Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gave an update on his war on Iran’s economy Thursday, pressuring its leaders to negotiate with Americans or suffer kinetic strikes in addition to the current blockade on Iran-linked ships. “For as long as it takes, we will maintain this blockade. … But if Iran chooses poorly, then they will have a blockade and bombs dropping on infrastructure, power, and energy,” Hegseth said. Since April 13, the United States has shifted from a strategy of military destruction to one of economic pressure in order to encourage an outcome in negotiations with Iran intermediated by Pakistan. “The war department will ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon,” said Hegseth. “We prefer to do it the nice way through a deal led by our great vice president and negotiating team, or we can do it the hard way.” SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: “If Iran chooses poorly, then they will have a blockade and bombs dropping on infrastructure, power, and energy.”“To Iran: choose wisely.” pic.twitter.com/iUlJfemSMx— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) April 16, 2026 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine joined Hegseth, and stressed that the United States was not blocking the Strait of Hormuz with a literal cordon of ships across, but rather targeting ships connected to Iranian commerce. “This blockade applies to all ships regardless of nationality heading into or from Iranian ports. The U.S. action is a blockade of Iran’s ports and coastline, not a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.” He added that the U.S. “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel” in regions such as the Pacific. Caine told reporters that the military is “ready to resume major combat operations at literally a moment’s notice.” Hegseth also mentioned Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent’s sanctions campaign against Iran, known as “Operation Economic Fury,” saying it is “maximizing economic pressure.” The post Hegseth: Blockade Will Force Iran to Negotiate or Perish appeared first on The Daily Signal.

House Republicans held a press conference Wednesday to promote what they described as tangible benefits families are seeing from the Working Family Tax Cuts, arguing the legislation has delivered relief to everyday Americans and marked an end to “Bidenomics.” “After four years of Bidenomics, we said enough,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., said. “So we passed the Working Family Tax Cuts.” McClain accused Democrats of mismanaging taxpayer dollars, saying they “advocate for waste, fraud, and abuse,” while asserting Republicans had provided meaningful relief to working families. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., echoed those remarks, saying additional tax relief is forthcoming. “When Biden took office, the economy was in ruins,” Emmer said. “For the last 15 months we’ve worked hard to bring it back.” “When Republicans govern, the American people win,” he continued. “And our work isn’t finished. We still have more to do.” Emmer added that “every single Democrat” voted against the tax cuts and accused the media of spreading false claims about the bill, but said Republicans were still able to secure its passage. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said the legislation disproved Democratic claims that only wealthy Americans would benefit. “For the first time in a long time, families are seeing the benefit of the federal government,” Scalise said, rejecting what he called “lies” that the cuts would primarily help billionaires and millionaires. “In reality, it’s hardworking families.” To underscore their claims, Republicans invited a guest speaker to describe how the tax cuts affected her personally. Amber Benamati, a Metallus steelworker from New Philadelphia, Ohio, told attendees the Working Family Tax Cuts had delivered “real results for everyday Americans.” “No taxes on overtime and no taxes on tips are real relief for working-class families,” she said. She also praised President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans for getting the bill signed into law last July despite Democratic opposition. The post Republicans Champion End of ‘Bidenomics’ on Tax Day appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A recent report that police were called to the home of gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton during a 2019 “domestic dispute” is raising questions as the election race heats up in Ohio. Over the weekend, NBC News reported that Ohio’s former health director shattered a mirror pulled off the wall during a “verbal argument” with her husband. Acton, who ran the Ohio Department of Health at the time, admitted to Bexley, Ohio, police that she had been drinking. The police report stated the verbal argument was over “her extended work hours” and that there was no evidence of physical violence. That incident is sparking chatter in Ohio and elsewhere as she runs for governor. Ohio Republican Party Chairman Alex Triantafilou told The Daily Signal it’s a story that will “be in the minds of the voters.” The story not only attracted the attention of many Ohioans, but also Donald Trump Jr., who referred to Acton on X as a “Leftwing psychopath.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor as a Republican, reposted Trump’s comment to his account, as did his pick for lieutenant governor, state Sen. Rob McColley. Leftwing psychopath @amyactonoh shouldn't be running for Governor in Ohio, she should be seeking help. https://t.co/G8BDrQXeMu— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 11, 2026 NBC News reported that Acton’s campaign “disputed and sought to clarify several elements of the police report,” pointing out that she had one drink at dinner. During the incident, Acton “bumped into a wall hanging which fell,” the campaign told NBC News. ABC News 5 spoke with Acton’s pick for lieutenant governor, David Pepper, who called the public reaction “sort of a desperate attempt to try and tear Amy Acton down.” Pepper characterized the situation as “a simple argument.” Matt Dole, a crisis public relations consultant, told The Daily Signal that the Acton campaign so far has delivered “a brutally bad crisis communications response.” He specifically took issue with the lack of transparency from the Acton campaign, noting that Pepper is taking the one responding. “The first rule of crisis communications is to be transparent, because the cover-up becomes worse than the original crime,” Dole said. He added that he would have advised Acton to share the story on the day she was announcing her run for governor, so “when it came out, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.” Gov. