Latest from Coffee House

Thursday

12 Feb 2026

Why was Canada so afraid of misgendering a trans shooter?

A horrible and incredibly sad tragedy unfolded on February 10 in the small town of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, Canada. An 18-year-old, Jesse Van Rootselaar, also known as Jesse Strang, turned a gun first on his mother and stepbrother, then on young students and a teacher at his former high school, and finally on himself – with nine reported dead, including the shooter, and at least 25 injured. Waves of shock, grief and horror have rippled across the nation. This was one of Canada’s worst school shootings, the deadliest in 37 years. It seemed especially cruel because Tumbler Ridge is such a tightly knit community, with only about 2,400 inhabitants.

Freddy Gray

Will Trump ‘totally obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear program – again?

Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s nuclear program, he assured the world, had been set back by “decades.” Yet yesterday, just six months on, there he was again – meeting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu once more to discuss the urgent need to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Wednesday

11 Feb 2026

Freddy Gray

What will happen in the midterms?

35 min listen

The midterm elections in November is shaping up to be one of the most expensive elections yet. Freddy and Ryan Girdusky, author of the National Populist Substack discuss how inflation, crime and immigration are shaping voter patterns, whether the Trump coalition remains as strong as he claims, and what impact President Trump's recent focus on international affairs will have with his base.

Neal Pollack

Epstein and Lutnick, sitting in a tree?

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted that he went on vacation, with his family, to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012. How very White Lotus! Suddenly, every ear in Washington cocked Lutnick’s way, like he was starring in an old E.F. Hutton commercial. “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple with, they were there as well, with their children, and we had lunch on the island – that is true – for an hour.” Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland gave America this early Valentine’s Day present during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee session on broadband funding – what was supposed to be a dull parliamentary proceeding along the lines of the hundreds that occur in DC every day.

Colin Freeman

Ukraine has entered the gray zone

Kharkiv, Ukraine In a bunker on the outskirts of Kharkiv, a group of rookie Ukrainian soldiers are learning the basics of combat medicine. The temperature outside is -4°F, and clouds of breath hang in the air – as does the gravity of what they are letting themselves in for. The dummies used for training have fake bullet holes and missing limbs, and during a quiz at the end of the lesson, gruesome scenarios are playing out. “If you tie a tourniquet, but there's still bleeding, what do you do?” “What is the significance of cerebral fluid in the mouth or ears?” Most of these medics will not even be right on the frontline’s “red zone.” Instead they work in field clinics a few miles further back, where troops drop off injured soldiers for immediate triage.

Tuesday

10 Feb 2026

Alexander Larman

What lies behind the royal redactions?

Nothing has been as damaging for the British royal family as the unfortunate meeting of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jeffrey Epstein. Republican Thomas Massie and the Democrat Ro Khanna know this. In a press conference yesterday, they said they had been shown documents that have been otherwise redacted and withheld from the Epstein files. These documents included mention of girls as young as 9 years old. Massie and Khanna are responsible for the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act. They have said that the levels of redaction and secrecy are unacceptable, and that they will continue to challenge the Justice Department’s approach to the documents. And this, according to Khanna, is extremely bad news for the royals.

Tim Benson

Is the Florida boom over?

During the pandemic, Florida became a haven for those looking to escape lockdowns. Miami was a “Zoom town,” a place where rich mobile professionals moved to enjoy the beaches and freedom, while continuing their remote jobs. Some $36 billion in extra income tax registered with the IRS in 2022. That great influx of people has now come to an abrupt end. ‘Florida is paradise, but you live in paradise to enjoy it, not to bust your ass’ New US Census Bureau figures show that net migration to the Sunshine State has fallen 92 percent since 2022, its lowest level for more than 15 years. The number of people moving to Florida has collapsed, while existing Floridians are picking up stakes and going elsewhere.

