FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2026
One of them shot off his mouth: In the week before the president's birthday bash, we the people didn't seem to be buying.
We'll let The Hill explain:
Just 16 percent approve of Trump UFC event at White House: Survey
A small portion of Americans approve of a UFC fight night event set to play out on the White House’s South Lawn this weekend, according to a new survey.
Just 16 percent of Americans said it was appropriate for President Trump to host the event at the White House, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found. Another 46 percent said the opposite, while 38 percent said “neither” or were unsure.
The latest survey, conducted this month, included 4,531 U.S. adults and had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
We agree! The word "neither" doesn't seem to make sense in that context, but so it goes when American journalists are forced to traffic in language!
(To see the question respondents were asked, you can just click here.)
On balance, we the people didn't seem to approve of the president's idea. Given the way last Sunday's event played out, we the people may have actually gotten it right, if only in this one instance.
It was at that event that a UFC fighter, in a bit of monster inanity worthy of a Fox News program, loudly shouted, for all to hear, a claim about Michelle Obama intended to be insulting. Prominent know-nothing Joe Rogan was holding the mike when he did that.
("Michelle Obama is a man," this unfortunate fellow screamed.)
On this campus, we weren't exactly all that surprised to learn what that fellow had said. We see similar suggestions made quite routinely on the droog-powered "cable news" program, Gutfeld!.
On that program, we've often noted, the termagant host routinely suggests that Michelle Obama is a man and Barack Obama is gay. As Blue America's news orgs keep averting their gaze, this is the trash can we've chosen
At any rate, so it frequently goes on that grisly program as its host, assisted by a shifting array of droog-adjacent guests, undermines the very possibility of the American project.
At least one major international expert has dubbed these players "Unrecognizables." Explaining that designation, he has said he never knew that you could get people to behave on national TV the way the Unrecognizables do, even if you paid them.
They do behave that way on the Gutfeld! program! Consider what happened on Wednesday evening's edition, where the gaggle of droogs looked like this:
Gutfeld!: Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Tyrus: former professional "wrestler"
Kat Timpf: comedian
Greg Gutfeld: host
Jeff Dye: comedian
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered
That was the all-star cable news lineup. Consider what happened that evening:
At the start of the program's second segment, the Unrecognizables watched some tightly edited videotape of Professor Richardson's recent appearance on Jim Acosta's podcast. To see that short bit of edited tape, you can just click here.
For the record, Richardson is a stone-cold major professor. The panelists seemed to have no earthly idea. Just so you'll know, this:
Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson (born October 8, 1962) is an American historian who works as a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Richardson has authored seven books on history and politics. In 2019, she started publishing Letters from an American, a nightly newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history
Born in Chicago in 1962 and raised in Maine, Richardson attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. She received her AB, MA, and PhD from Harvard University, where she studied under the historians David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp.
As a historian, Richardson advocates studying history to learn how to distill complex situations into something easier to understand.
[...]
In 2021, Richardson appeared on the Forbes 50 over 50 list and received the Frances Perkins Center Intelligence and Courage Award. In 2022, USA Today recognized her as one of the Women of the Year. In 2023, The Guardian described her as the single most important progressive pundit since Edward P. Morgan from the 1960s. In 2024, the Authors Guild Foundation awarded her the Baldacci Award for Literary Activism for 2024. In November 2024, Richardson was awarded the Kidger Award by the New England History Teachers Association at the NCSS Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. In July 2025, Richardson was named to the Time100 Creators of 2025 for Letters from an American, which appears on Facebook (3.2 million followers) and Substack (2.5 million subscribers).
She prepped at Exeter, moved on to Harvard. According to the leading authority, she advocates "studying history to learn how to distill complex situations into something easier to understand."
We aren't prepared to say that that formulation is the professor's fault. But the professor is an extremely well-known American historian, a fact which didn't seem to be known by the Gutfeld! gaggle.
Needless to say, that doesn't mean that everything she ever says will be perfectly clear and will also be perfectly accurate. No one's work is perfect or unassailable, but the work performed on some "cable news" programs tends to constitute an imitation of (human) life.
Full disclosure! In our view, something the professor said to Acosta in the course his podcast was perhaps poorly explained—was in our view hard to follow. Amid the typical clowning by the other panelists, Timpf stated a similar dissatisfaction on the Gutfeld! program this night, in the plainly intelligent way which is virtually unknown to this Fox News Channel program.
Along with that, the deluge! Inevitably, the panelists slipped into their favorite analytical mode. The lowlife messengers opened their traps and the garbage and swill spilled out.
We'll let a bloated blowhard start. In a standard manifestation, the bilious fellow wasn't pleased by what he saw when he looked at the still photo of Richardson and Acosta which loomed up to his left.
The big dope didn't like what he saw. Out of his opened mouth, this:
TYRUS (6/17/26): Idiots like this—who's her makeup artist, Whiteout?
COMPAGNO: [Unrestrained laughter]
AUDIENCE: [Laughter]
TYRUS: They just say—
TIMPF: It's always the whitest lady ever! It's always the whitest lady ever. The whitest lady evvv-er.
TYRUS: She really dressed up for the occasion. She's in a velour bathrobe!
This is the way the game is played on this very dumb messaging show.
For the record, the high-end fashion critic Tyrus was dressed in an oversized sweatshirt this day, with his cap on backwards. For those who care about such matters, Timpf is quite white-skinned herself—but this is the way the game is played on this very dumb primetime "news" show.
We don't have the slightest idea what Timpf's repeated remark was supposed to convey. Compagno merely continued to laugh and laugh, as she typically does when this program's appearance-based insult culture starts to fly around.
