Cockburn’s Diary

Are books about Tucker Carlson not guaranteed bestsellers? That’s the claim of Politico’s Michael Schaffer today, who revealed that Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by the New York Times magazine’s Jason Zengerle has been shelved by Little, Brown & Co. According to Schaffer, “the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer.” Tucker Carlson, publishing house poison?

Briahna Joy Gray, the former Bernie Sanders deputy press secretary and fierce defender of Palestine, has been ejected from the Hill’s YouTube show Rising. Gray, the regular co-host with Reason’s Robby Soave, tweeted out an unsigned termination letter from parent company Nexstar, in which her first name had been misspelled twice. Sources confirm that the decision was made by the parent company and that Hill management had no say.

The morning after the night before The week in Washington was overshadowed somewhat by the antics up the Acela corridor in New York, where a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records. For Trump haters, Thursday’s decision adds to a long list of “firsts”: he’s the first president to be impeached twice, the first president to be found liable for sexual abuse... and now, the first president to be convicted of a felony. But as with his previous court fights — over E. Jean Carroll’s accusations of sexual impropriety against him and Letitia James’s real-estate fraud case — it’s not yet clear how the guilty verdict will harm him in the polls as he attempts to be reelected as president.

Cockburn snagged an invite to Tulsi Gabbard’s book party in DC on Thursday night, hosted by Spectator editor-at-large Ben Domenech and his wife Meghan McCain. Some Fox News heavy hitters such as Harris Faulkner and Howie Kurtz were there, as well as Mark Halperin, Robby Soave, Mary Margaret Olohan, Ryan Girdusky, Amber and Jonathan Duke, Bethany Mandel, Juliegrace Brufke, Reagan Reese, Vanessa Santos and others. Word on the street was that one day prior, Tulsi was informed by President Donald Trump that she would not be chosen as his vice president.

Elon Musk has often clashed with members of the tech press — irritated by their “targeting” of him over minor matters such as how he runs his businesses and who he fires. He has a longstanding feud with contentious Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz — but is that all for show? That’s the astonishing claim of self-described “investigative journalist” Nicole Slaski, @coolndizabled on TikTok. In a video this week, Slaski talked about how she’d been speaking to a Thiel Fellow, John H. Meyer, who alleges he has been “falsely” imprisoned for arson — and says that Meyer had told her that Lorenz and Musk were in fact romantically involved with each other.  https://www.tiktok.

Barron Trump, modern-day Octavian? In the weirder quarters of the right-wing internet, kooks have long made comparisons between Donald Trump and the emperors of Ancient Rome — viewing him as a Caesar wronged by his rivals and betrayed by his friends, willing that one day his successor might avenge him. A story this week gave fuel to the fire that Trump’s youngest son Barron would become the Octavian to his Julius. The Mail Online reports how Barron has “quietly blossomed into an engaging young man who has leading conservatives purring over his charm and political acumen” and describes him as a “strapping 6ft 7in teen who has never uttered a word in public.” “I see all the attributes of a future president if he has the appetite for it. And why not?

Rising from the ashes of anti-porn laws racked up by hardline Republicans in Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma comes a team-switcher who flipped from flying his freak flag to wiping his history of porn likes on Twitter. Dan Osborn, who is married with children per his website, is the Democrat-turned-Independent running for a US Senate seat in Nebraska this November. He’s leaning heavily on his time helming a local union, but it’s his extracurricular activities that raised Cockburn’s eyebrows — mostly the slew of hardcore gay and straight porn he’s liked on Twitter. The faint-hearted should skip to the next item now...

Who pays for posts? A new post on X from “Billboard Chris” provides some insight into how the online influencer racket actually works. Earlier this week, pro-Trump poster Ryan Fournier shared a suspect report that claimed former president Donald Trump was considering picking North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to be his VP — and then listed all of the reasons why that would be a bad idea. The problem? Billboard Chris points out that an “influencer marketing firm” tried to pay him to post the exact same thing.  “I’ve been told there’s a story dropping today that I think would fit well in your feed re a GOP gov who vetoed a bill that would’ve banned biological males playing in female sports. Wanted to see what your rate was to share/write a post?

Who turned the Republican National Committee into a low-budget slasher flick? Just days after Trump’s chosen successors to chairwoman Ronna McDaniel took over the GOP, nearly sixty staffers were ruthlessly shown the door. A source tells Cockburn that Trump informed the new co-chairs, Michael Whatley and Lara Trump, that he wanted “shock and awe” and “headlines”. He got what he wanted: nearly every major media outlet breathlessly covered the mass firings and put “bloodbath” back into the lexicon weeks before Trump used it to describe the auto industry.

The fires of liberty Dramatic scenes at the new Dupont Circle headquarters of Reason this week, as the libertarian magazine’s staff evacuated due to billowing plumes of smoke from a first-floor fire.“The staff of Reason was briefly driven out of our Connecticut Avenue offices by a literal dumpster fire nearby on Tuesday,” editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward confirmed to Cockburn. “Everyone is fine, and our only regret is there was no private firefighting company to call in our time of distress.” The Spectator’s Washington editor Amber Duke was on the scene for a taping of her new YouTube show with Robby Soave. She offered Cockburn her retelling of events.

