As expected, Liberation Day was about reciprocal tariffs. President Trump announced a list of tariffs that will be put on imports for countries that charge the U.S. tariffs on exports.

As you can see, it is not exactly reciprocal. China charges 67% on U.S. products but the new tariffs on Chinese products are only 34%. Still, that’s 34% more than cheap Chinese goods were before so that’s gunna hurt.

The White House also ended “duty-free de minimis treatment for low-value imports from China.” That means no more cheap things from Temu. Those items will have to be treated like other imports, tariffs and all. That’s a pretty big deal.

“For generations, countries have taken advantage of the United States,” the White House press account said on X. “No longer. President Trump is implementing reciprocal tariffs to increase our competitive edge, protect our sovereignty, and strengthen our national and economic security.”

It is embarrassing to see how unfavorable many countries are to U.S. products but is this the way to allow American companies to compete globally? Kentucky Senator Rand Paul calls this executive overreach. He says that this will amount to a tax on American families and “one person is not allowed to raise taxes—the constitution forbids it.” He also says that this will cost Republicans dearly in upcoming elections.

“On many fronts, I’m a supporter of the president,” he said. “On tariffs, I think it’s economically a fallacy to think it will help the country. Tariffs are a tax.”

Asian markets and U.S. exchanges were all down on this news.

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Israel bombed a UN-run clinic on Wednesday. At least 22 people are reported dead including 9 children and a newborn baby. This was an UNRWA clinic, which Israel has repeatedly claimed is linked to Hamas. They say that the clinic was a Hamas “command and control center.”

The images are horrific. Hamas says that everyone inside the building were civilians.

Israel also ramped up the ground attacks in Gaza on Wednesday after they stated clearly that intend to “capture extensive territory that will be added to the State of Israel’s security areas.”

There are new reports that Israel is working with the U.S. to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in just a few weeks. Israeli sources told The Daily Mail that President Trump is the best partner in this goal that they could hope for in the White House.

“From Israel’s perspective, with Trump in the White House, this represents the optimum moment to deal with Iran. There won’t be a better chance,” the official said.

Iran has repeatedly declared that these are nuclear POWER plants, not nuclear weapons plants and they have worked with the IAEA on inspections but some dangerous people want a war with Iran so this dangerous rhetoric persists.

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Amazon made a bid to buy TikTok on Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos, who attended the Trump inauguration and has a personal relationship with the Trump White House, submitted an offer to buy the social network and the White House has confirmed that their received the letter.

Former State Department whistleblower Mike Benz says that “this retroactively makes the past 6 months make sense.” Like it was all a game to concentrate this power into the hands of a tech oligarch.

ByteDance, the only Chinese company that currently owns TikTok (not to be confused with the Chinese government) will still retain 19.9% of TikTok, which is just below the 20% threshold limiting Chinese ownership outlined in Congress’s law. There is no word if them and the other investors want to sell a controlling stake to Amazon.

President Trump’s executive offer to keep TikTok in the U.S. expires this weekend so something has to happen before then.

The short-term ban that took place in January did cost TikTok users. The company has begun to lose young users to Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts.

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We are being invited to be inspired by these women because they are “the all-star lineup of Blue Origin’s historic all-female space crew.” It is manufactured feminism and it makes me a little mad.

First, the word “crew” is generous. A flight crew is usually the personnel responsible for operating and managing an aircraft during a flight. The Blue Origin rocket that these gals will be on flies itself so they are passengers, not exactly a crew.

And we are told that they were chosen by Lauren Sanchez, the fiance of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, because “of their proven ability to inspire others.” Really?

CBS News anchor Gayle King has repeatedly said that she doesn’t want to go because she’s terrified so what inspiring message is that for us gals? Let other people pressure you into dangerous things?

This Elle profile of the flight really had me with this line: “Based on the statistics of women and space exploration, it’s evident the representation is needed. Not only has it been over 60 years since women (or technically just a woman) traveled to space without men, but women also only make up about 11 percent of those who’ve ventured into space in total.”

