Morning Wire - Socialists Sweep the Primaries & Spiderman Saves the Box Office | 8.6.26

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Scandals threaten the races of multiple republican candidates, Democratic Socialists secure primaries across the country, and movie theaters are making a major comeback – with Spiderman Brand New Day crushing the box office on the heels of hits like The Odyssey and Obsession. Reporting from Tim Rice, Ben Domenech & Lauren Bair. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 3024- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:Boll & Branch - Sleep cooler this summer with Boll & Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at https://BollAndBranch.com/wire with code wire. - - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app today. Scandals threaten the races of multiple Republican candidates. Plus, Dr. Fauci faces a vote of contempt this morning. My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her. Here's what actually happened.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley. It's Thursday, August 6th, and this is Morning Wire. Democratic Socialists secure primaries across the country, with Midwest states now seeing some of the... the most radical candidates rise. I want you to remind them that if we come through this, when we come through this, inshallah, that will have taken $70 million on the chin and kept fighting back. And movie theaters are making a major comeback, with Spider-Man brand new day crushing

the box office on the heels of hits like The Odyssey and Obsession. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. Two Republican congressmen had serious scandals come to a head this. week throwing their upcoming races into chaos. Plus, senators are expected to vote on whether to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt this morning. Joining us from the Capitol is our D.C. Bureau Chief Tim, great to have you on. Always a pleasure, John. Tell us about these accusations against Congressman Max Miller and what his father-in-law, Bernie Moreno, is saying. That's right. So Max Miller,

Republican Congressman from Ohio, gearing up for a already very tight reelection of fight. in November. His race has now been made more difficult by the fact that his ex-wife, Senator Bernie Moreno's daughter, Emily, has accused him of domestic abuse against both her and their two-year-old daughter. Emily Moreno alleges that for a number of years at the end of their marriage, Max Miller was abusive physically and emotionally to her and their daughter. She reports that her daughter was afraid to spend time alone with her father.

And the reason these, we've seen reports that police reports and requests for restraining orders had sort of been reported on, had been leaked to the press. This all came to a head over the weekend when Max Miller preemptively did a live stream on X and denied all of the allegations, right, and said that this was his ex-wife and former father-in-law engaging in some sort of political retribution against him. Senator Moreno then responded in kind, saying, you know, of course, I haven't commented on these things until now because they've been in the courts and we've been going back and forth and I'm trying to protect my family. It's just getting so ugly. It's been tit for tat.

Every time Miller says something, Emily and Bernie Moreno come out and say something else. President Trump has been asked about this. He has not yet rescinded any endorsements or wait in one way or the other, sort of equivocated whenever asked about it. But Republicans have been scrambling to see if they can get Max Miller off the ballot. Bernie Moreno says that he is not fit to serve in Congress. I believe the deadline to replace him on the ballot passed. So it seems that he might be on the ballot in November, which again, the party is a little bit worried. that'll be a very tough race to win, given the allegations.

Right. Now, there's also the case of Chuck Edwards, who is another congressman, Republican, who is not running for re-election. What triggered that? Yes. A number of Chuck Edwards, former staffers, said that he was engaged in aggressive flirtation, but, you know, Chuck Edwards is a married man. These were younger female staffers.

He was texting them and writing them notes and delivering them presents, inviting them to join him for comedy shows and for dinner, offering in one case to go over to one of his female staffer's homes, offered to skip votes on the house floor to go to her apartment and help her decorate a Christmas tree. I believe it was two, maybe three female staffers who have all come forward. And late Tuesday evening, Edwards just announced he was pulling the plug. He would not be seeking re-election.

And he had pressure from not just Democrats, but Republicans, correct? Yeah, that's exactly right. And he didn't deny it, I suppose, to his credit. You know, he just kind of, he copped to what happened and said that he would be, he would be bringing his career to an early end. Now, finally, today, the big Anthony Fauci contempt vote is set. Senator Rand Paul, of course, leading the way on this. When is that taking place? And what should we expect? Yeah, so any minute now, it's hard to say exactly. And the reason it's hard to say is because,

the contempt vote is being held in committee. So it's not the full, it's not the full Senate voting on it. It is the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is the committee that interrogated Fauci last week, is voting on whether or not to hold him in contempt and whether or not to refer him to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Now, our colleague, our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Ollahan, spoke to Senator Rand Paul earlier this week, and we have a fantastic piece of her write-up of that interview up on the site where the senator from Kentucky walks through the various things that he hopes could be done with Anthony Fauci, why he thinks that they're okay to hold the contempt vote and the criminal referral just on the committee.

