Latest from Coffee House

Monday

13 Feb 2023

Cockburn

Anna Paulina Luna kneecaps the Washington Post

Anna Paulina Luna is a bad girl. Why else would the Washington Post be so eager to discipline her? Reporters Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites, truly a modern-day Woodward and Bernstein, appear convinced that the freshman congresswoman representing Florida’s 13th congressional district is a George Santos retread. The pair of bullies went rummaging through Luna’s panty drawer in search of skeletons. The result? A lengthy article intended to punish her — to which several corrections and clarifications have been added in the days since its publication.

state of the union anna paulina luna washington post

Amber Duke

Exclusive: GOP questions health officials on Project Veritas’s Pfizer bombshell

A group of Republican congressmen and senators sent a letter to top US government health officials on Monday demanding answers on recent claims about "directed evolution" research made by a Pfizer employee during an undercover sting operation. A copy of the letter, which was sent to Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Robert Califf, and National Institutes of Health acting director Lawrence Tabak, was obtained by The Spectator. Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, and Representatives Chip Roy, Andy Biggs, Greg Steube, Eric Burlison, Bill Posey, Mary Miller, Lauren Boebert and Bob Good all signed the letter.

Oliver Wiseman

Washington grapples with UFO unknowns

Washington’s UFO speculation: sci-fi movie or cold war thriller? Mysterious airborne objects are downed by US jets off the Alaskan coast, over the Yukon and over Lake Huron in Michigan. The NORAD commander is asked if aliens could be involved and replies: “I haven’t ruled anything out.” Washington began this week trying to figure out if it was living through the opening scenes of a sci-fi movie, the first chapter of a Cold War thriller, or something more banal. A great deal of speculation filled into the information vacuum that followed the weekend’s news that the US military had shot down three unidentified flying objects. The president has been mum on the incidents in recent days.

Cockburn

The New York Times would like you to have more sex, please

America isn’t having enough sex. Phew. Cockburn thought it was just him — but now the New York Times is issuing a call-to-arms: Americans need to bump uglies more! In the national paper of record, Magdalene J. Taylor wrote a guest essay in favor of sex, arguing that it is a "critical part of our social wellbeing, not an indulgence or an afterthought" and explaining “across almost every demographic group, American adults old and young, single and coupled, rich and poor are having less sex than they have had at any point in at least the past three decades.” She goes on to say that, “In the 1990s, about half of Americans were having sex weekly or more — that figure is now under 40 percent. For many who are having sex, the frequency has dropped precipitously.

Jane Stannus

The truth slips out about Justin Trudeau’s euthanasia regime

Two cheers for a brief hiatus in the Canadian stampede towards suicide for all. Earlier this month, David Lametti, Justin Trudeau’s justice minister, announced that legalization of euthanasia for the mentally ill will be delayed by one year. This, he said, will give the health system and regulatory bodies more time to prepare. Mentally ill adults will now become eligible for euthanasia in March 2024. Sadly, it’s a mere hiatus. Despite the international wave of horror in recent months pushing back against Canada’s sickeningly casual euthanasia regime, the government clearly has no intention of walking back its plans to make death on demand available to the most psychologically fragile.

Sunday

12 Feb 2023

Amber Duke

The Satanic Temple’s legal campaign against criticism

What happens when you create a de jure religious organization for the purposes of opposing organized religion? In the case of the Satanic Temple, you seemingly become the thing that you hate. After I wrote about the Satanic Temple's attempt to start an After School Satan Club at an elementary school in Chesapeake, Virginia, I was made aware of an ongoing legal battle between TST and some of its former members. TST accused four former members of hacking a Facebook group for a Washington State chapter, as well as a related meme page, and using it to post defamatory claims about the organization and its leadership. The Satanic Temple's latest lawsuit against these former members was dismissed in January by a district court.

