Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Sanae Takaichi is making a huge election gamble

Japan will go to the polls in February for a general election after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called a snap poll today. Takaichi is looking to make the most of her extraordinarily high approval ratings – in what has proved quite a lengthy honeymoon period – to secure a more comfortable mandate for her ambitious policy platform. It is a bold move by Japan’s first female prime minister and not without risk. Her Liberal Democratic party (LDP), the closest thing Japan has to the UK Conservatives and long seen as the natural party of government, has a slim majority in the lower house thanks to the support of three independent lawmakers but lacks a majority in the upper chamber.

sanae takaichi

What’s really going on in Iran?

24 min listen

Spectator contributor and author Charlie Gammell and Freddy discuss what is really happening as protests play out on the streets of Iran. They discuss imams turning on the Shah, whether Trump could actually be seeking talks rather than war, what the Middle East wants from a fractured Iran, and what issues could arise from replacing the regime with Reza Pahlavi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

iranian

How Trump can squeeze the Iranian regime

The Iranian people have shown true courage as they protest against the Islamic Republic. As the pressure mounts, some elements of Iran’s regime have been pushing to negotiate with the Trump administration – trying to create the impression they are ready to drink from the "poisoned chalice" as the Islamic Revolution’s founder Ruhollah Khomeini did to end the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Saeed Laylaz, a reformist economist, told Euro News last week that, "I have information that Iranian political officials are ready for dialog with the other side.

Is the Supreme Court poised to back trans bans?

It’s been a less than stellar year for trans activists. Shortly after taking office last January, President Trump signed an executive order withholding federal funds from any school that permits biological men and boys from playing on women’s sports teams. Then in June the US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning the use of puberty blockers and hormones for the treatment of young patients suffering from so-called gender dysphoria and seeking to change their gender identity. And on Tuesday the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases brought by transgender athletes seeking to overturn laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring biological boys and men from playing on female sports teams at the state and local level.

Trans
Trump

Trump flips off Ford worker – and boasts about revving the US economy

“This is the easiest speech to make,” President Trump was saying. “We have great people. And all I’m doing is spewing off what the hell we’ve done.”No speech is particularly hard to make for this President. He loves speaking. He would speak to an empty room, a kindergarten class, or a blank wall. In this case, he was speaking to the Detroit Economic Club after a nice tour of a Ford F-150 plant. During the tour, a Ford worker – who almost certainly no longer has a job – yelled "pedophile protector" at Trump, who yelled back "f--- you" twice and flipped the guy the bird.  After that, Trump, who, after all, is just like us, headed off to talk to the swells. "Isn't it nice to have a President who can go off teleprompter?

Hegseth’s vision is more Starship Troopers than Starfleet Academy

​“Welcome to Starbase, Texas,” Elon Musk said from the stage Monday night, as the crowd whooped. “This is a city. It’s actually legally a city that thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team, we built out of nothing. And it’s now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. For people out there who are curious to see it, we’re actually on a public highway, so you can come and visit. Drive down the road and see the epic hardware. I think this is the first time that a rocket development program has actually been on a public highway.

iran women

Western feminists should be standing up for Iran’s women

As Iranians revolt against the brutal Islamic theocracy that has throttled their civilization since 1979, striking images of young Persian women have been circulating online. They are lighting cigarettes by burning photographs of Ayatollah Khamenei. With their insouciant attitude, tumbles of curls, kohl-lined eyes and lolling fags, they could be on the cover of an Arcade Fire album. These women have reignited the same spirit that sparked widespread protests across the country in September 2022, when Mahsa Amini died in custody following her arrest for disobeying the country's modesty laws. In the aftermath of this, female protesters burned their veils, cut their hair in public and chanted "Women, Life, Freedom.

