Cockburn

Cockburn was back in the old country this week, stuffing small brown envelopes with money and slipping them through the letterboxes of wavering Conservative voters before making his personal Brexit back to DC to read the articles of impeachment. As the wheels went up and the gin and tonic went down, he reclined in Club with the newspapers, and also the Washington Post.‘Americans should be jealous of British elections,’ was the headline. Henry Olsen, the Post’s in-house Deplorable, covers ‘populism and American conservative thought’.

Headline-writing can be hard, chaps. Especially when you have to capture the true spirit of a person in the light of their death. But with the demise of Isis founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a truly heinous individual, surely putting his character into black and white is a black-and-white issue. If you're the Washington Post, apparently not, as Spectator contributor Kelly Jane Torrance was one of the first to point out. https://twitter.com/KJTorrance/status/1188467380491640833 'Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State dies at 48', the paper crowed, dolefully commemorating the life of the man who inspired hundreds of deaths. Obviously, the headline of his obituary has since been changed.

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington.There, Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton.Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election.

Cockburn just happened to be loitering outside Fox News Channel’s Washington bureau Friday when one of the network’s most-talked-about anchors announced on air that his show was ending its run. Shepard Smith’s abrupt departure flabbergasted just about everyone on the East Coast — including, it turned out, his Fox colleagues.‘A personal moment now,’ the anchor said as he closed the 3 p.m. hour’s Shepard Smith Reporting. ‘I’ve witnessed and reported on the events that shaped our reality. Together with my colleagues, we’ve written a first draft of history and endeavored to deliver it to you while speaking truth to power without fear or favor, in context and with perspective. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity.

Oh dear, Robert de Niro is doing his 'swearing about Donald Trump' routine again. It’s a tired act. It’s also really quite sad. Cockburn saw him on CNN earlier this morning and thought he looked like a vain old goat. Of course de Niro has his big new Netflix film, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, to plug and cursing on live TV is a great way to draw attention to yourself. It's also pathetic. ‘Fuck ’em! Fuck ’em!’, he said, when Brian Stelter asked him about the criticism he receives for talking about Trump. Stelter reminded him he was on a Sunday morning show, and he issued a perfunctory ‘sorry’. As if it wasn’t premeditated. https://twitter.

In Cockburn’s grubby corner of the journalism world, New York Times writers Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly are at the center of a serious controversy. To promote their new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, the two journalists had an excerpt published in the Times featuring a new sexual assault allegation against Justice Kavanaugh. Unfortunately for Pogrebin and Kelly, the excerpt failed to mention that the alleged victim does not recall the assault. While the New York Times has been criticized for its journalistic malpractice, it seems only fair to hear about the new book from the authors themselves. On Wednesday night, Cockburn slinked into the prestigious National Press Club to see the two authors discuss their new book.

Andy Ngo has flown the Quillette nest. The Portland-based provocateur, famous for his hate crime-debunking Twitter threads, CCTV coverage of Antifa protests and narrative-driven writing on Islam, left his role as subeditor for the Australian Intellectual Dark Web magazine this week. The circumstances of his departure are unclear, but the timing is suspect: last Thursday a Portland Mercury reporter circulated a video that shows Ngo near to members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer immediately prior to a violent clash with Antifa. Ngo himself is yet to comment. https://twitter.com/alex_zee/status/1164406638519803905 Quillette editor Claire Lehmann said this was a coincidence.

Let's get ready to rumble! Two viral sensations are squaring off on the Twitter. In the blue corner, from Massachusetts Bay, Barstool Sports president and whole pizza-eating aficionado David 'Davey Pageviews' Portnoy. And in the red corner, all the way from the Bronx, it's fiery congresswoman Alexandria 'The Red Scare' Ocasio-Cortez. The spat concerns the hottest new trend in New York media besides developing a substance abuse problem and getting fired: unionizing. Nothing offers comfort to an overcaffeinated 23-year-old fresh out of a liberal arts college quite like a big 'union' laptop sticker on a battered MacBook Air. Springsteen would be proud. The latest cluster of journavists to attempt this strategy hail from sports site The Ringer, a Barstool competitor.

It seems The New York Times has decided to continue its bizarre crusade against Britain, which culminated in last year’s outlandish claim that the nation lives on a diet of mutton and oatmeal (although, given current reports that the government is considering buying up Welsh lamb in the event of a no-deal exit, this strange claim could turn out to have been an unwitting prediction). The latest pronouncement comes from the NYT’s European economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman. He writes: ‘The British pound has long possessed a mystique that transcends its marginal role in the global economy, conjuring memories of its dominance in the imperial age.