Cockburn

Cockburn

Mischief, mayhem and Washington gossip. Send tips and party invites to cockburn@thespectator.com.

Saturday

Cockburn

Inside Raheem Kassam’s ‘Transatlantic Right Wing Spring Fling’

Cockburn doesn’t mind a cocktail or two, but he wasn’t sure if he could stomach the ‘Raheem is Daddy’ special on offer at the Nigel Farage party last night at CPAC. Kassam is a particularly proud boy at the moment, and perhaps understandably so. He’s just bought Human Events, the media company, with his ally Will Chamberlain and his party had a celebratory and very boozy atmosphere. Raheem himself called it ‘The Transatlantic Right Wing Spring Fling.’ ‘Feel free to say how hot my date was,’ he said. His party was an ‘off-the-record’ (but not for you, dear reader) knees-up at Pose Nightclub, upstairs at CPAC, and a veritable ‘who’s that’ of conservative personae, including several folk who were too damn dangerous for access to the convention proper.

cpac party raheem kassam

Wednesday

Cockburn

Michael Cohen’s amazingly pointless letters to Trump’s universities

Of all the slightly dubious documents Michael Cohen supplied with his opening statement today, one stood out to Cockburn: the threatening letters the lawyer had sent to Trump’s old schools and colleges. Cohen sent legal missives to Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania, warning there would be dire consequences if they were to release Trump’s academic records. ‘The release or disclosure [of academic records] in any form...is expressly prohibited by law, with any violation thereof exposing the subject educational institution to both criminal and civil liability...The criminality will result in jail time,’ the lawyer wrote to Fordham. Cockburn couldn’t help but wonder: why bother?

michael cohen universities

Tuesday

Cockburn

Robinson banned, Kassam disabled: Facebook cracks down on the harder right

Does Facebook have a grudge against the right? It’s an accusation that’s been leveled against Mark Zuckerberg before — notably in a Congressional hearing last year — and is rearing its head again, with the suspension of two British right-wing broadcasters, Tommy Robinson and Raheem Kassam. Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, has been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram for ‘repeatedly breaching’ their Community Standards by ‘posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims’, according to a Facebook blog post. ‘What they’re saying about me is complete lies,’ Robinson told Cockburn this morning. ‘What they’re saying about “hate” is all lies.

tommy robinson raheem kassam banned facebook

Saturday

Cockburn

New York Times: Britain on verge of civil war, send more croissants

Cockburn is back in the Old Country this week, feeling Meghan Markle’s bump, smoking heroin with top soccer players, and making preparations for Brexit, because Britain will leave the EU at the end of March, unless the dimwit government of Theresa May devises some futile means of extending negotiations that everyone knows will go nowhere. He knew what to expect in London. When Cockburn got on the plane he read America’s best newspaper, the only truthful paper in this time of universal deceit. He also read the New York Times. The Times usually supports democracy in backward and violent states, but it hates Brexit. No news is too fake for the Times to print when it comes to Brexit.

britain

Wednesday

Cockburn

Could Russia have kompromat on John Bolton?

To the grand, art nouveau Café Louvre in Prague, once one of Franz Kafka’s favorite haunts in the Czech capital. Cockburn is here to meet another – very different – Czech figure of historical importance: Karl Koecher, the only KGB agent known to have infiltrated the CIA. He is relevant again because of a strange story claiming that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, visited a New York sex club called Plato’s Retreat. Koecher went there too, when he was a Soviet spy. Is it possible that the Kremlin has kompromat – compromising material – on Bolton, dating from the 1970s and 1980s?

john bolton kompromat

Tuesday

Cockburn

The Bernie backlash has already begun

Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the 2020 Democratic nomination early Tuesday morning. The Vermont senator was a formidable contender in 2016, winning 23 states and 46 percent of elected delegates. In fact, several people thought he would have stood a better chance against Trump than Hillary Clinton, due to the polarized nature of the race and the significance of the white working class vote. Given his track record, you might reasonably suspect that people would be excited about Sanders entering the ring. But you would be wrong: the Bernie backlash is already upon us. As soon as he had he finished his announcement on Vermont public radio, the complaints started rolling in.

