And Still More Post-Debate Ethics! [Expanded]

The <gasp!> apocalyptic news was the New York Times posting an editorial board statement telling Biden he has to go “for the good of the country.” Of course, the Times can’t be expected to accept a share of responsibility for saddling the U.S. with Biden by burying the credible account of a staffer who claimed he raped her, hiding the Hunter laptop story until the success of Joe’s basement campaign was cinched, and generally serving as an uncritical Democratic Party cheering section when it counts. The Times also let the completely discredited Lincoln Project take a typical shot at Trump in its op-ed pages. And a silly one: the Project’s mouthpiece said that Trump botched the debate because he didn’t “lay out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure” (Sure he did: get Joe Biden out of the White House! Works for me!) and reverse himself on abortion, saving “young girls” from having to “endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations.” No woman is in danger of ever being imprisoned in the U.S. for having an abortion. Dumb prosecutors will do dumb things, but that’s no reason to ignore the critical issue at the core of the abortion problem: the delicate human lives abortion enthusiasts want to ignore. In the debate, Trump focused on that. It wasn’t a mistake.

As for the Times board, it dutifully parroted the official DNC talking points about Trump’s lies and “lies,” as if Biden wasn’t spitting out whoppers himself when it was possible to figure out what he was saying. The Times also used the latest trope from the Axis: Republicans should consider replacing Trump. Sure, that makes sense. If Biden was a complete vegetable and still beating Trump in the polls, is there any chance that Democrats would replace him as their nominee? Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Fox News Comic Greg Gutfeld

“Everyone understands how bad the world would be without journalists because we haven’t had any for decades.”

—Fox News court jester Greg Gutfeld, justly mocking the whines of the Washington Post’s ridiculous Taylor Lorenz about the lay-offs in her profession, if it can be called that any more.

The rest of his rant is amusing and well-deserved, but that single sentence is enough to accurately describe the failure of Lorenz’s colleagues and peers, and the total lack of self-awareness displayed by this inexplicably employed hack, who, in a typical outburst last month, proclaimed that “Anyone who’s worked as a journalist at the [New York Times] knows that journalists there are absolutely allowed to loudly espouse political opinions, you just have to espouse the *right* political opinions. Right wing opinions are fine, left wing opinions are not.”

The Elon Musk Car On The Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck

This will take some explaining.

Chapter I: The inarticulate tweet.

On November 15, someone called “The Artist Formerly Known as Eric” on X put up the tweet above. It is, like so many tweets, poorly written and inarticulate, because it was probably composed in about 5 second. When it became famous, and I read it for the first time, I finally concluded that the comment was a shot across the bow of the segment of the liberal Jewish community which had closely allied itself with with the full panoply of minority victim-mongerers, particularly the black activists who have morphed from the days of the civil rights marches into anti-white bigots. These, as we have seen in the past two months, allied themselves with the Palestinians and their terrorist supporters while placing Jews in the roles of white oppressors. His message, then, though distorted by the hyperbolic “don’t give a shit” rhetoric, was “you should have seen this coming” and “your great pals and allies have turned on you, and that’s your thanks for supporting Black Lives Matter and the rest.”

But who knows? It is, as I say, a badly conceived tweet. However, as I read it, his general point has validity. The black community has always contained an excessive number of anti-Semites who do regard the Jews as “white” (as they are), and the support the civil rights movement has received from the Jewish community didn’t substantially change that animus. Thus Black Lives Matters chapters have been announcing their support for Hamas.

My conclusion: It was not an anti-Semitic tweet, just a sloppy one. Eric was clearer in a follow-up tweet, in which he wrote, “I support Jewish people’s right to self defense literally and ideologically. But I also, as a white person, have to acknowledge that it’s been depressing to see Jewish communities not take a stronger stance against anti white dialecticism that is basically just repurposed antisemitism.”

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