Two hundred and fifty years ago, a ragtag band of farmers, merchants, and thinkers reached a breaking point. The Crown had rigged the rules of trade against them: extracting their resources, flooding their markets with favored goods, blocking their ability to compete on fair terms, and using economic dependency as a tool of political control. They didn’t petition for fairness. They didn’t write a strongly worded letter. They declared independence. The United States faces a remarkably familiar challenge today — not from a King but from a communist government across the Pacific that has built its rise on the systematic rigging of global trade at the expense of Americans. As we celebrate the courage and fortitude of our Founders, it is worth asking ourselves whether we are living up to that same renegade spirit. The case for free trade relies on the assumption that all participants are playing by the market’s rules. That means private firms chasing profits, prices that reflect true production costs, and competition that rewards the most efficient producers. China’s industrial strategy is built on the systematic rejection of every one of those assumptions. Instead of letting markets decide, the state drives outcomes through massive subsidies that create excess capacity, regardless of profitability. The CCP artificially suppresses resource costs (land, energy, capital, labor) and mandates joint ventures that force technology transfer from foreign firms. By deliberately flooding global markets with goods sold at prices no unsubsidized private competitor can match, the CCP tramples on market rules using state power The old bureaucratic debate in Washington, D.C., has long centered on whether to protect American industries from foreign competition. But the CCP isn’t competing; it’s attempting to eliminate the American industry sector by sector. Made in China 2025, China’s self-proclaimed industrial strategy, targets advanced industries that the United States pioneered and historically dominated. For example, China’s solar panel subsidies caused global prices to collapse by 80% as state-backed producers flooded global markets with below-cost products, building domestic capacity while suppressing investment elsewhere. Naturally, the Chinese domination driven by those subsidies had a negative impact on innovation in the rest of the world. The point of this strategy? Make the United States structurally dependent on an adversary for the inputs that a modern economy and military cannot function without. The electric vehicle (EV) sector makes the point obvious. Chinese automakers are winning because the Chinese government has poured an estimated $230 billion in subsidies into the EV sector over the past decade, allowing domestic producers to sell vehicles at prices that bear no relationship to their actual cost of production. China-owned BYD surpassed Tesla in global vehicle deliveries in 2023, powered by land grants, discounted state financing, and government procurement contracts that effectively socialized the risk of building a dominant global manufacturer. The European Union reached the correct conclusion in 2024, finding that imposing tariffs of up to 38% on Chinese EV imports following a formal anti-subsidy investigation was the only path. The founders understood that economic and political independence were two sides of the same coin. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, submitted to Congress in 1791, argued that a free nation could not remain free if it depended on foreign powers for the goods its economy and defense required. Sadly, today we are once again dependent. China’s state-dominated economic model is fundamentally incompatible with free and fair trade. No amount of enforcement actions within the existing framework will resolve an incompatibility that runs to its core. The pivotal long-term step requires Congress to revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations status and replace the current patchwork of reactive enforcement with permanent, predictable tariffs on Chinese goods that increase steadily over time, creating a durable signal for investment to move elsewhere. For decades, the prevailing consensus view held that manufacturing’s decline was a natural and even welcome consequence of America’s comparative advantage shifting toward services and finance. President Trump has helped discredit that archaic view using evidence: decades of globalization and financialization have slowed investment, innovation, and growth, while industrial output and productivity have stagnated relative to their potential. Meanwhile, the communities that shouldered the brunt of that decline saw little to no benefit as the foundations of their communities eroded. We need to confront China’s dumping strategy with more than defensive enforcement measures and to treat American industrial capacity as a strategic asset to be deliberately rebuilt. We need investment rules that keep CCP capital out of American supply chains, export controls that stop American technology from feeding Chinese military-industrial development, and a trade posture built around the principle that the United States does not grant open market access to a communist government whose explicit strategy is to weaponize that access to destroy American industry. A free market cannot win a fight it refuses to enter. China made its choice long ago. In honor of Independence Day, Washington must decide whether it has the courage of our Founders to once again unshackle itself from a tyrannical state. *** Tricia McLaughlin served as the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. Follow her on X: @TriciaOhio

