Cockburn, Author at The Spectator

Monday

March 29, 2021

Cockburn

How to cancel someone

Cancel culture, I’m sure you’ve heard, is everywhere. Not a day goes by without some sorry sap being caught out for tweeting The Wrong Take, wearing The Wrong Clothes, using The Wrong Word. It’s not just a cottage industry: the entire digital media ecosystem is predicated on cancellation: pick your target, call them out, watch them burn and reap the rewards. Does it have to be this way? What if we didn’t all get mad — we got even instead? What if everyone was equipped with the same tools as the online witchfinders general who police popular discourse? Almost everyone has been on the internet long enough to have something on there that could hurt them. If everyone was canceled, perhaps no one would be? Let’s call it the Cockburn guide to mutually assured cancellation.

Friday

March 26, 2021

Cockburn

REVEALED: the Pentagon’s amazingly silly anti-Russia meme

After 20 years, a peak of 100,000 troops and trillions spent, the American military was unable to defeat the Taliban or even stop them from running half of Afghanistan. But that isn’t the only war America has been losing. We’re also losing the Meme Wars. That’s the lesson from a truly ghastly discovery by the intrepid reporters at VICE, who obtained 23 pages of internal documents from the Pentagon about an anti-Russia meme it deployed last October. The meme (see above) in question was created by US Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force, as part of its invisible war against Russian hackers. Their goal: expose the fact that Russia has hackers (gasp!) and make them look dumb in the process.

Wednesday

March 24, 2021

Cockburn

The perplexing Powell defense

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.

Cockburn

If you must be white, try to be LGBTQ

Poor Colin Kahl. The Stanford professor is qualified, experienced, and shares President Biden’s views on defense and foreign policy. Ordinarily, that would be enough to get confirmed to a job like undersecretary of defense for policy. But no more! Three and a half years after #MeToo, the casting couch has migrated from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, thanks to Sen. Tammy Duckworth. On Tuesday, Sen. Duckworth announced that, since President Biden’s political appointees were insufficiently diverse, she would be voting against any Biden nominees with white skin color, starting with Kahl. The only exception, Duckworth said, would be for LGBTQ nominees. Well, Kahl will have a hard time pulling off a racial rebranding this late.

Tuesday

March 23, 2021

Cockburn

Mass shootings and the presumption of whiteness

'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.

Friday

March 19, 2021

Cockburn

Teen Vogue, victimhood Top Trumps and the coming race war

Just two weeks ago, Alexi McCammond was wheeled out as the new editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, which uses the brand of a teenage fashion magazine to sell Bolshevism and anal sex (please don’t click that) to unmarried 30-year-old white women. Now, McCammond has been laid low before she could even begin. She fell prey to one of the sorriest Twitter cancellations on record, with enemies highlighting tweets she made a full decade ago as a college freshman. ‘Give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don't explain what I did wrong...thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. you're great,’ said one tweet. ‘Googling how to not wake up with swollen Asian eyes,’ said another. There were a few other archaic remarks of the ‘that’s gay’ variety, and... that’s it!

Tuesday

March 16, 2021

Cockburn

Tucker Carlson is the new Trump — because there is nobody else

'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.

Friday

March 12, 2021

Cockburn

Georgetown’s sad decline into affirmative-action madness

For a thousand years, Western universities were the champions and guardians of reason. Now, they know better. Such is the lesson from the sorry tale of Georgetown University Law Center professor Sandra Sellers, whose career abruptly ceased to exist Thursday for the crime of being able to observe patterns. Of course, Sellers’s remarks aren’t a shocking revelation. They’re common sense. Georgetown proudly maintains an 'Office of Affirmative Action Programs'. What is affirmative action, if not a pledge to admit less-qualified students for identity reasons, even if it means watching them struggle in class? Any poor soul who has hit the rock bottom of applying to law school knows that 'Under-Represented Minority' (URM) status is a boon for law school applications.

Thursday

March 11, 2021

Cockburn

Taylor Lorenz and the media’s sacred cows

How sacred is a New York Times reporter? Is one required to kowtow in their presence, or merely bow? If one eats a Times reporter, does one become ritually impure? These critical questions are being settled right now in the clash over Times technology reporter and factually-challenged busybody Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz spent the bulk of lockdown season stalking the nascent Silicon Valley chat app Clubhouse. In July, she vowed to quit the app forever for not caring enough about ‘user safety’, i.e. protecting Lorenz from all criticism. But of course, like most addicts who pledge to quit, Lorenz’s promise was a farce, and she was soon back on the app.

Wednesday

March 10, 2021

Cockburn

Sigh Ngo more: Mumford disowns a son

Pity the poor rockstar who finds himself embroiled in the culture wars because he liked the wrong book. Winston Marshall, banjo player for the hugely successful band Mumford and Sons, almost certainly had no idea what he was getting himself into when he decided to tweet praise at Andy Ngo, the conservative journalist, for his best-selling book about the horrors of antifa. 'Finally had time to read your important book. You’re a brave man,' tweeted Marshall, referring to the conservative journalist’s latest periodical Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. The book describes itself as telling 'the story of this violent hate group from the very beginning'. Queue a barrage of condemnation from the Twittersphere, accusing Marshall of 'endorsing fascism'.

Thursday

March 4, 2021

Cockburn

‘The N-word Republic’ is a disgrace!