Friday

10 Feb 2023

Oliver Wiseman

The capital vs the Capitol

The capital vs the Capitol When the House of Representatives voted to overturn a pair of laws recently passed by the Council of the District of Columbia this week, Eleanor Norton Holmes, the District’s non-voting delegate, delivered an uncompromising and partisan denunciation. “I can only conclude that that the Republican leadership believes DC residents, the majority of whom are black and brown, are unworthy or incapable of governing themselves,” she said. But Holmes’s black-and-white account of the House vote to block two controversial pieces of legislation — one a revamped (and relaxed) criminal code, the other allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections — omitted some inconvenient details.

Jennifer Sey

I’m pro-science. That’s why I’m anti-mask

“Are you anti-mask?” “Are you anti-vax?” “Are you anti-science?” Employees of Levi Strauss & Co repeatedly pummeled me with these questions during 2020-2022, when I was the company’s brand president. Why? I advocated in defense of children: against the masking of toddlers, against closed playgrounds and youth sports, for open public schools. I’m not exactly sure what an anti-science person is. But that’s not me. I’m pro-science. And that’s why I’m anti-mask. Given the findings from the recent Cochrane study, a meta-analysis summarizing seventy-eight studies including a million people, the science is now clear: “Face coverings make little to no difference” in Covid infection and fatality rates. Even when the hallowed N95 is worn.

Ben Domenech

How taxpayer money was used to silence speech

Here's a simple question: how much American taxpayer money is being spent to silence, censor, and blacklist opinions? Legacy media reporting on the House Oversight Committee's initial look into the actions of Twitter during the 2020 elections focused mostly on questions surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop. The committee's investigative reports, however, ought to hone in on the most disturbing aspect of this story: social media giants were routinely directed and coerced into censoring and silencing American citizens by entities funded by those same taxpayers.

tax dollars free speech censorship disinformation

Paul du Quenoy

Joe Biden takes a Florida vacay

Fresh — or not so fresh — from his awkward and stilted State of the Union address, President Biden took his show on the road to Florida to stump against what he claims are Republican plans to cut (“sunset” in Beltway-speak) Social Security and Medicare. Apparently unaware that Florida is now an irretrievably red state, on Thursday the president spoke at the University of Tampa in what was widely received as a kickstart to his expected 2024 reelection campaign. Despite platitudes about bipartisanship, Biden targeted Florida Senator Rick Scott, a Republican who has floated a plan to review federal programs once every five years for reauthorization (though the plan does not specifically mention either Social Security or Medicare).

Thursday

9 Feb 2023

John Pietro

China is playing the US for fools over the spy balloon

The Chinese balloon debacle has shone a light on America's security vulnerabilities, but it has also revealed just how audacious and deceptive the Chinese Communist Party is. As with their reaction to Covid-19's origins, they have brazenly lied from the day that the balloon’s presence was made public. It is abundantly clear that the craft was not a weather balloon, not least because of its uncharacteristically massive size. Yet China opted to construct a tall tale about a wandering weather balloon that somehow ended up over America. Oh, and the balloon over Latin America? That was just another errant storm tracker. Sure, China regrets the mishap, but there is no need to overreact. What makes the lie so extraordinary is that it is so easily debunked.

Joe Lindsley

Zelensky touches off a revolution in London

Kharkiv, Ukraine Wednesday, the morning after Russia sent six long-range missiles into the center of Ukraine’s second city, I went for a run in snow-covered Gorky Park listening to the music of the German band Scorpions: “Down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change.” Scorpions were singing about a park of the same name in Moscow but I wanted to hear that song here in Kharkiv. When that song was released in 1990, the Soviet Union was breaking up. There was so much hope. Ukraine and other nations that had lived under the Iron Curtain began the process of finding freedom, happiness, possibility. But Russia? Ah, I thought as I ran past the fresh crater of a Russian missile in Kharkiv’s Gorky Park, what happened to Russia? What happened to that “wind of change"?

Rich Cromwell

Gavin Newsom has no right to talk about other states’ crime rates

Gavin Newsom is running for president. Sure, he hasn’t announced it and has claimed he’s “all in” for Biden, but he’s increasingly taking time off from personally disrupting the nation’s Dapper Dan supply chain in order to weigh in on national issues, measure the drapes, and attempt to troll Republican governors. His latest salvo, directed toward Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was sworn in as Arkansas’ governor about 15 minutes ago, claims that “While [Sanders] touts public safety, here is what she skips over: Arkansas has the one of the highest murder rates in the nation.” This is, of course, true. In 2020, the last year for which CDC stats are available, Arkansans have a much greater chance of being murdered than Californians.

