Cockburn

Cockburn

Mischief, mayhem and Washington gossip. Send tips and party invites to cockburn@thespectator.com.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Joe Biden is raring to debate

What began on Wednesday morning as a cringy campaign video has resulted in an official debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Both candidates have agreed to appear in a June 27 debate hosted by CNN and a second on September 10 hosted by ABC. The announcements came after Biden said on Wednesday that he will not participate in debates hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates and instead proposed face-offs with Trump in June and September moderated by news organizations. Hours later, Biden accepted an offer from CNN to host the first debate. “Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020. Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate. Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again,” Biden bragged in a video posted to X.

joe biden debate

Tuesday

Cockburn

Johann Hari’s career-long trouble with the truth

British fabulist Johann Hari is at it again. After revealing he used Ozempic to lose forty pounds in his tell-all book, the alleged journalist still hasn’t shed his penchant for telling porkies. While the miracle drug made him “listless,” “strangely muted” and “emotionally dulled,” it hasn’t killed his energy for dreaming up facts.  In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Hari alleged that food critic Jay Rayner had lost pleasure in eating at even the finest Parisian establishments after taking Ozempic. The catch: Rayner has never used Ozempic or any other weight-loss drug.

johann hari

Friday

Cockburn

Newsmax reporter fired for going viral?

Barron Trump, modern-day Octavian? In the weirder quarters of the right-wing internet, kooks have long made comparisons between Donald Trump and the emperors of Ancient Rome — viewing him as a Caesar wronged by his rivals and betrayed by his friends, willing that one day his successor might avenge him. A story this week gave fuel to the fire that Trump’s youngest son Barron would become the Octavian to his Julius. The Mail Online reports how Barron has “quietly blossomed into an engaging young man who has leading conservatives purring over his charm and political acumen” and describes him as a “strapping 6ft 7in teen who has never uttered a word in public.” “I see all the attributes of a future president if he has the appetite for it. And why not?

Friday

Cockburn

The rise of the sex-positive pro-porn politico

Rising from the ashes of anti-porn laws racked up by hardline Republicans in Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma comes a team-switcher who flipped from flying his freak flag to wiping his history of porn likes on Twitter. Dan Osborn, who is married with children per his website, is the Democrat-turned-Independent running for a US Senate seat in Nebraska this November. He’s leaning heavily on his time helming a local union, but it’s his extracurricular activities that raised Cockburn’s eyebrows — mostly the slew of hardcore gay and straight porn he’s liked on Twitter. The faint-hearted should skip to the next item now...

Thursday

Cockburn

Kristi Noem and other curious incidents of dogs around the White House

Kristi Noem has been taking heat for packing heat on her dog. In an excerpt from her upcoming book, the South Dakota governor admitted to shooting her family’s wire-haired pointer, Cricket. After ruining a peasant hunt and killing her neighbor's chickens, Noem took the pooch out back and sent her to a gravely grave. The news has sent shockwaves across the country — all but tanking Noem's hopes of "softening" Trump's image as a female VP pick — but Noem is far from the first politician to be embroiled in a canine scandal. Barack Obama Hot dogs aren’t the only dogs Obama enjoys. Before becoming the proud parent of his pet Bo, Obama admitted to eating dogs in Indonesia with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro.

kristi noem

Tuesday

Cockburn

Banana skins from the UCLA encampment

Cockburn wasn’t sure how he would occupy his time after the season finale of The Bachelor aired last month. As it turns out, following daily updates from the pro-Palestinian encampment on the University of California, Los Angeles campus is better than anything on TV. The latest scene — banana warfare —is particularly absurd. The encampment, which began on April 25 with 100 students, has swelled to over 400 protesters. Organized by UC Divest, the activists are demanding that the university system divest from companies associated with the Israeli military, cut ties with Los Angeles Police Department and academically boycott Israeli universities.

