Tim Walberg

Tuesday

Cockburn

The State of the Union that isn’t

Welcome to Cockburn’s Diary, a new newsletter from The Spectator sent twice a week from the nation’s capital. Your intrepid correspondent will keep you informed about all the whispers circulating around town. Coming to your inboxes on Tuesdays and Fridays... President Donald Trump is addressing a joint session of Congress tonight — but don’t you dare call it a State of the Union; that term is reserved for speeches given in non-inauguration years. The president is expected to tout successes from the first forty-three days of his second term, while some Democrats are expected to skip it — or to protest by holding up props like egg cartons to spotlight the high cost of groceries.

state union

Friday

The Spectator

RFK’s Libertarian moment

The 2024 Libertarian National Convention in Washington, DC, unsurprisingly attracted a quirky bunch. Attendees would find themselves greeted by a man wearing a “Fuck Vaccines” shirt (not that odd) that was doing some squats in the lobby (pretty odd). Also overheard in the lobby, a weird flex: “I read Mises before I was twenty” — and then an even weirder one: “I grew up without AC, a very libertarian upbringing.” “Ermmm, konnichiwa actually means good afternoon,” one lady told her interlocutor. Last cycle’s Libertarian vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen told The Spectator, “It is useful to have Donald Trump speak, only if our candidate speaks right after him and rebuts him. Same with RFK. We should be leveraging them for attention, not the reverse.

rfk jr libertarian

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

Saturday

Matthew Foldi

Inside the surprise effort to force TikTok’s divestiture

“I will kill you if you fucking shut down TikTok,” a teenage boy warned to a member of Congress in a voicemail reviewed by The Spectator. “I will really really fuck you up. So don’t shut down TikTok. Bye bye!”  This week, Capitol Hill was inundated with a series of unusual callers — children, some as young as six years old. They had been enlisted by TikTok to forcibly push back against a bill that’s on track to sail through the House next week which forces the divestiture of a series of companies owned by foreign adversaries, like China in the case of the globally popular video app.

tiktok

Tuesday

Matthew Foldi

Republicans say Fauci-authorized grants may have been illegal

Anthony Fauci’s final months in office, in which he opposed a federal judge striking down a federal travel mask mandate and unilaterally funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a scandal-plagued NGO, were most likely illegal, according to findings from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee claims that his term was never legally renewed. According to the findings, the Department of Health and Human Services “repeatedly misled” Congress and tried to cover its tracks in order to dismiss allegations that Fauci and his allies were unlawfully working for months, during which they handed out tens of billions of dollars of government contracts, many of which are now in legal jeopardy.

anthony fauci