Free Republic

Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, seemed set to become Canada’s next prime minister at the start of 2025. For more than a year, his party had a 20-point lead in opinion polls over then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party and momentum toward a landslide victory. Then came President Trump. Trump’s trade war and threats to annex Canada have upended Canadian politics. In less than three months, the Conservatives have gone from heavy favorites to underdogs in an election set for April 28. Poilievre’s problem is bad timing. His preferred foil, the unpopular Trudeau, resigned in March, when Trump’s...

On Sunday Pope Francis publicly blessed the Easter crowds from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and privately received the Vice President of the United States to give Mr Vance's children a gift of Kinder Eggs. Yes, really: those Kinder Eggs. The following morning, the Holy Father died at his residence in the Vatican. If the choice of Easter chocolate was a conscious jest on the part of the Pontiff, it was an excellent one, and a reminder that even in America chest-thumping about liberty will only take you so far. So I thank him for that. Other than his...

If Donald Trump is upset about higher interest rates, he should stop doing just about everything he can to undermine the U.S. economy in the eyes of the world. As the U.S. becomes a riskier place to do business because of tariffs and fiscal uncertainty, and the independence of the central bank comes under threat from the president, people will demand higher yields to make buying U.S. sovereign debt worth their while. Maybe you think Trump’s trade policy has merit or the Federal Reserve needs to be brought more firmly under the president’s control. That’s a separate question from how...

China is doubling down: China has just announced that they will be pulling back from US private equity investments. Chinese state-backed funds are halting new investments in US PE firms due to government pressure. According to PE executives, funds like China Investment Corporation (CIC) have already begun withdrawing planned commitments. Chinese investors are also avoiding US-linked deals, even when managed by non-US based PE funds. Just 24 hours ago, China warned they would retaliate against countries that cooperate with the US in ways that compromise their interests. It's very clear what's happening here: China is seeking to isolate the US...

If the White House wanted a test of how firing Jerome Powell would go over in the markets, it succeeded on Monday. U.S. stocks and the dollar plunged while yields on long-term Treasurys climbed after President Trump renewed his attacks on the Federal Reserve Chairman. Monday was the first full trading day for markets to absorb National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett’s comments Friday that the White House is studying if Mr. Powell can legally be fired. On Monday Mr. Trump demanded again that Mr. Powell make “pre-emptive” interest rate cuts to avoid a slowdown. Cue the meltdown in stocks,...

Elite universities push for federal funding while ignoring legal and ethical obligations, fueling public distrust as they prioritize ideology over academic rigor and free speech. Harvard has refused to accept the orders of a Trump administration commission concerning its chronic problems with anti-Semitism, campus violence, and racial tribalism, bias, and segregation. Yet, unlike some conservative campuses that distrust an overbearing Washington, Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes. Aside...

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared detailed plans about a military operation against the Houthis in Yemen on a second Signal group chat that included his wife, lawyer and brother, three people familiar with the chat told CNN.The revelation comes as some of Hegseth’s closest advisers have begun sounding the alarm about the secretary’s judgment, including his former press secretary, John Ullyot, and three former senior officials Hegseth fired last week — his top adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, who served as chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense.

I think we don’t really realize what’s happening. When British PM Keir Starmer visited the White House, he rejected J.D. Vance’s claim that free speech is restricted in Britain. “We’ve had free speech for a very long time in the UK,” Starmer retorted, “and it will last for a very long time”. Unfortunately, Starmer’s Home Office seems not to have taken notice. Because it has just blocked a famous French writer from entering the UK to give a speech on the dangers of mass immigration, while in the courts British lawyers are trying to legalise Hamas. The writer is Renaud...

A popular knock on this second Donald Trump term is that the president stocked his administration with nothing but saluting loyalists. Tell that to the staffers scheming to undercut his signature tax reform—by “managing” him into surrendering to the left’s favorite talking point. A (delighted) mainstream media several weeks ago started writing stories about a new Republican interest in raising taxes on “the rich”—namely hiking the top individual tax rate from 37% to 40%, higher than even under Barack Obama. These reports all come from anonymous White House officials, and always take care to insinuate Mr. Trump is “open” to...

The UK’s largest teaching union has called Reform UK “far-right and racist” and its leader has dismissed Nigel Farage as “a poundshop Donald Trump,” as the union pledged funds to oppose the party’s candidates in elections. Delegates to the National Education Union’s annual conference backed a motion stating that “far-right and racist organisations, including Reform, seek to build on the despair, poverty and alienation in our society by scapegoating refugees, asylum seekers, Muslims, Jews and others who do not fit their beliefs”. The motion also committed the NEU to use its political fund for campaigns against Reform election candidates and...

