Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Johnson and Juncker agree to step up talks – but no backstop solution proposed

Is Boris Johnson approaching a Brexit breakthrough? That’s the question being asked among Conservative Members of Parliament after there appeared to be movement last week from the government and Democratic Unionist party that could help to secure a deal with the European Union. Today the prime minister met with EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker in Luxembourg to discuss the prospect, over a lunch of chicken oysters and risotto. On the conclusions of the meeting, a No. 10 spokesman said the pair had agreed to step up discussions and for Michel Barnier and Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay to hold talks on a political level: ‘The leaders agreed that the discussions needed to intensify and that meetings would soon take place on a daily basis.

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A fresh assassination of Brett Kavanaugh’s character

I guess that The New York Times didn’t get the memo. Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court last fall. He is sitting there (officially, I mean) right now, as I write. Despite the most disgusting, ad hominem, evidence-free effort at character assassination of a Supreme Court nominee in history, the combined forces of The New York Times and other cesspool media organs like The New Yorker, bottom-feeding Senate Democrats, feminazis of various stripes, and other woke constituencies on the left, Kavanaugh made it.

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How drones are dramatically changing warfare

The attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities by Houthi rebels using a fleet of 10 drones loaded with explosives has caused serious damage and will result in a global production cut of around five percent. The Houthi strike was the second aimed at Saudis oil facilities after a previous effort last month resulted in minimal damage. The Houthi drones were likely supplied by Iran, which has a large drone fleet and has been arming the rebel group in Yemen for years. Saudi Arabia is likely to launch retaliatory strikes against both the Houthis and Iran. Drones have become a new frontier in warfare allowing activist groups and nations access to a potent weapon that can be used for surveillance or as a remotely piloted bomb.

Can we engineer our way out of the climate crisis?

The Climate Apocalypse is upon us. More carbon monoxide has been discharged into the atmosphere in the last 50 years than in the whole of human history that went before. Carbon traps heat and the world is getting hotter. Heat holds water vapor and so rainfall is getting more frequent while heat waves last longer. Ice at the poles melts and coastal cities face inundation as sea levels rise. But the doom confidently predicted by many climate scientists around the world is being met by optimism among other scientists who are employing innovative technologies that may transform the debate and offer hope for us all. These technological breakthroughs will impact all aspects of climate change from carbon emissions to food production and all forms of energy.

climate change

The Cheneys have always put war first and America last

Donald Trump has called the Iraq war the ‘worst single mistake’ in US history. Most Americans, including our military, agree with the president. That grand mistake should be an example to all of the tragic unintended consequences inherent in regime change. It should be an enduring reminder of the misery that can be unleashed when our leaders don’t think soberly about what happens after they start a war. The Iraq war was started by Dick Cheney along with President George W. Bush in 2003. In the 16 years he’s had to reflect, the former vice president has been clear for many years that he would not hesitate to do it all over again. His daughter, Rep.

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Marianne Williamson is Trump’s perfect female counterpart

If the Democratic presidential debates reflected the sort of person who votes for the party, Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard would be center stage. As would Ed Buck, Harvey Weinstein, and the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. But with Williamson systematically sidelined by the Democratic machine and Gabbard abruptly deployed to the front lines at the behest of a vengeful Kamala Harris (I mean, maybe?), we were left with the chum.

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In Houston, Biden got his teeth into Sanders

To the extent Joe Biden is capable of actually formulating coherent sentences – a questionable proposition – he delivered an attack last night that Bernie Sanders has never really been forced to contend with during either of his presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton was not in a position in 2016 where she had to aggressively attack Bernie. Had she been, she would have almost certainly brought up the fact that he is a self-described 'socialist'. Of course, that’s common knowledge by now. But it's a salient point for Bernie's rivals to press him on, especially considering the overriding concern for Democratic voters at present is 'electability'.

What if Elizabeth Warren blows it in Houston?

