No, I’m not going to turn into Casey Kasem, Rick Dees, or Ryan Seacrest, although I certainly wouldn’t turn down the money they made counting down the big hits of the week every weekend. But thanks to the extraordinary opportunities provided by increasing alternative sources of media, the Trump administration, and Democrats who have no idea how to read the room, the river of dumb things said is flowing freer than water through California’s Central Valley…now.
Last week, I took the top 10 dumb things shtick to my Duane’s World podcast, and it was met with rave reviews. The episode that dropped earlier Friday morning features my longtime friend and former Aftershow collaborator James Lileks to do color commentary. It’s pretty spectacular.
But there is a little crack in the proverbial floor where dumb things said on Friday, after the taping of the podcast, fall. And some of them are just too rich to overlook. Fortunately, Hot Air is a 24/7 website, featuring space with which to allow you to peruse them at your weekend leisure. So without further ado, here are the top ten dumb things said…Friday.
#10
FCC food fight over NPR funding
Bendan Carr is going to be a terrific chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Only a few weeks on the job, and he’s already investigating both National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System for allegedly double-dipping – taking taxpayer money to keep running, and also running commercial advertisements. They can’t have it both ways, and they’re going to end up being defunded, if the writing on the wall is any indication.
But one of the other FCC commissioners, Geoffrey Starks, is sticking up for NPR and PBS. Here’s what he just said.
FCC commissioner Geoffrey Starks takes on Brendan Carr: “Public television and radio stations play a significant role in our media ecosystem. Any attempt to intimidate these local media outlets is a threat to the free flow of information and the marketplace of ideas.”
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) January 31, 2025
I’m not sure Commissioner Starks wants to inject the marketplace of ideas bit on an industry that is exempt from having to compete in the actual media marketplace because they get special funding. There is no free flow of information on public radio and television. There is only a restricted flow of progressive information. It is not a neutral source of information, and with the advent of podcasts, YouTube, and other social media streaming capabilities, there no longer is a barrier to entry into the marketplace of ideas. If progressives want to indoctrinate others, they should compete for those ears and eyeballs like everyone else. The “significant role” Starks believes NPR and PBS play is a rapidly shrinking one, and that’s a very good thing. Jim Acosta and Chuck Todd are podcasting. We’ll see if their free flow of information in the marketplace of ideas becomes profitable without taxpayer funding. There’s little ideological difference than what you get on public-financed airwaves.
#9
Jonathan Capehart – They’re coming for my marriage
The MSNBC and Washington Post host appeared with Chris Jansing, and said in this administration, he’s now worried that the marriage he has with another man is in jeopardy. It’s gaslighting and fearmongering to an absurd level.
First, Donald Trump just sent his special envoy, Ric Grenell, a married, gay man, to Venezuela to negotiate on behalf of the United States. Within one calendar day, Grenell is returning with six detained Americans he freed from the Venezuelan government, a feat Joe Biden couldn’t achieve in almost five months of captivity.
This week, the United States Senate, in a 68-29 vote, confirmed Scott Bessent to be the next Secretary of the Treasury. Bessent is a married, gay man. To insinuate that Trump is going to take away same-sex marriages is just a stupid take. Capehart is citing the circling shark out on the horizon, Justice Clarence Thomas. He thinks Thomas’ dissent in Obergefell is going to come back and bite him when the Supremes somehow magically just overturn Obergefell and end it. It’s excruciatingly dumb to think that, and it’s pretty rotten and manipulative to gin people up over something that’s not going to happen.
There is no test case, not one, that has been filed anywhere in the country to challenge Obergefell. The Supremes will not touch the issue without a case that works its way through the appellate courts making a Constitutional motion that it needs to be overturned. As conservative as the current makeup of the Court is, which is as conservative as any time in my life, there are not four justices who would accept cert on a challenge to Obergefell, nor are there five with the will to overturn it.
My position on marriage is well-known. I wanted to keep the word marriage defined as between a man and a woman, because it was the only word in the English language that describes the social and relational contract between the sexes, and when you lose the language, you begin to lose the culture. There is no exclusive word for a union between a man and woman anymore, which is regrettable. But I lost that argument. That genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. Capehart either knows this and is intentionally spinning up people on the left to keep the anger industry going, or he really worries about it, making him too dumb and irrational to be on television.
