Cockburn

There have been endless, gleeful reports about Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show losing nervous corporate advertisers. Far less attention has been paid to the fact that, for the last few days, his news show’s ratings have been creeping up. A week is a long time in politics, and an eternity on rolling news. On Sunday night, things looked bad for Tucker. He was trending nationally on Twitter after Media Matters surfaced old radio interviews in which he made some rather unsavory remarks. Influential public figures like Alyssa Milano from Charmed were campaigning for his ouster. It seemed like the presenter had a real risk of being #canceled by the outrage brigades. But a lot can happen in five days.

The Trump era has surfaced an ensemble cast of bizarre characters: hustling for eyeballs through a killer combination of outrage, bombast and grift. The majority of these are in the Trump corner: think Candace Owens, Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl. But let’s now turn the spotlight towards the strangest creatures of the anti-Trump brigade. Cockburn is of course talking about the Krassenstein twins. For the uninitiated, the twins are Brian and Ed Krassenstein, 37-year-old brothers from Fort Myers, Fla. They rose to prominence through a practice Cockburn refers to as ‘wohling’: that’s to say, whenever @realdonaldtrump tweets something, you reply with a bland but extremely partisan statement, in the hope of accruing likes and retweets, and building your personal brand.

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.

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.

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?

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.