Latest from Coffee House

Friday

7 Jun 2019

Joe Biden is a Trump Republican

If Joe Biden snatches the White House from Donald Trump in 2020, he will govern as a modern liberal. This week’s Hyde Amendment snafu is proof positive. But only Mr Biden knows if his beliefs have really changed. It doesn’t matter, because his party has. The famously gaffe-prone Biden would lead a censorious party. Whatever he thinks of the new Trump line on China, it’s clear that the elder statesman — who has considered running in nearly every presidential race since 1980 isn’t going to let his best shot yet — and his last shot — get mired in the details. Joe Biden, architect of the 1994 crime bill, will not reverse Trump’s reform of it.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Ben Shapiro on YouTube: ‘if you approach an unspecified line, you’ll be downgraded or banned’

This week was a disastrous one for those of us who care about free speech, viewpoint diversity, and fighting censorship. To find out why, tune in to the latest episode of Censored in the City, in which Ben Shapiro and I dig into the nefarious ongoings at YouTube. ‘They’ve created this incredibly vague standard, if you approach an unspecified line, then, presumably, you will be downgraded or banned,’ Ben tells me. ‘And not only that, in their new standards they say they are going to upgrade what they call “authoritative sources”. Well who the hell are “authoritative sources”?

Thursday

6 Jun 2019

Dominic Green

On D-Day, Macron has learned nothing and forgotten everything

No one wants to hear a lecture on ‘liberty and democracy’ from a finance guy turned technocrat. Especially not at a service commemorating the dead of the D-Day landings. In the last 30 years, finance guys and technocrats have enriched themselves at the voters’ expense, abused the notion of economic liberty, and wrecked social contracts across the West. Thank you for your service, as the voters never say. The 75th anniversary of D-Day should be a time for remembering the true meaning of freedom and democracy — and for honoring the thousands of young men who died in foreign fields so that we might inherit those privileges. Instead, we got Emmanuel Macron’s side-eyed hectoring of Donald Trump at Thursday’s memorial service.

Michael Tracey

Steven Crowder and the folly of the internet playground

Steven Crowder is a buffoon with a YouTube channel who churns out simplistic, reactionary political takes every day. This might be passably acceptable if he were funny – but he is not. He’s just annoying and obnoxious. Still, annoying and obnoxious people have populated the internet since it first became available to the masses: bitter insults were hurled at the dawn of the online bulletin board.

Wednesday

5 Jun 2019

Libby Emmons

How tech oppresses women in developing nations

Tech liberates Western women, but it oppresses women in developing nations – not that the tech giants care. Across the globe, tools that empower American women are being reconfigured to cage and degrade women. From the recent innovation that can ‘out’ women in porn, to Saudi Arabia’s use of women-tracking apps, to the surveillance potential of China’s Uighur-tracking systems, women are being colonized by tech. From the washing machine to the smart phone, technology has allowed women to be in control of their own time and space. If we’re walking home late at night, being able to reach out and let a friend know where we are gives a sense of security.

James Adams

Gene editing tech is a gamble with our future

In the past year, scientists have used gene editing techniques enabled by a technology called CRISPR to grow eye retinas, treat cancer, and create twin babies. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a group of DNA sequences found in the genomes of organisms like bacteria and archaea. Essentially, CRISPR is a gene editing tool that can be used for everything from curing previously incurable diseases to creating bigger tomatoes or leaner bacon. Offering the hope that body parts may be built from scratch, CRISPR raises the possibility that our bodies will never wear out.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Reports of the GOP’s death are greatly exaggerated

David Brooks, the center-right Cassandra of the New York Times, reckons that a GOP apocalypse is coming. The data predicted as much in 2016, when all the smart pollsters predicted a Clinton landslide, and I predicted as much when mourning the fact that Trump was the new Republican standard-bearer. But tinsel didn’t rain forth from Hillary’s near-anointing at the Jacob Javits Center. The end of the world is deferred, yet again. Trump is not conservative in the strict sense of the word; he’s a libertarian and a libertine. So you could plausibly argue that despite Trump’s victory, conservatism did not win in 2016. You could even argue that conservatism didn’t really compete at all in 2016, or, if it did, that it lost.

