Cockburn, Author at The Spectator

Thursday

15 June 2023

Cockburn

Is Mayor Francis Suarez too ‘woke’ for the GOP?

From our US edition

Miami mayor Francis Suarez is running for president, and his opponents already have plenty of attack ad images. The Cuban-American Republican with leading man style might have checked the boxes for an early 2010s GOP. Now it’s 2023 — and it seems no one told Suave Suarez that posing with a Pride flag-emblazoned mayoral sash is way out of style. Suarez’s Twitter feed is littered with rainbow flag paraphernalia. In June 2021, Suarez posted a video pledging Miami’s support of Pride Month. https://twitter.com/FrancisSuarez/status/1403449097453985798 The year prior, Suarez signed an “LGBTQ ordinance” to recognize “the decades of contributions by the LGBTQ Miami residents to the economy and diversity of the city!

Wednesday

14 June 2023

Cockburn

Trans White House flasher’s rack confuses conservative radio hosts

From our US edition

It only took one hot trans woman flashing her breasts in front of the White House to topple the GOP’s anti-trans agenda. After President Biden banned transgender activist Rose Montoya from future White House events for going topless on the South Lawn, some conservatives have taken to social media to declare their admiration for her. For the most part, this bold display of equity and inclusion has taken the form of middle-aged men slavering over her bust. “That tranny that flashed everyone at the White House looked pretty good and I’m tired of pretending he didn’t,” tweeted alpha male pundit Jesse Kelly yesterday. “I’m with you,” radio host Clay Travis responded. “Great boobs. And I don’t think I’d know that was a dude.

Tuesday

13 June 2023

Cockburn

Topless trans guests reveal systemic inequality at the White House

From our US edition

The White House lawn became the latest battleground in the “Free the Nipple” fight this weekend. A shocking display of inequality was captured on video when TikTok influencer and trans woman Rose Montoya filmed herself topless in front of the White House, flaunting her breasts during a Pride event. Montoya was joined by two trans male activists who were also shirtless. Yet only Montoya — whether out of a sense of decency or internalized social pressures — censored her nipples with her hands. For all the White House's moral posturing, Cockburn is shocked they would tolerate such brazen inequality.

Rose Montoya takes her shirt off on the White House lawn (Rose Montoya/TikTok)

Monday

12 June 2023

Cockburn

The GOP ballot harvesting bonanza has begun

From our US edition

A year after getting its clock cleaned thanks in large part due to abdicating mail-in ballots, everyone in the Republican Party is getting in on the ballot harvesting action. One of the latest entrants is Turning Point USA, which, through its Turning Point Action 501c4 plans to build the “first ever conservative ballot-chasing army,” according to plans obtained by The Spectator — and it won’t come cheap; Turning Point Action estimates that the total cost of its operation will be $108.6 million.

Friday

9 June 2023

Cockburn

Boris gives parting honor to hairdresser

From our US edition

The most surprising part about Boris Johnson's honors list, which allows him to approve lifetime peerages and other awards for his allies, is that he has included his hairdresser. That's right, the famous blonde mop isn’t just something that he wakes up with, but rather an intentional look crafted by House of Commons hairdresser Kelly Jo Dodge, who is set to get a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from the former UK prime minister. Johnson is standing down as a Member of Parliament after receiving a report into "Partygate" scandal. The honors announcement, needless to say, has turned heads. It was approved by British prime minister Rishi Sunak on Friday, along with almost forty honors and seven peerages.

Cockburn

Has Mark Meadows shopped Trump to the Justice Department?

From our US edition

The speculation in Trumpworld surrounding Mark Meadows, and whether the former congressman and White House chief of staff handed Special Counsel Jack Smith the tools he needed to indict the former president, continues to rise. It’s already known that Meadows’s staff was the source of an audio recording where the former president made comments about the classified documents he took from the White House — they recorded an interview in July 2021 at Bedminster for Meadows’s memoir about his time in the White House, The Chief’s Chief, which you can purchase at Amazon in hardcover for a very modest $8.07. Trump discussed a document, one that he said he ought to have declassified before leaving the White House, about potentially attacking Iran.

