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Well, hello everybody and welcome to Wired In. I'm Cabot Phillips coming to you live from Daily Wire HQ. I hope you're having a wonderful Tuesday. You're having a better Tuesday than our wonderful producer, Pavel, who is three days into a sugar cleanse right now, and he's always a little grumpy, but he's extra grumpy right now. So send some prayers up for the sugarless Pavel. All right, let's get to the show with 35 days to go until the midterms. We're going to check in on President Trump's election playbook that now includes a brand new AI-powered website to help Americans interact with the federal government and everything from Trump accounts to passport requests. We'll also hear from a former DOGE employee on the White House effort to slash the federal workforce and drain the swamp. Fentanyl and heroin overdoses have plunge their lowest point in years. We're going to hear what sort of role the president's border enforcement might be playing there. And American teens are becoming straight again. That's according to the latest CDC data at least. We're going to talk with a psychiatrist about what is driving the record drop in LGBT teens. And of course, stick around until the end of the show for our live listener Q&A. If you're a Daily Wire member, get those questions in the chat right now. If you're on Apple or Spotify, make sure to join us over at dailywire.com/subscribe.

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Well, 2025 saw positive progress on drug overdoses, with deaths falling nationwide by nearly 14 percent. And as we head into the fall, 2026 is once again on pace to see another significant decline. Republicans say it's the result of the border being closed, as fentanyl was no longer able to enter the US., while Democrats say the decline is being driven by progressive drug policy. Here to help us get to the bottom of things is our good friend, Rafael Mangual, fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. Rafael, great to have you back as always, man.

Rafael Mangual (3:16)

Always great to be with you, man. Thank you.

Cabot Phillips (3:18)

Let's start with these numbers because we talk about a lot of bad news, but I think it's important to get to the good news. We're going to get to the crime side of this, where we're also seeing good news. But just starting on the overdose side, a significant, now two or three years in a row, where we've seen double-digit declines in overdose deaths, what's causing it?

Rafael Mangual (3:39)

There are a lot of things. Part of what we're seeing, unfortunately, is just a function of the fact that there were so many excess deaths during COVID in the two years that followed, that a lot of the potential pool of people who would have been susceptible to drug overdoses either passed away from drug overdoses during those years when they spiked, or of COVID or other things, crime, homicide, that sort of thing. There's a lot of overlap in that pool. I think that's one of the big things that's going on here. One of the other things that's going on, which you alluded to, is that the federal government's really stepped up its enforcement at the border. Now, I suspect that a lot of these drug interdictions has probably only had marginal impacts on the overall market. You haven't really seen prices fall or rise really significantly around these things, which suggests that because this is a volume game and because the precursors are so cheap to produce, they can afford to lose a good quantity of them.