Cockburn

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.

'To live in Havana', Graham Greene once wrote, 'was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.' To work as Cockburn does, as an underfed Grub Street hack, is to work in an industry that turns out pointless emails on a conveyor belt. Every now and then though a real diamond rolls out of the coal chute. On Friday The New Republic invited its readers on a Caribbean jaunt – to Raúl Castro’s Cuba. Under the heading 'Discover Cuba and Support the Cuban People' the email read: 'While Trump petulantly restricts travel to Cuba, The New Republic invites you to discover the culture, society and politics of the island, and most of all bolster the people of Cuba when they need it most.

Alexander Nazaryan, the national correspondent at Yahoo! News, has a new book out – The Best People, pillorying the Trump administration’s staffing. And guess what? The NeverTrumper set is throwing a book party for him in New York in June, Cockburn has learned. The shindig will be held at the home of the new it girl of the Never Trump clique: Molly Jong-Fast, the daughter of northeastern blue-bloods Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast. MJF is known most for her libertine parents, her partial-renunciation of their antics and a weirdly massive Twitter following. She’s now contributing editor of The Bulwark, the Studio 54 of out-of-power, baby boomer conservatives.

‘First Family’, declares the cover of this week’s TIME, as Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten gaze at the camera, dressed in blue jeans, brown belts and tucked-in button-downs. TIME has only been going since 1923 – a full 95 years younger than The Spectator – but in that time, it’s sought to position itself as something of a political Nostradamus. Hey, if you’ve got to fill the void between the TIME 100 and Person of the Year somehow, why not wildly guess who the next president will be? But how often do those tipped by the magazine rise to glory? Cockburn peered through the archives to discover...not frequently at all. Hillary Clinton has featured on several TIME covers in the past 30 years...

Remember when Donald Trump’s administration courted the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? What about when the American right was still enamored with Big Tech? That seems a long time ago now. On Friday President Donald Trump tweeted: ‘I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!’ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1124447302544965634?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1124447302544965634 Conservatives increasingly accept that Big Tech is a problem, something that stifles creativity and ideas. But will anyone in power ever do anything about it? Sen.

The eccentric debut of Raheem Kassam and financier-attorney Will Chamberlain’s new Human Events is here. Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine is now Raheem’s roundhouse. So how does it look? Not the worst. Eager to solidify the bridge between the Trumpzine of today and the conservative periodical of old, the site is highlighting a forty-something Trump shaking hands with the Gipper. ‘This is no time for “peacetime” Republicans,’ say the editors, dissolving any pretense of partisan non-affiliation. ‘This is a time for brawlers. And we are here to brawl.’ On tap for week one: Donald Trump Jr., Chamberlain’s legal analysis of the Mueller exoneration, the popular populist Italian writer Alessandra Bocchi and Conservative Inc. grandee Dennis Prager, among others.