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Cockburn knows we've all been there before. You're off on an innocent slosh through the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexican border when suddenly a posse of yodeling Border Patrol agents on horseback gallops up and starts attacking you with bullwhips. Such was the outrage of the day 24,000 outrages ago when images appeared to show mounted government agents riding after Haitian immigrants illegally trying to enter the country. The agents were holding their reins, which the left promptly portrayed as whips, all but accusing the men of being Indiana Jones wannabes. The episode was blamed on racism, xenophobia, Donald Trump, who was no longer president. Joe Biden said the agents "will pay." Kamala Harris invoked scenes of slaves being flogged.

The biggest divide on the war in Ukraine is generational The Russian invasion of Ukraine has, in many ways, been a rare point of unity in American politics. The overwhelming majority of lawmakers are on the same page when it comes to sanctioning Russia and arming Ukrainians. Polls find that both Republican and Democratic voters have similar views on the war and its protagonists: for all the talk of the GOP’s pro-Putin wing, disapproval of the Russian president is all but universal. But look a little closer and some surprising divides start to appear. The biggest is generational. A recent YouGov survey for the Economist asked people who they sympathized with more in the conflict.

Some people are always telling you that the world is soon to end. In the old days many of them would wear sandwich boards describing near-term doom, and not wash. Now, their cousins in the environmental movement glue themselves to oil refineries and don’t shave. In each case, they drip with urgency. The oceans will boil, the land will burn. Your children will fry. Or, alternatively, the Lord will return and take only the righteous to their reward. Be afraid and confess, before it is too late. Public life has these people, too, for this tendency is quite universal. Financial doom-mongering is a profitable little side-line for some economists. The great crash they predict is always upcoming.

Can Elon Musk save Twitter? “I made an offer,” tweeted Elon Musk this morning, with a link to an SEC filing. The document details Musk’s bid to buy Twitter. In an accompanying letter to the company’s chairman, Musk gave his reasons: I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company. As a result I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.

At the start of this year, I took a flight from London to DC. For its duration, I wore a cloth mask that I had been given for free at a bookstore — the kind of mask that Most Experts now say does not meaningfully prevent viral spread. At one point, shortly after I’d finished eating, a tall male flight attendant asked me to pull my mask up — I, of course, did as asked. A few hours later, while the lights were dimmed and I was drifting off for a nap, my mask slipped to just below my nose, the same flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pamphlet from the airline.

Record-high inflation and soaring gas prices are boons for the Republican Party. Nothing sours the electorate on the party in power faster than pain at the pump. “People are becoming poorer,” Tucker Carlson said during a recent segment. “The standard of living of Americans, who for almost 100 years have enjoyed the world's highest standard of living in any big country, is plummeting. So, what's the administration doing to fix this? What are they doing to help? Well, of course, that depends upon whether or not you're Ukrainian.” It’s a note Tucker has struck before. The Democrats in power only care about virtue signaling. It’s Ukrainian flag pins and transgender admirals all the way down. You can go broke for all they care. Just make sure you go woke first.

The White House has a lot riding on Macron versus Le Pen In recent weeks, a Marine Le Pen surge turned the French presidential election from a procession for Emmanuel Macron to something a lot less straightforward. The election has reportedly been the subject of much nervous White House attention. It’s not hard to understand why. A Le Pen win would be both a major big-picture blow for Biden’s geopolitical ambitions and would have a more immediately destabilizing effect on the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It would also strike at the heart of the European project.

When Covid comes to town There’s a hot, must-have new accessory among Washington’s political elite this spring: a positive coronavirus test. Several recent swish DC get-togethers appear to have been super-spreader events and anyone who’s anyone is getting two red stripes on their antigen tests these days. The Gridiron dinner, one of the top tickets in town, is, some think, the source of the outbreak. Its attendees are dropping like flies. Among the contagious A-listers: commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and Attorney General Merrick Garland. Other big names who have tested positive include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. That’s the bad news. But the good news is two-fold. First, everyone seems to be just fine.

Five Guys has always been Cockburn’s first choice for a greasy cheeseburger — breakfast of champions, says he — but Good Stuff Eatery, a Capitol Hill joint, is a solid second. So it is that Cockburn finds himself with a new respect for Congressman Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who was recently interviewed by Politico while eating at Good Stuff. Yet for sheer artery-clogging goodness, you can’t beat the story Khanna told about President Joe Biden. Per Politico, Khanna said he was once chatting with the president about the difficulties facing the Democratic senatorial caucus (as one does). “Mr. President,” he said, “why don’t you just get Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin in the room and hammer this out?

Addressing the question of whether now is the time for counterrevolution rather than conservation, I will take “counterrevolution” to mean the idea that all-out political and cultural war is what the moment requires, not the alleged conservative gradualism or restraint that those crying out for such war detest. (There are a variety of factions that march under different banners — nationalists, populists, integralists, MAGA. And while there are meaningful differences between these troupes, the shadows of their banners overlap like the shaded part of a Venn diagram this idea of counterrevolutionary war. For brevity’s sake I’ll call them the “war party.”) I think this framing is part of the problem. I am all in favor of counterrevolutionary war where necessary.