Latest from Coffee House

Friday

5 Jun 2020

Sources: New York Times not telling the truth about Tom Cotton op-ed

The revolution is eating itself at the New York Times. After the Times ran Sen. Tom Cotton’s call for using the National Guard to quell riots, a riot broke out in the Times’s News department. Although a poll earlier this week found that 63 percent of Democrats ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ supported Cotton’s suggestion, the woke warriors at the Times were truly triggered. On Thursday, some 800 staffers broke the terms of their contracts and publicly denounced their employer. Most demonstrated their fearless individuality by retweeting the same sentence: ‘This article endangers Black @nytimes staff.’There’s no mob without a lynching.

Melissa Chen

Don’t compare the nationwide riots to Hong Kong

As soon as the unrest began in Minneapolis, the inevitable comparisons with Hong Kong began. We saw throngs of masked demonstrators take to the streets holding placards and chanting slogans while police in riot gear discharged rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas. We saw skirmishes in which protesters were pinned to the ground with excessive force. We saw smoldering barricades and burning police vehicles. But that’s where the superficial similarities between the two protest movements end. Hong Kong’s protests began as a revolt against the controversial extradition bill (which would have allowed extraditions to mainland China). It built upon past pro-democracy movements and morphed into an existential battle against the Chinese Communist party.

Matt Mayer

Virtue-signaling isn’t courage

It is completely understandable for African Americans to be outraged at yet another death of a black man by overly aggressive police officers. That outrage, when channeled into legitimate protests and marches, could become a force for good. Ultimately, protests and marches, like those in the 1960s led by Dr Martin Luther King, J., could increase the awareness among non-African Americans of the constant sense of trepidation and fear felt by African Americans. This could help spur the urgent reforms needed to push America towards that 'more perfect Union’.Unfortunately, it appears there were as many violent riots as peaceful protests in city after city.

Thursday

4 Jun 2020

Cockburn

New York Times makes The Spectator part of the story

Cockburn was thrilled to see the New York Times take an interest in The Spectator last weekend, after the paper published an article about our London office’s ‘incestuous ties’ with the governing elite. Amazing that during a global pandemic and nationwide rioting, the NYT saw fit to dedicate few inches on page A8 to a political adviser on a northern European island. ‘Rogue Trip by Boris Johnson Aide Makes U.K.’s Spectator Part of the Story’, declared the headline. At least that was the revised headline — the first suggested, erroneously, that The Spectator was in ‘turmoil.’ The Spectator may be in many things, but turmoil isn’t one of them. The Gray Lady isn’t known for its fair-mindedness these days. But its coverage of the Speccie was surprisingly reasonable.

Damian Thompson

Is Black Lives Matter a religion for woke white people?

The most memorable footage of the Black Lives Matter protests, and perhaps the creepiest, doesn’t capture any acts of violence, any looting, any chanting of slogans or — so far as I can make out — any black faces.Instead, we see hundreds of mostly young people sitting in the parking lot of a public library in Bethesda, Maryland, raising both pasty-white arms in a gesture that suggests both surrender and worship.An invisible speaker is reciting a list of promises that the crowd repeats. This is what we hear: Speaker: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.' Crowd: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.

Wednesday

3 Jun 2020

Kate Hyde

Bill de Blasio unites cops and protesters — in disgust

New York City is crumbling into shambolic lawlessness and its citizens are growing more afraid and frustrated by the day.Why?Because Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have once again proven to be categorically incompetent leaders incapable of working effectively together in a time of crisis.On Tuesday, the Governor was forced to confront the glaring issue that the state’s top concern had shifted from COVID prevention to the demolition of its biggest metropolis by unruly riots. During his daily press conference, Cuomo took the opportunity to chastise the Mayor and the NYPD for the turmoil, calling Mayor de Blasio’s handling of it a ‘disgrace’.

Patrick Hauf

The protests have not ended COVID-19

Remember when peaceful protesters of the economic lockdown were smeared for apparently putting lives at risk by utilizing their First Amendment rights? ‘Many protesters have ignored public health edicts, exposed themselves and others to COVID-19 and put our nation’s hodgepodge efforts to mitigate the pandemic at risk,’ the USA Today editorial board wrote. George Stephanopoulos, an ABC journalist and former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, appeared to suggest during an April interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the platform should censor posts promoting protests against the lockdown.‘Facebook also holds its users accountable by continuing to monitor and flag posts for harmful misinformation about the disease,’ he said.

