Senator James Lankford (R-OK) busted media during a recent appearance on Fox News, saying that although the legacy outlets might talk a good game, it was the people doing the actual work on Capitol Hill who knew what was really going on. Lankford was responding to the numerous reports swirling about President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, decorated Army veteran Pete Hegseth — among them, a report from the Wall Street Journal suggesting that Hegseth might be replaced by Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — and he argued that media outlets did not always have the inside scoops they claimed. WATCH: Sen. @jameslankford: “What’s interesting is the national media, the CNN, MSNBC, CBS, all talk about people as if they’ve met them. All of us get the privilege of actually getting a chance to be able to meet them… So there’s all the noise out there and then there’s actually… pic.twitter.com/XnpCc7MqdJ — Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) December 4, 2024 “What’s interesting is the national media, the CNN, MSNBC, all those, CBS, all talk about people as if they’ve met them. All of us get the privilege of actually getting a chance to be able to meet them… So there’s all the noise out there, and then there’s actually what’s happening on the Hill as people are one-by-one getting to meet with folks as I’m doing later on today with several different nominees,” he explained. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE Lankford argued that the people — and media — should allow the process to play out as proscribed in the Constitution and wait to see how those one-on-one meetings and eventual hearings went before rushing to judgment. “President Trump, like every other president, has the right to be able to hire his staff, and to be able to pick the people around him,” Lankford continued. “The Senate also has a role, in key people, in what’s called ‘advise and consent’ … at this point, let it play out. Let’s get past the media noise and let’s actually do the constitutional process and let’s actually support the president in who he’s actually trying to be able to pick to put next to him to be able to actually turn the country around.”

A transgender-identifying man has been crowned Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards in London, beating out five women on the shortlist for the title. Alex Cosani, 21, won the title at the ceremony on Monday night. Previous Model of the Year winners include supermodels Kate Moss, Kaia Gerber, Naomi Campbell, Bella Hadid, and Cara Delevingne. Cosani’s acceptance speech included shoutouts to other model inspirations, “specifically the black trans women who fought for the space.” “You fought for this space that allowed me to flourish today, and I’m eternally grateful for that,” Consani said.  The model continued, saying, “Now more than ever it’s an important conversation to be had, about how to support and uplift one another in this industry – especially those who have been made to feel insignificant. Change is more than possible. It’s needed. And this is a big step in the right direction.” The British Fashion Council (BFC) said the award “recognizes the global impact of a model who over the last 12 months has dominated the industry. With an influence that transcends the catwalk, the Model of The Year has made an outstanding contribution to the industry, garnering numerous editorial and advertising campaigns throughout the year.” CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE Fellow contestant Anok Yai expressed her frustration at losing to Cosani, though she didn’t blame the winner in her remarks.  “Alex, I love you and I’m so proud of you. British Fashion Council, thank you but I don’t want it anymore,” Yai shared on X. She wrote in a follow up, “If you have seen the effort that I’ve seen Alex put in; you would understand how proud I am of her. But Alex can be proud and I can be exhausted at the same time. It doesn’t take away how much love we have for each other.” Social media users also reacted negatively to the news. “Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards is a man. Why do women allow this?” one commenter asked. “Is this fair?” another person posted. “I hate how everyone pretends these people are attractive,” a third commenter agreed. Consani was one of the first trans-identified male models to walk the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show runway. The award winner also walked the runway for major fashion brands including Chanel and Stella McCartney, plus appeared in music videos for JT’s “Okay” and Charli XCX’s “360.”

