Megyn Kelly

Friday

Cockburn

Ivanka Trump’s hustle grindset

Ivanka Trump gave a rare interview yesterday, appearing on the Diary of a CEO podcast. The show, hosted by the British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, embodies the mix of individual hustle and mental health awareness that is rapidly becoming the dominant mode online. “You’re a bit of an empath, right?” asked Bartlett during a segment on business negotiation tactics. “Oh for sure,” answered his guest. Trump came across as a frazzled and slightly besieged figure. She was tired of the “nasty swirl of social media” and the “gladiatorial” aspect of politics. She claimed to have found solace in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, the treatise on stoic philosophy now much in vogue among people like Bartlett.

Monday

Ani Wilcenski

The Mar-a-Lago face-off

In all the post election danger-to-democracy commentary, one unexpected new peril has emerged: the “nationwide surge of Mar-a-Lago face." Best exemplified by demented far-right activist Laura Loomer and former Fox News host-slash-former Donald Trump Jr. squeeze Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mar-a-Lago face is a cosmetic look characterized by immense volumes of cheek filler, heavy eye shadow and enough Botox to petrify the face. The male version could be seen when Florida congressman and attorney general-nominee-for-ten-seconds Matt Gaetz stepped out at the RNC with so much Botox and foundation that he instantly became a bipartisan meme. I’d argue that Mar-a-Lago face is not taking over America anytime soon. It’s barely taking over the Republican Party.

cosmetic

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

RFK survives assault from Big Pharma-loving Democrats

My friend Dan Foster voiced a theory about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today that strikes me as particularly accurate. In response to a comment from the New York Times’s Ross Douthat giving credence to RFK’s belief that Lyme disease could be the result of a materially engineered bioweapon, he noted: “The reason I think Kennedy gets confirmed is because every single American agrees with him on one of his fringe things. He’s like the Captain Planet of kook.” This is the ultimate expression of voter antipathy toward traditional politicians, laid atop suspicions that everyone holds about something on the edge of appropriate discussion. It goes like this: “Well, yeah RFK’s probably wrong about X, and definitely about Y, but Z? He’s the only guy who tells the truth about Z!

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

Welcome to the era of personality media

Several high-priced journalists have begun experimenting with selling themselves instead of a corporate media brand. Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin have both started Substack ventures without having the branding back-up of CNN or Bloomberg. The pair follow in the footsteps of Megyn Kelly, who has been enormously successful in launching her own brand. Don Lemon has been confined to social media as well.Last year, Washington Post tech reporter Taylor Lorenz left corporate media behind to create her own outlet, although I would argue her audience and branding were separate from that of the Post.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

The rude awakening awaiting Trump

Welcome to Thunderdome, where last night’s debate in Tuscaloosa had some interesting aspects we’ll get to momentarily — but first, consider what this week looked like from the perspective of the front-runner for the nomination and, according to some, for the presidency. Donald Trump did a town hall with Sean Hannity — which got significantly less viewership than Ron DeSantis versus Gavin Newsom — where he managed to bolster Joe Biden’s central case against his candidacy. In Washington, Jack Smith dropped a new indication of the direction he plans to take with his case against Trump, including evidence of “encouragement of violence.

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Republican also-rans tussle in Tuscaloosa

It wasn’t the Fantastic Four on stage but the squabbling verged on the epic as the quartet of Republican presidential candidates sans Mr. Big faced off in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The stakes were higher for the fourth and final GOP debate that Donald Trump ducked and didn’t want to take place in the first place. But his baleful spirit hovered over it.  Both Florida governor Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy looked like Trump Mini-Mes, dressed in the full Trumpian regalia — blue suit, white shirt and iridescent red tie. DeSantis talked about using the military to end the drug menace while Ramaswamy fantasized about wiping out the “administrative state” overnight.

tuscaloosa

Thursday

Cockburn

NewsNation to host next GOP debate in Alabama

It looks like the Republican National Committee will partner with just about anyone to put on a presidential debate. In a press release released Thursday morning, NewsNation, an upstart cable news network with less than 65,000 nightly viewers as of last year, announced that they will be hosting the fourth GOP debate in December.  It will take place in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “All of us at NewsNation are incredibly honored to be hosting a presidential primary debate and to be part of what will be another historic election season,” said Sean Compton, president of Nexstar Networks which owns NewsNation.

newsnation

Friday

Cockburn

Will Trump stop using reelection money on legal bills?