Twitter Flags Two Of President's Trump Tweets

Cockburn

Twitter’s fact-check reignites calls for big tech regulation

Twitter began ‘fact-checking’ President Trump’s tweets for the first time last week, raising questions about the role that social media giants play as gatekeepers of digital information.After the President asserted that mail-in ballots would be ‘substantially fraudulent’, a blue notification was placed at the bottom of the original tweet: ‘Get the facts about mail-in ballots’. The notification links to a fact-checking page with the heading ‘Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud’.

Tuesday

2 Jun 2020

Ben Zeisloft

A night in an American riot

Race riots have gripped the nation over the past week, eclipsing the peaceful protesters demanding justice for the death of George Floyd. Violent rioters — including members of antifa — have laid waste to virtually every American city. As darkness descends on an American city, what is it like to be on the front lines of the riots?Reporters who set out to document the chaos described to The Spectator how the mood shifted as the sun went down. Rioters felt empowered under the cover of darkness and set out to fight, destroy, and steal.Krista Oliver, who covered the weekend-long protests in Washington, DC for the Daily Caller recalled ‘how scary these riots are getting as the night progresses.

Stephen L. Miller

Dear dictators: don’t lecture the US on how to treat its people

If you’ve been watching the news, you would think the United States is a third world nation on the verge of collapse. Less civilized countries all over the world have noticed American policing problems and the volatile riots we’re having; riots that they either experience on a weekly basis — or their governments don’t allow to take place at all. Take Iran, for instance. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, ‘some don’t think #BlackLivesMatter. To those of us who do: it is long overdue for the entire world to wage war against racism.

Cockburn

Chris Cuomo co-stars on Chinese app

Uh oh, Chris Cuomo has been engaging with a nefarious Chinese media company. Like countless quarantined dads across the globe, the CNN host has been trying out dances and other trends with his daughter, Bella, on a popular social media app called TikTok that allows users to make and share short videos with assorted visual and sound effects.Never mind that the app may be sending personal data to the Chinese Communist party, Chris is begging for a fair dose of mockery for his dancing. Accordingly, Cockburn pulled out his notebook and fountain pen to critique some of Chris’s attempts to win over Gen-Z. https://www.tiktok.com/@bellavcuomo/video/6830824175419100422 What does the world need to see right now?

Dominic Green

Children of the revolution

Some steal their luxury leisure goods, but others take their leisure by the luxury of right, and all of it is wrong. While gangs using luxury vehicles and lookouts cross the bridges into Manhattan for targeted looting — as opposed to looting Target, which is how the George Floyd riots began — the children of the elite parade their virtue and distract the police by acting out fantasies of violent revolution. How proud Mr and Mrs de Blasio of Yorkville, Manhattan must be of young Chiara, arrested on Saturday night in Manhattan for unlawful assembly.

Nick Gillespie

Mayhem in Manhattan

It’s important — and easy — to tell the difference between protesters and looters. Just as New York should have been opening up after the peak of the coronavirus lockdown, the city is instead retreating further indoors, hunkering down behind increasingly thick barriers of plywood as the evenings become free-for-alls for window-smashing rioters.New York City, America's cultural and economic engine, is rapidly degenerating into a scenario inspired by The Ωmega Man (1971), a post-apocalyptic movie in which Charlton Heston, seemingly the last unaffected survivor of a chemical-weapons attacks, wanders a deserted Los Angeles by day and fends off increasingly brazen bands of mutant hippies who torch the city every night.

Daniel McCarthy

This riot is brought to you by Nike

In Chicago last weekend 82 people were shot, 22 of them fatally. Between May 2019 and late May 2020, homicide claimed the lives of over 300 black men in the city. That’s not a police brutality problem, that’s a problem of insufficient police power being deployed to stop violent criminals. If the death of one man, George Floyd, while under arrest in Minneapolis is cause for nationwide protests, why don’t the deaths of hundreds of George Floyds every year prick the conscience of protesters that much more?Better yet, why don’t the antifa kids who are mighty bold with the police go and toss bricks at the gangbangers in Chicago? Because unlike the police, the gangs will shoot them dead.

