Society

Judging by some of the responses to Tucker Carlson’s announcement of his forthcoming interview with Vladimir Putin, you'd think the former Fox News host had been caught driving a tank into Kharkiv. Naturally, Cockburn is reserving judgment until he's seen the conversation itself — which is scheduled to be released this evening. Of course, Carlson has a track record of going easy in interviews with morally dubious guests such as Andrew Tate, Russell Brand and Kevin Spacey — and several other outlets were declined the opportunity to grill Putin by the Kremlin. Nonetheless, the reactions to Carlson's presence in Moscow seem particularly highly strung given no one currently knows what questions he asked. Among the most vocal critics of Carlson has been Hillary Clinton.

The past few days have been all smiles for E. Jean Carroll. She flashed her pearly whites at the jury after defeating Donald Trump in a defamation case on Friday. She beamed for the cameras outside the courtroom. And she’s been radiant in her CNN and MSNBC interviews. But it's not justice or vindication that has Carrol elated: it's the promise of a brand-new wardrobe.  Carroll plans to foot the bill with the $83.3 million in defamation damages that a federal jury ruled Trump must pay her. Carroll appeared on MSNBC Monday night, alongside her lawyers, to dish about her winnings with Rachel Maddow. She had previously hinted that she would use the “money for something that Donald Trump hates,” like a fund for women that he has reportedly sexually assaulted.

"We are not the Fox News of the left,” says Tara McGowan. “We are legitimate journalism.” We are sitting in the lobby bar of the Edition Hotel in Manhattan as McGowan tells me about Courier, the network of local-news outlets she founded in 2019 after a successful career in Democratic politics. Courier, in McGowan’s telling, “is a network of pro-democracy newsrooms across the country that reach passive news consumers where they are with good factual local news and reporting.” McGowan rejects allegations that Courier is a partisan political operation masquerading as a news outlet. Courier isn’t pro-Democratic Party, she says. It’s “pro-democracy.

Axios reporter Emily Peck isn’t afraid to state the obvious out loud and pass it off as inspired. In a hit piece published Thursday, “Why Trump supporters give him a pass on record-high unemployment,” Peck made the case that the economy suffered during Trump's last months in office due to coronavirus. Huh, who knew a global pandemic and lockdown could cause record unemployment?  “Trump's economic record is only good if you leave off what happened from March 2020 to the end of his administration,” Peck wrote, as if that were not exactly what any reasonable person would do. Prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the poverty rate hit a sixty-year low, and the country saw the largest real household median income increase since 1967.

If there is one thing the New York Times is good at these days, it's offending the public. Conservatives are often enraged at the Gray Lady from the sidelines, while its subscribers feel betrayed by anything the paper publishes from right of the center-left. This year, the Times wrapped up a particularly offensive Christmas gift — an op-ed by Gaza City mayor Yahya R. Sarraj condemning the Israeli military.   The Times published Sarraj’s essay, “I Am Gaza City’s Mayor. Our Lives and Culture Are in Rubble,” on Christmas Eve. According to the city’s mayor, Israeli’s bombardment of Gaza has resulted in more than 20,000 deaths and the destruction of Palestinian cultural institutions.

In the Phetasy.com book club, we recently read the famous social science tome, Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. In it he examines the decline of social capital across various facets of American life. Based on his 1995 essay of the same title, the book was groundbreaking when it appeared in 2000. Putnam had noticed a trend: Americans were spending more and more time alone. His book analyzed the data and contemplated what it meant for our democracy and humanity. Although his observations were a harbinger of the oft-cited “epidemic of loneliness” we are currently living through, in our post-Trump, post-pandemic pre-maggedon reality, Bowling Alone reads like a nostalgic look at the good ol’ days. Days when people still interacted at all.

When you exist in a mixed-race family like I do — black dad, white Jewish mom, Asian uncle, Latino ex-husband — race is something that’s hard to escape. We talk about our similarities, explore our differences and consider how the experiences of one generation might be similar or different for the next. Race is somehow always on our tongues. But that doesn’t necessarily make my family racist. Nor does it make the royal family racist either.  Back in March 2021 during Oprah Winfrey’s sit-down with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I was horrified by their now infamous exchange over the alleged concern by unnamed Windsors about the skin color of the Sussexes’ first kid. We all know what supposedly went down.

