alternative position is that he is so evil that he deserved to be abused. But I hear Big Lie #10 regularly from the social media Borg and my Trump Deranged friends and relatives when they are cornered and feel they have to deny what is literally undeniable. Big Lie #10 is a Jumbo: “Bias? What bias?”
The record of the effort to steal/rig/fix—choose your favorite word, but the objective was to make sure this President never had a chance to succeed, and if he somehow did succeed, that he would never get credit for it—the 2020 election is right here, tracked by the Ethics Alarms tag, 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, which I hereby retire after a wild four-year run. It took me twenty minutes to just scroll down through all of the posts that carry that tag; if I attempted to read them all, it would take weeks.
The first entry was here, when I announced and christened the Train Wreck, almost exactly four years ago, on November 13, 2016. In that post and three succeeding ones I highlighted four ugly examples of how the President-elect was being denigrated and undermined immediately, following the first post with this one, this one, and this one. I could not suspect that the efforts to demonize the newly-elected President of the United States would metastasize to the extent they did, with every late night TV show devoting large chunks of time every installment to insulting and denigrating him, with the vast majority of major newspaper columnists attacking him personally to the point of obsession, and all previous rules of decorum and official respect being not only suspended by the Democratic Party, but trashed, even to the point of elected officials calling the President a “motherfucker” in public without any penalty or reprimand, and the Speaker of the House making live theater out of tearing up his State of the Union message on TV.
1. As you can see from the map above, RealClearPolitics, the remarkably balanced politics blog (which means that progressives view it as a right wing propaganda organ) still rates the election as undecided.
Notice of Correction: Several sources reported incorrectly that RCP had called the election for Biden and then reversed itself based on, among other developments, the Trump campaign’s lawsuit alleging widespread voting fraud in Pennsylvania. RCP sent out a tweet denying that it had ever had William Penn’s pride and joy listed as anything but unsettled. Thanks to EA readers who pointed this out, and good for RCP for not following the mob and its conventional wisdom. What matters, of course, is what the map says now, and that at least one non-partisan, responsible source officially regards the election as undecided, which, in fact, it is.
RCP also shows Arizona, Alaska for some mysterious reason, Georgia, and North Carolina. All but Alaska currently have the President less than a percentage point behind with recounts looming and legitimate questions popping up daily. Biden’s Electoral vote count is under 270, at 259.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered the state to segregate votes that came in late. The state has been very reluctant to follow the orders of a Supreme Court Justice. This happened because at the last minute the Governor of Pennsylvania asked the state Supreme Court to extend the voting time. Constitutional expert Ken Starr [explains] this unconstitutional action:
“…[W]hat happened in Pennsylvania over these recent weeks is a constitutional travesty. Governor Wolf tries to get his reforms, his vision, as he was entitled to do, through the legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He failed. He then goes to the state Supreme Court, which by a divided vote, accepted the substance of what Governor Wolf was doing, and then added thereon nooks and crannies as well.”
In short, there are a lot of Biden votes in Pennsylvania that may be disallowed.
Pennsylvania isn’t enough: Trump still has to run the table to win, and that is a huge long-shot. But the claim that the election is over and settled now is simply and unequivocally false.
Ethics Alarms 