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, whom Acton worked under as health director, apparently did not know about the incident prior to the news report. “Governor DeWine was unaware of both the 2019 incident and associated police report involving Dr. Acton,” Dan Tierney, the governor’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “The governor holds his staff to the highest standards of conduct. Given that the allegations in the report are deeply troubling, Governor DeWine would have expected Dr. Acton to have at that time promptly disclosed this to him, and he is very disappointed that it did not occur.” DeWine told ABC News 5, “I don’t know what happened. I was not there. The only thing that I have said is that I wish she had reported that to us, just the police coming to a house, whatever the facts are.” Pepper said he did not see a need for Acton to have made the dispute public. “I think most people, when they have a private personal argument with their spouse, aren’t necessarily telling their boss about that,” he said. Dole said in not disclosing it, “she has now made it an issue in this campaign.” “If she had disclosed it to DeWine or disclosed it on the day she announced, it would not be an issue in the campaign,” Dole predicted. The Acton campaign has not responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. Triantafilou told The Daily Signal that Acton “should have” told DeWine, and that “Ohioans should be very alarmed” she didn’t. “The question is, what else is she hiding from Ohioans at this point,” he added. Triantafilou also took the opportunity to praise the likely Republican nominee. “We think we’ve got a far better candidate in Vivek Ramaswamy,” Triantafilou said. “Our candidate is working extraordinarily hard, is going to be very well-funded, and I think there ought to be a robust conversation here about who ought to lead Ohio.” Dole said Acton’s response speaks to her experience: “All of this points to what we know of Amy Acton. She is not a politician, and she is not ready for prime time.” The post Amy Acton ‘Domestic Dispute’ Report Stirring Up Ohio Governor’s Race appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Birth rates in the U.S. continue to fall, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control. U.S. birth rates have been steadily declining for more than a decade now, and the total fertility rate (the number of births a woman is projected to have over her lifetime) has continued to hit new lows for several years. The preliminary data released this month from CDC suggest the downward trend in fertility continued in 2025. The birth rate dropped from 53.8 births per 1,000 women in 2024 to 53.1 in 2025, and the total number of births declined by 22,534. Some media outlets and scholars say the drop in birth rates is good news, and that it is driven by declining teen births as well as by women in their 20s delaying relationships and motherhood until they are more financially and emotionally prepared. They argue births will be made up for down the road. The reality is not so rosy though. Teen births did decline, but the overall drop in the birth rate is driven mostly by a declining share of Americans marrying and forming families at all. Declining births among women in their 20s are not being made up for later on either, as marriage is delayed ever further into the life course.    Examining the change in birth rates by age:  Birth rates among teen-aged young women dropped, particularly among older teens (ages 18-19); The largest decreases in birth rates were among women in their 20s; and Birth rates among women age 30 and over increased, or in some cases remained steady (among women ages 45-54). Yes, it is true that teen birth rates fell, which is good news, particularly when we are talking about minor-aged teens. But teen births are too small a share of total births these days to move the needle of the overall birth rate much at all. This is especially the case if you look only at births to minor-aged teen women, the group we should be most concerned about. Teen births peaked in the early 1990s, after rising for several years. Since then, they have declined drastically, a positive and remarkable reversal. Today, teen births are a small fraction of U.S. births. In fact, if we had only seen the declines in teen births while the birth rates among other women had remained stable (no decreases among women in their 20s and not even increases among women ages 30 and above), the overall birth rate would have remained nearly stable.  What is happening is that an ever-increasing share of people are failing to marry and have children when they are in their prime childbearing years. With every passing year, the age of marriage increases, fewer people are marrying, and that leads to fewer children born. Delayed marriage reduces the likelihood of ever marrying. Researchers project that roughly one-third of Gen Z will not have married by age 45 and may never marry at all.  Married couples are much more likely to have children. The average number of children born to married couples has been steady for about three decades, although with some dip in the last few years. The drop in the birth rate is primarily driven by a decline in marriage rates. While there has been a bump in births among women ages 30 and older—indicating that some of the decline in births to young women are delayed births rather than births foregone—the increase in births among women 30 and older are not enough to make up for the declines in births among younger women. There are more consequences to declining marriage than fewer births, too. Marriage is a good in itself. Marriage is one of the strongest factors associated with adult happiness and is also connected with increased household income, better health, and greater psychological well-being for adults. Children raised in married-parent families also do better on these outcomes, as well as several others: greater educational attainment, lower delinquency rates, reduced likelihood of abuse.   