Paddy Ryan

Mitt Romney called. He wants his foreign policy back

‘Eight years ago, I argued that Russia was our number one geopolitical adversary,’ Mitt Romney said this week in his maiden Senate speech. And who could forget Barack Obama’s burn in the televised presidential debate of 2011? ‘The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,’ Obama said. Four years later, with the US and Russia at loggerheads and Russian ‘collusion’ a theme of the 2016 election, Romney was vindicated. But it was Obama who was the outgoing president.

Tuesday

4 Jun 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s Mexican tariffs could wipe out his 2017 tax cut

Donald Trump likes to brag about his deal-making prowess. During his visit to the United Kingdom, he’s touting the prospects for a ‘very, very substantial trade deal.’ But even as he dangles sugarplums before the British, he’s blowing up another agreement that he wanted to complete before the 2020 election — the United-States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is supposed to supplant NAFTA.His attempt to fuse national security and nationalism in the form of a tariff on Mexico could end up torching his own presidency. Trump’s big idea — concocted by his aide Stephen Miller — is that he can pressure Mexico to crack down on immigration by pressuring it with tariffs.

Monday

3 Jun 2019

Dominic Green

Did American outlets refuse to publish the MLK sex transcripts?

It’s #MeToo time for Martin Luther King — despite, historian David J. Garrow alleges, the efforts of senior staff at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the LA Times and the Guardian. In this week’s Green Room podcast, Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, alleges that these outlets chose not to publish his discovery of transcripts from the FBI’s taped surveillance of Martin Luther King. Instead, Garrow’s research was published this week in Britain’s Standpoint magazine. https://audioboom.

Melanie McDonagh

Sadiq Khan’s anti-Trump crusade is dull and reductive

Perfectly nice man normally, Sadiq Khan, mayor of London. Ambitious as Lucifer, obviously, but unpompous and cheerful in his manner, which is always good. But on Trump, he’s lost it, hasn’t he? Yesterday he was complaining about Trump and other far-right leaders ‘using the same divisive tropes of fascists of the 20th century’. You don’t use the f-word lightly if you’re grown up. And you hesitate, if you’ve got any sense, before using it about a US president who’s here to commemorate the contribution of US forces to the D-Day landings. Trump was wholly unfazed by the observations. In a tweet, he replied: ‘He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me...

Friday

31 May 2019

Michael Tracey

The inevitability of impeachment

It looks more and more like a foregone conclusion that impeachment proceedings will be initiated against Donald Trump in the near future. Bernie Sanders became the latest Democratic presidential candidate to call for this on Thursday, joining a cast of characters that includes Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Seth Moulton, and Wayne Messam. Bernie’s quandary is a particularly fraught one. He had equivocated for months on impeachment, lagging behind his chief ‘progressive’ competitor Warren, who was first to call for proceedings after the Mueller report’s release. You may not agree with Warren’s analysis, but at least she read the report and formed an independent conclusion.

Thursday

30 May 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump: American shogun

Japan has a new emperor, and so do we. Donald Trump isn’t merely president. He wants to be America’s shogun. Already Trump has repeatedly made his contempt for his Cabinet officials and staffers plain as he routinely forces them to line up and sing his praises. Now, in an episode that is more redolent of H.M.S. Pinafore than Top Gun, TVSG, or The Very Stable Genius, is enmeshed in an embarrassing brouhaha over the USS John S. McCain, which was inconveniently parked off the shores of Japan, where Trump might see it. Klaxons apparently started sounding in the White House over Trump’s Memorial Day visit to Japan. It was time to clear the decks. Under no circumstances could Trump be allowed to espy the dreaded name ‘McCain.’ It would harsh his mellow.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Muslims aren’t Europe’s new Jews

Last weekend, Felix Klein, Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner, said that he can no longer ‘recommend to Jews that they wear the skullcap at all times everywhere in Germany.’ This statement betrayed two devastating truths. First, that anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance in Germany, as elsewhere in many European states. Second, that no one with any knowledge of the situation has any confidence that things will get better anytime soon. Instead of working to change the latter, Jews are instructed to hide their faith. This is abhorrent for several reasons. The kippah or yarmulke is, like the hijab, an external signifier. It proclaims to the world that the wearer identifies with a particular group and a particular set of ideas.

