Latest from Coffee House

Monday

30 Mar 2020

UK coronavirus cases slowing, key adviser reveals

The growth of COVID cases in Britain is now slowing according to Professor Neil Ferguson, who is emerging as the de facto chief strategist of the government response to the crisis. No government data has been issued to confirm this trend but Ferguson has access to other real-time data through SAGE, the medical emergency committee. His words are worth following carefully. He told BBC Radio 4's Today program this morning: 'In the UK we can see some early signs of slowing in some indicators. Less so deaths, because deaths are lagged by a long time from when measures come in force. But if we look at the numbers of new hospital admissions, that does appear to be slowing down a little bit now.

Friday

27 Mar 2020

Freddy Gray

Tucker Carlson: ‘We aren’t very good at talking about death’

The media has not covered itself in glory in its response to the coronavirus crisis, it’s fair to say. Yet one well-known journalist who really has excelled has been the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Not only was he one of the first major TV pundits in the world to take the threat of the virus seriously, he also intervened with Donald Trump by visiting the president at his house in Mar-a Lago to discuss the gravity of the situation. I caught up with my friend Tucker yesterday on my podcast, and we talked about the media’s failings, Trump’s response, how the Democrats are going to junk Joe Biden, and not killing iguanas. Most of all, we talked about death and the theological implications of this terrible problem.

Thursday

26 Mar 2020

Stephen L. Miller

Our brave journalists

Almost every American has undergone a lifestyle change in the wake of the deadly and infectious coronavirus. Almost three million have lost gainful employment and patiently wait on government assistance. None of these circumstances have, however, stopped our brave news media from carrying out their dutiful mission — dividing us.In the latest Gallup poll, the president, hospitals and even Congress are all rated favorably. The only institution whose disapproval rating has increased is the news media, with 55 percent viewing it unfavorably. It’s not particularly hard to understand why. At almost every turn, the news media has attempted to make this pandemic about themselves, and the pointless work they choose to engage in.

Amber Duke

Peter Navarro blasts ‘Swamp Creature’ opponents of ‘Buy American’ order

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is hitting back at a group of Big Pharma lobbyists, medical organizations, and free trade groups for opposing President Trump's proposed 'Buy American' executive order reshoring the medical supply chain. Navarro, the assistant to the president for trade and manufacturing, told The Spectator that Big Pharma's opposition to the executive order, which would require government agencies to purchase pharmaceutical products made in the US, because it wants to 'preserve its offshore oligopoly'. 'All the EO would do is ensure that government agencies, including the VA, HHS, and DoD, Buy American,' Navarro said.

Wednesday

25 Mar 2020

Amber Duke

Big Pharma and free market orgs unite against Trump’s ‘Buy American’ order

The Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM), a trade association for major pharmaceutical manufacturers such as 3M, is drafting a letter to send to President Trump opposing his proposed ‘Buy American’ executive order reshoring medical supply chains. The letter currently has over 40 signatories, including PhRMA, a Big Pharma lobbying organization, dozens of medical nonprofits, and free market-oriented organizations, indicating the president will face immense pressure across the political spectrum for trying to reduce US medical dependence on China. AAM claims that signing the 'Buy American' executive order during the coronavirus crisis will harm efforts to provide doctors and hospitals with the equipment and medicines they need to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Cockburn

Do Democrats really need Joe Biden to stay alive?

‘Stay Alive Joe Biden’, implored contributing writer Alex Wagner in the Atlantic yesterday, setting perhaps the lowest ever bar for a presidential candidate. She posits that Biden ‘exists primarily as an idea, rather than an actual candidate’ and describes how coming off the campaign trail to pitch his premiership from quarantine has been a boon to the former VP: 'His appearances these days have an almost parallel-universe quality to them: Biden’s audience-less remarks from his home in Delaware have the suggestion of an Oval Office address, and their content seems intended to offer a glimpse into the twilight zone where someone else, someone more empathetic and capable, is president.