Obviously, the logic there is that if they were to turn this over to the full Senate, Democrats would have to join the vote to hold him in contempt. That's obviously not going to happen. But a committee with a Republican majority, and again, we saw the Republican senators in that committee grill Anthony Fauci last week. Almost certainly the contempt resolution will pass the committee. And then Rand Paul is going to, it says that he will be, if not the committee, then his office directly will be referring Anthony Fauci to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.

Senator Paul says that his office has made direct criminal referrals at least twice to departments of justice. So there does seem to be precedent for this. And from there, it's really a question of, again, a number of things could happen. And for that, I would encourage everyone to go check out Mary Margaret's piece where she really breaks down the possible ways forward for Anthony Fauci in greater detail. Definitely feels like things are heating up for Fauci. Tim, thanks so much for coming on.

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victories. Meanwhile, another high-profile contest is shaping up next week in Wisconsin. Joining us now as Ben Dominic, opinion editor for The Daily Wire and host of the Big Ben show. Ben, great to have you on. Great to be with you. So let's start with what we've just seen go down in Michigan, you know, radical left DSA candidates really sweeping up there. El-Said, the most significant. What does this say about the DSA's power over the Democrat establishment? Well, it says a lot in the since that you have, you know, a candidate who is far left in El-Sayed winning over somebody who was endorsed from the top down by Chuck Schumer, by other leading Democrats, and was backed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, not just by A-PAC, but by other political action

forces as well. And that was something that the DSA, you know, basically prove that they could overcome. Now, they're going to try to reframe El-Syad for the general election as being someone who is more centrist. They're going to pretend that he doesn't have the kind of radical views that he does. And they're going to suggest that any kind of accusations against him, as he said in his remarks, following his victory, that anything that looks like a criticism is Islamophobic or is some kind of attack on his religion. That's, of course, not true. It's about his ideology and about his past in terms of the comments that he's made. But the other thing that I think this election really proved, And it's something that is a story that we've seen throughout these primaries, not just in Michigan, but across the country, is that the DSA is the force to be reckoned with within the Democratic coalition.

Now, you mentioned Stevens' money that she had available for her campaign. Are we seeing a situation here where the Democrat establishment doesn't know how to use money to effectively promote their candidates? I think you're dead on there. Some of the candidates who have lost, who have been the better funded candidate, and both on the Republican and the Democrat side have been people who have expended an enormous amount of money on television ads and on kind of ubiquitous, you know, YouTube ads if you're tuning in to streaming services and like.

Now the thing that's happening in American politics is that people don't trust those ads anymore at all. The real money that is being effective, especially from the DSA, is flowing to influencers to people online who have their own followings on TikTok, on Instagram, on social media, across multiple platforms, and those are the people that are being listened to right now by voters in this country.

Now, another prominent figure making headlines in the DSA movement is Francesca Hong in Wisconsin. She's the Democratic Socialist candidate for governor there. Why has she gained, you know, so much attention and what should we make of her candidacy? Hong's problem is that she says the soft part loud. She doesn't really have the balance that you see. from someone like Zoran Mamdani or even El-Sayed. Instead, for Hong, she's someone who has leaned into a lot of her past positions. She went on Fox just the other day and stood by her previous position against Thanksgiving,

which is a fairly popular holiday in the country of the United States of America. But it's one of these things that I think is going to be a critical issue for her going forward. Because the fact is that when you look at the different, makeup of these DSA candidates who have won, one of the things that I think we see consistently is that they have been able to sort of hide the football. Hong is an exception to that rule, and it's one of the reasons why Washington Democrats, at least, are down on her chances. Now, final question. You know, many Republicans see the rise of these openly radical Democrats as an opportunity. Should Republicans feel, you know, better after this week or worse?

