Rep. Gill confronted the Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History after we uncovered an exhibit that called Mickey racist for allegedly symbolizing blackface.
These exchanges are hard to watch unless you enjoy watching dishonest, woke propagandists being publicly exposed as the disgraces to their professions and the enemies of democracy that they are.
When the White House announced that it was reviewing Smithsonian exhibits for left-wing bias about a year ago, I wrote here (in part):
“There can be little question that the current curators of the Smithsonian museums have used their positions to promote woke agenda items and to manipulate the exhibits to try to indoctrinate museum visitors. Most of what the Federalist flagged as well as the White House’s items are genuinely objectionable…For example, Ibram X. Kendi is a race-hustler, and his presence anywhere in the museums is signature significance.
“Does the Pride Flag have genuine historical significance? I suppose so. But emphasizing Ben Franklin’s early slave-holding stinks of the “1619 Project”: by the time that he was a Founder, Ben had become a vocal foe of slavery.
“I believe that a nation’s museums should err on the side of emphasizing the positive aspect of its history and culture, but that’s easier to say than to execute. Substituting one extreme bias for another is not a solution. But as I wrote in the previous post on this topic, I think finding an ethical balance will be a futile exercise.”
Behold the official website of the Democratic Socialists of America. Unless it is a false flag effort by frightened Democrats or sneaky conservatives, this is a metaphorical smoking gun of epic proportions. Yet its content should not surprise anyone who has any historical perspective or who has been paying attention for the last, oh, two decades or so.
As for me, my inner Fredo is again saying, “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everyone says!” I’d like to find the first time Ethics Alarms started warning that the American Left and the 21st Century Democratic Party was sliding into totalitarian goals and tactics, but I know it was quite a while ago. I also know that EA’s objective analysis of this terrible political development, which creates a genuine threat to democracy unlike the fake threats to democracy heralded by Axis propagandists, was perceived as a partisan tactic itself and attacked as such, here and elsewhere. That was and is wrong for I was and am right, and it didn’t take any Fox News script to lead me to the truth. I was paying attention. Democrats were using the playbook of Communist regimes while accusing their adversaries of doing what they were doing themselves. And it should have been obvious to everyone. I’m not that smart. Heck, Donald Trump figured it out.
Now, suddenly, after sowing these metaphorical dragons’ teeth and getting the predictable bumper crop, some progressives and Democrats are waking up to what their cynical pandering to the anti-American, radical and ignorant extremes on the Left has wrought. Bill Maher, Van Jones, James Carville, Joe Scarborough, Senator Fetterman and others are suddenly saying, “Hey, hold on a bit, these Democratic Socialists are crazy, and they are going to get us slaughtered in elections.” To which I respond with two Hollywood clips from the EA archive:
I have no sympathy for these fools, and the group includes a lot of my Trump Deranged friends and relatives. They allowed Bernie Sanders, the epitome of a communist “useful idiot,” to become the face of the Democratic party along with “the Squad” and now the mayor of New York City. They relied on the our broken education system’s indoctrination process to ensure the ignorance of much of the public, especially Gen Z and, to be blunt, stupid people. Now all those ignorant voters are threatening to expose just how irresponsible and unhinged the Left has become, making even the hated Republicans and their boorish POTUS look safe by comparison.
You really have to read the rhetoric on the website, but I’ll give you just an appetizer to get you started, as readers are told what like under a socialist (<cough!> communist <cough!>) regime will be like:
“You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities…OK, enough about bills. What do you do on your day off?…what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?”
I have to note that all of the graphics pander to “people of color,” like this sweet portrayal of the average American family:
On a day like today, when there are already a lot of juicy ethics stories on the runway, I have learned from bitter experience not to tackle the most complicated one until my brain wakes up, typically after two giant mugs of coffee and a few of hours. Thus I choose this to kick off the day: CNBC released its ranking of the ten worst states to live in 2026 based on its “Quality of Life “scores. Hilariously, the list contained only Republican-run conservative states. This was preordained because the criteria for the ranking included such leftist-priority items as “air quality” [read “climate change measures”], “healthcare access” [abortion restrictions], “worker protections” [ high minimum wages and DEI policies], and civil rights laws [Can biological males compete against girls? Can they use women’s rest rooms?]
Upon reflection, I am surprised “number of Democratic Socialist elected officials” wasn’t one of the factors weighed.
The rejiggered”Quality of Life” scores were then used to create CNBC’s best states for businesses list, so “blue” states dominate that list like the “red” states fill up the “suckiest places to live.”
Seems fair!
When consulted, a sample group of 1,000 aborted babies overwhelmingly disagreed that the states supporting abortions enhanced their “quality of life.”
