Society

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.

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?