Axis of Unethical Conduct

Ethics Hero: Megyn Kelly

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In the clip from her podcast above, Megyn Kelly, who has not always been the exemplar of ethical journalism, deftly eviscerated Ethics Villain Jack Tapper for his role in covering up Joe Biden’s galloping dementia and then turning around after the election (and the failure of his fellow propagandists to defeat Donald Trump) to profit from a book exposing the scandal that he was part of.

Kelly’s coup-de-gras comes when Tapper, cornered, whines, “There is a difference between the clips of Joe Biden falling on a stage… forgetting a Republican congressman had died… Those are embarrassing… but there is a difference between that and the investigative journalism that Alex and I were able to do—and only able to do after the election.”

Kelly goes for the jugular, and get it. “I don’t diminish the importance of the book,” she says. “But there is no way we can have that conversation with an audience that is as skeptical of your ability to tell the story as mine is without addressing your role in this, right?…you’ve watched the coverage since it came out that you wrote this book…. there’s a legion of articles comparing you in some instances to like, O.J. Instead of ‘If I Did It,’ this is ‘If I Hid It.’”

Perfect.

As a side note, should I give Tapper a teeny bit of credit for agreeing to do Megyn’s podcast? Surely he knew what was coming…or did he? I think he is mired in such a bubble and has been so corrupted by his stay at CNN that he really has convinced himself that working for the Axis of Unethical Conduct makes him one of the good guys. Either that, or he’s a moron.

Whatever the case, he’s lucky I wasn’t the interviewer. My questions to Jake would have made Megyn seem like Mr. Rogers….

Ethical Standards Needed, Precedents Lacking

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the gap between a Presidential election where the office is turned over to a new POTUS, and especially a President from the opposing party, a lot of partisan mischief can be done before the lame duck limps out the door. This is legal, of course: every President has a right to serve four full years. However, when the exiting Chief Executive deliberately acts to throw obstacles in the way of the People’s Choice or lock in policies that the incoming President is certain to oppose, the conduct is unethical in my view. It is giving a metaphorical middle finger to the newly elected President.

Ethics Alarms discussed several instances between the November election and January 20 in which whoever was pulling poor Joe’s marionette strings engaged in particularly egregious examples of this kind of divisive conduct, and more have been uncovered since.

Here’s one that made me do a Danny Thomas spit: In the last days of Biden’s administration, a $89 billion, 25-year grant was awarded by the National Institutes of Health to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research. The nonprofit, which “operate[s] exclusively for the benefit of” the University of California system, according to its tax filings has never raised or spent any money since it was formed in 2022. The new regime at NIH is investigating, as well they might, and the massive grant is likely to be cancelled.

Then there’s the board that oversees the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. On January 17, 2025, “Biden” stacked the Holocaust Museum board with Democrats, appointing Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, Susan Rice, Biden’s director of Domestic Policy Council of the United States, Tom Perez, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Anthony Bernal, who was an advisor to former First Lady Jill Biden, and best of all, Doug Emhoff, whose claim to prominence is that he married Kamala Harris. Trump dismissed all of them last week, but he shouldn’t have had to.

The Axis is always blubbering about “democratic norms”: one norm I would like to see solidly entrenched in tradition is for Presidents ending their term to do nothing that will interfere with the agenda of the leader the electorate has made clear that it wants to shepherd the government. That shouldn’t be too hard.

Meet JoAnna St. Germain, the Face of Trump Derangement

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

JoAnna St. Germain, a public school teacher (for a bit longer)at Waterville High School in Waterville Maine, personifies what the decade-long hate, fear and anti-democracy campaign from “the resistance,” Democrats, and the mainstream media has inflicted on the soul of America. Once, presumably, she was a normal, rational human being like you. Now, she posts screeds like this on social media:

The Secret Service has the perfect opportunity, if they choose to step up and take it. You are the ones with power. Coordinate. Take out every single person who supports Trump’s illegal, immoral, unconstitutional acts. Look at the sycophants and give them what they’re asking for.
 
Every other country sees what’s happening and they are taking stands.
If you step up, we can avoid a civil war. I’m not talking about assassinating a president. A president is a person duly elected by the American people.
Tr*mp has shamelessly bragged openly about stealing the election. He is making plans to give himself a third term. I’m talking about Americans recognizing a fascist dictatorship and standing against it.
 
Secret Service, you are Americans.My beloved military, you are Americans.
We, the people, are counting on you.

