Cockburn dislikes the latent misogyny behind the rise of this term ‘Karen’, which is used to describe any white woman who is caught being aggressive on social media. Then again, Karens don’t have to be female; plenty of men fit the term perfectly. One of them is the President of France.Yes, Emmanuel Macron lost his rag again on Wednesday, this time berating a French journalist who dared to try to cover the President’s complicated maneuvers in Lebanon.
President Trump spoke mildly in defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse on Tuesday, saying that the 17-year-old seemed to be defending himself when he shot three people, killing two of them. NPR, fresh off of interviewing In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil, had something stern to say about that, tweeting 'President Trump declined to condemn the actions of the suspected 17-year-old shooter of three protesters against police brutality in Kenosha — claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense.’ https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1300614359236964358 Without evidence!
Let nobody say the outgoing president of Liberty University is not an intellectual.Cockburn will not belabor you with the full tragedy of Jerry Falwell Jr. Who is he kidding, you already have read (though not seen, mercifully) all the details.Falwell’s rapid downfall is a testament to the dangers of hubris. At the tender age of 44, Falwell was handed the presidency of a university his father had already built. He was paid roughly $1 million a year for this privilege. To keep the job indefinitely, Falwell didn’t need to do much. Even taking photos of himself half-undressed with a woman half his age at a yacht party, and entering into a ménage à trois with a pool boy, would have been completely fine.
I can’t claim to know what Jake Auchincloss was thinking when he asked, 10 years ago, why it was acceptable for Pakistanis to burn the American flag but not Americans to burn the Qur’an. But I can make an educated guess. Auchincloss, currently front-runner in the race to succeed Rep. Joe Kennedy in the Massachusetts Fourth Congressional District, was a 22-year-old Harvard student when protests erupted across the Muslim world after an American Christian preacher threatened to burn the Muslim holy book. It was the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and Terry Jones wanted to memorialize that somber event in a way sure to attract attention.
On Thursday afternoon, prior to the final night of the Democratic convention, four New York Times opinion columnists gathered to discuss the political landscape. Of course, millions of people do that every single day. The special conceit of the Times opinion staff is that it believes its discussions are worth broadcasting to the world. The special curse for the rest of us is that many find them worth listening to. The theme of Thursday’s discussion was the awful, terrifying, unspeakable, unthinkable idea that a major presidential candidate might delegitimize an election outcome.
When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Religion News Service reported that she ‘now considers herself a Black Baptist.’ Black with a capital ‘B’, note. The upper-case letter is one of the shibboleths of identity politics: it’s Black, not black, lives that matter. In other places we read that Sen. Harris is just Baptist, with no mention of race — but we can be certain that if Harris describes herself as Black Baptist, it is with a capital letter. The lower-case designation ‘black’ has been regarded as disrespectful in the African American community since long before BLM. (The legendary civil rights activist W.E.B.
Is there nothing Karlie Kloss can't do? The Midwest-born supermodel and minor member of the Trump Expanded Cinematic Universe has proven herself to be something of a polymath since hanging up her Victoria's Secret Angel wings in 2015. The 29-year-old heads up a coding program to get more young women involved in STEM, hosts the Bravo show Project Runway and, as The Spectator revealed earlier this year, helps craft government healthcare policy through her father Kurt and brother-in-law Jared Kushner. But besides fashion, Kloss's true passion is investing. It's something she must have picked up from her husband, Josh Kushner. Clearly Kloss has an eye for a canny deal, as she's set to splash the cash in the famously lucrative world of legacy print media.
Two months ago, opinion editor James Bennet left the New York Times after, among other things, publishing a senator’s claim that antifa had infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests.Now, two months later, the press doesn’t just admit antifa’s existence. It’s giving them glamorous photo spreads.The Washington Post on Saturday released an essay profiling Portland antifa. The piece never uses the word 'riot'; 'violence' is only mentioned in reference to clashes with the right, not police or besieged courthouse personnel. But the heart of the article isn’t its text. It’s the Post’s determined effort to show that while far-left rioters may claim to be anti-fascism, they are definitely not anti-fashion.
We learned about journalists this past weekend. Specifically, we learned about tech journalists who aren’t particularly interested reporting or analyzing tech as much as they are committed to harvesting click revenue from a young audience engaged with tech and social media platforms. They proved, in other words, that their industry is broken beyond repair.You probably heard that President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was looking at banning the social media video app TikTok on Friday. TikTok has come under scrutiny in the past months over security concerns and its parent company ByteDance’s connections to China. It’s understood to be hacking and using data collected from its users’ phones.
The recent high-profile departures at the New York Times of editorial page editor James Bennet and opinion writer Bari Weiss have left some on the business side of the news industry scratching their heads. Both exited amid ideological turmoil that Weiss detailed in a letter of resignation to the Times’s publisher A.G. Sulzberger, describing the 'hostile work environment' she endured at the hands of fellow editors and staffers. They were wholly intolerant, she said, of her role as a ‘centrist' at the paper. Bennet, said Weiss, had led the effort after President Trump’s election in 2016 to bring in 'voices that would not otherwise appear' in the Times.
