Latest from Coffee House

Thursday

10 Mar 2022

Get rid of masks on planes

Officials at the Transportation Security Administration are telling media outlets that their agency is poised to extend mask wearing on airplanes for another month while they await guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Like everything else, through the length of the pandemic, this move lacks logic. The idea that a piece of cloth will protect you while you sit sandwiched between 200 other passengers inches away from you is an idea only our incompetent and compromised CDC could invent. Then, a short while into your flight, all of the passengers remove their magic cloth covering and eat and drink, spitting their particles into the air to travel about the cabin.

Oliver Wiseman

Fed fight

Fed fight In Biden’s laundry list of a State of the Union last week, the president made reference to a small but significant Washington stand off over economic policymaking. “Confirm my nominees for the Federal Reserve,” instructed Biden. Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee have been in a weeks-long impasse over five Biden administration nominees for the Federal Reserve. Republicans are most firmly opposed to one of those candidates, Sarah Bloom Raskin, and have refused to proceed with nominations until she is dropped from the slate of nominees. Opposition to Raskin (the wife of Congressman Jamie Raskin) centers on her views on financial regulation and climate change.

Wednesday

9 Mar 2022

Stephen L. Miller

Can Chris Licht turn CNN into a serious news operation?

CNN’s new president Chris Licht, who replaced Jeff Zucker, is reportedly shifting the network's direction away from partisan sniping at its competitor Fox News. According to the Daily Beast, Licht “has already begun backchanneling with key figures, including agents and reporters, and, according to two insiders familiar with the matter, making it known to Fox News that he is working towards a cease-fire on his network’s aggressive coverage of them.” The Daily Beast also notes that lead CNN hall monitor Brian Stelter did not mention Fox News at all on his most recent episode of "Reliable Sources.

Amber Duke

Democrats double down on wasteful foreign aid

The latest version of the Democrats' $1.5 trillion spending bill being pushed through Congress includes funding for questionable foreign projects, such as "gender programs" in Pakistan and democracy building in authoritarian nations. According to a section of the bill outlining State Department funding for the year, an unspecified portion of the nearly $4 billion available in bilateral economic assistance — meaning direct transfers from the United States to other countries — shall "be made available for programs to promote democracy and for gender programs in Pakistan.

Leon Hadar

Noninterventionists never win arguments

I’ve been thinking about where I was on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and my memories of the event are quite depressing. What have we learned? As a research fellow at the Cato Institute at that time, I was working with other analysts preparing research, authoring commentaries, publishing op-ed articles and giving interviews to the broadcast media, warning about the consequences of the coming American military conquest in the Middle East. It's not polite to toot one’s own horn, but we were right.

Oliver Wiseman

Tom Cotton’s time for choosing

Tom Cotton’s time for choosing On Monday night, Tom Cotton made a pitch not for unity exactly, but for the intellectual coherence of modern Republicanism. The senator from Arkansas, an outside 2024 contender, used an address at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, part of its “Time for Choosing” series of lectures, to identify both Trump and Reagan (and, by extension, himself) with the “Jacksonian” tradition within the GOP. It’s hard to imagine Cotton — ungainly and no great orator — as the GOP’s presidential nominee.

Tuesday

8 Mar 2022

Alex Perez

Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill plays into DeSantis’s hands

On Tuesday, the Florida Senate passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, and Democrats lost their minds. The Florida left is in a bind these days. Governor Ron DeSantis is shaping the state in his image and Florida is all but guaranteed to go red for the foreseeable future. Yet their recent behavior is desperate even for them. Democrats are having trouble finding suitable candidates to run for statewide elections in 2022 — Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, for instance, isn’t seeking to reclaim her old seat — so it’s not a surprise that they’ve gone all in with the emotional scare tactics and sleight-of-hand rhetorical tricks that increasingly epitomize their party. The approach, however, is misfiring, only serving to prepare DeSantis for his inevitable 2024 presidential bid.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (Getty Images)

Daniel DePetris

Putin the reckless gambler

Vladimir Putin’s two-week-long war in Ukraine is not going as planned. What the Russian strongman thought would be a romp of the Ukrainian army in a matter of days has turned into a slow-motion train-wreck, with thousands of Russian soldiers killed in battle, images of burned-out tank husks littering the roads and Russia’s economy circling the drain. CIA director William Burns told the House Intelligence Committee today that Putin is increasingly frustrated about the level of progress achieved thus far in the campaign. "He was confident that he had modernized his military and they were capable of quick, decisive victory at minimum cost,” Burns said during his testimony. “He’s been proven wrong on every count.