Benedict Rogers

Jimmy Lai cannot be left to die in jail

The decision to sentence Jimmy Lai to 20 years in jail in Hong Kong is no surprise, but it is no less shocking or heartbreaking. For his family, especially his courageous wife Teresa, son Sebastien and daughter Claire, who have advocated so tirelessly for their father over the past five years, one can only imagine the pain and grief they feel. Sebastien and Claire have walked the corridors of power in Washington, DC, London, Ottawa, Brussels, Paris and beyond, and sat in television studios for hour after hour, seemingly to no avail. For Hong Kong, this is yet another dark day, yet another nail in the coffin of the city’s freedoms. And for everyone who cares about liberty, the rule of law and basic human rights, this sentence is a punch in the solar plexus.

Chris Mondics

Celebrity Justices compromise the Supreme Court

The real problem with US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attending the Grammys wasn’t that it revealed her true colors as a liberal, but that it showed the slow and steady erosion of the court’s institutional reserve.Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican, demanded that Chief Justice John Roberts launch an investigation into Jackson alleging she breached ethics rules by appearing at the anti-ICE event.“Americans deserve a Supreme Court that is impartial and above political influence,” Blackburn gravely pronounced. “When a Justice participates in such a highly politicized event, it raises ethical questions. We need an investigation into Justice Jackson’s ability to remain impartial.

Monday

9 Feb 2026

Ross Clark

Will the Mandelson affair make loyalty a crime?

Nothing excuses the manner of Peter Mandelson’s communications with Jeffrey Epstein both before and after the latter’s conviction for sex offenses. Nor are the lies which Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor told about breaking off relations with Epstein defensible. Nevertheless, there is something disturbing about what looks like being the inevitable fallout of the Epstein scandal: that no one in public life will ever again risk remaining friends with anyone who has been jailed or disgraced in any other way. It may well extend to people outside public life, too. The principle seems to have been established: that if one of your friends commits a serious offense and you do not instantly cut off all relations with them, then you are guilty of moral turpitude yourself.

Freddy Gray

How deep does Epstein’s network go?

23 min listen

Freddy is joined by historian Andrew Lownie, to react to the latest release of Epstein emails - and how they are bringing down a global network of elites. They discuss whether Epstein was a Soviet spy, the renewed pressure on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and if politicians will hide behind "national security" to prevent the release of more files.

Sunday

8 Feb 2026

James Heale

The Epstein files have triggered a crisis in Britain

It is not just in Washington that the Epstein files continue to dominate. In Westminster, the political reverberations of the Department of Justice’s investigation are threatening to bring down the British government. At the center of the drama is Peter Mandelson: a former Tony Blair aide who served, until recently, as Our Man in DC. Keir Starmer, the Labour Prime Minister, named him British ambassador to America last year, reasoning that the oleaginous uber-networker could be the nation’s "Trump-whisperer." But the DoJ’s initial email dump in September exposed the closeness of his relationship with Epstein, with whom he shared a love of power and money.

Owen Matthews

How the Washington Post became a liability for Bezos

What does Jeff Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post say about America’s sense of itself and of its place in the world? Bezos has scrapped much of the paper’s foreign coverage, as well as the books and sports sections. Over three hundred reporters and editors have been fired – including publisher Will Lewis. The Ukraine bureau has been closed, along with Berlin and the entire Middle Eastern and Iran team. You’d think there wasn’t much going on in the world. Does that mean that American readers are no longer interested in books or foreign news? That doesn’t sound true. The numbers of literate, educated and interested readers in the US who were devoted followers of the Post’s world-class books section and prizewinning foreign coverage haven’t collapsed.

Mark Nayler

What Spain’s social media ban gets wrong

Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is proposing a ban on under-16s using social media, following the example set by Australia last year. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai earlier this week, Sánchez said: "Today our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone… We will protect [them] from the digital Wild West." The Spanish premier’s announcement comes at a time when several other European nations are also attempting to combat the harmful effects of social media on children. France’s ban on under-15s using social media is expected to become law later this year, while Greece, Portugal and Denmark have signaled their intention to enact similar legislation.

