That’s Erin Andrews above. She’s a broadcast professional, a long-time sidelines reporter in NFL games. She a professional public communicator. Here she is on one of her recent podcasts:
“And then I’m like, ‘Wait, wait, fuck, what did he say about going for it?’ Because I never want to quote a coach and get it wrong, so I’m like, ‘Oh my god’…I’m fully fucking out of breath, which is inappropriate. Like, get it together, sister! In through the nose, out through the mouth. It was all because the ramp was so long. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, how many people are watching … I’m so much better than that!”
And I’m like, “You sound like a moron, Erin, and this kind of illiterate blather just further embeds that toxic speech pattern in the next generation.”
Never mind the gratuitous “fucks,” that usage of “like” is worse than “um,” which was metaphorically beaten out of me as a child, and since I speak in public for a living, thanks, Mom, Dad, Miss Barrett, Mrs. Penwarden and the rest of my vigilent teachers. Are today’s teachers even trying to stop the “like” contagion? I doubt it: I bet they are infected themselves, and besides, they are too busy teaching kids to be communists.
My own daughter, after being taught by two articulate parents to speak grammatical and articulate English, now uses “like” every seven words, because that’s the kind of speech everyone around her all day uses. And I’m not about to correct a 32-year-old. Nonetheless, when I hear someone use “like” that way, my respect for them takes a nosedive, just as when I hear someone use “ain’t” or “we was” or “irregardless.” I can’t help it.
The confession is cynical and mordantly amusing. The Times really thinks its “transparency” will support the myth that the paper isn’t a partisan spin and propaganda organ for the Democratic Party. Well, it might be right. The Times is part of a long-running effort to make Americans stupid.
Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston and a frequent contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, complained to the Times after he was described twice as a “conservative law professor” earlier this yera. He didn’t object to the conservative description, which is accurate, but that in the Times, a conservative expert or analyst is labelled as such but those quoted from the Left are just “professors.”
Blackman reviewed a New York Times database and found that the Times would routinely brand a conservative but rarely label a progressive, thus representing conservatives as “the other” while left-biased analysts and experts were just good old reliable, trustworthy authorities.
Or, as the freaks chant in “Freaks”: “One of us, one of us! We accept them, one of us!”
Patrick Healy, the Times’s assistant managing editor for trust and standards, acknowledged that Blackman had a valid point. “It can come off like The Times treats liberals as normal and conservatives as unique and worthy of labeling,” Healy told Blackman.
Oh, it “can come off” that way, can it? How big of Healy to concede that. It can come off that way because that’s how the Times reporters, pundits and editors think, how its readers think, and what the paper wants as many members of the public to think as well. All the better to elect those Democrats! [Here is another example of Healy’s weaseldom. Also here, in Item #7]
Healy said the Times needed to be more “discerning” about its labels going forward. Right. Its current practice helps observant readers like Blackman realize just how biased and manipulative the New York Times is. Can’t have that! Healy’s sort-of apology is a perfect Level 10 sinister and unethical apology on the EA Apology Scale:
10. An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing.
Nothing like reminding voters who are tempted to vote for candidates who want to impeach you why they hate your guts…
The quote, uttered ad lib (of course) at a rally in Perry, Georgia, over the weekend:
“Jon Ossoff personally sponsored a bill to bring armies of migrants from terror-infested countries like Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia. Remember what I called them? Shithouse countries.”
I am reading indefensible conservative pundits trying to rationalize this unpresidential and uncivil discourse by countering, “Is he wrong?” That’s not the point. It wasn’t the point when he first was accused of using the vulgar and undignified term in 2018.
I wrote extensively about the ethics train wreck the then “alleged comments” set off. Like so much the Axis media publicized then and now, the episode was based on hearsay reporting on a private meeting, with the media freakout—pretending that no other President used vulgar and denigrating language behind closed doors—being dishonest and partisan. As usual.
