Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Lower your expectations for Dr. Jill’s White House Christmas

Christmas may not come from a store, but Cockburn's poor heart still shrunk three sizes after he saw First Lady Jill Biden's attempt at Christmas decorations on Monday. The good doctor unveiled her first annual White House holiday décor with the theme "Gifts from the Heart", an ode to "small acts of kindness" that was rather small-minded indeed. Cockburn's distaste for Dr. Jill's decorations is only partially motivated by the fact that he was not invited to the press preview as in past years; he is sure that after four years of First Lady Melania Trump's ethereal and Vogue-esque displays, independent observers will agree that the new administration didn't live up to the hype.

White House holiday decorations in Washington, DC (Getty Images)
fauci science

Fauci the omnipotent

What does Anthony Fauci have to do with a starship? The good doctor’s staggering claims and admissions during his Sunday interview with Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan recall a classic scene from Star Trek V: The Undiscovered Country. The crew of the Enterprise are taken to a mysterious realm to face a being claiming to be an all-powerful god. To question the being would be to question God himself. The being, of course, turns out not to be a god or the God, but rather an alien entity, trapped and trying to escape. Now, Dr. Fauci seems to be borrowing from the alien’s playbook.

Omicron omnishambles

Omicron omnishambles The scary charts are back. Rapidly rising case numbers in South Africa and the identification of a new coronavirus variant with an alarming number of mutations means the pandemic has returned to the top of the political agenda. Relatively little is known about Omicron at the moment. We do know that the variant is already in the United States and is likely to lead to a spike in case numbers. (We also know that the WHO skipped over the Greek letter “Nu” because it sounds the same as “new” and passed on “Xi” lest anyone get the right idea about who is to blame for the pandemic.

Wokeness claims a museum

When will our intellectual life return to normal, where facts come together into conclusions? Today, in service to ideologies like Critical Race Theory, conclusions are established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support them. You can't argue intellectually against something so profoundly nonintellectual but you can take note of it in hopes that someday we will untangle ourselves. That's why today we're paying a visit to the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side. When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016, it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th-century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments.

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Omigod it’s the omicron

Another holiday season, another Covid strain to quintuple-mask against. This one, discovered in South Africa last week, is called omicron, and how fitting that it sounds like the codename for some evil plan that was hatched in a volcanic lair. The omicron variant feels like nothing so much as a twelfth-in-ten-years action movie sequel, derivative and exhausting, asked for by no one, with even Vin Diesel and The Rock unable to tell each other apart anymore. Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, meaning Covid has already produced a couple dozen other variants. (The WHO, which names the strains, skipped nu, the thirteenth letter, so it wouldn't be confused with "new," as well as xi, the fourteenth letter, presumably to avoid offending a certain Chinese public health hero.

Is the supply chain stealing Christmas — or are the mandates?

Did you think we were having supply chain issues? Just wait until the vaccine mandates — cross-border and federal — kick in. We haven’t seen anything yet. “The supply chain that stole Christmas” has been dominating headlines all over the place for over a month now, even in The Spectator. Senator Mike Lee’s office is having fun with it too. The senator has just introduced the Surpassing Temporary Obstructions at Ports and Guaranteeing Resources to Increase the Nation’s Commercial Health Act — or STOP the GRINCH Act. More on that in a moment — but first, why are we hearing so much about the supply chain lately? Because of shortages, obviously! But wait. There’s nothing terribly new here.

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Andrew Cuomo is as bad as you thought he was

Imagine if former governor Andrew Cuomo had been as concerned with the safety of nursing home patients during the pandemic as he was with cranking out his crappy memoir. Perhaps more people would be seeing their grandparents this Thanksgiving. Alas, the Luv Guv had his eyes on a $5.1 million prize and therefore he had to quit, or at least check out of, his day job. Cuomo was not the only governor who mishandled the response to the pandemic — but his fall from grace was definitely the most captivating. After all, the media fawned over Cuomo. The talking heads drooled over his leather bomber jacket, his tough talk, his no nonsense press conferences and his possible nipple ring. Marie Claire dubbed him "America’s boyfriend" while Chelsea Handler wrote him a love letter.

