Latest from Coffee House

Wednesday

2 Jul 2025

Cockburn

Is Britain’s Rachel Reeves the new Hillary Clinton?

Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, the second most powerful politician in the country, shed a few tears from the front row of the government benches in the House of Commons during the weekly Prime Minister's Questions session. Her boss Prime Minister Keir Starmer – to her mounting horror – pointedly refused to confirm whether she'd be staying in her current post. "We’ve got free school meals, breakfast clubs, we’ve got £15 billion invested in transport funds in the North and the Midlands. We’re cutting regulation, planning and infrastructure is pounding forward," Starmer said with affected bolshiness.

Ben Domenech

The great big, beautiful risk

The electoral risk to politicians involved in passing a dog's breakfast of a "big, beautiful bill" – and there have been too many of this century to count – is often overstated. Once bills this large and unwieldy are passed there are a litany of problems that emerge as Americans, dulled into frustration by the same old swamp, discover only too late which specific policies negatively affect their lives and businesses. But then there are also things they like about it too, and even measures that are initially unpopular find purchase. And I do mean purchase in both senses, as in literally bribing voters with their own money, as Barack Obama's Medicaid expansion did.

Gavin Mortimer

How the French left made Mamdani

It should come as no surprise that Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in last week’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York was celebrated so vociferously by the French far left. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) regard the 33-year-old Socialist as a chip off the old block. In a post on X Mélenchon delighted in Mamdani’s defeat of Andrew Cuomo, saying: "Opposed to the genocide of the Palestinians, he is obviously already accused of anti-Semitism. He won against a figurehead of the centre-left backed by the local leaders of the cheating Democratic party." As in France, continued Mélenchon, the "traditional" left no longer speaks to the people; it is the radical left.

Janet Mills in The White House (Getty) maine governor

Cockburn

The Maine Governor’s cocaine problem

On a trip to the nation's capital last week, 77-year-old Governor Janet Mills of Maine was confronted with an old skeleton in her closet: accusations of cocaine use. A man approached Mills and, while filming, asked if she believed "sniffing cocaine at work" is a "human right," Fox News reported. Mills gracefully responded, "What the fuck?" That, Cockburn notes, is not a no. The man followed up with a more straightforward question: "How much more does an eight-ball cost with inflation?" Unfortunately, Mills did not give the reporter current street prices and instead chose to walk away. (The answer is around $180 in DC, per Cockburn's law enforcement sources.

Neal Pollack

Zohran Mamdani’s grocery chain will be a crime against New Yorkers

Of all the policies proposed by Zohran Mamdani, the socialist winner of last week’s New York’s Next Top Mayor competition, the idea of city-run grocery stores has proved the most divisive. If you want to reduce prices at halal carts by taking away regulations on street vendors, you’re going to get 80-plus percent approval rating. But state-owned groceries are another story. Modern history is strewn with tales of state-owned grocery disasters.

Tuesday

1 Jul 2025

David Sypher Jr.

Penn finally accepts that Lia Thomas is a biological man

The University of Pennsylvania just reversed course on one of the most controversial sports decisions in recent memory. After a federal investigation, the university agreed to restore titles and records to biological female swimmers who were forced to compete against Lia Thomas – a transgender-identifying male athlete. In addition, Penn will send apology letters to the affected athletes and adopt sex-based definitions going forward, limiting women’s sports and facilities to biological females.It’s being hailed in some circles as a win for common sense and women’s rights. And it is. But let’s be clear: this was not a moral epiphany. It was a forced retreat.Penn, like many elite institutions, didn’t arrive at this outcome willingly.

Kate Andrews

Can America afford the Big, Beautiful Bill?

The President needed One Big, Beautiful Vote in the Senate to move forward with his One Big, Beautiful Bill. It was a close call. This afternoon senators voted 50-50 to pass the act which will solidify Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, increase child tax credits, reduce Medicaid spending – to name a few of policies in the 940-page proposal. Vice President J.D. Vance acted as the tie-breaker, passing the bill and sending it back to the House of Representatives, where it also passed by just one vote back in May. Trump, unsurprisingly, is delighted. “MAGA VICTORY,” tweeted the White House just minutes after the bill had been passed. In many ways, the knife-edge victories have boosted the President’s agenda.

