Charley Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck

And the Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck Rolls On…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

This surprises me. After all the negative publicity about various teachers, academics and entertainers making “I’m glad he’s dead, he deserved it” comments after the Turning Point USA founder was shot dead and their being cancelled, fired or otherwise shunned in the public square, I thought these vile people had at least the sense to keep their sick sentiments to themselves. But there were many outbreaks of vocal Kirk hate during the dumb No Kings protests over the weekend. Charlie Kirk was a “piece of garbage,” and “evil people” like Charlie Kirk have “no place in my world” one especially vocal demonstrator in D.C. said on video, as lawyer friends of mine I respect joined with her and others like her in n infantile primal scream against the results of an election. In Chicago, an elementary school abruptly took down its website after a teacher erupted in an anti-Kirk rant.

I’m still trying to figure out what it was the Kirk did or said to justify this venom. The anti-Trump hysteria is irrational and un-American, but at least I can understand it because the President goes out of his way to enrage those who are already unbalanced.

And the aftermath of the earlier Kirk hate-fests hasn’t run its course. Judge Ted Berry, a municipal judge for Hamilton County, may be removed from the bench for his social media posts celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.

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A Democratic Government Should Not Be Afraid of Words: The Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck Rolls On

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Ugh. Yesterday, President Trump posthumously awarded Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom. That was an appropriate way to express admiration and appreciation for the martyred conservative activist. (MSNBC, alone among the networks, didn’t feel the ceremony was newsworthy. Now, a newsworthy ceremony for the network was President Biden giving the Presidential Citizen’s Medal to Liz Cheney for running a Star Chamber against American citizens tand her own party o make sure the public understands the difference between bad rioting—the half-day Capitol embarrassment by conservative morons—and good rioting—the nation-wide, May through December 2020 Black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful protests” by Democrats—at least according to”MS.” Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias…).

An inappropriate, cheesy, grandstanding pro-Kirk gesture absurdly hostile to freedom of speech was the Trump State Department revoking the visas of six foreigners who made derisive comments about Kirk or who joked about his assassination. Oh no, not THAT! Foreigners making jokes!

The State Department said yesterday that it had determined the six unidentified foreign nationals from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay and South Africa should lose their visas after reviewing their online social media posts and clips about Kirk. “[We]will defend our borders, our culture, and our citizens by enforcing our immigration laws,” the State Department said. “Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed.”

Celebrating.

Next up from this weirdly thin-skinned gang: prosecuting whoever celebrates LA Dodger victories in the baseball play-offs. The move hands a metaphorical spiked club to the Trump-Deranged who claim this President wants to cancel the First Amendment. Dumb. Abuse of power.

Unethical.

Morons.

Ethics Quiz: FREEDOM

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments

Libs of TikTok…you know, that account that progressives call racist and homophobic and transphobic even though it only re-posts damning evidence of woke lunacy from TikTok and other platforms?…posted an email exchange between Arbor Creek Elementary Principal Melissa Snell and an (unnamed) individual in which Snell indicated that “Freedom” T-shirts were banned in her school.  “I just want to make sure that you have told your staff to not wear those ‘Freedom’ shirts to school anymore. Thank you.” Jonathan Turley confirmed that there is such a ban, though it may be temporary. Superintendent Brent Yeager confirmed the emails that Libs of TikTok had postedbut suggested that it was temporary as Snell “reviewed district practices.”

Turley says there is nothing to review.”I fail to see why Snell had to suspend the wearing of such shirts pending review. “This is clearly a content-based limitation on speech,” he writes.

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Michael Mann Helpfully Continues To Prove Just How Much “Climate Science” Is Warped By Partisan Agendas and Unprofessional Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Climate change hysterics cannot discuss the basis for their passion without mentioning Michael Mann, who must be regarded as the face of whole climate change movement. Wikipedia makes him seem like a master of his domain:

Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.