There’s a new TikTok trend making headlines, and it’s all about moms smoking weed to survive taking care of their children. They call themselves “garden moms.” Parents are calling pot a coping mechanism, describing their drug habits with zero shame. As the barriers to accessing marijuana crumble nationwide, with multiple states legalizing the drug both for medical and recreational use, users are bringing their daily use into the mainstream. The Atlantic’s Sarah Levy recently reported that she found about 76,000 videos under the #gardenmom hashtag. She interviewed an influencer named Taylor Mitchem, who has 120,000 followers and started smoking pot daily when her son was two and a half. Her reasoning was simple: “If you can have something that can take the edge off a little bit, why not?” There have been enough articles about the pitfalls of legalized marijuana, and it’s not worth rehashing that argument here. But one of the most interesting aspects of the phenomenon isn’t specific to weed. It’s the larger issue of why these moms feel the need to escape their children in the first place. In this case, the stigma isn’t just around the substance. It’s more about admitting out loud that you find your own children exhausting enough to need daily relief from them, whether that comes in the form of wine, weed, or whatever the next thing is. A cute hashtag can’t hide that basic truth. Before the garden moms — also referred to as “cannamoms” — there were the wine moms who bragged that “Mommy’s sippy cup” was a stemless tumbler filled with chardonnay. Decades ago, there was Valium (“mother’s little helper”), and even before that it was the tranquilizer Miltown, which Levy noted was often prescribed to housewives in the 1950s for anxiety. For years, women have been coming up with ways to manipulate their minds to cope with the stress of motherhood. Weed is the latest vehicle. It’s not likely to be the last. And the weed mom trend isn’t new, either. Motherly ran “High on Motherhood: The Rise of Cannamoms” back in 2024, quoting a mom named Susie who said weed gave her “the sweetest, most engaged moments” with her daughter while high. Writer Jamilah Lemieux told Romper the same year she thinks cannabis is headed toward the same social status as alcohol: “widely available, legal, and socially acceptable.” ABC News was asking “Are weed moms the new wine moms?” back in 2019. Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at Columbia, told the network she’s watched it happen in her own practice: more parents turning to cannabis products to “take the edge off” of ordinary life. Advocates often frame smoking weed as an enhancement to parenting rather than an outright escape. “I got high so I could be more patient” sounds a lot better than “I got high because I wanted to feel good” even when the outcome is identical. And the outcome matters. Levy cites Kirby Deater-Deckard, a psychology professor at UMass Amherst, on how being chemically mellow slows your reaction time in an actual emergency. A relaxed parent isn’t necessarily a present one, and one who is overly calm could be dangerous if she needs to act quickly. I’ve watched this shift happen in my own circle. Lately, weed is more prevalent, and, what’s worse, it’s a little too convenient. Ten years ago, getting high took effort: find a dealer, roll a joint, smell like a skunk, hide the paraphernalia from a toddler who notices everything. Also, it was mostly illegal back then. That kept a lot of would-be users from even trying.  Then came the THC gummies. They have no smoke, no smell, no complicated rituals. Because of the convenience, they’re showing up in places where White Claws used to dominate.  But there are still problems. This form makes it easier to lose track of how much you’ve had, and edibles are notoriously easy to over-consume. Romper reported that accidental child exposure to THC edibles has spiked over 1,300% in five years, which makes sense considering that they’re packaged like fruit snacks. The format that made cannabis more parent-friendly also made it harder to notice when “taking the edge off” has turned into being zoned out for several hours. What almost none of this pro-weed content mentions is what happens when “a little bit” becomes a habit that’s not easy to quit. Slate writer Sammi LaBue described developing cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome after prolonged marijuana smoking. This involved a condition of violent vomiting tied to long-term regular use, nicknamed “scromiting” for the screaming that often accompanies it.  Alice Moon, a cannabis industry veteran, developed CHS herself after years of regular use. It took two years and several doctors before anyone diagnosed her because the condition wasn’t well understood yet.  You won’t find any of that in the #gardenmom clips. What you’ll find is a promise: a calmer, gentler version of parenting, one that doesn’t yell over spilled milk. The harder part to justify is feeling the need to check out in the first place.  Cannamoms did not discover a solution to stress-free parenting. They’re just repackaging the same escape mechanisms that, over time, were exposed for being cop-outs. Wine, weed, Valium: It’s all part of the same playbook that treats children like they need to be endured rather than enjoyed. *** This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

