Latest news with #conservative
New York Times
11 hours ago
- Business
- New York Times
Trump's Two-Week Iran Notice Gives Markets a Lift
Will the U.S. join Israel in its strikes against Iran? That is the big question on Friday as President Trump said he would make a decision within the next two weeks. Will it come sooner? Interestingly, Israeli stocks have moved higher all week despite the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange being damaged by an Iranian missile on Thursday. We delve into all of the implications for investors, the Fed and more. We also look at businesses' latest pushback against raids against illegal immigration. And I spoke to the leader of a major conservative organization bringing proxy contests against corporate America. Tehran, tariffs and inflation It's not quite a 'TACO trade' rally. But investors on Friday are cheering President Trump's announcement that he could take up to two weeks before deciding whether to join Israel in striking Iran. The hiatus — Trump really likes two-week windows — could buy the administration time to find a diplomatic off-ramp for a war that threatens to drive up oil prices and inflation. But it does little to remove uncertainty hanging over trading floors and board rooms, and may merely move this crisis into next month, when it could run up against other major deadlines, including the expiration of Trump's 90-day pause on most 'reciprocal' tariffs. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chatham County Commissioner Pat Farrell launches bid for U.S. House as "reliable conservative"
Chatham County Commissioner Pat Farrell formally launched his bid for Coastal Georgia's U.S. House seat Tuesday evening, branding himself as a "strong, reliable conservative." Farrell made his announcement to a group of over 50 people at the Forest City Gun Club and pledged to continue current District 1 Rep. Buddy Carter's work in Congress, while also saying President Donald Trump needs more "pro-MAGA conservatives" in Congress. "I will be the conservative voice in a crazy world that needs more conservatives to speak up about family values and what is important to us, the American dream," Farrell said. Background: Six-term Congressman Buddy Carter announces bid for Senate seat opposing Ossoff Coastal Georgia's U.S. House seat is up for grabs after Carter announced a bid for U.S. Senate in May, vying for sitting Sen. Jon Ossoff's seat. Carter has frequently aligned with Trump during his five terms in the U.S. House. Since Carter's campaign announcement there has been no rush of Republicans entering the field in a reliably red district. Bryan County Chairman Carter Infinger said he is considering a run for the seat, and Kandiss Taylor of Baxley, Ga. has formally entered the race. Farrell said he had been considering a run for some time, knowing Carter may eventually run for higher office. The open seat marked an opportune time to jump in the race, Farrell said. Tuesday's event came after Farrell first signaled his run at a One Tybee event in May, according to reporting by The Current. "I think I have the right experience and the right background, and all the different synergies are coming together that this is a good time for me to run for higher office." Potential candidate: Carter Infinger working with consultants to devise plan for Congress election run Policies mentioned by Farrell Tuesday included cutting income taxes and amending the constitution to require congress pass a balanced budget. A campaign brochure provided to attendees also states Farrell supports eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and supports Department of Government Efficiency efforts to "make the federal government more efficient." Farrell also said he is "strongly pro-life" and pro-second amendment, while touting his more than 20 years of local government experience. "I've been reliable in these roles, and I'm a conservative like each of you here tonight," he said. During his introduction, State Rep. Jesse Petrea pointed to Farrell's background as a Coastal Georgia native and business owner as strengths. Farrell also leaned into those attributes, mentioning his 13-year row crop business, Farrell Farms. Farrell is also a graduate of Benedictine Military School. Farrell touted that background as his being the candidate who has "fulfilled the American dream." "Small business is the backbone of this country. We've got that here," Petrea said. Farrell affirmed a commitment to "win this campaign, not just run," along with making a personal commitment to ensure the campaign has the resources and funding. He registered a campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission in May, but no fundraising data is yet available. The next quarterly reporting deadline for congressional candidates is July 15. "We are going to have the money to run a top tier campaign, and I hope and believe that I can count on my friends that I've worked with for 60 years in this community," Farrell said. Evan Lasseter is the city of Savannah and Chatham County government reporter for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach him at ELasseter@ This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Chatham County official enters race for Coastal Georgia's U.S. House seat
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
MAGA and the single girl