As lead author of a paper produced in 1998 with co-authors Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, Mann used advanced statistical techniques to find regional variations in a hemispherical climate reconstruction covering the past 600 years. In 1999 the same team used these techniques to produce a reconstruction over the past 1,000 years (MBH99), which was dubbed the “hockey stick graph” because of its shape. He was one of eight lead authors of the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001. A graph based on the MBH99 paper was highlighted in several parts of the report and was given wide publicity. The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was won jointly by the IPCC and Al Gore.

Mann was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003 and has received a number of honors and awards including selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. In 2012 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and awarded the status of distinguished professor in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications. He has also published six books: Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (2008), The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012), together with co-author Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016) with Megan Herbert, The Tantrum That Saved the World (2018), The New Climate War (2021), and Our Fragile Moment (2023). In 2012, the European Geosciences Union described his publication record as “outstanding for a scientist of his relatively young age”. Mann is a co-founder and contributor to the climatology blog RealClimate.

All the honors and accolades prove is how politicized the scientific community is, and how progressive bias has infected so many of the world’s institutions. His so-called “hockey stick graph,” supposedly a reconstruction of past climate temperatures, was shown to be the product of dishonest statistics methodology; for example, it conveniently ignored the Medieval Warm Period that continues to bedevil the climate change narrative.

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Weird Tales of the Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck: The Very Just Firing of Suzanne Swierc

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Do reporters understand what the First Amendment means? It would be passing strange if they did not, but to read and hear all the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending over lawyers, teachers and others justifiably dismissed for social media posts that announced to the world that they were cruel, irresponsible, biased or just not very bright, I find myself wondering.

The New York Times has one of their sob story features [gift link!] about an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana who found herself the target of online abuse and ultimately a negative employment action for posting this sentiment on Facebook: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” The “private” statement went viral, as they say (if you think anything you post on line is “private,” you are a fool at the very least), and five days after it went up, Suzanne Swierc was fired as the director of health and advocacy at Ball State.

Good. It would have been irresponsible not to fire her, but Times writer Sabrina Tavernise writes that firings like hers raise “questions about the limits of free speech.” Some of the alleged more than 145 people fired in the wake of Kirk’s assassination may raise those questions, but not this one.

As is par for the course, the Times story mischaracterized the meaning and import of the central fact in the story: what Swierc posted. She didn’t express anything specifically negative about Kirk. She did not cheer on his death or call him names. Her post declared her inability to be “friends” with anyone who held an opinion about Charlie Kirk that was different from hers. Those one cannot be friends with, as opposed to those one hasn’t become friends with yet, are expressly adversaries, persona non grata or even enemies. Treating anyone as an enemy because of their opinions and openly announcing that this is one’s practice is an embrace of bigotry and intolerance. It is proof of dead ethics alarms.

A university staff member responsible for providing services to students as director of health and advocacy (whatever that means) or any other function cannot be trusted to do so fairly if that is her attitude. If it isn’t her attitude, Swierc should not have written that it was.

Swierc was fired, not for her opinion of Charlie Kirk, but because she proved she was unable to deal fairly with people holding diverse viewpoints. Sadly, surveys indicate that a lot of Americans have this malady, and the bulk of them are progressives: if you don’t think like they do, you’re by definition a bad person and not worthy of their friendship. That is an unethical mindset as well as a disqualifying one for many jobs.

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The Irrational Premature Death Response

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

At least I am consistent. The phenomenon of public figures and celebrities immediately having their influence and perceived importance and value elevated by a sudden death that they had no control over has always bewildered me. I got my first taste of hostility for bucking conventional wisdom when I wrote an editorial for my junior high school newspaper questioning the fairness of the rush to rename airports, highways and buildings after President Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination. “Honor Him…Quietly” was my title, and I questioned whether it was responsible to strip names honoring other worthy Americans from various landmarks because Lee Harvey Oswald happened to have access to a warehouse window in Dallas. Since I was living in a Boston suburb at the time and Kennedys were considered just short of deities, this was not a popular point of view.