Monday

1 Jun 2020

Jacob Heilbrunn

War footing: can Trump turn left-wing protests into victory?

Don’t cross Donald Trump. Trump originally ran for the presidency because Barack Obama mocked him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. He has devoted himself to tearing up every accomplishment, every treaty that Obama signed. Yesterday he was mocked for the revelation that he was conducted into the White House bunker by the Secret Service. Now he has had his revenge. Speaking in the Rose Garden today, Trump declared, 'If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for there.' He indicated that he is prepared to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to quash to the protests.This isn’t rodomontade.

Amber Duke

Pity the shopkeepers

Small businesses in America have been hit by a devastating double whammy. Stores that managed to survive the economic shutdown now face a severe outbreak of looting and vandalism that could close them for good. Rioters might justify their actions by arguing that property damage is nothing compared to the suffering of black Americans at the hands of police, but the destruction of small businesses has profound economic and cultural consequences. As of mid-May, economists projected that more than 100,000 small businesses had been lost thanks to the COVID-19 quarantine. That accounts for at least 2 percent of small businesses in America. More than 30 percent of small business owners said they would be at risk if the shutdown lasted more than two months.

small Shop owners survey the damage to their store in Philadelphia, PA

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Washington war zone

Washington, DCLast night, I took my usual evening stroll in Friendship Heights, only to realize that it could have an insalubrious outcome as I saw a group of 'protesters', as they are known, huddling on Wisconsin Avenue. Discretion appeared to be the better part of valor: I made a swift left to avoid them only to detect another group of about 20 young men and women wearing ski masks and holding what appeared to be sticks and batons. No police were around. A quick calculation suggested that a reversal would be interpreted as fear. I strode ahead and about 10 seconds after I passed the group, I suddenly heard them rush toward me, yelling and laughing. Their target turned out not to be me but the stores on the business strip in Friendship Heights.

Matt Mayer

Republicans should now reclaim their strong history on civil rights

If you want a perfect example of how the progressive mindset betrays African Americans, look at the now viral video of two white women spray-painting a Starbucks with Black Lives Matter slogans while a black woman pleads for them to stop. 'Y'all doing that for us and we didn't ask you do that,' says the black woman. 'Don't spray stuff on here when they gonna blame black people...and black people didn't do it.' 'Don't police people's way of expressing themselves,' says the white woman's white friend. That is a neat metaphor for how white liberal Americans have behaved for the last 40 years, taking actions they think show support for minorities but which only hurt them more. https://twitter.

Sunday

31 May 2020

Andy Ngo

Antifa’s American insurgency

We are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was merely a pre-text for radicals to push their ambitious insurgency. In a matter of hours, after the video of Floyd began circulating the internet, militant antifa cells across the country mobilized to Minnesota to aid Black Lives Matter rioters. Law enforcement and even the state National Guard have struggled to respond in Minnesota.Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta are just some of the other cities waking up and finding smoldering ruins where businesses once operated. Nearly 30 other cities experienced some form of mass protest or violent rioting. At least three people have been killed so far.

Saturday

30 May 2020

Stephen L. Miller

End the lockdown. Stop the riots

These riots are not just about pent up frustration over police brutality and the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. In part, they’re about a population being locked up for three months while 40 million people lose their employment.Politicians like New York City mayor Bill de Blasio cracked down on Jewish funerals and schools. They remained silent last night as hundreds of people joined protests which turned into riots in Brooklyn, injuring police officers and resulting in the arrest of several members of the Blac Block anarchist group, antifa.Mayors in Atlanta and Minneapolis condemned the violent crowds which had gathered by the hundreds to turn on corporate businesses and small businesses alike and even the CNN headquarters building.