Ben Domenech

Congress’s Twitter hearings show Democrats are done with free speech

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, free speech was primarily defended by civil libertarians and the Democratic Party. This was in the 2000s, when a handful of civil libertarians on the right and many more on the left worried about how the Patriot Act would enhance the government's ability to monitor its own citizens. They also opposed the growing power of the intelligence community, which they thought could pressure companies into providing private information that the government could not legally grasp for itself. The past is a different country. Yesterday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee with three former Twitter executives illustrated as much. Democrats repeatedly made the case that the hearing was a distraction, unimportant, even conspiratorial.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden’s strategy-free SOTU

Biden delivered a strategy-free State of the Union The loudest line of Tuesday’s State of the Union was ad-libbed. “Name me a world leader who’s change places with Xi Jinping,” he shouted in a departure from his prepared text. “Name me one, name me one.” There may not have been a Chinese spy balloon drifting above the United States as Biden was speaking, but foreign policy hung awkwardly over the president’s address. In the wake of a major spat with America’s most powerful adversary and in the longest speech of his presidency, Biden spent about as much time talking about hotel resort fees as he did discussing the US’s relationship with China.

Wednesday

8 Feb 2023

Elle Gyges

Biden and Congress toss the debt ceiling hot potato

Earlier in the week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy gave an evening address about the urgency of raising the debt ceiling and cutting federal spending. Technically, the government has already taken on the amount of debt it’s allowed to carry. The Treasury Department is employing “extraordinary measures” to shuffle money around to service the national debt and make government payrolls. But these measures can’t keep the government afloat forever. Hence the need to raise the debt ceiling or risk catastrophic default some time in the summer. The timing of the speech — one day before President Biden's third State of the Union address — was conspicuous.

Ben Kew

Why Louis C.K. has a point on immigration

During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, comedian Louis C.K. stated a position that many on the left believe but are unwilling to admit: America should open its borders to the world. “My feeling is they should open the border,” he explained. “Just let everybody pour in… Then there will be all these problems, well, there should be. It shouldn’t be so great here. It is a weird thing to sequester a certain group of people and keep upping their lifespan and their lifestyle.” As someone who's spent most of his journalistic career railing against mass immigration, my initial reaction was one of scorn.

Joel Kotkin

How America’s ‘big sort’ will upend politics

The world may not be turning upside down, but it’s certainly tilting. In the long shadow of the pandemic, with war on the European continent and the West and China entering a new cold war, the “new economy” of bits and bytes that was supposed to connect and shape the world has hit a rough patch. Meanwhile, the much disdained “old” economy of manufacturing, agriculture and energy is thriving. Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Snap and Google. Last year, media companies  lost $500 billion in value and tech firms have shed $4 trillion off their valuations. Industrial spaces are in high demand while downtown offices sit half-empty.

Ben Domenech

Biden’s State of the Union went quiet on China

Joe Biden's meandering State of the Union left out a great many things, as his voice toggled between insincere whisper and frail bellow. The loudest moment of the night was when, going off-script from his prepared remarks, he insisted that really — c'mon, I really mean it! — China's Xi Jinping is being isolated from the world for some reason. https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1623157950654078977 "Name me a world leader who would change places with Xi Jinping! Name me one! Name me one!" Biden yelled. The comment had an air of frustration given that the humiliating Chinese spy balloon was fresh in the minds of all on Capitol Hill. "I’ve made clear with President Xi that we seek competition, not conflict," Biden said in his prepared remarks.