Why is this a problem exactly? And why are they treating this like such an accomplishment when all they are going to do is sit there? And why is this article so heavy on the hair and makeup tips? And also, do you need a bra in space?

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Today is Liberation Day in the U.S., as declared by President Trump but we don’t exactly know what that means yet. We know it means tariffs for other countries but…is there a cuisine we should eat to celebrate or a ritual of sorts for the rest of us?

I don’t think it is that kind of holiday. It is an economic milestone when the Trump administration will set taxes on imports from other countries that tax U.S. exports. He calls them “reciprocal” tariffs.

Not all Republicans support the President on this one. Senator Rand Paul co-sponsored a bill to terminate the emergency legislation that will place tariffs on Canada. Other Republicans have joined the efforts to stop the tarriffs, which President Trump said would “let the Democrats have a Victory. It would be devastating for the Republican Party and, far more importantly, for the United States.”

Economists are divided on the tariff idea so there really is no way to know what will happen. The best we can do right now is…hold on. Like we have been.

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The Trump administration admitted that it accidentally deported the wrong guy but it’s okay because that guy was a gang member.

The case involves a man named Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He was sent to the megaprison in El Salvador that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem showed off last week. His wife saw him in a news report about the prison and pointed him out to the government.

“Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the court document says.

Trump cabinet members are arguing that the man was an MS-13 gang member with “no legal right to be here.”

But how do they know that he was a gang member? Was he convicted of gang membership or gang-related crime? He wasn’t. In a 2019 immigration proceeding, a confidential informant claimed he was a gang member and said that his clothing was proof.

Abrego Garcia refutes this. He is a father with no criminal record, a union sheet metal worker and he complied with his regular ICE checkins.

The police never followed up for evidence so none of us can truly know. That is why we need due process for every human being created by God. The government is not God and should not have the power to do this. As Reason reporter Liz Wolfe put it: “We hold ourselves to a higher standard than that, we believe in due process here, and that’s what makes America great. There will be political consequences to Trump admin’s sloppiness.”

The ACLU says that the government has a list of how it identifies gangmembers including “high-end urban street wear,” Michael Jordan’s basketball jersey, and “sports attire from U.S. professional sports teams with Venezuelan nationals on them” as Tren de Aragua identifiers.

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New data shows that the economy was good in the first month of President Trump’s second term. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Personal Income and Outlays Report show that consumer spending was up .4% in February 2025.

Also, incomes were up by .9%. According to the report, “personal income increased $194.7 billion (0.8 percent at a monthly rate) in February, according to estimates released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Disposable personal income (DPI)—personal income less personal current taxes—increased $191.6 billion (0.9 percent) and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $87.8 billion (0.4 percent).”

Maybe it was because the liberal Economic Blackout handing started yet? That began on February 28 so until then, Americans were making more money and spending more money.

Economist Peter St. Onge said that this could still lead to a paper recession because these numbers are maybe a little “too good.” He says that there should be a bigger hangover from the Biden administration.

But will this economic upturn last through new tariff wars?

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How can a 3 year old get kicked out of school for being transphobic? That is what happened in the U.K, according to The Telegraph:

“Department for Education (DfE) data show the child, aged either three or four, was suspended from a state school in the 2022-23 academic year for “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity.”

How in the world can a 3 or 4 year old abuse someone’s gender orientation? A safe guess would be that a young child saw that his or her classmate was clearly a boy or a girl but pretending to be otherwise and pointed that out.

The Telegraph goes on: “statistics show that 94 pupils at state primary schools were suspended or permanently excluded for transphobia and homophobia in 2022-23.” They don’t give further details on the case but to protect gender identity to the point of kicking children out of schools is outrageous.

The Prime Minister’s office responded to this by saying “Obviously, the Prime Minister would not support those sorts of measures. But equally, I don’t know the specific incident.”

