Free Republic

Free trade has been so beneficial to so many countries that the world may find a way to live without its biggest player.President Trump’s self-proclaimed “liberation day,” in which he announced across-the-board tariffs on the United States’ trading partners, carries an echo of another moment when an advanced Western economy threw up walls around itself.Like Brexit, Britain’s fateful vote nearly nine years ago to leave the European Union, Mr. Trump’s tariffs struck a hammer blow at the established order. He is pulling the United States out of the global economy much as Britain withdrew from a continentwide trading bloc, in...

The Republican Party embarked this week on a haphazard experiment in economic policymaking, wagering that the United States can weather a monumental tax increase in the form of broad tariffs on imported goods as long as Congress also cuts taxes on income. It’s a mash-up that many investors, economists and even some G.O.P. lawmakers expect to be a failure. “I always think that with gambling, at least you have a chance of winning. This is worse than that,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist who worked for former President George W. Bush, said. “This is betting with the mafia. You’re going...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging a Tennessee law that bans transgender students and staff from using school bathrooms or locker rooms that match their gender identities. A transgender student, identified only as D.H., filed the lawsuit nearly two years ago, saying her school stopped supporting her social transition after the Republican-dominant Statehouse and GOP Gov. Bill Lee enacted several policies targeting accommodations for transgender people. The school instead accommodated the student by allowing her to use one of four single-occupancy restrooms. However, according to D.H.'s attorneys, the accommodation caused severe stress, leading to the...

The internet has been a huge boon for the accessibility of information. There are very few barriers to consuming classic literature or detailed scientific analyses or catalogues of news reports. There is also an exorbitant amount of garbage information, of course, and an entire universe of people who say stuff that they think will get people to click links that will earn themselves money. Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter. While confidence in American institutions has been in decline for some time, it’s not hard to imagine how the economic incentives of the internet contribute....

A new poll found that most white women without a college degree think that President Joe Biden didn't "legitimately" win the 2020 election over Donald Trump. The Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted between November 14 and November 16, asked respondents whether Biden "legitimately won the election, or not?" Of the 1,500 Americans surveyed for that study, 51 percent of white women who don't have college degrees said that Biden didn't legitimately defeat Trump in 2020, while 29 percent of white women with college degrees shared the same response.

In Georgia, Arizona and other states won by President Biden, some leading Republicans stood up in November to make what, in any other year, would be an unremarkable statement: The race is over. And we lost, fair and square. But that was then. Now, in statehouses nationwide, Republicans who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of rampant fraud are proposing to make it harder to vote next time — ostensibly to convince the very voters who believed them that elections can be trusted again. And even some colleagues who defended the legitimacy of the November vote are joining...

There are millions of Americans who will refuse to believe this sentence: There is no credible evidence of any significant fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Different people will take issue with different words. Some will reject the idea that the evidence that’s been presented by President Trump and his allies in conservative media and on Capitol Hill isn’t credible. But it isn’t; amateur affidavits aren’t credible evidence any more than tortured numerical analysis is. Others will debate the word “substantive,” willfully claiming that the existence of any fraud - which exists at a small scale, as it generally does...