While there are some silver linings in the new birth rate data then, including declining teen births, the underlying story is much bleaker. It’s a story of declining marriage and family formation. This comes at great cost—including a shrinking future generation. The post Teen Births Are Falling—But America’s Birth Crisis Runs Much Deeper appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“It seems that you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess.” That’s what the self-avowed socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani thought was a clever answer to Margaret Thatcher’s famous line about the problem with socialism being that you run out of other people’s money. He said it at his “first 100 days” bash on Sunday. Maybe the quip makes sense to the young, woke voters in Mamdani’s base who think that they transcend history (or more likely don’t know anything about it). Perhaps they believe just as many previous generations of leftists did that True Socialism hasn’t been tried. But it’s become clear after Mamdani’s first 100 days in office that the “New Era” he’s promised doesn’t look much different than the old era, and his ambitious agenda is quickly running into the hard reality that even in New York, wealth is finite. The city didn’t instantly implode the moment Mamdani walked into office, though that’s a low bar for success. New York is much bigger than one man, even a very powerful one. Yet, there are warning signs that not only will Mamdani’s leadership produce poor results, but that Gotham is looking at long-term deterioration if he governs as promised. If there is one thing socialists have truly perfected over the years, it’s exploiting voter dissatisfaction—whatever the cause—and creating a mess of historic proportions. No Free Bus One of the signature promises of Mamdani’s campaign was that he would bring free buses to all residents in the city. That clearly isn’t happening this year and may never happen at all. “Mamdani’s highly-touted demands for free buses has fallen to the wayside in both state and city budget proposals,” the New York Post reported in early April. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine has warned that New York faces an over $7 billion deficit between this year and next and it looks like the bus was a casualty of that budget gap. It didn’t help that the state relies on the revenue. The best Mamdani could come up with was a limited, pilot program. Hardly a revolution. And that’s almost certainly a good thing. Kansas City, Missouri tried a free bus program with federal COVID-19 relief money. What a scam that whole “pandemic relief” thing turned out to be, right? Once the federal money ran out, the local funding also quickly dried up. According to local residents, the New York Post reported, the buses became “unreliable, filthy, rolling homeless shelters.” $30 Million Grocery Store … By 2029 Another one of Mamdani’s big promises was that he would open a government-run grocery store in each of New York City’s five boroughs, because you can’t truly experience the warmth of collectivism without a good old-fashioned bread line, right? Mamdani announced during his first 100 days speech that the city would move forward with this awful idea by building a single store in East Harlem for $30 million and would finish all the stores by 2029 despite planning to burn through nearly half of the $70 million budget on this single location. It’s a staggering amount of money to pay for a single store that will surely cost more to operate than it could ever make in profit. But it makes total sense if you understand that Mamdani’s revolution is just to put the Democrat governing model on steroids. I’ll make a few predictions here. That dollar amount is just the beginning of the money that will be dumped into this project that is unlikely to even finish by 2029. The money isn’t just being used to build the store, it’s to pay for all the union jobs and officials working on it. This will be New York City’s Grocery Store to Nowhere. Like the California “ghost” bullet train, the whole project is a cover to make sure the right people get paid rather than a serious project to create a functioning supermarket. Disorder Increasing, Crime on Subway While crime has generally been falling in New York and around the nation, there are worrying signs that urban disorder will drastically increase under Mamdani. Mamdani blew his first serious test of governing when a big snowstorm pummeled New York shortly after he took office. Initially Mamdani insisted that the homeless encampments wouldn’t be torn down and that the city’s homeless population wouldn’t be forced to go into shelters. The mayor eventually backtracked on the city’s homeless sweeps but at least a dozen people died of exposure in the brutally cold temperatures. Perhaps more worrying is the potential for crime to spike back up again. There was a major surge in violent crime on public transit in the first few months of the year. Robberies are up by 21% compared to last year, according to NYPD data. There have also been a few high-profile violent crimes that highlight all that’s wrong with the Left’s governing philosophy. In March, an illegal alien shoved 83-year-old Air Force vet Richard Williams and another man onto the subway tracks. Williams later died of his injuries. In April, a machete-wielding manic calling himself “Lucifer” stabbed three people before being shot and killed by police. It seemed that at least a few of Mamdani’s diehard supporters were more upset with the NYPD than the man taking a hatchet to fellow New Yorkers. Does NYPD know how to disarm people without going straight to lethal force?Follow-up question: Has anyone else noticed that NYPD consistently reacts to a person with a knife by shooting them?? https://t.co/m9JWP69bcp— Talia Jane ???? (@taliaotg) April 11, 2026 If you wonder why it is that American cities have a crime problem, look no further than the mentality of that X post. Springtime for Radicals One final note about Mamdani’s early returns must be made. On top of the poor policy decisions thus far, the new mayor has additionally surrounded himself with a collection of extremists and other sordid people. Some of these radicals are serving in an official capacity, like his Marxist housing czar Cea Weaver who publicly dreamed about impoverishing white, middle-class homeowners. The city’s new racial equity plan hardly dispels the notion that this is Mamdani’s goal too. Mamdani invited anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil to the governor’s mansion for Ramadan. The Syrian-born Khalil faces deportation by the Trump administration that has accused him of being a Hamas supporter. That’s hardly surprising given that Mamdani’s wife has a growing record of supporting antisemites and pro-Palestinian terrorists on social media. Mamdani insists she is a “private person.” One way or another it suggests that Mamdani has no desire to moderate or “normalize” in his time as mayor. There are other nodes of power in New York City that will contain Mamdani, some will encourage him, but it’s increasingly clear that however things shape out in coming years the city will be worsened by his leadership.  The post Mamdani’s First 100 Days: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Bus appeared first on The Daily Signal.