Theodore Dalrymple

Fear, guilt and the virus

Fear and the frisson of fear are two very different emotions. The one is horrible and the other delightful or at least often sought after.Who, after all, does not enjoy a good fright in a cinema or while reading a thriller? When I arrived in Paris just before the lockdown was announced and one was no longer allowed out of the house without a laissez-passer (signed by oneself), all the places of public resort such as bars, restaurants and cinemas, had already been closed: but the atmosphere was still one of frisson of fear rather than of fear itself.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s wishful Easter deadline is a trap for Democrats

Will the stimulus stimulate? Donald Trump, who seems to have had nothing to do with the actual formation of the $2 trillion bill, is exhorting Congress to pass it Wednesday. It contains all kinds of bennies for the Democratic party, including an obscure provision that enables over-the-counter drug reform. But the real shift is that the GOP is now embracing big government — and it’s likely to continue in the form of further stimulus bills.The prospect of over a million workers hitting the unemployment line in March helps to concentrate the mind. And so, Republicans, who used to denounce helicopter money, are showering it on the average American, a nifty direct cash payment of $1,200. Then there is unemployment insurance. It’s being prolonged by 13 weeks.

Freddy Gray

Are you feeling stimulated?

Well, at least this isn’t socialism for the rich. The Trump administration’s gargantuan stimulus package — the third in response to the coronavirus crisis and the biggest by far in American history — is not about bailing out the banks. It’s about saving the financial system tout corps — that means you and me. The government is firing a $2 trillion-plus-sized fiscal rocket in the direction of a looming recession and hoping explodes in roughly the right place. The new bill is expected to include direct payments to most adults of $1,200 or less. Small businesses will get $300 billion, hospitals $130 billion and local and state governments $150 billion.

Tuesday

24 Mar 2020

Amber Duke

How the media created its latest anti-Trump hit job

I can't believe I actually have to write these words, but President Trump is not to blame for a couple ingesting fish tank cleaner. NBC News reported Monday that a man died after he and his wife opted to ingest a 'parasite treatment for fish' because it contained chloroquine, an ingredient in anti-malaria medication that Trump touted as a potential treatment or cure for coronavirus. The media zeroed in on the fact that the wife, who survived ingesting the chemicals, said she got the idea to eat the fish tank powder from the president: 'Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure.' 'Oh my God. Don't take anything. Don't believe anything. Don’t believe anything that the President says & his people...

Monday

23 Mar 2020

Amber Duke

Skype dates are the latest COVID-19 nightmare

All dressed up with nowhere to go? You might just be one of the self-isolating singles meeting a potential new beau via video chat. Those unlucky enough to be quarantined without a significant other during the coronavirus crisis are seeking companionship (and killing boredom) by swiping incessantly on dating apps like Tinder and Hinge. But what do you do once you have a match? Social distancing recommendations have effectively killed grabbing a coffee or cocktails, and texting can only take a budding relationship so far. Instead, tech savvy youngsters are hopping on Skype, Zoom or other live streaming video services to determine if their sofa sparks are the real deal. Look, first dates are pretty awful.

Roger Kimball

The Democrats just made a huge mistake

'Never let a good crisis go to waste.' When Rahm Emanuel said that during the economic meltdown of 2008-2009, his Machiavellian cynicism was instantly recognized as the calling card of the new breed of Democrat that he and his boss, Barack 'Bring-a-gun-to-the fight' Obama, embodied. We saw it then, when the gargantuan pseudo-stimulus package stimulated little apart from the federal debt, and we are seeing it again now as Democrats hold up an emergency spending bill (also gargantuan) in order to fill it with profligate and politically tendentious provisions. As Rep. Jim Clyburn put it, 'This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.' Rahm Emanuel could not have put it any better.

Victor Davis Hanson

The virus is not invincible, but it’s exposing who’s irreplaceable

In all the gloom and doom, and media-driven nihilism, there is actually an array of good news. As many predicted, as testing spreads, and we get a better idea of the actual number and nature of cases, the death rate from coronavirus slowly but also seems to steadily decline. Early estimates from the World Health Organization and the modeling of pessimists of a constant four percent death rate for those infected with the virus are for now proving exaggerated for the United States. More likely, as testing spreads, our fatality rates could descend to near one percent. There is some evidence from Germany and to a lesser extent South Korea, that it may be possible to see the fatality rate dip below one percent.

Amber Duke

Schumer holding up $50 billion in farm aid

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is attempting to hold up $50 billion in farm aid during negotiations over a coronavirus stimulus bill, a GOP aide tells The Spectator. Schumer is 'holding hostage' aid given to farmers through the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a USDA-owned entity, according to the aide. The farm aid is just the latest piece of the stimulus package to which Democrats have raised objections. A potential deal to move forward on a bill failed Sunday after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Schumer said they disagreed with the GOP's approach to bailouts for big businesses. Both claimed the bailouts did not include enough protection for workers.

