Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Trump’s African American ‘silent minority’ could swing the election

Donald Trump’s efforts to broaden his appeal to the African American community are bearing fruit. Rasmussen polling noted in early June that Trump’s approval rating among African Americans stood at 41 percent, far above the 8 percent of votes he received from that community in 2016. While approval ratings don’t necessarily translate to votes on Election Day, it mathematically would be very hard for Joe Biden to win in the key battleground states should Trump double his vote to 16 percent of African American voters. Trump’s opponents are convinced that his record as president and his response to the Black Lives Matter protests mean his popularity with black voters will go down. But the truth may well be the opposite.

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Abort stare decisis

The conservative legal movement has again been bludgeoned. The culprit, as has far too often been the case, is once more the Supreme Court’s most mercurial chief justice, John Roberts. In June Medical Services LLC v. Russo, a 5-4 Court majority enjoined Louisiana’s enforcement of its law that would require abortionists to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a prenatal abattoir. The Court’s four liberals, ever-reliable in their outcome-oriented efforts to further the progressive political agenda, wrote for a pro-abortion plurality. Roberts, for his part, wrote a separate opinion concurring in the judgment — notwithstanding the fact he dissented in a virtually analogous Texas case, Whole Women’s Health v.

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The poison of reparations

Reparations are a recipe for rancor. Under the guise of settling a grievance, they intensify and often eternalize it. They almost inevitably plant seeds of enmity that last for generations. However large the cost, the victorious side eventually feels it settled too cheap. And the side that humbly paid comes to recognize it paid too dearly and gained nothing more than a pause in the demands. Reparations don’t repair. They turn the original grievance into institutionalized animosity. The topic comes up because today’s doyen of racial resentment, the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, says that monetary reparations are ‘What Is Owed’ to black Americans for centuries of slavery and ‘slavocracy’.

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Fashion designer vs former rapper: the 2020 election you need to follow

Ola Hawatmeh, the apparent Republican nominee for New York’s 19th congressional district, doesn't bring many surprises to the table policy-wise. She’s an adamant supporter of the President, wants to build a wall on the southern border, opposes Obamacare, and is endorsed by the National Rifle Association. Her personal story, however, is unlike that of any candidate in history.Hawatmeh, 43, is the daughter of Catholic Jordanian immigrants, a domestic abuse survivor, and she's beaten cancer twice. Oh, and her job? A fashion designer.‘I’m a people’s person,’ she told The Spectator. ‘And I’ve always been a philanthropist.

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Welcome to the age of Lib Pharma

We are told we should Defund the Police. Some say it in anger, but for others it’s an opportunity to partake in the great American grift as activists, journalists, or further varieties of opportunist. Politically, it mostly benefits the Democrats. While Biden is hiding, they’re riding a wave of outrage, avoiding questions about their historic liability and their present competence to govern. Most of America’s metropolises are liberal. They are run like liberal fantasy lands. Behold the herds of young, aspiring liberals, unmarried and clueless about life. They’re supposedly happy, but they take out their unaccountable anger through radical politics.

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Don’t hold your breath for Joe Biden’s Sister Souljah moment

'While Biden was in his basement, @realDonaldTrump had 5.3 MILLION+ viewers tune in to his rally,' wrote GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last week. It's a variation on a theme for the Republican party of late: take the vacant airwaves left by a subdued Biden campaign and fill them with spurious claims about the whereabouts of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Sure, Biden has been quiet, relative to Trump — who isn't? — but he hasn't been totally basement-bound. The former vice president has been venturing out for socially distanced local speeches. He gave one on healthcare in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Thursday, stopped off in the Pennsylvania towns of Yeadon and Darby the week before, and hosted an economic round table in Philadelphia on June 11.

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Parler is not going to replace Twitter

Parler, the right-wing conservative public Slack channel, saw a surge in users last week after Twitter banned popular meme-maker Carpe Donktum. It’s all the rage in social media world, especially among free speech enthusiasts and the political right. It’s managed to not just pick up Twitter exiles like Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jacob Wohl and Twitter’s most famous Resistance Reply Guys, Ed and Brian Krassenstein, but more mainstream conservatives such as Megyn Kelly or Fox strongman Dan Bongino. It also has attracted politicians — Ted Cruz has endorsed the platform multiple times.