UCLA

Friday

Cockburn

How to win elections and influence Trump supporters

Who pays for posts? A new post on X from “Billboard Chris” provides some insight into how the online influencer racket actually works. Earlier this week, pro-Trump poster Ryan Fournier shared a suspect report that claimed former president Donald Trump was considering picking North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to be his VP — and then listed all of the reasons why that would be a bad idea. The problem? Billboard Chris points out that an “influencer marketing firm” tried to pay him to post the exact same thing.  “I’ve been told there’s a story dropping today that I think would fit well in your feed re a GOP gov who vetoed a bill that would’ve banned biological males playing in female sports. Wanted to see what your rate was to share/write a post?

Thursday

Cockburn

Why is ‘Yeezy porn’ in the works?

It's always too good to be true for the moral majority. After dedicating his life to Christ with the release of his gospel album in 2019, Kanye West is seemingly putting his conversion to Christianity on hold while he starts his own porn studio.  West confirmed his latest venture on Wednesday with a video on X, although his account his since been deactivated. “Yeezy porn is cumming,” the video read with a voiceover telling viewers to visit Yeezy.com. No information is yet on the website, but TMZ is speculating the studio could be launched as early as this summer.

kanye west yeezy porn

Tuesday

Cockburn

Herschel Walker goes back to school

During his 2022 Senate campaign, former NFL running back Herschel Walker said he graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in criminal justice. Like many things said during the campaign, however, this turned out not to be true: Walker had dropped out his junior year to pursue professional football. But now the NFL star is back in class.  Walker first registered for summer classes at UGA last year after losing his Senate race, and according to a recent post on #redcupgeorgia, he’s still hitting the books. A picture from the account shows the sixty-two-year old Senate hopeful turned student sitting in a classroom surrounded by his much younger peers.  https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1782512683742310550?

herschel walker

Friday

Cockburn

Donald Trump’s ‘shock and awe’ RNC cull

Who turned the Republican National Committee into a low-budget slasher flick? Just days after Trump’s chosen successors to chairwoman Ronna McDaniel took over the GOP, nearly sixty staffers were ruthlessly shown the door. A source tells Cockburn that Trump informed the new co-chairs, Michael Whatley and Lara Trump, that he wanted “shock and awe” and “headlines”. He got what he wanted: nearly every major media outlet breathlessly covered the mass firings and put “bloodbath” back into the lexicon weeks before Trump used it to describe the auto industry.

Thursday

Cockburn

Biden bookies’ 2024 favorite for first time in months

The betting market often provides different insights from traditional polling. While most polls presently have Donald Trump with a slight lead over Joe Biden, election betting tells a different story.  After months floundering, Biden is now the best bet for the 2024 election, according to data from OddsChecker, a British company that compares odds in everything from esports to American politics. OddsChecker has Biden winning the election, marking the first time since September 2023 that he has surpassed Trump: according to the website, Biden now stands a 46 percent chance of winning, compared to Trump’s 43.8 percent. The website also has Michelle Obama currently beating RFK Jr. for third place.

joe biden bookies

Tuesday

Cockburn

Ex-TikTok employees sound the alarm over ties to China

Cocaine Mitch may be onto something. Last week, the senator called on his colleagues to pass a bill banning TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Now ex-TikTok employees are coming forward with stories detailing the company's entanglement with China.  According to eleven former employees interviewed by Fortune, TikTok has deep ties to Beijing through ByteDance which the company has tried to conceal. Some of the employees were with the company as late as last year, after the launch of Project Texas, a $1.5 billion initiative to store data of American citizens in the US. Evan Turner, a former senior data scientist at TikTok, worked for a Beijing executive during his time at the company.

tiktok
NatCon
Cockburn

Brussels police tries to shut down NatCon

Happy NatCon day, one and all. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when some of Europe’s most vocal right-wing exponents get together in a room for the annual National Conservatism conference. Last year’s shindig was in Westminster and spawned numerous headlines about British Members of Parliament Miriam Cates and Lee Anderson. This time though it’s being held in Brussels: home of well-paid Eurocrats and overzealous officials. Where better to make a stand for conservatism? The line-up includes Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and Nigel Farage. The former UKIP leader encountered some difficulty this morning after arriving on stage at the Claridge venue in the Belgian capital.