“The View” cohost Whoopi Goldberg claimed on Wednesday that decorated Army veteran Pete Hegseth — President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Defense Department — wanted to “get rid of women.” Goldberg and her cohosts on the ABC midday talk show complained that Hegseth wanted to disqualify people from serving in the military, arguing that was a bad idea when the armed services were already facing a recruitment crisis. WATCH: While lying about Pete Hegseth's position about women in the military (falsely claim he doesn't women there at all, when he was was talking about frontline infantry), Whoopi Goldberg suggests he and people like him want to eliminate women from the American population. pic.twitter.com/P0VYrfJB1W — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) December 4, 2024 Goldberg appeared to take issue with statements Hegseth has made — specifically his argument that women should not serve in direct combat roles — and exaggerated that to falsely claim that he did not want women to serve in the military at all. “Here you’re telling people, ‘Oh, you’re not qualified, you’re not qualified,'” Goldberg said, her tone condescending. “That does not seem to be a good way to keep people in a VOLUNTEER ARMY.” As the audience laughed and applauded, cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin noted that the military was already facing a crisis with regard to low recruitment numbers — implying that Hegseth’s position on the issue would only serve to worsen that crisis. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE “The U.S. military has a recruitment crisis, we need more people to volunteer, including women,” Griffin said. “A recruitment crisis among men, especially,” cohost Sunny Hostin added, apparently suggesting that the military needed more women to make up for the deficit in male recruits. “Don’t worry, we got you. The women got you,” Goldberg crowed. “You know, when you get rid of us — if you get rid of the women, you getting rid of half the population. That’s not a smart move to make.” Hegseth has never argued against women in the military in general, but has said that certain combat roles should be reserved for men only. “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he said on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” adding, “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated. We’ve all served with women and they’re great, just — our institution don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally — not traditionally, over human history — men in those positions are more capable.”

The day after Donald Trump was confirmed the winner of the 2024 presidential election, the U.S. stock market took off like one of Elon Musk’s rockets. Major stock indices posted gains for the day ranging from 2.5% (S&P 500) to 6% (Russell 2000). The stock market is forward-looking, a mechanism for discounting expected future cash flows into present valuations of companies’ shares. Clearly the market applauds the election results and is anticipating a return to strong growth and huge investment returns in the second Trump Administration. Is the hype warranted, or is this just another Wall Street bout of irrational exuberance? Let’s take a look under the hood of the Trump economic program and assess what Trumponomics has in store for the U.S. economy in 2025 and beyond. Supply-Side Economics  To appreciate Trump’s economic policy program, we need a basic understanding of supply-side economics. In turn, understanding supply-side economics requires a working knowledge of that essential tool of economic analysis, the supply and demand model. As all first-year econ students know, market “equilibrium” occurs at the intersection of the demand and supply curves. Demand represents the quantity of any product consumers will buy at each possible price. Demand will slope down as consumers buy more of a product when its price declines. The level of the demand curve will shift up or down based on a number of factors — changes in the number of consumers, shifts in buyers’ incomes, preferences, and expectations, or conditions surrounding related products. Demand for pickup trucks, for example, will shift upward after a prolonged drop in gas prices. Supply, on the other hand, represents the cost of production for different quantities of any given product. Supply typically slopes up when more “factors of production” — workers, tools, equipment — are required to meet the demand.  