Cockburn, Author at The Spectator

Thursday

3 June 2021

Cockburn

Donald McNeil described Americans as ‘selfish pigs’ in email to Fauci

From our US edition

There are some wondrous revelations in Dr Anthony Fauci's over-3,200-page email trove acquired by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act. A number of people — particularly Republican politicians — are fixating on the several emails from other experts mentioning the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have been engineered at and emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They are right to do so — but there are some other gems in there too. A tipster pointed Cockburn to a February 2020 email from then-New York Times science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr, in which he describes how Americans 'tend to act like selfish pigs'. In contrast, McNeil tells Fauci that 'a lot of average Chinese behaved incredibly heroically'.

Wednesday

2 June 2021

Cockburn

Why is Ellie Kemper being targeted?

From our US edition

Comedienne Ellie Kemper is in trouble! What for? Well, it’s a bit hard to understand. Let Cockburn go and take a couple of hours to figure it out. … … ... OK, Cockburn is back — and more confused than ever. Apparently, Kemper, 41, is in trouble because she won a local St Louis beauty pageant 22 years ago, when she was 19. Why is that bad? The pageant was the Veiled Prophet Ball, put on by the Veiled Prophet Organization of St Louis. OK — and why is that bad? Well, the Veiled Prophet Organization was founded by white people, and didn’t admit black members until the 1970s. Also, sometimes its members dress in goofy outfits befitting organizations founded in the 1800s. And that’s it!

Tuesday

1 June 2021

Cockburn

The fall of Rising

From our US edition

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti announced Friday that they were leaving the Hill, where they helmed the popular morning show Rising, and going independent. It seemed like a shock, considering the Hill's YouTube subscriber count ballooned with Krystal and Saagar in front of the cameras. But sources close to the show tell Cockburn that the duo's departure was a long time coming. The problem may have been political. Krystal and Saagar started cohosting Rising together two years ago and began covering populist issues from a left and right perspective, focusing on areas of agreement between the two sides of the political spectrum. The pair earned a New York Times media profile and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience.

rising Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (YouTube: The Hill)

Cockburn

A shakedown in Tulsa

From our US edition

Cockburn was vaguely aware that yesterday, May 31, marked the centenary of one of America’s darker episodes, the ‘Tulsa Race Massacre’ of 1921, when a mob of white residents rioted in Greenwood, Oklahoma, aka the ‘Black Wall Street’. Today, President Biden is in the city, to offer his sympathies to the surviving victims and their descendants. The rampage left an estimated 300 black Tulsans dead, 11,000 homeless and scores of black-owned businesses, school, churches, hospitals and homes in ruins. In the intervening years, the city has done its best to try and pretend the whole thing never happened. There have been no statues or memorials, official commemorations, or public apologies. Until the early 2000s, it wasn’t even in the local history books of Oklahoma schools.

Sunday

30 May 2021

Cockburn

Lori Lightfoot ruins the CRT racket

From our US edition

Give some credit to Lori Lightfoot. She’s really good at wrecking things. When America’s most Innsmouth-ian politician took over Chicago in spring 2019 (presumably for lack of any other volunteers), it was hard to imagine screwing up the city worse than it already was. The city was already losing population. It already had the most murders of any US city and a top-30 violent crime rate overall. But Lightfoot rose to the challenge and then some. She inherited a city with 563 murders the year before she took office. In the 365 days between George Floyd’s death and the one-year anniversary of his demise, the city clocked more than 800, including 105 in a single month and 18 in a single day.

Thursday

27 May 2021

Cockburn

Don’t cancel Chip and Joanna Gaines

From our US edition

HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines are living the American dream. The married couple managed to turn their home renovation business in Waco, Texas into a wildly successful television show, Fixer Upper. The program, which ran for five seasons, led to a profitable home goods line at Target and their own TV network. They have five children and attend church regularly. Chip and Joanna do not talk about politics on their show or on their social media accounts. Since the left has declared that silence is violence, that obviously means the Gaines family does not deserve all of their happiness and success. Naturally, the media is now trying to cancel them.

Chip Gaines and Joanna Gaines (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TIME)

White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Cockburn

Making up history with the Biden White House

From our US edition

Journalists gleefully declared on Wednesday that the Biden administration was 'making history' by sending White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to the podium to lead a press briefing. They were only half right. Jean-Pierre was indeed the first openly gay woman to lead a White House press briefing. The press corps, however, seemed much more interested in her skin color than her sexual orientation. '.@KJP46 making history as the second Black woman to ever lead a White House press briefing,' CBS News's Weijia Jiang tweeted. 'White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will make history when she steps behind the podium in the James S.