Cockburn was recently made aware of a new production at the New York Times, bearing the ominous-in-2020 title Nice White Parents. The podcast, launched on Thursday, is the work of the same people who created Serial, the preposterously popular true crime podcast. This time, Team Serial digs into New York City’s public school system, and specifically, the group they say is the root of all pedagogical evils. 'We’ve tried standardized tests, and charter schools,’ narrator Chana Joffe-Walt solemnly intones in the first episode. 'We’ve tried smaller classes, longer school days, stricter discipline, looser discipline, tracking, differentiation. We’ve decided the problem is teachers, the problem is parents.
Christians around the world have been outraged by Turkey’s decision to convert the Hagia Sophia cathedral into a mosque. This astonishing architectural masterpiece was completed in 537 and is considered one of the Orthodox church’s holy sites. (The cathedral was, for 57 years after the crusades, a Roman Catholic church.) With the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, minarets were added, and it was converted into a mosque. In 1934, the secular leader of Turkey attempted to end the religious division over the building and turned it into a museum.The reader should notice that I place the responsibility for Hagia Sophia’s conversion on the nation of Turkey, not on President Erdogan.
Once upon a time, in the days when you could round a corner in Rome without accidentally tripping over the snoozing spirit of Vatican II and setting it off into a shrieking fit, popes weren’t inaugurated: they were crowned. A magnificent procession accompanied the new pontiff as he was carried into St Peter’s Basilica on the throne-like sedia gestatoria to receive the papal tiara, a triple crown symbolizing the threefold mission of St Peter’s successors: to teach, govern and sanctify. A sobering dose of reality was built into the ceremony. Three times a master of ceremonies would halt the procession in its tracks. Stepping before the pope, he would ignite a bundle of highly flammable flax, issuing a solemn warning as it crumbled into ashes: Sic transit gloria mundi.
One of your irritating cousins on Facebook may have already shared the news about 'Umbrella Man'. The man appeared in a May 27 viral video out of Minneapolis, smashing windows and spraying graffiti at an AutoZone, before quickly departing. Shortly after, the AutoZone was plundered and set ablaze by the mob. Soon, hundreds of businesses across Minneapolis were smashed, looted or destroyed. Rioters exposed the impotence of Minneapolis police by seizing a precinct building and setting it on fire. Within days, riots and looting had scarred not just major cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, but once-sleepy locales like Fort Wayne, Green Bay or Olympia.
Kimberly Guilfoyle has a surprising message for Catholics come November: vote for Donald J. Trump. The former Fox News host, now senior adviser to the President’s reelection campaign and girlfriend of Don Jr, spoke Monday about the role her Catholic faith plays in supporting Trump.While Guilfoyle makes some convincing arguments, Cockburn has a feeling her checkered past may scare some Catholics away.West Coasters certainly remember Guilfoyle for when she was married to then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who of course is now the governor of the Golden State. At the time, Guilfoyle was known to be a charming figure, with her media nickname being ‘the babe of the San Francisco bar’. She was quite open about her sex life too.
The New York Times reports on the struggles faced by families who, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been forced to convert their second homes into their primary homes. The Gray Lady observes: ‘These homeowners share many of the same difficulties as anyone dealing with the coronavirus lockdown — working in communal spaces where their children are now present 24/7, discovering items in their home that need updating, and then renovating a home while they are living in it. In addition, these homeowners must adjust to living in relatively unfamiliar towns, often far from friends, family, or creature comforts like a favorite bagel shop or longtime barber.’ Don't I know it. I consider myself a solidly middle-class American, making about $500,000 a year.
Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s most prominent writer, John Kass, wrote a column decrying the rise in urban violence. Its compelling title: ‘Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: an overwhelming sense of lawlessness.’ In today’s woke world, it is risky to speak such hard truths about gang shootings, unprosecuted shoplifting, looting, carjackings and more. This rising lawlessness is often cloaked in the language of protest, racial justice and income equality. Speaking out against it runs real risks. You might be doxxed, your home tagged with graffiti, or your family threatened.
Though you wouldn’t know it from most American media outlets, the phenomenon of vandalizing and burning religious sites which is accelerating in Europe has, like a virus, jumped an ocean and is now among us. Over the past month, statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary have been damaged in states as far apart as Colorado, Missouri, New York, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. On July 11, a vehicle was driven into a Catholic church in Florida with the clear intent of burning the building to the ground while congregants were inside. But it’s not just Catholic symbols and edifices being targeted. America’s Jewish community has received similar treatment.
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy has released his hotly anticipated interview with President Trump. Normally, in media, an interview with the president of the United States is considered a major score. But in 2020, in some circles, a non-hostile conversation with the Commander-in-Chief is a controversial act. https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1286726116594647049?s=20 https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1286729956500922373?s=20 https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1286733637698768896?s=20 In a way, it is shame. Barstool’s appeal has long been apolitical. The company’s edgy, comedic style resonates with college-aged Americans of all persuasions.
In a startling departure from its typically dogged defenses, Planned Parenthood admitted through clenched teeth this week what many have asserted for decades: that their founder Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenicist.Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced Tuesday that it will remove the name of Margaret Sanger from its Manhattan abortion clinic and will even lobby the city to scrub her name from a street sign near its Bleecker Street location.'The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,’ reads a statement from Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board.