Donald Trump White House Cross Hall (Getty)

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump threatens to deport Elon Musk over BBB opposition

It’s a time, as a great Republican once announced, for choosing. Elon or the Donald? After they seemed to reach a détente, open hostilities have now resumed. This isn’t a cold war but a hot one that could go nuclear at any moment. To borrow from Trump’s own comment about Israel and Iran, we basically have two guys that "have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing." Will it jeopardize Trump’s chances for a Nobel Peace Prize? Are foreign mediators necessary to create a new ceasefire? Musk is threatening to launch and fund a new political party, much in the spirit of Nigel Farage’s Reform party, that could crater Republican political fortunes in the midterm elections. If anyone could succeed, it would be Musk.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the Oval Office (Getty)

Joel Kotkin

Why we need to talk about black anti-Semitism

At the Glastonbury musical festival in England this weekend Bobby Vylan – a British-born rapper of African heritage – led the crowd in a chant of "Death, death, to the IDF". It was a potent reminder of a dispiriting trend: the growing hostility among those of African heritage in the United States towards Israel and even to Judaism itself. One notable development seen during the bitter battle over Gaza and the recent strike on Iran has been broad embrace by African-American celebrities of anti-Israel and sometimes openly anti-Semitic memes. These include such figures as the influencer Candace Owens, Kanye West, also known as Ye, and, to a less heinous extent, the New York Times' Afro-centrist columnist Charles Blow. These figures, as well as the usual anti-Semites like Rev.

Monday

30 Jun 2025

Bethany Lorden

A road to healthier forests

The US Department of Agriculture rescinded the 2001 Roadless Rule last week, a regulation that restricted road building and timber extraction in about 30 percent of land managed by the National Forest System. Judging the pushback from environmentalists, you might think that President Trump was selling Yosemite to a logging company. But the red-tape cutting actually increases public recreation access and opens neglected forests to fire-mitigation projects. Conservationists should be celebrating. On paper, the Roadless Rule preserved America’s most beautiful landscapes. In practice, the regulation proved burdensome and ecologically counterproductive. For instance, some 2,400 Tinglit Native Alaskans reside on islands in the Tongass National Forest.

Peter Wood

The education of Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Kwame Mamdani, having secured the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor, is in the national spotlight. At the age of 33, he ran as a Democratic Socialist having previously held elected office as a New York State Assemblyman. He has no record of significant achievement in other walks of life. He composed and produced rap music, but to no acclaim. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non-profit organization (501(c) 3) that does not endorse political candidates or parties, and in this respect we take no position on Mr. Mamdani’s candidacy. That matter will be decided by the voters of New York City this November. We do, however, take special interest in Mr. Mamdani’s educational background.

Brandon Goldman

Democrats want federally mandated infanticide

Women in Britain will soon be able to kill their baby at any point during their pregnancy, even if the child could survive outside the womb. Infanticide is set to be the law of the land after British MPs voted 379 to 137 in favor of an amendment to end the criminalization of abortion after 24 weeks. The natural consequence of a slouched, “you do you” morality. Donald Trump called attention to the issue of unlimited abortion during his 2024 presidential debates, much to the media’s chagrin, who interceded desperately to disprove his claims about Democrats supporting "executions after birth." But he was right.

Sunday

29 Jun 2025

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Zohran Mamdani’s selective scrutiny

Within weeks of launching his campaign to be mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani declared that he was also running to be the first South Asian mayor. He began aggressively courting this demographic, which accounts for around five percent of the city’s population, as well as the seizable total Asian population of almost 15 percent. Mamdani reached out to the desi community with the help of the Indian subcontinent’s great unifier, Bollywood. The Hindi film industry that even those who don’t speak the language in South Asia can relate to. He used a 1980 Bollywood song "Meri Umar Ke Naujawano", roughly translating to "my fellow youngsters", to explain the NYC’s ranked choice voting system using popular desi drink, the lassi, as prop.

Saturday

28 Jun 2025

Eva Terry

Should we legalize all drugs?

