Amber Athey

Friday

Cockburn

First TikTok, now tutoring

The fires of liberty Dramatic scenes at the new Dupont Circle headquarters of Reason this week, as the libertarian magazine’s staff evacuated due to billowing plumes of smoke from a first-floor fire.“The staff of Reason was briefly driven out of our Connecticut Avenue offices by a literal dumpster fire nearby on Tuesday,” editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward confirmed to Cockburn. “Everyone is fine, and our only regret is there was no private firefighting company to call in our time of distress.” The Spectator’s Washington editor Amber Duke was on the scene for a taping of her new YouTube show with Robby Soave. She offered Cockburn her retelling of events.

tiktok

Friday

Cockburn

Nancy Mace busted by the Capitol Hill fashion police

With her vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker, Nancy Mace has made herself the pariah of the House. And after donning a red, Scarlet Letter-style “A” on her chest to reflect this as she headed into House GOP meetings this week, she caught the ire of the Capitol Hill Fashion Police too. One of her colleagues intimated the “A” must stand for “attention” — and lamented that “there wasn’t enough bling” on it and that “a light-up version would’ve been better.” In a Congress filled with all but literal skeletons, Mace stands out for her relative youth. One staffer had no problem with her choice of outfits this week.

nancy mace

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Trans takeover at Georgetown University

It was a tale of two events Tuesday night at Georgetown University, the oldest “Catholic” university in the country and my alma mater. Michael Knowles was set to speak about whether President Joe Biden is more evil than Putin and Xi in an event organized by the Georgetown University College Republicans (GUCR) and Young America’s Foundation (YAF). After GUCR announced the event, left-wing campus groups denounced Knowles due to his alleged transphobia (read: denying that people can — or should! — change their sex). I spoke to a couple of leaders for GUCR who told me they’d been on the receiving end of a lot of online vitriol and that flyers they put up for the event wouldn’t last for more than ten minutes before being ripped down.

trans takeover georgetown

Friday

Cockburn

The Democratic Party goes alpha

Is the Democratic Party trying to be more masculine? An eagle-eyed political observer pointed out recently that the DNC’s official logo has mysteriously changed color without any public fanfare. The logo, which features a “D” inside of a circle, used to be a sky blue. At some point in 2022, the “D” went quite a few shades darker to a royal blue. You can spot the difference in this side-by-side: A graphic design expert tells Cockburn that the change might have been an attempt to make the party’s colors better match its newfound lip service to the working class under Biden. Alternatively, they may be trying to cash in on those “dark Brandon” memes! A tale of two Naomis There are few things more annoying than being mistaken for someone else.

joe biden

Thursday

Thursday

Cockburn

The new ‘conservative’ cancel culture

Working at The Spectator has its perks. The unflinching resolve of the world’s oldest English-language magazine in the face of cancel culture is just one of them. Cockburn has been threatened by shrill delusional mobs in his time with the Speccie — but now it’s the turn of his glamorous colleague Amber Athey, who was defenestrated from her radio side hustle at WMAL-DC following complaints about a joke she tweeted about Kamala Harris’s State of the Union outfit. In the week that Amber went public with the reasons for her ouster, WMAL-DC issued the following unrelated tweet: BREAKING: @elonmusk takes a majority steak in @Twitter . Big tech is shaking! - Tune in live for more on the stories that matter to you: https://WMAL.

cancel culture

Monday

Amber Duke

I was fired for a joke about Kamala Harris’s outfit

I am no stranger to cancel culture — or what we know more commonly (and accurately, in my opinion) as censorship. When I was one of a handful of conservatives on a liberal college campus, my peers on the left reported me to our resident advisor for "creating an unsafe environment" and demanded the administration step in to cancel speaker events I hosted through the College Republicans. They later would ask the university to revoke my degree. Throughout my six years as a political journalist and commentator, left-wing activists have tried every trick in the book to drive me out of the industry: digging up old tweets, demeaning my appearance and harassing my employers. None of it has worked... until now.