Trump is playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland

Donald Trump is playing hemispheric monopoly. Depending on what day of the week it is, the President's focus alternates between Venezuela, Canada, the Panama canal – and for the last twelve months or so, Greenland. Given what Trump and his team have said over the past week, their acquisition plans for the island are well advanced. But why exactly does he want Greenland? The world’s largest island is an integral part of the Kingdom of Denmark and is about three times larger than Texas. While the term du jour is geopolitics, perhaps the most plausible reason for why Trump is gunning for Greenland is ego-politics. We have a president eager to make America great again and complete the task that his predecessor President Monroe started some 200 years ago.

greenland

Iran’s uprising and the moral bewilderment of Western youth

I’m starting to feel sorry for progressives who are schtum about the revolution in Iran. My contempt for them is giving way to pity. Imagine watching women fling off their hijabs in glorious defiance of the cruel mullahs who rule over them and feeling nothing. Imagine seeing brave youths swarm the streets to confront the tyrants who oppress them and just looking the other way. The extraordinary valor of the young in Iran has exposed the moral bewilderment of the young in the West Imagine seeing that young man in London this weekend scaling the walls of the Iranian Embassy to yank down the flag of a ruthless regime and saying: "Well, it’s complicated.

hollywood

Why has Hollywood got so little to say about Iran?

It was the Golden Globes last night in Tinseltown and as per usual Hollywood’s finest strutted and peacocked on the red carpet to the click and flash of the massed paparazzi cameras. Images of their 1,000-watt smiles and 10,000-dollar couture outfits were beamed around the world to a million Instagram and X feeds. And yet, something was missing. These days a celebrity glamfest is not complete without a healthy dose of woke posturing on the issue du jour, whether it be underrepresentation of black people ("#OscarsSoWhite" or Black Lives Matter), women’s empowerment, climate change, or most recently of course, the plight of the Palestinians. This time, not so much.

AI

Inside the Democrats’ AI skepticism

Bernie Sanders has been rolling out political hot takes for more than half a century, and in recent years his familiar socialist prescriptions have found a new focus: artificial intelligence. In 2023 he argued that workers who use it should be entitled to a four-day week. In October of last year he called on corporations who employ AI to be hit with a “robot tax”. And, just last month, he made his punchiest proposal yet: a complete moratorium on all AI data centers. In a characteristically plaintive video address, the Vermont Senator argued that halting data center construction would "give democracy a chance to catch up," preventing the benefits of AI from being monopolized by "the wealthiest people on Earth.

Are falling birth rates a bigger threat than overpopulation?

In 1980, two academics made a bet. Julian Simon, professor of economics at the University of Illinois, predicted that the prices of chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten would fall over the coming decade. Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University, predicted that prices would rise. What Simon and Ehrlich were really betting on was the future of humanity – specifically, how many souls could the good ship Earth carry without running aground? By 1980, the global population had seen a period of enormous growth: doubling between 1800 and 1930 to reach 2 billion people, and then doubling again to reach 4 billion by 1975. Every sign suggested that this rate of growth would only accelerate, and Ehrlich was among those who saw catastrophe looming.

falling birth rates

The end is drawing near for Iran’s mullahs

As a wave of protests swept across Iran last night, the internet was completely shut down. I have no idea what is happening to my friends, my family, or anyone else. My best friend Champ was at the demonstration. I desperately hope he is safe. Iran is a nation wanting its soul back. Protesters burn the Islamic Republic flag and replace it with Iran’s real flag Overnight, there were protests throughout Iran. From Qom and Mashhad, the most religious cities, to Rasht and Anzali, the most secular, people took to the streets. In Tehran, there were protests in the poorest parts to the richest parts of the city. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the huge crowd in Pol-e-Roomi, a neighborhood in Tehran where prices are comparable to London.

iran mullahs
iranian regime collapse

Will the Iranian regime finally collapse? 

These are tense hours for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and head of state. Thousands of protesters are flocking to the streets to protest the economy. Iran has not seen a wave of unrest like this since the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, after Amini was killed for allegedly not wearing her veil properly. During a televised speech in Tehran Friday, Khamenei showed little restraint, vowing he “would not back down” in the face of what he described as “saboteurs.”  The protests began in Tehran in late December and quickly spread across the country. They have since turned bloody, with Amnesty International reporting at least 28 people killed.

Minnesota

The question the FBI must answer in Minnesota ICE shooting

For the third time in a week, Minnesota is making national headlines, and for all the wrong reasons. In a massive show of federal force against a resistant sanctuary metropolis, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployed 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis-St. Paul in the largest immigration enforcement operation in the nation’s history. Against the backdrop of what federal prosecutors described as a nine billion dollar federal fraud scheme centered in Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, agents have gone door-to-door investigating human trafficking, narcotics and gang activity, and surreptitious employment by illegal aliens.