Susanna Gibson, the nurse turned camgirl turned defeated Democratic candidate for Virginia State Assembly, has scores to settle. In an interview with Politico magazine's Alexander Burns, she reveals all about what it was like to deal with the blowback from the national media discovering her side hustle, saying the ordeal "fundamentally changed" her "as a human." "My entire life was rocked on September 11, when the article ran," Gibson says. Cockburn can't imagine — truly the worst thing to happen on that date. Burns characterizes Gibson as being "captured in a recorded video performing sex acts online with her husband" and says that an "opponent exposed her private digital life to the public.

Around 750 employees for the Washington Post walked out on their jobs Thursday in the first labor strike against the newspaper in fifty years. A couple hundred of the actively striking employees gathered outside of the paper’s headquarters in Washington, DC, where they marched in tandem and noshed on coffee, pastries and pizza provided by local businesses. Coincidentally, that is about even with the number of jobs — 240 — the Post says it needs to cut amid negative profits and struggles to grow its subscriber base. So far 120 employees have accepted voluntary buyouts to leave their roles, meaning just as many will likely be laid off in the coming months. Nonetheless, the employees mostly seemed happy and excited to be on strike.

Pope Francis threw down the gauntlet earlier this month by removing Joseph Strickland from his position as bishop of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, after the conservative church leader reportedly refused to resign. Now, reports the AP, the Pope is enacting similar vengeance on another of his critics by revoking Cardinal Raymond Burke’s “right to a subsidized Vatican apartment and salary in the second such radical action against a conservative American prelate this month.” Strickland, an outspoken traditionalist, has long been a thorn in liberal Francis’s side.

MSNBC has finally found a host that's de trop for them. Outspoken critic of Israel Mehdi Hasan had his show canceled by the network. Semafor announced the shake up on Thursday morning as part of broader changes to MSNBC’s weekend programming. Hasan’s show has been canceled but he will remain with the network as an on-camera analyst and fill-in host. Ayman Mohyeldin’s program will expand an hour to replace the vacated slot.  Hasan has been one of MSNBC’s most outspoken supporters of Palestine. During a November 16 interview with Israeli government advisor Mark Regev, Hasan attempted to get his guest to agree that Israel has wittingly killed children.

On a summer afternoon in Erie, Pennsylvania, Right Side Broadcasting Network host Matthew Alvarez was doing what the outlet does best: interviewing diehard supporters of former president Donald Trump before one of his raucous rallies, the WWE-style events that defined his 2016 sprint to the White House and continued after his 2020 election loss. At one point during his cheery canvass of the crowd, Alvarez pointed his microphone at a stocky man wearing a Trump 2024 baseball cap and a “Thin Blue Line” T-shirt. “Joe Biden is a disgrace to this country,” the man said in a thick drawl. “And so are all the left and the RINOs, the globalists, every one of ’em! Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!” “I agree with you on that,” Alvarez cautiously replied.

For the illiberal left, it’s not enough that you submit to their cultural revolution. You must also underwrite it. This happens not only at the state level, with issues such as abortion and public-school curricula, but at the private level as well. A good recent example includes efforts by certain Wikipedia editors to censor mentions of a journalism award handed out recently to the journalist behind the so-called Twitter Files. Wikipedia: glad-handing for donations on the front end, while certain “master editors” censor factual events on the back end! On November 1, journalist Matt Taibbi received a journalism award for his efforts to uncover the incestuous relationship between Big Tech and censorious federal apparatchiks.

The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn announced that a parish priest has been demoted for allowing pop singer Sabrina Carpenter to film her new music video in the sanctuary of the church. Money provided to the church from Carpenter's production team will also be re-donated to a crisis pregnancy center. Carpenter's music video for her single “Feather”, which was partially filmed at the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Brooklyn, New York, dropped on Halloween last week. In the video, Carpenter is seen dancing provocatively in black underwear in the church sanctuary and in front of the altar, which were decorated with pastel and neon props that featured obscene language.