TMZ, the celebrity news site, has always been pretty stupid (along with its readers), but I thought this headline had to be a joke. When have you ever heard of a news story involving someone who isn’t famous saying a word? Apparently TMZ’s audience is so woke and unfamiliar with the core value of freedom of speech that a stranger uttering the two-syllable word “nigger” is as news worthy as an actual crime. Readers are expected to react with horror: “How could this happen? What is the country coming to? What can we do to halt this unbearable assault on our sensibilities?”
What ever happened to “Sticks and stone can break my bones but words will never hurt me”? TMZ never even reveals to whom the dangerous word was addressed, if anybody.
A Delta passenger was caught on video using the n-word while being escorted off a flight by cops … after allegedly screaming “death to America” and pretending to shoot fellow travelers. Video circulating on X shows the unruly passenger being removed from a Delta flight Thursday, which was scheduled to travel from New York City’s JFK International Airport to Atlanta.Law enforcement sources tell TMZ … the passenger has been identified as Jerome Anixter, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man, who was arrested and charged with assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. We’re told Port Authority Police responded after Delta reported a disruptive passenger who appeared intoxicated while the plane was at the gate preparing for departure. ..
And so we see what TMZ considers, in order, worst, bad, and least bad: the uttering of a word, “Death to America,” (a threat) and “pretending to shoot fellow travelers.” (With what, his finger? But that still can constitute criminal assault).
TMZ is also deliberately trying to get the man, whose disruptive behavior seems to have fallen well short of actress Selma Blair’s recent flying freakout, attacked or killed by some anti-hate speech vigilante by branding him as a racist. Nice. If that word is the lead, then presumably simply using the word would justify a TMZ story if the guy didn’t do anything else. Perhaps we can look forward to future news flashes like “DoorDash delivery man says “Poopy-head”! and “Dog-walker says supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” If the non-famous are going to be publicly shamed for mere words now, the least TMZ could do is start headlining real affronts to communication with headlines like “Woman on bus says “Statue of limitations!” or “Teacher uses “Irregardless”!
This is The Great Stupid, my friends. Banishing it from the culture will be like trying to get rid of bedbugs.
Rep. Omar actually said this on live TV after asked by MSNOW mega-hack Chris Hayes whether she married her brother as part of the tangled web of fraud and lies the anti-American “Squad” member is accused of creating. Wow. Is she setting up a Luke and Leia defense? Hayes asked, “You’re not related to him at all?” “Not to my knowledge,” she replied.
That’s Omar’s lawyer banging his head against the wall above.
Omar also called allegations that she married her brother “insane”and then gave that hilarious answer. Allegations that Omar and her ex, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, got married in a failed effort to get him a green card are all the inventions of “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” the Congresswoman insisted in her first interview since federal agents raided her Washington, D.C. home last week.
Omar then told Hayes she was living “paycheck to paycheck,” when Hayes asked about documents in which Omar seemed to say she and her current husband had a combined net-worth of some $30 million. That was just a mistake, she said. “I have a Toyota Camry that’s from 2016. It’s our only car. I rent my DC place and my Minneapolis place, and so I mean, I don’t know, that sounds like not the majority of Congress, but there’s some of us that don’t come from wealth and don’t have wealth,” she insisted.
There are reports that many voters are ignoring true accounts of statements and conduct by Democrats running in the mid-terms because they can’t believe what they are reading and hearing. Omar’s answers about marrying her brother and making the “mistake” of estimating her wealth at $30 million when she must really have to shop at Costco make this phenomenon completely plausible.
Finally, regarding Hayes: I watched the interview so you don’t have to. This is journalism to MSNOW: Hayes talks to Omar in an obsequious, sympathetic, “you poor dear, how terribly you have been treated” manner that is the opposite of putting a politician on the “hot seat.” Putting her in a comfy chair while getting a foot massage and yummy snacks would be more accurate. This is how Axis journalists “speak truth to power” now when they are speaking to progressives and Democrats. My mind flashed back to Katie Couric on “Today” grilling Ross Perot like he was Beelzebub and Tim Russert interviewing Louis Farrakhan like Perry Mason cross-examining a witness he was trying to make confess to a murder. Quite a contrast.
