Latest from Coffee House

Friday

16 Sep 2022

Will Ron DeSantis miss his political moment?

The biggest question for the future of the Republican Party is not whether Donald Trump runs for president in 2024 — he will. It is whether Ron DeSantis chooses to challenge him, or jumps the shark instead. Henry Olsen, the esteemed election analyst and Washington Post columnist, has a new column arguing that the overall lesson from the midterm primaries that have played out over the last several months is that the appetite for Trumpian populist candidates exists almost everywhere. The GOP electorate doesn't just want the policy priorities of populists — they want the style and attitude Trump brought to bear against the media and the Republican establishment.

Paul du Quenoy

Martha’s Vineyard and the fraud of the rich white liberal

“We have talked to a number of people who’ve asked, ‘Where am I?’ And then I was trying to explain where Martha’s Vineyard is,” said befuddled Edgartown, Massachusetts, police chief Bruce McNamee of the 50 illegal immigrants who landed on two charter flights at the island's only airport on Wednesday. According to local reports, the airport officials believed the planes were delivering corporate guys on a late-season golf retreat, before suffering the crushing disappointment that the arriving passengers were, in fact, poor people of color. The illegals arrived courtesy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who sent them there using a $12 million budget set aside by our free state’s legislature to transport illegals to sanctuary jurisdictions.

Thursday

15 Sep 2022

Charles A. Coulombe

What Americans can learn from the monarchy

September 8, 2022 will go down in history as the date we lost Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and of her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. Her son Charles, Prince of Wales, has now succeeded her as King Charles III. For the first time in this writer’s life, the anthem is to be sung as "God Save the King." To write about the accomplishments of the sole public figure remaining from one’s earliest memories is a daunting task. The Queen in her turn inherited an institution that is difficult for Americans — especially of a conservative stripe — to understand.

Peter Van Buren

Vanity plates and the fight for free speech

If politics makes strange bedfellows, defending free speech sends one down some equally odd paths. The First Amendment and laws protecting speech exist for every thing that can be said, but end up being tested at the margins of what society tolerates in the name of free speech. A recent case in Hawaii, involving a car license plate, is a perfect example. Like most states, Hawaii issues specialty/vanity license plates where the owner can chose his own letters or numbers. The only restrictions are that the letters/numbers not be "misleading" or "publicly objectionable." Otherwise pick your combination, pay the fee, and you have your unique license plate, such as LUV YOU. That was the plan of Edward Odquina, who runs a web site named www.fckblm.

Amber Duke

Migrants win free trip to Martha’s Vineyard

I’ve never been blessed enough to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, but if you’re an illegal alien who’s always dreamed of biking with the Obamas, you might be in luck. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has just sent two planeloads of migrants to the New England paradise. You’d think the residents of Martha’s Vineyard would be thrilled at the opportunity to increase the diversity of the approximately 80 percent white island. Oddly, there have been reports of elderly women in straw hats and kaftans packing up their “no human is illegal” signs and marking their doors with the blood of slaughtered lambs.

Cockburn

Texas sends a migrant surprise to Kamala Harris

More mischief this week from Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor along with his Texas counterpart Greg Abbott have been busing illegal immigrants to blue states that have declared themselves sanctuaries for migrants. Last night, DeSantis escalated this strategy by flying dozens of Venezuelans to the posh and isolated Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, home to the Obamas. Now, the GOP guvs have kicked it up another notch. Cockburn hears that two buses of immigrants have arrived at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, home to Vice President Kamala Harris. The result has been a scene of chaos on the residence's lawn as migrants disembarked and journalists showed up to film the spectacle.

Wednesday

14 Sep 2022

John Pietro

How Russia is forcibly relocating Ukrainian civilians

With the stunning, rapid advance of its military against the Russians, Ukraine has shot back into the headlines. The focus is, understandably, on the battlefield, but the happenings behind the lines deserve attention too. Since the first weeks of the war, information has trickled in about Russia’s massive, criminal attempts to relocate Ukrainian civilians. While much of the situation in the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine remains murky, what is known provides a rough outline. Russia’s attempt at social control in Ukraine consists of two key elements: filtration and forced relocation.

