Society

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.

Along a twist in the Connecticut River within an old-style colonial Vermont home lives Meredith Angwin, the Jewish grandmother who saw what almost no one else did: the coming downfall of the American electrical system. Three years ago, Angwin self-published Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, the first-ever explanation for laymen of America’s labyrinthine, abstruse power markets. Her diagnosis was simple and troubling: when America moved away from the monopoly utility system in the Nineties toward restructured electricity markets, all players were divested from the responsibility of keeping the lights on.

CNN’s media reporter Oliver Darcy took a blowtorch to one of his network’s rival outlets for daring to host a Republican presidential debate and “collaborating” with so-called extremist partners, like a YouTube competitor and a massive radio company that used to host his former boss, Glenn Beck. “NBC News has made its decision,” Darcy fumed in a blog post about the network’s partnership with Rumble and Salem Media... which CNN has previously partnered with for multiple Republican primary debates. “Now it’s up to other news organizations to do so as well.” Awkwardly for Darcy, as of the time he published his article, his own network was working to secure the exact same kind of partnership with the Republican National Committee.

It's been a year since Elizabeth II’s death and Harry and Meghan are looking to make their move. With the Queen — that old bulwark of tradition — finally out of the way, the couple has judged it safe enough to return to the royal fold. Their in: Prince Edward and Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh.    Cockburn can only imagine what ruin the attention-loving couple has in store for the British royal family. And while he wouldn’t inflict Harry and Meghan on his worst enemy, Cockburn can’t hide his excitement that they are finally making their way back across the pond.

The recent spate of articles about attempts by different countries to land vehicles on the Moon make it clear that a new space race is on. Just last month, Russia launched its first mission there in forty-seven years. And although the automated Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed at the last minute, India’s heavily-instrumented Chandrayaan-3 landed successfully just four days later. NASA itself aims to return humans to the lunar surface in 2025 with its Artemis program. Remarkably, more than eighty countries, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates, have thus far established some kind of presence in space.

Of all the things to lead to a Washington Post smackdown, Cockburn never would have expected it to happen over a pizza festival.   On Wednesday, Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy posted a call with a Washington Post reporter on social media. Portnoy had caught wind that the paper was running a hit piece on his One Bite Pizza Festival taking place in Brooklyn on Saturday and decided to hit back first.   https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1704574353415823411 Portnoy was tipped off by an email that reporter Emily Heil had sent to one the event’s largest sponsors.