race-baiting

Unethical Website of the Century: “Above the Law”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

[Oh, all right, not “evil,” exactly, but I just wanted to use that clip from the Ethics Alarms Clip Archive because it always made Grace laugh. For an indisputably great director, Hitchcock allowed some pretty awful acting in his films periodically. ]

I was about to declare the legal gossip and now full-time Democratic Party and Woke World mouthpiece the Unethical Website of the Month, a title it deserves, frankly, every month, but decided to check its Ethics Alarms dossier. Not only would that designation make it the only website to be so honored twice, “Above the Law” has been an ethics dunce multiple times, issued the most misleading headline of the month once (well, just once when I bothered to flag it). Two of its most frequent writers, Joe Patrice and Kathryn Rubino, have been hit with flagrant ethics foul calls here, and that doesn’t even include the reign of terror and hysteria by Elie Mystal, the anti-white racist Harvard lawyer who was the most prominent voice at ABL until he left for “The Nation,” apparently because ABL wasn’t quite communist enough for him.

“Above the Law” isn’t the worst website out there, of course, but it is by far the worst supposedly respectable website. Yesterday, a legal ethics blog authored by a legal ethics specialist I know cited Above the Law as an authority on one legal controversy, and that did it: I won’t be going back there again. For a legal ethicist to admit to following “Above the Law” is the equivalent of a political analyst revealing that he or she watches MSNBC or follows NewsMax. It’s as disqualifying as opinion columnists quoting Kamala Harris, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Bill Maher, Joy Behar or Mike Lindell to support their positions.

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So It Looks Like Harvard Students Aren’t Learning Logic, Ethics or History, But Damn If Those Kids Don’t Know How to Play the Race Card!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Harvard student pundit Maya Bodnick authored an indignant column in the Harvard Crimson arguing that “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty.” Bodnick, the niece of high-powered tech exec Sheryl Sandberg (not to suggest that her connection to a wealthy former CEO of Meta had any bearing on her admission, mind you), gives us this argument: because conservatives (like Christopher Rufo) have uncovered genuine plagiarism on the part of prominent black members of Harvard’s administration and faculty, including deposed Harvard president Claudine Gay, it is clear that the objective is to target black academics and scholars, and thus is racist.

To begin with, it would be nice if someone being educated at Harvard understood what “witch hunt” means. After all, it’s a historical reference, in fact, it’s a historical reference to an infamous event that occurred not all that far from Harvard. You see, there were never any witches, because they don’t exist. Various members of the Salem community in colonial days exploited the fear of witches to get innocent people tried, ruined, and executed. “Witch hunt” means a contrived and organized effort to falsely accuse and harm an innocent person for other, sinister motives. However, plagiarism, unlike witchcraft, is real, and the Harvard plagiarists the investigations have uncovered deserved the consequences of their dishonest scholarship. This last part is apparently beyond the ability of Bodnick to comprehend.

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Race-Baiting! Is There Anything It Can’t Do??

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Branding all critics and opponents racists has been a standard progressive and Democratic Party ploy for a long time, though it shifted into high gear when that was the primary argument used to deflect legitimate observations that Barack Obama was poor POTUS with a great PR machine. Then it shifted into higher gear as the “Get Trump!” effort became an ongoing crusade. Trump didn’t oppose letting illegals cross the border with impunity because it was, you know, insane policy for any nation; his opposition was based in racism. The tactic is dishonest, unfair, divisive, despicable and indefensible, but as the late Harry Reid—forwarding address: Hell—explained cheerily as he defended the Big Lie he circulated about Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign, it works.

I am now noticing that the Race Card has been designated as the Axis’s official counter to the looming GOP recycling of Ronald Reagan’s effective question during the 1980 campaign: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” By almost every objective measure, as with Jimmy Carter’s failed Presidency, the unavoidable answer today is “Are you kidding? NO!” It’s a powerful weapon. So the Axis has declared it to be racist.

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Ethics Villains: Carron J. Phillips And The Woke Activism Website That Employs Him [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is what Woke World has become in the Age of the Great Stupid, as the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck continues to run amuck. It is, essentially, a race-baiting bully. (Among other revolting things.)

