The above ahistorical, moronic and infuriating cartoon was posted by a long-time friend and—believe it or not!—a tenured history professor at Georgetown. I am reaching the end of my patience with once smart people deliberately making less-educated people stupid, and for the second time this week (the first was prompted by this Facebook meme) I couldn’t wrestle my fingers to the floor fast enough and responded to my Trump Deranged freind, “Now, you KNOW this is untrue. I know it’s untrue, and I know you know it’s untrue.”
And this is Trump Derangement! People who actually have the education, wit and critical thinking skills to reject false framing and imaginary facts, yet who nonetheless betray their own principles and integrity in order to attack the President. I’m hoping Steve-O-in NJ will gift us with one of his excellent historical retrospectives about how the United States was, at great risk to FDR, aiding Europe in fighting the Germans well before Pearl Harbor, and what the U.S. sacrificed in lives and treasure to indeed rescue Europe as well as that civilization thingy. We also rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and have been bolstering European military defenses ever since.
It’s bad enough for a UK cartoonist to issue that crap, but for a U.S. historian to endorse it? Truly despicable. OK, for me, long friendship plus Trump Derangement and aging brain cells equals forgiveness.
Barely.
UPDATE:There is hope! My old friend the professor reacted to my mild rebuke with a “thumbs up.”
I went to bed last night having decided that the first post here today would be about President Trump’s blunt, characteristic, in-your-face reaction to the death of Robert Mueller, who led the cynical and destructive Axis of Unethical Conduct effort to cripple Trump’s first term with a contrived, partisan plot based on false accusations that he and his campaign “colluded” with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The quote, an ethics quote because of the natural debate it fosters, an unethical quote because it intentionally breaches societal norms that dictate being respectful of the dead in the immediate aftermath of their deaths and a President should always model the best behavior for the public, and an ethical quote because it is true, was..
“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
It’s not a close call whether this was an ethical thing to state in public, which Trump did on Truth Social. It wasn’t, and isn’t for many reasons. It is gratuitously cruel to Mueller’s family for POTUS to say such a thing immediately after their loved one’s death. It accomplishes nothing but relieve Trump of some of his apparently inexhaustable back-up of bile. It makes the Trump Deranged hate him even more than they already do, which qualifies as deliberately being divisive, something else leaders should never do. And it accomplishes nothing positive. Such an act does, however, take another step in making this Ethics Alarms 2015 post look as wise and prophetic as it was.
“See? I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”
Before I sat down to compose a post that would have essentially said what I did in far fewer words above, I decided to check whether Ann Althouse, the red-pilled Madison Wisconsin retired law professor/bloggress had posted on the quote for her followers. She had, briefly. But what did I discover in the comments to her post was that the topic had provoked none other than our own Steve Witherspoon into not only doing battle with the vocal Trump Deranged and Mueller defenders (in truth defenders of the anti-Trump plot Mueller knowingly participated in) but being allowed to do so by Althouse!
Ann carefully moderates her commenters, and seldom allows an extended back-and-forth between commenters, a policy that Ethics Alarms, obviously, does not embrace. Steve (who was frequently derided on EA along with Steve-O-in NJ by self-banned Ethics Alarms troll “A Friend”) was measured, fair, polite, balanced, ethical and relentless as he was swarmed by Trump-Deranged attackers like the “The Birds” going after Tippy Hedren in the attic. Unlike Tippy however, Steve knew what he was getting into.
He was courageous, and he was right. Meanwhile, his adversaries’ comments were weak and illogical; the main defense of Mueller was that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran. This is rationalization #21, Ethics Accounting, or “I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that,” as regular readers here know.
Here’s the full transcript of Steve’s interactions regarding Trump’s quote. I will have occasional asides in brackets.
“I guess it’s no surprise that Superhuman believed it could, in my opinion, break the law. We live in a world where A.I. companies are grabbing every bit of writing, art and music without consent. Where our president is launching wars without the consent of Congress that our Constitution requires. Where Jeffrey Epstein spent years coercing girls too young to provide consent into sexual relations”
—NYT “investigative journalist” Julia Angwin, dragging a flase and ignorant attack on President Trump into her op-ed about a lawsuit having nothing whatsoever to do with him.
Once again, I challenge the oblivious defenders of the New York Times and those who insist that the Axis news media isn’t a full-time Democratic propaganda operation to defend a passage that should never have made it into print.