Guy Shepherd

Time for Europe to man up

The End of History has ended. It officially ended with Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History in the early Nineties. It's a book that captures the optimistic zeitgeist of that decade — born of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communism. The basic idea was that once communism faded away — the reality, not the ideal, which will forever exist in the minds of many intellectuals — the world would become a more liberal, democratic and commercial place. It was an argument with real legs. East Germany was digested by the West without a burp. The Baltic states prospered. Asia took off. A rising commercial tide lifted all boats.

Cockburn

Republican hawks squawk at each other

Cockburn has never been much of a hawk, unless you count his begrudging deficit hawkery over the massive tab he ran up at his local bar. But many elected Republicans are very hawkish on foreign policy, supporting "peace through strength," as Ronald Reagan put it, as well as occasionally war through strength. So how are the GOP's highest-flying hawks handling Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Cockburn was surprised to find them divided. Nearly every Republican lawmaker (and Democrat for that matter) agrees that we need to throttle Russia with economic sanctions. It's on the question of whether the United States should implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine that the cracks begin to show.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden confronts the new politics of energy

Biden confronts the new politics of energy Joe Biden upped the ante this morning. Heeding calls from lawmakers on the Hill, the president announced an import ban on Russian oil. Americans are in favor. A recent survey found that 71 percent of voters back a ban, even if it means higher gas prices, as their views on the conflict harden. But a population horrified by events in Ukraine that says it is willing to pay the price required to punish Putin is not the same thing as being forgiving to a president under whom they find themselves paying sky-high prices for gas. Biden knows that, branding the inevitable inflationary pressure as “Putin’s price hike” in his statement this morning.

FOX Business Network Anchor Maria Bartiromo (Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images)

Amber Duke

Maria Bartiromo vs social media

Fox Nation, the online streaming counterpart to Fox News, recently dropped a new investigative series by Maria Bartiromo called Killer Apps. The program digs into the rise of dangerous social media trends, internet addiction, and the facilitation of trafficking via social media. The Spectator World caught up with Bartiromo about her new show. Amber Athey: What was the inspiration behind your deep dive into the dangers of social media? What do you hope to achieve with this investigation? Maria Bartiromo: One trigger was what appeared to be dangerous "challenges" going viral on social media, such as 'who can swallow the most laundry detergent?' or 'who can tie a belt around your neck and see how long you can stop breathing?

Amber Duke

What does Dr. Oz really believe?

Dr. Mehmet Oz, a daytime television doctor who announced in November he'd be running for an open Pennsylvania Senate seat, has long faced accusations that he is a glorified snake oil salesman. Critics point to his promotion of dubious weight loss products and homeopathic medicine as proof that he's a grifter. Dr Oz's Senate campaign could very well be his latest scam, this time with Republicans as the mark. In his campaign announcement, Dr. Oz described himself as a "conservative Republican" and assured voters that "as a surgeon" he "knows how precious life is". This point was dramatically underscored with a video clip of Dr. Oz kissing a baby. It turns out the Dr.

Monday

7 Mar 2022

Rupert Darwall

There is no climate crisis

“No climate crisis” is, of course, not the spin the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is putting on its new 3,676-page report released last month. “The choices we make in the next decade will determine our future,” the IPCC says. “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.” It could hardly be plainer. The report is political advocacy barely masquerading as science. The IPCC Working Group II report is not meant to be about policy; that’s the job of Working Group III, which has yet to produce its contribution to the sixth assessment report. “The focus of our new report is on solutions,” the IPCC says of the Working Group II report.

