Category Archives: ethics

Useless Argument

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Amid the hue and cry over Jimmy Kimmel’s TV show being put on hiatus over his lies about Charlie Kirk and his murderer—some saying the government shouldn’t be in the business of pressuring news outlets and others saying Kimmel got what he deserved—there is this argument, as articulated by Ben Shapiro among others:

But I do not want the FCC in the business of telling local affiliates that their licenses will be removed if they broadcast material that the FCC deems to be false. Why? Because one day the shoe will be on the other foot.

What Shapiro, et al., are eliding, though, is that the shoe has been on the other foot since at least the 2016 Presidential campaign season. That’s when The New York Times announced in a front page article that its news room would no longer attempt balanced coverage; it was so dismayed over then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump that its news room would pick a side and openly bias its supposedly objective news writing to favor whoever the Progressive-Democratic Party candidate might be.

Not so long later, a broadcast news outlet announced that there were not two sides to every story, and it began nakedly favoring the Left’s side.

The bias became blatant when the Progressive-Democrat-run Executive Branch began pressuring—threatening—social media outlets if they didn’t start suppressing Conservative commentary.

The bias became overt election interference when CNN participated in the circularly created Russian interference to favor Trump’s election hoax by publishing the “intelligence experts'” letter.

This then was followed by all news outlets (save The New York Post) spiking all “reporting” on the Hunter Biden laptop.

As a result of the Post breaking that story anyway, social media blocked it from posting on the social media outlets.

Then we had Progressive-Democratic Party Congressmen, of whom California’s Adam Schiff is one of the more infamous examples, overtly lying about then-President Donald Trump (R)’s being in cahoots with Russia. Schiff expanded on this with his lies about having the intelligence reports (from the same intelligence community of the letter infamy) to prove it.

I’ll elide the argument that CEOs who fold under mere pressure are unfit for their positions. That the Left and Party politicians have a long and hoary prior history of this pressure and overt action against free speech is no excuse for Republicans to do the same. Spare me, though, the foolishness that one day the shoe will be on the other foot. It already has been, for far too long.

Note: As I write this post (22 September 2025) ABC has taken the position to restore Kimmel to his show and airtime with effect 23 September 2025.

Leaks

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Leading off a Wall Street Journal article alleging Pentagon internal lawyers’ concerns regarding the Trump administration’s targeting of drug boats in international Caribbean Sea waters, there’s this:

Some military lawyers and other Defense Department officials are raising concerns about the legal implications of President Trump’s expanding military campaign against Latin American-based drug cartels, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Leave aside the worries about the legality of destroying boats and the crews on them that are targeting American citizens with those poisons. Of course, there’s nothing illegal about destroying those attacks in progress.

The larger question is this: who are those people with knowledge? They’re speaking without authorization, discussing in public matters of national security, and they’re doing so in direct violation of their terms of employment by the government, and depending on who they are, perhaps in violation of their oaths of office.

Some defense officials and career military lawyers have provided written and verbal legal opinions to decision makers inside the Pentagon, but believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined, according to one of the people.

This is pretty dispositive—in the WSJ‘s own words—of these people’s deliberate violation of their employment parameters. And all because these wonders actually think they run the show, and are quite cross that they’re not being heeded on the spot.

These are people—these are leakers—who need to be identified and fired for cause.

Patriotism is Intimidation

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The subheadline tells the tale that’s been unfolding for far too long in the United Kingdom, the cradle, but no longer a home, of individual liberty and consensual government,.

For some it [the national flag of the United Kingdom] is a symbol restoring patriotic traditions. Others see it as vehicle for intimidation.

The British flag, and its sibling, the red cross on a white field that is the Cross of St George flag, are symbols of British culture and history, and especially of British national identity.

Yet there is a growing movement (only lately starting to be answered) that openly disparages those national symbols, risibly calling them bigoted, exclusionary, and divisive.

They’re sort of right on one, but the other two—the bigotry and divisiveness—are centered on and emanate from only those folks, mostly “immigrants” and their apologists, who do not want to assimilate into British culture, to become British citizens, or merely to accept British culture in their status as non-citizen legal residents.

The flags are exclusionary, though, in the sense that they’re symbols of nationhood for patriotic British citizens and subjects, folks who are proud of their national history and culture, warts and all, while working to improve a grand but humanly imperfect nation.

Different flags in the UK have different connotations. The Union Jack, or, more formally, the Union Flag, is meant to represent England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It can be controversial among Scottish, Welsh, or Irish nationalists, but is often seen as a mild expression of patriotism in much of England. But the English flag—the Cross of St George—is sometimes associated with soccer hooligans and far-right protests, and has xenophobic connotations for some.

This is just foolish. There’s nothing controversial about the Union Flag—it symbolizes the union of the nation. Those who don’t want to be part of the union need to recognize that their view has lost repeated independence referenda and get over themselves. The only ones seeing the flag as in any way xenophobic are those immigrants who refuse to assimilate and the timid virtue-signalers who side with them to curry favor.

