Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Gavin Newsom blew his chance to stand for law and order

Gavin Newsom had a golden opportunity this week to prove that he’s learned something in the time since the summer of George Floyd. He had an opportunity to set himself up as a Democrat willing to take on the factions of his own coalition when their methods go from peaceful protest to setting fires in the streets, destroying property and all-out anti-cop violence. He could have taken a stand for law and order, taking flak from his own side for standing up for the law-abiding citizens of California. Instead, he blew it. He called the decision by President Trump to deploy the National Guard “an illegal act, an immoral act, an unconstitutional act,” and announced a lawsuit against the government over the issue.

gavin newsom

The porn reckoning is here

One of the most disturbing pieces of recent documentary journalism follows Lily Philips, a petite blonde Englishwoman and popular OnlyFans creator, on a deeply unsettling quest: to sleep with 100 men in a single day. The footage, produced by YouTuber Josh Pieters and viewed more than 10 million times, doesn’t leave viewers shocked by her “empowerment," it leaves them queasy. Philips doesn’t come across as a liberated woman expressing her sexuality. She looks like the product of trauma. That look of trauma is more easily understood when it becomes clear that her mother is her manager. As a parent, I have a visceral reaction to my children being exposed to pornography, let alone participating in it.

Lily Phillips

How an international community of do-gooders made the US lose the plot in Yemen

As British Ambassador to Yemen from 2015 to 2017, and later in counterterrorism roles at the UN, I watched with growing frustration as Washington, despite its early clarity, lost the plot in Yemen – with consequences that are now rippling across the Red Sea and into Israel. In 2014, the international community got it right. UN Security Council Resolution 2140 blamed the right culprits: former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthi leadership. The Houthis, a small sectarian militia allied with Saleh, were trying to hijack Yemen’s democratic transition – and the world recognized that.

Yemen

Biden’s FBI targeted ‘radical traditionalist’ Catholics

Most Catholics were well aware of Joe Biden’s, at best, tepid observation of Catholic teachings as president.But even they will be aghast after a new report from the Senate Judiciary Committee uncovered the true breadth of a crackdown by the FBI – during the Biden administration – on “radical traditionalist” Catholics. In 2023, an FBI memo called for sources to be developed within parishes that offer the Latin Mass and online Catholic communities for the purpose of “threat mitigation.” At the time, the FBI retracted the memo after an outcry and said it was an isolated incident out of one field office. Now Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has discovered new evidence that casts serious doubt on that narrative.

Joe Biden
elon musk

After Elon Musk, America is never going to be the same

Only certain days qualify as the greatest days in American history: July 4, 1776 will always lead the way, as will the day the Constitution was ratified. So will the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, VE Day, the moon landing and a small handful of others.  Yesterday, June 5, 2025, will join that select company, because yesterday was the day that the world’s richest man, on a media platform that he owns, accused the President of the United States of Jeffrey Epstein kinds of behavior. As I looked at my phone blowing up, I realized that America was never going to be the same. Elon Musk, as we all watched in real time over the last few months, made one of history’s most tragic miscalculations.

gun rights

Trump’s pardon team is quietly working to restore gun rights to thousands of felons

President Donald Trump’s pardoning blitz has dominated the headlines with reality-TV stars, a rapper and political allies all walking free from prison after he granted them clemency. But quietly in the office of the Justice Department’s pardon attorney – where all of the above appeals were processed – a much more significant and wide-reaching process of forgiveness is taking shape. Ed Martin, Trump loyalist and new pardon attorney, is preparing his team to review applications from people – a lot of people – with criminal convictions to have their gun rights restored. “The pardon staff has already been working at it, because we anticipate hundreds and hundreds of thousands of applicants,” Martin told the Wall Street Journal.

meghan markle

In, sigh, defense of Meghan Markle

Here we are again, Meghan’s latest cringe-inducing social media offering: an 80-second video of her twerking in a hospital delivery room while heavily pregnant with her daughter Lilibet. The clip, posted to mark her daughter’s fourth birthday, shows the Duchess of Sussex doing what can best be described as suggestive dance moves beside her hospital bed, complete with shimmies and rowing motions, while Haz joins in wearing a hoodie. It’s peak Meghan, really – simultaneously oversharing and attention-seeking while complaining about the invasion of privacy.