Washington, DC Reason magazine staffers Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion walked away from the Reason Versus debate in Howard Theater, Tuesday night, with victory candy cigarettes in hand. Their feat? Convincing a little over half their audience that the federal government should legalize all drugs. Their opponents from City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael A. Mangual, started off in the lead with 43 percent of the debate's attendees opposed to legalization. By the end, they lost 4 percent, while Reason gained 13. So what pushed these young, suit-wearing voters to change their conservative-leaning minds toward libertarianism? Sullum, 59, and Binion, 33, argued that prohibition makes the black market more dangerous for drug users.

Friday

27 Jun 2025

Rachel K. Paulose

Amy Coney Barrett v. Ketanji Brown Jackson

The Supreme Court has reined in the authority of district court judges by ruling unconstitutional the ever more common practice of universal injunctions, an abuse of Article III power that cried out for the Court’s intervention. Trump v. Casa is a long overdue vindication of the limits of constitutional power. Sadly, yet increasingly predictably, some progressives claimed the end was nigh… again. In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words fairly smoldered from the page: “It is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.” She further lambasted her colleagues’ 6-3 majority decision as “an existential threat to the rule of law.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Supreme Court allows Trump to recast America

Donald Trump is on a roll. Last week, he bombed Iran and imposed a ceasefire on Tehran and Jerusalem. Now the Supreme Court, in its final day of session, has handed him another victory by constraining the power of federal judges to constrain the executive branch. The verdict is clear: the Trump administration will have much more latitude to recast America.In essence, the Supreme Court is consolidating a conservative counter-revolution that began, as Sam Tanenhaus notes in his exemplary new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., after World War II and is reaching full flower under Trump. Once upon a time, liberals enacted sweeping policies and programs through the courts. Now it is the right’s turn.

Daniel Hummel

For evangelicals, Trump’s Iran strike was divine

When Trump announced U.S. forces had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites on June 22, he ended with an unusual presidential benediction: “I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America.” Eric Metaxas, one of Trump’s most fervent evangelical supporters, was amazed: “I could not believe what I heard... that was the most bold declaration of faith that any president has made in our history.” The statement thrilled Trump’s evangelical base, but its place in wider events mattered just as much. Pastor Greg Laurie of the Harvest Christian Fellowship called the airstrike “a foreshadowing” of a prophecy fulfilled.

Neal Pollack

Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

The Trump administration's dream of reopening Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay appears to have stalled. But more than 3,000 miles away, the state of Florida and Governor Ron DeSantis are making that dream come true anyway. Scheduled to open as soon as July 1, Florida is building “Alligator Alcatraz,” a 1,000-bed temporary migrant detention center on an unused airstrip deep in the Big Cypress National Preserve, part of the Everglades region. They’re naming it after Alcatraz because, according to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, “There’s not much waiting for [detainees] other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” Calling it “Climbing Fern Gitmo” or “Everglades Abu-Ghraib,” while also catchy, wouldn’t play.

Thursday

26 Jun 2025

Anthony Thomas

Don’t mourn the death of TV

The online American right is positively obsessed with the nineties. It’s easy to establish the cause here: a surfeit of Gen X and early millennial users, many of whom are fresh converts from within the last decade. Social-media posts by conservative users depicting America’s cities, beaches, and nightclubs from this era regularly achieve staggering virality. The memorialization of these things is justified by presenting them, perhaps not wrongly, as evidence of the cultural homogeneity that America has lost in the past quarter century. There is one tendency among these that I find particularly troubling – lamenting the death of American network television.

Shay Khatiri

What do Iranians want?

I was born in Gorgan, Iran, ten years after the Islamic Revolution, and for the first 21 years of my life, I never experienced life outside of it. But my parents and grandparents told me about the prosperous lives they had before Islamism captured the country during a revolution they had initially supported. Their generation had detested the feeble and feckless Shah, and they’d been inspired by Ruhollah Khomeini’s charisma. That was the story of my generation: parents recounted to their children how the revolution they had supported ruined their lives, but they always blamed someone else for it. Instead, my generation has experienced theocracy, poverty and international embarrassment. As we grew up, our parents told us of bars, cabarets and nightclubs back in the Shah’s days.