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ahmaud arbery

The verdict of the Ahmaud Arbery trial points towards hope

The jurors who convicted the killers of Ahmaud Arbery delivered accountability after a shocking crime, prosecutorial misconduct and an often disappointing trial. Their just verdict was based on foundational constitutional principles, the law and the facts. Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan chased down and killed the unarmed Arbery as he jogged through the residential neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia. Bryan filmed the attack, which culminated in Travis McMichael firing a shotgun at point blank range at Arbery. For nearly two months, prosecutors refused to file charges or even arrest the killers. Then Bryan’s film was leaked, a public uproar ensued, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case.

Are the Republicans getting complacent?

Are the Republicans getting complacent? As you may have noticed, this diary hasn’t exactly been heavy on celebration of the Biden presidency. Indeed, our first few months have coincided with a period of distressing mismanagement in the White House. But in a fit of holiday generosity, today’s pre-Thanksgiving offering is dedicated to a thought experiment: what is the strongest realistic case for being bullish on Joe Biden? After a miserable period for the president, Republican triumph in 2022, and even 2024, is all but taken for granted and question marks loom over whether Biden will even seek a second term. But is everyone getting ahead of themselves? Here’s the case for White House optimism.

Why I (sort of) stopped using the word ‘woke’

The college campus-born elite ideology that has swept through American institutions in recent years has gone by many names, from “identity politics” and “multiculturalism” to “intersectionality” and “cultural Marxism.” The essayist Wesley Yang coined the phrase “successor ideology,” referring to the doctrine’s replacement of traditional left-liberalism as the hegemonic ideology of the American ruling class. “Critical Race Theory” has become a household name alongside a surge in grassroots resistance to cultural radicalism in public schools across the country. But no term of art has taken hold quite like “wokeness.

defund Protesters hold up signs on June 3, 2020

The Democratic distraction

Ten months into Joe Biden's presidency, he finds himself sitting at the lowest approval rating of his time in office, most recently due to massive inflation and supply chain issues. The Democrats have a novel solution to their crumbling popularity: avoid tackling any of the actual issues facing American families, continue their political obsession with pinning the January 6 riot at the Capitol on former president Donald Trump. Democrats ignore the fact that the FBI found scant evidence that January 6 was some massive conspiracy and that some bad actors had already made their way to the Capitol building and were pushing down police barriers before Trump concluded his so-called "inciting" speech.

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We aren’t serious about fighting climate change

“UN Global Climate Poll: ‘The People’s Voice Is Clear – They Want Action.’” So ran a typical headline in the British newspaper the Guardian in January. Yet this month, a poll released as world leaders met at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference prompted a very different Guardian headline: “Few Willing To Change Lifestyle To Save The Planet, Climate Survey Finds.” Huh? Yes, surveys are essentially universal in showing people worldwide are terribly concerned about Global Climate Change (GCC) and support efforts to mitigate it, often no matter how drastic. But those polls may reflect a false perception.

A bad time for bail reform

A badly timed call for bail reform On Monday, three House Democrats sent a letter to New York’s district attorneys asking for answers on what they describe as the prosecutors’ use of “excessive” bail in the city’s court system as well as ways to deal with unsafe conditions at the infamous jail on Rikers Island. “We have grave concerns that excessive bail amounts are leading to unnecessary pretrial detention,” said Carolyn Maloney, Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a joint statement. The timing of the announcement could hardly have been worse.

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Bill Maher is not your ally

On Friday night’s season finale of his weekly HBO chat show Real Time, Bill Maher encouraged Democrats to recruit a “messaging czar.” They need someone to point their party in the right direction, he insisted. “Vote Democrat because white people suck” isn’t working, Maher said. “I’d say, do the math, but math is a form of white supremacy,” he went on. Why do Democrats seem out of touch? Because “no one likes a snob” and “your microaggression culture doesn’t play well in the Rust Belt.” With each dig at the left — which, for conservative viewers, amounted to little more than tired memes and stale culture war ephemera — Maher’s audience erupted in applause.