The Trump-Elon bromance is over

The Elon-Trump bromance may have breathed its last today, with their relationship descending into a social-media flame war – on their respective apps, of course. The source of the discord is Musk's opposition to the "Big, Beautiful Bill" presently being debated in the Senate, which, among other things, does not codify the cuts his Department of Government Efficiency had made since Trump's inauguration. The bill also strips away Biden-era tax credits for consumers who purchase electric vehicles, which had been benefiting Musk's firm Tesla. Musk took his grievances to his over 200 million X followers and, let's face it, everyone else on the app too. On Tuesday Musk wrote, "I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore.

elon maga

Is Biden’s autopen mightier than the sword?

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?  The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.  Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

new york mayor Andrew Cuomo

No one won the New York City mayoral debate

If you tuned in to the first New York City Democratic mayoral primary debate hoping for vision, leadership, even a halfway compelling reason to stay in the city – you were sorely disappointed. What we got instead was two hours of political karaoke: forgettable performances, familiar refrains and not a single candidate who looked remotely prepared to lead America’s largest city out of the hole it’s in. The media crowned former governor Andrew Cuomo the winner, but that says more about the sad state of the field than it does about Cuomo’s abilities. He barely had to try. Like a career politician coasting on name recognition and reflexes, he sleepwalked through the evening while eight other candidates took turns lobbing stale criticisms his way. They all missed.

Erik Prince

The American mercenary is back

Two years after the fiery death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the warlord behind Russia’s Wagner Group, the global shadow war waged by mercenaries and contractors still rages on. And now one of the most well-known names in the mercenary world is back in the headlines: Erik Prince. The founder of Blackwater and longtime ally of President Donald Trump, is on the ground in Haiti, where he has signed a deal with the government to take on the armed gangs that have brought the capital to the brink of collapse.Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 after its contractors opened fire on civilians in Iraq and it now operates under a different name.

Inside the parents versus social media conflict at the FTC

Washington, DC The battle between social-media companies and parents found itself center stage at the Federal Trade Commission, Wednesday. A panel of four speakers discussed the state of play in America's fight to protect children online – and where it should go. On the stage at the FTC were Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee; Dawn Hawkins, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation's senior advisor; Michael Toscano, director of the Family First Technology Institute for the Institute of Family Studies, and Maurine Molak, the founder of David's Legacy Foundation. Every day in 2021, 100,000 minors received sexually abusive content from adults on Facebook and Instagram, Blackburn said on the stand, referencing internal documents released by the Department of Justice.

FTC Are Kids in Danger Online? panel parents

BBC editor accuses Trump of dishonesty – wrecking broadcaster’s impartiality

The BBC’s response to recent White House criticism over its Gaza coverage highlights the Corporation’s vulnerability on the question of impartiality in conflict reporting. What began as a public rebuke by Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, over a disputed report quickly developed into a broader interrogation of the BBC’s editorial assumptions and its long-standing handling of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, defended the Corporation and accused the Trump administration of dishonesty. Responding to Leavitt’s remarks, he said, “To be quite frank, the Trump administration does not have a good record when it comes to telling the truth itself. She’s making a political point, basically.

Donald Trump

Why you should fear the post-DoGE right

Elon Musk’s departure from Washington was celebrated by many in the media. In the space of just a few years they had transformed him from a “Yay Science!” rocket-building Tony Stark stand-in doing awkward cameos on Rick and Morty into a crazed inhuman boogeyman, whose cars must be keyed, firebombed or layered with bumper stickers saying, “I bought this before Elon was a Nazi.” (Before you say that’s an exaggeration, there’s literally a Tesla with that sticker in my neighborhood – you can buy them on Etsy.

doge musk elon

Will the new ‘communist’ leader of South Korea abandon the US for China?

American divisions over politics look positively civil compared to the polarization that has gripped South Korea over the last few years. During the 2022 elections, Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power party (PPP) narrowly won the presidency over his liberal opponent Lee Jae-myung from the Democratic Party by a razor thin 0.73 percent. But Yoon hastened the demise of his own presidency when on December 3, 2024, he made the poor decision to declare martial law over baseless accusations that the National Assembly’s progressive opposition were collaborating with North Korea. Martial law lasted for only a few hours after both parties unanimously voted to lift the decree.