Dominic Green

Antifa’s white privilege

There is no right to burn down your neighborhood, but it’s always an option. Freedom means choice, and real freedom must include the choice of self-destruction — but not destroying someone else’s neighborhood. Especially not when the neighborhood is mostly black and poor. That is what the privileged whites of antifa are doing by instigating disorder and destruction in Minneapolis’s 3rd precinct and elsewhere. Cost-free kicks at black people’s expense: the height of white privilege. Race is the American sickness, and though everyone is sick of it, no one has the cure. The murder of George Floyd and the fact that it took riots before his killer was charged, confirms, should anyone still need confirmation, that Americans are still not equal before the law.

Daniel McCarthy

The roots of riot

That LEGO set or Louis Vuitton bag you’ve always wanted can be yours free if you just wait for the next black suspect to die in police custody. That’s the lesson so far from the riots in Minneapolis, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere following the death of George Floyd. Arson and luxury looting are not the most obvious ways of fighting racism or police brutality, but at this point riots are a ritual. ‘Antifa’ means bourgeois bolshevism — college-educated mock revolutionaries performing to a predictable script. This is the most sterile rebellion any country has ever seen. Far from terrifying the establishment, it reflects exactly what is taught in schools and preached over the airwaves and in respectable op-eds.

Friday

29 May 2020

Ben Zeisloft

Trump severs ties with World Health Organization

President Trump is cutting all US funding to the World Health Organization as of Friday afternoon.‘China has total control over the World Health Organization despite paying only $40 million per year, compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million per year’, said the President.Trump cited the WHO’s failure to enact recommended reforms and said that the funding will be redirected toward other public health initiatives.The announcement comes after months of skepticism about the WHO’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. In early April, the Trump administration froze funding to the WHO due to their mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis.

Amber Duke

Where is the law and order President?

Donald Trump announced on Twitter this morning that the National Guard is standing by in Minneapolis. The Guard is ready to be deployed to quell the riots stemming from righteous anger over the death of George Floyd. The only sensible question is: why has it taken so long? President Trump ought to be the tough but moral leader the city needs right now, but his initial response was just as spineless as the rest. When the protests first started, Trump was busy tweeting about Joe Scarborough’s dead intern. As the city burned, he whined about Twitter fact-checking him on voter fraud and had his administration quickly draft an executive order on social media.

Matt McDonald

Amy Klobuchar’s VP prospects are over

Move over, Kamala — there’s a new bad sheriff in town. After the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minnesota police officer, Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s prosecutorial record is finally coming under serious scrutiny. While Harris copped a fair share of criticism during the Democratic primary for her stint locking up African Americans, Klobuchar managed to evade a similar onslaught. But now, with Minnesota in flames and her hat in the Veep ring, people are paying attention: in 2006, during her tenure as Hennepin County attorney, Klobuchar failed to criminally charge Derek Chauvin, the police officer charged with killing George Floyd.

Freddy Gray

Twitter spreads riot porn — but censors a President vowing to restore law and order

If you have been following the Minneapolis riots on Twitter or Facebook, you may have come across an edgy new media channel called Unicorn Riot. The company is five years old and describes itself ‘viewer-supported’, ‘independent’ and ‘alternative’. In fact, it thrives by circulating images and videos of social unrest with indisputable glee — on riot porn, in other words. Unicorn Riot's Twitter channel has about 150,000 followers. The account specializes in fanning the flames of racial aggravation. It also helpfully informs viewers where the National Guard blockades are in case anyone might want to avoid or attack them.

Thursday

28 May 2020

Stephen L. Miller

Facebook is right. Twitter is wrong

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey opened up a Pandora’s box two days ago by dropping a fact-check on a tweet by Donald Trump regarding mail-in ballots. That raised all sorts of hell from a bombastic President, as well as more questions than answers. There are several problems with Twitter deciding to put its thumb on the scale of ‘truth’ on its social platform. The site has previously come under enormous scrutiny over widely perceived political and ideological bias. The charges against the company include its unfair and unbalanced actions in banning conservative or politically right-leaning accounts, as well as shadow-banning and limiting views and engagements on trending topics which it deems problematic.