When his rival and frequent adversary Truman Capote drank and drugged himself to death at 59, Gore Vidal famously said, “Good career move!” Nasty as that assessment was (and was intended to be), whether at the the hand of another or the public figures themselves, early death is almost always a good career move.

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Comment of the Day: “It’s Come to This: a Majority of House Democrats Chose To Avoid Angering Their Radical Trump-Deranged Base Over Appealing To Sane Americans”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Certain long-form comments on Ethics Alarms (most blogs don’t get them or don’t allow them: I love ’em) just scream “Comment of the Day.” This one, by emerging Ethics Alarms commentariate star CEES VAN BARNEVELDT, was one of those. It concerns the decision by about half the Democrats in Congress to eschew a symbolic vote condemning political violence because apparently they couldn’t bear endorsing any sentiment complimentary to Charlie Kirk, whom their radical base considers a an evil fascist (mostly because Democrats said he was.) Here is that Comment of the Day, on the post, “It’s Come to This: a Majority of House Democrats Chose To Avoid Angering Their Radical Trump-Deranged Base Over Appealing To Sane Americans”:

***

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a moment of absolute moral clarity. And almost all moments of absolute moral clarity have a villain. I became aware of the Charlie Kirk assassination via Ethics Alarms. When I switched on the television the news was that Charlie Kirk had died. Soon thereafter the news changed to “Republicans pounce after the death of Charlie Kirk,”following the main stream media.

But as everybody with two eyes and a couple of braincells can see, the real news since that day has been “The left goes mental after Charlie Kirk’s assassination”.

American history had more moments of absolute moral clarity. The most recent one with similar significance is the attack on the World Trade Center at 9/11/2001. Another one is the lynching of Emmett Till, among many more that are related to Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights.

The one moment that strikes me as most comparable is another famous example of political violence. In May, 1856 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to denounce the use of force and fraud to plant slavery in the territory of Kansas. This speech is known as the “Crime Against Kansas” speech. A couple of days later, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, with two other Southern Representatives, entered the Senate Chamber and gave Sumner such a beating with a cane that he nearly died. The other Southern Representatives made sure that the Senator could not get any help. The Southern newspapers praised the attack, and blamed Sumner for bringing his fate on himself. The cane had broken in two, and Southern supporters made sure that Preston Brooks got a new cane. An attempt to oust Brooks from the House of Representatives failed.

In 1856 the country was deeply polarized about the issue of slavery, even more polarized than today. Sumner used words and debate to persuade; however Brooks, with full support, used force and violence in order to extend their power and way of life, which included an oligarchy supported by slavery.

The caning shocked the conscience of the United States of America. The Southern Democrats had let their mask slip; they stood exposed for the entire nation as a party that disdained free speech and republican norms, and instead chose force and violence to get their vision realized.

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Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck Update, 9/21/2025

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I have to say that I’m pretty sick of hearing and reading about Charley Kirk. The hagiography on the Right and the desperate spinning from the Left, which fears, with considerable justification, that the activist’s assassination will be a devastating tipping point that will doom their prospects in the 2026 election, are both relentless. The Kirk memorial service i is being compared to a state funeral, and that diminishes the tradition and the status of state funerals. Whatever Kirk was, he was not a national public servant. He wasn’t Charles Lindbergh either. The Democrats approached this level of creating exaggerated status when they held a Capitol Rotunda viewing for a Capitol police officer on the pretense that he was killed by the mob on January 6, 2021. He wasn’t, but the charade was all part of the coordinated effort to demonize Republicans, just as the deification of Kirk, a partisan organizer, is a Republican effort to show that the American Left approves of and encourages violence as a political weapon. (It does, you know.)

The obvious comparison is with George Floyd, but like most obvious comparisons, it’s not valid. To begin with, there really are good reasons to mourn Kirk. George Floyd was a blight on society, if an insignificant one. His ambiguous death was brilliantly exploited despite the fact that it signified nothing except that some cops aren’t very good at their jobs (we knew that). Floyd’s death didn’t result from racism or bigotry. Sure, the lifetime petty crook and drug addict’s life “mattered,” but it didn’t matter enough to him to do something positive with it. Also, to state the the most vivid distinction, conservatives didn’t use Kirk’s murder to go on a destructive nationwide “mostly peaceful demonstration” spree resulting in billions of dollars in damage, over 30 deaths, and the disruption of daily life for Americans who had nothing to do with Floyd’s demise.