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The Facebook ad boycott is a convenient virtue-signal

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, some industry pundits predicted that the ‘techlash’ — the souring of public opinion on huge technology companies like Facebook and Google — would cool off or even disappear entirely. After all, with everyone cooped up at home, surely we’d develop a newfound appreciation for the technologies that became the only way to connect with others?That was short-lived. Following extraordinary social pressure amid this summer’s heated civil unrest, an advertiser boycott of Facebook has taken hold. Under the moniker Stop Hate For Profit and backed by the Anti-Defamation League and NAACP, brands from Starbucks to Unilever to Coca-Cola have bravely pulled ads from Facebook for the month of July.

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How conservatives sustain CNN

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is on a publicity tour to cover up his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 crisis in New York and point the finger at red state governors for managing it differently. Puff pieces on his administration have appeared in People magazine and on the website for the governor’s favorite television station, CNN.  Chris Cillizza’s interview with Cuomo did not include any mention of the fact that the New York death rate was not just the highest in the country but one of the highest in the world. That a significant portion of New York’s population dying from the virus can be considered a win for the governor is a true liberal privilege.  Cillizza let Cuomo say absurd things like ‘We tested both theories. We have the evidence. It's numbers. It's irrefutable.

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The trouble with Brad Parscale

What Donald Trump hates more than anything is someone making money from his name without cutting him in for a share of the profits. Roger Stone told me that once and he should know, having spent decades advising Trump. With this in mind, the anti-Trump Republicans of the Lincoln Project made a video perfectly designed to needle Trump and damage his 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale. It shows some of the things Parscale has bought since he joined the campaign back in 2016: a ‘gorgeous’ red Ferrari, a ‘sleek’ black Range Rover, a $2.3 million home in Fort Lauderdale, two more Florida condos worth $1 million each, and a yacht, one seemingly packed with jiggling, bikini clad flesh, though that might be the Lincoln Project’s artistic license.

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What’s Bill de Blasio’s problem with Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jews?

New York City was the center of the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with equally severe lockdown policies to match it. However, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio drew international attention for what seemed to be exceptionally strict enforcement of social distancing measures upon Orthodox Jewish communities.As the Mayor walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Black Lives Matter protesters and turned a blind eye to unfettered looting, his police officers patrolled Brooklyn, threatening Hasidic communities with arrest for attending evening prayers.De Blasio’s uneven enforcement of lockdown policies earned him a rebuke from Eric Dreiband, the US Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

Do we erase black history when we take down statues?

The Summer Of Our Discontent is in full swing and the social guillotines — at first applied to legitimate injustice and prejudice — have now come for history itself.We watch as mobs tear down statues and monuments to the past. The destruction is supposedly performed in the name of justice, but can we seize true justice by destroying the past?American history is a fascinating and sometimes tragic tale of oppression and rebellion, injustice and progress. There is a push and a pull to it all that has led us to be the most successful and prosperous society in human history.Undoubtedly there has been much pain: but how can we know how far we’ve come if we’re not allowed to see where we’ve been?The history of black America is an exhaustive tale of overcoming.

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J’Accuse Barack Obama!

When President Obama was in his 75-day transition to the Presidency, he initiated correspondence with Supreme Leader Khamenei of Iran to explore, at the least, some form of what French diplomats call détente, or even entente. But Iran remained an adversary to the United States. Instead of rapprochement, the Shia theocracy  was sanctioned by UN Security Council resolution 1803 on March 3, 2008. As it happens, this was prologue to l’affaire Flynn, a scandal whose events resemble those of that affaire to remember, the notorious Affaire Dreyfus. That’s Alfred Dreyfus the army officer, not Richard Dreyfuss the actor.

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Where are the deaths?

The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts.

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Don’t write off Donald Trump yet

New polling this week spells more bad news for President Trump. Nationally, and in battleground states, former Vice President Joe Biden has caught Trump or expanded his lead. Certain pundits are beginning to talk as if November's election is a fait accompli. That's a mistake. This election has a long way to go. From the beginning of his presidency, Trump’s ballot performance has lagged his job approval. Some voters, though satisfied with Trump’s presidency, will not commit to supporting his reelection. If these approvers turn into supporters as Election Day nears, Trump’s position will strengthen. Yes, his job approval numbers have dipped in recent months, but they remain above 40 percent, just below where he started his presidency.