Cockburn

Takeout with Woody, Soon-Yi and Epstein

The more salacious aspects of the Epstein files are well known – but what of the banal side of being a billionaire sex pest? It’s no secret Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn were close friends with Epstein, as the trove of emails show. One food-obsessed friend of Cockburn alerted us to the non-stop back and forth of emails, spanning years, between Soon-Yi and a coterie of Epstein assistants. The topic? Scheduling dinners at Epstein’s townhouse, along with directions on what Woody and Soon-Yi would like to order-in that night. Soon-Yi does all the ordering and coordinating, as she explains in an email to one of Epstein’s assistants when asked for an email to pass on to private equity titan Leon Black, “Woody doesn’t email but he texts.

Saturday

7 Feb 2026

Neal Pollack

Inside Texas’s messy Senate primaries

There used to be a political designation in the South of “Yellow Dog Democrats,” meaning voters who’d vote for a yellow dog if the Democrats put them up for election. But in Texas, the yellow dogs have been Republican for a generation. Texas last had a Democratic senator in 1993, and last occupied the Governor’s Mansion in 1995, when Ann Richards gave way to George W. Bush. Nevertheless, the dogs are barking this year. Senator John Cornyn is up for re-election, and the primary contest has been chippier than usual. On the Democratic side, former football player Colin Allred dropped out of the race in December, hoping for a return to Congress, leaving the nomination wide open for James Talarico, a state representative and Presbyterian minister.

Friday

6 Feb 2026

Maud Maron

Who’s the victim in Zohran Mamdani’s New York?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a hospital visit to comfort the victim of a knife attack on a police officer, who was forced to fire his weapon to defend himself. Of course, the bed Mamdani visited was that of the schizophrenic man, Jabez Chakraborty, who charged at police and was shot as a result. It almost goes without saying that New York’s new mayor did not check in on the officer.Face and voice full of strained emotion, Mamdani said after the visit: “No family should have to endure this kind of pain,” referring to the family of the knife-wielder. He made no remarks about the strains on families of police officers whose incredibly difficult, and increasingly thankless job, puts them face-to-face with knife wielding assailants for a starting salary of $60,000.

Travis Aaroe

The growing conservatism of the Democrats

Kamala Harris is destined to be the Democratic nominee in 2028 because the American left is now conservative. Democratic politics is now based on two suppositions: The existence of a “silent majority” and the reflexive defense of even the most unlovely institutions. The conservative left glorifies the intelligence agencies and praises generals as the defenders of the republic, while insisting that most Americans despise MAGA and its revolutionary aims. It’s why Joe Biden’s attorney general described the FBI as “patriotic public servants” and the Democrats ran Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative, in Virginia.

Freddy Gray

Kamala’s comeback?

Political candidates aren’t people these days so much as brand logos for the business of politics. Their stock – the ticker tape of their approval – goes up or down, but after any politician has reached a certain level of mass recognition, their name and face hold value. It doesn’t matter, necessarily, if most voters think they’re a joke. Their image can drive media engagement just as their donor files and old campaign data can be profitably mined. Kamala Harris is a perfect example. She was, all but her most stubborn supporters agree, a disastrous presidential nominee.

Owen Matthews

Why is America determined to pick a fight with Poland?

Until very recently it was hard to find more stalwart allies of America in Europe than the Poles. Poland was an early supporter of Washington’s policy to expand Nato and actively pushed for a stronger US role in central and eastern Europe. The Poles also stood up as an enthusiastic member of every US-led military coalition, taking leading roles in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was to Warsaw that US President Joe Biden traveled – twice – in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to give barnstorming speeches affirming that America would stand by Kyiv. All the more surprising, then, that the recently-appointed US ambassador to Warsaw chose to pick a diplomatic fight that threatens to snowball into a profound rupture between the two onetime allies.

Brendan O’Neill

The Epstein scandal has morphed into a moral panic

That’s it, I’m out. I’m finished with the Epstein scandal. This morning I read about a man who is on the cusp of cancellation because he once sent a flirtatious email to Ghislaine Maxwell, years before her crimes were known about. This is getting ridiculous. It feels like MeToo on steroids. There’s a medieval vibe of finger-pointing and rumor-mongering The man is Casey Wasserman. He’s chair of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. And there are hollers for him to stand down. All because he once got digitally horny with Ms Maxwell. "I think of you all the time," he wrote in one email. "What do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?" he asked. That’s it. A little bit of lame middle-aged wooing.