#8
How about we do a vegan season reveal cake instead of Punxsutawney Phil?
Fox-5 out of Atlanta had a lot of fun at PETA’s expense. It seems the the animal advocacy group wants to ban the annual tradition of yanking the hog out of the tree stump once and for all, and have a seasonal version of a gender reveal cake, of course not made with eggs in the batter. That would be too cruel to chickens, who are going to lay the eggs anyway.
I’ll give credit where credit is due. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro had a tweet that said he was a hard no.
Come and take it. https://t.co/dU2wTnImNb
— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) January 31, 2025
You could have had him, Democrats. But no, you went with Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and his helicopter hands.
#7
Sunny Hostin – It’s Trump and his voters who wanted to blow things up, just like what happened over the Potomac.
Words fail.
I’m kind of in the ‘pox on both sides’ camp until we actually investigate what happened. But the supreme dumb here is to engage in the wildest of wild ass speculation when there’s still 20-plus Americans that haven’t been pulled out of the icy wreckage just a mile or so from what was meant to be their final destination. It’s beyond ghoulish. But worse, blaming over half the country, remember, Donald Trump won the popular vote, for causing the crash is not exactly the way to endear your ideological movement back into the country’s good graces. It’s dumb politics on top of being cruel and inhuman.
#6
Maggie Hassan – The Science can be wrong. Also Hassan: The Science is settled
The Democratic female senators over the last couple weeks of confirmation hearings have lent their angry, shouting faces to a lot of fun internet memes. But it’s what New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan said to HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that caught my eyes and ears.
So Hassan is screaming that science can be wrong. Boy, have we certainly discovered that to be true, despite what the Biden administration claimed during the previous four years. But in the same freaking sentence, she also refers to science as settled. Um, I hate to be the bearer of bad news to the Granite State senator, but either science can be wrong or science can’t be wrong, unless you use the progressive definitions of science, which I understand to be as follows:
wrong science – science that discredits the political narrative we have, and must be discredited, changed, and updated to reflect where we progressives need it to be.
settled science – any hard data that fits progressives’ predetermined narrative and cannot change even if there’s evidence that develops to the contrary.
#5
Dr. Quintessa Hathaway – everything and everybody is racist
Never heard of her before in my life, but she makes the top five with a stellar entry as part of MSNBC’s coverage of the debate for the next Democratic National Committee chair.
Let’s see. DEI – check. Systemic racism – check. 1619 Project – check. Slavery – check. Yup, that pretty much covers everything, doesn’t it? She gets my vote. Line her up with David Hogg as vice chair, and i’m positive Democrats will be back in power nationally in no time at all.
#4
Ana Navarro – Trump only wants thoughts and prayers when children get shot
Can you imagine how grim it must be to be around the set of the View for the next four years, if they even make it that long? My gracious, what a genuinely unhappy individual. I’d suggest a hobby, but Trump hatred seems all-consuming in her. It’s also a ridiculously dumb claim to make as President Trump just a day or two before started his press conference by asking for a moment of silence and prayer for victims of the Potomac air disaster.
#3
Jaime Harrison – Sure, Kamala could win again. And you get a car! And you get a car!
The outgoing chairman of the DNC sat down with Ed O’Keefe of CBS News as sort of an exit interview. To O’Keefe, it carried the added benefit of receiving his talking points directly on camera from the source instead of having to wait for them to be emailed to him from someone on Harrison’s staff at the Committee.
Honestly, do you think anyone believes that about Kamala Harris? Sure, they’ll say it with cameras rolling, but in their heart of hearts, do you think any major, or minor for that matter, Democratic donor is already looking forward to a Kamala ’28 campaign to support? I’m sorry, but that person doesn’t exist. Kamala Harris is a spent force. She’s the proverbial used fuel rod of nuclear Democratic politics. About all that’s left for her is burying her under Yucca Mountain until her half-life expires.
The former Vice-President took the big plane ride home from Washington to Los Angeles on the 20th, and by nightfall was in front of a camera crew and a fire truck in the Palisades, talking about how we all together need to be about community, because the community is about all of us together. She’s been in national politics since 2016, and unlike Donald Trump, who has learned with each passing year how to run more effectively for office as well as how to govern more effectively once elected, Kamala Harris has not changed a bit. She’s as tone deaf and horrible trying to communicate a coherent thought as ever. Improving in any area of politics is just not in her skill set. Four more years of Chardonnay naps and meandering speeches given to Planned Parenthood fundraisers aren’t going to make her any more palatable to the majority of the country.
