This Comment of the Day by Isaac—not his first—again raises the issue that Ethics Alarms periodically faces in querulous e-mails from subscribers who announce their withdrawal by accusing the site of covering politics rather than ethics. As the facilitator/proprietor here, I struggle with this every day. Ethics Alarms, as the title suggests, conerns applied ethics, not Plato’s Cave. The mission is to assist the culture’s ongoing and never ending search for beneficial, rational and effective standards of right and wrong. This is best accomplished by monitoring and analyzing all corners of the culture and society, including its institutions. Government is both a reflection of the culture’s values and an enforcer of them; politics is the means by which a government’s values, priorities and methods are determined. It is literally impossible to examine the march of ethics without politics and political ethics, as well as the institutions that influence them, notably the news media, taking a central role. 

Here is Isaac’s Comment of the Day on the post “The Unethical, Depressing, Bar Complaint Against Kellyanne Conway”:

I stand by my theory that the Left is suffering from such serious cognitive dissonance right now that they are almost literally mass-hallucinating. They believe that Trump is lighting the Constitution on fire and dancing on it. If he isn’t, they will create their own reality in which he is.

Look at how angry they get whenever a media outlet portrays Trump as a human being. “They’re NORMALIZING his EVIL!” “Don’t they know he’s Hitler?”

The Left is acting like a Doomsday cult typically does, in the months after the predicted Doomsday fails to arrive. In those situations most cult members have invested so heavily in the cult-leader’s scam, that they’d rather go on following than just admit that they were taken for fools. And so the cult goes on, even as its predictions keep failing.

These people bet everything on Trump being an unelectable devil. Just watch that clip of Ann Coulter from 2 years ago on the Bill Maher show being laughed at by everyone, to her face, for declaring Trump the most likely to win. What do you do when you were so horribly, horribly wrong, and you spent months mocking, cursing, and shunning everyone who turned out to be right? You either humble yourself and be decent, or you double down. Human nature is to double down. In this case, that means the Left NEEDS Trump to be Hitler. They need to believe that his election was a “white-lash” even after the numbers come in to prove it wasn’t. They now need to believe not only that Trump is Hitler, but that millions of American voters are willing, aspiring Nazis who made the biggest mistake in all of history. If Trump isn’t Hitler, they will MAKE him Hitler. They are doing it for their own psychic well-being.

I didn’t think Trump would win either. I think it was a mistake to elect him. But I wasn’t so heavily invested in his personal failure. Frankly I see more upside to the current situation that a Hillary presidency, which would have just been 8 more years of a slow slide into oligarchy. If I had spent two years warning everyone that Trump’s election would bring about the immediate Apocalypse, I’d be tempted to root for him to fail now, too. Maybe if I were unscrupulous enough, I’d even try to sabotage him to protect my own ego, perhaps even at the expense of America. At least I’m trying to understand the impulses behind the current Left freakout.