The Washington Post is under the microscope again. This time, it has been facing legal pressure to rehire former opinion columnist Karen Attiah. If she is brought back on board, her role would be within an overhauled Opinions section, which since early 2025 has had an explicit focus on “free markets and personal liberties” and is mostly populated by libertarians and conservatives.
Documents cited in the legal decision make it seem like former Opinions editor Adam O’Neal wanted to fire Attiah for some time, as her body of work was “inconsistent” with his section’s new free-marketeer vision. Officially, she was fired because of her social media use, following a post about the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder that read: “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence.”
At the time of her firing, Washington Post staffers told Cockburn that Attiah had been missing deadlines. O’Neal may have erred in making the dismissal about “gross misconduct” instead, considering how difficult it is to fire columnists at-will at a paper such as the WaPo, where the guild is strong. It is not clear why Attiah would want her job back, but Cockburn assumes the lawsuit is aimed toward a future payout.
SPACE ACADEMY Trump has announced the creation of a United States Space Academy, while speaking at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Like the other military academies, it will be on training officers for the Space Force.
GRACEFUL EXIT Karoline Leavitt had her last day on the job. She posed for a photo with her two children behind the podium and referred to the White House press pool as her “colleagues” who she will miss working with.
ANTHROPOLOGY A federal judge blocked the Pentagon’s decision to blacklist Anthropic, following their refusal to allow certain uses of their technology by the US military.
“We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence – it metastasizes because we can always point the finger at the other side.” So said Spencer Cox – Governor of Utah – in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September of last year. Cox was duly hailed as a unifying figure, though whether the moment called for unity as opposed to some quite frank discussions about political violence is another matter.
Now we learn that Cox has preached the same message off camera as well. An extract from his forthcoming book Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt recounts his attempt in August 2023 to persuade the then-President Biden to pardon Donald Trump.
Biden was amenable to the idea. “You know, I’ve actually considered this for a while,” Biden said. “In fact, just this week as we were lying in bed, Jill and I had a long conversation about it.” At any rate, nothing came of it, and various AGs continued to hound Trump until election night 2024, and in some cases a little beyond it.
What if Biden had gone for it? It’s an interesting counterfactual. This anecdote from Cox seems to confirm what Michael Wolff claimed in his 2025 book All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America: that prosecutors were willing to drop the charges against Trump if he declined to run in 2024 – a slightly blackmailing form of clemency.
In the end, Biden did make some unprecedented clemency grants – but these were to his son Hunter and allies such as Anthony Fauci. Should the election of 2028 not go MAGA’s way, we will likely see the power of the pardon used even more liberally.
TMZ reported that British right-wing commentator and former Kanye West chief of staff, Milo Yiannopoulos, has been detained by ICE in a Louisiana airport and faces deportation. West will be performing tonight in New Orleans.
Yiannopoulos was a former Breitbart news editor, Marjorie Taylor Greene intern, and polarizing internet personality. According to the Daily Beast, “Yiannopoulos was credited with arranging West’s hugely controversial Mar-a-Lago dinner with Donald Trump and white nationalist [Nick] Fuentes in 2022.”
Milo is a proponent of strict immigration policies and deportations. He has advocated for ICE checkpoints in all kinds of public places. Last September, he posted that the “Justice system should be just ICE.”
While Cockburn won’t assume his detainment means that Milo himself was illegally living in the United States, such a contradiction would not be hard to imagine. He is, after all, famous for being a gay man publicly attempting to make himself straight. Some things are inevitable. The ice is cracking, if you will.
By Jane Stannus
The Irish Rovers sang about the biggest mixup that you have ever seen: he was christened David Anthony, but still in spite of that, his father called him William while his mother called him Pat.
Picture the feelings of Lake Ontario this morning. It was christened Lac Saint-Louis by Samuel de Champlain, but it’s woken up to Canada calling it William and the US calling it Pat – or rather, Lake America (without the “of,” as Trump helpfully specified in his video on Truth Social).
The new right-wing art scene is disappointing
By Aiden Abbott
It averaged a brutal 91 degrees this week in Cameron County, the southernmost tip of Texas, and a group dressed as the cast of O Brother, Where Art Thou have been there sweating away at something big. A colossal limbless torso is parked on the dunes and a head, suspended from a crane, is swaying very gently in an ocean breeze. There is the smell of metal and hot dust.
Pending some finishing touches and last-minute dabs of glue, this Atelier Missor’s Prometheus, soon to be unveiled at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site – standing contrapposto, torch aloft, bidding the rockets a comradely “Adieu!” It is Prometheus who gives the gift of fire, and thus technological civilization, to man, and so it is to him that we owe stainless steel, the internal combustion engine, the nuclear bomb and, in a roundabout way, Elon Musk.
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