Nigel Farage: Trump is taking us back to more traditional alliances

Our Washington editor Amber Athey interviewed Nigel Farage, founder of the UK Brexit party, for a Steamboat Institute livestream. We've published the transcript below.Amber Athey: Welcome everyone to the Steamboat Institute's live broadcast. I'm Amber Athey, the Washington editor for Spectator USA. And I am joined by Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Brexit party, who will also be a keynote speaker at the Steamboat Institute's annual Freedom Conference this year from August 28 to 29. Nigel, thank you so much for joining us again.Nigel Farage: Thank you. No problem at all.AA: So I want to go ahead and get started by giving you a chance to respond to a little bit of a controversy. People are very upset with you for attending Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Black Lives Matter is a state-backed religion

'Protest' often feels inadequate as a characterization for the public exhibitions that have erupted nationwide over the past several weeks. The term 'protest' carries a connotation of actions carried out in opposition to existing structures of power; hence, you 'protest' against forces that are arrayed against you (even if some municipal bureaucrat might have reluctantly granted you a permit). However, at least in many jurisdictions, events which were presented as 'protests' should more rightly be labeled as something along the lines of 'state-backed demonstrations.' For instance, in my otherwise sleepy hometown of Caldwell/West Caldwell, New Jersey, high-school students organized what turned out to be an astonishingly large protest march.

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The Great Self Hate

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.   The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov.

After BHAZ

Protesters tried to establish an autonomous zone between the White House and St John’s Episcopal Church on Monday. Law enforcement pushed the demonstrators out of Lafayette Park using pepper spray, quickly shutting down the ‘Black House Autonomous Zone’ and establishing a perimeter much farther away from the White House. The protesters also attempted to topple a statue of Andrew Jackson.By the next morning, law enforcement had set up a perimeter such that it was impossible to venture within a quarter mile of the White House from any direction. https://twitter.com/BenZeisloft/status/1275458551985483776?s=20 The police line in the middle of the newly dubbed Black Lives Matter Plaza was rather calm.

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The right’s cannibalism problem

The right has a cannibalism problem. It gleefully attacks and eats its own. The left silently watches Republican after Republican do their dirty work for them. John Bolton is just the latest example of this problem. Sitting astride their high moral horses, establishment Republicans talk wistfully about the integrity of the presidency and the perceived damage Donald Trump’s personality and style are doing to it — as if Bill Clinton had not already defined the presidency downward.The left never attacks its own leaders in this way, which is why they’ve managed to enact far more of their policies over the last 30 years. The left knew that a morally repugnant Clinton allowed for the placement of thousands of political appointees who got their wish list done.

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You say you want a revolution?

In the early hours of May 30, after a night of violent protests in New York, two lawyers were arrested by the NYPD. Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, Princeton and Fordham graduates respectively, were charged with attempting to firebomb a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail. Mattis and Rahman are now indicted on seven felony charges for which they could face life in prison. What drove two promising young professionals with top-flight educational credentials to risk everything like this? Gary Saul Morson, an expert on Russian literature at Northwestern University, offered an answer.

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The rule of law is collapsing

It is the law that makes us 'the best of animals.' So saying, Aristotle had a very specific conception of justice in mind: 'The law is reason free from passion.' Committed to live under it, mankind is 'perfected.' There is, however, a flip side. 'When separated from law and justice,' as happens when passion overwhelms reason, mankind 'is the worst of all.' Which would make this the worst of times. The streets of America’s greatest cities are aflame. Some of it is anarchic. Most of it is methodical mayhem. Cultural Marxists are not merely desecrating statuary, they are erasing history. Naturally, this is done under the guise of ideals such as ‘anti-racism’, ‘anti-fascism’, and ‘equality’.

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The death of the private citizen

The internet is not a private place, but news outlets have decided that it's up to them to determine when someone loses their right to anonymity. Quite often, the media gets this calculation wrong and destroys lives in the process. Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous blogger behind 'Slate Star Codex', deleted all of the content on his popular website after the New York Times revealed it was going to publish his true identity. In a long post explaining the debacle, Scott Alexander said that he was talking to a Times reporter last week who was planning on writing an article about his blog. The Times reporter apparently discovered Scott Alexander's identity in the course of reporting and cited a 'New York Times policy' requiring him to publish his full name.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones and 1619, Inc.

The New York Times’s 1619 Project is meant to be all about details that, it alleges, were ‘conveniently left out’ of America’s ‘founding mythology’. But should its Pulitzer-winning curator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, worry more about the details she’s been slipping in? And what’s the relationship between the Times’s 1619 Project and 1619 Enterprises, a company for whom Hannah-Jones’s techie partner, Faraji has supposedly worked? When she's not explaining how destroying property isn't violence on national television or circulating conspiracy theories about fireworks, Hannah-Jones is giving puff interviews, like this one to Glamour in May, in which she endorsed some of her favorite products.