Friday

Cockburn

Is Nala Ray too far gone to be saved?

Cockburn never would have expected a porn influencer to bring religious discourse back to the public square, much less one who cosplays as anime characters. Yet months after her come-to-Jesus moment, OnlyFans starlet Nala Ray has TikTok theologians arguing: “Is she too far gone to be saved?”  Ray, a self-described nerd who grew up a pastor's kid, started her OnlyFans account in 2020. After being drawn to pornography because of the beauty of the human body (what else?!), Ray is “giving it all up for Christ.”  Conveniently, Ray is leaving OnlyFans after making over $9 million as one of the platforms top one percent of earners. She has deleted all but one video from the website since her conversion.

nala ray
tiktok
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.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Mitch McConnell stands against TikTok

Mitch McConnel is tackling America’s biggest national security threat — TikTok. In a Senate speech Monday, McConnell implored his fellow senators to pass the bill requiring the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok or face the app being banned from app stores within the United States. Passed by the House on March 13, the bill — officially known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — has stalled in the Senate.  “America’s greatest strategic rival is threatening our security right here on US soil... in tens of millions of American homes.,” McConnell declared from the Senate floor. “I’m speaking, of course, about TikTok.

mitch mcconnell

Friday

Cockburn

Barstool Sports’s Billy Football runs for Santos’s old seat

There’s something in the water in New York’s 3rd district, which continues to pump out interesting candidates for Congress. Of course, we had George Santos. Enough said there. Then after the colorful Santos was expelled from Congress in a historic vote, Republicans nominated Mazi Pilip, an IDF veteran and Ethiopian immigrant, who lost in a special election to Democrat Tom Suozzi, who is... vastly less interesting than his GOP counterparts. But now, Suozzi could face another colorful Republican — Bill Cotter, formerly known as Barstool Sports’s Billy Football, who joined the race a few weeks ago, and has been gathering the requisite number of signatures to appear on the primary ballot in June.

billy football bill cotter barstool sports
hillary clinton
Cockburn

Hillary Clinton, drama queen

Cockburn was surprised to find out that Madame Secretary has found a new line of work — Broadway producer. Hillary Clinton, along with fellow Broadway mogul Lin-Manuel Miranda, hosted a fundraiser for President Biden on Wednesday night at a presentation of Suffs, a musical about the women’s suffrage movement and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The show apparently first opened in 2022 where it received middling reviews and had a short run. The New York Times review called it “all work and mostly no play.”  So Cockburn finds himself wondering — who asked for this?

Thursday

Cockburn

Which DC olds should be put out to pasture?

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is at the nice old age of sixty-nine. Considering the average age of a US senator is sixty-five, she’s essentially in the prime of her political life. But that hasn’t stopped the growing calls for her resignation.   Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, who himself is seventy-eight, recently compared the justice to a pile of bones. “The old saying — graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included,” Blumenthal told NBC on Wednesday. He’s worried that unless Sotomayor steps down, the court will be left with a RBG repeat and the ascension of another conservative judge.

sonia sotomayor

Tuesday

Cockburn

Is Donald J. Trump International Airport on the horizon?

As the 2024 presidential election picks up steam, so is the race to kiss up to the presumptive GOP nominee. The battleground has taken to the sky as seven Republican House members push to rename DC’s international airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport.  Representative Guy Reschenthaler, the House GOP's chief deputy whip, introduced a two-page bill to rename the Washington Dulles International Airport after the former president on Friday.  "In my lifetime, our nation has never been greater than under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump," Reschenthaler told Fox News.

dulles airport