Nice. Even with rampant madness oozing through social media and the op-ed pages every day, calling for the execution of the President of the United States and all of his supporters from someone not in already in restraints like this guy…

…is unusual, especially when the provocateur has been entrusted with molding young minds. A few hours later, the teacher wrote, “I have zero shame about what I’ve said. I’m not backtracking a single thing. I believe Trump and every sycophant he has surrounded himself with . . . needs to die,” adding that she posted “knowing I’d likely lose my job and benefits.” When her call for violence was reported in some media outlets, JoAnna “doubled down,” and quite arrogantly too, writing a week ago on her Facebook page:

Apparently, I have made the news. People are quite angry with me for stating openly that Trump and his cronies need to die. Gosh, I fear I may have “Trump Derangement Syndrome”!
 
I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, and I say it with my full chest:
Fuck fascism. Fuck a country that suppresses the media. Fuck a country that moves to weaken the education system in order to produce weak-minded people who will follow orders. Fuck a country that sends innocent women and men to die thinking they’re defending democracy when they’re really defending the rights of corporations to fuck over the very people lining their pockets.
 
If you’re mad at this post, knowing that I just threw away a decade of experience teaching the truth, fully knowing that my superintendent will have to fire me? If you’re mad that I’m speaking truth to power?
 
Fuck you. I’ll still take a bullet to keep your child safe.

Niiiiice!

Later, as she had to know would happen, Waterville Public Schools Superintendent Peter Hallen emailed a statement to parents that said in part, “Please know that I have taken steps to ensure everyone’s safety and am, along with the appropriate authorities, actively investigating the incident.” St. Germain’s reaction:

Well all righty then!

Observations:

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Prof. Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“If you view conservatives judges and justices as “lawless,” then every decision that they issue can be construed as a “crisis” in failing to adopt your own interpretive approach.”

—George Washington University law professor and lawyer Jonathan Turley

I decided to ignore the recent open letter signed by approximately 950 law professors declaring the second Trump administration a “Constitutional crisis,” because it was so obviously a mass exhibition of both “bias makes you stupid” and the overwhelming partisan slant of the legal profession, upon which Ethics Alarms has commented many times. The letter is the equivalent of the infamous one in 2020 signed by all those national intelligence experts who wanted everyone to know that the Hunter Biden laptop was really Russian disinformation, but the current letter is worse. Lawyers, as professionals, are required to be trustworthy. Trustworthy lawyers don’t put their names on legal misinformation and political propaganda like this latest “Trump is a dictator” attack. (The American Bar Association has issued a similar statement.)

I’m glad I waited and let Professor Turley eviscerate these disgraces to the law and academia. Cruelly, he has more influence, visibility and credibility than little ol’ me. In his blog post and column for The Hill titled “Panic politics: Law professors’ umpteenth ‘constitutional crisis’ falls flat”, Turley neatly points out,

  • “The latest letter follows a familiar pattern that has played out like a political perpetual motion machine since the first Trump impeachment. It works something like this: A legal academy composed of largely liberal academics announces a “constitutional crisis” caused by conservatives, and then a largely liberal media runs the story with little scrutiny or skepticism. On most echo-chambered media sites, the public rarely hears an opposing view.”

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! On my Facebook page, lawyers and even a couple of professors regularly proclaim as fact that President Trump is “defying” the Constitution.

Biased, ignorant and Trump-Deranged is no way to practice law, son.

Read the whole thing, but here are some more excerpts: Continue reading →

Oh Great. “Hamilton” Again. Where’s Aaron Burr When You Need Him?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I haven’t seen “Hamilton” yet, which is embarrassing for me, as I consider it my duty to try to keep abreast of theatrical phenomena with cultural implications. I thought I would finally see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s creative re-imagining of the life of one of America’s most important Founders with an all “of-color” ensemble singing rap next year when the touring company had a scheduled month-long run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., but no. The touring company announced that it is canceling the gig, which had been scheduled to be part of the Kennedy Center’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The show and its creator are throwing a tantrum, punishing the audiences of the Washington D.C. area because Donald Trump is Hitler, or something.

President removed Democratic members from the Center’s board, became its (temporary) chairman and replaced the venue’s president, so the uniformly leftist cast and production company decided to boycott the place. Well, you know, theater types…

“This latest action by Trump means it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, who originated the title role on Broadway, said in an interview last week. “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center. We’re just not going to be part of it.”

