Dem
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GOP
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Donald Trump is waging war on DEI and trans people, so it is hardly surprising that his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, a gen-Zer herself, is now waging war on... pronouns. Strunk and White famously observed that you should write with nouns and verbs. Little did they know that someday pronouns would be the hottest part of speech.
Leavitt said yesterday: "As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios." If a reporter's bio says: "I work for NBC," they will apparently be excommunicated. After all, "I" is the first-person singular pronoun. Can't do that.
She is not the only one waging a war on those innocent little words. Katie Miller, a senior DOGEy, sent out an e-mail with the text: "As a matter of policy, I don't respond to people who use pronouns in their signatures as it shows they ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts." White House Communications Director Steve Cheung also chimed in: "If The New York Times spent the same amount of time actually reporting the truth as they do being obsessed with pronouns, maybe they would be a half-decent publication."
Matt Berg, who works for Crooked Media, which runs Pod Save America, normally does not have pronouns in his e-mail signature. As an experiment, he added "he/his" and asked Miller a question about Ukraine. The answer was nearly identical to Cheung's response.
Trump has also banned federal employees from putting pronouns in their e-mail signatures. Thank goodness he's spending his time and energy on the things that really matter to Americans. Well, at least when he's not golfing, that is. (V)