Wednesday

26 May 2021

Cockburn

Why did the Biden administration shut down Pompeo’s lab leak probe?

From our US edition

Joe Biden and his administration want you to know that they are not — repeat not — soft on China. Look, look — Biden has said all sorts of mean things about Xi Jinping, calling him a ‘thug’ who doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. Cockburn is sure the president of the People’s Republic sobs into his pillow each night. There have been testy diplomatic exchanges between Beijing and Washington of late — and lots of Beltway talk of insisting on Chinese transparency (good luck). There’s also been a fair few spoon-fed editorials saying that Biden could in fact prove much tougher on China than President Trump ever was.

Tuesday

25 May 2021

Cockburn

Hell hath no fury like a restaurateur scorned

From our US edition

How does the saying go? Is it ‘fool me once, shame on me. Fool me four times, I’ll shame you on social media’? It’s a lesson someone like Graydon Carter, the legendary former Vanity Fair editor who now runs an ambiguously successful digital magazine called Air Mail, should know by now. Yet Carter has managed to infuriate his fellow bon-viveur, Keith McNally, the restauranteur and Instagram enthusiast. Carter has, McNally claims, booked and not shown-up at one of his New York restaurants not once, not twice, but four times. To rub salt into an empty place setting, Carter didn’t call ahead in his latest no-show, at Morandi in the West Village, for a reservation for 12 people.

Cockburn

The unapologetic ‘big bitches’ of the WNBA

From our US edition

Cockburn has long admired the athletic feats of strength displayed on the basketball court and the Olympian proportions of the game’s players. The muscle-bound, skyscraper-sized men and women leaping and pirouetting across the court, like a herd of stampeding gazelles, is never less than thrilling to watch. So, it was with consternation Cockburn heard of an incident last weekend, during a game between the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and the Las Vegas Aces, where a coach was heard to hurl a dire insult at one of the players, from the safety of the sidelines. Curt Miller, the head coach for the Sun, reacted to a decision by the referee about an opposing team member, by yelling out ‘Come on, she’s 300 pounds!’ Big mistake.

Cockburn

Gretchen Whitmer broke the rules. Nobody cares

From our US edition

Did you hear the news? Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer broke the virus rules! No, it’s not about that time her husband tried to use her position to get their boat in the water earlier over Memorial Day. Or that time Whitmer flew to Florida right before warning the public that traveling to Florida was dangerous because of all the virus variants it could spread. Or that time Whitmer ignored all her own social distancing decrees to join the 'racial reckoning' over George Floyd. Nope, this time Whitmer is in trouble because she met a dozen friends for dinner at a bar in East Lansing. That violated Whitmer’s order to cap dinner groups at a maximum of six people, and her other order that tables be spaced out. Whitmer has trotted out to do the usual fake penance.

Friday

21 May 2021

Cockburn

Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones will see you now

From our US edition

Cancel culture has come back to campus! Cockburn was dismayed to learn that 1619 Project curator Nikole Hannah-Jones had been denied tenure at the University of North Carolina. Hannah-Jones had been announced as a Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism last month. Her New York Times magazine supplement the 1619 Project had earned Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, despite garnering criticism for playing fast and loose with the facts of America's founding from Bret Stephens in the New York Times Opinion section and several history professors in the New York Times Letters page. Who doesn't love a heterodox publication?

Cockburn

How private should Prince Harry’s life be?

From our US edition

‘Never complain, never explain,’ the Cockburns say. Our family friend Prince Harry has a different motto: carry on moaning and show me the money. Perhaps this time the Prince of Wails has good reason to be crying on the couch. A formal report has found the BBC guilty of deceitful and dishonest behavior in securing its infamous 1995 interview with Princess Diana. There were stinging reactions from Princes William and Harry yesterday, and questions in the UK about whether the BBC, a state-funded broadcaster deserves public funding. Cockburn is an old polo chum of Prince Charles and wonders whether this could finally be the spur for the estranged princes to reunite? After all, the mood in Buckingham Palace is one of vindication.