What do Pope Leo XIV and Billie Eilish have in common?  Neither have kids, and both were spontaneously named by numerous people in a recent survey as the person they most admired in the world. Among that set of popular celebrities, their admirers had some of the lowest desired family sizes: 2.04 kids for Pope Leo’s fans, 2.1 for Eilish’s. At the opposite end of the spectrum, superfans of Cardi B (4 kids), Tom Brady (3 kids), Michael Jordan (5 kids), and Chris Brown (3 kids) topped the list for desired family size, with all their fans wanting 3.2 or more children. The small family sizes for the pope’s fans may be a misleading number; some of the people who named him as their favorite public figure might be Catholic clergy, committed to celibacy. When we add a range of demographic controls to adjust for this effect, the Pope Leo Fanclub’s adjusted desired family size rises to 2.18, while Eilish’s falls to 1.72, the lowest of any celebrity we studied. Those sound like two cherry-picked examples. They aren’t. For the Institute for Family Studies’ 2026 State of Fertility report, my colleagues and I surveyed more than 4,700 Americans about the texture of their social and cultural lives, and one finding jumped off the page. We asked every respondent to name the public figure they most admired, then matched that figure to the number of children they were publicly known to have, as well as other demographic traits. The result: Each additional child borne by someone’s most-admired celebrity was associated with larger family-size desires for the fan — about as strong an association as the number of siblings that person grew up with. For women, the celebrity effect was larger and more statistically reliable. The effect of being a fan of a big-family celebrity on desired family size was nearly as large as the effect of being a regular churchgoing person, and I think we can safely assume the median Cardi B superfan is not the median churchgoer. These aren’t small effects, and they appear in a country where the birth rate is below 1.6 children and falling. It’s high time we got serious about asking what exactly it is about modern culture that leads to such low birth rates. It’s not just simple economics: Religious people have far more kids than non-religious yet work in the same economy. While pro-natal policies that give cash to parents do boost births a bit, the overall effect has been a bit underwhelming. It’s time to take a good look at our culture, and culture, in a country like ours, is set at the top. It is set by the famous across various dimensions of society. There are exceptions to the celebrity effect, of course. NBA YoungBoy and Elon Musk both have around dozen acknowledged children, yet their fans have below-average desired family sizes: around 2.2-2.3 children in both cases (and Elon’s under-30 fans only desire about one child on average).  In both cases, those are men who had children with many women, which might undermine the influence of their big families on their fans. Most people don’t just want offspring; they want a family — a spouse who loves them, children around them, and a home full of memories. Thus, it’s not just celebrities who have many children who may shape fertility desires, but celebrities who have compelling family lives for fans to emulate. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched a teenage girl reorganize her wardrobe around a pop star or a young man pick up lifting because an athlete made it look like the point of being alive. We are imitative creatures. We always have been. We rehearse adulthood by copying the adults we find magnetic. Nowadays, the adults many people find most magnetic — the ones whose lives fit into our pockets for hours a day — are, disproportionately, people whose brand is built on everything except raising children. This is not a knock on any individual star. It’s a description of an incentive structure. In some cases, it’s explicit: K-Pop stars are often required by their contracts to remain single and childless, and if by chance they do start a family, their fans often turn on them. They exist to be accessible heartthrobs, not real people. Fame in 2026 rewards availability, mobility, reinvention, and the appearance of perpetual youth. It requires a carefully cultivated and sustained personal brand meant to capture a devoted audience, not just the highest number of eyeballs. Unlike the celebrities we see on TV, parents have to set limits on their availability, and they often put down roots. And, well, let’s face it: It’s called “dad bod” for a reason.  