Michael Tracey

Trump isn’t the only one to blame for our slack response to COVID-19

One of the mantras for interpreting the nature of Donald Trump has always been to take him ‘seriously, but not literally’. When this maxim was first introduced in September 2016, the advice was clearly useful. Journalists and pundits were in a constant state of outrage over his every utterance. The daily deluge of Trump jokes, wisecracks, obviously figurative exaggerations, and ALL CAPS tweets were incessantly ‘fact-checked’ in the most tedious fashion by members of the media who hated Trump. One illustrative example would be when Trump accused Barack Obama of being the ‘founder’ of Isis. In short order, the fact-checking brigades sprung into action to clarify that Obama had not in fact literally founded Isis.

Sunday

22 Mar 2020

Heather Mac Donald

Consider the costs

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed 'non-essential' businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. 'This is about saving lives,' Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. 'If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.' Cuomo’s assertion that saving 'just one life' justifies an economic shutdown raises questions that have not been acknowledged, much less answered, as public officials across the country compete to impose ever more draconian anti-virus measures: Is there any limit to the damage we are willing inflict on the world economy to mitigate the infection?

Saturday

21 Mar 2020

Freddy Gray

Why you should subscribe to The Spectator

Dear Reader, There isn’t much to be cheerful about in this world of plague anxiety. Yet one comfort is that, locked down as we all are, we may have more opportunities to read. That’s where The Spectator can help. We’ve got a flash sale on, and there are many reasons you'll want to take it up: We have now put our June edition to bed and it looks great. The subject — ‘how to tame the dragon’, ie China — couldn’t be more important. Get your copy here Each month we produce a similarly stunning print issue. As well as great essays on politics, we have brilliant arts, books and life sections, edited by Dominic Green, with reviews and essays by some of the best writers in the English language.

Friday

20 Mar 2020

Amber Duke

Coronavirus will give Trump a second term

Donald Trump is right now facing easily the biggest test of his presidency. That’s a crazy thought considering Trump was impeached just three months ago, spent his first two-plus years in office battling claims his campaign colluded with Russia, and faced allegations of campaign finance violations that included paying hush money to a porn star. But the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus is totally out of Trump’s wheelhouse. He’s not fighting against a political opponent, the media, or the courts; instead, as the president pointed out on Twitter, he is battling an ‘invisible enemy’ — an unpredictable and deadly illness that’s quickly spread across the globe.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Coronavirus keeps the spotlight on Trump and away from Joe Biden

Well, well, well. There was former White House press secretary Sean Spicer at today’s press conference in a new incarnation as Newsmax reporter. Looking much better tailored than when he was press secretary — Trump was apparently livid about his schlumpy appearance back then and a GoFundMe campaign was launched to buy him fresh habiliments — Spicer was looking quite the dandy, or about as dandyish as he can get: checked jacket, pocket square, shirt and tie all of which appeared to be various hues of purple. For the most part, Spicer’s posture towards Trump remained unchanged, which is to say that he was as cringing as ever. 'Mr President, two questions if you’ll indulge me,' he said. Trump indulged.

Cockburn

The Spectator’s guide to video conference etiquette

Video conferences are like all business meetings — 95 percent pointless and usually arranged and dominated by some self-important twerp. Still, humans attach strange importance to management habits and, now that we are living in the age of the coronavirus, many of us will have to do a lot more video conferences for work. Ever the public servant, Cockburn has compiled the following guide to video conference etiquette. 1) Dress Cockburn prefers formal attire, yet in times of isolation, the rules can be relaxed. Nudity is too much, no matter how matter impressive one's physique. Pajamas are a no-no, too. Sporting a kaftan on the call may make you feel like a charismatic tech billionaire dialing in from Mustique. But everybody knows you aren’t — so put a shirt on.

Charles Lipson

Beijing’s attempts to elude blame for the Wuhan virus will backfire

Facing harsh criticism for allowing the novel coronavirus to spread, Beijing has settled on an international communications strategy: smearing the United States by claiming the virus originated with American soldiers visiting China. This strategy, based on obvious lies, will not work out well.Nobody outside China’s state broadcasters and some information-starved viewers could possibly believe it. For good reason: it’s bunk, and vile bunk at that. An infected unicorn is more likely to have started the virus in Wuhan than the US military. Yet that is the story the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is trying to peddle.