I actually think that they should feel worse. One of the reasons I think that they should feel worse is because El-Syad's election was as close as it was. Had he won running away, the truth is that I think he would have stuck to his radical message. He would have felt like he didn't need to moderate, and that would have been a gift to Republicans. I think that, unfortunately, for Republicans, because his election was so close, he is going to moderate as much as possible and cling to a lot of these mainstream or more centrist Democrats who, quite frankly, were uncomfortable with all the different ideas that he supported. Haley Stevens included, by the way, who came out and endorsed him very quickly after she lost to him.

Because of that, I think that the result is going to be, he's going to be a more dangerous candidate in the general election than he might have been had he run away with things. Yeah, and it seems like both sides seem to underestimate charisma, the influence and power of charisma like we saw in New York. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Great to be with you. The new Marvel Blockbuster Spider-Man Brand New Day has already made. over a billion dollars at the box office, and it just keeps racking in the dough. So what's the secret to the success? Joining us to discuss the recent trend of success in Hollywood is Daily Wire Reporter Lauren Baer. Lauren, thanks for coming on. Hi, you guys. Fun to be here. Good to have you on.

So let's start with Spider-Man, although it's not the only success story out of Hollywood recently. Why was Spider-Man such a hit? This will be the second weekend. It is smashing records. It's smashed Avengers Endgame, which has been another Marvel movie that held the record since 2019. So this is like a bookends on a kind of dark period in movies, in movie theater going, and in ticket sales and box office revenue. Movies are coming back. We thought these were dead and it's on. Yeah, it does feel like the 2019, you know, was a high mark for Hollywood and then the COVID crash. We all thought this was never going to come back. And you're saying, so this is is already competing with 2019 blockbuster hits. Yes, it's competing as far as box office sales.

So that has a lot to do with the ticket prices being higher, premium services like IMAX and things being offered to fans. I guess compared to 2019, we're not seeing as much foot traffic into theaters as we did back then, but the sales are higher. So that has to do with several. different movies. Last night I saw people were there for Spider-Man, people were there for Odyssey, which is crushing it. Toy Story 5 is doing amazing. They're not the only ones. There's a lot of indie stuff that you might consider like Blockbuster Adjacent is doing really well. Project Hail Mary for 2026. Now, I have also heard that the writer's strike put a lot of things in the pipeline and caused them to delay and that we are now reaping the benefits years later.

of some projects that were put on hold for a while. How true is that? I would say that's very true. Having lived in Hollywood, the whole vibe is that things are shooting outside of L.A., just literally anywhere else where there's tax incentives. Yeah, and I'm sure the writers are glad to be back to work. Now, you mentioned that films are being made basically anywhere except L.A. now, what does that mean for Hollywood in general as the powerhouse behind the film industry? Are things being diversified, do they still have the iron clutch they used to have? I think they want to think they do. And I feel bad saying that because I have a lot of friends in the industry that are there and all different aspects, writers, stunt coordinators, actors,

producers, casting directors, everybody wants to work and they all live there. So when they shoot a show, they shoot the first season of something, and then they say, oh my gosh, there's better tax breaks over here, then they'll recast everybody. They'll use local crew and things like that. So I think it's sad. I mean, it's, it's legitimately a wake-up call that has been going for like 10 years. So if they don't see it, if the local government can't like get their, their butts in order to get some tax incentives going and bring filming back, you know, if you don't see the writing on the wall, that's that's on them then. Can be too woke to wake up, I guess. That's right. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

It's great to have you on. Thanks so much, you guys. I love being here. Before we go, a quick announcement. Tonight, we are having an All-Axcess Live episode on DailyWire, and we decided to mix it up a little bit. We're pulling back out our retired teacher hats for back-to-school season. So former Professor Bickley and math teacher, Ms. Howe, will be grading clips sit-in by you. Our producer team will play their favorites on our All-Axcess live stream

on DailyWire.com at 5 p.m. tonight. Thanks so much for waking up with us. To enjoy the show, ad-free, and join our mission, become a member at DailyWire.com. We'll be back this evening with more news you need to know. What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith.

Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app today.