Our current VP was subjected to a CBS “town hall” over the weekend where a series of generally none-too-bright questioners peppered Vance with questions that he hesitated to answer with the clarity and forcefulness necessary. I thought Vance’s strength was supposed to be communication. Maybe Trump can get rid of him…
You can read the transcript here, but my main nausea came from Vance’s weenie responses to two questions regarding illegal immigration. CBS set him up to some extent with the first one, asked by a nun, Sister Nancy Sylvester. The Veep is Catholic, of course, and spoke as if he felt he owed some kind of deference to Sister Nancy despite the fact that her question bypassed law and policy and went straight to toxic empathy. She asked…
“Mr. Vice President, we are sisters who minister at the southern border in the United States, as well as here around Detroit, and they are constantly seeing families who are affected by our immigration policies. They see the trauma of children who are separated from their parents, sometimes on a moment’s notice. They go to school and they come back and they’re not there. And they have to sort of fend for themselves. And so they, the sisters see the kind of effect, the fear and violence of the ICE behavior. We know the complexity of this issue, but what really pains us is how it’s being implemented in such ways. And so I’m going to, sort of know that both of us share the same faith. We may not always agree, ’cause I understand you don’t always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to, though, wonder what would you say, how would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who try to follow the gospel, how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified to, in terms of the kind of values we live, wanna live by, and also what policies would you advocate to try to promote more compassionate and respective behavior toward our immigrant sisters and brothers?”
Elected officials and responsible citizens can’t accept the false premises underlying such a question, but Vance did. He replied, after wasting time showing his concern for the Pope’s health and pandering to his fellow Catholics,
“So let me say, one, we’re trying to strike the right balance. And when you have a country where approximately 25 million illegal aliens have come in over the past 30 or so years, many of them completely unchecked and unvetted, we’re trying to strike a balance between how do we do law enforcement, but how do we also do it humanely, and how do we not do so little law enforcement that you actually empower some of the worst people in the world. And so—I think that it is constantly a work in progress. When you’re talking about millions and millions of people and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, you know, we’ve even just in the past year or so increased training protocols. Because I do think that men and women of ICE, by the way, it’s like the men and women of law enforcement. Most of them are amazing people who are patriots and they want to do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up. And obviously we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up.”
Clear as mud, and incompetent. His duty was to begin by saying, first, that the Sister was talking about illegal immigrants, and the “immigration policies” of enforcing the law. These aren’t “immigrant sisters and brothers,” but illegal immigrants who should not benefit from taking what isn’t theirs to take, It’s nice that she and her colleagues are trying to ease the burdens law-breaking illegals have inflicted on their own children, but that is not the fault of the United States or its primary concern, nor should it be. “Following the gospel” means, as the wonderful Pope has made clear, open borders, and the disastrous consequences of that are blazingly evident in Europe and increasingly in the U.S. You cannot govern competently and responsibly with faith and the the idealistic teachings from a culture 2,000 years ago. Law enforcement wouldn’t have incidents of overreach, bad decisions, accidents and mistakes if lawbreakers didn’t force the government to deal with their destruction.
I have a dear friend and occasional commenter on EA who thinks like Sister Nancy. This is the poison well of misplaced Christian charity that creates the “Good Illegal Immigrant” myth and the absurd parallels between Mary and Joseph and the millions of illegals the Biden administration encouraged to first break our immigration laws, and then to engage in further lawbreaking.
Then CBS host Tony Dokoupil introduced another questioner, a naturalized citizen named Niv Agarwal. Sister Nancy had just asked, “I’m interested in how, from your very core of your faith, how would you want to be, how do you want to treat immigrants? Because in many cases, we get, they all are called terrorists sometimes by people. They are—like, how does, what, what would you want? What would you want to do?” Great: Shut up, Sister, you ignorant slut. Tony segued to Niv, whose infuriating question was along the same lines. He said,
“Hey, my name is Niv. My family and I immigrated here about 20 years ago, and I became a citizen about five years ago. So you were the first person I voted for, actually….One reason, because of the reasons you just mentioned, I was concerned about border safety, as in the trafficking and the drugs, not because I think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, but after seeing ICE behave like military police, and you recently call H-1 visa workers foreign indentured servants. I think Americans are anything but safe. So I’m just curious, why, why are you scapegoating immigrants for the issues you’re supposed to be solving as a Vice President?”