South Korea

Elon Musk is right: America’s spending is out of control

Elon Musk rarely bites his tongue. Just ask the Treasury Secretary, who the tech billionaire branded a “Soros agent,” or the UK’s Prime Minister, who Musk accused of going soft on grooming gangs in January this year. But it seems the founder of the Department for Government Efficiency (DoGE) has been holding back a rather explosive opinion – one he could never share while he was popping in and out of the Oval Office, working for President Donald Trump. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote this afternoon on his platform X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.

elon musk
Iran

Will Iran take the nuclear win?

To enrich or not enrich? This seems to have been the question dividing Iranian and American negotiators, and there are swelling choruses in Tehran and Washington who hold strong views on the matter. In a report leaked to Axios, it appears that during the last round of talks, the US gave Iran a proposal that would allow limited low-level uranium enrichment for a specified period. The proposal suggested that Iran would be forbidden from building new enrichment facilities and must dismantle “critical infrastructure for conversion and processing of uranium,” adding that research and development on centrifuges would also have to stop. Sanctions relief will only come once Iran is demonstrably adhering to the terms of the deal and has clearly paused its underground enrichment activities.

Is ‘eating the tariffs’ good for business?

When President Trump told Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS,” he implied that to not do so was a profit-mongering conspiracy against the American people. He noted Walmart’s extensive trade relationships with China and its large profit margin. But Walmart maintained that tariffs made price rises unavoidable. And when Amazon flirted with noting on some of its products the precise amount of cost increases attributable to tariffs, Trump called Jeff Bezos to complain and Amazon backed away from its plan. After observing Trump’s hostility to Walmart and Amazon, Home Depot took a different approach and asked: what trade war? Unlike numerous major American corporations, Home Depot has not rescinded its 2025 guidance for investors because of the uncertainty from tariffs.

George Floyd

Black families suffered after white college kids used George Floyd to dismantle society

Five years ago, we watched a man die under the knee of a police officer. The footage of George Floyd gasping for breath wasn’t just horrifying – it was galvanizing. For a brief moment, America stood still, and it felt like we all agreed: this was wrong. This shouldn’t have happened. And something needed to change. But instead of coming together, we fell apart. What should’ve been a rare moment of national consensus turned into yet another front in the culture war. The left veered toward revolution, and the right veered toward denial. And somewhere in the wreckage of hashtags, riots, cable news rants, and billion-dollar DEI schemes, the real moral clarity of that moment was lost. Let’s start with the obvious: what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy.

The fight to make science great again

If one were looking for dismal assessments of the Trump administration’s contributions to the vitality of American intellectual inquiry, the editorial eructations of Holden Thorp would likely be at the top of the list.   Thorp is the editor-in-chief of Science, the weekly journal of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This makes him one of the most influential figures in the academy and in American science as a whole. Few weeks go by without an editorial from Thorp denouncing the havoc wrought by Trump. The May 8 issue is mildly titled, “The New Reality for American Academe,” but the mildness ends there.

science
Pam Bondi

The DoJ is wise to deploy the False Claims Act against colleges

Like Papal encyclicals, many statutes are known by the opening words of their Latin formulation. One that I just learned about is known as a “Qui tam” action. By itself, it is an enigmatic expression, since it just means “Who so” or “Who as.”   If you look it up, though, you will discover that “Qui tam” is shorthand for “Qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur,” which makes much more sense: “Who prosecutes in this matter both for the King and for himself.” That tam, as is often the case, is balanced with quam, “as x, so y.” Spinoza contains a famous example toward the end of the Ethics: “Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt”: “For all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Why President Trump shouldn’t pardon Derek Chauvin

Five years ago this month, anarchists set on fire my adopted town of Minneapolis in the wake of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. Now, as President Donald J. Trump has made a triumphant return to the Oval Office, some of the blogosphere are calling for him to pardon Chauvin for his crimes. Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the United States Constitution grants the President the “Power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”  President Trump should respect the verdict of the people and protect his own legacy by rejecting the ignoble calls to absolve the fired officer of his guilt.

chauvin
OneTaste

Is the ‘OneTaste’ CEO a sex cult leader – or a high priestess of female pleasure?

I first met sex guru Nicole Daedone three years ago when she was performing orgasmic meditation on a colleague from her sexual wellness start-up, OneTaste. Daedone, was delicately touching Rachel Cherwitz, her head of sales, giving her multiple, and very vocal, sexual highs – for 15 straight minutes – in front of more than 100 riveted people in a studio in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district at 7pm on a weeknight. Naked from the waist down, Cherwitz was lying on a raised table with her legs open towards the audience. Cameras and microphones catching her every reaction. The crowd was that archetypal New York mix of wealthy investors, impeccably dressed-for-business single women, and the orgasm-curious of all ages.

