Cockburn

Being a somewhat old-fashioned person, Cockburn is skeptical of latter-day feminism and the utter sanctity of a woman’s right to choose. So it’s quite odd that he also feels compelled to defend progressive womanhood from Planned Parenthood, which quite unexpectedly has come out in favor of misogyny. ‘I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood. We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,’ says the headline from current Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson. The context is Planned Parenthood’s ongoing cancellation of Margaret Sanger over her support for ideas that are today unpopular, such as sterilization, eugenics, and freedom of speech.

For years, activists have demanded stricter gun control in America, on the cogent (though perhaps unconstitutional) grounds that fewer guns will save the lives of young people in American cities. Cockburn has an alternative proposal: instead of gun control, America needs celebrity control. Lacking any skin in the game and let loose on Twitter, famous people are saying extremely insane things that are going to get people killed. The chief honor this time goes to alleged ‘comedian’ Chelsea Handler, after the shooting death of Minneapolis’s Daunte Wright. Wright tragically learned the hard way that resisting arrest puts you at risk of being shot by a birdbrained police officer who confuses her taser with a pistol.

Over three-quarters of Republicans believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and about a third of all Americans believe that President Biden's win was illegitimate. When tens of millions of Americans lose faith in the system, that spells serious trouble for democracy. A normal and healthy country would allow a fair and open debate about whether or not fraud occurred, and, if so, how much fraud and what evidence exists to back up these claims. Instead, Big Tech platforms have repeatedly censored any mention of voter fraud at all. Such was the case late last week when YouTube and Vimeo pulled a video interview with Trump lawyer John Eastman.

From the moment Matt Gaetz blitzed into Washington in 2016 as a 34-year-old Trump ally, it was clear that the representative from Florida liked to live dangerously. He invited Holocaust doubter and general crazy person Charles Johnson to the State of the Union. He hired canceled Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, then, because that wasn’t risky enough, he potentially fudged House ethics rules to pay him. As a Florida state representative, Gaetz allegedly concocted a scoring system for sexual conquests in Tallahassee: lobbyists were one point, aides two, legislators three, married legislators six. (Gaetz denies any knowledge of the game.) In fall 2019, Gaetz white-knighted for Democrat Katie Hill after her bisexual menage à trois forced her out of Congress.

If you lay down with dogs you get fleas. If you make your bed with demented conspiracy theorists, you become mentally ill. This is the unfortunate position that certain sections of the American right have found themselves in following the presidential election last year. Lots of Americans had — and still have — suspicions about the massive surge in mail-in voting in November. It’s hard to blame them. The 2020 election was a very strange one on any number of fronts. But no sane person can possibly now deny that the Trump campaign, in its attempts to prove the election a fraud, engaged in and with some serious charlatanry.

'A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.’ So said Cordell Hull, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, long before the internet. Now we live in the virtual age. What’s true is barely relevant. No sooner has a man shot 10 people dead and been taken into custody than his suspected motives are shoved into the great culture-war grinder and splatted out of a million social media accounts. So we saw this week with the arrest of Ahmed Al Aliwi Alissa, who was presumed white as quickly as he was guilty after pictures of his arrest yesterday in Boulder, Colorado circulated online. Alissa made the mistake of looking a bit pale in the grainy images.

'Tucker Carlson is the new Donald Trump.' So said CNN’s Brian Stelter on his Sunday program, Reliable Sources. Stelter was apparently handed his own TV show based on the principle that at least one CNN host ought to resemble the network’s target audience. Nevertheless, he is correct. Progressivism needs Tucker to be Trump, and so for the moment, he is. To work in cable in the age of Donald Trump was to live life on easy mode. For years, channels tried desperately to hook viewers with endless updates on missing white women, murdered white women or murdering white women. Suddenly, with Trump, none of that was needed. Every day brought a fresh outrage, a new ridiculous statement or tweet or national policy. The news cycle shrank from a week to a day to mere hours in some cases.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing. The ACU has upped sticks and thrown its annual shindig in Orlando rather than its usual home in National Harbor, Maryland. Former president Donald Trump is to give his first speech since leaving office tomorrow and the leading lights of the Republican party — Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo — have been making their cases to be 2024 nominee (or Trump’s VP) on the main stage. But you know all that. You’ve seen it on Twitter. That’s not what you read Cockburn for. You want to hear about the cocktails, the ruckus, the maskless flirting, all the unbridled diesel-strength freedom the great state of Florida has to offer.