Lara Brown and John Power

Can Peter Thiel stop the Antichrist?

Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of PayPal. We discussed globalization, artificial intelligence and the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. But one subject seemed to particularly exercise Thiel: the Antichrist. He promised to expand on this when we next met – which is how we ended up in the back room of a Cambridge college, surrounded by theologians, venture capitalists and AI engineers, to hear Thiel describe the end of humanity. Standing in front of Gustave Doré’s illustration of Satan’s fall in Paradise Lost, Thiel, a can of Diet Coke in his hand, explained why the most important thing he can do with his money is to identify and then defeat the Antichrist.

Thursday

5 Feb 2026

Ben Clerkin

Is something rotten in Fulton County?

“I suspect that the FBI is going to find things missing.” As a member of the Georgia State Election Board, Salleigh Grubbs is an authority on the alleged 2020 election fraud that led to an FBI raid on an election center in Fulton County. “It could be ballots, it could be reconciliations, it could be poll tapes, it could be any number of things,” she told The Spectator. “They have been fighting to prevent anyone looking at this evidence and preventing investigations. If you don't have anything to hide, why do you care?” Fulton officials finally admitted in December – after being subpoenaed by the State Election Board – they had broken state regulations by failing to sign 2020 election tabulator tapes and that they had misplaced other tabulator tapes.

Simon Jenkins

After Trump comes reform

America needs Donald Trump, badly. He is the bull in the china shop that every nation needs from time to time. He is testing his country’s constitution to destruction as well as its relations with the outside world. Such tests hasten the necessity of reform. The only question is how long will it take for reform to catch up and overcome him, as it surely will. Constitutional chaos may then break loose after midterms. This is America’s great opportunity In January alone Trump toppled the leader of Venezuela, mooted the conquest of Greenland and a 100 percent tariffs on Canada, insulted the British army and killed Americans protesting his immigration policy.

Matthew Lynn

Musk’s SpaceX is worth every penny

As the hype builds for the reported $1.5 trillion IPO of Elon Musk’s SpaceX later this year, there will be plenty of critics who argue the company’s marketing has more hot air than one of its rockets. It has been claimed by some that the IPO will be worth more than the top seven companies currently listed on the London Stock Exchange – including century-old giants such as Shell, HSBC and AstraZeneca – combined. And yes, sure, there is probably an element of wishful thinking in these reports, as there often is with Musk. But SpaceX also has the potential to become one of the giants of the 21st-century economy and is very likely to prove its worth. SpaceX's will be the biggest IPO of the year.

Gavin Mortimer

Why Emmanuel Macron has declared war on X

Investigators from the Paris prosecutor's cyber-crime unit raided the offices of X in the French capital on Tuesday in what Elon Musk described as a "political attack." The raid was part of an inquiry into whether X, which Musk has owned since 2022, has violated French law. In particular, the prosecutor’s office said it was investigating complicity "in possession or organized distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature... sexual deepfakes and fraudulent data extraction by an organized group." X has denied any wrongdoing. Musk and the former chief executive of X, Linda Yaccarino, have been asked to attend hearings in April. Yaccarino, who left the company last year, echoed Musk’s declaration, accusing France of waging "a political vendetta against Americans.

Wednesday

4 Feb 2026

Neal Pollack

The plight of Peter Attia

The Epstein files, while they still haven’t harpooned their biggest whales, continue to destroy reputations on the side. One of the most unusual scalps claimed last week was that of celebrity doctor and “longevity expert” Peter Attia, creator of the “Outlive” brand. Last month, CBS News named Attia one of 19 new essential contributors. Now it’s cutting ties with him. And they’re not the only ones. Attia was born in Canada but graduated from Stanford University Medical School in 2001. He spent five years as a general surgery resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was named "Resident of the Year," followed by a surgical oncology fellowship at the National Cancer Institute focusing on melanoma.

