Charles C. W. Cooke


Charles C. W. Cooke is a British-born American journalist and the editor of NationalReview.com, formerly known as National Review Online. He assumed the role after Rich Lowry stepped down in June 2016. Cooke is the author of The Conservatarian Manifesto and a frequent guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. In addition to National Review, he has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Along with Kevin D. Williamson, he hosts the Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast. Cooke has been described by The Atlantic as "perhaps the most confident defender of conservatism younger than George Will" and "a principled conservative who is allergic to anything resembling groupthink."

Early life and education

Cooke and his sister grew up in Hemingford Abbots, a small village outside of Cambridge, England.
Cooke is a graduate of Oxford University, where he studied Modern History and Politics under Gillian Peele and Clive Holmes at Lady Margaret Hall. Before attending Oxford, he was educated at King's College School, Cambridge, and Kimbolton School.
Cooke immigrated to the United States in 2011. He became a naturalized US citizen on February 23, 2018.

Political views

A "conservatarian," Cooke is known for his outspoken criticism of populists such as Donald Trump and Sarah Palin, for his opposition to censorship and gun control, for his support for more robust federalism, for his disdain for the “imperial presidency,” and for his objections to the politicization of popular science. On many issues, Cooke leans libertarian, such as his support for legalizing marijuana, prostitution, and same-sex marriage, and his opposition to both the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency's metadata collection program. A staunch advocate of the right to keep and bear arms, he has described the "collective right" theory of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution as "utterly farcical" and "the legal equivalent of Moon landing trutherism." Cooke is a constitutional originalist and a critic of the administrative state. He opposes the death penalty.
Cooke has regularly criticized the conservative movement's blind-spot on race. In 2015, he wrote that slavery and segregation "presented challenges that eclipsed those that were posed during the Revolution... the crime of the British in America was to deny British conceptions of good government to a people who had become accustomed to it, and to do so capriciously. The crime of white supremacy in the South was, in the words of Ida B. Wells, to 'cut off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distribute portions' of any person whom the majority disliked, and to do so in many cases as a matter of established public policy." In an essay the previous year, Cooke noted that "for most of America's story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.'"

Personal life

Cooke lives in Florida with his wife and two sons. Although his wife is Catholic, Cooke describes himself as an atheist. Cooke is a fluent French speaker and a self-confessed "Francophile."

Works