#2
Tennessee State Sen. Heidi Campbell – Dictators were for school choice, too
You love to see it when Democrats begin developing a bench of people saying dumb things. I mean, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Nancy Pelosi aren’t going to be around forever. The baton of stupid has to be passed down to the next generation at some point, right? Let me take you to the Tennessee legislature.
Now the bill under consideration, of course, is HB 6004. It says so right on the screen in the bottom left corner. It did pass, will be signed by Governor Bill Lee next week, and goes a very long way to establish school choice in the Volunteer State. If a parent has a kid in a failing school in Memphis, they will be able to take that money as a voucher and apply it to a private school in order to give their child a chance at a better education. Senator Campbell thinks that’s just what North Korea does – let parents opt their kids out from a failing state school and go to a private school. As we all know, all the cool dictators and despots around the globe allow their citizenry to do that for their kids.
The fun part of this clip, in case you don’t know about Ms. Campbell, is that she herself went to a private school. But I guess that’s understandable, since one has to be properly educated in order to fight for the rest of her eventual constituents to remain in substandard educational institutions.
The extra kicker? Her kids avoided Hillsboro High School in Nashville, the boundaries in which she lives, in order to send them to a private school.
And if that weren’t enough, here’s her own reasoning why she opted out of the public school for her kids in order to put them in private school.
… has a diverse student body…is known for its academic excellence and commitment to students.
Racial demographics 12.5% Black or African American, 10.7% Two or more races, 9.4% Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, 4.0% Hispanic/Latino, and 0.4% American Indian or Alaska Native.— Senator Heidi Campbell (@Campbell4TN) January 30, 2025
She told a radio show on Groundhog Day last year that for her kids, it was “their community. That’s where they feel comfortable. It was a cultural thing.” Hmm. Doing the math from her tweet here, adding up the 12.5% Black, 10.7% mixed race, 9.4% Asian/Pacific Islander, 4% Latino, and 0.4% Native American, I come up with 40% minorities. Unstated in her stats are all the white kids, which make up the bulk of the other 60% of the school’s population.
Would you care to take a stab at the racial mix of Hillsboro, where she wants everyone else’s kids to go, by force, without a choice in the matter, but not her own children? 39.7% Black, 8.8% white, and, well, you really don’t even need to go much further down the line, do you? In spite of her hypocrisy and idiocy on the subject, the bill thankfully passed with ease.
#1
Aaron Rupar – This you?
There are few people smarmier and more disingenuous online than Aaron Rupar. If there is a remote possibility of micro-parsing a video clip totally out of context, sometimes down to the millisecond, in order to make a Republican look and/or sound bad and then gaslight you about it and call it journalism, Rupar is your guy. Friday at Karoline Leavitt’s second press briefing of the Trump era, she announced that in the new media chair was a member of Ruthless Podcast, John Ashbrooke. Full disclosure, John and I are very good friends and go back a long, long way. I’m thrilled he got to go. Rupar was incensed. Here’s what he put up on X.
Karoline Leavitt is now using the White House briefing room to do promotion for rightwing podcasts pic.twitter.com/J0wAr4CqVr
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 31, 2025
In a vacuum, one might look at this critique and say well, technically, he has a point. A few minutes later, however, Stephen Miller pulled up this tweet from Rupar’s timeline taking a selfie from the podium during a Biden era briefing from the very same Brady room.
https://t.co/cLJFc2VCLT pic.twitter.com/QthEW56kKO
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 31, 2025
This you, bruh?
Seriously, as a person who straddles between the old media of talk radio and the new media of podcasting and internet column writing, I appreciate the spirit of what Leavitt is trying to do with the new media chair. I just think the White House is missing an opportunity to reward the godfather of all of us who are taking new media into arenas that once were thought impossible.
Leavitt and the Comms people at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should name the seat the Andrew Breitbart Memorial New Media Chair. Trust me when I tell you, having known Andrew for years before his very untimely passing on March 1, 2012, occupying that seat, even for only a day, would be an honor.
