Society

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.

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.

The most recent issue of the New Yorker includes a 5,000-word feature on the police (summary: they are racist). In it, staff writer Jill Lepore drops this frightful fact to illustrate the barbarism of America’s uniformed enforcers:'One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.'Cockburn started writing precisely to avoid ever doing math again, but even to him, this claim sounded like a howler. Two-thirds of all emergency room visits by American young adults were for police injuries?

In an appearance for MSNBC’s Morning Joe, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised the specter that President Trump might lose in November, but then refuse to vacate the White House premises until forced out by noxious chemicals: https://twitter.com/politicususa/status/1285225043988029447 Of course, Pelosi does not remain leader of the ever-transmogrifying Democratic party by expressing original thoughts. She stays in the Speaker’s chair by dutifully amplifying the phobias and obsessions of the DNC rank and file. And this is no exception. By this point, the thought of President Trump refusing to leave power is a genuine mania of the left.The prompt this time was President Trump’s weekend interview with Mike Wallace’s son at Fox News.

‘Bari Weiss’s letter was tame,’ a New York Times insider tells me. ‘She could have named names. She could have said, “There are dozens of other instances of bullying and harassment.” Because there are.’ What took Weiss so long? Prominent writers at the Times never accepted her as a colleague. Instead, her colleagues on the opinion page sniped and leaked against her on Twitter from the first. Was it ‘tall poppy syndrome’ — resentment of a young writer who, in an era when legacy media seem to be in perpetual crisis, landed a plum job at the Times?

It is a truth generally acknowledged that any statement of civil principles will now be met with pitchforks and personal attacks, insinuations of racism, sexism, classism and white privilege, not forgetting online guerrilla action by the army of the fashionably aggrieved, led by their crack troops, the transsexuals. Take this week’s letter to Harper’s magazine, ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’.

Earlier this week, a motley assortment of about 150 sententious bourgeois liberals, joined by a couple of Chamberlain conservatives, diminished whatever public standing they had by choosing Harper’s magazine, your grandmother’s favorite periodical, to publish an ungainly group letter that, they would like us to believe, is an impassioned defense of free speech in these parlous times. On its merits, this should not be controversial or even necessary. Until about ten years ago, free speech was a sacrosanct element of the American Republic.

In an interview last week with Breitbart News Tonight, Ann Coulter revealed a curious episode from her past in which she met Jeffrey Epstein. Coulter recalled Epstein picking her up in a limousine and taking her to his Manhattan townhome. She was so creeped out by the encounter that she later asked to be dropped off two blocks from her own home. Cockburn has acquired the transcript of Coulter's story. ANN COULTER: I had my own encounter with Jeffrey Epstein, and before I give you this little vignette: very important that I tell you something. All of my friends know I have absolutely no radar on freaks, on weird people. I'm a terrible judge of character.