ISIS Plot Thwarted & Hollywood’s New Super Studio | 10.8.26

Okay, first, before we give you the facts of the day, run Hyde Fight in Fadelles is streaming now only on Daily Wire. It's an ode to the great action movies of the 80s and 90s, there's even a love story which nobody expected, and you can support Daily Wire's mission to continue making movies that people actually want to watch, go check it out. Midterms are barreling closer with the backdrop of unrest in Europe and a foiled terror attack within our borders. 100% committed. Those are the words Muhammad allegedly uttered. We described his planned jihad journey. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley. It's Thursday, October 8th, and this is Morning Wire. Hollywood's new super studio is poised to change the entertainment landscape. We break down how it's going to affect TV and movie production going forward. And several states have launched lawsuits against a massive router company over claims it's hiding its ties to China and has left Americans exposed. These routers are chock full of spyware collecting data and sending it back to the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. Another thwarted terror plot is coloring the campaign trail this week as the November election fast approaches. Joining us now is Ben Dominic, Daily Wire opinion editor and host of the district club. So we have a lot to cover today, but let's start with the midterms. The president was in Texas last night. That's his second trip this week. What's he doing in Texas? Is the GOP concerned there? Yes, they are concerned and that's why he's making repeat visits this time to San Antonio. You know, this is a situation that the GOP saw coming Donald Trump endorsed Ken Paxson late after was already clear that he was going to beat incumbent Senator John Cornyn. And Paxson has had a pretty rough go of it in the past week or so with audio leaking from a meeting that he had fundraising meeting in Washington, D.C. where he complained about the White House's role. He complained about the Dallas convention that the RNC held and he complained about a lack of control of his own campaign. I've never been erased by thoughtless control over the like the campaign and like what issues are going to matter because it's all coming, you know, from D.C. and I don't control message or what we're doing or and I can't I have no ability to change anything. So I have to live with whatever I've got. This is a race that Republicans are very concerned about and that's why Donald Trump is making his stop there along with other states that he is hitting and plans to hit in the weeks to come. Yeah, what are some of those other states and his Michigan, one of them? Yes, so the president yesterday said that he was planning to hit Michigan within the next week, week and a half or so and that's certainly going to be something that is getting a lot of eyeballs on it given the fact that that is such a close and tight race that people are paying attention to nationally. He was in Nebraska just the other day and he's bounced around to Ohio and to other places. He's going to be in New York this week as well to to have some impact there where the governor's race is surprisingly close within single digits where Kathy Hoekle has not been able to pull away the way that she has in the past. That's probably a pipe gene for the GOP but they're leaning into some of these states where they feel like they could expand the map potentially and have Democrats spend money in places that could go to more competitive races. Big picture does it seem like Trump is helping on the campaign trail. It's a little too early to say and I think that some of these candidates are unsure about it. We'll see how he plays in Michigan. Certainly in Texas, I think that he's trying to get the same coalition that has voted for him consistently out to support Ken Paxton. That's not something though that is going to be as easy perhaps as you might think given that so many of the people who he's trying to reach with that message are part of the minority contingent of Hispanic voters in particular who were new additions to the Republican coalition in 2024 and are not as excited this time around to vote given the economy and the state of things nationally. Now we also had another Islamic terror scare this week. President Trump of course has positioned the GOP as the anti-terror party and so this potentially could play into the election in some capacity but essentially the FBI thwarted another ISIS attack on the Mall of America. What do we know about that? So in this case it's a situation of a young and impressionable kid who apparently was posting very publicly about his feelings and animosities toward America and towards Jews. He planned apparently an attack on the Mall of America. The FBI had been monitoring him for quite some time and waited until he attempted to purchase an AK-47 from an undercover agent in order to nab him. This is an attack that's probably another lone gunman situation. He had talked about the idea that he would kill people and because the Mall of America has Jewish ownership it would scare people away. This is the kind of thing that we see occasionally but truthfully I think that this is going to be something that might play into the conversation in that Minnesota Senate race which again is a situation where Republicans would like to expand the map to include Michelle Tafoya and her efforts there against a lieutenant governor candidate on the Democrat side who has been connected to a lot of these scandals and have come to the fore in the last couple of months. Very scary for people in Minnesota. Ben, thanks for reporting. Great to be with you. You can be careful about what you post online and still leave a much bigger digital trail than you realize. I don't publicly share things like my phone number or home address but that doesn't mean that those details aren't already circulating on data broker websites. That's the part I find unsettling. Privacy isn't only about what you choose to post. 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Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com/wire. That's E-T-H-O-S.com/wire. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. After the Supreme Court denied a last-minute effort to block the deal, Paramount and Warner Brothers have merged to form a new super studio Skydance. The new media giant will now control everything from Harry Potter to Top Gun to HBO and CNN. Daily Wire Cultural Reporter Megan Basham is here to explain how this massive deal is likely to impact the entertainment industry. So Megan basically, you know, with a stroke of a pin, Skydance just became the biggest player in the business. There's also a lot of concern about where CEO David Ellison will take the company. What do we know so far? Yeah, John, well, you know, one thing we know is that it took a lot of lawyers to get to this place. Essentially, David Ellison fought off lawsuits for nearly a year. At one point, it actually looked like Netflix might have a chance to swoop in and steal Warner Brothers out from under him. That didn't happen. But he did fight off an anti-trust case that was coming from 12 mostly blue states. And even at the very end, some activists brought a last-minute appeal to Justice Elena Kagan, specifically asking her to block this deal. So she denied that request. And now we have two of the oldest studios in Hollywood, combining to create what can only be called the greatest collection of intellectual property in Hollywood history. Though both of these brands will still continue to live under the same corporate umbrella. And Ellison did not wait to celebrate. He immediately posted a promotional video to his brand new X account. And in that post, he promised that Skydance is going to be a creative first home for bold quality storytelling. Now that appeal to creative first is actually pretty telling because there are a lot of jitters from the creative class about this merger. And that's probably warranted given that immediately Ellison sent out a memo on Tuesday. Letting employees know that they are going to be facing and layoffs. Now, the exact number isn't clear, but industry analysts are pegging it at least in the thousands, as Skydance is looking to trim about $6 billion and they need to because they now have $80 billion in debt. Right. That doesn't bode well for a lot of employees. Now, it seemed that a lot of the opposition to this deal was actually about the news content rather than the movies and TV, especially we saw this at CNN. There was a lot of legacy media talking heads complaining that Ellison was too closely associated with Trump and that it might affect the news coverage. His father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is of course a major Trump donor. What's your sense here of how this could affect the news coverage? Well, my initial sense is that you're exactly right and a lot of the opposition that you saw coming from the legacy media to this merger was specifically about what would happen with CNN, especially given that right after he acquired CBS last year, Ellison put the center-right journalist Barry Weiss in charge of operations over there. But I do think it's hard to argue that David Ellison is where Larry Ellison is. I would describe him as much more moderate and pragmatic. So my sense of David Ellison is that he's more of an old-school businessman who's less interested in getting involved in politics and more interested in greasing the skids for what he wants to do with his companies. Though, you know, that said, Trump has certainly been a fan of this merger. This was what he said when a reporter asked him about the deal after it closed. Yeah, I'm happy, but I didn't know that you tell me that that's great. It's a great, it's going to be a great company, the terrific people, and it's going to be a great company. Now, what about consumers? How's this going to affect those of us who watch a lot of TV and movies? Well, ideally with a lot more reason to get out to theaters because one stipulation that came out of this antitrust suit was that Skydance has to agree to release 30 films per year in theaters. So they have to be theatrical releases. Now, if they don't, they face a penalty of $30 million for, you know, every film that falls short of that target. And in the longer term, Ellison is saying that HBO and Paramount are eventually going to be combined to be the same streaming service. But then, you know, the big change that I'm looking at is that I think we may actually hear a change in tone from the celebrity class because already we are hearing some a listers backing away from politics. Jennifer Lawrence has done so, and then just this week, we heard the same from Ben Affleck and yesterday from Glenn Powell, who's about the hottest young star there is out there. Both of them saying that they don't really want to talk about politics anymore, and they don't think it serves audiences. So, you know, I think we could ask if they are changing their tune because suddenly the biggest player in Hollywood is not so antagonistic to conservative audiences that, you know, maybe haven't felt well served in the past. I get the sense that it would be a welcome change to many Americans. Megan, thank you so much for reporting. Yeah, but anytime. Four states filed separate lawsuits against router company TP link systems incorporated this week, alleging the business misled its customers about its links to China. Joining us now with more is an attorney general of one of those states, attorney general of Montana, Austin Knudsen. Austin, thanks for coming on. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So first, tell us about your lawsuit and what you're alleging with TP link systems and what you believe they've done. Yeah, well, what we're alleging here is that TP link systems is a Chinese Trojan horse. Basically, TP link controls about 60% of the market share when it comes to home routers, business routers, small business wireless routers, whether it's in your home, in your office, they control a big chunk of the market here. And what we have found in our investigation is that despite them holding themselves out as now a holy US held US based company, that's simply not true. They're largely based still in China. The huge line share of their employees are still in China. But more concerning is that these routers are chock full of spyware and malicious bots, hardware, things that are spying on Montana's collecting data and sending it back to the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. That's flagrantly in violation of Montana's consumer protection laws and that's why we filed suit. So you guys have proven the fact that they do have this sort of spy software. Well, I mean, obviously we've just filed the lawsuit. This is going to come out in court, but we wouldn't have filed the suit if we didn't feel like we had a pretty good smoking gun here. What we've been able to find out is that they're also aside from just harvesting data inside your home about your personal usage, about your personal information and sending it back to China. There's also a lot of pernicious hardware and and from where software inside these things that often carry spying applications and spying viruses. We know that for instance, the Russian FSB has used it, the GRU. That's their version of the CIA. They've used this T.P. link hardware to hack and introduce viruses into the United States. I mean, this is a bad thing and it's not just circumstantial here. Now, is your office coordinating with any of the other attorneys general and other states that are also suing the company or are these all separate suits? There's always some level of coordination, but I mean, obviously this is a suit that we've brought here in Montana. We're leading on this one. I wouldn't surprise me if some of the other states get involved and we drive to some sort of cumulative resolution, but probably a little too early to say, but this is a Montana case. Right. Well, it's a game of whack 'em all with these Chinese spy devices. You bet. Thanks for waking up with us. The reporting that fuels this show is only possible because you tune in every day and because of our daily wire subscribers. To enjoy the show, add free and join our mission, become a member at dailywire.com. We'll be back this evening with more news you need to know.