W James-Antle-Iii

How coronavirus could kill conservatism

'No corporate bailouts,' says Michigan Rep. Justin Amash as lawmakers debate an economic stimulus package in response to coronavirus. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, usually somewhere in Amash's orbit if not quite a fellow traveler, demurs. She wrote that the proper response to the outbreak is, much to her chagrin, 'subsidize everything'. Libertarians are divided on coronavirus, an unusual event (the virus, that is, not intense disagreements among libertarians). Of libertarians, it has been said of late that there are none in a pandemic. We are all Andrew Yang — he of the universal basic income — now. What about conservatives? My longtime TAC colleague Matt Purple says they too are ill suited to the current crisis, as are perhaps humans more generally.

Daniel McCarthy

After the coronavirus, who wins the recovery?

We are living through a gruesome case study in the irrationality of elites. COVID-19 is a serious disease, but the question of just how serious it is has hardly even been posed correctly, let alone answered intelligently. Yet already our leaders have assumed dictatorial airs and enacted policies that threaten to plunge the Western world into an economic crisis unmatched since the Great Depression. Eighty days into 2020, the official worldwide death toll from the coronavirus stands at somewhat over 10,000 lives. That includes fatalities from the final months of 2019 as well, when Chinese authorities initially tried to disguise rather than treat the outbreak of the new disease. The world was utterly unprepared for the virus as it spread from Wuhan.

Michael Lind

How government should respond

Misdiagnosis can be fatal in a pandemic. Treating the economic effects of the global COVID-19 epidemic as a conventional recession means prescribing the wrong medicine and harming the patient. This is a supply-side recession, not a demand-side recession. The shortfall includes intensive care beds, ventilators, protective gear for healthcare workers, and other medical supplies. Thanks to these shortages, as well as insufficient trained medical personnel, hospitals may soon be overwhelmed everywhere by the demands for treatment of coronavirus victims. To slow the spread of the virus while augmenting existing medical supplies and personnel, governments are promoting social distancing and sheltering in place, both euphemisms for quarantine.

Thursday

19 Mar 2020

Michael Tracey

Why Tulsi backed Biden

Though neither her supporters and detractors wanted to hear it, Tulsi Gabbard was always clear that she would support the eventual Democratic nominee. Now, with the Democratic primary functionally over, she has endorsed the nominee — Joe Biden. It’s really as simple as that.Tulsi haters loved to invent wild theories about her supposedly sinister motivations, and were always either unwilling or incapable of just listening to her plain-spoken words. Over and over again, she said she would not run as a third-party candidate and would support the eventual nominee. Anyone surprised by her announcement today had no reason to be: it doesn’t contradict anything she’s said in the past; in fact, it comports entirely with what she always said she would do.

Ben Sixsmith

Waiting for corona in Poland

We are all improvising now. In front of the supermarket, at 6.30 a.m., we stood at a cautious distance from one another. Then the doors opened, and men and women rushed forward as one, in a habitual desire to be first inside the shop.Normalcy ended last Wednesday. My office closed its doors, like many others, with the optimistic hope of opening them again in two weeks. I had a beer with a friend in a quiet bar as my phone buzzed with news of closures and infections. I doubted there would be another pub night soon.It is a beautiful spring in Tarnowskie Góry, in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. Of course, few of us are in a position to enjoy it. All the bars, cafés and restaurants have been closed. No mass gatherings are allowed.

Wednesday

18 Mar 2020

Melissa Chen

Time to ban wet markets

There’s a recurring flashback from my childhood that never fails to induce a blood-curdling shiver down my spine. My mother’s request for company on her monthly shopping trips to the wet market was always a Hobson’s choice, one I deeply resented because the experience was awful. Deep in the bowels of Singapore’s Chinatown complex was a large open-air market that stood in stark contrast to the surrounding glitzy skyscrapers and immaculate streets. The place was a veritable not-so-little shop of horrors and till today, those horrors remain firmly etched in my memory.A distinctly fetid stench greets you long before entering the market; soon it becomes apparent why they’re referred to as ‘wet’.