Gabbard 2028, anyone?

"The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela," said Tulsi Gabbard. "Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders – so we have to stop trying to choose theirs."That was in 2019, when Gabbard was still a rebellious anti-war Democrat. Nobody then could have predicted that, six years on, she would be Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI). But in 2024, Gabbard jumped aboard the Trump Train and became a key player, alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the big realignment of that year. Yet now, she finds herself isolated. Her dovish foreign policy views make her a bad fit for an administration committed to the "Donroe Doctrine" – and, asserting itself through violence in Latin America.

Tulsi Gabbard

Britain’s X crackdown is no joke

The internet suddenly went down in Iran last night, as courageous Iranians continued to rise up against the Ayatollah. The UK government was apparently inspired. Not by the rebels, whose plight the Prime Minister has remained remarkably quiet about – but by the mullahs’ digital crackdown. Call me a conspiracy loon, but I dare say Labour’s ire for X isn’t simply about the site’s supposedly insufficient safeguarding policies Britain’s Labour party has issued its most serious threat yet to social-media giant X – whose owner, Elon Musk, has become this rudderless government’s go-to bogeyman.

France’s bistros are dying

Emmanuel Macron says France’s traditional bistros should be granted Unesco world heritage status. Speaking at the Élysée this week, the French president vowed to help save the country's traditional cafes. "This is a fight that we want to take on, because our cafés and bistros aren’t just selling croissants, baguettes and traditional products – they’re also on the front lines of preserving French craftsmanship and know-how," Macron told a group of French bakers at the annual Epiphany cake ceremony. France doesn't need to list its bistros. It needs to decide whether it still wants them Macron is right about what the bistro represents. For generations, it has been a shared meeting place as much as a commercial one; somewhere to linger and belong.

Unrest is spreading across Iran

"If they shut down the internet, you know it’s serious," said a well-informed observer of Iran to me yesterday morning. The internet blackout came yesterday afternoon – along with over a million Iranians marching in streets across the country. Strikes are continuing in bazaars and the cries for the end of the Islamic Republic are becoming more brazen. A video was sent to me before the blackout from Iran’s upscale northern suburbs, home to the sons and daughters of the regime elites, in which the cries of "death to the dictator" could be heard loud and clear. "We are excited," was the caption to the video. And this morning there came unconfirmed reports that the National Bank of Iran had implemented a ban on people withdrawing cash, a potentially huge moment in events.

Is Trump going for Iran next?

23 min listen

Donald Trump’s stunning attack on Venezuela has the world wondering what his next move might be. What does it mean for Iran, Russia, and the future of the global order? Freddy is joined by Owen Matthews and Paul Wood to discuss.

Walz minnesota

What’s the matter with Minnesota?

Just when you thought Minnesota had hit rock bottom, the state achieves a new level of chaos. Once again it is the epicenter of a self-serving, destructive “revolution” at the behest of an incompetent, unhinged and rancorous city and state leadership, helmed by Governor Tim Walz.According to local reports, “A 37-year-old woman was fatally shot by a federal agent on Wednesday, January 7, in south Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation. The shooting happened around 9:30 a.m. in the area of East 34th Street and Portland Avenue. The woman, later identified as Renee Nicole Good, died at the hospital.”In a press conference following the incident, Governor Walz threatened “war with the federal government” by calling up the Minnesota National Guard.

donald trump nation influence

‘Regime influence’: Trump’s foreign-policy third way

At 2 a.m. on Saturday, President Trump gave a New Year’s kinetic expression to his recently published National Security Strategy and what it means in the American hemisphere. If we take President Trump at his blustering word – which those in the administration’s Maduro-adjacent crosshairs should – this is just the first, big, shock-and-awe move by the United States in a resetting of the rules-based order that has governed our hemisphere. This time on America First terms. In Europe, those who take Trump seriously and see the long-term upside in his policies, call him “Daddy.” Last weekend Trump showed the “Papi” side of this national security strategy in our hemisphere. The Venezuelan people woke up praising the Papi of Venezuelan freedom.

Food

RFK Jr.’s health rules: eat, drink and be merry!