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How cable news ruined Thanksgiving

Jim Acosta is an edgy, edgy man. You can tell because he uses the word "bullshit" on live TV, which in this year of our edgelord 2021 still retains a good 1 percent of its taboo. So it was that Acosta on CNN last week honored Tucker Carlson with his "Bullshit Factory Employee of the Year" award, which sounds like a throwaway joke Jon Stewart scribbled on a steno pad while off on an Ambien sleepwalk. The entire Acosta segment was unspeakably sad — and not just because he's supposed to be one of the more respected reporters at The Most Trusted Name in News™®©. It's because CNN's relationship to Fox has become one of clinically committable obsession. Its personalities are forever playing Fox clips and trashing them. And they're not the only ones.

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Kyle Rittenhouse takes on his QAnon lawyers

Much of Tucker Carlson’s exclusive interview with Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager found not guilty in a high-profile homicide trial last week, went as Cockburn expected. Tucker largely let Rittenhouse tell his side of the story, running through the events of the bloody night last summer when Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and wounded a third. Tucker’s questions on the political dimensions of the case, something about which Rittenhouse has said very little until now, prompted the most interesting responses. “This case has nothing to do with race, it never had anything to do with race,” said Rittenhouse. “It had to do with the right to self-defense.” Rittenhouse also said: “I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating.

Kid Rock conservatism

Kid Rock feels like he emerged from a time capsule left for us in the Nineties, perhaps along with Dunkaroos and the decaying corpses of the Simpsons, who were replaced with inferior clones around the dawn of the millennium. In those heady days of nu-metal, Jackass and the Attitude Era, bored suburbanites and neglected “rednecks” unleashed their frustrations into jubilantly crass and confrontational entertainment that turned the raising of a middle finger into a kind of sacred ritual. Mr. Rock's breakout hit “Bawitdaba” hailed “the topless dancers” and “the...heroes at the methadone clinic,” and scorned “the crooked cops” and “all you bastards at the IRS.” Both he invited to, well, “Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.

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jerome powell

Biden picks Powell

Biden picks Powell After months of umm-ing and ahh-ing, Joe Biden this morning announced that he will nominate Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to a second term at the helm of the central bank. The move is designed to reassure. At a time when prices, and economic anxiety, are on the rise, Biden has opted for a known quantity: the Trump appointee who has helped steer the US economy through an uncertain few years. Progressives had been pushing Biden to replace Powell with Lael Brainard, a Fed board member who had criticized some of Powell’s moves as governor. Among her most vocal supporters was Elizabeth Warren, who has called Powell a “dangerous man.

Why I didn’t start a Substack

When I first began thinking about restarting my email newsletter, Prufrock, after a nine-month break (during which I cycled the Blue Ridge Parkway twice, slept until six every morning, and read novels), one option I considered was Substack. I started Prufrock in 2013 when there were very few newsletters, especially on the right. It was basically Ben Domenech’s The Transom, Michael Brendan Dougherty’s The Slurve, and Prufrock. Sometime around 2016, everyone had a newsletter. Then came Substack in 2017, which grabbed people’s attention in 2019 when Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes agreed to run their new publication, the Dispatch, exclusively on the platform.

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mcwhorter

John McWhorter versus the progressive elect

In his timely new book Woke Racism, Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter examines the force of an ascendant political religion that to his mind “has betrayed black America.” “White privilege becomes the original sin that requires perpetual atonement,” McWhorter observes. Woke rebukes white America for its passive, unpardonable complicity within a fundamentally racist system. One is cleansed only through self-mortification. According to McWhorter, a multi-racial Elect thinks of itself as a bearer of exclusive wisdom and empathy. Woke positions itself against the white race, men, Christianity, capitalism and private property, heterosexuality — in other words, against people, institutions, belief systems and worldly activities at the nation’s core.