The show’s producer, Jeffrey Seller, whined that Trump “took away our national arts center for all of us.” “It became untenable for us to participate in an organization that had become so deeply politicized,” he said. “The Kennedy Center is for all of us, and it pains me deeply that they took it over and changed that. They said it’s not for all of us. It’s just for Donald Trump and his crowd. So we made a decision we can’t do it.”

The claimed justification for this hissy-fit insults the intelligence of Democrats and Republican alike. The Kennedy Center has, since its opening in 1964 as a memorial to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, been a stronghold of Democratic power-brokers and liberals in general and the Kennedy family in particular, whose members and allies have always controlled the place. Although its inception was an order by President Dwight Eisenhower calling for a non-political arts venue in the Nation’s Capital, once the three theater complex was under the control of the Democratic Party’s First Family, bi-partisanship got the hook.

The “Hamilton” Axis allies had some gall referring to the Kennedy Center as apolitical and “neutral.” Nothing is neutral in Washington. I experienced first-hand the partisan influence of the Center when my theater company in nearby Arlington, VA. presented the premiere of a drama, “The Titans,” about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It had originally been slated to be presented at the Kennedy Center, but was vetoed by the Center’s board when the Kennedy family protested that the script was not sufficiently supportive of the myth that it was JKF who saved the world from nuclear war (rather than the one who almost blundered us into it).

Continue reading →

Inadequate Notes on the State of the Union Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is exhausting. It is why I dreaded another Trump term, even though re-electing the Democrats after they had so disgraced themselves with the Joe Biden administration was, n my view, indefensible. I don’t want to keep writing about all this crap: Trump’s habitual excesses and rhetorical hyperbole, the partisan factchecking, the Axis news media propaganda, the absurd spectacle of Fox News gleefully spinning everything Trump of the Republicans do as marvelous while CNN and MSNBC give the public stony expressions and unrestrained hatred of the elected President of the United States; the increasingly unhinged conduct of Democrats, and the pathetic declarations of Trump Derangement by my Facebook friends (How did that February 28 boycott work out for you, morons?) The State of the Union debacle and its aftermath showed that while some of this has moderated from Trump’s first term in office, its not nearly enough. Will it really be this way for all four years? I see no reason to hope that it won’t be.

I accumulated over a dozen episodes and articles that would support individual post here related to the aftermath of Trump’s speech, and I don’t feel like writing any of them. I’ll touch on some in what follows, a random set of largely disgusted notes and observations….

Continue reading →

“March Comes In” Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/3/25

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

March 1 was the 395 day anniversary of my wife’s sudden and unexpected death on Leap Year, 2024. I want to thank everyone who has been so kind , tolerant and supportive here. To be honest, it seems like yesterday that I found her lifeless body. I still have nightmares, anxiety, attacks of regret and sudden sadness when something triggers a memory, and almost anything can, from my dog to movies to songs, like this one, which for no reason at all suddenly started going through what I laughingly call “my mind”….

Anyway…thanks.

Meanwhile…

Continue reading →

Friday Open Forum (and a Couple of Other Things)

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Thing I: The most obvious ethics issue going on is, still, the post 2024 election Axis freakout. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. When Ronald Reagan, whom the Democratic establishment in Washington regarded as a Neanderthal, washed-up actor whose most memorable film had him co-starring with a chimp (“Bedtime for Bonzo”), the reaction of liberals and Democrats wasn’t nearly this hysterical…or demeaning to them. The news media has been equally bonkers. The faces of network news anchors and hosts when a Trump administration supporter is talking are uniformly mask of pure hatred: I started noticing this yesterday. It reminded me of Katie Couric when she interviewed Ross Perot in the “Today Show” with an expression she reserved for people like David Duke…or Satan. Facial expressions and body language that tell an audience that an interviewer detests her interview subject is unprofessional, but it has now become the norm.

The same faces, restrained (and sometimes unrestrained fury) have been on display as the Democratic Senators question virtually all of Trump’s nominees. It says something that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who was derided by the Right for running for the Senate after suffering actual brain damage from a stroke,has emerged as the sole voice of reason in his party. “There isn’t a constitutional crisis, and all of these things ― it’s just a lot of noise,” Fetterman said this week. “That’s why I’m only gonna swing on the strikes. I’m still wishing him the best. I’m effectively rooting for [Elon Musk] and all the nominees because they’re working for America.” This should be the position of all Democrats and progressives, especially since, unlike 2017, the majority of American feel the same way, and it is the way Americans have usually regarded newly elected POTUSes and their emerging administrations.