John 'Rick' MacArthur, the president of Harper’s, is one of those old-fashioned cats on the American left who think that journalism should be lively, provocative, interesting to read. He doesn’t think that the purpose of all writing is to treat every reader as a vile racist who must be reeducated through endless hectoring. That makes him a heretic, of course, in New York media circles, so the knives must come out. Somebody called Ryu Spaeth, a school-hall monitor manqué who’s had to settle for the less elevated role of features editor at the New Republic, has decided that enough is enough. 'John R. MacArthur is a disgrace,’ his latest article declares. A disgrace! Oh dear, what has Rick done now?

Wednesday

March 3, 2021

Cockburn

Is your three-month-old baby racist?

Conservatives like feeling outraged, but they don’t often like to earn their outrage. For most, it’s enough to wait for the AP to mention Dr Seuss getting canceled, briefly become upset, then return to waiting for the next setback to kvetch about. This passivity has created an excellent opportunity for one Christopher Rufo. In the past year, Rufo has carved out a career niche by adopting the novel strategy of actually finding all the poisonous propaganda embedded in America’s schools and government departments, and suggesting that, just maybe, these insanities should actually be tackled instead of being the subject of an instantly-forgotten Fox News segment. Rufo’s latest find is from Arizona, where the Department of Education has crafted an 'equity toolkit'.

Tuesday

March 2, 2021

Cockburn

President Biden vs Dr Seuss

The children’s author Theodore Seuss Geisel lived his entire life not just as a staunch progressive, but even as the rather grating variety. To Geisel, the Cold War clash with totalitarian communism was a dispute as flimsy as a debate over how to butter bread. Horton Hears A Who! may declare that 'a person’s a person, no matter how small,' but Seuss threatened to sue a pro-life group that took that statement to its logical conclusion. If Bartholomew Cubbins and his 500 hats were around today, at least one of the hats would be a Pussy Hat. But Seuss’s books were still phenomenally popular. Thousands of schools celebrate March 2 as Read Across America Day. The date was chosen to mark Geisel’s birth date.

Saturday

February 27, 2021

Cockburn

Pints and proposals at CPAC in Orlando

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.

Friday

February 26, 2021

Cockburn

America is back — and still bombing Syria

Presidents come, presidents go — but they all end up launching military airstrikes on the Middle East. Last night Joe Biden ordered his first big missile sally, a retaliatory strike in Syria. American air forces dropped seven 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions at a crossing used by Iranian-backed militia groups, reportedly killing 17. Boom! America is back, baby, as Joe Biden never ceases to remind us. Except, when it comes to legally and strategically dubious maneuvers in the Middle East, America never really went away. Trump launched tit-for-tat air strikes on Iranian-backed proxies, just as Obama did before him. What does change, however, is how Democrats react to such moves. We can see it all the hypocrisy-exposing time-machine that is Twitter.

Wednesday

February 24, 2021

Cockburn

Inside the American Moment launch party

What will the conservative movement look like post-Trump? Establishment Republicans seem eager to shake former President Donald Trump's influence on the party and the new right would like him to be a kingmaker for years to come. But while pundits opine and politicians dream, three young conservatives are building. American Moment, a new nonprofit organization founded by Saurabh Sharma, Nick Solheim and Jake Mercier launched Wednesday. The organization is dedicated to reshaping the political class to reflect populist priorities. Sharma is the former Chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas, Solheim the founder of The Wallace Institute for Arctic Security and Mercier an independent writer and editor.

Cockburn

Who is really pushing misinformation?

There’s a new administration in town. On Monday, House Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both members of the House Energy and Commerce committee, sent letters to 12 grand poobahs of television to make sure they were properly updating their ideological software. ‘Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm,’ the letter says. ‘Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN… now and beyond any contract renewal date? If so, why?’ Sadly, America’s government grows less transparent by the day, so the letter conceals half its content beneath a layer of subtext. That’s a nice TV company you have there, it says.

Tuesday

February 23, 2021

Cockburn

Neera Tanden is being treated differently because she’s a woman

Why is Neera Tanden, Joe Biden's nominee to head up the Office of Management and Budgets, stumbling where his other cabinet picks have sailed through confirmation? The senators who say they won't vote for her see her as an obstruction to Biden's efforts to govern in a bipartisan manner. 'Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,' Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said yesterday. 'Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend.

Cockburn

Biden goes back to school with Dr Fauci

We’ve all had to learn more than enough about pathogens in recent months — how contagion spreads, how our immune systems work, what vaccines do and so on. All of us, that is — apart from President Joe Biden, it seems. On Sunday, in order to demonstrate that he ‘listens to scientists’— an important campaign promise — the Commander-in-Chief posted a video of himself being lectured by the Scientist-in-Chief, Dr Anthony Fauci, the man who used to tell us not to bother with masks but now says we’ll still be wearing them until, oh, maybe forever. 'This is the spike protein,’ explains Dr Fauci, patiently. ‘This is the protein of coronavirus.

Sunday

February 21, 2021

Cockburn

Harvard study: reparations for slavery would reduce COVID-19 infections

Throughout the dark years of the Trump administration, brave, isolated voices in America’s richest, most liberal cities needed a means to communicate. They needed a kind of secret signal to show other liberals they were not alone, that the flame of liberalism was still burning. You may have seen the sign above and been confused: Now, thanks to Joe Biden’s triumphal arrival in the capital, these symbols can be deciphered. In each line, the glyphs carry a hidden, greater meaning: 'Black Lives Matter' translates to 'we should defund the police and increase the crime rate in predominately black areas.' 'Women’s rights are human rights' is coded language for 'biological males should win every women’s track meet.' And so on. What about 'Science is real?