cancel culture

Wednesday

Casey Chalk

Home is where the racism is

My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Ireland. I had pretty high expectations: my mother’s side of the family is almost entirely of Irish descent, and I suppose in some inchoate way I yearned to “go home,” as it were, even though the last of my Irish ancestors had arrived on American soil more than 150 years ago. Still, the Emerald Isle seemed to call to me (admittedly I was listening to a lot of The Chieftains). Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn’t that the Irish aren’t welcoming (they are), or that the adult beverages weren't delicious (they are). It was that Ireland was definitely not my home — not culturally, culinarily, or familialy.

racism

Thursday

Amber Duke

A tribute to my father

This essay is adapted from a speech I gave on July 18, 2021, at a memorial for my father, Philip M. Athey, who passed away at the age of 59.  I’d like to tell you all a little about my dad. My dad was the hardest working, most honest and most loyal man I knew. He would do anything for his family. By the time I was four or five he was already teaching me how to play tee-ball, hook a worm, shoot a bow and turn a screw — righty tighty lefty loose-y! Some of my favorite memories with my dad are from when we would go hunting and fishing. I remember him showing me how to place my feet when walking in the woods so I didn’t spook the deer, or how to cast my pole so the bait would land perfectly under an old dock.

phil athey

Monday

Cockburn

YouTube pulls Spectator editor interview with Trump lawyer John Eastman

Over three-quarters of Republicans believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and about a third of all Americans believe that President Biden's win was illegitimate. When tens of millions of Americans lose faith in the system, that spells serious trouble for democracy. A normal and healthy country would allow a fair and open debate about whether or not fraud occurred, and, if so, how much fraud and what evidence exists to back up these claims. Instead, Big Tech platforms have repeatedly censored any mention of voter fraud at all. Such was the case late last week when YouTube and Vimeo pulled a video interview with Trump lawyer John Eastman.

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Mostly ghostly: Henry James haunts Bly Manor

Halloween wasn’t quite the same this year: no trick-or-treating or bobbing for apples, no packed parties, not even a socially distanced haunted house. As a lover of all things horror, I had to rely on television to put the spooky in the season. Netflix’s new series The Haunting of Bly Manor is the sister show to last year’s wildly popular The Haunting of Hill House, created by Doctor Sleep’s Mike Flanagan. (Flanagan is also behind Hush, one of the smartest horror movies I’ve seen in a few years and definitely worth watching.

bly manor

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Amber Athey joins as The Spectator’s Washington editor

I’m delighted to announce that Amber Athey is The Spectator’s new Washington editor, joining us from the Daily Caller next month. We’re thrilled to have her on board. Amber is a highly talented and accomplished young journalist and a very gifted writer. She’s been an excellent White House Correspondent for the Caller, where she’s broken countless great stories and regularly questioned the president, Mike Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin and other officials. She has already written some excellent stuff for us and she’ll be invaluable in giving The Spectator a presence in DC. The Spectator’s US edition goes from strength to strength. We are already on to our fifth print edition of the monthly magazine and we feel we are getting better and better.

amber athey

Sunday

Amber Duke

The left’s real cause is muzzling its opponents

In February 2019, I appeared on the now-defunct NRATV to discuss anti-Semitic comments that Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib had made. Timothy Johnson, a so-called researcher for Media Matters for America who has spent nearly a decade lying in wait for conservative pundits, was watching. He didn’t like that I opposed the new de facto leaders of the Democratic party. In revenge, he posted several screenshots of inappropriate jokes about Jewish people I made on Twitter seven years earlier. The screenshots went viral. My mentions and DMs flooded with demands for an apology, calls for my firing and orders that I kill myself. Bookers reached out to tell me that upcoming television and radio appearances were canceled.

amber athey

Friday

Spectator Editorial

Tyranny of the minority

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans used to say: ‘Of the dead speak only good.’ We can speak nothing else of the friend and longtime Spectator contributor we lost in January. Sir Roger Scruton was a fearless and humane advocate for art, beauty, faith, peoplehood and tradition; a fierce defender of the right to free and honest speech; and a clear-eyed advocate for the legal inheritances and cultural unity of the English-speaking peoples. He was one of the first people to undergo ordeal by ‘cancel culture’, or persecution by progressives, which is why we dedicate this free-speech issue to him. In the early 1980s, Roger was effectively expelled from the academy for expressing conservative opinions in public.