John Fund

How Ken Starr served America

I first met Ken Starr in 1989. I was a Wall Street Journal editorial writer who was invited to speak at a conference held by the Federalist Society’s chapter at Cornell University. I met two very impressive people that day. One was Leonard Leo, the head of the Cornell Federalist Society. Only twenty-four, it was clear he had a natural genius for organizing, planning and networking. As the later head of the Federalist Society, he turned it into the premier farm team for conservative lawyers who wanted to become judges. In 2020, then-CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told a group of lawyers that Leo had played a major role in the selection of a majority of the Supreme Court.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden throws an inflation party

Biden throws an inflation party Yesterday’s inflation report was a reality check for the US economy. After a summer of easing price rises, economists expected the August numbers to bring more good news. Instead, the data suggested there remains a long way to go in the fight against inflation. The consumer price index rose year-on-year by 8.3 percent, down from 8.5 percent in July. But core CPI, a measure which excludes volatile energy and food prices, was up 6.3 percent in August over the same time last year, a rise on 5.9 percent in both June and July. As inflation clairvoyant Laurence Summers put in, the report “confirms that the US has a serious inflation problem.

Cockburn

Cockburn’s letter from London

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last week, every national TV network in America dispatched crack squads of producers to London to cover the aftermath. Staff shortages meant that The Spectator opted to send Cockburn over on an economy flight, although he bets that if it was anyone else, they’d be flying classy. After Cockburn got over the screaming kids and bad liquor on his JetBlue plane, he decided to start at Buckingham Palace. This was, in hindsight, a huge mistake. In fact, Cockburn would go as far to say that the British royal family’s HQ is host to a cabal of the worst humans on earth. Loud, crying Americans, British oiks taking smiling selfies, Instagram moms laying flowers down seven times to make sure that their dutiful camera man got the best angle of their ass.

Tuesday

13 Sep 2022

Rupert Darwall

China, not America, has the real emissions problem

Hailed as America’s first comprehensive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro. The UNFCCC’s objective was to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” a threshold that the convention left undefined. In 1992, the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 356.54 parts per million by volume (ppmv).

Gilbert T. Sewall

The president who cried ‘extremist’

In a primetime television address on September 1, President Joe Biden declared that a large share of the nation’s voters threatened the “very soul of America.” This creepy, unprecedented presidential alert opened the midterm elections, which are now going into their mail-in phase. Waving his arms, the presidential simulacrum barked imprecations at teleprompters. His spooky, dark, red-and-blue tableau with stiff Marines in parade dress was ominous and intentionally staged. To hear a president talk and act this way was one of the political shocks of a lifetime. Make America Great Again Republicans, it was indicated, constituted an enemy within, Merrick Garland’s domestic terrorists writ large. Be very afraid.

Cockburn

Is there a second Hunter Biden laptop?

What could be more scandalous than one Hunter Biden laptop? How about... two Hunter Biden laptops? Andrew Rice, a contributing editor at New York magazine, floated the idea that the president's prodigal son may have lost more than one computer during a CNN interview on Monday: People close to him have propagated the idea that perhaps actually there’s a second laptop out there that it might actually trace back to, which goes back to the general point that Hunter Biden was capable of losing more than one laptop that potentially contained devastating information about himself in this time period in his life. To recap: Hunter abandoned his first laptop in a Delaware repair shop back in April 2019.

Amber Duke

Virginia election official indicted over ‘discrepancies’ in 2020 race

A former county election official in Virginia was indicted Wednesday on corruption charges after her successor found "discrepancies" related to the 2020 election. Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares brought the charges against Michele White, who served as the Prince William County registrar of voters until she resigned last year. White is facing felony counts of corrupt conduct as an election official and making a false statement as an election official and her misconduct is reported to have occurred between August and December of 2020. Eric Olsen, who is replacing White, said that he discovered "discrepancies" while going through election-related documents in the registrar's office.