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It’s Come to This: a Majority of House Democrats Chose To Avoid Angering Their Radical Trump-Deranged Base Over Appealing To Sane Americans

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

To be fair, Republican had Democrats in a metaphorical head-lock and the assassination of Charlie Kirk gave the Elephants a perfect “gotcha!” Then again, the Democrats and the rest of the Axis of Unethical conduct were begging for their just desserts and are getting it good and hard.

Well, good. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving party.

House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced House Resolution 719 this week and with over 100 co-sponsors, all Republicans. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass., and Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar (D- Cal.) all sucked it up and supported the resolution, which, with a sane party, should have been easy. The relevant text read,

Resolved, That the House of Representatives

(1) condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination of Charles “Charlie” James Kirk, and all forms of political violence;

(2) commends and honors the dedicated law enforcement and emergency personnel for their tireless efforts in finding the suspect responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk and urges the administration of swift justice to the suspect;

(3) extends its deepest condolences and sympathies to Charlie Kirk’s family, including his wife, Erika, and their two young children, and prays for comfort, peace, and healing in this time of unspeakable loss;

(4) honors the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk, whose steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty; and

(5) calls upon all Americans—regardless of race, party affiliation, or creed—to reject political violence, recommit to respectful debate, uphold American values, and respect one another as fellow Americans.

Only ninety-five Democrats had the sense to back the resolution even though the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t read the text and would just see it as a routine rejection of political violence and an expression of regret over the death of a murder victim. Thirty-eight Democrats voted “present,” 58 voted against the resolution, and 22 did not vote at all. That’s 117 who objected to the existence of Charlie Kirk so much that they were unwilling to support a resolution condemning political violence.

In June, the House unanimously passed a resolution honoring Minnesota House Democrat Leader Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark after they were murdered, while also condemning political violence. There were no Republican dissenters. But the Hortmans hadn’t played a part in defeating a grand scheme to remake the nation, the government and its culture like Charlie Kirk had. The Mad Left hated him and hates him still, hence today’s vote. Res ipsa loquitur.

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Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The newly Christened “Charie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck” is barrelling along at breakneck pace. I need this post just to catch up:

  • Attorney General Pam Bondi idiotically stated that “hate speech” was not protected by the First Amendment. Ethics Alarms negligently didn’t flag this immediately as Ethics Duncery, and I am abashed. I just am not surprised when Bondi shows us what she is: a legal hack, an unqualified and incompetent AG, and in the running for the worst Trump Cabinet appointment. Should she be fired for directly undermining the Trump/MAGA/conservative position on freedom of speech? Of course; she should never have been appointed in the first place. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the U.S. Attorney General understand the Bill of Rights and all the SCOTUS cases establishing that “hate speech” is just speech, and completely covered by the First Amendment. What a disgrace Bondi is. Ugh.
  • Then there is Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Party leader in the Senate, lawyer (once upon a time) and utter hypocrite. Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension is unfair and cowardly, but there is nothing preventing an employer from firing or suspending an employee who makes a statement in public that the organization decides is detrimental to business, But Schumer wrote on “X”:

“America is meant to be a bastion of free speech. Everybody across the political spectrum should be speaking out to stop what’s happening to Jimmy Kimmel. This is about protecting democracy. This must go to court.”

Roseanne Barr tweeted back derisive laughter, as well she might. She was fired from her hit sitcom for an offensive, arguably racist tweet, though what she said was, again, protected speech. I don’t care enough about Schumer to check and see if he expressed outrage at Roseanne’s tweet, but he certainly didn’t say that she had a case in court, which she definitely did not, just like Kimmel. Continue reading →