Sure, a celebrity with one carefully managed child and a glam squad might read as aspirational, but a celebrity with five? Their kids are almost certainly not on screen, unless the celebrity deliberately puts them in the frame. In turn, the culture-shaping class in our society tends either to be childless or to present themselves as such to maintain their image. As we find in the data, the result is that their fans suppress their own fertility desires. Not all hope is lost. The same cultural machinery that has talked us out of children can talk us back into them. We don’t need to lecture young people about their duty to the nation. Nobody has ever been nagged into wanting a baby. We need to make family life visible, attractive, and high-status again, and the fastest way to do that is through the people we already can’t stop watching. We need more famous families. So how do you manufacture a more familistic celebrity culture? You can’t draft people into parenthood, and you shouldn’t try. But you can stop treating elite fertility as a private eccentricity and start treating it as a public good worth incentivizing. France already does a version of this: Its family quotient system hands its largest tax breaks to high-earning parents — on the theory that the people who set the tone for society should find children easy and rewarding rather than punishing. We could do the same: make it absurdly, conspicuously rewarding for the most influential Americans to have big families and let the cultural spillover do its work on the millions watching. It is possible that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars per kid (and maybe a billion more for a nice lullaby album) would do more for the American birth rate than spending that same billion on another round of child tax credits spread out, with a few bucks extra for each kid in America. I am not actually proposing we cut Taylor a check, but some math from our estimated effect sizes suggests that Taylor Swift having two kids could theoretically boost fertility for her cohort of fans by over 200,000 babies.  If we take the effect sizes from published studies of cash benefits as gospel, a billion dollars spent on baby bonuses for regular people would only get you about 40,000 extra babies. Subsidizing celebrities’ families might be a bad idea for a whole host of reasons (and probably no image-conscious celebrity would ever agree to take the money!), but the principle of the matter stands: Cultural interventions could be valuable ways to reverse the birth dearth. Of course, family aspirations aren’t the same as family outcomes. We find that celebrity families have a big impact on the total number of children young people want to have; their effect on couples’ actual intentions to have more is smaller. It takes more than a glossy Instagram family to change what people actually do. Turning the desire for kids into the third kid in the car seat requires something else: friends who show up, neighbors who help, and a society that makes room for parents. In the same study showing celebrity fertility effects, we found that individuals who had more supportive friends (i.e., whose friends would deliver them meals after a baby, celebrate with them, or babysit a child) not only wanted more kids — like the celebrity effect — but also actually intended to have more kids. Celebrities can help ripen the culture for family life, but supportive American communities remain indispensable to making families’ desires a reality. *** Lyman Stone is a senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from McGill University and is also director of research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

In the hours since one of Graham Platner’s former girlfriends accused him of rape, the Maine Democrat has lost the support of the state and national party, as well as nearly every prominent figure who stuck with him through his scandal-plagued campaign. But he can still count on Stephen King. “Graham Platner may drop out. (I hope he doesn’t, but.),” the septuagenarian horror writer and Maine resident posted on X. “Meanwhile, the Abuser in Chief just keeps on keepin’ on.” Graham Platner may drop out. (I hope he doesn’t, but.) Meanwhile, the Abuser in Chief just keeps on keepin’ on. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) July 6, 2026 King, a former cocaine addict whose 1986 novel “It” depicts group sex among minors, has long promoted Democrats and leftwing causes on social media. But his defense of Platner — as well as his attempt to shift the focus to President Donald Trump’s alleged misdeeds — leaves him prominent among a rapidly dwindling group of supporters. On Monday, Politico published a bombshell report in which 41-year-old Maine resident Jenny Racicot recounts how Platner drunkenly broke into her house in 2021 and raped her. The report, which includes corroborating evidence from Racicot and people with whom she shared the story, seems to have been the last straw for Democrats who stuck with Platner through revelations of his offensive social media posts, Nazi tattoo, presence on an app popular among sexual predators, and allegations of abuse from other women. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded that Platner drop out in a statement with fellow New York Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. The statement said that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which Gillibrand chairs — “will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.” The Maine Democrat has also lost support from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), two of his earliest and most ardent backers. The Maine Democratic Party also withdrew its support, as did leftist podcaster Hasan Piker. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego (D), embroiled in a controversy of his own, also called for Platner to drop out of the race. Platner denied Racicot’s accusations in a two-minute video message shared to social media shortly after Politico’s story dropped. “Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false,” Platner said. “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality it will inflict, we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward.” Maine Democrats face a July 13 deadline to swap Platner for another Democrat to challenge incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins. Racicot told Politico that she “didn’t come forward sooner” due to “the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person.” Seeing other women come forward motivated Racicot to speak out, she says, noting that “I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.” “Tell you what,” King wrote on X shortly after posting his initial statement of support. “If you knew the whole truth about everyone in the Senate and House of Reps, those chambers would be dead empty. Jesus said, ‘Let him without sin cast the first stone.'” Tell you what–if you knew the whole truth about everyone in the Senate and House of Reps, those chambers would be dead empty. Jesus said, “Let him without sin cast the first stone.” — Stephen King (@StephenKing) July 6, 2026 Two years ago this week, King urged President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race.

Jenny Racicot, 41, said during a CNN interview that aired Monday that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, a Democrat, had stopped briefly to apologize while he was raping her. Racicot described the scenario to CNN anchor Jake Tapper, claiming that Platner had appeared to be “blackout drunk” when he came into her house — and although he did not listen when she told him to stop, there were periods where he “came to” and apologized before going right back to what he was doing. WATCH: Ro Khanna and numerous other Democrats have dropped their endorsements of Graham Platner just in time. Just minutes before CNN’s Jake Tapper conducted a lengthy exclusive interview with the woman accusing the Senate candidate of r*ping her. https://t.co/oqyxVuIm03 pic.twitter.com/5VVWA7oVE1 — Media Lies (@MediasLies) July 6, 2026 Racicot explained that she and Platner had been texting each other on the evening of the alleged assault, and that she must have said something that he had believed to be an invitation. She said she had not meant it that way, but he said he was going to come over. According to Racicot, she said again that he should not come over, and he stopped responding — at which point she believed he had gotten the message. It was about thirty minutes later that she said he showed up, entered her home through an unlocked door, and got on top of her. Racicot said she told him several times that she was “not into” what he was doing, but that he did not listen. She said that as the assault continued, Platner had a blank look in his eyes. She said that in the struggle, one of them had knocked over a sewing kit that she kept near the couch — and when the contents hit the ground and scattered, that was the moment she began thinking that she should “comply” for her own safety. “That was me recognizing that this wasn’t just like oh, hey, somebody showed up and I’m going to tell him to go home, like he was heavily intoxicated, had intentions with me, and wasn’t listening when I said no,” she claimed. As the assault continued, she said he seemed to be going in and out of moments of lucidity — and even said that he “would apologize” before going right back to what he’d been doing. Racicot said that once it was over, she sat in her bathroom for quite some time attempting to process what had happened. The hardest thing, she said, was realizing that he had been someone she trusted and had been involved with before, was that it “was consensual until it wasn’t.” By the time she came out of the bathroom, she said that Platner had fallen asleep in her bed. Realizing that he had driven to her house drunk and not wanting to put him back on the road in that condition, she said she waited until he woke up and told him to leave. He said he did not remember anything that had happened the night before — and Racicot told him that nothing he had done that night had been acceptable, demanding that he leave. “He just got up and got dressed and didn’t seem concerned,” she said. “He didn’t ask me a single question … How can somebody that you’ve been in some type of a relationship with for this long tells you to never speak to [them] again because of something that you did and you don’t even ask what you did?” Racicot told Tapper that she had been torn on whether to come forward, in part because she is a Democrat and would like to see a Democrat win the Senate seat in Maine — but that she felt like she couldn’t stay silent any longer.