--:-- [Upbeat music plays in the background]
--:-- Georgia Howe: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: And I'm John Bickley, Daily Wire editor-in-chief.
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--:-- [Music transitions to a more serious tone]
--:-- Georgia Howe: President Trump is making the military mighty again, signing executive orders on everything from trans-identifying service members to DEI.
--:-- John Bickley: We will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world. How else is the president boosting military readiness?
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Tuesday, January 28th, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: A new Chinese chatbot capable of keeping pace with bigger, higher-priced models is sending shockwaves through the industry and Wall Street.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I believe they have created something that needs to be paid attention to. In many ways, what we're seeing is the opening salvo of an AI Cold War. This is China's Sputnik, if you will.
--:-- John Bickley: Gunfire erupts between Border Patrol and suspected cartel members just days after Trump labels them terrorists.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
--:-- John Bickley: Have you seen all those woke executives just now jumping on the bandwagon of freedom and liberty? Where were they when banks were sharing your data with big government and canceling patriots?
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--:-- John Bickley: Head over to oldglorybank.com slash wire today to open your account and put your money in the hands of people you can actually trust.
--:-- Georgia Howe: President Trump is overhauling the U.S. military through sweeping executive action and out-of-the-box appointments.
--:-- John Bickley: Here to discuss is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigiacomo.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: So, Trump signed numerous executive orders on Monday addressing the military. Let's start with this order on trans-identifying military members. What does that order say?
--:-- John Bickley: Right. So building off of past declarations on gender, Trump signed an EO that directs the DOD to ban men from using or sharing sleeping, changing, and bathing facilities that are designated for females. And it also rescinds a Biden order that allowed other gender identity related accommodations, arguing that it hinders military readiness and other standards.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Now, additionally, this EO stops taxpayer dollars from funding gender transitions, including surgeries for military members. This was actually happening under President Biden to the tune of millions of dollars. The Trump administration said that this applies to trans identifying children of service members as well.
--:-- John Bickley: Trump's order on the whole intends to emphasize that the military will have high fitness, health and readiness standards that will ensure military members are able to deploy, fight and win.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Now, Trump also addressed the thousands of troops that were forced out of the military over the COVID vaccine mandate. What did the president do there?
--:-- John Bickley: So under Biden about 8 active and reserve service members were forced out of the military between 2021 and 2023 because they refused the COVID vax Trump executive order restores those troops previous rank, and it gives them full back pay and benefits. This is a fulfillment of a Trump campaign promise, and it targets the last administration's recruitment crisis.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: After the vax mandate was rescinded by Biden, those who were forced out were allowed to reapply, but only 43 service members chose to do so.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, there was also an order signed on Monday that specifically targets DEI. Can you break down that order for us?
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Yeah, that order eliminates diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from the DOD. The order ends race and sex-based preferences by any branch of the military, the DOD, or DHS. It will also eliminate remaining DEI-related bureaucracy from those departments and order a review of the curricula from military service academies.
--:-- John Bickley: Military recruitment goals were repeatedly missed during Biden's tenure, and many critics tied that to these DEI initiatives.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Here's newly confirmed DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth addressing these issues during his confirmation hearing. You have to rip root and branch the politics and divisive policies out of these institutions and then focus them on creating and preparing actual future military leadership.
--:-- John Bickley: And we need more uniformed members going back into West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy, as a tour to teach with their wisdom of what they've learned in uniform, instead of just more civilian professors that came from the same left-wing woke universities that they left, and then try to push that into service academies.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: When that changes, Senator, I truly believe under Donald Trump, we will have a recruiting renaissance.
--:-- John Bickley: Hexeth himself is actually a big change on what we can expect from the military. Before he was tapped for Secretary of Defense, he wrote a book on the woke policies and initiatives at the Pentagon, and he categorized them as a betrayal to warfighters.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Here's Vice President J.D. Vance discussing Hegseth during an interview on CBS. Pete is a disruptor, and a lot of people don't like that disruption. But Margaret, that disruption is incredibly necessary.