Wednesday

27 May 2020

Amber Duke

Pompeo: Hong Kong autonomy statement made with ‘great sadness’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a press call Wednesday afternoon that his decision to declare Hong Kong no longer autonomous from China was made with ‘great sadness’ but that it merely ‘reflects the facts.’ Pompeo released the statement, which is required annually by Congress, on Wednesday morning. The statement indicated that China had violated Hong Kong’s autonomy to such a point that the United States would likely be forced to strip its special trading status. The move could also severely affect China economically, as they often use Hong Kong as a middleman for international trading. ‘Things have deteriorated significantly in these last months,’ Pompeo said on the call.

Roger Kimball

In praise of Kayleigh McEnany

Is Kayleigh McEnany the best Press Secretary in history? I think she may be. True, it’s early days. She was elevated to the position only in April and presided over her first briefing just a few weeks ago on May 1. But so far her tenure has been glorious. Despite having attended both Georgetown and Harvard, where she took a law degree, she remains quick-witted, forthright and occupies a cant-free zone that suffuses the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with a spirit of patriotic candor that is as welcome as it is rare in the self-involved purlieus of the so-called mainstream media. She is also, I think it important to observe, distinctly dishy, another advantage.

Amber Duke

Why is Trump protecting a microchip company with close ties to China?

The United States and China are locked in a battle for technological superiority. President Trump has blacklisted tech giant Huawei over concerns the company will leverage its control of 5G networks to spy on behalf of the Chinese Communist party. The crackdown shows the administration is acutely aware of the national security implications of outsourcing network and chip technology. But the concerns don’t end with foreign-owned companies. Qualcomm, US-owned and the one of the world’s largest chip companies, has developed an intensely close relationship with China, potentially making it a trojan horse for communist influence. Qualcomm has been on Trump’s radar.

Tuesday

26 May 2020

Kate Hyde

Joe Biden’s campaign has set feminism back decades

As we inch closer to the Democratic National Convention in August, the question looms ever larger: who will Joe Biden choose as his running mate? Running mates are usually chosen to inoculate the party’s ticket from a vulnerability. in 2008, for instance, Sen. Biden was the career statesman running mate chosen to cover for Barack Obama’s inexperience. In 2016, Mike Pence was the evangelical bonafide Republican picked to help Donald Trump the outsider. Biden’s team knows he must pick someone who will act as a human shield against his biggest issue: women.

Matt Mayer

Reopen schools now

My old boss Michael Chertoff, former secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, went on Face the Nation this past weekend where he opined that K-12 schools should not reopen until there is a vaccine for the Wuhan virus. Now, I have enormous respect for Sec. Chertoff. I believe he is one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. But his opinions on this topic should carry no more weight than mine or yours. The reality is that it is time for the evidence and common sense to determine what states do in the fall in terms of reopening our public schools. Virtually all of the evidence on the Wuhan virus indicates it has little impact on the five-year-old to 18-year-old school age population. Most states have had few, if any, deaths of school-aged citizens.

The Spectator

The big debate: is lockdown wrong?

Is lockdown a gargantuan mistake? That's the view of a growing number of thinkers and critics, including The Spectator’s very own Toby Young, who sees the political class's shutting down of entire populations as the most catastrophic policy error in history. Not every free thinker agrees, however. We asked Matt Labash, a contributing editor and a skeptic of lockdown skepticism, to challenge Toby over email. Matt Labash: Toby, thanks for stepping into the squared circle and joining me for a Pandemania tussle as a gentleman pugilist, sage, and co-equal partner in the search for truth. And also, as a fellow amateur epidemiologist, which there is no longer any shame in saying, since the pros have bunged things up so spectacularly.

Monday

25 May 2020

Amber Duke

Joe Biden’s ‘you ain’t black’ hole just gets deeper

Democratic strategist Joel Payne was left ‘embarrassed’ after insinuating on TV that black Trump supporters were merely stock models paid to pose in pro-Trump t-shirts. His remarks followed former vice president Joe Biden’s claim that, if you are having a hard time deciding whether to vote for him or President Trump, then ‘you ain’t black’. Payne was the latest Biden defender to put his foot in his mouth by erasing black Trump supporters, chuckling during a CBS News interview that two black people shown wearing the Trump campaign’s new ‘you ain’t black’ t-shirts were probably just paid models. ‘Those two models you showed wearing those shirts...I wonder if they’d actually vote for Donald Trump.