Get your skates on! The Democrats on Ice roadshow rolls into Houston this evening, and the media are poised for a slip-up. Tonight is the night Brooklyn-based content creators have been yearning for: when Joe Biden finally lines up alongside the Anointed One, Elizabeth Warren. Surely it's here, they speculate, that Uncle Joe will commit one blunder too many and the era of Elizabeth will be ushered in. How's he gonna mess it up? Will he call Cory Booker 'Barack'? Maybe both eyeballs will explode this time? Gosh I can't wait! Liberals online are so fixated on the narrative of 'Biden gaffe-Warren competent', that they're not considering a series of other possibilities.

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9/11 and the false sense of American security

Eighteen years ago, I was only a child. My first indication that something bad had happened on September 11, 2001 was that a birthday party my whole class had been slated to attend was canceled. Instead of heading to a celebration, I waited with the rest of my classmates for our parents to come and take us home. Except my mother didn’t take me home. We went straight to the supermarket. I remember watching, mouth agape, as my mother piled what seemed like hundreds of boxes of spaghetti, cases of water, and canned goods into the wagon. None of us knew what would come next, and she wanted to be prepared. That commitment to preparation came from fear. A fear that was rational and justified, and which grew out of a realistic sense that the sands had shifted. We were at war.

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John Bolton and the nationalist moment

John Bolton has left the White House and those of us who desire some modicum of peace in this world can breathe a sigh of relief. Bolton was appointed to serve as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser barely a year and a half ago, succeeding H.R. McMaster. It was always a strange choice: Trump’s foreign policy is premised largely on hard-nosed (and often hard-of-luck) deal brokering, while Bolton’s preferred method is to bomb other countries. This is the man who has no regrets about the calamitous occupation of Iraq, who wanted to assassinate Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who seemed to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and who lamented that we didn’t destroy the Syrian regime all the way back in 2003.

The Spectator’s first US edition is coming!

It’s a busy and exciting week for The Spectator in America: we are putting together our first US edition. It’s beautiful and big: an 84-page book, perfect bound, with a glossy cover. We’ve been pleased with the number of early-bird subscribers, and I’m pretty confident we will be able to reward them with a great magazine, the likes of which they haven’t read before. The Spectator’s brand of journalism is unique, and we are confident that it can thrive in America. We aren’t publishing stories in order to tell our readers how to think. We aren’t politics bores. We aren’t interested in shaping the conservative or any other movement.

Dispersing the clouds of the vape panic myth

The Great American Vaping Panic is reaching its ghastly conclusion. As I write this, five people have died in hospital and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating 450 reports of people going into seizures after vaping. Politicians are demanding a renewed clampdown on an e-cigarette industry that was being blamed for a youth ‘tobacco epidemic’ long before these events unfurled. The market leader, Juul, is under investigation by the FDA, its products are banned in the company’s hometown of San Francisco and it may not be long before they are banned nationwide. Moral panics rarely come out of nowhere and there is a grain of truth in this one. Dozens of people, mainly young men, have been hospitalized after vaping in recent weeks.

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john bolton

John Bolton is Trump’s latest distraction

Donald Trump is declaring that he has fired John Bolton as national security adviser. Bolton is saying he offered to resign. It’s par for the course for the Trump administration where no one really gets to leave on their own terms. How long before Bolton writes his own tell-all? Or did he sign an NDA?Trump, who views staffing his administration as a kind of casting call, was never comfortable with Bolton’s 'I am the Walrus' mustache but after tiring of H.R. McMaster, he tapped him for the job of national security adviser. Now, Trump is declaring that he 'strongly disagreed with many of his suggestions.' This is probably the precursor to a future tweet declaring how Bolton was a loser and bum whom Trump never wanted on the premises in the first place but begged for a post.

We shouldn’t be surprised the mainstream left is ‘NeverTulsi’

MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted in July what, at surface level, seems an obvious point: 'If I were the DNC, I would be spending a lot of money learning basically everything I could about 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016.' Considering how much Hayes and others on the mainstream left have invested into debunking the current administration, there’s no surprise that, when the rubber meets the road, the Democrats let their collective hatred of Trump cloud their political judgement. Look no further than their treatment of Tulsi Gabbard.