Kabir Singh Bawa

The world after New START

When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires tomorrow, the United States and Russia will, for the first time since the early 1970s, operate without a binding agreement limiting their strategic nuclear forces. That fact alone is striking. What is less obvious – and more consequential – is what the expiration reveals about the state of nuclear order in a world increasingly shaped by authoritarian ambition and multipolar competition. Signed in 2010, New START capped each side at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and restricted the number of missiles and bombers that could carry them. Equally important were the verification provisions: inspections and data exchanges designed to reduce uncertainty and prevent worst-case assumptions.

Gavin Mortimer

France has a nasty case of Trump Derangement Syndrome

The French IT giant Capgemini has put its US subsidiary on sale because of its association with the work of ICE in America. All hell broke loose last week in France after it was revealed by the state broadcaster that Capgemini’s software was being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify foreigners on US soil and track their locations. According to the BBC, Capgemini multi-million dollar contract with ICE was agreed last December and was scheduled to run until 15 March. It has now been curtailed after the company found itself in the eye of a storm following the deaths last month of two anti-ICE protestors in separate incidents in Minneapolis. Union leaders in France demanded an "immediate and public cessation of any collaboration with ICE.

Tuesday

3 Feb 2026

Alexander Larman

The Epstein files have exposed the extent of Sarah Ferguson’s greed

Since the latest tranche of the Epstein files was released over the weekend, the people who have been most embarrassingly affected by them include former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly styled Prince Andrew, Duke of York) and Bill Gates. Yet inevitably, attention has turned to Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, who is emerging spectacularly poorly from the scandal. This is thanks to a series of revelations that portray her as, variously, greedy, an appalling judge of character and someone seemingly willing to figuratively pimp her children, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, while she sought to obtain the money that she craved from Epstein. Many distasteful details were revealed in the first files released last year.

Daniel Thorpe

Why Turkey wants to help Iran

The Iranian regime remains firmly in the crosshairs of American bombers. As President Trump mulls whether to strike, Turkey is using every available channel to halt a military intervention. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has personally offered to mediate between Tehran and Washington. At the same time, Turkish authorities have tightened their grip on exiled Iranian opposition figures. Turkey’s sudden support for Iran is not born of friendship. Over the past two decades, the two countries have repeatedly found themselves on opposing sides. In the Syrian civil war, Iran sent Shi’a proxies to prop up the dictator Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey armed and trained Sunni rebel groups. Ankara’s push for dialogue is driven by a fear of regional destabilization.

Catherine Ellis

Colombia can’t give Trump the cocaine crackdown he wants

When President Donald Trump hurled abuse at Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro last month, branding him a "sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States," it was strikingly audacious. Trump leaned into bombastic provocation: there is no evidence to suggest Petro himself makes cocaine. And yet, Trump’s claim didn’t come as a shock – the two leaders have spent the past year locked in a volley of barbs with one another. Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing leader, likes to fire back with ideological, often sermonizing lectures on imperialism and US hypocrisy. But tangled up in the rancorous exchanges – many of them about drugs – is a stubborn fact: Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

Monday

2 Feb 2026

Corey DeAngelis

Teachers are bringing ICE into the classroom

A wave of school protests sweeping the US in response to the fatal shooting of two anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota has revealed how teachers' unions have weaponized classrooms for their own left-wing agenda. The unions have revealed themselves as political operatives more concerned with indoctrinating kids than teaching them reading, writing and arithmetic. These disruptions didn't materialize out of thin air. The teachers' unions fired the starting gun by blasting out anti-ICE propaganda to teachers, urging them to rally against immigration enforcement and turn schools into battlegrounds for their partisan fights. The National Education Association is also pushing teachers to print out immigration-related political propaganda posters and put them in their classrooms.

Freddy Gray

Who is the real Melania Trump?

14 min listen

Freddy speaks to the documentary maker Fernando Sulichin who produced Melania, soon to be released on Amazon Prime. They discuss the First Lady, how the ten days leading up to the inauguration unraveled, her relationship with Donald Trump and whether she was sidelined by the fashion industry.