That some hooligans have chosen to wrap themselves in the English flag is in no way a reflection of what that flag represents—it only reflects the misbehaviors of the hooligans. Those who associate it with hooliganism need to leave off their Newspeak Dictionary-twisted definitions and return to British English dictionaries.

[A] local lawmaker called to remove the flags, whether British or English, saying they were being used by some “to rally those who suppress the rights of others and perpetrate acts of hate.” The local city council estimated it would cost £250,000 to take them down and has removed only a few.

This is disingenuous at best. Here, too, the lawmaker’s beef is with those who misuse—abuse—the flags, not with the flags themselves. It’s only the ones who rally those to hate who should be getting the lawmaker’s opprobrium. The position he’s taken, though, is akin to him actively supporting the unpatriotic over British patriots.

Don’t get too smug over the falling—and fallen—Brits, though. We have too many neighborhoods and news writers waxing hysterical about how divisive our own national flag is.

The same contempt for bigots and cowards in the UK applies to these so-called Americans, too. We have a chance, still, to decisively defeat those naysaying unpatriotic ones, and hopefully one good thing about our own Left’s murder of Charlie Kirk will wake us up and get us going.

There’s Always an Excuse

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Recall that Bureau of Labor Statistics honcho Erika McEntarfer was fired over labor reports that reflected wildly inaccurate data and that necessitated radically large corrections in subsequent months. Those data may have been fudged, as President Donald Trump (R) suggests, or they may have resulted from badly inaccurate and incomplete data collection by the BLS’ periodic polling processes.

Now she’s speaking out.

While speaking to students at her alma mater, Bard College, McEntarfer said she took the helm of BLS last year with high hopes of improving the stats on employment and inflation that the agency produces. Instead, she wound up spending much of 2025 guarding it against interference from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team.

And making self-serving excuses. She took office in January 2024. DOGE didn’t start in until early 2025.

Two questions, then: the first is what progress had she made on her improvements in the intervening year? What bureaucratic impediments had been interfering with those efforts, and what had she been doing about those impeding bureaucrats?

McEntarfer, who spent most of her career working to improve statistics quality at the Census Bureau, said she had been aiming to tackle those problems as BLS commissioner before she was fired.
“I was prepared to help BLS modernize data collection,” she said.

She spent that whole year “preparing to” help? When was she going actually to get started? When was she going to start leading the effort rather than “helping” it?

The second question is in what way had DOGE been interfering with her efforts, and what resources had she diverted from stats improvement to dealing with—mostly interfering with—DOGE’s efforts?

Judicial Insubordination

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Elizabeth Price Foley and Mark Pinkert are on the right track. They’ve laid out the problem concisely in their Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Now some lower-court judges have become brazenly defiant, not only of the administration’s agenda but also of high court opinions. In response, the justices have had to remind lower courts of their constitutional role and chastise them for resisting court precedent. But the resistance continues, threatening to erode the judiciary’s ability to function.

And

An anonymous group of 12 lower-court judges took their grievances to NBC News, telling a reporter that the high court’s rulings are “validating the Trump administration’s criticisms” of lower courts. One said “it’s inexcusable” that the justices don’t “have our backs.” Four judges opined that the justices, especially Chief Justice John Roberts, “should do more to defend the courts,” in the reporter’s words. Another judge complained that he and his colleagues have been “thrown under the bus.” But even an Obama appointee admitted that “the whole ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ is a real issue” and that lower-court judges “are sometimes forgetting to stay in their lane.”

They then propose a solution:

They should avoid writing opinions that contain obvious ambiguities like the one in Fair Admissions. They should also clear away the underbrush of nonoriginalist constitutional law, overruling such precedents rather than narrowing, distinguishing or calling them into doubt. … And all the hullabaloo over the president’s authority to fire executive-branch officers would be quieted if the court flatly overruled Humphrey’s Executor v US rather than merely chip away at it.
The court has a duty to provide doctrinal clarity, especially on constitutional law.

Those certainly are good ideas, at least from this textualist’s perspective. Clarity in bold, declarative sentences written in exclusively plain terms, would good, whether textualist or activist. More is needed though.

The Supreme Court needs lay aside its hesitancy and swat down, firmly, recalcitrant judges, especially (but not only) those of the district courts. The Supreme Court, over the course of its admonishment-containing overrulings, need to remove the recalcitrant judge from the case altogether, an action the Court has done, but up to now all too rarely. The Court also needs, rarely but at a non-zero rate, to rule that a particularly insubordinate judge will have all of his rulings automatically stayed until reviewed by appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, if necessary.

These are drastic steps, to be sure, but they’re necessary to emphasize that Supreme Court rulings are binding on the lower courts, especially at the district level; to increase the efficiency and speed of the courts and especially of the appellate process; and to begin to restore the public’s confidence in our court system.