The USDA and Department of Health and Human Services has issued a new food pyramid, and it’s simultaneously great and appalling. On extreme upside, the Trump administration, run by someone who enjoys a quarter pounder with cheese for lunch, recommends a diet rich in protein, vegetables and fruits, while demonizing sugars, processed foods, and empty carbohydrates. On the other hand, it indicates that saturated fats are good for us. The pyramid features a thick juicy steak at the top of the pyramid, next to a roasted chicken, an enormous broccoli floret, a chunk of Emmental, a meatloaf and a packet of frozen peas. The next level down is avocado, olive oil, canned green beans, salmon and a pear.

Will Trump back down in Minnesota?

So much for Minnesota nice, the phrase that Midwesterners like to use to describe their calm dispositions. Three gunshots – fired pointblank in the gelid snows of Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer at Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old white woman and American citizen – have plunged the North Star State into renewed political turmoil. The fatal shooting took place only a few blocks from where George Floyd was killed in May 2020. In responding to the tragedy, President Trump proceeded on his favorite premise: the best defense is a good offense.

Trump

What Trump should learn from the British empire

One remarkable thing about Donald Trump’s adventure in Venezuela is just how old-fashioned it is. It is a world away from George W. Bush’s neoconservative efforts at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little attempt to justify the arrest of Nicolás Maduro in terms of the human rights of Venezuelan citizens. Little attention appears to have been paid as to how the country will now be governed. Nor have we heard much more about the drugs crimes of Maduro, other than the admission that he perhaps isn’t, after all, quite the lynchpin of an international criminal racket (for all his other offenses against his own people).

Kai is the queen of Generation Alpha Trumps

Americans hate to love, or love to hate, the country’s First Family, the Trumps, a melodramatic cast of characters that makes the Ewings, the Carringtons, the Bridgertons or the Roys seem small by comparison. But a gee-whiz protagonist for everyone has emerged in the persona of Kai Trump, the President’s granddaughter and the eldest daughter of Donald Trump Jr.Kai, 18, stands out among the Generation Alpha Trumps. Barron, the President’s son, is a dark crypto prince who seems to have adopted his mother’s reclusive profile. The rest of the Trump babies have yet to receive their media debuts. But Kai is everywhere. This week, she appeared on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast, saying that American politics is too divisive – thanks, grandpa.

Kai Trump
mandelson

Peter Mandelson: Trump’s lessons for Europe

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve. It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolás Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t. Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this brutal reality. The future of Greenland is being misunderstood.

Europe’s self-deception over Greenland

As Donald Trump weighs up taking control of Greenland, Britain and the EU has fallen back on a familiar strategy: talk tough, and do nothing. The UK joined France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Denmark yesterday in making a joint statement affirming that "Greenland belongs to its people." Arctic security, it said, must respect "sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders." Invoking it Article 5 the United States would expose NATO’s limits rather than overcome them If Donald Trump decides to take Greenland, Europe’s initial response would be loud, formal and legally impeccable. Europe and the UK would protest loudly, threaten, – and then do almost nothing at all.

WATCH: Trump imitates trans weightlifter for House Republicans

President Trump offered Republican members of Congress a stand-up routine involving an imitation of transgender athletes lifting weights at the House GOP Member retreat earlier today. The President said that his wife “hates” when he does this and considers it “unpresidential.” "She said, 'darling please, the weightlifting is terrible'," the President recounts, before launching into his impersonation, replete with sound effects. The impression has been a regular feature of Trump's rally speeches over the last year or so. Melania, he claimed, also said that his audiences didn't like his dancing, pointing out that FDR would never dance as a counter-example.

donald trump trans weightlifter impression
OnlyFans

The John Lennon visa is now the OnlyFans visa

The US created the O-1B visa system in 1972 after John Lennon was nearly deported, and it became clear that there was no immigration system to attract artists to the country. Lennon couldn’t possibly imagine what the system has become now – nearly half the applicants for the O1-B in the last year are OnlyFans models, according to a report published by the nonprofit Florida Phoenix. This makes sense in the Trump 2.0 era, where the President is a game-show host, the War Secretary is a news anchor, Dr. Oz runs Medicare and the former first lady of World Wrestling Entertainment is in charge of the Department of Education. Our cinemas are empty and the average American reads negative five books a year. Bonnie Blue, there’s a luxury condo in Miami waiting for you.