Tuesday

6 June 2023

Cockburn

Behind the Trump-DeSantis influencer Twitter bloodbath

From our US edition

Forget the campaign trail: the real Trump-DeSantis fight is spilling out on Twitter. Conservative influencers who support the respective campaigns are duking it out on Elon Musk's app — and it's getting personal. The Twitter beef ostensibly started with Trump supporters growing antsy over the prospect of a "disloyal" DeSantis running against the president who swung his governor's race, then devolved into policy fights over DeSantis and Trump's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and Trump's ability to win the general. The arguments have since spiraled into nasty scuttlebutt. One prominent example featured New York Young Republicans chairman Gavin Wax and a handful of DeSantis surrogates.

circular firing squad desantis influencers

Cockburn

Flashback: Donald Trump predicted the PGA-LIV merger a year ago

From our US edition

The PGA Tour will officially merge with LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed golf league, in a shock bid to squash the antitrust lawsuits brewing between the two corporations. It’s a surprising move considering the PGA Tour executives and some of their high-profile players, such as Rory McIlroy, spent the past year morally shaming the pros who defected. But one man who was not shocked was former president Donald Trump, whose organization hosts LIV events at his courses. In July 2022, Trump wrote on Truth Social: All those golfers who remain "loyal" to the very disloyal PGA, in all its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big "thank you" from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year.

Monday

5 June 2023

Cockburn

Taylor Swift dumps British man, again

From our US edition

Swifties rejoice! Or, at least, stop self-harming. Taylor Swift and 1975 singer Matt Healy are officially over. A friend close to the couple told TMZ that Taylor is in fact "single" again. It's still unclear exactly why they've now split up. A source told Entertainment Tonight that: "Taylor and Matty broke up. They are both extremely busy and realized they're not really compatible with each other. "The source added that "Taylor's friends want what's best for her and aren't shocked that their relationship fizzled out since she recently got out of a long-term relationship." It was a pretty wild romance. Just last month, Matty was spotted at all three of Swift's Nashville concerts.

Sunday

4 June 2023

Cockburn

Can ‘anti-woke’ boycotts fix the obesity crisis?

From our US edition

Conservatives just discovered the surest cure for America’s obesity epidemic: boycotts. On Tuesday morning, Chick-fil-A became the latest casualty in the Bud Light War when a Twitter mob began calling for a boycott of the fast food chain gone “woke.” The outrage followed a viral tweet highlighting that the company had hired a vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. “We have a problem,” tweeted conservative commentator Joey Mannarino on Monday. “Chick-Fil-A just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This is bad. Very bad. I don’t want to have to boycott. Are we going to have to boycott?” Cockburn certainly does not want to give up his weekly chicken sandwich!

Saturday

3 June 2023

Cockburn

Elvis’s cousin Brandon delays marriage months before his election

From our US edition

A distant cousin of Elvis Presley is running as a Democrat to be governor of Mississippi. And much like the King of Rock and Roll, Brandon Presley can’t help falling in love — at the most politically expedient times. Just days before his campaign season wedding to Katelyn Mabus was scheduled, he scrambled to let invitees know that his show will not in fact go on. Presley, a lifelong bachelor, has been running for office since he was a young man. He was elected mayor of his North Mississippi town at twenty-four years old and has served as an elected energy regulator since. In December 2022, just twenty-four days before announcing that he’d be challenging Governor Tate Reeves in an attempt to turn Mississippi blue, he had an even more special announcement.

Friday

2 June 2023

Cockburn

Have the LA Dodgers struck out?

From our US edition

Mad Joe Manchin yells at journos Senator Joe Manchin is furious — and he’s letting reporters know. Sources close to the West Virginia senator tell Cockburn that Manchin is fuming over a recent article in Fox News giving credit to House Republicans, and not Manchin, for the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The new major pipeline could help Manchin politically as he faces a perilous path to reelection next year. “Manchin is furiously calling reporters himself to push back on it,” according to a West Virginia source, despite that “the truth is that he played a relatively minor role in finally getting MVP done.

Cockburn

Explaining Prince Harry’s costly legal spree

From our US edition

“A person should not just be able to buy special police services,” Prince Harry was told last week after losing a legal challenge over the UK Home Office’s decision to not allow the government to pay for his security when visiting Britain. The man that begged for the world to see him as "Just Harry, drop the prince," had to be reminded that the Metropolitan Police was not for hire, and that privately-funded protection would undermine public confidence in London’s police force. This is just one of the ongoing court battles that Harry has on his plate at the moment. It seems that tending to his chickens, being hired on as "Chief Impact Officer" at a hippy-dippy wellness company BetterUp and taking part in his worldwide privacy tour is less time consuming than one might think.

Thursday

1 June 2023

Cockburn

Tucker Carlson is the new Voldemort

From our US edition

Murdoch gets what Murdoch wants — and this time, it’s to erase any evidence that Tucker Carlson ever existed. The media mogul is so insistent that the “T”-word remain unspoken that he has purportedly banned any mention of the ex-host across the Fox networks. This is bad news for Chadwick Moore, author and contributing editor at The Spectator after he announced his new book, Tucker, that comes out next month. Moore tweeted that he’d been blacklisted from the network after announcing the book, saying: “I’m not allowed on Fox anymore, because I wrote a book about @TuckerCarlson. I’ve been banned from the network.