Trump bids Elon ‘the DoGEfather’ farewell

Sporting a black eye and a shirt with the words "The DoGE Father" on the chest, Elon Musk joined President Trump in the Oval Office Friday afternoon to announce the formal departure from his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. While Musk will no longer be a special government employee and will direct his workday back to his several companies, the world's richest man will remain a "friend and advisor" to the President when needed. "Today it's about a man named Elon, and he's one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced," Trump said, opening the press conference.

Elon Musk and Trump in Oval Office doge
melania trump

Melania Trump is phoning it in

There’s something admirable about Melania Trump’s commitment to doing absolutely nothing. While America obsesses over her husband’s latest provocations, the First Lady has opted for absence – and turned it into a pretty lucrative enterprise. Consider this month’s rare emergence from her self-imposed exile. As rumors swirled that Donald’s vendetta against Harvard stemmed from the university rejecting their son Barron, Melania was finally compelled to issue a public statement. The denial was characteristically terse: Barron never applied to Harvard, and all such assertions are “completely false.

thc gummies dan patrick

Dan Patrick’s war on weed gummies could endanger Texas Republicans

In a press conference that veered into awkward sketch comedy in Austin, Texas, yesterday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick railed at reporters over a table full of THC snack products sold in the state as he demanded the media alter their reporting on Senate Bill 3, which he’s called “the most important bill this session” – an effort to effectively ban the sale of any THC products in the state.  “This is everything you can buy at a smoke shop and a vape shop that will either cause potentially paranoia, schizophrenia (or) tremendous health issues,” Patrick said. “Why have I called you here today? Because I don’t think the media has taken this issue seriously. I don’t think the story has been told.

Gen Z

Why Gen Z is converting to Catholicism

Both of my parents are Jewish, as were theirs, going as far back as anybody remembers – probably to Abraham. As with many secular, Jewish-American families, God was practically non-existent in our house, though we still observed holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover. There came a point, however, when I had to ask why we partook in any of these traditions if God, who commanded their observance, wasn’t real. I figured that the Greeks had Zeus, the Romans had Jupiter, the Norse had Odin, and now we have God. This one will pass, too.In college, I studied progressive politics and devoured the writings of Marx and Engels, forming a firm foundation for my socialist beliefs.

Tariffs will make America poorer

Is life worse today than it was 50 years ago? According to a Pew Research survey, 58 percent of respondents believe it is. Perhaps watching the doom and gloom of the nightly news gives the impression that times have never been worse. But the facts show otherwise.The world has never been richer, food has never been more abundant, and extreme poverty is at historic lows. We are fortunate to live in a country where the people have a strong work ethic and control a vast, resource-rich territory. Yet, even with those advantages, we rely on trade to access goods that America simply does not produce in abundance, like coffee and bananas. Perhaps we should ask a more nuanced question: is international trade good or bad?

Rand Paul
Vance crypto

Trumpworld’s embrace of crypto should raise suspicion

“It’s been quite a while since I’ve been to a conference with this level of energy… I promise I’m not just saying that to juice my own memecoins.” After dropping this clanger in his keynote speech at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, J.D. Vance paused awkwardly for an applause which never arrived. Bar a few perfunctory laughs, this was one buzzword the Vice President rolled out which failed to impress the thousands-strong crowd in Vegas yesterday afternoon. To understand the frosty reception, a cursory glance through Trump’s recent dealings in this chaotic corner of the crypto industry is required. On January 17 this year – a mere three days before his inauguration – the soon-to-be president of the United States launched his own memecoin: $TRUMP.

Is Trump’s unified Republican front fracturing over Russia?

For the most part, President Trump hasn’t had to worry too much about the loyalty of his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill. Sure, he needed to make a trip to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue to pressure a few Republican holdouts to support his “big, beautiful” package of tax cuts and spending cuts, but the rank-and-file has tended to blindly follow whatever the White House wants.  Yet over the last several days, a slight divide has emerged between Trump and Republicans – or more specifically, Trump and Senate Republicans – on Ukraine and Russia policy.

russia republican