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Iran says that it will respond with a “strong counterattack” if provoked by the U.S. after President Trump threatened to bomb Iran over the weekend.

“We are not moving towards (nuclear) weapons, but if you do something wrong in the Iranian nuclear issue, you will force Iran to move towards that because it has to defend itself,” said Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Iran does not want to do this, but … (it) will have no choice.”

Iran has complied with all international uranium inspections and repeatedly said that it has no nuclear weapons. Where is President Trump getting this notion that they have a nuclear weapon? We’ve searched and searched for proof and come up empty.

The U.S. has at least 10 bases in Iran that would be vulnerable to a counterattack with at least 50,000 troops there. The best way to prevent them from being retaliated against is to not do something that would provoke retaliation, right?

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to carry out daily airstrikes in Yemen, while blaming the Iranians for arming the Houthis.

Ron Paul says this about all of this renewed war rhetoric out of the Trump administration: “This reminds me of all the promises of George H. W. He was very promising that we were not be the policeman of the world and what did we end up as?”

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Europe has decided to go all in on punishing political opponents. In France, opposition leader Marine Le Pen was banned for standing office for five years and sentenced to jail after being convicted of embezzling funds. This would block her from taking the presidency in 2027, which she was on track to do.

She stormed from the courtroom before the verdict was read and muttered the word “Unbelievable.” On X, she vowed to continue fighting injustice until the end.

It is would be foolish to see this as an impartial trial. She was tried for financial records between the years 2004 to 2016, so nine years later she gets a verdict! She was accused of using EU funds for parliamentary assistants but she argued that their work blurred the lines between EU duties, especially as she is a member of parliament. She took nothing for herself and the punishment is harsher than other cases of this kind.

She joins the ranks of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and Calin Georgescu in Romania: modern opposition leaders jailed as they were poised to take office.

They want to punish Hungary’s Victor Orbán too if they can only figure out how. The incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz has drafted laws to demand the E.U. “withhold funds and suspend voting rights from countries that violate key principles such as the rule of law.” That could mean anything but Politico says that it is a clear shot at Hungary for continually opposing the liberal agenda.

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The Trump administration is reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal grants at Harvard while it investigates how the university has handled antisemitism.

“This administration has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow anti-Semitism to fester,” said Josh Gruenbaum, an official with the General Services Administration and a member of the government’s recently formed antisemitism task force. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”

What is it that Harvard is supposedly guilty of? There are no reports of violence. In November of 2023, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students confronted each other and there were allegations of harassment and doxxing by both sides. Why is only one group’s interest being represented by the Trump administration?

Colombia University had its funding targeted by the Trump administration a few days ago and capitulated to government demands to review policies towards Jewish students and “reviewing the portfolio of regional studies programs, starting immediately with those that teach about the Middle East and Israel.”

In a congressional hearing on Monday, Rabbi Levi Shemtov told the senate that it is “not enough to be not anti-Semitic.” He said that “one must be anti-anti-Semitic.”

This is the rebirth of neo-racism, the antiracist rhetoric that took hold during the Biden administration has since been shown to be racist: ranking people by race and skin color to bestow privileges on some and not others.

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President Trump promised to clean up Washington D.C. He meant that quite literally.

A recent executive order calls for “making the District of Columbia safe and beautiful.”

“As the capital city of the greatest Nation in the history of the world, it should showcase beautiful, clean, and safe public spaces. America’s capital must be a place in which residents, commuters, and tourists feel safe at all hours, including on public transit.  Its highways, boulevards, and parks should be clean, well-kept, and pleasant.  Its monuments, museums, and buildings should reflect and inspire awe and appreciation for our Nation’s strength, greatness, and heritage.  Our citizens deserve nothing less,” the order says.

This calls for tougher policies on crime, more policing on public transportation, and increasing “the speed and [lowering] the cost of processing concealed carry license requests in the District of Columbia.” It will also call for fast removal of graffiti and removal of homeless encampments on public parks.

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