A CNN panel discussion went off the rails on Wednesday after a guest who had served in President Joe Biden’s administration claimed that then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had “never compromised American lives.” Dan Koh, who was the White House Deputy Cabinet Secretary during the Biden administration, began the exchange by suggesting that military leadership in President Donald Trump’s administration was putting people at risk and “no one was facing consequences.” “That’s when people check out and realize that their democracy may not be what they thought it was,” Koh continued. WATCH: This is one of the most BRUTAL exchanges I've ever seen on CNN. LIB: "Secretary Austin never compromised American lives…" JENNINGS: "13 American lives?! They were more than compromised, they were ENDED."@ScottJenningsKY does not miss. pic.twitter.com/0Ag73R2ZuK — Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) April 3, 2025 Republican commentator Scott Jennings pushed back, noting that Koh “held a high-ranking position with Joe Biden.” “Yes, I did, you did with George W. Bush,” Koh replied. “Did you recall a single person in your White House or in your Democratic Party asking for the resignation of Lloyd Austin after Afghanistan, after the drone strike vaporized those kids, or after he went AWOL, yes or no?” Jennings asked, referencing the fact that Austin had been in charge when the Biden administration had closed Bagram Air Base and evacuated everyone — both military and civilian — through the crowded international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. The end result of that decision was a chaotic withdrawal that left American equipment behind, American allies at the mercy of Taliban leaders who immediately took power, and a suicide bombing that killed 13 American service members and dozens of Afghan citizens. “Secretary Austin never compromised American lives,” Koh replied, but the words had barely left his mouth when everyone at the table began talking at once. Exclamations came from all directions: “That’s a no,” “He did,” and, “Thirteen of them.” Jennings looked straight at the camera in apparent disbelief for a split second before he joined the fray, exclaiming, “Thirteen! Thirteen! Thirteen American lives were more than compromised. They were ended!”

WASHINGTON — Missouri’s Republican senator Josh Hawley unleashed on Code Pink activists who confronted him in the halls of Congress on Thursday, videos first obtained by The Daily Wire show. As the senator took a question from a reporter about TikTok, the head of Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, questioned Hawley, “How about weapons to Israel?” holding a phone up to his face to record his response. Hawley, aware of which group she was with, quickly responded: “Oh, you’re the China people! You are 100% funded by the Chinese Communist Party.” Code Pink is a far-left anti-war group known for its antisemitism and ties to China. The New York Times reported in 2023 that the group is part of a “lavishly funded influence campaign” working closely with “the Chinese government media machine” to promote the CCP — it has, in turn, gone as far as defending the Chinese detention of Uyghur Muslims. The group, which has aligned with Hamas since its October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel, has repeatedly protested against Hawley, who has defended the Trump administration in its efforts to deport anti-Israel protesters who promote Hamas on college campuses. NEW: Videos obtained by @realDailyWire show @HawleyMO unleashing on pro-CCP Code Pink activists protesting against Israel. "It is a moral travesty what you do," he tells Code Pink's Medea Benjamin. "You have blood on your hands…you're awash in blood and dirty money." pic.twitter.com/8BeeLBZkgb — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 4, 2025 “You’re deflecting from all the money you take from AIPAC! You’re a foreign agent!” the activist exclaimed on Thursday. “You’re a baby killer because you want to send more bombs to kill more children in Gaza.” Hawley responded, interjecting between her responses: “You are anti-semite….anti-Israel, pro-China, pro-CCP, it is disgusting. Your organization has defended the Uyghurs being violated, being persecuted, it is a moral travesty what you do.” “Where is the blood on your hands?” he continued emphatically. “You have blood on your hands. You’re awash in blood and dirty money and I hope that you are accountable for that one day.” She continued to follow him as he walked away, surrounded by reporters. Another video obtained by The Daily Wire shows Benjamin pursuing Hawley, asking why he is sending taxpayer dollars to “bomb people in Gaza,” questioning, “Are you America first? Are you America first?” At this point, another activist appears on the scene, this one dressed in a black and white keffiyeh, and she tells Hawley, “You’re a baby killer.” “You’re a baby killer,” he responded. “The Uyghur babies? Their blood is on your hands. The blood of the Chinese is on your hands. And of course of the Jews.” The Code Pink activists followed Hawley, berating him for supporting Israel. Hawley was giving it right back. "You're just a Jew hater, right? You're along for the ride?" "You are rabidly anti-Israel. You are absolutely morally despicable. You are appalling." pic.twitter.com/PRsRs17dDo — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 4, 2025 The second, younger activist laughs as she films close to Hawley’s face and asks, “You’re a Christian Zionist right?” “Oh no, no, don’t accuse ME of things,” he responded. “You’re a Jew hater. You would destroy the nation of Israel.” “Sir, you’re a public official,” laughs the activist. “You’re a public official!” “Which means what, I can’t speak truth to power?” he asked. They continue to argue as the senator leans in and tells the activist: “You love China, you are taking their money, and you are rabidly anti-Israel. You are absolutely morally despicable and I look forward to one day, the moral come-uppance that you will deserve.” “I’m a health care worker!” the activist pipes up. “I save lives!” “You are appalling,” he responds. “You don’t save lives, you are killing Jews and loving it. You are despicable.” “You are a war criminal, baby killer,” responds the younger activist, raising her voice emotionally as the senator departs. In the background, the elderly activist calls after him, “Baby killer, you have blood on your hands.” During a Senate Help Committee last week on antisemitism on campuses, the senator grilled a Democrat witness on what is being done to protect students on college campuses for anti-semitism. Hawley strongly defended the decision to deport Ivy League anti-Israel ringleader Mahmoud Khalil, saying: “I want to say for the record, I’m glad [Mahmoud Khalil] is gone, and I hope he never comes back.” Code Pink did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire.

Economist Thomas Sowell suggested that President Donald Trump may be taking a “ruinous” approach to tariffs and international trade. Sowell commented on Trump’s trade policies during an interview on April 1, a day before Trump enacted sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries. The “Liberation Day” announcement, as the White House billed it, put in place a system of “reciprocity” on international trade where foreign countries are tariffed in accordance with the trade barriers they impose on the United States. Prior to Liberation Day, Trump has vacillated on tariffs and tariff threats to allies and adversaries. Sowell was critical of Trump’s handling of foreign trade, comparing the president’s tactics to those of the 1920s that contributed to the 1929 Great Depression and the tepid U.S. recovery in the 1930s. “It’s painful to see what a ruinous decision, from back in the 1920s, being repeated,” the 94-year-old Sowell said on an episode of “Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson.” “Now, insofar as he’s using these tariffs to get various strategic things settled and that he is satisfied with that.” “But if you set off a worldwide trade war, that has a devastating history. Everybody loses because everybody follows suit and all that happens is that you get a great reduction in international trade,” Sowell said. The elderly economist then brought up former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who held the United States’ highest office from 1933 to 1945. Sowell said that Roosevelt would experiment and discard ideas until “you come across something that does work.” The approach Trump has taken to international trade and tariffs is fundamentally different, according to Sowell. Roosevelt’s approach works “if you are operating within a known system of rules. But, if you are the one who’s making the rules, then all the other people have no idea what you’re going to do next,” Sowell said. “And that is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you’re going to do. And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s.” “If this is just a set of short-run ploys for various limited objectives limited in time. Fine, maybe,” Sowell granted. “But, if this is gonna be the policy for four long years, that you’re gonna try this, you’re gonna try that, you’re gonna try something else. A lot of people are gonna wait.” Sowell noted the recent dips in the stock market that have followed many of Trump’s announcements on tariffs and said that “people are holding on to their money before they do anything because they don’t know where this is gonna lead.” In an interview recorded yesterday, Hoover Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell criticizes the tariffs President Trump instituted earlier today. Watch the complete interview with Dr. Sowell on @UncKnowledge with Peter Robinson (@P_M_Robinson) on April 15th, 2025. pic.twitter.com/i0Ver1QIp4 — Hoover Institution (@HooverInst) April 3, 2025

On Wednesday, President Trump declared that it was “Liberation Day.” He said this is our economic Declaration of Independence now. The markets were rocked after the announcement and there’s a reason why, which I will explain. The president seems to believe that international trade is a zero-sum game. His giant tariff policy is predicated on a few false notions about the American economy. One is that the American economy has been a giant failure for the last 40 years. That is simply not true. This is a myth that is propagated by both parties. I know, it’s a fun myth. It’s something people like to believe, that yesterday was economically better than today. But then you look at all the stuff around you, the phone in your pocket, the computer, the fact that you can literally order any product at any time from anywhere on earth and