Yes, it’s time to defund NPR

When the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law in 1967, the stated goal was to provide public financial assistance to producers and broadcasters of educational programming. And so PBS and NPR came into existence. They enjoy public funding from taxpayers today. But should taxpayers continue to fund these enterprises, when they clearly focus less on educating the public, and more on pushing commentary and opinion, and now, even libel?Public media has long been defended. Frequently it’s pointed out that public funding for NPR is only about two percent of their federal operating budget, the same excuse we hear when Planned Parenthood pushes back against calls to defund it. Just as frequently, right-leaning outlets seek to point out a clear bias in publicly-funded coverage.

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immigration President Donald Trump

Trump unveils sweeping immigration changes

President Trump will be signing an executive order and implementing a series of new regulations that will temporarily halt specific types of guest worker visas and make permanent changes to the H-1B visa program. In April, Trump signed an executive order preventing the issuance of new green cards for 60 days. The new order extends that guidance through December 31, 2020 and also temporarily suspends the issuance of new visas through the H-1B and H-2B programs, as well as some visas through the J-1 and L-1 programs. The order intends to lower foreign competition for the tens of millions of newly unemployed Americans during the economic shutdown resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak. The May unemployment rate dropped slightly to 13.3 percent from 14.

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Teddy Roosevelt saw this mob coming

So now they have come for Teddy Roosevelt. The large bronze statue of TR on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian, will be removed from the spot it has graced since 1940 in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Why? According to Warren Wilhelm Jr — known to some as Bill de Blasio — the statue is being moved (to where no one yet knows) ‘because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.’ Does it? I don’t think so. I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt.

The conservative legal movement is dead

Imagine if Sonia Sotomayor, once she got on the Supreme Court, started ruling like Clarence Thomas. I know, I know, that’s like something out of The Twilight Zone or the Babylon Bee. But try to picture it. There’d be riots on the campus of every school she’d attended, and likely in DC, too. Democrats would drawing up articles of impeachment, and speaking of packing the court. And whatever social justice thinktank vets SCOTUS appointees for the Democratic National Committee would start chopping off heads. Scapegoats would be piling up on the unemployment line like pork chops at a slaughterhouse. But that’s precisely what just happened with Neil Gorsuch (and less, surprisingly, John Roberts) in the Bostock decision.

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Gracious China allows athletes to speak out on social issues again

Even after China unleashed a viral pandemic on the planet, crashing the world economy and killing thousands, we all find ourselves in their debt. You see China has been magnanimous enough to let those who matter most in America finally begin to weigh back in on social and political issues: our beloved professional athletes.Remember when China stopped NBA players from speaking about what was happening in Hong Kong? That now seems a long time ago. This past week has seen a flurry of professional athletes finally stand up and speak out against a racist government and police brutality. At an Atlanta rally in the wake of the shooting of Rayshard Brooks, Atlanta Hawks head coach Lloyd Pierce spoke about the protest movements happening across the world. What about China?

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Thank goodness for Hillsdale College

Did you go to college? If so, then it is overwhelmingly likely that you have been the recipient of a nauseating communication like this one from 'Maud' (that would be Maud S. Mandel, President of Williams College) explaining how Williams will 'confront and fight racial and social injustice.’ I hope that you are impressed by both Maud’s bravery and her virtue. In an earlier communication, just as the wave of violent hooliganism began rolling over the country at the end of May, she let us know that she is 'disgusted, saddened and angered by ongoing racism in all forms and places’ (every last one!). What a paragon she is! Maud then went on to 'state unequivocally’ (unequivocally!

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Conservatives talk about cancel culture too much

If you are on the right I suspect you have heard leftists saying something like this: ‘Thousands of people are dying from coronavirus, the Chinese and Indians are fighting, young black men are being killed on the streets and all conservatives can talk about is “cancel culture”. What is up with that?’Well, in the past few weeks there have been attempts, many successful, to force people out of their jobs for discussing social science studies and genetic research, for saying all lives matter, for questioning whether the killing of George Floyd was racially motivated, for publishing a US senator’s opinion piece, for making edgy jokes, for refusing to ‘walk around with a BLM sign’, for wearing blackface to a Halloween party two years ago et cetera.

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Juneteenth is Trump’s chance to win in November

Of course June 19 should be a federal holiday. It’s not just the right thing to do: it’s also the smart thing to do. If Donald Trump doesn’t establish honoring the freeing of America’s black slaves in the national calendar today, then we’ll know that he’s asleep at the switch: too busy tweeting ‘LAW & ORDER’ in full caps, or nodding out in bed to Tucker, or incapable of leaving a mark on American life and politics any deeper than a divot left by his five-iron.Emancipation Day, which is what it should be called, would be a symbol, but also a statement of fact. It would acknowledge slavery, but also freedom.