bernie backlash

Monday

Cockburn

An exhaustive list of ‘Conservative Critics’ from The Bulwark

News from the #NeverTrump bubble, as Weekly Standard spinoff site The Bulwark have decided to keep tally of every conservative who expresses discomfort or opposition to Trump’s declaration of a national emergency for wall money. It’s an ambitious branching out into listicles for the site, whose preferred format up until that point had been ‘please, someone, anyone, primary Trump’. Their piece, entitled ‘Conservative Critics of Trump’s Non-Emergency Declaration, Listed’, categorizes opponents of the executive cash grab by their area of work.

bulwark

Thursday

Cockburn

Women’s site Babe.net closes US office

babe dot net has closed its US office, Cockburn has learned. The controversial website which published the Aziz Ansari sexual misconduct article is winding down operations, after its parent company Tab Media failed to secure further funding from American investors. At its peak, Babe.net had an average staff age of 24. The site, whose slogan was ‘for girls who don’t give a fuck’, published ribald stories aimed at young American women such as ‘Power ranking every US president by their dick size’, ‘Was Snape an incel?

babe dot net aziz ansari
aoc valentines
Cockburn

Valentines for Democrats

Like all true romantics, Cockburn is not a Valentine’s Day enthusiast. He was, however, amused to find his progressive nieces messing around on his computer, giggling over Valentines memes they were making for their equally woke crushes. For those readers wondering how to woo a leftie, apparently these cards are all the rage on Twitter. Simply find out your beloved’s favorite politician, print one out, fill it in, hand it to your sweetheart, and remember – the best word to describe your political views is ‘moderate’. May Cupid’s arrow fly true.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Joy Villa: Border wall Grammys dress made people angrier than ever

Joy Villa shot to infamy in 2017 by donning a Make America Great Again dress. She set eyeballs rolling again last year with her pro-life fetus-in-the-womb outfit. How could she top that, you ask? Why, by dressing as the border wall of course! Her outfit included a barbed wire necklace, a Pink Floyd-inspired border wall gown and a MAGA handbag (handMAG?), and was designed by Desi Lee Allinger-Nelson. Cockburn caught up with Villa last night in New York to find out the gossip from the ceremony. ‘On the red carpet, I was getting a lot of side-eye from celebrities, which I kind of expected,’ she said. ‘Camila Cabello smiled at me, and Lele Pons, the YouTuber was really nice, she came up and was like “I love your dress, I’m in gold and you’re in silver!

joy villa camila cabello lele pons wall grammys
dognald trump dogphobia dog
Cockburn

The dogphobia of Donald Trump

Donald Trump doesn’t want a dog, for fear of looking phony, he says. But Cockburn can’t help wondering if there isn’t a deeper neurosis here. The president, it seems, is a dogphobe. He once was reported to have said ‘I never understood why people like dogs. Dogs are disgusting’ — though Snopes declared that fake news. Trump does however seem to have a strange canine preoccupation. He has used the word ‘dog’ over 40 times on Twitter. He employs the formulation ‘like a dog’ with particular regularity — often, misusing the dog simile. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/589251220000403456 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/715013260462960642 Are dogs thrown off TV? https://twitter.

Sunday

Cockburn

WATCH: SNL sends up the Virginia blackface scandal

For the first time in what seems like decades, Saturday Night Live turned their sights on the Democrats – and delivered what Cockburn considers one of their best sketches of the season. ‘State Meeting’ takes place in the Virginia State Capitol, where an African American ethics committee chief (Kenan Thompson) addresses a room of mostly white colleagues to check whether they have ever worn blackface. Unsurprisingly, many of them have – and they ask whether their excuses for doing so are good enough. ‘I have a question,’ asks Beck Bennett’s state senator. ‘What if your blackface was just part of your costume as a black person?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrpQVSVa2QI ‘Does it count if you did it all the way back in the Eighties?

SNL virginia state meeting

Wednesday

Cockburn

Turning Point USA is a campus activist group for old people

Exciting times at Turning Point USA, the Tea Party college activism group founded by Charlie Kirk (who never attended college). It emerged today that everyone’s favorite plagiarist Benny Johnson will be joining from the Daily Caller as Chief Creative Officer. Cockburn congratulates the (presumed) author of ‘Penis Pump Claims Becoming A Stiff Problem For Federal Government’, and wishes him well with his endeavors to draw in more college kids to the movement. Judging by how their Facebook advertising campaigns are going, he’ll have his work cut out for him. As a keen-eyed left-wing activist noticed on Twitter, despite TPUSA’s target audience being college students between the ages of 18-23, it’s that demographic that are seeing the least of their boosted posts.

turning point usa
tulsi gabbard
Cockburn

Who’s afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?