John Pietro

A closer look at Biden’s State of the Union proposals

Joe Biden’s lengthy State of the Union address on Tuesday saw him call on Congress to pass a bevy of policies, most of which were regurgitations of his previous proposals. Here's a look at some of the policies that were mentioned by the president. Capping insulin prices at $35 Everyone knew this would be on the agenda after the Inflation Reduction Act passed Congress last August. The IRA's Medicare copay cap was just a foot in the door, with a push for further drug price controls an inevitability. The problem is that price controls do not work. Ed Haislmaier of the Heritage Foundation succinctly outlines how the problem can be mitigated responsibly. The most obvious option is to eliminate the prescription requirement for insulin.

Congressman Andy Ogles (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Amber Duke

GOP congressman scoffs at complaints about ‘lack of decorum’

Newly elected GOP congressman Andy Ogles said that President Joe Biden shouldn't have been surprised to receive jeers when he "levied false accusations" about Republicans during his Tuesday night State of the Union address. "I think him standing in the dais and lying to the American people is inappropriate," Ogles told The Spectator. "If you're going to have the audacity to do that, don't be surprised that you get pushback from those who are being levied with accusations. So I would say what was inappropriate is his tone." Biden claimed during his State of the Union address that some Republicans wanted to sunset Social Security and Medicare every five years. "That means if Congress doesn’t vote to keep them, those programs will go away," Biden said.

Amber Duke

Ben Carson: Biden ‘demonized’ Republicans in his State of the Union

Dr. Ben Carson said that President Joe Biden attempted to "demonize" Republicans during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. "I think perhaps the one that hit me strongest was the attempt to demonize Republicans and say that they were anti-Social Security and Medicare and elderly people," Carson told The Spectator when asked about his least favorite part of Biden's speech. "I mean, how is that going to result in unity?" President Biden accused Republicans of trying to sunset Social Security and Medicare every five years, an allegation that prompted jeers and shouts of "liar!" from the GOP caucus in the House Chamber.

Tuesday

7 Feb 2023

John Pietro

Trump is wrong that the US should negotiate peace in Ukraine

The GOP’s foreign policy doves and soft isolationists have grown stronger, with 40 percent of “Republican and Republican-leaning independents” saying the US is giving too much aid to Ukraine. Former president Donald Trump has now taken up the mantle of this movement, firmly anchoring himself to the anti-Ukraine aid faction of the party. Trump recently gave an interview to radio host Hugh Hewitt in which he made one thing clear: he’s no fan of aiding Ukraine. Asked about sending F-16s, Trump said, “I think the United States should negotiate peace between these two countries, and I don’t think they should be sending very much.” When Hewitt asked if the former president would cut aid to Kyiv, Trump responded, “we’ve got to make peace.

The Spectator

State of the Union 2023: The Spectator World’s live coverage

Monday

6 Feb 2023

Lewis M. Andrews

The Doomsday Clock has been corrupted by ideology

Ever since I can remember, I have always been aware of something called the “Doomsday Clock,” a symbolized calculation produced by a panel of prominent scientists of just how close humanity is to destroying itself. Published on the cover of every issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project physicists, the clock’s hands would move toward or away from the dreaded midnight hour depending on how near Armageddon was believed to be. As a kid, the Doomsday Clock seemed an appropriate warning of how the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union might accidentally spin out of control.

Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter: twenty-five years on from the Clinton impeachment

Happy twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest headline in world history! DRUDGE REPORT NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT Thus began the nation's one-year slog through President Bill Clinton’s lies and calumnies, ending in his disgrace and impeachment. Now, that was an impeachment. You missed a good one, kids. President Trump was impeached for making an (allegedly) inappropriate call to the president of Ukraine? Oh please. To discuss what Clinton did in the Oval Office the whole country needed a V-chip.