Donald Trump is in the process of setting up the Patriot Legal Defense Fund, a fund to help pay off legal bills for him and his co-defendants in the four indictments he is facing, according to a report in the Messenger. Up until this point, the former president’s legal fees had been paid by his Save America super PAC. “Save America wasn’t really designed as a legal defense fund, so as the legal landscape evolved, so did this effort,” a Trump official told the site’s Marc Caputo. So who can expect to be covered? Rudy Giuliani, presumably, who is named as a co-conspirator in Fani Willis’s Georgia case, and was the beneficiary of a Trump-hosted legal fundraiser at Bedminster last night. Giuliani’s fellow election attorney Jenna Ellis?

donald trump legal reelection funds

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Who in the media will be Trump’s debate co-conspirator?

Donald Trump is executing an identical debate strategy that he deployed in 2016, right down to the same complaints and threats of boycotts against Fox News and their debate moderators.   Trump is currently threatening to boycott the first GOP primary debate on Wednesday August 23, citing his lead in the polls and what he projects to be unfair treatment by moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. Not only is Trump threatening to skip the debate, according to three sources speaking to CNN, Trump is looking to counter the debate by offering his services to other networks — or even Tucker Carlson, who is reportedly considering the offer.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Where does Tucker Carlson go from here?

Fox News stunned its viewers — and, according to sources within the company, its own staff — when it let go of primetime host Tucker Carlson on Monday. Fox News employees were said to be "shocked" and "upset" when they read the public press release announcing Tucker's departure from the network. "FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," read the muted release. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor." Speculation as to the reasons behind Tucker's abrupt exit has run rampant. The initial online consensus was that Tucker was out due to his being named prominently in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox — but that doesn't explain why Maria Bartiromo and Judge Jeanine Pirro are still on the air.

tucker carlson

Friday

Cockburn

Cockburn’s Christmas party chronicles

Shaker Heights, Ohio This year, Cockburn’s annual call for Christmas party invitations took him all over the country: DC, New York, even to one to “the longest-running libertarian-hosted Christmas party in Ohio.” What type of libertarians were these? he wondered, as visions of a drug-laced hors d'oeuvre platter and laissez-faire lovemaking danced in his head. “The party has spawned one marriage and three children,” Cockburn’s invitation said, confirming his suspicion (and hope) that all libertarians are also libertines. The Ohio party was advertised as “multi-generational,” and Cockburn’s would-be hosts helpfully added, “We managed to kill no one attending during Covid years.

christmas party

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Parler is not going to replace Twitter

Parler, the right-wing conservative public Slack channel, saw a surge in users last week after Twitter banned popular meme-maker Carpe Donktum. It’s all the rage in social media world, especially among free speech enthusiasts and the political right. It’s managed to not just pick up Twitter exiles like Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jacob Wohl and Twitter’s most famous Resistance Reply Guys, Ed and Brian Krassenstein, but more mainstream conservatives such as Megyn Kelly or Fox strongman Dan Bongino. It also has attracted politicians — Ted Cruz has endorsed the platform multiple times.

parler

Friday

Kat Rosenfield

The age of online bullying is back

For some people, the video of police officer Derek Chauvin callously kneeling on the neck of the unarmed, pleading George Floyd looked like many things. A travesty. A horror. A stark reminder of the brutality and injustice of American policing, and an urgent call to stand up, dig deep, and demand change.But for the subjects of an article published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, the video prompted a different kind of deep digging.‘Blackface incident at Post cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party resurfaces amid protests’, reads the headline, a prelude to 3,000 words of groundbreaking work in the field of offense archaeology.

online bullying