Daniel M. Bring

Vermin Supreme’s quest to win hearts, minds and the Libertarian primaries

Vermin Supreme has ‘been running for president for over 30 years’. His two most recent bids polled at third and fourth in the 2012 and 2016 New Hampshire Democratic primaries, respectively. But now, the boot-bonneted boomer is running to win.When I spoke to Supreme in January, he had just triumphed in New Hampshire’s Libertarian presidential primary. Now he’s runner-up in the LP’s primaries, with a chance to be on every American’s ballot come November.‘This is my first legitimate, actual, bona fide, real campaign,’ he said. ‘In the past, I ran as a Democrat and was not a Democrat, I ran as a Republican and was not a Republican. Right now, I am a Libertarian and seeking the Libertarian party nomination.

Tuesday

17 Mar 2020

Amber Duke

Biden bus rolls over Bernie in Florida, Illinois and Arizona

Joe Biden is projected to win all three states that voted in the Democratic primary on Tuesday night, advancing his delegate lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders. Biden won Florida by a wide margin, garnering nearly 62 percent of the vote compared to Sanders’s 23 percent. Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders by a similar margin in 2016. Florida awards 219 delegates proportionally, putting Biden that much closer to the 1,991 delegates required to secure the nomination in the first round of voting at the Democratic National Convention. Poll workers in Florida noted lower turnout than usual due to fears over the coronavirus, a phenomenon that could have hurt Biden due to his popularity among older voters.

Dominic Green

The coronavirus is springing the Thucydides trap

The first casualty of informational war is truth. The first American casualty of COVID-19 was the myth that the United States can ‘manage’ the rise of China as a world power through mutual interest. That mutual interest was only ever economic. Naturally, most of our politicians, business leaders and commentators explained it as strategic too: as technocracy calls GDP the index of human happiness, so it identifies strategic interests with economic ones. The coronavirus crisis has, however, exposed an essential strategic antagonism between the United States and China.'‘What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta,’ Thucydides wrote in History of the Peloponnesian War.

Cockburn

The brothers Cuomo

If there's one good thing about the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent collective social distancing in the US, it's that families are getting to spend more time together. That is, unless you're one of the brothers Cuomo. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and his CNN anchor brother Chris reignited their intense sibling rivalry on live television Monday night, arguing over which of them is their mom's favorite. Andrew kicked off the nostalgic debate by comparing the coronavirus lockdown to a curfew implemented by his father, Mario, when he was a kid: 'I don't like the word "curfew." Dad tried to have a curfew for me, I never got past the resentment. But I do believe you'll see more heightening if the numbers don't slow.

Roger Kimball

Panic among the pigeons

Life is a risky business. Danger is everywhere. In New York, even the pigeons are a threat. A friend recalled a graduate school class in which he was told that some 20 people each year die from diseases contracted from pigeon dung. Twenty people! Why hasn’t Mayor de Blasio confiscated all the pigeons? Banned people from walking on the same streets where the pigeons congregate? Enforce a regimen of 'social distancing' among the birds? As of this afternoon, there are about 5,000 reported cases of the Wuhan flu in the US. Ninety-five people in this country have died from it. Ninety-five. Twenty-five of those, more than a quarter of the total, are associated with one place, the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, a long-term, critical care facility.

Monday

16 Mar 2020

Stephen L. Miller

The American media is in a Chinese finger-trap

Imagine if during the height of the Cold War, a media already combative against President Reagan was also heavily invested in the Soviet Union financially. Pretend the Soviet Union could leverage vast amounts of propaganda using our entertainment, news and print media as Reagan told them to tear down the Berlin Wall. Due to either a complicit corporate media in America, China is presently engaged in a highly organized propaganda war against the United States, not dissimilar from that analogy. As COVID-19 spreads across the United States, mainstream outlets are publishing Chinese state apologia across the web, and China is leveraging their clear influence over these markets, using the Hong Kong protest blackouts as a blueprint.

Ross Clark

We’re all Chinese now

I didn’t know this was what they meant by ‘cancel culture’. Sports events, theatre shows, plane flights, weddings, funerals: everyone is in a mad rush to cancel everything. Governments are ordering citizens to remain indoors, with Spanish police even deploying drones to catch miscreants. I don’t know whether it is the best way of tackling coronavirus — the UK government, which has gone to greater lengths than others to explain the scientific modeling behind its decision-making, has come to the conclusion that banning things and forcing the entire population into lockdown will have minimal effect and may even be counter-productive, at least at this stage. But it is going to cause a global recession, if not depression.