Immediately, Vance should have said,
“Let’s get two things straight once and for all, Niv. First, the issue is illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants like you. Stop letting open borders advocates confuse the issue by adopting their dishonest rhetoric. Second, if an illegal immigrant has a job in this country, by definition he or she is taking that job away from an American, because if that illegal wasn’t here, an American would have that job. So if you don’t think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, you’re confused. Nobody is “scapegoating immigrants.” Again, we are talking about illegal immigrants. I would think, as an immigrant yourself, you would insist on that distinction. We are correctly pointing out the harm done to the nation, society, the economy and law-abiding citizens when foreign citizens come here illegally, and ICE acts exactly as law enforcement has to act when criminals are being protected by rogue state and local governments and misguided Americans who have accepted pro-open borders propaganda as you have.”
If the Republicans get clobbered in the mid-terms, a main reason will be their incompetence and rhetorical cowardice.
“Well, it’s an extraordinary insult, but he continues to repeat it. And what’s so ironic is that Donald Trump is clearly the dumbest person ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…”
Jeffries was talking to the execrable Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNOW so of course there was no push-back. Such a classy exchange between a President and a Congressional leader! “You’re stupid!” “Oh yeah? Well you’re stupider!” I can just imaging Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun talking to each other like that.
Actually I can’t. Those career-long adversaries has respect for the positions they held, our institutions, and, yes, each other. They also understood the importance of civility.
Donald Trump’s penchant for stooping to ad hominem attacks is another one of his obnoxious and self-destructive habits. I wish someone would explain to him that “IQ” does not mean “intelligence” and that it is ignorant, indeed stupid, to think so. I’d bet at some point Trump’s IQ was tested, probably as a kid, registered in the relatively high range, and his parents or teachers told him it meant something. (My father told me that what proved one’s intelligence was what you did, not how you scored on a test.) The President has always been obsessed with ratings, scores and numbers (“Subscriptions way down!). Heck, if I used that to measure the value of my life, I would have killed this blog years ago. Maybe myself too.
You could excuse Trump a bit, especially given his “tit for tat” reflex, for resorting to ad hominem since his political foes constantly use the practice. Trump is fat, he’s orange, his hair is weird, he’s nuts, he’s demented, he’s stupid. It’s still no excuse for him returning fire in kind. Furthermore, it is extremely unlikely that Hakeem Jeffries is “low IQ.” He had an impressive academic record, he was a law review editor in law school and graduated at the top of his class, clerked for a judge and was a corporate litigator before entering politics.
UPDATE: Literally minutes after I posted this, I saw reports that she is “transitioning” out of the White House Press Secretary role. Good.]
***
There’s no excuse for this.
The new details on the latest White House paid liar’s misrepresentation of herself as a “lawyer” or “attorney” make her (and the decision to appoint her) appear worse and worse; she’s either a fraud or an idiot. In either case, she has lost all credibility. A paid liar must have credibility, as strange as that sounds.
Katie Zacharia confirmed yesterday that she had never passed a bar exam or and has never been an “attorney.”Then she claimed that she had not misrepresented her legal career by saying she “is” a lawyer. As I have explained already, she’s not. If many members of the public—you know, morons—think that a JD or LLB degree means one is a lawyer, that doesn’t excuse the holder of a law degree thinking or saying that. “Lawyer” means one can act as a lawyer—Duh!—and a mere law school graduate cannot. It is against the law for such a person to practice law, which is what lawyers do—again duh.