National Counterterrorism Center Director Christopher Miller testifies at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing (Photo by Joshua Roberts-Pool/Getty Images)

Amber Duke

Former defense secretary: yes, Trump would have shot down the Chinese spy balloon

Former acting secretary of defense Christopher Miller challenged several of the major claims being made about the Chinese spy ballon that recently entered US airspace during a podcast interview Monday with The Spectator World. Miller joined The District podcast to discuss the Chinese spy balloon and his new book, Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield and the Pentagon about America's Most Dangerous Enemies. The Biden administration shot down the balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday after it had been floating across the United States for nearly a week. Following its destruction, administration officials claimed that other Chinese spy balloons had entered the US "at least three times" during the Trump administration.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden gets a State of the Union reality check

Sobering polls should cool Biden’s bullishness Joe Biden could be forgiven for ignoring the polls lately. Not because they would have made for especially difficult reading for the president — his approval rating has improved in recent months — but because, with the wind in his sails after the midterms, he and his team won’t have had much reason to worry. But a brace of surveys published today a reminder of the precariousness of the position which the president finds himself in. The first comes from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It finds that just 37 percent of Democrats say they want Joe Biden to run again in 2024.

Cockburn

Anthony Fauci cashing in as $100k ‘motivational speaker’

When Cockburn turns on the television these days, something is missing. Then he realizes — that (very) little something is Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose 400-plus media events during the Covid pandemic made him a fixture of the tube. Then one day, after we made him the highest paid employee in the federal government, Fauci upped and left, abandoning us to figure out on our own if we should stay home when we’re sick. or if coughing on our ancient relatives is a good idea or not. But if you thought you’d seen the last of Fauci, never fear — the man has reemerged like an Omicron variant, this time as a motivational speaker.

Ben Domenech

So we’re canceling AI for being transphobic now

With the dramatic expansion of artificial intelligence-generated text, the speed and frequency of the internet's milkshake-ducking has become all the more essential. If you believe that problematic speech is the same as violence, it's hard enough to be on the lookout for material generated by living and breathing human beings — now you have a horde of AI chatbots to monitor as well. And unlike their human counterparts, these chatbots lack the shame and fear to prevent them from saying things at odds with cultural trends. Consider the latest example of this, which comes with the Twitch stream "Nothing, Forever," an AI-and-video-game-engine-generated parody of Seinfeld that has been streaming for several months.

Dave Seminara

Kamala Harris’s top ten word salads

No assessment of Vice President Kamala Harris's first two years in office would be complete without her word salads and pedantic lectures. Here are just a few of my favorites: Kamala Harris on geography So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for. Harris on community banks We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community.

Sunday

5 Feb 2023

Amber Duke

AP stealth edits its Chinese spy balloon report

The Associated Press (AP) appeared to stealth edit a major report on the Chinese spy balloon, which was the origin of the claim that two such balloons also entered US airspace during the Trump administration. The AP first published the article on Saturday. The balloon was then shot down after floating for several days over the US. Deep into the report, the AP cited one unnamed Biden administration official who claimed that two similar incidents "happened twice during the Trump administration but [were] never made public." [caption id="attachment_45048" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The Associated Press's first iteration of the Chinese spy balloon story (Screenshot: Internet Archive)[/caption] However, the AP article looked different on Sunday.

Saturday

4 Feb 2023

Grace Curley

Enough with politicians’ performative crying

We might have finally discovered something that politicians are worse at than budgeting: regulating emotions. What is in the water in Washington, DC that is causing these adults to constantly melt down in public? First there was President Biden’s now-former chief of staff Ron Klain. The man who has been accused of being the brains behind the Biden operation is moving on from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue… well, maybe. Klain delivered a mawkish farewell address in the White House East Room, with his 80-year-old boss proudly looking on a few feet behind him. To say Ron got choked up would be an understatement. He gushed over the Biden family and the administration’s accomplishments. He even heaped praise on Joe Biden’s parenting skills.

Rebeccah Heinrichs

The balloon is a Chinese middle finger to the US

Military fighter jets have just shot down the Chinese Communist Party's gigantic spy balloon that had been hovering about 60,000 feet over the United States. The balloon was "taken care of," to quote President Biden, over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of South Carolina. Prior to the maneuver, the balloon drifted, unharmed, over our sensitive military sites and fellow citizens. It lingered there, doing what Chinese President Xi Jinping pleased, while rightfully indignant members of Congress representing those violated states took to press releases and cable TV to demand the federal government secure our sovereign airspace. All of this was no doubt churned back through the CCP's propaganda outlets, smearing America as divided, weak, and foolish.