The essay was headlined, “Why I’m Suing Grammarly,” and the writer had a valid and interesting story to tell on a hot topic: the failings of artificial intelligence. The A.I. editing service Grammarly apparently attaches the names of prominent writers to some of its re-write suggestions. Not only have the writers “quoted” not agreed to the use of their names and authority, the suggestions attributed to them might make them sound like unpublished hacks. Angwin writes,
“Like all writers, I live by my wits. My ability to earn a living rests on my ability to craft a phrase, to synthesize an idea, to make readers care about people and places they can only access through words on a page. Grammarly hadn’t checked with me before using my name. I only learned that an A.I. company was selling a deepfake of my mind from an article online. And it wasn’t just me. Superhuman — the parent company of Grammarly — made fake editor versions of a range of people…In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent. At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service…”
Fascinating and informative…and absolutely irrelevant to President Trump, the Iran War and the Constitution. But Julia couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t help herself because she is surrounded all day by Trump Deranged hysterics and bubble-dwelling boobs who spend every waking hour hating everything the President of the United States says or does, so she couldn’t resist inserting an attack on POTUS in her column, even though it was as wrong as it is was gratuitous.
Back in 2024, I posited, only half in jest, that “The View’s” resident lawyer on the all-female idiot panel, Sunny Hostin, had made such a stupid assertion on the program that it should trigger legal ethics Rule 8.3, which mandates that a lawyer who has knowledge of another lawyer’s conduct that substantially calls into question that individual’s fitness to practice law must—must—report that unfit lawyer to bar authorities for professional discipline. Hostin had surmised that “climate change” causes earthquakes and eclipses, and stated this cretinous conclusion on national television, on an ABC News program, which is what “The View” purports to be.
I wrote in part (and in disgust):
“[S]ome people with law licenses are demonstrably too stupid to be trusted by clients. Hostin is screaming proof of the validity of this conclusion, yet there is nothing in the disciplinary rules governing the minimal ethics requirements of lawyers that mentions basic, personal intellectual competence as a mandatory component of professional, legal competence.
There should be. One would think that the challenge of graduating from law school and passing the bar exam would be sufficient to ensure that a lawyer is at least smart enough to come in out of the rain, but in extreme cases like Sunny, one would be wrong….believing that climate change causes solar eclipses is signature significance. You can’t come to such an idiotic conclusion and not be an idiot. This delusion [shows] a crippling deficit in critical thinking skills. One cannot be a trustworthy lawyer without minimal critical thinking skills. When a lawyer demonstrates such a deficit beyond a shadow of a doubt, that ought to be considered a legitimate reason for disbarment.”
Remember, professionals are special members of society whose important roles require that they be trustworthy. True professionals include the clergy, doctors, lawyers, judges, law enforcement officials, military leaders, public servants, accountants, psychiatrists, and teachers, and though it sounds absurd today, journalists. Really, really stupid people are not trustworthy, in fact it is dangerous to trust them. If they are sufficiently stupid, they should not hold any of those societal roles and positions.
Ethics Alarms, as those of you who have read the commenting rules here know, has among its provisions that the moderator, that’s me, may at his discretion ban a commenter who has demonstrated to my dissatisfaction that said commenter is too intellectually deficient to contribute substantively to the discussions. I believe that I have only had to invoke it twice.
Jackson said, during a private memorial service at Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago, that “[Y]esterday, I listened for several hours to three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson.”
He continued,
“He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were white or black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these — those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time ever sold us out as people. And it speaks volumes about who the Rev. Jesse Jackson was.”
Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Joe Biden all used their eulogies to attack the President and his policies, though, as you might have guessed, Harris was the most obnoxious and made the least sense. “Let me just say I predicted a lot about what’s happening right now,” Harris smirked. “I’m not into saying I told you so but we did see it coming.” I’d love to ask her what it was exactly that she “saw coming.” The forceful repudiation of the weak, zombie administration she was part of? The voters’ rejection of her embarrassing DEI candidacy? Her running mate’s utter disgrace and exposure as a corrupt hack?
Jackson’s was a subtle and measured rebuke, so subtle and measured that most of the Axis media felt it necessary to ignore it. Many, realizing how inappropriate it was for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to turn attention away from Jackson’s father and onto their hatred of Donald Trump at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s funeral, also worked to hide the Democrats’ nauseating conduct from the public…after all, there’s an election coming!
