Jonathan Turley

Prof. Turley Calls “False Light” on House Democrats Sleazy Epstein Photos Smear

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I hate that I am tempted to write this every day now, often several times a day, but how can anyone of good character and admirable values continue to support a political party, whatever its claimed beliefs are, that behaves this way?

Yesterday EA discussed the desperate Democratic Party tactic of picking 19 photos (out of thousands) that showed a young Donald Trump (and other progressive hate-objects, like Alan Dershowitz and Steve Bannon) in the company of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he was known as just another billionaire on the celebrity party circuit or in the company of unidentified women. These were described in some of the Axis media as “bombshell” and “explosive” photos, though it is unclear when and where most of the photos were taken, many of them had been publicly released before, and none of them suggested any criminal, illicit or even unethical activity.

Despite that, political hack Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) had the gall to say, “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth.”

He might as well have added, “And we won’t stop lying about this phony Epstein scandal either until we Get Trump!”

Today Professor Jonathan Turley, a one-time Democrat who is obviously disgusted with Democrats, pointed out that what his former party has done with the photos is a classic example of a tort known as “false light,” where true photos are presented in a misleading and harmful way to damage a reputation or otherwise harm an individual via innuendo . It is essentially photographic deceit. He writes,

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Unethical AI Use of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

In Great Britain, an A.I. generated image that appeared to show major damage to Carlisle Bridge in Lancaster prompted authorities to halt trains following a minor earthquake. The tremor was felt across Lancashire and the southern Lake District. After the image appeared on-line, Network Rail ended rail service across the bridge until safety inspections had been completed. The delay inconvenienced commuters and wasted public funds. Here is the bridge and the bot-built fake version:

As far as we know a human being was behind the hoax, not a mischievous bot. But A.I. is almost certainly going to challenge Robert Heinlein’s famous declaration that “There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men,” in addition to the fact that there are also a lot of dangerous women out there too.

ChatGPT has been accused of encouraging people to commit suicide, for example, and Professor Jonathan Turley wrote that ChatGPT defamed him for reasons yet to be determined.

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Ethics Observations on Another Progressive Academic Meltdown

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

On his usually excellent blog, Prof. Jonathan Turley tells readers about Derek Lopez, a teacher’s assistant and graduate student at Illinois State University. This jerk—-signature significance!—was caught on video attacking a Turning Point USA table on his campus and verbally abusing the conservative students manning it. The 27-year-old Lopez says to the students as he overturns their table, “Well, you know, Jesus did it, so you know I gotta do it, right? Thanks, guys, have a great day!”  Then he tears down a TPUSA flyer on a nearby bulletin board.

He was later arrested. Will he be fired? He should be, but don’t bet on it. He is a part of a dangerous ideological movement in this country that believes that violence and the abuse of political adversaries is justified as the “means necessary” to remake America. He is not an aberration.

Ethics Observations:

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The Red-Pilling of Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Yesterday George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley registered one of his increasingly frequent columns mocking the Democratic Party. Conservative pundits, blogs and websites continue to describe him as a liberal Democrat professor because it makes his criticism seem more damning, but I’d be shocked if Professor Turley continues to support his old party.

In the post he writes, a bit in his academic weenie mode, unfortunately, “As many know, I was raised in a politically active, liberal, Democratic family in Chicago and worked much of my life for Democratic candidates and campaigns. This week again reminded many of us how far the party has moved from its more centrist history. That includes another call to pack the Supreme Court with liberals to force or ratify sweeping political and social changes.”

What Turley is really saying is that his old party is now thoroughly nuts, and he’s embarrassed to be associated with them….as he should be. As anyone should be.

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President Trump: The Kennedy Center, NPR, PBS…Now Fix The Smithsonian, Please

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I knew there was a reason I hadn’t been to the Smithsonian Institution for so long. Like so many other crucial institutions the apathy of sane and patriotic American allowed to become leftist propaganda weapons over the last 50 years or so, the Smithsonian, along with most of the major museums across the country, “stress on narratives over artifacts.” That’s a quote from Jonathan Turley in his annoying understated mode.

White House official Lindsey Halligan condemned the new National Museum of American History’s Entertainment Nation exhibit, writing, “American taxpayers should not be funding institutions that undermine our country or promote one-sided, divisive political narratives. The Smithsonian Institution should present history in a way that is accurate, balanced, and consistent with the values that make the United States of America exceptional.”

Gee, ya think?

That Star Wars exhibit above would have prompted me to walk out of the building. Turley comments, “I was one of those who went to the movie when it came out, and I cannot recall anyone thinking, let alone connecting, the film to Nixon or Vietnam.” Nor can I, because nobody thought that, even the most politics-obsessed. Even film reviewers, always mostly left-leaning and desperate to find hidden messages in the most apolitical films, didn’t think Jabba the Hut was meant to suggest Spiro Agnew, or something.

