2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck

Comment of the Day: “Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…”

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Time for a Trump Derangement report Comment of the Day. This admirable job by AM Golden fills the bill nicely, especially since I had almost the exact same conversation with my own “not unintelligent” relative who has been a raging, drooling, Trump Derangement victim getting progressively (double meaning, there) worse (Stage 1, 2, 3, 4, now 5, and I suspect Stage 6 is terminal) for almost a decade. There is a viral social media tale with video about a woman who interrupted a conversation between two black Trump supporters to start screaming about how he was a criminal who wants Liz Cheney to be put in front of a 9-person “firing squad.” This lunatic also claimed to be well-informed, though she must only frequent MSNBC and other propaganda outlets that haven’t thoroughly debunked this most recent desperate lie. (All you have to do is read what Trump said.) There may be a new one by now; I haven’t checked.

I am going to depart from the usual format with COTDs here and follow AM’s post with some supplemental analysis of my own.

In the meantime, here is AM Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…,” which is a follow-up to this earlier post regarding the unforgivable “Trump threatened Cheney” AXIS hit.

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Trying to convince people that what Trump said is being misrepresented, and deliberately so, by the Democrats and their media advocates is like pulling teeth.

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Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Federalist was kind enough to supply what it says is complete list (it’s not, but never mind). The details are here, the unethical hacks are below.

When I point this kind of thing out to my usually intelligent, Trump-Deranged relative, the responses are:

  • “You keep saying the news media is biased and untrustworthy. Not ALL the reporters claimed that Trump said that!”
  • “Besides, that’s probably what he meant anyway.”
  • “So what? You know Trump has said that he wants to punish Liz Cheney!”
  • “Fox News exaggerates what Democrats say all the time!”
  • “Why are you always defending Trump?”

Here’s the list:

Jonah Goldberg

CNN anchor Kasie Hunt

CNN’s Eric Bradner

CNN’s Jim Acosta

Politico’s Andrew Howard

Politico bureau chief Jonathan Lemire

CNN’s Kate Sullivan

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake

Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan

Reuters reporter Susan Heavey

National Review’s Jim Geraghty

Politico Senior Political Columnist Jonathan Martin

Rolling Stone reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez

I know the Federalist missed a few and maybe more than a few, like those mentioned in the Ethics Alarms post yesterday such as Joe Scarborough (The Federalist may not consider MSNBC worth counting, and that’s defensible). As far as I know, Goldberg is the only one who apologized, and a weaselly apology it was.

I’m sure the rest will say that they were just trying to save democracy, and how can you fault them for that?

BOY these people deserve to lose…

Ethics Dunce: The Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

If the administrators at the insanely expensive school (the parents of 1,700 students pay tuition for all grades of $65,540 a year) are not embarrassed by that headline, they should be. Morons.

The school told families this week that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” after the election can get excused from classes, and—I find this incredible—psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling for the tender souls who have presumably been told by their teachers and parents that they will be sent off to work camps and their parents will be executed in Trump wins.

The message to parents “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community. No matter the election outcome will create space to provide students with the support they may need.” Excused absences will be allowed on Wednesday or whatever day the election results are announced for those students who are unable to “fully engage in classes.”

Any student who doesn’t immediately recognize this as a “Get Out Of School Free” ticket is too dim-witted to be in school.

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4 Ethics Takeaways From USA Today’s 5 Takeaways From Joe Rogan’s Interview With JD Vance

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The target is this USA Today story.

1. The quote everyone seems to be repeating is “It’s just strange that everyone’s accepting that this person who is the least popular vice president ever is now the solution to the problem and that the media machine in just a few days did this 180 and just sold her as the solution. And as long as they keep her from having these conversations where she’s allowed to talk, they’re able to pull this off. And the, the fact that it’s happening with no primary should be really concerning to people… because that’s never happened before…. they could have had a primary….”

It should tell voters everything they need to know to vote against Harris that even with the race so close, she refused to do an interview with Rogan for his massive audience of mostly young men unless he did it under her staff’s control and limited the interview to an hour rather than his usual three. This shows that she’s hiding her real nature, unsure of her abilities, a coward, a weenie, and a prop candidate. Why would anyone vote for someone like that to be President? There are no ethical reasons: the reasons that exist are all linked to unethical conduct and characteristics or non-ethical considerations like fear and hate.

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The Worst Case Scenario

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Haven’t seen Geena around these parts recently, but her return is appropriate. And she was just worried about her boyfriend turning into a giant fly. Compared to what the nation may be facing, that’s nothin’!

The totalitarian tilt of the Democratic Party is undeniable, and Ethics Alarms has been making the case for months that its complete rejection of fair and responsible tactics and rhetoric for fearmongering, paranoia and propaganda is dangerous—not just dangerous, but ominous. I am certain that if Trump wins narrowly, perhaps even if he wins decisively, the freak-out deliberately seeded by the Axis will result in riots coast to coast.