Matt Purple

Vladimir Putin, deep statist

Vladimir Putin's brutality in Ukraine is only going to get worse. The Ukrainians have fought valiantly, far better than anyone expected, but then that only means the Russians will have to up the slaughter in the coming days. As for Putin, he's reportedly fuming over his army's setbacks, threatening reprisals, while hunkering down in — I'm not making this up — his "mountain lair" deep in the Urals. If that makes Putin sound like a Bond villain, then that's just one of the many images of him that's emerged in recent days (the most popular is Putin as Hitler). The seemingly insane nature of his Ukraine invasion has left observers grasping for a reference point. Is Putin addled by cabin fever? Under the sway of extremists? Mentally ill? Who is this Vladimir Putin anyway?

Bill Wirtz

What Erdogan is thinking about Ukraine

Turkey’s twentieth-century experience was very different from that of most European countries. During World War One, the late Ottoman Empire joined forces with Germany, a decision the sultans not only came to regret but that ultimately led to the fall of their monarchy. The Turkish War of Independence followed, touched off by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who transformed the Ottoman Empire into the secular Turkish Republic that still exists today. During World War Two, Turkey remained neutral, because of its previous experiences with joining a German military campaign, but also because it was in dire economic shape. In 1952, Turkey joined NATO, and has since been an ally of the West.

Oliver Wiseman

Trump’s cunning plan for World War Three

Congress wants to go further and faster on Ukraine When it comes to Washington’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one dynamic has been consistent throughout the crisis: Congress has generally pushed for a more aggressive on sanctions on Russia and support for Ukraine whereas the White House has hewed to a more cautious course. Nowhere is that clearer than on the question of an embargo on Russian oil. Yesterday, Antony Blinken said the US was working with allies on an import ban. That came after days when the administration had talked down the possibility, even as voices on the Hill calling for the move grew louder. The White House might be warming to the idea, but it remains behind Congress.

Pablo Kay

What’s behind the push for abortion in Latin America?

As the pro-life movement in the United States looks with optimism to the very possible overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court later this year, the tide seems to be flowing in a different direction down south. First came Argentina, where the Senate passed a highly contested bill in early 2021 legalizing abortion in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy. The vote was preceded by months of protests, debate, and even a series of personal pleas from the world’s most famous Argentinean, Pope Francis. In September, Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down abortion bans in two states, effectively paving the way for decriminalization nationwide. Most recently, Colombia effectively legalized abortion in the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy.

Sunday

6 Mar 2022

Peter Wood

The latest smear campaign against Clarence Thomas

Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia (Ginni) made the cover of the New York Times Magazine on February 27 amid an eleven-page article titled “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.” The authors are Danny Hakim and Jo Becker. It is in essence a hit piece, and the latest of several in the left-wing media aimed at undermining the legitimacy of Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence. The first salvo came in late January from Thomas’s long-time antagonist Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, but other eager journalists have stepped through Mayer’s muddy footprints. Three of their publications — the New Yorker, the Guardian, and CNN — contacted me because Ginni Thomas serves on the advisory board of my organization, The National Association of Scholars (NAS).

Harry J. Kazianis

Putin will escalate

“I can’t tell you how this ends. All I can tell you is that I just hope millions of people don’t die, or that both Ukraine and Russia aren’t both destroyed in some way thanks to this war.” Those words, spoken to me on an encrypted smartphone app yesterday, are from a Ukrainian commander actively fighting Russian soldiers that I have known for years thanks to wargames I helped organize that brought together national experts, military officials, and policymakers from around the world.

Friday

4 Mar 2022

Grace Curley

Lindsey Graham unites the world

It was a beautiful moment of bipartisan unity when, left and right, American and European, young and old, united to call Lindsey Graham a moron. The South Carolina senator made headlines Thursday night after appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox. He openly called for Vladimir Putin to be assassinated: How does this end? Somebody in Russia has to step up to the plate. Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there more successful Col. Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends, my friend, is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out! You would be doing your country a great service and the world a great service. Graham doubled down on his insanely dangerous comments on Twitter right after. Best to put this kind of stupidity in writing, in case there was any confusion.