Dwayne Walter

We must reclaim the word ‘progressive’

I’ve grown tired of hearing the term progressive used to describe people and policies that embody anything but progress. The word suggests a movement toward liberty, reason and human dignity. But what now passes for “progressive” ideology is a regressive assault on foundational principles: race-based social engineering, denial of biological truth, hostility toward the rule of law and an obsession with censorship disguised as compassion.Progress gave us the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, constitutional government and equal protection under the law. It was built on Enlightenment ideals – reason, open inquiry and the primacy of the individual over tribe. The ideologues now claiming the label have rejected those very foundations.

Wednesday

25 Jun 2025

Neal Pollack

Mahmoud Khalil is living the American dream

With Iran’s nuclear sites “obliterated” and the 12 DAY WAR in the rear-view, the Trump administration can now turn attention back to its core mission: defeating the Enemy Within. Buried within all the war and New York election hubbub this week was the news that the US had arrested 11 Iranian nationals who were in the country illegally, including, according to the New York Post, “a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member with suspected ties to Hezbollah, an ex Iranian army sniper and a terror watchlist suspect.” The administration, not without reason, is concerned that Iran will activate “sleeper cells” in the US.

Neal Pollack

Call him Daddy

Sitting next to Donald Trump at the end of a short NATO summit, Mark Rutte, head of the organization, looked quite amused as he listened to the President describe the Israel-Iran conflict. "They've had a big fight, like two kids in a schoolyard," Trump said. "You know, they fight like hell, you can't stop them. Let them fight for about two to three minutes, then it's easy to stop them." Raising a fist, Rutte added: "And then Daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get (them to) stop." Soon after, flanked by two of his Apprentices, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, Daddy Trump gave his own press conference. He talked for 15 minutes before he took a single question. The Netherlands, he said, “has the most beautiful trees. I want to bring some back with me.

David Sypher Jr.

Zohran Mamdani’s New York: prostitution, crime and socialism

Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in the race to be the next mayor of New York City is not just a local upset – it’s the moment the progressive fringe officially took the keys from the Democratic establishment. The 33-year-old socialist unexpectedly seized the most first-choice votes in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. And if symbolism mattered more than substance, he would already be crowned mayor of America's largest city. For years, the Democratic machine in New York managed to contain its most radical flank with centrist figures like Eric Adams and, before him, Michael Bloomberg. But that firewall has crumbled.

Jay Nordlinger

A short ****ing history of presidential swearing

On Tuesday, President Trump dropped a bomb – not a bunker-buster but the F-bomb. Talking to the press about Israel and Iran, he said, “We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” There is a lot to say about this statement – starting with the implied moral equivalence between the two countries. But let’s focus on the F-bomb. Has a president ever before used this word in public? Used it deliberately, in a public statement? Trump seems to have recorded a first. Plenty of presidents have had salty tongues. You may know a story about Harry and Bess Truman. It is quaint now. There are several versions of this story, but, essentially, it goes like this. Mr.

Charles Lipson

Democrats vexed by Trump’s success in Iran

There are serious, unanswered questions about the impact of America’s bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites. Three stand out. How much was actually destroyed? Where is the highly-enriched uranium that Iran apparently removed from the Fordow site before the bombs fell? And is America threatened by Iranian sleeper cells, perhaps hidden among the more than 700 Iranians whom the Biden administration released into the American interior after they crossed the border illegally? Nor are they the only threat. We have no idea how many terrorists are among the 2 million “got aways” who were seen on surveillance cameras crossing the border but never apprehended. Those are serious questions about serious threats, and they deserve thoughtful, bipartisan inquiry. They won’t receive it.

Tuesday

24 Jun 2025

Aidan McLaughlin

‘Muslim democratic socialist’ Zohran Mamdani wins New York City mayor primary

As I write, the time is 10 p.m. in New York City and the temperature is hovering somewhere around unbearable. It’s a nice respite from the 100 degrees the city hit on Tuesday afternoon, as voters flocked to the polls to cast their ballots in an unusually heated mayoral primary. Polls closed at 9 p.m., and a town famed for its impatience was given the gift of a clear front-runner. Improbably, against all odds, all common wisdom, the vast majority of polls and even the betting markets, the night ended with Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and proud “Muslim democratic socialist” as the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. “I’m very proud of the campaign that we ran,” Cuomo told his supporters as Mamdani’s lead proved insurmountable.

