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Josh Mandel, who is running for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, wants you to know that he loves freedom. He loves it SO much that his campaign released a 10-second video on Twitter of him lighting a face mask on fire.

Masking -- the necessity of it, generally speaking -- was turned into a political issue by former President Donald Trump as the country battled the coronavirus pandemic over the past 16 months.

On the same day in the spring of 2020 that he announced the CDC guidance on mask-wearing, Trump was asked whether he would be wearing a mask. To which he responded: "I don't think I'm going to be doing it. Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens -- I just don't see it."

Our democratic system requires strong-enough economic growth to raise living standards and support activist government. These expectations, present in most advanced democracies, are no longer realistic, because the global economy has changed in ways that reduce growth.

For the United States, Europe and other developed nations, this means that “anything over 1.5 percent [annually] should be seen as healthy,” he says. This would be a big drop for the United States. Since World War II, the American economy has usually grown each year by 3 percent or better.

To be fair, there’s no technical consensus on these issues. Consider another recent report by innovation experts Michael Mandel and Bret Swanson. Contrary to Sharma, they predict a productivity boom that would boost annual U.S. economic growth closer to 3 percent a year — a target of the Trump administration — from the 2 percent of recent years.

In the spring of 2016, National Review published its “Against Trump” issue. Twenty-one prominent conservatives signed individual statements of opposition to Trump’s candidacy. Of those 21, only six continue to speak publicly against his actions. Almost as many have become passionate defenders of the Trump presidency

As a survival strategy, this is viable enough in the short term. But let’s understand what is driving it.

The conservative intellectual world is whipsawed between distaste for President Trump and fear of its own audience. The conservative base has become ever more committed to Trump—and ever less tolerant of any deviation. Those conservative talkers most susceptible to market pressure—radio and TV hosts—have made the most-spectacular conversions and submissions: Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson.

As shopping has shifted from conventional stores to online marketplaces, many retail workers have been left in the cold, but Ms. Gaugler is coming out ahead.

Sellers like Zulily, Amazon and Walmart are competing to get goods to the buyer’s doorstep as quickly as possible, giving rise to a constellation of vast warehouses that have fueled a boom for workers without college degrees and breathed new life into pockets of the country that had fallen economically behind.

Warehouses have produced hundreds of thousands of jobs since the recovery began in 2010, adding workers at four times the rate of overall job growth.

In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey unpacked lipstick, an iPhone and something else from her purse in one campaign advertisement — “a little Smith & Wesson .38,” she said. A Republican candidate for governor in Georgia declared in a different spot, “I believe in Jesus, guns and babies.”

As the nation reels from a massacre at a Texas elementary school in which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, a review of Republican and Democratic advertising during the first months of 2022 highlights the giant cultural chasm over guns in America. As both parties have navigated their respective primary seasons, Republicans have been far more likely to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms than Democrats — who are largely in agreement on the issue of combating gun violence, but have seen one legislative effort after another collapse.

But more than 100 television ads from Republican candidates and supportive groups have used guns as talking points or visual motifs this year. Guns are shown being fired or brandished, or are discussed but not displayed as candidates praise the Second Amendment, vow to block gun-control legislation or simply identify themselves as “pro-gun.”