An essay on the blog “Chicago Boyz,” which I have never encountered before, makes a persuasive case that we are facing much worse than that. Read it, please. Some excerpts:

  • “There has been a lot of criticism from the Right regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic “revealing” Trump’s affinity for Hitler. The critics says that the revelations are old and thinly sourced. The critics miss the point, which is that Goldberg’s article wasn’t so much meant to be an “October Surprise” as it was to give the Democrats the news hook they needed to launch their final argument that Trump is a fascist.The Goldberg article was merely the starter’s gun for that final argument.

  • “[T]he Democrats don’t much like the Constitution itself…It’s not just the elite either, with 49% of all Democrats thinking the document “should be mostly or completely rewritten.” The reasons vary, some Democrats believing that the document is tainted by its racist writers, other Democrats seeing it as a hindrance to the type of social change they wish to enact, and others just believing that a 240-year-old document is an archaic relic in need of a re-write. So the question I have asked those on the Right who see the 2024 Election through a normality bias is, on what basis do they believe that the Democrats will accept a Trump victory? The Democrats have spent the past eight years dismissing him as a legitimate part of the political system. They have turned that notion up to “11” over the past several years by explicitly calling him a threat to democracy and a fascist, and they have little attachment (among both elite and party identifiers) to the existing Constitutional order….”

  • “I haven’t even delved into the vast array of dirty, norm-breaking tricks that the Democrats have either engaged in or had revealed over the past four years, including lawfare, indictments, FBI raids, censorship, spying on campaigns by the security agencies, electoral chicanery, etc… All of which would lead to the understandable fear of the Democrats not relinquishing the White House to Trump. Take a step back and you see that every warning light is flashing red…”

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Here’s What the New York Times Has For Readers This Morning [Updated]:

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Main article: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism. The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.“

#2: “Inside the Movement Behind Trump’s Election Lies”

#3: “Far-Right Figures Escalate Talk of Retribution and Election Subversion“

A ways down the page we see, “A Trump Rally Speaker Trashed Puerto Ricans. Harris Reached Out to Them.” Added: I didn’t read the piece, but the headline was misleading and deliberately so. The “speaker” was a comedian, and he was doing a routines. Ah. So the idea is that his jokes were meant seriously, and because it was a Trump rally, Trump endorsing the jokes as if they were serious positions.

Now for the columns:

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Unethical (But Unsurprising) Quote of the Month: Michelle Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“It’s clear to me that the question isn’t whether Kamala is ready for this moment because by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready.The real question is: as a country, are we ready for this moment?”

—-Former First Lady Michelle Obama, suggesting that not electing Kamala Harris President will prove that America is “not ready” to have female president of color.

And there it is. The missing piece, and again, the standard accusation every time a black or female Democrat is judged by accomplishments, character and ability and found wanting: the critics are bigots. The race card, the gender card, and the fact that we have to put up with this insult and default accusation repeatedly is, all by itself, a good reason to have second thoughts about electing Democratic female and/or “of color” candidates. We had to put up with this when Barack Obama, a weak and divisive President, was called tor account, and when Hillary Clinton, corrupt and repellent, wasn’t able to win the 2016 election against a vilified real estate mogul with no previous experience in elected office.

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Observations on This Trump Derangement Video…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

1. Are there any videos of Trump supporters acting like this? As with the many episodes of violence against citizens wearing MAGA caps: if the Trump supporters are the Nazis, why is it that the Democrats are the only ones engaging in violence and harassment?

2. I asked this question of a Trump Deranged relative today. The “But Trump…!” answer I got was “What do you call the Capitol riot?” I call it a bunch of idiots trying to remedy what they thought was an attempt to steal a Presidential election through a protest that got out of control. It was not Americans targeting those whose political views did not align with theirs.

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Academic Ethics Villains: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is time to call these two partisan operatives in the guise of professors what they are: hypocrites, hacks, abusers of authority and totalitarian enablers. Naturally, they are Harvard government professors, my college and my major. I already have my Harvard diploma turned face to the wall and on the floor; there’s not much else I can do is burn it. But I consider these two unethical academics—they shouldn’t be called “scholars”—and insult to me, and any readers who are capable of non-Trump-Deranged thought. The New York Times is complicit by repeatedly giving them a platform to sell books and mislead the public.

But that’s the Times: an institutional ethics villain assisting two individual ethics villains. Nice.

I’ve been flagging the indefensible dishonesty and scholarship-as-propaganda of these two since 2018, when they were lionized by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) for their Big Lie launching book, “How Democracies Die.” They’ve published more similar screeds since. I wrote in part (If you like, skip to the end of the long quote, but this is necessary perspective for the rest of the post):

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“The Dishonest Waiter” Strikes Again! [Corrected and Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I immediately thought of the “dishonest waiter” when I stumbled upon this story, about a month late. (How did I miss it? You readers are supposed to keep me up to date!) If someone asked Alexa, Amazon’s creepy “virtual assistant,” “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” “she” replied, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.”

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In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, the late, great Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, evokes the analogy of “the dishonest waiter” in a memorable speech:

My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, “all historians make mistakes.” But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.

I immediately thought of the “dishonest waiter” when I stumbled upon this story, about a month late. (How did I miss it? You readers are supposed to keep me up to date!) If someone asked Alexa, Amazon’s creepy “virtual assistant,” “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” “she” replied, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.”

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