In 2015, hackers accessed the user data of Ashley Madison, a website that helps facilitate clandestine romantic affairs. The logins of millions of users were leaked. Politicians, reality TV stars and ordinary people just trying to cheat on their spouses were exposed. To this day, the database remains searchable on a series of websites, such as Ashley.Cynic.Al and CheckAshleyMadison.com.
Many of the people whose emails were in the hack have since gone on to illustrious careers, happy to know that their 2015-era obscurity saved them from embarrassing revelations and awkward conversations. Cockburn confirmed this week that the old realtor email of Congresswoman Nancy Mace was found on one such database.
Now, there could be an innocent explanation for this. Perhaps anti-Mace activists registered her email address at the time in an attempt to smear her. Or, like US Senate candidate Bernie Moreno’s very plausible explanation for why his email was attached to an account seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” on AdultFriendFinder, a disgruntled colleague signed up with it as a joke. If some dastardly dog is trying to slut-shame Nancy Mace, Cockburn for one won’t stand for it.
Ashley Madison, for its part, was incredibly loose with both morals and email verification — they did not require it to create an account. One Trump administration official said he made an account to do “opposition research,” for example. It is likely that any user of the site knew what they were signing up for — or signing someone else up for — whether for “research” purposes or for more conventional affair-having purposes. “Life is short. Have an affair,” remains the site’s slogan.
The congresswoman was far from a frequent Sunday show guest in 2015; she was a businesswoman and author who had recently come in a distant fifth in a US Senate primary.
Mace, who was married at the time of the hack, had been divorced once before and divorced her then-husband in 2019. She got engaged for a third time while in the House and then broke that off last year, supposedly because she caught her beau on, ironically, dating apps — hopefully not Ashley Madison!
Cockburn reached out to the Mace email, which sent an auto-reply due to it being “overwhelmed with messages.” Subsequent requests for comment to both that email and to Mace’s office have thus far gone unanswered.
TeXXXas
“PornHub has now disabled its website in Texas. Sites like PornHub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children,” the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton,
famously a paragon of virtue, posted on Twitter/X Thursday. “We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”
But could the Texas law affect users of another widely used website that’s swimming in pornography: X itself? In response to Paxton, @Melissa_M818 pointed out that the bill “does not protect children from the massive amounts of porn on @x and @reddit. These apps SHOULD require @AppStore level age verification. @x and @reddit also need to be rated ‘Adults Only’ with prominent content warnings.”
X CEO Elon Musk is a Texas resident. And right now the age requirement to be on his app is… thirteen.
Kiss kiss Fang Fang
Fang Fang is back!
This week, Hu Xijin, who spent years as the editor-in-chief of one of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda outlets, tweeted a photo of himself eating lunch with Congressman Eric Swalwell’s alleged former belle. “I had lunch with this lady today. Her name is Fang Fang, and US media called her a ‘suspected Chinese spy.’”
The return of Fang Fang may be no coincidence. She honeypotted her way across the western United States, scoring kompromat on who knows how many politicians. Now, as CCP control over TikTok is at a potential crossroads, the company is pulling out all the stops to block a bill that would force CCP divestment, using an army of child lobbyists last week to beg Congress to not “ban” TikTok.
Fang Fang’s resurfacing could bring back a lot of unsavory memories for some elected officials in America. Might this be a bit of blackmail on China’s part to remind members of Congress what details they have on them? We may never know.
Swalwell, for his part, sided with CCP interests in voting against the TikTok divestment bill — although he cited largely debunked free speech concerns as his reason for doing so. “I don’t like Republican bans on bodies,” he said in part.
VP to QVC
Allow Cockburn to fill in for Ben Domenech, who was off this week, and offer a brief insight into the 2024 veepstakes. Tulsi Gabbard, who ran as a pro-universal healthcare, pro-choice Democrat in 2020, told Donald Trump Jr. it would be an “honor” to be selected as his father’s vice president. But elsewhere in devastatingly photogenic female candidates, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is taking a more unorthodox approach to getting attention: she’s rebranding as an influencer.
“Fit My Feet does amazing work to make custom insoles. Just wait… I’m gonna be so fast! 👟,” the governor posted yesterday, in her third product plug of the week.
She also praised Common Grounds coffee in Spearfish on the same day, calling the owners “the backbone of South Dakota.”
But at least those two businesses are in her state. On Monday she tweeted out a nearly five-minute-long clip about having her teeth done at Smile Texas. “They gave me a smile that I can be proud of, or confident in,” Noem beams.
Nowhere in the video does she mention the cost of the procedure. Cockburn is not the only one to consider Noem’s behavior rather strange for a state executive. But then the Donald is fond of the art of the deal. Perhaps he’ll look kindly upon Noem’s brand ambassadorship so she can help hawk his campaign wares, such as a “Crooked Joe” T-shirt ($36), a pair of “Joe Biden Owes Me Gas Money” coozies ($15) or a “Never Surrender!” Trump mugshot coffee mug ($25)…
