Cockburn

A touching tale The anti-porn crusade is claiming more territory. Kentucky lost access to Pornhub earlier this month, with Indiana, Idaho and Kansas to join them a week from today and Nebraska to miss out from July 17.Those states join seven others — Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia — where residents can’t access the world’s thirteenth most visited website, as they have passed or are passing laws that mandate age verification through uploading a government ID. Pornhub pulls access to locations that pass these laws in protest, as the company feels that on-device age verification is “the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike,” whereas uploading a government ID opens up users to the risk of data breaches.

Are books about Tucker Carlson not guaranteed bestsellers? That’s the claim of Politico’s Michael Schaffer today, who revealed that Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by the New York Times magazine’s Jason Zengerle has been shelved by Little, Brown & Co. According to Schaffer, “the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer.” Tucker Carlson, publishing house poison?

Briahna Joy Gray, the former Bernie Sanders deputy press secretary and fierce defender of Palestine, has been ejected from the Hill’s YouTube show Rising. Gray, the regular co-host with Reason’s Robby Soave, tweeted out an unsigned termination letter from parent company Nexstar, in which her first name had been misspelled twice. Sources confirm that the decision was made by the parent company and that Hill management had no say.

The morning after the night before The week in Washington was overshadowed somewhat by the antics up the Acela corridor in New York, where a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records. For Trump haters, Thursday’s decision adds to a long list of “firsts”: he’s the first president to be impeached twice, the first president to be found liable for sexual abuse... and now, the first president to be convicted of a felony. But as with his previous court fights — over E. Jean Carroll’s accusations of sexual impropriety against him and Letitia James’s real-estate fraud case — it’s not yet clear how the guilty verdict will harm him in the polls as he attempts to be reelected as president.

Cockburn snagged an invite to Tulsi Gabbard’s book party in DC on Thursday night, hosted by Spectator editor-at-large Ben Domenech and his wife Meghan McCain. Some Fox News heavy hitters such as Harris Faulkner and Howie Kurtz were there, as well as Mark Halperin, Robby Soave, Mary Margaret Olohan, Ryan Girdusky, Amber and Jonathan Duke, Bethany Mandel, Juliegrace Brufke, Reagan Reese, Vanessa Santos and others. Word on the street was that one day prior, Tulsi was informed by President Donald Trump that she would not be chosen as his vice president.