The fury being directed at Elon Musk, a brilliant man who is giving his time to his nation as it tries to solve the problems of government bloat, waste, corruption and abuse that everyone at least claims they want to solve is an embarrassment for the Democrats and their Axis allies. Infamous dim-bulb Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson (he’s the one who worried that Guam would flip over because too much U.S. military material was on the island) raged yesterday, “What does that mean when an unelected billionaire can waltz into our agencies and slash and burn the whole thing to the ground like a Taliban terrorist, This level of corruption is shocking. President Trump and the Republicans in Congress, all of whom have abrogated their legislative power to the King, have handed the keys to the nation’s treasury to unelected co-president Elon Musk. Their actions are taking what we know as corruption to a whole new level. This is Banana Republic style corruption at its ugliest.” I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that this idiot doesn’t know how the Executive Branch works, but the frightening thing is that so many lawyers are behaving similarly based on their social media rants. Is it possible that they are really this stupid.

Thing 2: The guest post submissions I solicited a week ago are finally coming in: another will go up today. I thank you all: what I have seen so far is of excellent quality. This effort to try to keep up with an unprecedented wave of ethics stories while freeing me from a permanent government and politics beat is important; I also want to emphasize that it does not eliminate the Comment of the Day feature here. (I think I have at least one of those languishing).

I’m sorry: that was a longer intro than I anticipated.

The stage is yours.

“Superman II” Plot: After Trump-Deranged Sen. Murphy Makes An Ass of Himself, Vogue Says “Hold My Beer”…

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

The previous post discussed the level of hysteria now being attained by the Trump Deranged, with a U.S. Senator yesterday joining in the bonkers conspiracy theory that the Trump administration is a cabal of actual Nazis . Chris Murphy’s echoing the ridiculous Big Lie that Elon Musk gave a deliberate Nazi salute—you know, like Superman when he’s flying—

….managed to surpass even the late campaign claims by the dumbest sub-species among the Axis of Unethical Conduct that Trump was emulating the American Nazi Party when he held a campaign rally in Madison Square Garden. Yes, the Nazi salute smear on Musk is even worse than that, though redolent of the “OK” secret white supremacy hand signal insanity that the Mad Left used to slime everyone from lawyers to baseball fans during Trump’s first term.

Here is Vogue, writing about the cool necklace Ketanji Brown Jackson (above) wore to the inauguration:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: CNN’s Brian Stelter

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here is Brian Stelter, making a fool of himself, and CNN, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct, again:

This is the depth to which this cosmic hack will stoop to bolster his propaganda-spewing pals in the Axis. Censoring free speech is the equivalent of putting out deadly fires! Brilliant, but telling. This is CNN!

And this is CNN: CNN “factchecker” Daniel Dale rushed to try to defend the incompetence of L.A. and California Democrats, saying “There is no shortage of water in the LA area,” and babbling that reports of fire hydrants being dry were due to “technical logistical infrastructure,” whatever that means. You can’t check facts before the facts are known: a major investigation will be required to determine exactly what went wrong, what public officials were at fault, and what factors were in play regarding the devastating Palisades fires. Never mind, though: to those brave factcheckers, a lack of facts won’t dissuade them from rushing into debates and drowning opinions that might singe the Woke and Wonderful.

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the fire response put immense strain on the water system. That would seem to suggest a shortage of water, no? Or the fact that many fire hydrants were dry, according to the firefighters who tried to use them. The Santa Ynez Reservoir the Pacific Palisadeshas been out of commission since February 2024, meaning 117 million gallons of water was missing, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, desperately saying anything he could come up with to preserve his presumed status as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s 2028 Presidential nomination, told NBC News that the state’s reservoirs are full. He also said, more accurately, there will be an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

It should come as no surprise that these essential public servants, the Axis factcheckers, didn’t choose to factcheck shameless Biden paid liar Jan Psaki, now a paid liar on MSNBC, who told viewers. completely without facts, that the California fires weren’t the fault of anyone in California at all, but Donald Trump for not doing enough to combat climate change. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (that’s the “resistance,” Democrats, and the left-biased mainstream media for those unfamiliar with the Ethics Alarms term) sense that accumulated incompetence and bad progressive policies on display as homes burn might be a tipping point for ridiculously woke California, causing millions of voters to suddenly slap their foreheads and exclaim, “Why have we been voting for these liars and idiots?” I have my doubts that anything short of mass deprogramming can achieve that result, but still what we are getting from Stelter, Psaki and others reeks of panic and desperation.