Sip shots and stuff your face, it’s shutdown season

With the federal government shut down indefinitely, paychecks are going to be light or non-existent around DC, putting disposable income at a premium. Businesses in the Capital are stepping into the breach with the greatest array of discounts in memory. Cockburn will do his best to take advantage of them with his fake government ID. He wonders if anyone will realize he’s not actually “Rashida Tlaib.”

Some of Cockburn’s favorite DC spots are bringing items back to 2010-ish prices. The legendary Tune Inn will offer $4 Lemon Drop “Shutdown Shots,” $8 two-cheese Bipartisan Melt with French fries, and $7 “Gridlock Nachos” from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Furlough Fizzes for everyone! Up the street, MAGA hangout Butterworth’s offers a $5 Welsh rarebit, one of Cockburn’s childhood comfort foods, and a $10 “Furlough-rita,” one of his adult comfort drinks.

Logan Circle’s Amelie serves up, for $21, a plate of mussels and fries, plus a glass of wine, which is about what you’d pay to eat at Shake Shack. The DC outlet of Osteria Morini is practically giving away $15 pasta specials.

For now, DC is a city of all-day happy hours, $2 oysters, half-price sandwiches, $10 pizzas, $2 drip coffees and free admission to museums and women’s soccer games, all under the watchful eye of a permanently deployed National Guard. The only drawback is that everyone is out of work. It’s utopia and dystopia, caused by federal myopia. Cockburn will criss-cross the happy-hour strewn boulevards of Washington, drunken and bloated, until the gears of state once again grind to life.

On our radar

‘PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ONE WAY OR THE OTHER’ In a Truth Social post, President Trump gave Hamas a deadline of Sunday 6 p.m. ET to agree to the peace deal with Israel he presented on Monday.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME? The top 1 percent of Americans saw their wealth reach $52 trillion in the second quarter of this year.

OBAMA THE AURA FARMER Former president Barack Obama resumed his annual tradition of posting an anniversary picture with Michelle – one that is much more flattering to him than to her.

Inside The Spectator’s NYC hard-hat party

Spectator parties have been a rarity on this side of the pond – so naturally Cockburn made the trip up the Acela Corridor for Tuesday’s “hard-hat” party in his magazine’s New York office. The new digs are atop a NoMad high-rise and will doubtless be the envy of the city when completed – threatened features include an event space for talks and a broadcast studio, to accompany the gorgeous wrap-around terrace. Yet upon his arrival your correspondent found the bureau in a state of relative undress: knocked-through walls, an air-conditioning dial hanging from the ceiling. Still, the promised hard-hats were there – and there were two bars.

Early concerns about an outdoor party in late September were allayed by the sunshine – the first major weather incident was a hurricane called Caroline Calloway breezing in an hour and a half before the start time. The author and influencer grabbed a glass of chablis, regaled Cockburn and his colleagues with Dimes Square gossip, posed with a hard hat, fitted an orchid flower crown and dashed out to make the evening performance of Turandot at the Met. Special points for her Midsommar-inspired dress, which she designed herself. “The nightgown is from Etsy, the dupioni silk is from India and I had a tailor in Florida combine the two to my liking, with a biiiiig bow,” she said.

Around 150 or so guests took the long elevator ride up, a mixture of journalists and authors, artists and socialites. “You’re getting your fill,” Ted Lasso’s Keeley Hazell said to Cockburn as he retrieved four drinks from the bar for his friends. She wasn’t mistaken. Your correspondent also chatted to Emma Mnuchin, daughter of the former Treasury secretary Steve. He told her that her stepmother Louise Linton had written a Diary for the first US edition of The Spectator in October 2019, the last time the magazine threw an NYC bash.

Spotted at the event: Nick Allen and Shannon Totten; the Times of London’s Katy Balls and Megan Sheets; the Daily Mail’s Kayla Brantley, Chelsea Ritschel, Wills Robinson and Karen Ruiz; Breaker Media’s Lachlan Cartwright; Monica Chmelev; the New York Post’s Oli Coleman and Keith Poole; Ann Coulter (on her way to the Yankees game); National Review’s Caroline Downey; GB News’s Steven Edginton; FeedMe’s Cami Fateh; Ryan Girdusky; the National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam; Red Scare’s Anna Khachiyan; Roger Kimball and a petite battalion of New Criterion staffers; Harper’s John R. MacArthur; Chadwick Moore; Ed Roman; Kat Rosenfield; Allison Schrager; Lionel Shriver; IWF’s Inez Stepman (and June Stepman, aged almost one, who charitably offered her pacifier to Ben Domenech), and representatives from The Spectator’s DC, London and New York offices. More pictures here. Props to organizers Zack Christenson and Orson Fry. Next time in Washington?

Labor of love

So long to EJ Antoni, the Heritage Foundation economist whose nomination to head up the Bureau of Labor Statistics was quietly withdrawn this week. Antoni’s prospects of Senate confirmation grew increasingly slim after a series of troubling stories – among the first of which appeared in this newsletter, when Cockburn revealed on August 29 how Antoni had discussed the relationship between gender and IQ with last summer’s Heritage intern class. Cockburn’s report followed a story from NBC that Antoni was in the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while a subsequent story from CNN’s KFile showed that Antoni had an anonymous Twitter account replete with a number of fruity posts about feminists and homosexuality.

You would be blissfully unaware of Cockburn’s involvement if your sole source of the news of Antoni’s departure was the Washington Post. A triple-bylined story earlier this week says:

Antoni had shared a controversial scientific theory of differences of intellect between men and women during remarks to Heritage Foundation interns last year, The Washington Post reported.

It is true that the Post published a story on September 2 by Jacob Bogage about Antoni’s comments… but that story cites Cockburn’s report, which was published four days earlier. What could possibly explain their failure to credit? Cockburn’s editor emailed the corrections desk to ask. Their response:

We spoke to the assignment editor who handled this story, and she said that The Post put a lot of resources into our own report on this allegation, including reaching out to all three interns who were present, as well as many hours listening to recordings of conversations in the article that Jacob anchored (in which The Post gave the Spectator credit for reporting the allegation first).

In the story about Antoni, we decided to cite our own story, which we put so much work into. At no point did we claim to have broken the story.

In the eyes of the Post therefore, you can claim credit for a story you didn’t break if you put lots of effort into your later version. Cockburn is looking forward to telling people about how The Spectator reported out Watergate and the Pentagon Papers at dinner later. Democracy is dying in darkness…

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