Jane Stannus

Canada’s new Conservative leader is no Donald Trump

Contrary to media messaging, Pierre Poilievre, the new leader of Canada's Conservative Party, is no Donald Trump. But he does represent a challenge to the left, so the brush must be dipped in the most lurid colors available. On September 10, Poilievre won the Conservative leadership contest in a landslide, giving the party its first credible leader since Stephen Harper. Andrew Scheer, a former leader who squared off against Justin Trudeau, was likable but failed to project confidence, notably when the left held his feet to the fire over his Catholic pro-life views. Far less convincing was Scheer's successor, Erin O’Toole, who wasn’t even likable. When it came to policy, O’Toole acted like a Liberal who’d somehow wandered into the Conservative caucus.

Monday

12 Sep 2022

Daniel DePetris

Vladimir’s no good, very bad week

The Ukraine war’s first seven months have been a long slog, with high costs in both men and material. Then, over the last week of combat, that suddenly changed. While casualties undoubtedly remained high on both sides, the Ukrainian army’s surprise counteroffensive in the northeast shattered Russia’s defensive lines and culminated in the most humiliating Russian tactical defeat since its forces were pushed out of Kyiv in April. While Russian President Vladimir Putin was celebrating the opening of a new Ferris wheel in Moscow, his troops 534 miles to the south were dropping their weapons and retreating.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

The fight for the burn pits veterans isn’t over yet

On July 28, 1932, the United States military attacked its own veterans. The desperate former soldiers, who had survived the horrors of World War One, had dug in for months in Washington, DC to get the bonuses that had been promised to them by Uncle Sam. Yet instead of paying the money they were entitled to, the Hoover administration dispatched General Douglas McArthur, who led against them four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine gun squadron, and six tanks. Ninety years after the infamous attack on the Bonus Marchers, dozens of veterans camped out on the steps of the Capitol building for several days. These veterans were not routed, thankfully.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) departs the Senate floor (Getty Images)

Cockburn

Lizard man loses national conservatives

Cockburn has made it about halfway through the third rendition of the National Conservatism Conference and he's already identified some major winners and losers. Loser: Cockburn, whose room was not ready when he arrived drenched in sweat from the airport and thus was forced to change in a hotel lobby bathroom ahead of the conference's VIP welcome reception. Winner: Florida senator Marco Rubio, who made an actually decent joke about the Dallas Cowboys during his keynote address. Loser: New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, who was ratio'd on Twitter when he claimed Florida governor Ron DeSantis's speech was courting "anti-vaxxers" and has now been deemed an enemy of the NatCons. Technically, everyone at this year's conference is a winner.

Oliver Wiseman

Is Joe Manchin about to be betrayed by his own party?

Manchin’s energy bargain Is Joe Manchin about to be betrayed by his party? When the West Virginia senator unexpectedly changed his tune on a large spending bill earlier this summer, he did so as part of a deal. He would back the green subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act if Democratic leadership backed an overhaul of the energy permitting process. Given progressives’ hostility to fossil fuels, the politics of this deal were never going to be straightforward. And sure enough, a gang of left-wing Democratic senators is gearing up for a blue-on-blue fight over the legislation.

H.W. Crocker III

Why conservatives are happier than liberals

Ross Pomeroy, editor of RealClearScience, calls it “one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction.” Given their recent embrace of lockdowns and masking as a societal ideal, drag queens as role models, abortion as a good career move, and sanctions against “misgendering,” it might not surprise you that American liberals are much more prone to neurosis, depression, and anxiety, and, as one recent study cited by Pomeroy pointed out, “have become less happy over the last several decades.

Bruce Bawer

How Amsterdam ceased to be gay heaven

Last month, in preparation for an article about the growing gay backlash against trans ideology, I spoke with Bev Jackson, the co-founder of LGB Alliance, a gay and lesbian activist group that opposes the hijacking of the gay rights movement by transfolk. Bev told me about her background — fifty years in British gay activism, a resident of Amsterdam for four decades — and asked me about mine. I mentioned my 2006 book While Europe Slept, a cri de coeur about the Islamization of Europe. I heard in her voice a degree of disquiet about its topic. Nonetheless, she asked me to participate in the LGB Alliance’s forthcoming annual convention. I accepted, but when I hung up I told my partner: “I’ve been invited to a convention in London.