As the great economist Thomas Sowell continually reminds us, “Economics is the study of scarce resources which have alternative uses.” To increase production of any one good means pulling resources away from the production of other valuable goods. In a market economy, these resources must be “bid up” in price to give their owners sufficient incentive to redeploy them to an alternative productive use. Hence the supply curve — a.k.a. the cost curve — slopes up for most products in the short run. The level of the supply curve is based primarily on factors that alter any business’ costs of production. When it comes to “cost of production,” economists identify five categories: Technology, taxes, price of inputs, the number of producers and producers’ expectations. If changes in one or more of these factors lead to an increase in costs of production, the supply curve shifts “up and to the left,” and market forces will move the market to a new equilibrium with a higher price and lower quantity produced. Likewise, if one or more of these factors changes in a way that reduces the costs of production, the supply curve shifts “down and to the right” and the market will move towards a new equilibrium featuring lower prices and larger quantities produced and purchased. Supply-side economics starts with the simple truth that economic growth and wealth creation ultimately stem from the supply side of markets — the economic situation facing producers of goods and services. In other words, the recipe for economic growth is to push the supply curve to the right. When the supply curve for any good or service shifts to the right, the cost of production is reduced, meaning businesses can produce at a lower cost. In a competitive marketplace, lower costs will soon be passed along to consumers in the form of lower prices. Shifting the supply curve to the right leads to a new equilibrium at a lower price and higher quantity of output. When prices fall and quantities rise, we all get richer. Hence the mantra: the recipe for economic growth is to push supply curves to the right.  Only by pushing supply curves to the right consistently over time can we increase the production (and thus consumption) of goods and services, improve our standard of living, and achieve economic prosperity.  So what can government do to push supply curves to the right? Plenty. Donald Trump — the entrepreneur-turned politician — knows this well and is promising supply curve-shifting policies like never before. Three policy areas in particular are ripe for large “positive supply shocks” and a rapid return of the U.S. economy to a high-growth, low-inflation situation: Energy production, Taxes, and Regulations.  Energy Production My personal favorite plank of Trump’s supply-side program is summarized in Trump’s refrain, “Drill, baby, drill.” Indeed, President-elect Trump knows that the economy runs on energy, he knows that reducing energy costs will benefit everyone in a direct and obvious way, and he knows that America is sitting on vast amounts of “liquid gold,” as he so charmingly refers to “America’s yuge oil reserves.” Trump further understands that government can help or hinder American energy through its stance on regulation, permitting, and taxation of energy production. Trump has promised a 50% reduction in energy costs for Americans by the end of his first year back in office. Elites in both parties probably laugh this off as mere Trumpian rhetorical hype, but it’s economically realistic and very doable. Here’s why. The demand for energy products like gasoline is “inelastic,” meaning the quantity people will buy is not very sensitive to changes in price. If the price of gasoline goes up, most of us will keep on buying gas because we have set patterns of commuting for work, school, and the like. We might be able to trim gas spending by cutting some non-essential trips, but it’s difficult to drastically alter consumption, at least in the near term. Consumers, therefore, have to eat the costs and feel the pain of high energy prices in the form of lower real incomes. On the flip side, if energy prices fall, consumers will not ramp up purchases all that much — they’ll mostly just enjoy the cost savings and expand their purchases of other nice things. In the big picture, inelastic demand means that when we steadily increase oil and gas production, their prices can fall substantially. We saw this coming out of the recession of 2008, when the perfection of new methods of shale oil production — fracking and directional drilling — led to an explosion of U.S. production. Oil prices were initially rising along with the economic recovery, but once the production boom set in and inventories expanded, prices eventually tumbled. Oil prices hovered around $100 in the early 2010s, and then collapsed during 2015, all the way down to the $50-$60 range. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE The post-Covid recovery saw another run-up in prices — partly based on demand recovery, but partly due to the overall inflation wrought by the terrible combination of loose monetary policy and massively wasteful government spending via stimulus checks and the Inflation Reduction Act. Even with Biden’s unfriendly regulatory environment, U.S. production of crude oil recently hit an all-time high of 13.4 million barrels per day, and U.S. proved reserves of both oil and natural gas are also at all-time highs. With Trump’s pro-energy policy mix, oil and gas production is likely to once again take off, with the potential to crush prices, as we saw in the early 1980s and again in the 2010-2015 era. Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency With his cabinet nominations, Donald Trump has shown a serious commitment to “energy dominance.” As governor of the third largest oil and gas state, North Dakota’s Doug Burgum knows the industry well, and as the incoming Secretary of the Interior he will be in a position to greenlight drilling permits on over 500 million acres of federally-managed land — permits that Biden’s cronies either slow-walked or denied outright. Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy, helped perfect the fracking techniques that vaulted America to the forefront of global energy production. As Energy Secretary, Wright can quickly undo Biden’s moves to hamstring U.S. exports of natural gas. Lee Zeldin is a former GOP congressman from New York and a strong supporter of American oil and gas. As EPA Administrator, he will be able to mitigate regulations that stifle fossil fuel production and delivery. Overall, Trump’s picks present a strong and united pro-fossil fuel front. The stage is truly set for an American energy renaissance, the largest piece of Trump’s supply-side economic package. * * * Tyler Watts is a professor of economics at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, combat veteran Pete Hegseth, came out swinging on Wednesday, during his first sit-down interview since being tapped for the position. Hegseth has been the subject of numerous legacy media attacks since his nomination, including one from NBC News fueled by anonymous sources and another from The New York Times which included the publishing of a leaked private email from Hegseth’s mother. Speaking to journalist Megyn Kelly, Hegseth said he’s done letting the media run with stories about him. “What has been said about me, it was so ridiculous and all anonymous that we didn’t want to give it oxygen. You don’t want to respond to things that don’t merit a response,” he said. “But going forward … it’s our time to stand up and tell the truth and our side.” The former Fox News host claimed what’s happening to him now is a “smear” job. “It is the classic ‘art of the smear,'” he told Kelly. “Take whatever tiny kernels of truth, and there are tiny, tiny ones in there, and blow them up into a masquerade of a narrative about somebody that I’m definitely not.” He also ripped the media for “never asking the people who were involved directly” while they’ve reported on him. “I’ve got a list right here of people,” he said, pulling out a sheet of paper from his coat pocket. “Will Cain and my hosts at Fox News have come out, all the folks on ‘Fox & Friends’ have all come out and said, ‘this is not Pete, and we’ve worked with Pete for 10 years, every single morning, every single day.” CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE A recent NBC News story suggested Hegseth has a drinking problem and repeatedly showed up to work drunk. The story was only backed by anonymous sources, and soon after it was published, Hegseth’s old Fox News colleagues jumped to his defense — on record. His two former “Fox & Friends” co-hosts Will Cain and Rachel Campos-Duffy, for example, called the report “horse s***” and said NBC never bothered to reach out to them. “They never asked those people,” Hegseth told Kelly. “And that’s what a smear looks like. It’s a couple anonymous nuggets, usually from disgruntled people who are fired for cause, who are jealous or want a little bit of retribution. And so they peddle stuff to reporters who are not interested in the truth, they’re interested in smearing someone who supports Donald Trump’s agenda. It’s really clear.” Hegseth also told Kelly that he has the support of Trump, whom he met with this morning, and has had positive meetings with U.S. Senators. “Trump told me, ‘You’re going to need to be tough as s***,'” Hegseth recalled. “But he paused again as I was walking away and said, ‘But you’re the man for this moment, I chose you because you’re the guy that’s going to put the warfighters first. … Clean house of the woke crap.'” “‘Hey Pete, I got your back. It’s a fight. They’re coming after you — get after it,'” Hegseth said Trump told him. “My meetings with (senators) have been fantastic,” he continued. “No one has looked me in the eye and said, ‘I have concerns and I can’t vote for you.’ In fact, most have said, let’s take a picture, and I’m behind you all the way. And that’s a reflection of Donald Trump and the strength of his election, but also the mandate to change something at the Defense Department. We’re not backing down one bit.” In addition to his rough go with the press, it was uncovered last month that Hegseth was accused of sexual assault back in 2017. An unnamed woman claims Hegseth sexually assaulted her in a hotel room following a conservative conference. Hegseth said that the encounter was consensual, and police decided against any further action. “It’s very simple,” Hegseth has told the press. “The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared, and that’s where I’m gonna leave it.” Notably, Kelly went through the police report on her show last month and said the accusation looks to be “bulls***” and stated that it appears the accuser “was not raped,” but panicked after her husband became suspicious that she cheated with Hegseth. WATCH: Related: WATCH: Pentagon Nominee Pete Hegseth Reveals Details From Call With Trump, Says He Won’t Back Down

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