Travis Aaroe

Zohran Mamdani and the millennial soul

Rent controls don’t have a stellar track record but I’m no expert. In any case it’s academic. At 33, New York City’s rent-regulated apartments are mostly beyond the reach of Zohran Mamdani's contemporaries. That Mamdani, a millennial, has made the fate of this property portfolio the central issue of his campaign reveals not so much the radicalism of his generation but rather its retreat into quietism. Whatever their merits these apartments operate on a semi-feudal system. Tenancies last for decades and are acquired largely via inheritance or the backslap.

David Sypher Jr.

The Washington Post ends toxic narrative that cops are hunting black men

The Washington Post just quietly pulled the plug on its police shooting database, “Fatal Force.” Don’t expect an apology or a reckoning. Don’t even expect an explanation. Because to acknowledge the full impact of that project would be to admit this: that for nearly a decade, the nation’s premier legacy newsroom helped manufacture and perpetuate a toxic narrative – that police officers are hunting black men in the streets with impunity.Let’s be clear, the “Fatal Force” database didn’t just compile data; it crafted a storyline. It presented fatal police shootings in isolation, stripped of context and devoid of nuance. No breakdown of the circumstances. No mention of weapons. No differentiation between justified use of force and actual misconduct.

Neal Pollack

Memories of the 12 DAY WAR

President Trump didn’t start the war. But if we’re to believe the greatest social-media post of all time, he sure finished it, and quickly. Either way, he definitely branded it, and in geopolitics, as in business, branding is everything. If you break the terms of the brand, Israel and Iran have found out, the President is going to whup you, at least verbally. “Upon the 24th Hour,” Trump posted yesterday about a peace of his own making on Truth Social, a website of his own making, “an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR will be saluted by the World. . . . On the assumption that everything works as it should, which it will, I would like to congratulate both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, ‘The 12 DAY WAR.

Monday

23 Jun 2025

Kate Andrews

We need to hear from Tulsi Gabbard

Where is Tulsi Gabbard? The country’s Director of National Intelligence has been glaringly absent as the biggest national security story in years continues to develop. In both the lead-up to and the aftermath of President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, Gabbard has barely been seen, or heard. It’s a strange time for the chief of the US intelligence community to go silent, leading to a growing number of questions that Americans – particularly MAGA Americans – would like answered.It’s Gabbard’s now-infamous testimony to Congress in March – and a video posted to social media earlier this month – that are thought to have sidelined her from the Trump administration in recent weeks.

Mark Krikorian

How’s Trump doing on immigration? Great! (mostly)

New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask almost everyone he met, “How’m I doing?” Trump hasn’t asked me “How’m I doing?” on immigration, but if he did, I’d answer, “Outstanding, Mr. President, but with one hiccup and much left to do.” The first challenge the President faced was to stop the disaster at the border. And he’s succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. As journalist Byron York asked on X, “How many presidents solve a problem... that was a huge issue in the campaign, and solve it in the first few months of their presidency?” Arrests at the southern border in May were down 93 percent from the same time last year.

Neal Pollack

Donald’s divine inspiration

President Trump appeared in the long hallway Saturday night, flanked by his Three Sons – J.D., Pete and Little Marco – to let us know he’d done the big violence in Iran. It was a somber moment, a war moment, though, as Trump said on Truth Social after he’d ordered the dropping of the Mother of All Bombs deep into the heart of old Persia, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.” Terry Southern, the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove, couldn’t have dreamed up a line so darkly ironic, but Trump gifts us with daily comic diamonds, intentional and unintentional. Saturday’s crown jewel came at the conclusion of his statement, the time usually reserved for “God Bless America.

Roger Kimball

On Iran, trust Trump’s instincts

What now? After the daring and what everyone is describing as a “flawlessly executed” attack by the United States on Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities Saturday night, Macbeth’s words must be on the minds of many: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.” Things did not work out so well for the Thane of Cawdor, as Macbeth then was. But even though his attack was not “the be-all and the end-all” he wanted, everyone who wishes for peace must second his opening argument.