It's Easter at SteynOnline. This column has become something of a tradition here at this time of year: my thoughts on Mel Gibson's big blockbuster from twenty-one Easters ago. ... ... back in 2004 it was impressive not just cinematically but as an interesting business model for bypassing Hollywood: The headline on the Washington Post review summed it up: "'Passion' Is A Gory Take On A Gentle Teacher's Violent End". Somebody's confusing their Gospel with Godspell. A few days before the "violent end", the gentle teacher had been hurling tables around in the temple. And, even if you overlook the...

For Canadian voters, blink and you could practically miss this campaign. Not only is it lightning fast at just five weeks long, but the ho-hum pace of the race means that the tone and tenor haven’t changed much since the election was called in late March. That doesn’t mean Canadians have tuned out, quite the opposite: early ratings indicate they watched with interest as national leaders – including Prime Minister Mark Carney and his key rival Pierre Poilievre – debated in both French and English the last couple of evenings in Montreal. Two men not on stage were nonetheless top...

American Senator Chris Van Hollen said Thursday he had met with a Salvadoran man wrongfully deported to his home country by the Trump administration, in a case that has sparked outrage in the United States. Van Hollen had earlier said he had been denied access to the prison where Washington has paid President Nayib Bukele millions to lock up nearly 300 migrants it says are criminals and gang members -- including 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia

President Trump’s tariff war isn’t going well, with market ructions and evidence of a slowing economy. So it was probably inevitable that Mr. Trump would demand that the Federal Reserve ride to his rescue by cutting interest rates. The President took to social media Thursday morning to blast Fed Chairman Jerome Powell with his familiar nuance. “Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always TOO LATE AND WRONG, yesterday issued a report which was another, and typical, complete ‘mess!’ Oil prices are down, groceries (even eggs!) are down, and the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Too...

We are both mothers whose daughters went through a phase in which they believed they were boys. We never affirmed that belief, although their schools and much of the broader culture did. Eventually, our daughters recognized their true identities and ceased identifying themselves as “transgender.” A bill under consideration in Colorado (where Ms. Lee lives) would define parents like us as child abusers. The measure would harm vulnerable children and violate the U.S. Constitution in multiple ways. Lawmakers including state Reps. Yara Zokaie and Javier Mabrey have likened parents like us to Klansmen, and their legislation is expected to pass...

El Salvador won’t let Senator Chris Van Hollen have any contact with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who is being unlawfully detained in a megaprison in the country. Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador Wednesday in search of answers about Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts. The father of three was deported last month due to an “administrative error” by the Trump administration, which continues to claim Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, despite there being no evidence to prove it.

The biggest lie of all is told by Republicans who claim Democrats have no message. In the acrimonious climate of the current political debate, the biggest lie of all is told by Republicans who claim Democrats are in disarray because they have no message to persuade voters to support them. Actually, they do have a message. But it is a message so obvious, destructive, and forbidding that it offends Republicans so profoundly they would prefer not to recognize it – so they don’t. Democrats do have a message, which is this: Every policy of the Trump administration designed to make...

Acting to please a constituency that prefers scarcity over abundance, Joe Biden ordered up a list of federal rules that restricted consumer choice. Given the exhaustive White House agenda that began when Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, it would have been unsurprising had he waited to unwind the Biden regulatory knot. But to his credit, Trump has been moving on that, too. Ignoring the left’s constant “we’re running out of everything” screeching, Trump restored “shower freedom” earlier this month with an executive order “to end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure.” The new rule rescinds “the overly complicated...

Harvard risks $2.2B in federal funds as it defies anti-discrimination mandates, drawing comparisons to Hillsdale's stand-alone model of rejecting government strings. Harvard University has rejected various demands of a presidential commission on anti-Semitism. The task force wants to persuade Harvard to ensure Jewish students on its campus are no longer harassed, or else lose its federal funding. Harvard retorts that it won’t be bullied by Washington. Among its other requirements, the Trump administration also warned Harvard to cease using race as a criterion in its admissions, hiring, and promotion, contrary to law. And it also directed the campus to ban...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come a long way since 2018. When she first arrived on the political scene by beating out not just an incumbent, but a member of her party’s leadership in a Democratic primary contest, she was a rebel — an avatar of insurgent impulses within her coalition. And, among Republicans, something of a joke. Now, she’s the Democratic Party’s most popular elected official. A Yale University poll released this week found that among Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez boasts the single highest net favorability rating of all the party’s many potential 2028 presidential candidates — a sky-high 62%. In addition, 41%...