We’ve known this about the Smithsonian for a long time, of course, but just shrugged it off because so many other example of insidious political corruption are worse. The Institution tried to slap a war crimes narrative on the Enola Gay. It left Clarence Thomas out of the National Museum of African-American History because being conservative means that he doesn’t count.

Among the flagrant propagandizing noted by Turley:

  • The commentary tied to a 1923 circus poster, reads: “Under the big top, circuses expressed the colonial impulse to claim dominion over the world.” Ah. So those clowns were supposed to be scary…
  • The Smithsonian declares “One of the earliest defining traits of entertainment in the United States was extraordinary violence.” You know, because United States BAD. One of the earliest traits of HUMAN entertainment for thousands of years was “extraordinary violence”! That one would have also had me running for the exits. Gladiators? Bull-baiting? Public executions? Grimm’s Fairy Tales???
  • The Lone Ranger display states: “The White title character’s relationship with Tonto resembled how the U.S. government imagined itself the world’s Lone Ranger.”

Oh for God’s sake…

Fix this, Mr. President. Fire the administrators and curators, all of them. Start from scratch.

A Letter From Harvard, A Response From Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Harvard’s president Alan Garber invaded my email yesterday with a “message to the Harvard Community,” of which, alas, I am a long-time member. It arrived on the same day that the University, with its almost 55 billion dollar endowment, announced that it was suing the government for having the audacity to withhold about 2 billion dollars in federal research grants. Here is Garber’s letter—-you can skim it or jump to the end: it is easily summarized as “How dare they?” …

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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 →

Come On, Prof. Turley: “Let’s Go Brandon!”= “Fuck Joe Biden!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A student known only as “D.A.” was told last spring by Assistant Principal Andrew Buikema and teacher Wendy Bradford at the Tri County (Michigan) Middle School to remove his “Let’s Go Brandon!” hoodie. The school’s dress code states that school officials can “determine [if] a student’s dress is in conflict with state policy, is a danger to the students’ health and safety, is obscene, [or] is disruptive to the teaching and/or learning environment by calling undue attention to oneself.” Western District of Michigan Judge Paul Maloney ruled that the teacher and the principle were within the standards articulated by SCOTUS in in Tinker v. Des Moines in banning the hoodie.

“If schools can prohibit students from wearing apparel that contains profanity, schools can also prohibit students from wearing apparel that can reasonably be interpreted as profane,” Maloney wrote. (The district had banned shirts with the phrases “Fet’s Luck” and “Uranus Liquor” on them.) Maloney added that administrators and teachers could prohibit apparel that said“F#%* Joe Biden,” for example.

“Because Defendants reasonably interpreted the phrase as having a profane meaning,” Maloney said, “the School District can regulate wearing of Let’s Go Brandon apparel during school without showing interference or disruption at the school….”

The judge is right. Prof. Turley, whose analysis Ethics Alarms usually concurs, is wrong this time, and so is FIRE. He argues in part,

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Alternate Realities in the Manhattan Trump Trial, Except Only One of Them Is Real…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump for 34 felonies that are exactly one misdemeanor on which the statute of limitations has run is not just an unethical case, it’s a revealing one. It should let the objective members of the public know, if they have the opportunity and inclination to pay attention, just how undemocratic and trustworthy the 21st Century mutation of the Democratic Party has become.

“Dangerous” is also an adjective that belongs in that sentence.

I’ve been beginning mornings lately jumping back and forth between the coverage of the trial on CNN and MSNBC—you know, the Pravda channels—and Fox News, which would be claiming that Trump was as innocent as the driven snow even if he were as guilty as O.J. It is astounding how completely divergent the impressions one is given from the Left and Right sources are—that, and horrifying. The public has no reliable way to get the information it needs to figure out “What’s going on here?” because all of the coverage is agenda-driven. Very few members of the public have the time (or education) to puzzle it out either.

Interestingly, Abe’s observation—the one that begins, “You can fool some of the people…“—again seems to be holding true, and God Bless America for that. A recent poll suggests that a majority of the the public regard Democrats and the Biden administration as the true existential peril to American liberties and freedom, and not Donald Trump. Might it be that the spectacle of four dubious prosecutions in Democratic Party strongholds by Democratic prosecutors all taking place in an election year and aimed at putting the likely GOP nominee and former President behind bars before an election the Democratic resident of the White House looks poised to lose suggests a slight totalitarian bent, mayhap? Perhaps? Ya think?

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Conservative Pundit David Burge, a.k.a. “Iowahawk” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Burge’s tweet above was in response to the episode described by ultra-woke UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in the statement below (you can view Chemerinsky’s damning Ethics Alarms dossier here).

Gee what a surprise.

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