GRAPEVINE, Tex. — 'We are witnessing a cultural revolution.' Alex Clark stood center stage in a hotel ballroom on Friday evening, all business in her tweed minidress, pearls and beehive bun. The influencer and podcast host was addressing the hundreds of attendees who had gathered for the Young Women's Leadership Summit, an annual conference hosted by MAGA youth group Turning Point USA. Perched on a pair of periwinkle platform heels, Clark laid out the tenets of that cultural revolution, one alliterative prescription at a time. 'Less Prozac, more protein!' she said. 'Less burnout, more babies! Less feminism, more femininity!' Clark, whose 'Culture Apothecary' podcast for Turning Point vaulted her to the forefront of the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement, was articulating her vision for a new conservative womanhood — one that fused its traditional pillars of faith and family with wellness culture. 'This is Whole Foods meets The West Wing,' she said. 'It's collagen, calluses, and conviction. It's castor oil, Christ, and a well-stocked pantry.' The right has 'the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together,' Clark said. The left, meanwhile, has 'TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light.' All this amounted, by her calculation, to the notion that conservatives are now 'the cool kids' and 'mainstream.' 'We're not running from culture anymore,' she continued. 'We're running it.' Are they? President Donald Trump's most enthusiastic supporters like to imagine that his narrow victory in the 2024 popular vote signals a wholesale rejection of liberal cultural values and institutions. Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk has suggested that liberal ideas prevailed in the past because media and tech leaders had stacked the deck, and that was changing. 'We are the zeitgeist now,' Caroline Downey, the editor in chief of a conservative lifestyle magazine, recently told attendees of a party in Washington. Trump's gains among younger voters, including young women — Kamala Harris still won these groups, but by relatively small margins — have been particularly exciting to the soothsayers of the MAGA cultural revolution. Sure, maybe it was concerns about the economy and the job market, but hear them out: Maybe it was also a backlash against toxic feminism, trans people and the woke police. And what, exactly, is the conservative culture in the age of Trump's second coming? What does it think conservative women should want? These were the questions facing the roughly 3,000 young women, mostly ages 16 to 26, as they flitted around the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in a smear of pastels and florals — ruffles on their dresses, cowboy boots on their feet, bows on their curls. The aesthetic could be summed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder-core, like if the little house on the prairie had been down the street from a Sephora. The conference's Pinterest board of fashion inspiration featured prairie skirts and Kate Middleton-esque silhouettes; its playlist claimed Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Dua Lipa. There were booths selling toothpaste with 'zero ingredients discovered by NASA' and athletic gear from a company 'unapologetic' in its mission to keep transgender women out of women's sports. There were T-shirts instructing you to 'Call Her Crunchy' and tote bags declaring that 'Motherhood is my resistance.' There were the sounds of babies — crying, cooing, nursing — in the background, clutched to the breasts of young mothers who bounced and rocked them in the back of the ballroom. Some of the women wore 'Make America Great Again' hats, but only a few. Trump didn't come up much. The focus was on culture, not politics. After Clark delivered her manifesto on Friday evening, Charlie Kirk's wife, Erika, took the stage to warn against prioritizing work over family. 'You will always be able to create your own company, but children, family, your husband, marriages — that is not a renewable resource,' she said. Of course, many of them wanted careers, she added, acknowledging she herself had an online ministry and a line of biblical streetwear ('They said Noah was a conspiracy then it rained,' reads an $88 hoodie). 'I don't want you to be chasing a paycheck and a title and a corner office,' Erika told the women, only to 'sacrifice such a short window that you have in this time period.' Later, Charlie joined her onstage to take relationship questions from the audience. Erika advised the women to make themselves 'godly' and 'attract the man He made for you.' Specifically: dress modestly, save yourself for marriage, don't curse and gossip. Charlie — who, at an event later in the weekend, would tell the women that college is a 'scam' but a good place to pursue the proverbial 'Mrs.' degree — admonished that if they're not married with kids by age 30, the chances of either happening for them will drop precipitously. 'To the women who are getting married after 30, that's okay,' Erika added, softening the blow. 'I'm trying to bridge the gap here, because it is okay. It's not ideal — it's not probably the best statistical-odd position for you, but God is good, and — ' 'There's nothing wrong with it — ' Kirk interjected. 'Right,' Erika said, cutting him off. The audience laughed. "It's just, I find... ' Her husband shook his head and threw his hands up in spousal surrender. 'If you just want happy talk, then that's fine.' The next day, the line to meet Erika was at least 300 women long, snaking past the booths with the 'Raw Milk Revival' posters and the 'Dump Your Socialist Boyfriend' stickers. For some, the Kirks' advice about how and when to think of marriage had been clarifying. 'If you have any confusion about the steps of womanhood, they are covering all of that, which has been super helpful and insightful,' Lauren Thacker, a 19-year-old from Fort Worth, told The Washington Post the morning after Erika and Charlie's Q&A. For others, it was anxiety-provoking. 'I thought about that laying in bed last night!' said Wren Gordon, 32, a single woman from the Dallas area. 'I thought I would be done having children at this point in my life, not still waiting to get married,' she said. 'So, yeah, that really does freak me out. I have to rely on God and His timing. He's never late for anything.' Later that day, Nicole Hadar, a high-schooler from Massachusetts, approached the microphone in a smocked blue dress to press Charlie Kirk on what, exactly, he thought women should be aspiring to. 