Martin Vander Weyer

Should we fear Facebook’s cryptocurrency?

The cryptocurrency winter has turned to spring: having slumped from $20,000 in late 2017 to $3,200 a year later, bitcoin has lately risen like a rocket to $8,800. Though it doesn’t change my negative opinion, I admit that if I had bought a fistful of these wacky gaming chips last October when I gave the crypto concept a kicking at our Spectator conference on the subject, I’d be up almost 40 percent. Evidently, hints from the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank that further bouts of ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing may be in the offing have spurred what the FT calls ‘a rally in riskier assets’. Crypto is the new gold for those who distrust central banks and seek stores of wealth that governments can’t reach.

Freddy Gray

The cosmic magnetism of Trump and Brexit

Polite British eurosceptics still insist that Brexit isn’t Trump and Trump isn’t Brexit — as if that meant anything at all. Many of us Britons like to think that our populist revolt is a more civilized affair than the one happening across the Atlantic. As London prepares to welcome President Trump next week, it may be time for the British to admit that we have been deluding ourselves. The truth is that Trump is the sun to the Brexit moon. Some mysterious cosmic magnetism always seems to pull them together. Nigel Farage might call it destiny. Look at recent history. On June 24, 2016, the day after the EU referendum, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland.

Wednesday

29 May 2019

Roger Kimball

Why Joe Biden can’t win

Like the poor according to Jesus of Nazareth, Joe Biden we will always have with us, or so it seems. Can anyone remember when he first ran for president? It was more than 30 years ago, in 1988. I looked it up. Many of the people who work for me weren’t even born when Biden plagiarized his first speech. And now, just as he should be stocking up on Geritol and Viagra and preparing for that Acela Express to the beyond, he is at it again. Running for President. Of the United States of America. Joe Biden and 6m785 other Democratic hopefuls. Opinions about Joe’s potency — as a political candidate, I mean — vary widely. I have several well-informed friends on both sides of the chasm who believe that he will be the candidate.

Curt Mills

Don’t write off Elizabeth Warren

In the outlandishly deep and diverse 2020 presidential field, Elizabeth Ann Warren cuts an anonymous figure. She’s female and running for the White House, but so are Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s a 69-year-old second term senator – not a green first-termer like Kamala Harris, but she’s no Joe Biden. She’s an economic populist, but so is, ostensibly, the president, not to mention her neighbor, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The only distinctive moments of her political life in recent months are embarrassments: the much-mocked claim of Native American heritage and a cringe-inducing beer swilling exercise. Long talked about as a nominee-in-waiting, Warren’s campaign so far has failed to establish any great momentum.

Tuesday

28 May 2019

Libby Emmons

Deepfakes and the war for the soul of reality

The faked video of Nancy Pelosi slurring her words as if she was drunk was shared on social media over 2.5 million times. The video wasn’t only shared by random accounts intent on spreading misinformation. Those willing to believe it, or at least to seem willing to do so, included Trump attorney and former NYC mayor, Hizzonor Rudy Giuliani. ‘What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre,’ Giuliani asked, before his critical faculties kicked in and deleted the post. Though Facebook has banned some forms of speech, including white nationalism and fair housing ads from the city of Houston, it opted not to take down the doctored Pelosi video. The concept of reality is under threat.

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Wolff is at the door

The Wolff is once more at the door. The Guardian reports that Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, has written a new tome. It’s called Siege: Trump Under Fire. It alleges that special counsel Robert Mueller drafted a three-count obstruction of justice indictment that he then decided to discard. The Mueller team says that Wolff’s report is bogus. But Wolff himself writes that his assertion is ‘based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel.’ He’s also got some eyebrow-raising quotes. ‘The Jews always flip,’ was apparently Trump’s verdict on the cooperation agreements of Michael Cohen, David Pecker and Allen Weisselberg.