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Would Britain really be first in line for a US trade deal?

The animosity between the Trump administration and Europe has not yet damaged military relations, but the same can't be said for economic ties. Negotiations for an EU-US free trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (‘economic NATO,’ as the organization’s former secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, had called it), have stalled, perhaps permanently. Negotiations are at ‘a stalemate,’ said EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström. The Council went a step further, declaring the mandate for the talks to be ‘obsolete and no longer relevant.’ TTIP’s demise, and the frustration it has caused the Americans, might augur well for another possible transatlantic trade deal.

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Mark Sanford’s hopeless politics of debt

Mark Sanford might not eat brains, but he is the closest thing in American politics to the living dead, an authentic Zombie Republican. His career died a decade ago when he was governor of South Carolina and absented himself from office for a few days to go off hiking the Appalachian Trail – or rather boffing the Argentinian mistress. He was censured, nearly impeached, but clung to office anyway until his term expired in 2011. And then, two years later, he shambled back to a familiar haunt, the US House of Representatives. Sanford began his brief national career as a Class of ’94 House Republican insurgent. And there he was again, nearly a decade later, after winning a 2013 special election.

Trump is pursuing Mugabe economics

Can Donald Trump weather the spate of bad news that’s coming his way? Trump remains enmeshed in a battle over his prediction that Alabama would be socked by Hurricane Dorian, but what could really upend his presidency is the new report that job creation was a measly 130,000 in August and that the manufacturing industry is taking a hit because of his trade war with China. True to form, Trump is trying to blame someone rather than himself.Last week, he claimed that American businesses are at fault. They’re 'badly run and weak', he claimed. An odd stance for a Republican president to adopt, for sure. Today, he went back to an old reliable, the Federal Reserve, in — what else?

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The race for the Libertarian nomination

There’s a presidential primary race afoot in the Libertarian party, America’s third largest. In 2016, the Libertarians nominated former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and as his running mate, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Their ticket received 3.28 percent of the national popular vote, the largest third-party vote share since 1996 and the best ever Libertarian performance. For 2020, party leaders hope to break that record. Dan Fishman, executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, says the goal is to crest 5 percent of the popular vote, the share above which a minor party becomes eligible for federal campaign funding. ‘The numbers could be even higher,’ Fishman said.

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Trump will be re-elected because of left-liberal stupidity

Not such a long time ago, in a galaxy that now appears far, far away, the public space was clearly distinguished from the obscenities of private exchanges. Politicians, journalists and other media personalities were expected to address us with a minimum of dignity, talking and acting as if the common good is their main preoccupation, avoiding vulgar expressions and reference to personal intimacies. There were, of course, rumors about their private vices, but they remained that – private matters mentioned only in the yellow press. Today, however, not only we can read in the mass media about the intimate details of public personalities, populist politicians themselves often regress to shameless obscenity.

The Democrats find religion

Now for some bracing honesty from the Democratic National Committee. In a new, unanimously adopted resolution, Democrats have declared that ‘the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic party, growing from 19 percent in 2007 to one in three today’ (emphasis added). Advocates for truth in political advertising should rejoice. The so-called ‘secular’ left has finally abandoned the canard that its views and policies are purely ‘neutral,’ or the products of inarguable empiricism. According to the resolution, the religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious (labels used interchangeably) are, instead, members of a new faith community.

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Donald Trump, canard of chaos

Is Donald Trump riding a rubber ducky into alligator-infested waters, as a former aide to House Speaker John Boehner suggests to Politico? It’s hard to avoid the impression that an increasingly unmoored Trump seems to groping for assistance wherever he can find it. This morning, for example, Trump, in between playing weatherman about Hurricane Dorian, retweeted the real estate tycoon Sam Zell, one of whose great accomplishments was to bankrupt the Tribune Company. Zell declared that the notion that America shouldn’t impose tariffs on countries like China is a canard: '....We can’t have a system where we run our entire economy for the benefit of other countries, which have long charged us big tariffs. Don’t keep ducking the reality.