Ethics Alarms hasn’t pointed out what a biased, often incompetent, purveyor of progressive and Democratic propaganda Wikipedia is for a while, and I regret that. I am reminded of Wiki’s key role in hammering woke propaganda into the brains of unsuspecting users (like students) virtually every day, however, when I choose to use the crowd-written web encyclopedia for basic facts (when did Jerry Lewis die was the latest) and am irritated both by what the badly curated articles leave out, and the dunning for contributions. The promise of AI Grokipedia as a more ethical alternative has been dimmed by my dawning realization that I can’t trust bots either, and that Grokipedia uses Wicki among its sources.
“He’s described as an “American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States.” Biographical details include his time as a real estate developer, reality show host, and his 2016 presidential victory over Hillary Clinton. So far, no disagreements.
But the first policy mentioned is a travel ban against seven Muslim-majority countries, expanding the border wall, family separations, rolling back environmental and business regulations, downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, refusing to concede the 2020 election, and getting impeached. Then comes a recounting of his legal battles, his second term involving “mass layoffs of federal workers,” “targeting of political opponents,” the “revers[al] of pro-diversity policies,” and “persecution of transgender people.”Â
The final paragraph concludes that “many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racist or misogynistic” and that “he has made many false or misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics.” It also states that his actions “have been described as authoritarian” and “historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history.”
Even more revealing is the reaction of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose response to Reason’s query about that biased alignment, replied, “If you get a negative view of Donald Trump from reading it, that’s not our fault.” Wow. No bias there!
The unethical and diabolical woman on the left, physically and politically,
… is UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies and performance studies Juana MarĂa RodrĂguez. Not content to rot the brains and values of her students, she has weaponized her charges to inject Leftist propaganda into the general population through Wikipedia, itself a propagator of biased and left-slanted disinformation.
I would not hire any job applicant who had taken any of those courses, nor would I send my child to any school that treated those subjects as worthy of academic study.
“I want my students to think of themselves as not just consumers of knowledge but as being able to produce knowledge as well,” RodrĂguez explained in a smoking gun email. This is new: a college professor who doesn’t know what “knowledge” means. One doesn’t produce knowledge, (“facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject”) one seeks, acquires, conveys, and distributes knowledge. Producing knowledge is called “making stuff up.”
The professor allows students to skip finals in exchange for doing her propaganda work.
RodrĂguez integrates Wikipedia into her curricula in collaboration with Wiki Education, a nonprofit organization that encourages faculty in the United States and Canada to assign their students to create content for Wikipedia articles, aiming to fill in “knowledge gaps” on Wikipedia regarding gender, racial and ethnic diversity. RodrĂguez’s students alone have added more than 300,000 edits and 3,000 citations to Wikipedia. the professor says she’s “really proud” that her students’ propaganda has been viewed an estimated 96 million times. Isn’t that wonderful?
How many societal termites like this are being paid by institutions of higher learning to distort reality, then education, and finally the culture? I’m beginning to fear that Americans were asleep at the metaphorical switch so long that the progressive body- and mind-snatchers spread their sinister pods so deeply in our comunities’ collective consciousness that the battle was already lost before it was even discovered.
In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Louis Carroll’s Mad Hatter asks Alice the riddle, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” One would think that the question in the headline above is equally obscure (the Guthrie, in Minneapolis, is one of the most respected and celebrated regional theaters in the country) but it has an answer. Like the Colbert late night show, which has since its inception sought to exclude anyone who isn’t woke, obsessed with progressive politics or, since 2015, Trump Deranged, the Guthrie now aims at entertaining only that same audience, except in its case only the wealthy, white, upper-middle class demographic within that audience, or others willing to sit still for relentless leftist propaganda and cant.
A recent audience member for The Guthrie’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Dolls House” wrote about his experience. “A Doll’s House” is about as moldy a feminist tract as there is (I once called the play the drama equivalent of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” but much longer, and even more over-exposed (it was written in 1879, so its analogies with the real state of womanhood, especially in the U.S., have been increasingly forced as time goes by. (No, her husband did not stop Nora from having an abortion: she would never have dreamed of killing an unborn child.)
I just heard President Trump at his press conference, rambling as only he can, declare that the news outlets claiming his surprise bunker-busters attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not as effective as the U.S. claimed were “losers” and liars. Meanwhile, a CNN article, followed by the New York Times, citing leaked classified documents, and thus unnamed sources of those illegally retrieved materials, announced that “Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say.” Reporters Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen wrote that “the US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.” It continued, “The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.”
.@StephenM roasts @PamelaBrownCNN for using fluffy terminology to describe criminal illegal immigrants: "When we use language that's designed to obscure the truth, that's not good faith. An illegal alien is an illegal alien. They're not an 'undocumented migrant.'" pic.twitter.com/80dVgCSeT1
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 30, 2025
and…
NEW: California attorney Julie Hamill corrects CNN's Brianna Keilar after she tried calling biological male track athlete AB Hernandez a girl.