Nicholas Farrell

The triumph of Matteo Salvini

Since becoming leader six years ago Matteo Salvini — Il Capitano as they call him — has transformed the radical-right Lega from small regional separatist party into the largest party in Italy. After last week’s European elections, the Lega is now also the second largest national party in the European Parliament. Its 28 seats place it level with Angela Merkel’s CDU, and just behind the 29 seats of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. The European Parliament election results confirm Salvini as the undisputed leader of Europe’s populists. Their insurrection is determined to unseat the EU ancien régime. Its latest champion, French president Emmanuel Macron, is ever less convincing and popular in France and elsewhere in Europe.

Edward Elliott and Dina Smeltz

The enduring power of the Special Relationship

The resignation of Theresa May, continuous Brexit chaos, and probable anti-Trump protests will all present a lively backdrop to President Trump’s upcoming state visit to the UK. Despite the US and the UK appearing to move toward inward-looking foreign policies in recent years, new survey data show that the public in both countries share more of a global outlook than their leaders might realize. Trump was elected on an ‘America First’ platform and has applied tariffs to trading partners, questioned the utility of alliances, and continues to push for more restrictive immigration policies. May was elected on a promise to deliver the UK’s departure from the EU, with cutting back on immigration a key part of that promise.

James Adams

China will be the AI superpower

As President Trump settles in for a long trade war with China, he ignores a far more serious crisis in China relations. At stake is not just the size of a trade deficit, but the future of America’s position as a superpower. China has made clear its determination to lead the world in Artificial Intelligence by 2030 and to become the world’s sole AI superpower by 2050. To achieve these goals, China is aggressively investing tens of billions of dollars in future technology including robotics, surveillance, and data analysis. This state-controlled effort unites both the public and private sectors for a single purpose: world domination.

Samuel J. Abrams

Will Generation Z elect a Boomer president in 2020?

Not a week goes by without my Generation Z students asking, ‘Does America have an age problem?’ It does, but the rationale may surprise. The nation’s age problem is not with older, Boomer politicians dominating the news. Rather, our age problem is the political inaction of younger generations, which marginalizes their notably divergent interests and views. If Trump is re-elected in 2020, he will be 75 years old: older than Ronald Reagan at the start of his second term, and older than many of my students’ grandparents. Even more alarming to some of my students is that Bernie Sanders will be 79 in 2020, and Joe Biden 78. There are some younger Democratic candidates in the 20-plus pool running for the White House.

Monday

27 May 2019

Roger Kimball

Let’s call the Russian collusion ‘hoax’ what it really is

During the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in 1932, the Austrian essayist Karl Kraus was anguishing over the placement of commas in a column. It might seem futile at such a moment, he told a friend, but ‘if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.’ Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But the general point holds: words matter, as do the their appurtenances, punctuation. (After all, ‘Let’s eat Grandma’ means something quite different from ‘Let’s eat, Grandma.’) George Orwell made a kindred observation about the importance of having the courage to call things by their real names.

Saturday

25 May 2019

Curt Mills

Liz Cheney rehabilitates the family name

There have been darker days for the House of Cheney. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney left office amidst two imprudent wars and a capsizing economy. A decade on, the times are surprisingly kind to a family once among the most controversial in American politics. Dick’s daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, is looking at a Senate run. ‘She’s got pretty good foreign policy, national security chops,’ Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said unironically earlier this month. ‘She’d be a great addition.

Friday

24 May 2019

John McAfee

A thought experiment with John McAfee

Knowledge, which is known information, has become the number one commodity in the world. It doesn’t matter how large and important or how small and insignificant a piece of information may be: there is still value in it. Knowledge of a person’s shoe style preference, for example, is valuable to shoe manufacturers or sales organizations which may place targeted ads on social media. Knowledge is king. Given the massive effort placed in collecting, analyzing, cross referencing and disseminating this near infinite body of valuable knowledge, it is odd that no one has yet attempted to exploit the far larger collection of knowledge’s mirror image – the world of ignorance.