Bill Wirtz

Ukraine won’t join the European Union any time soon

In the wake of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has renewed his country’s wish to join the European Union. This week, the European Parliament approved Ukraine’s application to join the EU with an overwhelming majority. But Ukraine will not join the European Union this year, and possibly not even in the next five years to come. The reasons for that lie within the structure of the EU. The closening ties between Brussels and Kyiv had been the reason for Ukraine’s revolution back in 2014. Then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych had rejected the EU-Ukraine association agreement, which tied both partners closer together, politically and economically.

Oliver Wiseman

No easy choices in the new world order

No easy choices in the new world order Nine days since the start of the Russian invasion and the news out of Ukraine is no less frightening. The latest alarming development: reports of fighting between Russian and Ukrainian troops at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Washington remains understandably fixated on the latest on-the-ground development, but, sooner or later, American policymakers must grapple with the long-term consequences of Russia’s actions. How has the world changed? And how must the United States adjust? In the Washington Examiner, Damir Marusic offers a useful sketch of the new multipolar world, full of hazards, but also opportunities.

Cockburn

Congressman bows out after affair with ISIS bride

The “Tinder Swindler” has some competition in the “romantic entanglement gone wrong” department this week. Congressman Van Taylor, Republican from Texas, has just announced he’s ending his re-election campaign, which the Texas Tribune reports he had in the bag with 49 percent of the primary vote. The reason? According to Breitbart, Taylor had an affair with Tania Joya, a so-called “ISIS bride.” Cockburn notes that the details are sordid. Joya had been married to the late John Georgelas, an American who had converted to Islam, embraced jihad, joined ISIS and was reported to have been killed in Syria in 2017. Joya says Taylor paid her $5,000 to keep the affair quiet and provided Breitbart with bank records that appear to prove that Taylor did, indeed, make such a deposit.

Thursday

3 Mar 2022

Michael Warren Davis

Fasting this Lent for the people of Ukraine

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent for Christians in the West. Many of us will give up sweets or video games or online shopping. Some intrepid souls will even give up coffee. I tried that last year, but my priest reminded me that my wife didn’t choose “dealing with a crabby husband” as her penance, so I found another penance. It’s a little different for our brothers in the East. Their season of fasting begins on Meatfare Sunday and ends on Pascha (Easter). They’ll give up meat… then dairy… then fish…then wine... then oil. They’ll go from eating three meals to two, and then from two to one — and their one meal is basically just a peanut butter sandwich and carrot sticks. The most devout won’t eat at all from Holy Thursday until Easter Sunday.

Slavoj Zizek

Putin’s Stalinist playbook

Vladimir Putin's actions have shocked many Western observers over the past few days. But his moves bear all the hallmarks of one of his predecessors: Joseph Stalin. Last Monday, the Russian Duma passed a direct appeal to Putin to recognize the Russian-controlled separatist states of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Russian president first said he would not immediately recognize the so-called republics. The reason for this was he wanted it to appear that when he finally did recognize them as independent republics, he was simply reacting to popular pressure from below. This is straight out of the Stalin playbook.

Peter Van Buren

Russia’s war is not a Trump redux

I hate going back, again, to Orwell, but since the world is intent on using Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instructional guide, I have no choice. So proles, take note: this week's Two Minutes Hate will be split between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. They apparently share the goal of destroying American democracy via the invasion of Ukraine. Something very sinister has happened in the American mind-space over the last few days. Ukraine, a country of little importance to the United States, suddenly became the sole focus of most media-consuming Americans. This was constructed to appear organic, but it is impossible not to imagine guiding hands behind the shift of every single media outlet to a single story told in a single way.

