Politics

Cockburn has done his fair share of jail time, mostly on overblown bootlegging charges. Yet after paying his dues to society, he decided to venture to a recent press conference on the situation of those imprisoned after the January 6 riot. The Patriot Freedom Project helps aid the families of the January 6 prisoners with legal costs and living expenses. Now, the organization is advocating for a review of the prison conditions of the inmates. One inmate’s mother said, “The conditions at the DC jail are horrendous. His rations often smelled like cleaning fluid. There were pubic hairs included in the small portions of his food. The drinking water, visibly dirty. Mold was visible in cells, and roaches lived amongst [the prisoners].

Lessons from Watergate Today marks fifty years since the Watergate break-in. Given that the scandal is something of a founding myth for modern Washington journalism, there is no shortage of reflections on the meaning of the story half a century later — and what has changed between 1972 and 2022. One popular parallel is between Nixon and Trump, with contemporary commentators claiming that the big change between then and now is a level of partisanship that makes the successful ousting of a sitting president practically impossible. Witness, for instance, the one-sided proceedings of the House’s January 6 Committee. Away from this rather tired and often overstated analogy, more mischievous comparisons are possible.

The recent controversy over prominent legal commentator Ilya Shapiro's employment at Georgetown University Law Center ended last week. In a Wall Street Journal column on a Friday, Shapiro declared that his cancel culture nightmare was over, vindicated after a four-month investigation into a troublesome tweet. On Monday, the WSJ ran the rare immediate follow-up column, where Shapiro announced his decision to quit the university rather than subject himself to an inevitable future cancelation. Shapiro's experience was astounding in how much it reveals about the insanity of the woke left brigades, and how much their heckler's veto is empowered by the administrators at universities like Georgetown.

Senator Marco Rubio today sent a strongly worded letter to Harvard president Lawrence Bacow expressing concerns prompted by a Spectator magazine investigation by this reporter that Harvard may be “actively supporting [America’s] principal adversary,” the Chinese Communist Party. “Throughout the pandemic, we were told to trust the experts," Rubio told The Spectator exclusively. "But what we increasingly see is so-called trusted experts and institutions engaged in highly questionable behavior. This looks really bad, and if it turns out to be true, any last shred of faith that the American people had in these ‘experts’ will be deservedly stamped out.

Biden’s geopolitical reality check Joe Biden’s plan to visit Saudi Arabia in July, announced this week, marks one of the most clear-cut foreign policy U-turns of his presidency. On the campaign trail, Biden boasted about his plans to “make a pariah” out of the kingdom. In his first few months in office, the president outlined a foreign policy that drew clear lines between the world’s democracies and autocracies — with Saudi Arabia on the wrong side of that divide, of course. But the interconnected realities of global and domestic politics, as well as soaring prices, have forced Biden to rethink such a clear-cut approach and seek some level of cooperation with the Gulf petrostate. The president has been criticized for a move that many in his own party are uneasy about.

The American Conservation Coalition last week held its first official summit, hosting a vibrant crowd of over 250 people. The organization boasted speakers such as Michigan congressman Peter Meijer, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu and conservative radio host Jason Rantz. Cockburn was lucky to attend — and even luckier to partake in the open bar. The many speakers held talks and panels on topics such as China as a player in the clean energy arms race, nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, and the deregulation of free market economies. While it is still far from the mainstream attitude in conservative thought, the ACC represents a growing minority of people who recognize climate change as a threat, only without the left's “doom and gloom.

The Democrats' democracy hypocrisy The Democrats, you may have heard, are the responsible party. Joe Biden wants you to know that this is a dangerous moment for American democracy. The Republic’s future is in doubt — and only he and his Democratic colleagues can be trusted to save it. With the January 6 hearings in full-swing, the midterms approaching and Biden keen to talk about anything other than the increasingly gloomy economic picture, don’t expect the death-of-democracy language to temper any time soon. The problem is that, time and again, the party’s actions don’t match the rhetoric. Josh Kraushaar reports on a particularly pernicious example of that gap in his National Journal column this morning.

Imagine a BLM member's trial in which the prosecution simply played violent videos over and over, which weren't even related to the defendant in question. Sound fair? No? Well, welcome to the Third Trump Impeachment, aka the January 6 televised hearings. Having watched a lot of PBS back in the day, I kept waiting for chairman Bennie Thompson to promise a Democratic Party tote bag if I phoned in my pledge of $50 or more. That was the tone from, as they say, gavel to gavel. But there are so many important things being left out in the Dems' desire to showcase violence. Here are just five of the issues that the hearings have left unquestioned. *** Dems and groupie Liz Cheney constantly use words like coup, insurrection, incitement, sedition, and treason.