--:-- John Bickley: If you think about all of those bipartisan, massive votes, we have to ask ourselves, what did they get us? They got us a country where we fought many wars over the last 40 years, but haven't won a war about as long as I've been alive.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: They've got us the military with a major recruitment crisis. We need a big change.
--:-- John Bickley: Peg Seth said on Monday that he's working to implement Trump's orders as quickly as possible.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Well, as we've reported on this show, military recruitment has been suffering for many years now. So hopefully this can turn it around.
--:-- John Bickley: Amanda, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: You're welcome.
--:-- [Music transitions to a new segment]
--:-- Georgia Howe: Tech stocks tumbled Monday after a stunning announcement from DeepSeek, an emerging AI powerhouse in China.
--:-- John Bickley: Here with more is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So, for the last year, the general consensus has been that America is leaving the rest of the world in the dust when it comes to artificial intelligence, especially generative AI like ChatGPT.
--:-- John Bickley: But yesterday, a new player introduced itself in a major way, stunning Silicon Valley and leaving Wall Street in a frenzy. That new force is Chinese startup DeepSeek, which announced Monday that their latest generative AI service, DeepSeek R1, was not only on par with top models like ChatGPT, but that it had been created, or trained as they put it, at a fraction of the cost.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Shortly after the news broke, DeepSeek rocketed to the top spot on the App Store. For more, I spoke with Tom Kolopoulos, an AI expert and author of GigaTrends.
--:-- Tom Kolopoulos: What is causing all the uproar is that DeepSeek R1, which is their current version of their reasoning AI, has been able to achieve cost efficiencies that are just unheard of.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: To the extent that, believe it or not, it is 93.5% less expensive to operate, from what we're told, than OpenAI's chat GPT, which is pretty extraordinary.
--:-- John Bickley: And that news sparked a massive market sell-off, correct?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yes, it did. Tech stocks in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. tumbled following the news. By Monday afternoon, NVIDIA, which had enjoyed a record-breaking 2024, was down a whopping 15%.
--:-- John Bickley: That translated to over $500 billion in losses. That's the single largest one-day drop-off of any stock in history.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Elsewhere, large AI companies like Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices were down 10% and 6% respectively, while Microsoft, which backs OpenAI, fell 3%.
--:-- John Bickley: Altogether, those dips represented over a trillion dollars in value.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, the big reason for that sell-off is that prior to Monday, the general idea was that generative AI required incredibly expensive high-tech chips to operate, chips manufactured by companies like NVIDIA.
--:-- John Bickley: But DeepSeek appears to have upended that notion. Seemingly proving that groundbreaking AI can be trained and operated at a much lower cost and with less complex chips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: For context, DeepSeek says they trained their latest model for just $5.6 million. Similar programs here in the U.S. cost anywhere from $100 million to $1 billion.
--:-- John Bickley: So you can see why the news sent such a shockwave.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Here's Kolopoulos. I think we've overreacted, to be quite honest. I think this will be a back and forth, a game of leapfrog, certainly between the U.S. and China for quite some time.
--:-- John Bickley: But I think markets were spooked because they expected, especially after the announcement we just made with the enormous investment of $500 million in AI infrastructure, that we somehow had a lead that was not going to be easily displaced.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And the reality is that is not the case. This is very much going to be a tit-for-tat, an arms race, and we are not going to be able to take the lead and keep the lead without some serious innovation on our part as well.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, keep in mind, this all comes as President Trump just announced a collaboration between the federal government and tech giants OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank that will pour up to $500 billion into AI infrastructure here in the U.S.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Trump really has made clear that America must lead the way on AI and cannot afford to fall behind China in this new arms race.
--:-- Tom Kolopoulos: For his part, Kolopoulos views it as a cold war.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: What we have in the U.S. is this incredibly rich ecosystem of technology players. And that ecosystem, I think, gives us a significant leg up.
--:-- John Bickley: China is going to have to try very hard to scale what they've just demonstrated.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And while there's an element of cooperation that we can, I think, certainly exercise going forward, we also have to keep in mind there's an element of national interest and national security at play here, too.
--:-- John Bickley: Their CEO, Lian Wang Feng, is someone who needs to be taken quite seriously.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: I don't think that they are being hyperbolic in their claims. I think there's question as to whether or not they can scale their claims.