it arrives at your doorstep in two days at a price you can afford, and you think to yourself: Would I rather live in 1980 when the only person with a cell phone was Gordon Gekko on a beach holding a shoe box to his head, when central air conditioning was kind of a rarity? When the cars, if you were lucky, had electric windows? Was that better? Were things better simply on an economic level? Forget about everything else. You can make a case about the descent on the spiritual level. You can make a case about the dissolution of the family. I agree with many of those cases. But we’re not talking about the life of the spirit within. We’re talking about economics, which is the distribution of goods and services. America has done well for decades and has not stopped. A myth that all politicians like to tell is that America has not done well, that America has been hollowed out by deindustrialization and we are not actually manufacturing anymore in this country. That is not true. In 1997, the United States was producing $1.4 trillion in real manufacturing value added. In 2025, we are producing $2.4 trillion. That is an arithmetic increase. So, if we are manufacturing more, why aren’t there more manufacturing jobs? The answer is technology. We manufacture more because we have better robots and they are doing much of the work that people seem to have a very warm and fuzzy feeling about, but then never want to do themselves. I notice a lot of people say, “Why can’t I have a factory job just like in 1955 at Ford? Working in a non-air conditioned factory riveting all day?” It’s unlikely that’s your ideal job. WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show We’ve been told the lie that the American middle class has been hollowed out by international trade. But here is what actually happened to the American middle-class over the course of the last several decades. The American middle-class stayed approximately the same or shrank a little bit. Why did it shrink? Not because people became lower middle-class or poor, but because a huge number of Americans went into the upper middle-class. The number one change in the status of American families in terms of income from just before 1980 to about 2015 was a 16% increase in the upper middle-class. In other words, people got richer. And by the way, everyone got richer, including the poor, because the stuff you can get as a poor person in America in 2025 is way better than the stuff you could get as a poor person in America in 1980. That’s just a reality. How about wages? We keep hearing that wages are stagnant and have been stagnant since 1979. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, there was a steep increase in wages between 1980 and 2025.  I know this cuts against the conventional political wisdom, which says that the American economy sucks and it’s because everybody is cheating us.  One of the things President Trump is predicating his tariff war upon is the idea that trade deficits are inherently bad. A trade deficit is where, in terms of value, we import more stuff than we export. As I have pointed out before, you have a trade deficit with literally every business you do business with unless they’re buying your product. So, for example, I have a trade deficit with my local grocery store, a huge trade deficit. They have received pretty much nothing from me. But I have bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of groceries over the years from my local grocery. They’re not taking advantage of me; I’m getting value for my dollar in the form of food and supplies. As the great economist Thomas Sowell points out, “If the goods and services available to the American people are greater as a result of international trade, then Americans are wealthier, not poorer, regardless of whether there is a deficit or a surplus in the international balance of trade.” In fact, I can name a period in American history where there was a fairly large surplus in America’s balance of trade: the entire Great Depression. As it turns out, trade deficits have pretty much nothing to do with the health of an economy. They don’t tell you very much. 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote on this topic, essentially saying, “Look, if you’re so worried about trade imbalances, then actually what you should do is you should sink ships filled with your own exports before they ever get to the other side.” So if we’re exporting oranges to Europe and they’re going to send us apples in return, the best way to ensure that no trade imbalance takes place is we should send our oranges out of the country and sink the ship before it ever gets to Europe so they can’t send us apples back. Then we’ll have a large export on our ledger and no imports. Great idea. The economy will be stronger. So, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of trade deficits. This is not about balance of payments, which is a different thing. Balance of payments is about the flow of gold. We’re no longer in a gold standard, but it’s about currencies. Trade deficits are a different thing. In reality, I think the Trump administration is likely to try and leverage headlines out of various foreign nations suggesting they’re going to invest in America to the tune of some billions of dollars before lowering the tariff rates again. I do have faith that President Trump actually responds to