.
…what hope is there for sanity and rational discourse in the near future?
I am distraught. The meme above was posted with approval by a elite college history professor I have known for 50 years. I know he’s smarter than this, wildly so, and that he would flunk any student exercising such poor critical thinking skills in an essay or thesis. So how did he come to post such obvious crap, and how can he be helped? Continue reading
Hardly an upset, but wow, what an asshole. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?
Acosta was riffing on a “No Kings” Day episode of “The Contrarian” podcast hosted by fellow-Stage 5 Trump Derangement sufferer Jennifer Rubin, and attacked President Trump for having ICE enforce our immigration laws. Then he made the bizarre argument that the President is a hypocrite because two of his three wives were immigrants. They weren’t illegal immigrants, mind you, but progressive Democrats like Acosta pretend that they don’t understand the distinction.
“Where are the ICE raids at the Trump properties? Could somebody call ICE on the Trump golf course in Virginia? You’re telling me there’s nobody in there that is undocumented or has some kind of squirreliness going on with their paperwork?” he asked. “Give me a break. How many immigrants has he married? He’s got one [that would be first wife Ivana, who died in 2022] buried at his golf course in New Jersey! Isn’t she buried by the first hole or the second tee or something like that?” he asked. Rubin’s guest April Ryan, another unethical reporter, cackled along with Rubin at Acosta’s wit. “Immigrants always doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do!” he joked.
This guy was CNN’s primary reporter on the first Trump administration. His bias was palpable, and Acosta is now revealing what kind of vicious hate-monger CNN allowed to distort the news in pursuit of his–and its— own partisan agenda.
Someone can try to amuse like-minded resistance fanatics with absurd anti-Trump bile, and one can be a tough journalist speaking “truth to power.” But a reporter who indulges in the first has no credibility trying be the latter. What are the chances that Acosta’s disqualifying contempt for Donald trump wasn’t common knowledge at CNN while he was posing as a journalist? My guess? None.
Commenting on his outburst, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Jim Acosta is a disgraceful human being.” Why yes, Karoline, I believe you are correct.
Gee, I don’t know what ethics news and issues you could want to discuss today…
Me, I’m just trying to decide which is more fatuous, the drivel I am reading from the Trump Deranged among my D.C. showbiz friends, who once had functioning brains even as you and I, on my Facebook feed (Did YOU know that there was a First Amendment right for illegal immigrants to riot?) or the selection Ann Althouse posted from Reddit regarding the crowd reaction to Trump’s appearance in the audience at the Kennedy Center performance of “Les Miserables”: “Honestly it sounds like a mix of both? Boos and cheers/clapping together. Because as disappointing as it is, there is a lot of people who literally reside up Trump’s ass crack & worship this man. I fully despise him and everything he stands for. And the fact that he simultaneously, gets to go to the theater and exist peacefully while terrorizing the immigrant populations in LA & around the US.”
That last could have been written by many of my friends, from whom I would withhold my comment that many Americans have the courtesy to treat the President of the United States with formal respect, as Americans have done since George Washington, without “literally” residing up the President’s ass crack…
David Wallace-Wells, described as “the best-selling science writer and essayist” for the New York Times who “explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it” wrote an essay called “Our Regression on Gender Is a Tragedy, Not Just a Political Problem.” That’s interesting: what “regression on gender”? Unfortunately, the writer was incapable of making whatever point he wanted to make without making his biases so obvious and obnoxious that I didn’t finish reading.
I wonder if someone like me was expected to.
I’m not going to fisk the whole thing, just as far as I read before deciding that I didn’t care what David Wallace-Wells thinks…about anything, really. Here we go…
“When Donald Trump stormed into the White House in 2016…”
“Stormed.” He walked into the White House after being elected just like every other President who didn’t inherit the office. Nice of the author to flag his bias and animus in the fourth word.
“….horrified Americans debated, almost endlessly, whether the shocking result was an expression of widespread racism (backlash to a Black president resulting in the election of a birther) or economic anxiety (the industrial Midwest especially feeling abandoned by globalization and the China shock).”
Note that the Americans who voted for Trump aren’t “Americans” to Wallace-Wells. The people who attributed Trump’s election to racism are the same lazy, demonizing, angry progressives who attribute all of their defeats (and failures) to racism (or sexism). Obama was a weak, divisive, arrogant and subtly racist President, and any backlash against him was entirely justified.