Yes, Joe Walsh can!

When Joe Walsh announced that he’d be running to be the Republicans’ nominee for 46th president of the United States, the phrase 'long shot' came to the minds of more than a few gamblers and political strategists. Regardless of the bookmakers and power brokers, it's more than possible for Walsh to shake up a political landscape dominated by Donald Trump. With the right political strategy, NeverTrumpers, with a Joe Walsh campaign as their representative, could beat Trump in 2020. In the era of Trump, 'long shots' are more than possible. Lest we forget, Trump was once a long shot. The polls said that he could never hit the bullseye. But today, he’s the leader of the free world.

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How Boris Johnson can deliver a liberal Brexit

For all its ferocious momentum, Boris Johnson’s government is capable of making pretty bad mistakes – as we saw with Priti Patel’s announcement that free movement of people will end with Brexit on October 31. This is a massive problem, if it hasn’t worked out what regime will replace it. As I say in this week’s UK cover story, this decision plunged millions of European Union nationals into uncertainty. The Home Office has only managed to process one million of the three million living in the country. And what would happen to the other two million on October 31? If they change jobs, how would a French baker who has lived here for 30 years distinguish himself from a French baker just off the ferry if he starts a new job?

Can we find Bill Kristol a new job?

With millions of people unemployed, finding a new job for a well-heeled Washington insider might seem like a low priority for Americans but I still believe it would be sensible and humane to find Bill Kristol another job. The poor fellow has spent years working in politics, and it just isn't working out for him – or anyone else. Mr Kristol is of course the son of neoconservative theorist Irving Kristol. Neoconservative families are unusually rich in political commentators. Irving Kristol's contemporary and ideological comrade Norman Podhoretz produced the columnist and editor John Podhoretz. Right-leaning historian Donald Kagan produced the neoconservative theorists Robert and Frederick. Conservative literary agent Lucianne Goldberg is the mother of conservative columnist Jonah.

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Kirsten Gillibrand blames everyone except herself

When asked by the New York Times why her presidential bid ended in such spectacular failure, Kirsten Gillibrand said, ‘I don’t know… My campaign may well have been ahead of its time.’ Well, that’s one way of putting it. An alternative explanation is that it was a poor choice to construct a campaign specifically to align with the sensibilities of hyper-woke professional class Democratic consultants. Unfortunately for Gillibrand, other female candidates have done perfectly well, with one (Elizabeth Warren) now hovering at second or third place nationally and on a consistent upward trajectory. That kind of precludes Gillibrand from blaming her failure on the unwillingness of voters to embrace a woman as their party’s standard bearer.

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The DNC would rather lose than nominate Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard is arguably the most interesting woman in American politics today. A combat veteran from the Iraq war, the Hawaii Democrat’s beliefs were forged not only in the desert wastelands of Iraq but also by the wastefulness of America’s permanent bipartisan fusion party. Having served in the US Army National Guard in a medical unit during the darkest days of pre-surge Iraq, Gabbard was forced to question all of her pre-war assumptions. From that point, she entered politics and quickly rose to prominence as one of the few voices of restraint and reason among Democrats now infected by the warmongering ruling class. Since then, the four-term congresswoman has been lampooned by the leaders of her own party for her troubles.

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How I became an ‘extremist’ overnight

Ever since being beaten and robbed by Antifa in Portland in June, I have continued to receive threats of violence, which have prompted attention from police. But the scale of the abuse I received on Tuesday morning after waking up was unprecedented. The source of the rage? A Daily Beast hit piece headlined, 'Right-wing star Andy Ngo exits Quillette after damning video surfaces.' This was followed by another story in the Washington Examiner, shared in a tweet, which said I was out at Quillette 'after controversial video surfaces showing him doing nothing to stop or report violent attack.' This was followed by more hit pieces on VICE and Media Matters.