"Look, you fat f*ck Trump — if you listen to this, you listen good!"
"I got Trump Derangement Syndrome. I hate the motherf*cker! And you know what? I don't want to get rid of it. I don't want to get better! I want to get WORSE! I want to hate… pic.twitter.com/p9rfP1lCcC
Nice! And Carville speaks for if not all, a majority of the Axis. I defy anyone to justify this with facts and logic as opposed to an appeal to emotion. There is no justification, and Carville’s party’s determination to make hatred for the nation’s elected leader viral and controlling of our nation’s fate and policies is ethically indefensible.
Nor do I care to hear protests that Carville is an outlier. A showboat, yes, but he is expressing exactly what the American Left has allowed to sustain its agenda. Hate. Ugly, corrosive, irrational, destructive hate. We saw the antics of Democrats during the State of the Union, and it was only a slight escalation of Speaker Nancy Pelosis despicable conduct during Trumps 2020 SOTU. The democrats are all Carvillized. Some just hide it better than others.
Amazingly, most of the hate is rooted in bitterness and bad sportsmanship. Democrats lost power because they proved themselves dishonest, corrupt and incompetent…and their reaction to losing is anger? Fury? Hatred of the man who beat them? How juvenile. How embarrassing.
1. You have to give Ann Althouse credit, as annoying as she often is. She lives in Madison, her blog readers once were predictably progressive, but she is relentlessly mocking the Axis’s inability to show the integrity and common sense to admit that President Trump finally taking action against Iran is praiseworthy.
“From the comments over there: “How Barack Obama must feel now, having tried sucking up to the Ayatollah, then bribing him (as did Biden later), and now finally realizing, after mocking Trump and denouncing Trump and lying about Trump, that the president who will be remembered as being truly consequential, is Trump. Sleep well, President Obama. Trump got him.”
Here, she reminds us that Trump-hater Sen. John McCain joked about bombing Iran nearly 20 years ago, wondering when we would “send them an airmail message. ” “Question answered: February 28, 2026,” she writes.
Here, she notes that Glenn Greenwald appeals to the authority of Charlie Kirk to condemn the attack, a cheap shot by Greenwald.
Here, she salutes (in her own, Ann-ish back-handed way), Sen. John Fetterman for being the only Democrat to openly support the President.
Here, she points out how absurd and dishonest the Trump Deranged voices are claiming Trump attacked Iran to distract from the Left’s Epstein files obsession. I would add that if you want a Trump Derangement test, making that argument is as clear a positive for the malady as one could find.
Here, she posts a TikTok video in which an Iranian schoolboy declares, “I Love Trump.”
Here, she mock comedian Mike Benz, who tweeted that Trump had started WWIII, and then withdrew the dumb comment saying that he didn’t mean that literally but only figuratively because he didn’t know how to describe “what this is.” Ann: If you “don’t know of a 280 character way of describing whatever this is,” there is always the option of saying nothing…”
Meanwhile, her few remaining knee-jerk progressives are largely silent, as are the progressives, troll and non-trolls alike, who frequent Ethics Alarms. I think that is cowardly.
2. Over at MSNOW, the talking heads that routinely attack capitalism are warning that the Iran conflict might adversely affect the stock market.
Stratton is seeking retiring Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) seat, with the state’s primary taking place on March 7. This is impressive in one respect: she is actually giving voters a chance to replace the objectively awful Durbin with someone even worse. the At least Polling averages from Decision Desk HQ show Stratton trailing behind Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) with 18.5 percent compared to Krishnamoorthi’s 30.5 percent. So I guess Stratton decided that the best way to make up ground is to energize the Trump Deranged vote and say “fuck.”
Right on cue, later last week there was another foiled assassination attempt on the President whom Democrats call racist, a dictator, Hitler and a fascist, all provocation for the weak of mind and ethics to view as justification to murder our nation’s leader. As a Fox News history-reading reporter noted, they want Donald Trump assassinated just like Benjamin Harrison.
Since anyone likely to be persuaded—or even entertained—by this bottom of the unflushed toilet bowl political offal, it’s unlikely that any of them will be bothered by the candidate lying to their faces in the ad, smirkingly saying. “They said it, I didn’t!” That’s deceit, and deceit is lying. This miserable excuse for a public servant is openly lying in her campaign ad, and thinks it’s funny.