headlines and to the news. He lives in the world of reality and won’t simply ignore that the markets hate all of this. Yesterday, The White House quietly put out a fact sheet that read: These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated. Today’s IEEPA Order also contains modification authority, allowing President Trump to increase the tariff if trading partners retaliate or decrease the tariffs if trading partners take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align with the United States on economic and national security matters. Now, other countries could say they will invest in the American economy and President Trump gets a huge win. That could happen. I’m hoping that’s what Trump is planning on doing. Is President Trump going to send out surrogates, like the Treasury Secretary, to walk some of this back and to try to point out where an off-ramp is? Or is he just going to keep doubling down on the theory that it’s short-term pain for long-term gain? If so, he’s going to have to explain how short-term the pain is and what exactly the long-term gain is, because that has not even been spelled out at this point. Is the idea that other countries are going to reshore to the United States to take advantage of our markets in some way, but we will leave tariffs on stuff that they export to us? They could also form trade blocs themselves and then go make time with the Chinese. There are real-world implications for this sort of stuff. Trade wars are not good and not easy to win, particularly if you don’t actually have a plan. You actually have to have a plan. So, I want somebody to make the case as to why this is actually excellent policy, why this is going to be salutary for the United States, why this is going to benefit the people of the United States en masse. And if you’re going to call for sacrifice from the American people, the question is, what is the thing on the other side of that sacrifice that is better and good? What I’ve heard so far is a lot of casting of various aspersions at foreign countries for engaging in trade with us, regardless of whether they are good or bad, because we’re treating Canada the same way we’re treating China. This is why I think the markets are confused. Investors are confused. Confusion and fear are going to breed sell-off. Less investment, less job growth. It’s all avoidable. We need to hear an actual narrative, not a bunch of talking points that are generated from a cork board filled with statistics made up by some sort of AI.

The Senate confirmed former TV star and heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz today in a strictly partisan vote to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he will oversee more than $1.5 trillion in federal health spending. The 53-45 vote split perfectly along party lines, with Oz now set to oversee insurance coverage for more than 160 million Americans. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) expressed concern over Oz’s previous stances regarding transgenderism and abortion, but voted for the former GOP Senate candidate in the end on Thursday. When reached for comment in March, an Oz spokesperson told The Daily Wire: “Dr. Oz fully understands the harms caused to minors by such procedures and is committed to implementing President Donald J. Trump’s agenda of protecting children so they can grow to live out their God-given potential.” The statement, which comes shortly after Oz advanced out of the Senate Finance Committee by a 14-13 vote, seems to have cleared up some apprehensions about where Oz stood on the hot-button issue, which drove many voters to the polls in November. Oz had also defended Roe v. Wade in 2019, but in a 2022 op-ed, the doctor clarified his pro-life position. Oz takes the helm amid a significant downsizing at HHS, where a reorganization launched Tuesday by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminated 10,000 jobs department-wide. The cuts directly led to the firing of 300 CMS employees, but closed five HHS offices tasked with assisting states with Medicare issues, with similar cutbacks indirectly affecting Oz’s new venture, Politico reports. During the confirmation hearings, Oz closely aligned himself with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda to “Make America Healthy Again” by focusing on combatting obesity and supporting preventative care measures. “The deeper promise that we should all be making to America is we’re going to make it easy for America to do the right thing when it comes to their health,” Oz said during his confirmation hearing, per The Washington Post. The new administrator will immediately face Medicaid reform demands, as House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee seek $880 billion in savings to curb what they claim is substantial waste and abuse in the program, according to Politico. “Let’s be aggressive in modernizing our tools to reduce fraud, waste and abuse. This will stop unscrupulous people from stealing from vulnerable Americans and extend the life of the Medicare trust fund,” Oz said in his Senate hearing, notes The Hill. Prior to his confirmation, Oz hosted a popular daytime television show from 2009 to 2022 and suffered a narrow defeat in 2024 for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat against Democrat John Fetterman. Mary Margaret Olohan contributed to this report.