After dark at the DNC

Chicago

Big Little Lies season three is happening, says Young Sheldon

Convention guests looking to play a game of IRL “Who? Weekly” were best off hanging out at the CNN-Politico Grill, which served free booze and local delicacies all week. Smoking was forbidden, sadly. On Thursday Cockburn caught up with Iain “Young Sheldon” Armitage — who confirmed that a third season of Big Little Lies is “happening” while he was mixing an ice cream float — and spoke to Dean Norris, AKA Hank from Breaking Bad. “I’m having a blast,” said Norris, “I’m having a brat summer.”

Also spotted at the grill: Community’s Yvette Nicole Brown, Senator Chris Coons, Gene Sperling, Jim Acosta, Wolf Blitzer, Laura Coates, Scott Jennings, Charlotte Klein, Ben Smith and the whole Semafor crew, David Urban, Andrew Cockburn and Bakari Sellers — whose top three guesses for the much-vaunted DNC mystery guest were Taylor Swift, George W. Bush and Beyoncé. None turned up.

The day before, Cockburn watched for around three minutes as Michael Cohen attempted to find the right lighting for a selfie with the Lincoln Project’s Tara Setmayer. Donald Trump was eager to portray the New York trial in which Cohen served as the prosecution’s star witness as a hit-job orchestrated by his political opponents. Cohen showing up to schmooze at the DNC does wonders to dispel that accusation. 

On Wednesday Cockburn made a brief jaunt up to a Wyclef Jean and Shaggy concert at the Salt Shed. After watching Wyclef and his covers band for a couple of songs, he was astonished to find that a beer cost $11 at the bar and departed to hole up at a dive bar with the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, Shawn McCreesh and Michael Grynbaum. En route, he heard a series of pops around a half-mile away. “Fireworks?” he asked the driver. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Gunshots.” She then recounted how there had been a shooting a little earlier on Lake Shore Drive. Charming city.

Inside ‘Hotties for Harris’

The social highlight of the week was Tuesday night’s “Hotties for Harris” party at the Moonlight Studios, which was apparently thrown together at ten days’ notice at a cost of over $200,000. Like much of the convention, the event was targeted at Gen Z “creators” and influencers — and was orchestrated by Democratic strategist Liz Plank, a thirty-seven-year-old Canadian. “Hotties for Harris, let’s go!” the DJ cried, again and again and again. 

The level of attention to detail at the soirée was remarkable. “TRUMP-VANCE SEX ENDS NOV 5th” announced a mock sale sign. “EVERYTHING MUST GO!!! CHOICE ENDING SOON.” The bar served “Madam President’s Spicy ’Rita” and “A Walz on the Beach.”

In the games room attendees could play a feminist mini golf course, or “whac-a-weird policy,” or “abortion access skeeball.”

There was a sex supermarket with free plan B, UTI tests and “f*ck Project 2025” condoms. The bathrooms were split into “male” and “female” — outmodishly — but there were tampons and pregnancy tests in the men’s room.

A “wall of weirdos” displayed images of Trump, his sons, Amy Coney Barrett and several others. The oddest inclusion was perhaps Spectator sweetheart Dr. Sebastian Gorka — hardly one of the leading lights of the American right. Cockburn asked a host about his inclusion. “I’m twenty,” she said, “I was thirteen when Trump was elected. I don’t really know who most of those people are.”

Cockburn watched as Michael Tracey and his intern — covering the convention as “creators”’for Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble channel — received a sex tarot card reading, where each card featured a sex position. She received the “wheelbarrow.” “What’s the most Republican card you have in there?” he asked. “I actually keep a special card for people like you,” the reader said, reaching into her back pocket to show him one that read “JUSTICE” and depicted a man on all fours preparing to be pegged by his female partner.

Taylor Lorenz — the Washington Post tech columnist over whom the sword of Damocles presently dangles due to her sharing a meme on her “Close Friends” Instagram Story — has a longstanding theory that journalists are ultimately “influencers,” in how they leverage their brands through media appearances to draw more attention to their content. The Hotties for Harris” party offered a helpful way to delineate between a journalist and an influencer: influencers are excruciatingly well-dressed compared to hacks, who look like dug-up corpses in crumpled suits because they are over the age of twenty-five. Lorenz was spotted at the party sipping on one of the coconuts they were distributing, as was the New York Times’s Ken Bensinger, New York magazine’s Ben Jacobs, the Independent’s Andrew Feinberg and Claudia Conway and her brunette girlfriend. Parkland teen David Hogg, after cutting shapes on the dancefloor, told Lorenz it was the best party he’d ever been to — plausibly, given that he went to Harvard.

Malort Monday

Cockburn hits up plenty of parties but it’s always a special treat when The Spectator crew hosts one itself. This week, the staff of his esteemed title threw a Monday night shindig at their Airbnb in River West. Journalists were seen slurping martinis, gin and tonics, wine, beer and, regrettably, Malort, as they watched the conclusion of President Joe Biden’s swan song — which started more than an hour behind schedule. Cockburn spotted Ben Dreyfuss, son of Another Stakeout star Richard, and Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin chopping it up behind the bar with Spectator colleagues Ben Domenech, Matt McDonald, Freddy Gray and Zack Christenson. Also spotted were Maxwell Tani and Nicky Woolf. Amber Duke and the Daily Wire’s Brent Scher ran the pool table with Newsmax’s Marisela Ramirez and Fox News’s Dave Marcus. One attendee was going around telling people he was a famous director — he scoffed when Natasha Feroze showed him what she’d been shooting for Spectator TV. The party ran late into the night and was doubtless the reason some media were dragging themselves through the United Center the next day.

The two Mike Lindells

There were not all that many right-of-center media outlets covering the DNC in person. So naturally pillow magnate Mike Lindell — cleanly shorn of his famous mustache — became standard-bearer. He has been guest-hosting Real America’s Voice while Steve Bannon is in jail — and the New York Post’s Jon Levine does a wonderful impersonation of him, which you can see Lindell enjoying here:

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