Carron J. Phillips, a writer for the recently resurrected website Deadspin, which wasn’t reliable in its original form as an internet tabloid, decided to use this photo of a young Kansas City Chiefs fan sitting in the stands…

…to justify the headline,

The “native headdress” complaint ignored the fact that the NFL team’s name is “The Chiefs” and that fans have been showing their support like this…

…for decades. And, of course, that the target of Phillips and Deadspin is a little boy who we now know was 5-years-old. But wait! There’s more! After Carron posted that photo on X with a link to his despicable article, X-users responded with this…

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Apparently It’s Racist For Gov. DeSantis To Prefer Baseball To Basketball…Wow, That Desperate To Smear DeSantis Already?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I am having increasing difficulty figuring out what progressives and Democrats are trying to convey when they all a politician “racist.” As far as I can tell the current definition amounts to “Republican.”

DeSantis was recently asked by a CBN interviewer about his love of baseball, which he extolled as a “meritocratic” game because athletes of different sizes and skill levels can perform at a competitive level professionally, unlike basketball.”I think that there’s kind of a place for everybody in a baseball team if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to practice… I kind of thought it was always a very democratic game, a very meritocratic game.” He added, “Whereas I kind of viewed basketball as like ‘these guys are just freaks of nature.’ They’re just incredible athletes. In baseball, you know, you have some guys that might not necessarily be the best athletes, but maybe they’ve got you know that slider that nobody can hit, or they have the skills that allow them to compete at the highest level.”

I would take issue with DeSantis’s suggestion that basketball players are superior athletes to baseball players: as Bob Costas memorably replied to a similar claim by another sportscaster, check out Michael Jordan’s record when he tried to play in the minor leagues, where he never got higher than AA and washed out after a single (pathetic) season.

But never mind: the main thrust of his comments is irrefutable and true. The average height of an NBA player is nearly 6-feet-7-inches, nearly a foot taller than the average American man. Players under six feet are extremely rare. Major League Baseball players, in contrast, average about 6-feet-1-inch tall, with some superstars well under that level, like Houston’s Jose Altuve and the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts. There are some freaks in the mix (2022 MVP Aaron Judge, for example) but unlike in the NBA, they are an exception, not the rule.

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Enjoying Seeing Open Borders Hypocrites Squirm, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is rather glorious, though I can wipe the smile off my face by remembering how many doltish knee-jerks fall for the posturing of such unscrupulous politicians as Eric Adams, the mayor of NYC, and Lorie Lightfoot, the deservedly soon-to-be-unemployed mayor of Chicago. New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. are sanctuary cities (among others), which means that they literally invited illegal immigrants to defy U.S. laws and cross our borders. Welcoming them sent the message that major American metropolises would not assist in the enforcement of our laws, and the cynical non-performance of the Department of Homeland Security reinforced that message.

Now those cities are freaking out as the prospect of more illegals being transported to their metaphorical doorsteps and left there like abandoned babies of yore yawns before them. (Good.) The Title 42 policy, which is about to expire with the already unethically extended pandemic public health emergency, will no longer be around to discourage border-crossers, and it is estimated that 10,000 of them will arrive daily once the public health restrictions end. As usual, it will be the border towns that bear the brunt of the chaos, though those municipalities are emphatically not sanctuaries. Texas governor Greg Abbott, and probably some other governors as well, will resume his policy of busing as many of the invaders to sanctuary cities as possible, causing sanctuary city mayors to cry out indignantly about having to deal with the problem they helped create.

Part I of this theme, if you have forgotten, was posted here last September. That’s when the smug little enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, which sported “Illegals welcome!” signs like this…

was suddenly faced with actual people arriving. The islanders did not take it well. The towns treated the “migrants” little better than Alex Kintner-eating sharks, and quickly shipped the newly arrived border-defiers to a military base, triggering MSNBC’s progressive hacks and Hillary Clinton to claim that governors who transport illegals to welcoming shores areengaged in “human trafficking.” This was both legal and logical nonsense. Then Gavin Newsom, whose whole state is a “sanctuary,’ accused Abbott of “using kids as political pawns.” This raised raised the bar in the hypocrisy competition, for, as the EA post noted, “The Open Borders progressives have applauded the illegal use of children by border-breaching aliens, and revved up the “Think of the children!” chorus to a scream when President Trump had to separate alien children from illegally migrating parents in the same emergency enclosures Obama used…”

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Ethics Heroes: Dane County (Wisconsin) County Supervisors

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Race-baiting, race bullying and using the threat of being tarred as racist have worked speculatively well as unethical political weapons since Barack Obama’s party and supporters perfected them. Thus it is gratifying to see a municipal body refuse to be intimidated when confronted with the demands of a shameless practitioner and her supporters.