--:-- John Bickley: Fascinating. Well, we'll have to see if DeepSeek is the real deal.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Anytime.
--:-- [Music transitions to a new segment]
--:-- Georgia Howe: Border Patrol agents exchanged gunfire with suspected cartel members along the U.S. southern border on Monday.
--:-- John Bickley: The eruption of violence comes after President Trump labeled Mexican drug cartels terrorist organizations.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Here to talk about the latest news on immigration and Trump criminal crackdown is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce.
--:-- Tim Pierce: A Tim, so first where was this shootout?
--:-- John Bickley: It was right across the border near Fronten, Texas. Border patrol agents responded to a group of aliens that tried to cross the river and enter the U.S. illegally.
--:-- Tim Pierce: And then in an incident that would seem to justify Trump's strong stance against the drug cartels, those border agents were fired at by suspected cartel gunmen.
--:-- John Bickley: According to Fox News' Bill Malugin, the agents then fired back. Nobody on either side was hit in the firefight, nor did the group of aliens make it across the river.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Alarming development, to say the least.
--:-- John Bickley: And this comes as the Trump crackdown on illegal immigrants is really ramping up, correct?
--:-- Tim Pierce: Right. The deportations, he promised, are well underway, and so are the political fights around them. The current count is well over 2,000 arrests.
--:-- John Bickley: And unsurprisingly, the crackdown is sparking a lot of debate, which Trump's top lieutenants are definitely not shying away from.
--:-- Tim Pierce: They've been out defending the administration's approach. Vice President J.D. Vance appeared on CBS Face the Nation over the weekend.
--:-- [Clip plays of Vice President J.D. Vance on CBS Face the Nation]
--:-- Tim Pierce: He talked about a lot of things, but he specifically addressed criticism by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on exemptions Trump lifted on deporting aliens from schools and places of worship.
--:-- John Bickley: I believe the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, if they're worried about the humanitarian costs of immigration enforcement. Let them talk about the children who have been sex trafficked because of the wide open border.
--:-- Tim Pierce: CBS anchor Margaret Brennan also questioned Vance on the administration moving to freeze refugee programs.
--:-- [Clip plays of Vice President J.D. Vance on CBS Face the Nation]
--:-- Tim Pierce: Here's that exchange. Now that we know that we have vetting problems with a lot of these refugee programs, we absolutely cannot unleash thousands of unvetted people into our country.
--:-- John Bickley: These people are vetted. These people are vetted. Just like the guy who played a terrorist attack in Oklahoma a few months ago.
--:-- Tim Pierce: And here's Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, talking to reporters last week.
--:-- [Clip plays of Stephen Miller talking to reporters]
--:-- Tim Pierce: We've seen, as you know, half a million children trafficked over a four year period in the United States. This administration is going to investigate every instance of child trafficking, labor trafficking, sex trafficking, child smuggling, and all the attendant crimes involved in that.
--:-- John Bickley: And our message to everyone in the country is to cooperate fully with immigration and customs enforcement so that we can end the scourge of child trafficking and child abuse that has been endemic these last four years.
--:-- Tim Pierce: So as you heard in those clips, the White House is continuing to hit on the public safety aspect to promote its immigration policies. A major concern for Americans.
--:-- John Bickley: So it makes sense to do that.
--:-- Tim Pierce: How are deportations going so far? In Trump's first week, ICE says it's arrested over 2,500 aliens.
--:-- John Bickley: The administration has been publishing videos of some of those raids. For instance, one such documented raid featured Trump's border czar Tom Homan and Dr. Phil.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Here's some sound after agents arrested an illegal alien from Thailand. This is an example of sanctuary cities, right? We got an illegal alien convicted of sex crimes involving children. He's walking the streets of Chicago.
--:-- John Bickley: So the administration is really running a full court press to show and explain its agenda to the American people.
--:-- Tim Pierce: It's an aggressive media campaign that sort of matches its pace on deportations.
--:-- John Bickley: Tim, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Hey, thank you for listening this morning. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation.
--:-- John Bickley: If you love our show and stand with that mission, consider subscribing, giving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.
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