Saving children’s books from wokeness

There is something deeply sinister happening in the world of children’s literature. Whereas the children’s section at your local library or bookstore was once filled with fables and fairy tales, it's now filled with titles like The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish and Race Cars: A Children’s Book About White Privilege and How Mommas Love Their Babies featuring wholesome lines like “Some mommas dance all night long in special shoes. It’s hard work!” The illustrations accompanying that page are an outdoor shot of a strip club at night, with glowing neon lights and a woman protesting for fair wages for strippers. This is a recent tweet from the author: https://twitter.com/juniperfitz/status/1458215711805956101?

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Kyle Rittenhouse is still no hero

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in law, but this does not mean he did the right thing in going armed to Kenosha. Much of the right is celebrating him as a patriot for taking arms against a sea of troubles, and as a poster child for the Second Amendment. He is neither. He is a liability for both of those causes. The right to bear arms is just that: a legal right. Choosing to bear them publicly is another matter: an ethical choice. Rittenhouse’s defense was that he was legally innocent because he was ethically innocent. Despite growing up with guns, he seems to have been unaware of the adult commonplace about bearing them: if you produce a weapon, you should be prepared to use it.

Yes, Build Back Better will raise the deficit

The fate of the Build Back Better plan is now in the hands of the Senate. The House approved the gargantuan $1.85 trillion bill on Friday despite efforts from Republicans to delay the vote. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy played the role of Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, railing against the legislation in an over eight-hour-long speech. The Associated Press suggests that McCarthy viewed his talk-a-thon as an opportunity to show his conservative bona fides should Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and he decide to push for the speakership. “This is a tipping point,” McCarthy said on Friday morning as he wrapped up the speech. “This is a point of not coming back. The American people have spoken, but unfortunately, the Democrats have not listened.” Which Americans?

Does Liz Cheney want to be a Republican?

Last weekend, the Wyoming GOP Central Committee voted not to recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the Republican Party by a margin of 31-29, a vote that was much closer than those taken in some county committees, a number of which made the unanimous decision to disavow her. The action does nothing to reduce Cheney’s power and position as Wyoming’s sole congressional representative, and in any case it seems increasing likely that the lady no longer cares what her constituency Way out West thinks of her. Last weekend Cheney, together with Representative Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and Chris Wallace of Fox News, each accepted a Jefferson-Lincoln Award bestowed by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy on Dr. Wallace’s Sunday show.

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Justice for Kyle Rittenhouse

The fundamental right to self-defense won today. A jury in Kenosha acquitted teenager Kyle Rittenhouse on all counts related to allegations that he murdered rioters who attacked him. The prosecution’s case rested on the insane lie that legally carrying a firearm is an incitement to violence. Rittenhouse, they argued, was akin to an active shooter and thus deserved Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz chasing him, trying to take his rifle, hitting him in the head with a skateboard and pointing a handgun at his head.

Kyle Rittenhouse reacts to "not guilty" verdict (Getty Images)

Kevin McCarthy’s magic minute

A magic minute and magic maths Why did House minority leader Kevin McCarthy deliver a speech that lasted a whopping eight and a half hours last night? After all, his filibuster will not stop the House from passing the Democrats’ $1.75 trillion social spending bill, which will be voted on shortly after lawmakers reconvene this morning. But in much the same way people don’t run marathons to get from A to B, McCarthy’s demonstration of rhetorical stamina was designed to prove a point. “I am a fighter” was the intended message and the GOP caucus was the intended audience. For McCarthy wants the Republicans to win back control of the House next year, and he wants to be the one handed the speaker’s gavel if they do.

The selfish and cynical ‘resistance’

It's bad enough when someone actually thinks reposting an "I Stand With..." meme is an act of woke resistance. But when the problem is enlarged to a societal scale, it hurts us all. Nothing actually broken ever gets fixed, and a deep sense of cynicism is injected into once-believers when they realize they've been conned. We live inside a con job where the appearance of action is mistaken for action. So we are left to wonder about the point, other than setting the stage for more future cynicism, of the Google "doodle" this past Veteran's Day. The illustration showed various vets, all appropriately racially ratioed, drawn half in uniform and half in civilian garb. One's a painter, one's a baker, and the Marine is shown as trans.

