The Great Stupid

Somehow, A “Great Stupid” Rally At Harvard Doesn’t Seem So Incongruous Any More

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Don’t let poor, dumb Cornell take all of the justifiable ridicule and contempt when Harvard, the alleged creme-de-la-creme of the Ivies, has students behaving like this. From The Harvard Crimson:

More than 100 Harvard affiliates gathered in Harvard’s Zimmer Hall Plaza Thursday night to protest sexual violence, calling on the University to strengthen protections for survivors and reform its handling of harassment complaints. The rally was part of a nationwide day of action calling for justice for Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student, and Kendall D. Francis, a Louisiana State University student, who have both alleged sexual assault. Organizers at Harvard also issued six demands, including an independent grievance process for harassment and discrimination complaints, expanded resources for survivors, and the reopening of two diversity offices shuttered in July 2025…

“Jane Doe” is Lucy Craig, who has become one of the most improbable “Believe All Women” icons yet after suing seven male colleagues at Cornell for sexual assault despite massive evidence that she was a willing—well, you know. The only words that spring to mind are in bad taste. Women are disgracing themselves in this Ethics Train Wreck and apparently don’t care. My Leftist social media friends have decided that the Cornell 7 are rapists despite both the school and a district attorney determining that Craig’s claims are not credible; after all, she only sued after she was disinvited from a Halloween Party given by the same fraternity where she made whoopie, as Eddie Canter would say. But Lucy got her revenge: Cornell has cancelled that party and all others at fraternities for the rest of the school year. So there! New York’s woke Democratic governor Kathy Hochul appointed a special prosecutor who had already announced that she had decided the men were guilty despite her assignment of running an “independent” investigation. (Your host is quoted in this story about that...)

The LSU case? I don’t know anything about it, and I suspect the Harvard demonstrators don’t know much about it either, but someone figured out that Lucy’s tale is too thin to base a “nationwide day of action” on even in The Age of the Great Stupid (and before mid-terms).

How does a dubious rape claim at Cornell relate to the need for more “diversity” offices at Harvard? Why don’t these affiliated organizations also demand that the MLB divisional play-offs be expanded from five games to seven? Or that the official language of the U.S. be changed to Swedish?

The rest of the Crimson report is equally risible:

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And “The Great Stupid” Crawls On: White Female Executive Fired Because Her Hairstyle Was Too Black

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I can’t believe I even wrote that.

That’s Kelly Carnes above, the recently-hired executive director of the apparently insane Baltimore Rock Opera Society. After the blonde, white female returned from Burning Man with newly braided cornrows (above), her organization began receiving complaints from the staff regarding her choice of hair style. Cultural appropriation, you know. Can’t have that.

Carnes, who apparently has a habit of exploring daring hair displays…

…was fired, being told only that she and her new job were “not a good fit.” She had adopted the cornrows, she says, to deal with the desert where Burning Man is held annually. I wouldn’t regard a white woman’s cornrows as especially daring almost 50 years after “10” —Hello, Bo!

but The Great Stupid is full of nasty surprises.

The society’s board was especially stupid, publicly acknowledging “concerns” over their organization’s new executive director’s cornrows and that it was “taking the matter seriously.” It also said it planned to revise its anti-discrimination policy and require anti-racism leadership training, which apparently means that whites are racist when they adopt styles, behavior or dress that emulate our African American brothers and sisters. The board advised her not to attend a town hall that was called to discuss the controversy. That’s always a bad sign: they said that to Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers” when the town was meeting to fire him as the high school basketball coach for trying to teach the kids team play. Then the town’s star player got up and said he would only play if they let Gene keep coaching…wait, where was I?

Oh, right: the cornrows.

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The Converse Ad Controversy: Oh-Oh…”The Great Stupid” May Even Be Gathering Momentum

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I wonder if and when enough people will wake up to the fact that when they vote for progressives, this is the kind of culture they are voting to live in. You know: hysterical, power-mad, and insane.

The footwear and apparel company Converse was attacked this week by the woke social media mob for an ad in a new sneaker campaign. It featured the bottom half of a person wearing a white garment and holding a pair of black sneakers.