There followed a gross bit of misdirection involving Tyrus and Gutfeld. At some point, we'll describe that exchange.
Soon, though, the panelists were back in their zone. It came time for the frequently inarticulate Compagno to deride the professor's appearance as she referred to the comment which had been clipped from the Acosta podcast:
GUTFELD: Emily?
COMPAGNO: Well, no one is more credible to talk about lynching than Kathy Bates and Jim Acosta together...
Formerly "the whitest lady ever," Richardson was now derided as Kathy Bates. Here's a chunk of the statement which followed. We've transcribed it the best we can:
COMPAGNO: Well, no one is more credible to talk about lynching than Kathy Bates and Jim Acosta together! Like those—
We are supposed to understand that from their perspective? From what— I can't, with the condescension coming from the left constantly, ensuring that they are speaking for the same group of people, that she is now sucking the wind out of their voices. Because she is speaking on air, someone actually from that community can't and we're supposed to take her word for it as she purports to speaks for them.
We've transcribed that as best we can. In fact, though, Richardson had made a reference to lynching in the short comment the Gutfeld! producers had clipped. Given that fact, Compagno seemed to be saying this:
She seemed to be saying that Richardson was purporting to speak for Black people in the brief comment in question, and that she was keeping a Black person from going on the air when she appeared with Acosta.
That's the best we can manage concerning what "Kathy Bates" had supposedly been doing in the very short clip which had been aired. Still steaming, the perpetually furious Compagno offered this:
COMPAGNO (continuing directly): And this is what I hate the most. Two things:
Number 1, that people ascribe everything, on the left, with that fighter's comments about Michelle Obama, automatically to Donald Trump. They come down with cancer, with a cold, they get hit by a car, and somehow they will equate it back to—
That was that person's mouth. That wasn't Donald Trump! And secondly, everyone was saying on the left that somehow the celebration, the UFC fight, was beneath the office.
This was in interviews. Beneath the office, like shoving a cigar into an intern's shirt wasn't?
Compagno continued from there, furiously reciting three (or four) additional Democratic horribles, not excluding President Biden's use of an autopen. But first, she angrily traveled thirty years back, returning us to President Clinton and his still-famous cigar.
It's an action for which Clinton has been widely reviled right up the present day. Few presidents have ever been so thoroughly reviled for some set of personal behaviors.
In her fury, Compagno seemed to suggest that no other president could ever be criticized for anything else, given the fact that President Clinton had once behaved that way. The logic tends to run that way on this godforsaken corporate messaging program.
Beyond that, though, was it true? Was it true that people "on the left" had ascribed the fighter's insulting remark about Michelle Obama to President Trump?
Surely, someone had done something like that. There are 340 million people in the country, and Gutfeld!'s producers spend their waking hours search for the person "on the left" who has made the least insightful remark on the given day.
That said, "Kathy Bates" hadn't been shown doing ascribing the fighter's remark to Trump, and no other example had been offered. We were now in a post-logical Lala Land, where this barely recognizable program resides.
In fairness to Compagno, though, would the great and kindly President Trump ever engage in conduct like that? Would he ever imaginably aim an insult at a former first lady?
On Gutfeld!, no—he never would, and he never has! The program's Red American audience will never hear a screamer like Compagno mention a moment like this:
Trump's racist post about Obamas is deleted after backlash...
President Donald Trump's social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as racist.
The Republican president's Thursday night post was deleted Friday and blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation's first Black president and first lady. The deletion, a rare admission of a misstep by the White House, came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed "fake outrage" over the post. After calls for its removal for being racist—including by Republicans—the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously and it had been taken down.
President Trump would never say that Michelle Obama was a man— but he did picture her as an ape! Or rather, it turned out that the staffer had done it, after an extremely high-profile staffer had gone out and said that it was just good clean fun to portray the former first lady that way.
Obviously, President Trump hadn't known about that staffer's blunder either! The two staffers let him down!
This is going very long. For today, we're going to stop, though first we'll mention this:
In truth, we think the Gutfeld! panelists were justified this night in portraying that one thing Richardson said to Acosta as "a stretch."
We've puzzled over the professor's fuller statement. (See minutes 12-16 on the Acosta tape,) Pending further explanation, we'd also be inclined to call it a stretch, or something of that sort.
And yes, the professor's statement did involve "lynching"—and as Timpf quite correctly said, lynching was, and lynching remains, a profoundly serious topic.
We've never seen Timpf get anything right in the way she eventually did this night. But before she got part of this topic right, she played the standard Gutfeld! game, joining the world-class blowhard Tyrus in mocking the professor's appearance.
Later, the professor was turned into Kathy Bates as Compagno went on an extended tear about matters which had nothing to do with what the professor had said.
Within the American context, lynching takes us directly to race, and race is profoundly important. Absent further explanation, we think the professor may have moved a bit too quickly at one point when she spoke with Acosta that day.
We wouldn't call that the end of the world, but it's something we Blues do much too routinely. One day later, Maya Wiley went on Deadline: White House and she went straight to "racist" and "bigotry" when she discussed what the UFC droog had said.
Because we watch the Gutfeld! show, we thought she too was moving too quickly. You see, we've seen Gutfeld play this moronic "she's a man" game with women other than Michelle Obama—with well-known women who are white.
We thought that Wiley, who's very sharp, had moved to race too quickly.
There's much, much more to be said about this general Blue American impulse. That includes the way Blue American agitprop instantly turned to "Jim Crow 2.0" in the wake of two recent Supreme Court decisions.
We think those statements were extremely unwise. Every time we Blues behave that way, we'll guess that thousands of wavering MAGA voters decide to hang into their wings.
Still coming: Jim Crow 2.0? There's much, much more to be said...