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What’s ngext for Andy Ngo?

Andy Ngo has flown the Quillette nest. The Portland-based provocateur, famous for his hate crime-debunking Twitter threads, CCTV coverage of Antifa protests and narrative-driven writing on Islam, left his role as subeditor for the Australian Intellectual Dark Web magazine this week. The circumstances of his departure are unclear, but the timing is suspect: last Thursday a Portland Mercury reporter circulated a video that shows Ngo near to members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer immediately prior to a violent clash with Antifa. Ngo himself is yet to comment. https://twitter.com/alex_zee/status/1164406638519803905 Quillette editor Claire Lehmann said this was a coincidence.

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David Oks’s day off

Only just turned 18, David E. Oks extends over a lean 6'1 frame, bent slightly forward. His voice, called 'terrifyingly deep' by a fan, is unforgettable once you’ve heard it. Overall, he seems more like a Romanian apparatchik than the architect of the 2020 Democratic primaries’ biggest anti-war disruption. If you weren't aware, Oks, along with high school friend Henry Williams, was the teenage manager of former Alaska senator Mike Gravel’s insurgent bid for the Democratic nomination. In office from 1969 to 1981, Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record to make them publicly available and became a leading figure in the end of the draft and the Vietnam War.

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Trump’s bold defiance of Macron’s hate speech charter

In Arthur Miller’s superb examination of the nature of fanaticism, The Crucible, the key moment comes not with the initiation of the Salem witch trials which form the subject of the play, but in the leading character finally and fully rejecting them. The point of crisis comes when John Proctor refuses to sign his name to the condemnation of supposed witches which would justify their horrific punishment. 'How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name.' It is the moment when a man finally finds the courage that is essential to any meaningful masculinity, the courage to defy the absolute consensus of opinion that harms the innocent and taints those who accept it with complicity in evil.

I saw the violent Hong Kong protests

This weekend saw the most violent clashes yet in Hong Kong between demonstrators and riot police. On Sunday, as mass protests entered their 12th week, Hong Kong police deployed water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets, and a policeman pointed a gun at a protester and the press. Meanwhile, dissidents threw bricks and grates that they had dug out from the street at riot police. They returned volleys of tear gas canisters with tennis rackets, threw homemade petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails, and used  lasers to thwart facial recognition cameras.

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Emmanuel Macron’s climate change virtue signaling

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the 'emergency’, the 'international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) 'the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ 'Our house is burning.

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David Koch’s ‘dark money’ was misunderstood

Here’s a shocker: people are more complicated than the caricatures disseminated by their enemies suggest. Witness the stupefyingly rich David Koch, who together with his brother Charles, presided over a business empire worth some $115 billion. David, who died on Friday at 79 after a long battle with prostate cancer, was at one with his brother in embracing a staunch libertarian philosophy of government and also in his belief in the power of philanthropic investment. When you control a personal fortune of $50 billion, you are in a position to distribute philos to many anthropoi. This the Koch brothers did, on a breathtaking scale. A lot of their money, and a lot of money they leveraged from other conservative donors, was siphoned to political candidates of whom they approved.

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The cosmic combination of Hong Kong, Brexit and the trade war

Over the past several months, we have witnessed remarkable courage in the streets of Hong Kong. What began as limited protest against a single act of pro-Beijing legislation now has the markings of existential struggle, if not revolution. As the people of Hong Kong understand, the city government’s proposed extradition bill — enabling removal of its citizens to mainland China for trial — was not an isolated event. It was, instead, a sign of things to come, the gradual encroachment of Beijing upon the rights and freedoms promised Hong Kong for 50 years in the 1997 Basic Law. These constitutional guarantees — negotiated with the United Kingdom before it transferred the city — have come steadily under attack as the clock ticks ineluctably towards midnight.