The shadows that suggest the outline of a long, tapering triangle was obviously reminiscent of the pointed hood of a Klan robe, see. And the lighting makes the black sneakers look like someone is being hanged. The sneakers are black, get it? And have a single leg in two shoes, or something. The alleged lyncher was K-pop singer Karina wearing a skirt and holding a pair of Chuck 70 X sneakers, but never mind: some genius figured out this was another opportunity to hold 21st century America guilty of racism.

Naturally, Converse groveled an apology, thus ensuring more of this crap from the race-baiters and political correctness thugs. “We’re sorry,” Converse said in an emailed statement. “We understand why this image is deeply upsetting and recognize that we got this wrong. We removed it from our channels and are working to remove it everywhere it appeared,” the statement added. “This should not have happened and we will do better.”

I wish I bought Converse merchandise so I could boycott the brand. Their craven behavior harms every American, the culture, society, commerce, kids, brains, everything. Just listen to these idiots:

“As a Black man and someone who loves Converse shoes, I find this very insensitive and distasteful,” Kendall Peacock, who runs the Education Firm, a tutoring and mentorship program in Atlanta, said on social media. “Deliberate racist intent hasn’t been established yet, but that doesn’t erase the impact,” he added.

Lee Merritt, a civil rights attorney based in Texas, posted on Instagram that Converse’s apology “doesn’t undo what got past legal, marketing and leadership at every step.”

Stephanie Schwartz, a social justice photographer, wrote on social media, “Every photographer can tell you, whoever did this ad knew EXACTLY what they were doing.”

I discovered the racist sneaker ad because Holly Mathnerd wrote about it on her exotic and eccentric substack. I can’t do better than Holly’s evisceration of the latest woke obsession, and besides, she’s sharp, she’s funny, she writes well, and she deserves attention. She wrote in part,

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A Note On The Latest Axis Freak-Out Over Trump Trivia

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The graphic above was based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), White House executive orders, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary’s Orders to chart notable geographic renamings in the U.S. from 1963 to 2026.

While renaming two large bodies of water is certainly an unusually flamboyant example of changing names of geographical locales for political or other reasons, Trump’s contributions to the map certainly have plenty of company. The hysteria attached to the most recent “horror,” the renaming of Lake Ontario (Who. Cares.) is, in this context, wildly excessive.

It is also, as an astute conservative contrarian on my Facebook feed pointed out, hypocritical. The same people foaming at the mouth over the loss of “Ontario” to name a lake shared by the U.S. and Canada were all-in as schools, streets, plazas, parks, buildings and more had their names changed by wokesters when The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land. They applauded attempts to erase from cultural memory such crucial figures as Founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley and John Tyler, and important historical figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun….and I’m not even talking about all the toppled statues.

As an aside, I saw for the first time, the brilliantly gold-refinished hyper-muscular horses and riders that grace D.C.’s Memorial Bridge as I crossed crossed from from the Old Dominion to the Lincoln Memorial. They look great, in stark contrast to their tarnished, ruined appearance for, oh, as long as I’ve lived in the area. But I bet the Trump deranged still hate the upgrade, because he did it. For example, a Trump-hater posted on X a representation of how Trump’s arch would block the view of the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery. Huh. So you wanted to pull down every statue of the General across the country, but his plantation’s mansion is sacred!

Fascinating.

Asshole.

Another Nauseating Chapter From The Presumed-Racism-and-Police- Brutality Playbook

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This kind of confirmation bias-driven sliming of law enforcement has become the norm since the Obama Administration and its leader’s unforgivable sanctification of Trayvon Martin as his crypto-offspring because Martin was black and got himself shot. The news media loves it, however, and you know, Freedom of the Press.

Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez (above) died in February after starting a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana. His last stand lasted only a few second, because two police officers who were crack shots put him down quickly and safely despite others being close to the exchange.  Yet that rather straightforward cause-and-effect result generated this headline from WNDU-TV, the NBC-owned affiliate in South Bend, about 20 miles from Elkhart, two days after the shooting:

Family of teen killed by Elkhart police seeks state investigation amid wave of violence

The deliberately anti-law enforcement and pro-deadly punk story continued,

“The family of a 17-year-old killed by Elkhart police is calling for state investigators to take over the case as the community grapples with three separate shootings and a stabbing in a 48-hour span. Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez died Sunday around 2 a.m. in an officer-involved shooting. A memorial now sits at High Dive Park where he was killed. Alfredo Ramirez-Gomez, the teen’s brother, spoke at a vigil for Bryan on Tuesday afternoon and demanded the release of police footage: “Bryan was a bright kid, he was a member of this community, this is where he grew up,” Ramirez-Gomez said. “As for his cause of death, we can’t really point fingers yet. We just ask and demand that the footage comes out from the car and from the vest.”