Guest Post by AM Golden
[From your host: AM Golden has a second guest post this week, which is what happens when you send two excellent submissions that get lost in my email. This one is not only on a topic near and dear to my heart—the ethics rot in the ranks of American historians—but also on a specific historian and work that I had flagged for a potential Ethics Alarms post myself. How I love it when a participant in the ethics wars here not only saves me the time and toil of writing a post, but does such a superb job of it, which AM definitely does here. JM.]
Of the professions that have been disgracing themselves for the last 10 years or so, the betrayal of historians has cut me the deepest.
We all have biases. Each of us has a responsibility to be aware of those biases in a professional setting and work to subdue them. Prior to the 2016 campaign, I’d already learned to get a feel for an author’s premise before starting a book. If an author likes Andrew Jackson, for example, he or she will likely rationalize unpleasant facts about his life. If an author hates him; however, he or she will diminish Jackson’s triumphs. This is unprofessional. It is also unethical. A historian should be devoted not only to fact, but also putting fact within its appropriate historical context. Whether you like him or not, Jackson played a significant role in our country’s history. A competent historian can produce a “Warts and All” portrayal without compromising the integrity of the subject.
Since 2016, a new practice has entered the history books: gratuitous, sometimes barely relevant, statements about Donald Trump. A recent book I will not name included two completely superfluous footnotes regarding secessionist states and how many of them voted for Trump. In general, though, it’s included in the prologue or, more often, the epilogue to allow the author to tie the secessionists, the Dixiecrats or some other group of bigots (but never, for some reason, FDR’s State Department which deliberately slow-walked paperwork for desperate Jews in Europe) to Trump.
Last week on YouTube’s “The Morning Meeting,” Mark Halperin and Dan Turrentine appeared to acknowledge Ethics Alarms’ “Julie Principle.” They just didn’t know what it was called.
President Trump had delivered the commencement address at West Point while wearing a red MAGA cap (Oh NOOOO! He’s violating “norms” again!) and on Monday published a Memorial Day Truth Social post like some of his previous holiday wishes—you know, one of his “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!” style shots. Halperin noted that many Democratic critics and pundits, right on cue, were freaking out.
“If you read [historian] Heather Cox Richardson or the emails and texts I get from my Democratic sources, as I said before, the Trump administration’s over. And it’s just a bankrupt, you know, corrupt mess and he’s already a failed president and he’s not getting anything done. That’s their point of view. They also are very taken with his wearing a MAGA hat … to give … a West Point graduation speech,” Halperin said. “They’re taken with his tweet, his Truth Social post, saying ‘Happy Memorial Day’ and criticizing Joe Biden. And they’re back to a Adam Schiffian and [biased and Trump Deranged historian] Heather Cox Richardson point of view, which is everything Trump does is an epic disaster and that the American people will turn on him and Republicans in the midterms because he’s impolite.”
Come on. Really?
There is no excuse for drawing this, paying someone to do it, publishing it, or treating the opinion it represents with anything but contempt. It is the epitome of the simple-minded, reductive, dishonesty that typifies the political cartooning genre, which deserved to die decades ago, as I’ve stated here for years. As for the once thoughtful, fair, analytical friend who posted it to get cheers from his fellow Trump Deranged, his loved ones have reason to worry.
So do those of another FBF, a retired lawyer of note, who posted today a question: “Can anyone recall Trump ever saying anything that was true?” In a sane world, I would have rocketed back, “Sure: ‘Journalists are the enemies of the people.'” Now I just shake my head in the privacy of my office.
JoAnna St. Germain, a public school teacher (for a bit longer)at Waterville High School in Waterville Maine, personifies what the decade-long hate, fear and anti-democracy campaign from “the resistance,” Democrats, and the mainstream media has inflicted on the soul of America. Once, presumably, she was a normal, rational human being like you. Now, she posts screeds like this on social media:
The Secret Service has the perfect opportunity, if they choose to step up and take it. You are the ones with power. Coordinate. Take out every single person who supports Trump’s illegal, immoral, unconstitutional acts. Look at the sycophants and give them what they’re asking for.Every other country sees what’s happening and they are taking stands.If you step up, we can avoid a civil war. I’m not talking about assassinating a president. A president is a person duly elected by the American people.Tr*mp has shamelessly bragged openly about stealing the election. He is making plans to give himself a third term. I’m talking about Americans recognizing a fascist dictatorship and standing against it.Secret Service, you are Americans.My beloved military, you are Americans.We, the people, are counting on you.