'I was wondering if you could clarify what the mission of this summit is, because it's a Young Women's Leadership Summit, and all of the women that spoke on that stage today and yesterday were there because they pursued a career.' As far as Hadar could tell, the takeaway from the conference 'was that I should, quote, get married and have babies.' Murmurs and some giggles rippled across the room. 'That's interesting,' Kirk replied from the stage. His face scrunched into a thoughtful grimace. 'I wouldn't say all of them are there because they pursued a career — maybe I'd have to think about the entire career.' He stammered a bit before continuing. 'I could flip it on you,' he told the high-schooler. 'The people that pursued a career are telling you to pursue kids. Maybe they know something you don't know.' Hadar asked for the microphone back. 'But don't you think that they, like, had children and got married to their wonderful husbands because of their career?' she said. 'Like, if they didn't pursue that career, that wouldn't have happened? I thought that one of the speakers today was really cool about this, and she talked a bit about how you can have a child and a family while also pursuing your career.' An unscheduled panel discussion seemed to be taking shape. 'Again, that's for every one person to decide,' Kirk countered. The mission of the summit, he ultimately concluded, 'is whatever takeaway you want to have' — a renewed sense of patriotism, of 'traditional norms and roles,' of 'true femininity — not this toxic type.' 'But I'll also tell you this,' Kirk added. 'I hope that some of you ... walk away with a warning that a career-driven life is very empty.' You notice how everyone's dressed and how I'm dressed? I'm dressed like a New Yorker.' Arynne Wexler, in a black tube top and a long white skirt, stood out against the sea of nursery tones and florals. Not that she minds. 'Maybe a liberal would come here and be afraid of floral dresses, but I'm not afraid of the milkmaid dress,' she says. 'I just don't dress like that.' She was hanging out in the convention center lobby on Saturday afternoon ahead of her Sunday morning panel on 'Next Gen Female Voices: Media, Culture & Impact.' Wexler grew up in Westchester County, New York, and graduated from Wharton. She runs a popular Instagram account where she mocks Gen Z college degrees as 'pescatarian arts with a concentration on hating white people' and calls the WNBA 'welfare for tall lesbians' — but she'd delete her account tomorrow if she could trade it in for a husband and kids. She is Jewish, and religious. She eats healthy, but when it comes to the most recent iteration of the cultural right, Wexler has her limits. 'RFK can take that diet Dr Pepper out of my cold, dead, aspartame-filled fingers — he's not f---ing going near that,' she says. Also: 'I'm not gonna use your f---ing pronouns.' she says. (Wexler apparently missed Erika Kirk's advice to 'harness your tongue in a way that's biblical.') She believes there are plenty of people like her out there — those with 'common sense, patriotic values' — who feel culturally out of place among conservatives. The 2024 election cycle had been an 'ascendant time' for the right, she said, but that was partly because people were sick of the excesses of the left — the people Wexler would describe at her panel as 'androgynous pixie haircut unbathed Marxist freaks in polycules.' But a backlash against liberal ways of life isn't the same as an endorsement of the opposite. 'I do not see the popular vote as supporting conservative culture,' Wexler said. 'We love being extreme and telling people they have to meet us where we are in culture. I don't agree with that.' The last person to address the young women was conservative commentator Brett Cooper. Cooper is 26, recently married, and pregnant. Her YouTube channel has 1.57 million subscribers, a following she's built with a cheerful delivery and a penchant for pop culture. Onstage, Cooper told the story of her mother, whose career-oriented friends had mocked her when she left academia to raise Cooper and her siblings. Feminists and the left, Cooper said, had made a 'grave error' when they chose to champion the idea that 'a woman's value and happiness existed only in her work.' As a response to that error, the 'tradwife' aesthetic made sense. But perhaps, Cooper ventured, the pendulum had swung too far in some corners of conservatism — which had become as 'polarizing and puritanical as what the left was doing years ago,' she said. 'Some people might think that I'm crazy for getting up here on conservative women's conference and saying all of this,' Cooper said. 'But I think it's important to say this because I know that, personally, I fall somewhere between these two extreme binaries that we have been presented with. I'm sure that many of you do as well.' 'Tell 'em, Brett!' someone shouted from the audience. 'I'm not here to say that you need to chase being a wife and a mother and finding an amazing career and stay healthy and not eat seed oils and be engaged in politics and, and, and,' Cooper continued. 'That is really not reasonable. That's not the point.' (Later, over email, she explained her decision to address this in her speech. 'I believe young women want — and deserve — a nuanced approach to work and family,' she wrote. 'Life is more complicated than an X thread.') Letting go of living up to others' expectations and building a life that works for you. It's a sensible bit of wisdom — and not an especially political one. The young women shuffled out of the ballroom for a final time, still buzzing from Cooper's closer. To Leona Salinas, 20, she'd gotten permission to be whoever she wanted. 'Don't overwhelm yourself with thinking that you aren't good enough, career-wise, just because you want to have children,' she said. 'You can't have it all, literally. You don't have to be a career girl boss, you just have to be ambitious in what you do.' 'And as long as you have that — like, I'm literally getting chills.' Salinas paused and rubbed her forearms. 'As long as you have that, you really will be at your peak happiness. And that is what God wants from all of us.'