Cockburn was surprised to find out that Madame Secretary has found a new line of work — Broadway producer. Hillary Clinton, along with fellow Broadway mogul Lin-Manuel Miranda, hosted a fundraiser for President Biden on Wednesday night at a presentation of Suffs, a musical about the women’s suffrage movement and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The show apparently first opened in 2022 where it received middling reviews and had a short run. The New York Times review called it “all work and mostly no play.”  So Cockburn finds himself wondering — who asked for this?

Is Bud Light alpha again? The roughnecks at the Teamsters Union announced a boycott of Molson Coors this week, in solidarity with striking workers of the Local 997. They issued a flyer urging people to not buy brews such as Coors Light, Miller Light and Yuengling, as well as Topo Chico Hard Seltzer. In organizing the boycott, the Teamsters point out that “there are alternative beers available from model employers, such as products brewed by Teamsters at Anheuser Busch” and lists them... including the recently troubled Bud Light.

Candace Owens’s watch at the Daily Wire has ended. The news came in the form of an X post from Wire CEO and Lady Ballers star Jeremy Boreing this morning: “Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship.”  “The rumors are true — I am finally free,” Owens tweeted shortly after, along with a plug for her Locals page, a link to a site where you can donate her money and a pledge of more to come.  The separation comes shortly after Owens said she’d “stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” making her exit a big win for trans rights. As they say en France, quand on vient pour la reine, il ne faut pas la manquer.

In 2015, hackers accessed the user data of Ashley Madison, a website that helps facilitate clandestine romantic affairs. The logins of millions of users were leaked. Politicians, reality TV stars and ordinary people just trying to cheat on their spouses were exposed. To this day, the database remains searchable on a series of websites, such as Ashley.Cynic.Al and CheckAshleyMadison.com.  Many of the people whose emails were in the hack have since gone on to illustrious careers, happy to know that their 2015-era obscurity saved them from embarrassing revelations and awkward conversations. Cockburn confirmed this week that the old realtor email of Congresswoman Nancy Mace was found on one such database. Now, there could be an innocent explanation for this.

NBC anchors play with traffic Spotted: NBC News anchors Chuck Todd and Hallie Jackson furiously waving cars under a parking garage gate after the State of the Union address. Cars started to pile up at a broken pay station before an enthusiastic Jackson, who hosts Hallie Jackson NOW, yelled down the ramp for everyone to line up bumper-to-bumper so they could follow each other out before the gate closed in between cars.  “I feel bad,” Jackson lamented as one car missed the cutoff. Joe Biden uses human shields to avoid Pelosi: source Never fear, “Uncommitted” voters. It turns out Joe Biden may have more in common with Hamas than previously thought.

The biggest drama coming out of CPAC last week comes courtesy of a woman who wasn’t even admitted. Amanda Moore is a freelance reporter best known for going “undercover” with the MAGA movement. She found herself denied entry to the event, as one of the “propagandists” singled out by ACU chairman Matt Schlapp, along with reporters from HuffPost and Mother Jones. Instead Moore sat in the lobby of the hotel where the conference was hosted, writing about the experience for the Nation. Ben Goggin is the deputy tech editor at NBC News, whose specialties include extremism. Goggin wrote a piece about the “Nazis” who went to CPAC and “mingled openly.

National Harbor, Maryland Hello from the press pen at CPAC — the only part of the convention center that’s as full as previous years. There have been ten empty rows in front of Cockburn in the auditorium for most of the conference. President Trump’s address tomorrow lunch time should change that — but which other speakers will? South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, apparently: people filed in to see her when she spoke this afternoon. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris... they suck,” she said, to applause. The media row outside is half as populated as previous years. The attendees are noticeably older: you’d be hard-pressed to find a college student here (Cockburn’s nieces skipped it).

Interested in swapping seats with President Joe Biden? The Oval Office desk chair isn’t up for grabs — at least, not yet — but you are welcome to bid on a Cadillac once leased by Amtrak Joe. Since the DMV presumably took the keys away from the well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory, Biden will no longer need those hot wheels with the custom Kona Brown interior. If you’re lucky, the sedan may even come with a few boxes of classified documents in the trunk, assuming the DoJ didn’t find them all during its last sweep. The car, which Delaware Cadillac is selling, has fewer than 16,000 miles on it, perhaps another testament to Biden’s purported love of public transportation.

It looks like Sebastian Gorka has been booted from the MAGA movement. The self-proclaimed “dragon of Budapest” first raised eyebrows a few weeks ago when he needled Human Events editor Jack Posobiec for suggesting the FBI had planted pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC on January 6. Posobiec had pointed out that the recovered bombs looked awfully similar to those used in FBI training. “Right Jack. Because are soooooo many different types of plumber’s end caps out there,” Gorka snarked. On his show he then made a point of rehashing Posobiec’s absurd Pizzagate allegations.Now, Gorka has really kicked the hornet’s nest by not-so-subtly accusing journalist Tucker Carlson of being an “agent of the Kremlin” for choosing to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The ever-joyful People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have put the nail in their no-fun coffin by announcing a new target: the bizarre and beloved Pennsylvania-Dutch tradition of pulling a groundhog out of his burrow to predict the weather.  On this Groundhog Day morning, Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring, but PETA had to go and rain on everyone’s parade by reminding us that Phil “is not a meteorologist.”  PETA branded the celebration “a cruel holiday display” because groundhogs are “naturally shy, sensitive prey animals who react poorly when handled in front of raucous crowds.