In interviews with The New York Times and Real America’s Voice, Zacharia said she had consulted Pepperdine’s president and “others” about how to describe her qualifications before appearing on television, and was told she could use the term “lawyer,” but not “attorney” or “esquire.” Zacharia hasn’t said which “president of Pepperdine” advised her. She graduated from law school there in 2011. Andrew K. Benton was the university’s president at that time. In 2019, Jim Gash became the president told the Times that he was not the one who advised her, though he did call her “a young woman of high integrity.” You know, a a young woman of high integrity who represented herself a lawyer without having a law license. Gash’s representative said “he does not comment on private conversations,” but a statement from Gash said: “Pepperdine is proud to count Katie among our alumni, former colleagues and friends. As she takes on this significant responsibility, we pray that God will grant her wisdom and courage. We look forward to seeing her use her incredible gifts and extensive experience in service to our nation.”
Got it. A non-responsive answer. A law degree from Pepperdine isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, and the school’s presidents are cowards and suck-ups.
The wild—and increasingly weaponized—hypocrisy among alleged feminists is not to be borne, and I’m happy to flag it as the unethical—but woke!—cultural poison that it is.
Perpetually unfunny comic Shane Gillis was back for the third (or is it fourth?) time as a host of the now totally ideologically-captured Saturday Night Live last week. During his rambling monologue to begin the show, Gillis said, “I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now? Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe it.” Gillis then went on to describe the ubiquitous tight short-shorts that dominate young women’s attire at the gym as featuring “wrinkles [that] go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole,” adding, “You’re not allowed to look… because they are filming. I’m in the background of about 10 TikToks right now.”
The Hollywood Left’s explosion of fury, which sure sounds like mandatory feminist outrage from beta males to me, focuses on Gillis’s use of the word “whores”—I even saw it censored on Axis news sources as “wh*res.” Not to go back into the misty past, but as I will always remind readers here, Bill Maher called conservative women like Sarah Palin and others “cunts” and “twats” on his HBO show with nary a peep from feminists. Today, over a decade later, the same people who laughed at Bill’s hilarious misogyny want to cancel Gillis. Here’s Forbes virtue-signaling to the mob:
You can read all about the investigations and arguments over terminology many places. The Washington Post’s is a good as any, but its headline is crap. “Katie Zacharia calls herself a lawyer. Legal experts aren’t sure.”
Really? Ethics experts are. She’s a JD, meaning she has a diploma from a law school. That no more allows her to practice law than a diploma from medical school allows a grad to do brain surgery. She hasn’t passed a bar exam in any jurisdiction. She’s not a lawyer. Representing herself as a lawyer is a misleading statement and dishonesty (or stupidity). All by itself it is grounds for a bar association to decide that she lacks the character to practice law.
Trump’s Truth Social post about her selection to replace Karoline Leavitt described Zacharia as “a distinguished Graduate of Pepperdine University, and the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, an attorney, and a frequent Commentator on outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax.” Wrong. Either Trump was misinformed or he doesn’t know what an attorney is. Technically, an attorney is a lawyer who represents a client, but the distinction between lawyer and attorney has gone the way of the distinction between “implied” and “inferred.” Either way, a JD degree doesn’t allow you to practice law and you aren’t either a lawyer or an attorney until you pass a bar exam and get a license. Fox News has identified Zacharia as a lawyer at least 18 times since March 2025. Same as with Trump: Fox News is misinformed or stupid. She isn’t a lawyer.
Zacharia’s LinkedIn profile says she was “General Counsel” for a nonprofit organization called “Fix California.” If she was, she was practicing law without a license, a bright-line ethics violation as well as illegal. She also claims to have been licensed to practice in China, which is interesting but irrelevant. It would not make her a lawyer in the U.S. any more than being chef in China does
The conclusion here is clear and unavoidable. Zacharia has been misrepresenting herself. It is no less serious than lying on a resumé. Such a gross misrepresentation is a serious ethical breach, and in my view, disqualifies her from getting a law license. She may have the job of White House paid liar, but even that job requires some level of credibility and trustworthiness. She doesn’t have either; she can’t have either.