Fresh off her formal campaign announcement last weekend, Tulsi Gabbard took to the hallowed grounds of Morning Joe’s studio for a friendly sit-down interview. Surely the expectation was that Joe, Mika, and the rest of the gang would herald Tulsi’s history-making potential as the first female, minority, and non-Christian president. A trailblazer! An inspiration! Instead, the discussion immediately took on a dark, interrogatory tone, focused (as usual) on Tulsi’s alleged fondness for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Kasie Hunt, the most overtly dimwitted of the Morning Joe crew, asked whether she thinks Assad ‘is a good person.

tomi lahren cardi b nicki minaj
Cockburn

Tomi Lahren offers a lot to the world of rap beefs

Back in the Nineties, rap beefs used to mean something. Fans of the genre watched in horror as its biggest stars traded insults and then bullets. Two of its most promising talents, 2Pac and the Notorious BIG, were wiped out within months of each other, all because of a coastal rivalry. Cockburn isn’t hoping for a return to bloodshed — needless to say, his streets have seen too much of that in their time — but he is concerned about the relative tameness of conflicts between rappers these days. When a multimillionaire like Kanye West rises to a supposed slight from multimillionaire Drake about whether he slept with his multimillionaire wife Kim Kardashian, it’s fair to ask whether the noble art of the rap beef has lost its edge. That’s why new contenders are always welcome.

Thursday

Cockburn

After seeing Donald Trump fan art, your life will never be the same

How does Donald Trump make you feel? For the oft-maligned sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, incandescent rage might be the first emotion that springs to mind. Incredulity is a fairly common one too. Indeed, the 45th President causes a veritable rainbow of sentiments around the world. Perhaps one of the rarer ones, though, is the urge to create. But for some in the online artistic community, Donald Trump has served as muse to truly inspired works. Cockburn is delighted to welcome you back once more for a viewing of his private gallery, where this week we will be showcasing the boldest, finest, strangest Donald Trump fan art that the dark recesses of the internet has to offer. The images of President Trump span a number of different artistic styles.

donald trump fan art

Wednesday

Cockburn

Revealed: Steve Bannon’s ‘most influential Catholics’ listicle

Cockburn was flattered to read BuzzFeed News’s claim that what Steve Bannon wants to read is a ‘Catholic Spectator’, but puzzled. The Spectator is a broad church, broad enough to accommodate atheists, Bible-bashers, even that notorious sinner Taki. But on further inspection, Cockburn realized that Bannon is talking about British weekly The Catholic Herald, and its launch in America. What the Herald should do, Bannon says, is cultivate ‘Catholic influencers and millionaires’, and to follow the strategy which has worked so well for BuzzFeed, by running listicles like ‘The 25 most influential Catholics in the US.’ Catholic BuzzFeed, perhaps? The ways of the Lord are more mysterious than Donald Trump’s tax returns.

steve bannon ariana grande catholic

Tuesday

Monday

Cockburn

BuzzFeed aren’t paying out unused holiday to their fired staff and People Are Freaking Out

It’s a rough life, being a liberal media mogul. Balancing your aura of caring for your staff and their rights with the cut-throat demands of your investors is testing at the best of times...imagine how hard it gets when your business hits the skids. So pour one out for Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, for whom this week isn’t looking any easier than the last. After suffering the embarrassment of having BuzzFeed News’s major Russia scoop unraveled by Robert Mueller’s office, Peretti had the unenviable task of laying off hundreds of employees across the country. Their entire national desk was culled along with many other BuzzFeed News staffers, in cuts brutally staggered over several days.

buzzfeed

Sunday

Cockburn

Why SNL’s Tucker Carlson skit was a misfire

Cockburn never wants to criticize people for trying to be funny, even if they fail. He’s fallen flat on his own comedic face more than once so he knows the pain. But last night’s Saturday Night Live spoof on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson show missed the mark in several unfortunate and interesting ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sld27PfAF3M&list=PLS_gQd8UB-hISSFxFTxdheRfIDH-XKBCi Let’s begin with what worked. Alex Moffat’s impersonation wasn’t too bad — his impression of Carlson’s ‘listening face’ was amusing, certainly. Moffat was also helped by Kate McKinnon, who did a brilliant and hilarious Wilbur Ross routine, and Cecily Strong did a pitch perfect Judge Jeanine. But the conceit was wrong.

alex moffat tucker carlson saturday night live