Arab News
3 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
French ex-PM Fillon given suspended sentence over wife's fake job
PARIS: Former French prime minister Francois Fillon was on Tuesday given a four-year suspended prison sentence over a fake jobs scandal that wrecked his 2017 presidential bid. Fillon, 71, had been found guilty in 2022 on appeal of embezzlement for providing a fake parliamentary assistant job to his wife, Penelope Fillon, that saw her being paid from public funds although the court found that she never did any work in the National Assembly. The Paris appeals court also ordered him to pay a fine of 375,000 euros ($433,000) and barred him from seeking elected office for five years. The sentence was milder than the one handed down in 2022, when he had been ordered to spend one year behind bars without any suspension. But France's highest appeals court, the Court of Cassation, overruled that decision and ordered a new sentencing trial. No change was made to the punishment for Penelope Fillon, who is British, and who was handed a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay the same fine as her husband. The couple has always insisted that Penelope Fillon had done genuine constituency work. Neither was present in court for the sentencing. Fillon, a conservative, earlier this year called the ban on seeking public office a 'moral wound.' The scandal, dubbed 'PenelopeGate' by the French press, hurt Fillon's popularity and contributed to his first-round elimination in France's 2017 presidential election that was won by current President Emmanuel Macron. 'The treatment I received was somewhat unusual and nobody will convince me otherwise,' Fillon said. 'Perhaps there was a link with me being a candidate in the presidential election.' Sarkozy and Le Pen Fillon claimed that fake parliamentary jobs were common between 1981 and 2021, saying that 'a large majority' of lawmakers had been in a 'perfectly similar situation' to his during that time. His wife's fake contract ran from 2012 to 2013. 'It is the appreciation of the court that there is no proof of any salaried work in the case,' the court said in its ruling. Fillon's lawyer, Antonin Levy, welcomed the decision to spare his client time in prison. 'Francois Fillon is a free man,' he said. In another recent high-profile case involving French politicians, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, also a conservative, was stripped of his Legion d'Honneur distinction following his conviction for graft. Sarkozy, 70, had been wearing an electronic ankle tag until last month after France's highest appeals court upheld his conviction last December of trying to illegally secure favors from a judge. Sarkozy is currently on trial in a separate case on charges of accepting illegal campaign financing in an alleged pact with late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Another case involves far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who was convicted in an embezzlement trial over fake European Parliament jobs, and is appealing the verdict. As well as being given a partly suspended jail term and a fine, she was banned from taking part in elections for five years, which would — if confirmed — scupper her ambition of standing for the presidency in 2027.
Tahawul Tech
3 days ago
- Business
- Tahawul Tech
Trump launches smartphone mobile service
The Trump Organization has recently launched a self-branded mobile service and a $499 smartphone, dubbed Trump Mobile. Marketed towards conservative consumer, the Organization is keen to position this wireless service as an alternative to major telecom providers. The new mobile venture will include call centres based in the United States and phones made in America. The Trump family, long known for its real estate empire, luxury hotels, and golf resorts, has in recent years ventured into newer arenas including digital media and cryptocurrency. The Trump Organization, which is the main holding entity for most of the U.S. president's business ventures, said ahead of Trump's inauguration that control of the company would be handed to his children, replicating the arrangement from his first term, though concerns about potential conflicts of interest remain and were expressed by a several commentators. 'The new wireless plan and handset announcement is the latest attempt by the Trump organization to capitalize on the President's popularity, much like Truth Social, the DJT stock listing and crypto endeavours', said Gil Luria, Head of Technology Research, D.A. Davidson & Co, Portland. 'No one who has been paying attention could miss that President Trump considers the presidency a vehicle to grow his family's wealth. Maybe this example will help more come to see this undeniable truth', said Lawrence Lessig, Law Professor, Harvard. 'I don't see much impact from Trump mobile across the industry, as half of it's addressable market is negated by political parties, and then from there, this industry already has a lot of stickiness to current providers. These companies need scale to work, and we'll see if the company can execute on the most important thing – consistency of network', said David Wagner, Head of Equities, Aptus Capital Advisors, Cincinnati, Ohio. Source: Reuters Image Credit: Stock Image