Chadwick Moore

The Buttigieg delusion

Referring to her imaginary victory in the midterm elections, the LARPing governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, delivered to Democrat voters a come-to-Jesus moment. ‘The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the last 10 years, and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the new voices coming into progress,’ she said to an audience last week. ‘I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and it’s exactly how we won.’ She didn’t win, for the record. But this is what they call in therapy a breakthrough. The Democrats seemed to have finally entered the fifth stage of grief: Acceptance, a time of adjustment, readjustment and resolve.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Nancy Pelosi has the whip hand

It was a maiden moment in the annals of the White House yesterday. Kellyanne Conway is claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ‘treats me as she might treat her maid or her pilots or makeup artists or her wardrobe consultants’ because she refused to discuss infrastructure with her yesterday. Conway went on to play the elitist card, asserting that Pelosi is apparently too ‘rich’ to bother talking with the hoi polloi. The only problem being, of course, that Conway is herself no piker when it comes to accumulating the green stuff — she lives in a $7.

Thursday

23 May 2019

Roger Kimball

The hounding of Hope Hicks and the desperation of the Democrats

Oscar Wilde once observed that only very superficial people don’t judge things by their appearances. Like many of Wilde’s quips, that observation has the dual advantage of being both witty and true. Its apparent flippancy — in fact, its flippancy is genuine, not just apparent — does not so much conceal as embody the deep truth it expresses. Thomas Aquinas also appreciated the importance of appearance as the ambassador of truth. Aquinas tended to speak of pulchritudo, ‘beauty,’ which he congregated with the good and the true as interwoven ‘transcendentals.’ The beautiful, Aquinas wrote, is id quod visum placet, that which having been seen, pleases.

Toby Young

The paranoid style in British politics

The politics professor Matthew Goodwin made an interesting comment on Twitter earlier this week. He pointed out that many of the elements of the ‘paranoid style’ in politics – a phrase coined by Richard Hofstadter in a famous essay to describe right-wing populist movements – are now as common on the Left as they are on the Right. Goodwin mentioned ‘Remainia’ as being particularly susceptible to the paranoid style, which is characterized by ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy’, according to Hofstadter. That struck me as an astute observation and I’ve tried to flesh out the idea in my Spectator column today.

Wednesday

22 May 2019

Michael Tracey

Maria Butina: jailed for the crime of being Russian

Maria Butina was not a Russian spy. She did not trade sex for influence. She had nothing to do with any clandestine espionage activity, nor did she ever hide her dealings with American political officials. In fact, she unabashedly loved America – perhaps to a fault. But she’s currently sitting in jail, and almost no one will say a word in her defense. The ordeal to which she’s been subjected is jaw-dropping for its recklessness and absurdity. There’s so much that’s wrong with this case, it’s almost hard to know where to begin. Maybe the most obnoxious malfeasance was committed by moralizing media members who saw fit to cast judgment on her personal romantic decisions – as if that was ever remotely any of their business in the first place.

Ben Johnson

Donald Trump’s one-front trade war

At 12:01 a.m. on Monday, President Donald Trump went a long way toward defusing a potential war – not with Iran, but Canada and Mexico, where Trump revoked tariffs he had imposed in the name of national security. Why the sudden bout of tariff reduction? The president is focusing on a one-front trade war with China. The restrictions began as two fronts of the same war. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imported from China last March. Then he extended those tariffs to the EU, Canada, and Mexico on June 1. But the president seems to have concluded that the US can no more fight a two-front war in trade than on the battlefield.

Tuesday

21 May 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Trump thinking too small in merely defying Congress?

Inquiring minds want to know: should Nancy Pelosi, who has hitherto prudently fended off calls from her left flank for impeaching Trump, adopt the lesser tack of launching an impeachment inquiry? Progressives want progress, which is to say they’re intent on ousting Trump from office by any means necessary. Their thinking is that starting an inquiry may not be tantamount to impeachment, but will help erode Trump’s defiance of Congress, thereby allowing it to inform the public of his various transgressions. Trump has instructed his former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II not to meet Congress, an edict he obeyed this morning to the vexation of Jerry Nadler, the head of the House Judiciary Committee.