Apophasis: Mentioning something by saying it will not be mentioned.

It's a sly debater's trick, and a favorite James Taranto term during his days as editor of The Wall Street Journal feature "Best of the Web Today." 

CNN This Morning host Audie Cornish employed a cunning variation on apophasis today to dunk on Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Cornish began by playing a clip of Bondi, in the context of Charlie Kirk's assassination, saying:

"There's free speech, and then there's hate speech. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."

Cornish then displayed a post by conservative activist Erick Erickson, the first line of which read: "Our Attorney General is apparently a moron."

Cornish sanctimoniously said:

"I won't repeat the first line, because there's no need to insult the attorney general."

Riight.

Think about it. What better way to insult Bondi than to draw attention to that first line by saying you wouldn't repeat it? Viewers' eyes surely shot to it.

If Cornish were sincere in not wishing "to insult the attorney general," she wouldn't have displayed Erickson's post at all. She could simply have quoted him: "No ma'am. That is not the law."

Cornish then turned to Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a New York Times White House "correspondent." As our Clay Waters has observed, Kanno-Youngs comes across as a liberal editorialist, not an ostensibly objective correspondent.

Today, Kanno-Youngs ominously warned that Bondi's statement, taken with VP Vance having guest-hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast yesterday:

"Foreshadow something that goes beyond what we've seen in terms of cancel culture."

Kanno-Youngs didn't specify just what he doomsayed as a Republican plan even worse than cancel culture: an existential threat to democracy, perhaps?

Here's the transcript.

CNN This Morning
9/16/25
6:26 am EDT

AUDIE CORNISH: Okay, let me play for you a piece of tape. This is the U.S. Attorney General, who was asked a question about hate speech versus free speech. 

PAM BONDI: There's free speech, and then there's hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. 

We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. 

CORNISH: And then I want to show you a tweet from a conservative activist, Erick Erickson. I won't repeat the first line, because there's no need to insult the attorney general.

But he says, no, ma'am, that is not the law. 

And I want to talk to you, because it's one thing to say, employer, you're a private, take an action. There may be levers of the state that are brought to bear in defining and going after hate speech.

What do you see in how the administration is talking about this? 

ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: Right. Those comments by the attorney general, as well as the vice president's guest hosting of Charlie Kirk's podcast yesterday, specifically when he invited Stephen Miller onto that podcast, that foreshadows actually something that goes beyond what we've seen in terms of cancel culture.