Nice. Even with rampant madness oozing through social media and the op-ed pages every day, calling for the execution of the President of the United States and all of his supporters from someone not in already in restraints like this guy…
…is unusual, especially when the provocateur has been entrusted with molding young minds. A few hours later, the teacher wrote, “I have zero shame about what I’ve said. I’m not backtracking a single thing. I believe Trump and every sycophant he has surrounded himself with . . . needs to die,” adding that she posted “knowing I’d likely lose my job and benefits.” When her call for violence was reported in some media outlets, JoAnna “doubled down,” and quite arrogantly too, writing a week ago on her Facebook page:
Apparently, I have made the news. People are quite angry with me for stating openly that Trump and his cronies need to die. Gosh, I fear I may have “Trump Derangement Syndrome”!I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, and I say it with my full chest:Fuck fascism. Fuck a country that suppresses the media. Fuck a country that moves to weaken the education system in order to produce weak-minded people who will follow orders. Fuck a country that sends innocent women and men to die thinking they’re defending democracy when they’re really defending the rights of corporations to fuck over the very people lining their pockets.If you’re mad at this post, knowing that I just threw away a decade of experience teaching the truth, fully knowing that my superintendent will have to fire me? If you’re mad that I’m speaking truth to power?Fuck you. I’ll still take a bullet to keep your child safe.
Niiiiice!
Later, as she had to know would happen, Waterville Public Schools Superintendent Peter Hallen emailed a statement to parents that said in part, “Please know that I have taken steps to ensure everyone’s safety and am, along with the appropriate authorities, actively investigating the incident.” St. Germain’s reaction:
Well all righty then!
Observations:
Over at RealClearPolitics, conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson has an essay that I fervently believe is spot-on regarding what he calls “the Trump counter-revolution.” Of course I do: it tracks exactly with what I’ve been writing here for more than a decade, the primary difference being that Hanson’s views carry a lot more weight than mine do. The “money quote” in the essay, its conclusion:
Enraged Democrats still offer no substantial alternatives to the Trump agenda.
There are no shadow-government Democratic leaders with new policy initiatives. They flee from the Biden record on the border, the prior massive deficits and inflation, the disaster in Afghanistan, two theater-wide wars that broke out on Biden’s watch, and the shameless conspiracy to hide the prior president’s increasing dementia.
Instead, the Left has descended into thinly veiled threats of organized disruption in the streets. It embraces potty-mouth public profanity, profane and unhinged videos, nihilistic filibusters, congressional outbursts, and increasingly dangerous threats to the persons of Elon Musk and Trump.
All that frenzy is not a sign that the Trump counterrevolution is failing. It is good evidence that it is advancing forward, and its ethically bankrupt opposition has no idea how, or whether even, to stop it.
Oh, those words give me a BINGO! orgasm. I am now in the processes of fighting the impulse to post Hanson’s essay on Facebook, knowing full well that it will lead to mass fury among 90% of my friends, have me unfriended and cancelled, even cause some associates to pull out of a major theatrical project I’m involved in. Posting it would run directly into Cognitive Dissonance Scale reality.
And yet…I put up with far more triggering (for me) content from them literally every day without protest. I don’t cancel them or unfriend them, any more than I reject friends and relatives when they have contracted a pernicious disease. Do friends let friends remain tunnel-visioned, bubble-bound, biased and ignorant?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Imagine the late James Earl Jones’ resonant bass intoning, “THIS is Trump Derangement!” and you have the perfect backdrop for my depressing story.
A retired lawyer of great accomplishments and gravitas has recently erupted into repeated anti-Trump/anti-Republican rants on Facebook. I consider him a good freind and generally a wise one—and he’s a passionate baseball fan!—so it pains me to read this sad evidence of mental and ethical deterioration. His most recent screed began with a declaration that he now detests David Brooks. As the Ethics Alarms Brooks dossier vividly shows, there are plenty of reasons to detest Brooks, an obnoxious and arrogant conservative in his Daily Standard days, and now a sell-out who accepted the dishonest role as a token non-progressive propagandist on the New York Times opinion page and quickly “cut the cloth of his conscience to fit the fashion of the Times,” (to quote Lillian Hellman at the McCarthy hearings, except that when she said it, she used a small “t.”)
[Yikes! I just looked over my own collection of Brooks posts, and he’s even worse than I remembered. In October of 2023, for example, I nailed him for writing that President Biden was still sharp and capable though it was obvious then, a year before Biden’s debate babble-fest, that Joe was demented.]
But my learned, once rational friend wasn’t critical of Brooks for any of his lies and hypocrisy; he now detests Brooks because of this column, in which the pundit gives President Trump credit for something. It is a trait that I have also noted: Trump has amazing energy and drive, to the point of being indomitable. Brooks begins his column this way:
Ethics Alarms 