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Congress: worst anime ever

Yes, yes, I know Congress has a lot to worry about these days. But have you seen the anime edit videos? Over now to Crazytown's favorite son, Congressman Paul Gosar, who this week found himself on the butt end of a censure hearing. His crime? He had retweeted an anime video that depicted a likeness of himself killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a sword before also attacking Joe Biden. This was, according to the scrupulously nonpartisan Nancy Pelosi, an "emergency," worthy of a criminal probe, and possibly a threat to the republic as we know it. We're 100 words in and already you may be thinking: what in God's name is wrong with the United States Congress? If so, be assured that this is a perfectly healthy rumination and one you should keep repeating on a near-constant basis.

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Infrastructure Republicans aren’t ‘traitors’

Are you a Republican — or did you vote for the infrastructure bill? That’s the binary choice offered to House GOP members by the right-wing of the party. The thirteen representatives who voted to pass the landmark legislation find themselves in the sights of not just their fellow members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, but also former president Donald Trump, whose list of primary targets grows longer by the day. In a Saturday email, Trump called for “good and SMART America First Republican Patriots to run primary campaigns” against both the members who’d voted for the infrastructure bill and the members who had voted to impeach him for causing the January 6 storming of the Capitol. “You will have my backing!” he asserted.

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A radical regulator faces the Senate

Will Biden’s radical comptroller get the nod? You’ve probably never heard of Saule Omarova. A professor at Cornell Law School, she is hardly a household name. She is also Joe Biden’s pick for the job of Office of Comptroller of the Currency and her Senate Banking Committee hearing will be held today. OCC is one of those important jobs that doesn’t generally capture the headlines: its officeholder is the nation’s top banking regulator. Omarova is popular among progressives. Elizabeth Warren has called her “an excellent choice to oversee and regulate the activities of our nation’s largest banks.” But her nomination has earned outsized attention because of some eyebrow-raising details in Omarova’s backstory and her views on economics.

The White House thinks you’re stupid

The White House thinks you’re stupid Whether things are going well or badly, presidents are almost always awarded too much credit or blame for the state of the economy. As the White House is eager to point out, Joe Biden cannot eradicate inflation or solve the supply chain crisis with the stroke of a pen. What he can do, though, is help. He and his advisors can listen, try to understand the struggles of American households and act accordingly. Faced with this option, however, the Biden administration has instead chosen to stick its fingers in its ears. On the massive spending bill that Congress is set to vote on soon, the Biden administration has not swerved. No recent events have persuaded senior Democrats that anything about the legislation needs to change.

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Stop pretending Ukraine will ever be in NATO

Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again making the West nervous. And unlike his previous display of military might near the border with Ukraine last spring, Washington is concerned enough that it's sent CIA director (and former US ambassador to Russia) William Burns to Moscow for talks earlier this month. If Burns’s trip was meant to scare the Kremlin into halting additional military formations near the Russia-Ukraine border, then the confab didn’t work as planned. The Ukrainian government estimates that up to 100,000 Russian forces are now camped out in the area. American and European officials are sharing information with one another about various scenarios the Russians could be contemplating, the most dramatic being a second invasion of Ukraine in seven years.

The ‘disinformation’ delusion

The disinformation delusion This week sees the release of the Aspen Institute’s report on “Information Disorder.” The commission responsible for the publication assembled representatives of the great and the good, including noted Ginsburg censor Katie Couric and First Amendment hater Prince Harry. This latest blast in the war on “disinformation” trots out the usual arguments in favor of greater supervision over the news we all consume. “Merely elevating truthful content is not nearly enough to change our current course,” they argue. By now the double standards and missteps of those who want to “flag,” ban and de-platform their way to a healthier democracy are well established.

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