I’m so old I remember when the Democratic Party and its zombie media accused Sarah Palin of causing Rep. Giffords to be shot because Palin put her face in cross-hairs on a campaign map to indicate that the Arizona Democrat could be defeated. In addition to their other anti-virtues, Democrats are hypocrites on a level previously unapproached by mortal man or woman. As in 2024, they deserve to lose in the mid-terms, and if Republicans can’t accomplish that against such a vile, destructive, divisive and ugly party, they should just give up and start pottery barns or something. Maryland. Oregon. California. Minnesota. Illinois.
The above tweet (Do they still call them that even though it is no longer Twitter? We need a new word. “Xeet”? “Exit”?) is being circulated on social media followed by declarations that the only ethical course is to root for the Seattle Seahawks in this weekend’s Superbowl broadcast. My Facebook friend, an esteemed professor whom I have known in an arts context since 1969, making him also one of my oldest friends, posted it with commentary stating that the contents made it clear that every decent, thinking person should be rooting for Seattle.
My friend calls football “concussion-ball”) and reviles the sport for the same reason I do, though I have extra ethical ammunition against the National Football League, easily the most unethical among the spectacularly unethical professional sports organizations. If I were inclined to watch the Superbowl, the fact that the NFL was so irresponsible as to pick a cross-dressing, open-borders Trump-Deranged performer who will mostly perform in Spanish to lead its half-time show in what was once a non-partisan, All-American event that everyone could watch without feeling political anxiety would end that inclination instantly.
Who decides what sports teams to root for according to whom their owners are friends with, or where their political contributions go? My answer: crazy people. These factors have absolutely nothing to do with the sports, the teams, the players, or the entertainment value of the team’s games.
If one is looking for a professional sports team to favor and one is a wokeness-obsessed loony, it is probably impossible to cheer on any of them. They are all owned by billionaires or consortia including big, bad corporations. They are all privileged tycoon who reliable act as if they can make their own rules, because much of the time, they can. Jody Allen, for example, was sued along with her brother and Vulcan, the holding company she served as CEO in 2013 by five of her former security guards who alleged sexual harassment by Jodie, illegal activity, cover-ups and more, including bribing customs officials to smuggle animal bones out of Africa and Antarctica. The lawsuit was settled out of court, probably because that’s what rich people and corrupt corporations do when they are scared to death of what discovery will uncover. Not that any of that should matter to a Seattle Seahawks fan.
I admit it: I have been occasionally engaging with these lunatics off my own Facebook page, when I don’t know the miscreant and there is little chance of insulting or upsetting someone I care about even a little bit. Pointless and futile, of course, except that it gets some pent up disgust and frustration out of my system.
I didn’t bother responding to the jerk who posted that thing above. Clearly, she is beyond hope. Ethics Alarms is still seeking evidence that anyone west of the great ideological divide has posted something similar. I haven’t seen any, not one example. In contrast, many of my show-biz and academic friends have posted virtually the same message: “If you voted for President Trump or supporthim, get out of my life. I hate you.”
In my continuing quest for symptoms of Trump Derangement to shake in the faces of those, including some commenters, who say the diagnosis is just an ad hominem attack and not based on substance, I find these social media posts especially persuasive that some kind of mental break is responsible. To use one of the Trump Deranged’s favorite refrains in a correct context for once, this “isn’t normal.”
There was much discussion during the respective administrations about “Clinton Derangement,” “Bush Derangement” and “Obama Derangement,” yet I never heard or read anyone suffering from those alleged emotional handicaps announce, “If you support this President or voted for him, you are evil and I want no contact with you, forever.” Literally and historically, no President in our history justified that attitude. Someone who would write, say, or even think that is, to use the kind of metaphor that once got me sued here for defamation, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Proportion? Respect? Empathy? Fairness? Restraint? The Golden Rule?
Bueller? Hello? McFly?
My next job will be to identify what causes this unique brain dysfunction. CNN and MSNBC? Falling IQs? Social media itself? Advocacy journalism? Educational indoctrination? Wet markets? “Gain of function” research? The C.I.A.? Fluoride?
Whatever it is, I believe it is important to identify the cause and fix the problem, as I hope that the cure won’t require deprogramming. Meanwhile, I find myself less and less inclined to regard “Nah, there’s no such thing as Trump Derangement!” as a legitimate or supportable position.
Ethics Alarms 