Tuesday

18 May 2021

Cockburn

Biden’s bogey

From our US edition

President Joe Biden hit the golf course for the second time since taking office on Sunday, continuing something of an American presidential tradition. Unlike his predecessors, however, Biden appears to be a duffer. It's possible that at one point in time Biden was a decent golfer. He's been a member of Wilmington Country Club in Delaware since 2014 and reportedly had as low as a 6 handicap. That's a bit hard to believe as former president Barack Obama said he had an 'honest 13' handicap after playing 300 rounds of golf. A video of Biden on the links this past weekend further confirms that his golf game has gone the same direction as his mental acuity. The clip shows Biden well to the left of the green behind a short stone wall.

Cockburn

Bill Gates isn’t a creep. He’s a beta

From our US edition

Won’t you spare a thought for poor William Henry Gates III? For most of America, the collapse of a marriage is a private trauma, or at worst publicized in a series of ill-thought Facebook posts. But Mr Gates is worth $120 billion — and it turns out an unfathomably enormous fortune can buy a great deal of unwanted attention when your personal life is disintegrating. Jeff Bezos had an even bigger fortune at stake when he divorced — and his public breakup involved cringeworthy X-rated text messages being leaked to the world via the National Enquirer. Somehow Gates’s divorce has already managed to become more publicly excruciating. First, there were the leaks about Melinda’s $132,000 a night island getaway where she planned to wait out the media storm.

Thursday

13 May 2021

Cockburn

Long live the Riot Squad

From our US edition

Spare a thought for the joyless malcontents over at the Intercept, a website that once proudly defended journalists and fought government interference in the everyday lives of American citizens. Now the Intercept gleefully smears reporters who have dared to cover the protests-cum-riots of the past few years. The site's senior writer Robert Mackey and video producer Travis Mannion bothered to make a 25-minute-long video scrutinizing the coverage of 'the Riot Squad', a group of young journalists and videographers who film the violent aftermath of Black Lives Matter and antifa protests — among other riots. Some of these young reporters are, gasp, conservatives. Cockburn couldn't be bothered to watch the whole mini-documentary (seriously, must everything be a video these days?

Cockburn

Everyone is depressed!

From our US edition

Former first lady Michelle Obama told late night host Stephen Colbert this week that she suffers from 'low-grade depression' and anxiety. If you rolled your eyes at that self-diagnosis, you're not alone. Mrs Obama has joined the hordes of celebrities who have publicly spoken about dealing with anxiety disorder, including Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Cardi B, Adele and Jennifer Lawrence. Apparently this is supposed to make these mega-rich, ultra privileged individuals more relatable to the average human. I mean, who doesn't get a bit nervous before embarking on a worldwide singing tour or giving a 'thank you' speech after receiving an Oscar?

Tuesday

11 May 2021

Cockburn

Do you have Bruenig Derangement Syndrome?

From our US edition

Oh, mother! What’s the most subversive argument a woman can make in the topsy-turvy la-la land that is America in 2021? It is of course a point that would have been regarded as utterly normal and sane just a few years ago — i.e., that women shouldn’t necessarily be afraid to have children. Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion writer at the New York Times, this week made the shockingly transgressive point that ‘there are good reasons to wait to have children and good reasons not to’. She mildly suggested that the nation’s declining birthrates was a cause for concern, that the Biden administration was right to want to do more to support parents in need of financial help. She admitted that she found becoming a mother at 25 daunting but also a ‘relief...

Wednesday

5 May 2021

Cockburn

Facebook keeps Trump on the naughty step…for now

From our US edition

The Facebook Oversight Board has reached a decision on Donald Trump…kind of. The tech company’s ‘Supreme Court’ is upholding the move to restrict Trump’s ‘access to posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account’. But the board deemed it ‘not appropriate’ to indefinitely suspend Trump from Facebook’s platforms, describing that penalty as ‘indeterminate and standardless’. The FOB wants Facebook to ‘determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform’ in the next six months. In other words — they punted.

Tuesday

27 April 2021

Cockburn

Tucker Carlson…unmasked

From our US edition

It’s a day that ends in -y, which means there is some execrably stupid dust-up involving Tucker Carlson. Have you heard about Justin 'Definitely Not A Psychopath' Baragona? He possesses 52,000 tweets, 'spends most of his waking hours consuming cable news' and has one of the internet’s creepier fake smiles. He’s also tweeted about Tucker Carlson 29 times just this month. Wow, he sounds well-adjusted! Justin was the perfect kind of addict to spearhead the newest Tucker outrage spasm. https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1386837979453399049 Wait, that’s it? Tucker doesn’t like kids wearing the Face Diaper of the Beast? Who cares? But in the hyperreality of Twitter, Carlson’s throwaway venom was treated like a criminal offense. https://twitter.