Cockburn

DeSantis vs the mask scolds

“My way, or the highway,” was, at one time in the not-so-distant past, quite a popular phrase to associate with American dads. Cockburn recalls his fellow classmates invoking the maxim as evidence to their fathers’ strictness. “My dad is tough, man, he always says ‘it’s my way or the highway.’” On the contrary, Cockburn would respond, that statement shows your father to be quite reasonable, pusillanimous even: “Ahh, you’ve got it easy, then; your dad gives you a choice. Mine doesn’t allow the highway option.” Having a choice is what differentiates a command from a recommendation. Not terribly complicated — yet this simple fact apparently evades a great many in our media class.

Leon Hadar

America’s long history of sitting out Russian invasions

By now, my colleagues in the media may have convinced you that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a “transformative” event, a challenge by a reactionary dictator to the “liberal international order,” if not an end to one historical epoch and the beginning of a new one. The world has turned upside down, nothing will again be the same, blah, blah, blah. When millennials make such apocalyptic observations, I can understand. Like Founding Father Thomas Paine, they assume that each day marks the “birthday of a new world.” But what about baby boomers like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who were in high school in 1956 during the so-called Hungarian Revolution, which was very much like what is happening in Ukraine today?

Tim Ogden

Pro-Ukraine citizens clash with authorities in Georgia

Tbilisi, Georgia After one week of fighting, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has already caused far-reaching geopolitical consequences, most of which point to gross miscalculation from the Kremlin. Following an arguably hesitant start, the Western world has united to provide Ukraine with lethal and non-lethal aid, as well as economic and humanitarian support. In addition, despite Putin ostensibly launching his war to prevent Ukraine from becoming a NATO member and curtail the alliance's easterly expansion, Kyiv's relations with the West have ironically become closer. Both Sweden and Finland appear to be closer than ever to considering joining NATO.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden, Jackson and the meaning of a court pick

Biden, Jackson and the meaning of a Supreme Court pick With the State of the Union out of the way, the confirmation process for Biden’s Supreme Court pick Ketanji Brown Jackson has begun in earnest. Biden’s pick — and his previous promise to select a black woman to fill a vacancy on the court were one to arise — have kicked off a lively conversation about the court’s composition. In the March issue of the magazine, legal scholar Benjamin H. Barton made the case for “real diversity” on the Court. Barton’s article happened to land at Spectator HQ before Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, but that development would give fresh salience to the questions with which he grapples.

Wednesday

2 Mar 2022

Grayson Quay

The Russian Orthodox Church eyes Ukraine

Christopher Hitchens, allergic to the idea that secular regimes might actually be more bloodthirsty than religious ones, infamously attempted to blame the atrocities of Stalin’s Soviet Union on the Russian Orthodox Church. It was an end run worthy of the NFL Hall of Fame, and no doubt Hitch would be attempting something similar if he’d lived to see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He would be wrong, but as Putin fights to reclaim territory once held by the Soviet and tsarist empires, the church appears to be conducting its own parallel campaign of spiritual imperialism. There’s little doubt Putin sees the church as politically useful.

Andrew Bacevich

The Ukraine invasion is nothing compared to Iraq

Of the war in Ukraine, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, “Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel.” In the very next sentence, he describes the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “a raw, eighteenth-century-style land grab by a superpower,” thereby acknowledging that the episode actually has innumerable historical parallels — just not ones that Friedman cares to acknowledge as legitimate. Friedman figures prominently among those claiming to have divined the essential character of the present age. His key finding: tech-driven globalization has rendered old-fashioned power politics obsolete. The rules of the game have changed irrevocably. Practically speaking, nations have no choice but to submit.

Gilbert T. Sewall

Putin understands America’s moral decay

Last October, Vladimir Putin aired a speech to the Russian nation chiding the United States for its moral decay. He observed an America “blotting out whole pages” of its history, pursuing “reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of minorities,” and renouncing time-honored values in an effort at “public renewal.” “It’s their right, but we are asking them to steer clear of our home,” he warned. “We have a different viewpoint.” This iteration of family values and conservative critique went barely noticed by the American press at the time.