Cockburn

Journos take offense at Cockburn’s report of Americans slacking

From our US edition

In last Friday's gossip column (which you really should sign up for), Cockburn revealed how Emma Tucker, the London newspaper editor who took the helm of the Wall Street Journal in February, has been unimpressed with the lousy work ethic of her new colleagues. “What do they all do all day?” the former Sunday Times of London chief is reportedly prone to wondering out loud. Much to Cockburn’s surprise, the small piece of gossip has blown up on the internet, drawing the ire of America’s "hard-working" hacks. It wasn’t long before journalist complaints started to roll in. How they managed to carve out the time to do so between copying and pasting press releases, Cockburn does not know.

Cockburn

What Succession got right about Rupert Murdoch

From our US edition

HBO's flagship drama Succession came to an end on Sunday night. The tale of the Roy saga was heavily based on the Murdoch family, to the point that Rupert Murdoch's divorce agreement from his fourth wife Jerry Hall stipulated that she would be barred from providing plot points to the show's writers. But how close is the fiction to reality? Spectator chairman Andrew Neil — who spent over a decade as editor of one of Murdoch's top newspapers — joins Freddy Gray on Spectator TV to discuss. "There was enough of an overlap to make it interesting, and enough of an overlap to say, 'yeah, that's happened in real life, that's the kind of thing that goes on,' but not enough to give the lawyers at HBO palpitations," Andrew says. He describes how Logan Roy "ran his company like a king.

Wednesday

31 May 2023

Cockburn

Coca-Cola’s ‘Indigiqueer’ Pride workshops for kids

From our US edition

Coca-Cola is kicking off Pride Month by sponsoring events for preteens that are taught by Native American "Indigiqueer" and two-spirit artists. On the first day of Pride Month, Coca-Cola is partnering with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to bring workshops from “across the Western Hemisphere working towards equity and social justice for Indigenous peoples” to middle- and high-school students. “Fashion is often used to confirm identities, challenge social structures and display personalities,” the event description reads. “Discover the joy of fashion in our conversation celebrating PRIDE month.” There are four panelists.

Tuesday

30 May 2023

Cockburn

The New Yorker: Latinos can be white supremacists, too

From our US edition

The New Yorker has come to the profound revelation that crazy, evil people who carry out heinous crimes hold crazy, evil beliefs to justify their crimes. Such people, the New Yorker has apparently now realized, can be of different races. But no matter what, the most common motivating cause is white supremacy, regardless of the perp's race — and it’s all America’s fault. In his piece on “the rise of Latino white supremacy,” New Yorker columnist Geraldo Cadava writes about how Mauricio Garcia, the mass shooter who killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas, before being killed by an off-duty police officer, expressed white-supremacist views in a diary and online — and because of this, “many were shocked that he was Latino.

Cockburn

Babylon Bee fires conservative activist for swearing at DeSantis press sec on Twitter

From our US edition

It was a not-so-happy start to the Memorial Day weekend for conservative activist Gavin Wax. Wax was publicly fired from his job at the Babylon Bee, a Christian right-wing satire site, on Friday over a not-so-nice tweet about a member of the DeSantis 2024 campaign. Wax, who runs the New York Young Republicans and supports former president Donald Trump in the GOP primary, was warring against DeSantis supporters last week who implicitly accused him of fraud because he used to work for Gettr. Gettr was financially backed by Miles Guo, a Chinese businessman who was arrested for allegedly orchestrating a $1 billion fraud conspiracy. Cockburn acknowledges that this is all very confusing. Stick with him.

Cockburn

Democrats gag congresswomen in kinky new billboards

From our US edition

Democrats are rolling out a novel strategy heading into 2024: kinky ads featuring Republicans. Cockburn, whose stance is pro-kink and anti-shame, came across new billboards that House Democrats are launching against Congresswomen Jen Kiggans and Michelle Steel. The two trailblazing women are depicted gagged, next to a bare-faced Donald Trump. The ads argue that the women were silent when former President Trump said he wanted to defund federal law enforcement. Kiggans won her seat in 2022, two years after Trump left the White House, while Steel won hers in 2020, so overlapped with him for all of two weeks. The ads suggest that the main strategy Democrats have to retake the House is rehashing the anti-Trump messaging that was effective... when Trump was actually president.