Right. “We can’t point fingers yet” but Ben Crump is on our auto-dial. The response is reflex: the family is angling for a big settlement from the city. Blogger Robert Stacy McCain points out:

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Seattle’s Self-Inflicted Police Chief Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t understand this at all. Even for Seattle, the current controversy over the ex-chief of police is nuts.

The city’s far left Mayor Katie Wilson is under fire for the city’s botched handling of the Bite of Seattle mass shooting, which saw seven people shot with three dying. A toddler was among those wounded. Seattle Police issued a brief report to the public shortly after the shooting, urging everyone to stay away from the area, but nothing more for five hours, when a press conference was called. The city’s emergency alert system wasn’t activated, though this is exactly the kind of situation it was designed for.

Meanwhile, Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town, as he is remarkably frequently. He was at a police convention in Dallas; since March, he’s also attended police gatherings in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. Barnes doesn’t reside in Seattle full time, you see. He lives part-time in Chicago, where his family is. Over the last six months, Barnes has been out of town for about seven weeks, including four trips to Chicago.

When he got back to his place of employment, Barnes got in the face of a reporter who dared to ask him whether reports were accurate that Barnes planned to be away from Seattle until mid-August, and whether his travel schedule might be a bit problematic. Barnes stepped into his questioner and said, “I don’t have to tell you where I go…,” before a city employee pulled the chief away from the reporter and out of the room. At another news conference, Barnes denied that he frequently travels or is routinely absent from the city, and said that he doesn’t travel as much as he would like to. He really said that.

Subsequently Mayor Wilson announced that Barnes had “resigned.” Incredibly, the Seattle City Council was troubled by that. City Councilman Bob Kettle said working with Barnes was going well—yeah, it all seemed to be going swimmingly!—and that firing him would just increase the city’s feeling of insecurity. Barnes lasted a year, and the city has had four police chiefs in just two and a half years.

Wait, let’s back up a bit. Why would any major city—Seattle is one, or at least used to be until it was engulfed by The Great Stupid—hire a police chief who wasn’t prepared to reside full time in that city, or at least nearby? Unless the individual was some kind of miracle worker, it makes no sense. Based on his biography Barnes is an anti-policing police advocate, a social justice warrior, and, of course, he’s black:

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Another “Nah, Universities and Colleges Don’t Indoctrinate Students!” Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

[Note: Flushed with unexpected good health, I promised yesterday to post on the unraveling Fauci scandal. 1) I wasn’t quite as recovered from the previous day’s cold, especially energy-wise, as I thought I was, and 2) I realized that today would be the more appropriate day for that post given that the arrogant Ethics Villain is testifying before Congress and Sen. Rand Paul would be, as the saying goes, “tearing him a new one.” Fauci gets his EA excoriation next, I promise.]

Just as a depressing number of people, either captured by the fascists of the Left or intimidated by them, deny that the Axis news media manipulates, censors and distorts facts and events to gain their ideological allies power “by any means necessary,” so do similar victims refuse to acknowledge the ideological capture of our educational institutions, with a few exceptions. My own two almae matres (Miss Rounds would never forgive me for writing “alma maters”) are prominent and despicable examples: Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, as I have documented extensively on EA.

Now comes a particularly egregious example of this dangerous phenomenon from Mt. Holyoke, one of the cluster of woke private colleges in northern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont along with Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wellesley, Dartmouth and Bennington.

Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts mandates that student organization leaders complete Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, and that they must develop “anti-racist plans” before the college administration will recognized them and allow them to hold sanctioned events. Without proof that an organization will be a full participant in promoting the Left’s anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight discrimination agenda, an organization will not be eligible for college funding. Chess club, drama club, Young Republicans, football team…it doesn’t matter: all the leaders of student groups must complete the required training before receiving official recognition from the college.

After a minimum of two student officers complete the training, each organization must create or update an “anti-racist plan.” Seriously? Did I just accidentally type the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, like “1984” in reverse? I can’t believe I’m writing this.