Charles Lipson

Ukraine’s incredible success turns the tables on Russia

Ukraine’s swift counter-offensive has captured more territory in four days than Russia’s huge army did in six months. The victories go beyond the 3,000 kilometers of liberated land. The Ukrainians have managed to break and scatter the enemy army across city after city in Kharkiv (in the country’s northeast) and are now moving swiftly into Luhansk (in the north Donbas region). Russian commanders have abandoned major cities and supply hubs, forfeited their hard-won control of vital rail lines and highways, and fled eastward for their lives. Their soldiers have dropped their guns and abandoned vast stores of heavy weaponry, from tanks to anti-aircraft batteries. It has been a complete rout. How did Ukraine accomplish this swift and unexpected victory?

Sunday

11 Sep 2022

Peter Van Buren

Why is a ‘special master’ reviewing Trump’s documents?

The appointment of a special master is usually a case of much ado about nothing. Except with Donald Trump and his war with the Department of Justice, there is never "nothing." A special master is an independent party appointed by the court, in this instance to “review the seized property for personal items and documents and potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege.” In other words, the master will look at the pile of documents and other items seized from Mar-a-Lago by the DOJ under its search warrant and decide which ones they can keep to review and use in their prosecution and which ones are not allowed based on the limits of the warrants and privilege.

Saturday

10 Sep 2022

Teresa Mull

Setting the record straight on the Latin Mass

Actor Shia LaBeouf is known for being pretty…let’s call it outlandish. The “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page is hefty. He comes off in interviews as intense, impulsive, and potentially explosive (he once reportedly made a fan cry because she asked for his autograph). He’s being sued by his ex-girlfriend over abuse allegations and just welcomed a child with his on-again-off-again wife. Then there’s his full-torso tattoo. Now, LaBeouf is back in the headlines, but for once it isn’t for anything “scandalous” (despite what Slate might claim).

Friday

9 Sep 2022

Emmet Penney

California goes lights-out thanks to green energy

California has gone full pagan — it lives and dies by the weather. Over the last few days, the state’s power grid has groaned under the strain of a massive heatwave. Combine that with a hydropower-sapping drought and you’ve got a recipe for blackouts. While major weather events pose challenges for any electricity system, California’s has become uniquely vulnerable to blackouts thanks to an over-investment in weather-dependent wind and solar. Every night during the heatwave, solar experiences its scheduled defeat at the hands of sunset and Californians are left praying for the wind to blow and and the imports to flow.

Charles Camosy

Abortion distortion versus prenatal justice

“Abortion distortion” has been a serious problem for decades. And in our post-Dobbs moment, it's grown worse than ever before. This topic somehow manages to transform conservatives into energetic supporters of the kind of powerful government necessary to protect prenatal children, while at the same time making progressives worship at the altar of government staying out of the lives of autonomous individuals. It has caused reputable academic physicians to describe the four-chambered heart of a six-week old prenatal child with Orwellian euphemisms like "cardiac pole vibrations." It has even pushed Republicans to propose significant social programs to support vulnerable women and families — everything from paid family leave to help with child care.

Ben Domenech

The ignorance of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘anti-colonialist’ critics

As Alexander Larman writes, the passage of the Queen is not a tragedy. No life lived so well, so dutifully, and with such faith in so many things now lost to us can be considered a tragedy. But it is nonetheless very sad, even for those of us in America — a nation she loved in so many ways. Her death seems like another blow to another important institution of the West, undermined in recent decades by boomer proclivities and millennial narcissism, and likely to break into a thousand pieces in the absence of the old-world values Elizabeth represented. What is more tragic, and more offensive, is the degree to which the Queen's passing has been met by historical ignorance from the anti-Western left and its attendant useful idiots on the decadence-obsessed right.