Keilar was very confused during the interview & struggled to keep up.
Keilar: What would make this fair for her to compete?
All ethical and aware Americans should treat their Axis-supporting friends, relatives and colleagues similarly. What both Miller and Hamill did was to label propaganda what it really was, and not allow it to falsely present itself as “journalism.”
As the Cardinals meet in Rome to find a new Pope for real, it is a propitious time to consider “Conclave,” the “thriller” (as Wikipedia calls it, a stretch) about a fictional conclave after the death of a fictional Pope. I had several friends recommend the film to me, and I finally watched it this week.
I’ll complete this ethics overview without spoilers since the film is relatively new, but wow, what a disappointment. Strong cast, excellent performances, brilliant production design and cinematography, but still, “Conclave” has to be one of the most wildly over-praised films I’ve seen since “Don’t Look Up!,” “The Crying Game” or “Ghost.” This overt Hollywood woke propaganda piece received eight nominations at the 97th Academy Awards, a number once reserved for all-time classics like “Ben-Hur,” “West Side Story” or “Lawrence of Arabia.” Its Best Picture nomination shows how far movie-making standards have fallen and that it won Best Adapted Screenplay is outrageous, since the screenplay was the worst aspect of the movie, predictable, over-wrought and unbelievable.
My late wife was superb at sleuthing out “surprise” endings of movies by the half-way mark or earlier; this time I felt like I was channeling her spirit because I guessed the movie’s ending (and woke propaganda mission) the second the key character showed up. I also thought, “Oh no, really? They are stooping to this?” Indeed they were.
“Conclave” is, ultimately, trivial and soap opera-ish, no better and less entertaining than the loony movie version of Dan Brown’s follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons.” Along the way to an anti-climax, we get more of the “white man bad/black man victim,” pro-LGTBQ+ proselytizing that Tinseltown has been addicted to for years.
I’ll give “Conclave” this: it was better than “Snow White” and a lot shorter than “Wicked.”
Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” became a critical and financial success by merging the Frank L. Baum children’s series with contemporary issues and values, notably discrimination, prejudice, the abuse of power, and corruption. The still-running Broadway musical “Wicked” softened the preaching and propaganda a bit, but it has come back with full force in the movie adaptation now playing at inflated prices in theater near you. (I purchased a box of Junior Mints and regular size coke. They cost 15 bucks.)
In the novel and the musical, the witch-to-be is born green, leading to a life of being the victim of hate and discrimination. The movie cast not just a black woman in the role, but one with pronounced African features (in contrast to, say, Halle Berry) making it nearly impossible not to experience the plot as a thinly veiled Critical Race Theory brief. Though there are black actors and actresses in Oz here and there, only the white characters are seen to be repulsed or frightened by Elphaba (Maguire gave her a name), because the director correctly calculated that in his film, the character is as much black as green. We see her rejected and cast aside (to be raised by a bear) by her father the moment he sees her skin shade, so it is clear where this is going: Elphaba is going to be forced to fight against the cruel culture that rejected her. Thus we know that she is a personification of the Black Lives Matter riots within the first ten minutes of the movie.
Just as early in the movie we know we are in the grip of sensitive wokism obsessions when we we find ourselves in Munchkinland and the Munchkins pretty much look like anyone you know. The movie “Wicked” is obsessed with, the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz,” had the Munchkins played by the Singer Midgets, a little people performing group. In the Baum book that started it all, they are described as being about the same size as Dorothy, who is about 10, but one way or the other, we know the Munchkins are small. Ah, but Disney’s endlessly delayed “Snow White” movie got into trouble after the most famous acting dwarf, Peter Dinklage, declared that the whole idea of portraying the Little People of the familiar fairy tale was offensive, so Disney eliminated the dwarfs entirely. That was also attacked by Little People activists—erasing them, you know. Similarly, Peter Jackson got in trouble for using computer magic to make a full size actor look like he was a a yard or so tall in the “Lord of the Rings series.” So “Wicked” director Jon M. Chu punted and just made the Muchkins normal size and boring. And that wasn’t all: to make sure Dinklage didn’t find some reason to take shots at his movie, the Little Actor was hired to provide the voice of a talking goat.
This is DEI at its silliest. The film gets credit for hiring an “under-represented minority” who was personally responsible for the film not hiring many more members of the same minority. Furthermore, while I like Dinklage (who became famous in “Game of Thrones”) as much as anybody, the only reason he’s a star is because he’s so short. Sure, he plays lawyers, doctors, gangsters, but no matter what he plays, he plays it as a dwarf. That’s the only thing that distinguishes him from hundreds of other equally able actors. It makes no sense at all to hire Peter Dinklage as a voice actor. His unique feature can add nothing to such a gig. The film took away another talented vocal actor’s job so it could be “inclusive” and hire a dwarf for his voice alone.
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