Dane County Executive Joe Parisi nominated Rep. Shelia Stubbs (D-Madison) for director of Dane County Human Services, a position that oversees the county’s largest agency with a $240 million budget and around 800 employees. Almost simultaneously with her nomination Stubbs began mau-mauing those who had to approve the appointment. The weekend following the announcement from Parisi, Stubbs told members of the End Times Ministries International, a church she co-founded and serves as a pastor, that members of the board were putting her under scrutiny because she is black, saying “they have never had a black lead a department, and I would be the first.” She urged her congregation to email the Dane County Board supervisors and demand that she be confirmed. This was sufficient to inspire the good parishioners to threaten the board members with violence.

There were ample non-racial reasons to question Stubbs’ appointment. She was heard on video saying that she planned on keeping both her state legislative job and her new position once she was confirmed, thus acquiring two paychecks for two supposedly full-time jobs. “They said I can’t do two jobs at one time,” Stubbs says on the video. “I can walk and eat and talk if I need to. It’s my choice if I want to [resign].”

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More Weird Tales From “The Great Stupid”: Neat Pantries Are Racist And Sexist!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Some of the Wokish opinion pieces being belched out of The Great Stupid are so outlandish they transcend being selected as Ethics Alarms “Unethical Quotes of the Month.” A truly deranged quote isn’t unethical so much as it is tragic, even one as brain-melting as this one, from “The Conversation,” a website which risibly claims to provide “academic rigor, journalistic flair.” Yeah, only academic rigor could produce an essay like “Pantry porn’ on TikTok and Instagram makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol.”

Here’s the ‘money quote’, the section that proves beyond all doubt that the only reason to take the time to read this precious, arrogant clap-trap is to gain insight into just how crazy the victim-obsessed Left has become:

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Stop Making Me Defend The National Football League!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In a new low for reflex race-baiting, Daily Beast columnist Ernest Owens, a reliable progressive hysteric, accused the NFL of being racist because the league took more than an hour to suspend and postpone yesterday’s Monday Night Football game after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after making a tackle.  Hamlin, 24, went into cardiac arrest on the field and remains hospitalized in critical condition.

“One would have thought the game would have immediately been cut short. After such a drastic shift in energy and spirit, surely the game would be called without a doubt,” Owens wrote. “It would take an hour after Hamlin was first administered CPR for the NFL to officially postpone the game after first attempting to suspend it. Yes, after all of the chaos, the league thought it was practical to have the traumatized players continue to play….It would be one thing if Monday’s incident was a rare drop of the ball from the NFL, Instead, it’s another reminder of how incompetent this multibillion-dollar institution has been to its players, who are mostly Black.”

DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! There it is! The obligatory race-baiting! Hamlin is black, so the time it took to make a decision to end and postpone a nationally televised football following his medical emergency must have been motivated by racism, even though no NFL game had ever been suspended and postponed following an injury no matter how serious. The only games that have ever been cancelled and rescheduled at all since 1930 involved player strikes, and those games had not begun. One would think that a white player’s injury had previously caused a game suspension in the past for Owens to even suspect that NFL officials took too long to make their decision because of race.

No, he’s just a shameless, race-baiting asshole. It’s as simple as that. Continue reading →

“You’re The Dog”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto—how I miss his blog!— famously wrote of accusations that something was a “racist dog whistle”:

“The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog.”

Bingo. In the last week we have seen two particularly vivid examples of this phenomenon. The most recent is peak Great Stupid: the World Health Organization announced  that it will begin referring to monkeypox as “mpox.” Why? Well, there were complaints that its name constituted “racist and stigmatizing language.”  Yes,  all it takes to make WHO jump is complaints from morons, or perhaps power-seeking activists who want to see how easily they can bend organizations to their will, just to prove they can. Continue reading →