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Friday Open Forum: The Great Stupid Meets Trump Derangement Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

There is so much crazy and stupid ethics stuff out there I just woke up from a crummy night’s sleep and am exhausted already.

Last night, trying to have an intelligent discussion with a lawyer friend who used to be intelligent, I raised the incident I wrote about yesterday and which I continue to think is an unusually important one for the legal profession today: the ABA’s president refusing to be honest-–in front of cameras and under oath—when asked in a Congressional hearing about its extreme woke positions. My friend started screaming at me, literally screaming, with a “whataboutism” attack: what about Trump, what about Todd Blanche, what about the Supreme Court, what about the ballroom, what about the Kennedy Center. It was scary. I was tempted to have her sedated.

Weird things keep appearing on my screen too. Lindsey Graham’s sister, who has no qualifications whatsoever to be a U.S. Senator (and maiden names don’t count) announced that getting appointed to a position she has no business being in isn’t enough, she now is going to run for a full term. A female sportswriter suggested that WNBA star Caitin Clarke complaining about being mugged on the basketball court by the black lesbians who have virtually put a hit out on her has put them at risk of ending up like Emmit Till. Megan Rapinoe, the over-the-hill women’s soccer star who thinks she has something to contribute to society besides hitting a soccer ball with her head, actually said that President Trump was responsible for the U.S. losing in the World Cup and that opposition to biological men playing women’s sports is “an attack on women in society.”Prof. Turley has a post up about how Democrats are now referring to belief in the Constitution as “nostalgia.” The Secret Service has opened more than 10,000 threat investigations this year, which is 40% increase from the same period last year. Yesterday Whoopie Goldberg, on ABC’s “news ” show “The View,” ended the program by ranting, “We need to get out and make changes, because we need to block [Trump’s Presidency] every way we can! That’s all. Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote.Don’t wait until November. Start looking now.” That is a pure violation of FCC rules, and if the FCC dared to act on it, we would be hearing about Trump trying to censor the press.

But by all means, write about what you want to.

This cheered me up yesterday for about 30 seconds…

Another Unethical Website of the Month, But This One Is Scary…The Democratic Socialists of America

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

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:

Read it all.

_______________________

Pointer: Steve Witherspoon

Trinity College’s Authentic Frontier Gibberish

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Trinity College has the gall to charge over $72,000 per academic year to students, and yet passes woke, divisive, fact-free mumbo-jumbo (aka. Authentic Frontier Gibberish) off as “education.”

“Unsettling the White Gaze” appears on the school’s anthropology course schedule for spring 2027, and is described thusly:

“White supremacy and racial capitalism structure our world, setting in motion the systems of domination that Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly describes as a ‘racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation’…Students will learn to turn their anthropological gaze upon whiteness itself and understand its insidious modes of self-and-other construction thus destabilizing its ocular power to define others. We will pay special attention to how the white colonial gaze has operated in the liberal discipline of anthropology and explore ethnographic methods for studying whiteness and white supremacy,”

Oh. What??? And who the hell is Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, and why should what she says matter to me any more than what, say, Adam Sandler says? [I just checked. It shouldn’t matter. She’s an obscure anti-white ideologue. Dropping in an appeal to authority using an obscure race-baiting academic is pretty desperate; then again, would any respectable scholar say something like “racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation” ?

Not to pile on too much, but gaze at her faculty photograph. A professor choosing to radiate such ‘tude—“Bring it on, whitey!” is to be avoided at all costs.

Ugh.

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, teaches “Unsettling the White Gaze,” and she is obviously an Authentic Frontier Gibberish master herself. She describes herself as a “white, disabled, trans anthropologist whose work focuses on how criminalized people who use drugs envision and experiment with abolitionist horizons of transformation, healing, self-determination, and solidarity beyond incarceration and forced-cure.” She also explains that she “participates in abolitionist, harm reduction, and transformative justice organizing projects in NYC and beyond.”

Okaaaaaay…

If students are willing to sign up to take such self-evident crap and parents will pay for it, there’s not much that can be done. There were really silly, obscure courses at my college too, but they weren’t political indoctrination courses. These offenses to common sense and democratic society won’t dry up and blow away until there is sufficiently competent secondary and primary education to ensure college freshman have a sufficiently solid foundation in critical thinking to recognize a course like this one for what it is: pseudo-social science contrived to fulfill a political agenda.