Oliver Wiseman

The Queen who captivated America

The Queen who captivated America The tributes and messages of condolence issued since the death of Queen Elizabeth II yesterday speak for themselves. In Washington, the statements came flooding in from about as wide an array of American public figures as it is possible to imagine. The president and every living former president shared fond remembrances of their interactions with her. Lawmakers and governors commented on the news. Even state representatives and small-town mayors felt compelled to express their admiration for the woman who was, until yesterday, the world’s longest-serving sitting monarch. Baseball players paused for a moment’s silence before the first pitch. Flowers were laid at the British embassy in Washington.

Matt Purple

She lived her best life

CNN and Fox were fine, but you had to tune in to the British news channels to get the full weight of the Queen's death on Thursday. Every anchor, every reporter, spoke in a voice burdened by grief. So it was easy to forgive one Sky News commentator when she said, "At a time when it's all about having a brand, the Queen stood in defiance of that trend." In fact, it's hard to think of anyone who had a more cultivated brand than Elizabeth II. Her every public appearance, every utterance, every twitch was carefully calibrated toward the image of a stately monarch. Yet you can also understand what the Sky commentator meant.

Cockburn

When the Queen addressed Congress

Cockburn has always been an ardent republican — or at least he prefers Sam Adams beer — yet even his flags are at half mast this morning over the death of Elizabeth II. The Queen's passing yesterday also served to remind this old Washington hand of a transatlantic moment: when Her Majesty addressed a joint session of Congress back in 1991. It was the first time a British monarch had ever spoken in the Capitol building. And while you'd there might have been some tension over that whole War for Independence thing, the queen expertly diffused it right off the bat with a joke about her height. “I do hope you can see me today from where you are,” she said, drawing roars of laughter and a standing ovation from the congressman and senators.

Thursday

8 Sep 2022

Peter Wood

When the masks come off in blue states

The other night, I went to the Vermont State Fair in distinctly downscale Rutland, where my wife and I watched the pig races, ambled through the livestock exhibits, and examined the farm equipment, while enjoying corndogs and the crowd of distinctly overweight Rutlanders. The next day, I was back in my office in midtown Manhattan. A thin man wearing a mask got into the elevator with me and used a cloth to press the elevator button. Then he used the cloth to open the two doors to the street. He was clearly annoyed to have had to share the elevator with a maskless heathen. As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair.

Roger Kimball

An American remembrance of the Queen

I write as an American patriot who is also a confirmed Anglophile. So when I got the sad news this morning that the Queen’s health had taken so dangerous a turn that the palace had summoned her family to Balmoral, I steeled myself for bad news. Alas, the bad news has now been confirmed. Queen Elizabeth II has died. It says a lot that when I say “the Queen” even American readers know I can mean only one person. The ninety-six-year-old had just celebrated her platinum anniversary this summer — seventy years on the throne, the longest of any English monarch. Elizabeth was far and away the most admired head of state in the world. Her good sense, her generosity of spirit, her thoughtful but active reticence have made her one of the most successful monarchs in history.

Cockburn

Britain reeling after Queen’s health announcement

Cockburn is saddened by the news emerging from Britain about Queen Elizabeth II earlier, after Buckingham Palace announced that they were "concerned for her health." The Palace statement said, “Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen's doctors are concerned for Her Majesty's health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision," adding, "the Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral." After the news, king-in-waiting Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall made their way to Balmoral, the Queen's Scotland home. They were followed shortly after by Prince William and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. The Queen's other children, Anne, Andrew and Edward are also on their way to Balmoral.

Oliver Wiseman

The Democrats’ John Fetterman problem

The Democrats’ John Fetterman problem Democrats have a candidate problem. He’s called John Fetterman. As you may already know, the party’s candidate to fill the all-important Pennsylvania Senate seat that will be vacated by Pat Toomey suffered a stroke on the eve of the Democratic primary and then took an extended break from the campaign trail while he recovered. While he was away from the limelight, Fetterman opened up a considerable polling lead over Mehmet Oz, who has frustrated Republicans with a rather low-energy and flat-footed pivot from the primary to the general. But the dynamics of the race have changed ever since Fetterman returned to the campaign trail. His public appearances have not been reassuring.