Yesterdays News 10/8

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SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

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SPEAKER_3 (1:00)

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SPEAKER_4 (1:19)

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Monte Mader (1:31)

Hello and welcome to Yesterdays News, where I cover Yesterdays News in about 15 to 20 minutes. Apologies, I haven't had these up the last couple of days. I have had a lot of late nights and two 3:30 a.m. mornings for the last two days. It's currently 11 p.m. and I've been up since 3.30. As I mentioned last week, I have a very intense travel schedule for the month of October, so I will attempt to get these up every single weekday. I do appreciate your flexibility and forgiveness if that doesn't happen every single day. I really wanted to stay up and make sure I got today's up. Tuesday mornings, I recorded in advance, I tried to upload it in the airport and the internet was not fast enough to handle a file that size, so I will do the best I can for the remainder of this month while I am living in hotels and airports. October 8th, 2001, the Office of Homeland Security is born. 27 days after September 11th, George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13228 and swore in Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge the first Homeland Security Advisor with a small White House staff and a mandate to coordinate the defense of the country against terrorism. Within 14 months, Congress turned the office into Cabinet Department folding 22 agencies and 170,000 employees into the largest reorganization of the federal government since 1947 Immigration enforcement which had lived in the Justice Department was split into ICE and CPB moved under a new roof on the theory that border control was now a matter of national security.

25 years later, that same department has spent $464 million on airplanes that can't fly, $16.7 million on electric gloves the army found terrified the people that they're used on, and $20 million on the president's campaign ads. Its agents have shot a US citizen five times in Chicago and killed two people in Minneapolis. It deported a torture survivor to the prison that tortured him. That is what the office ridge opened on a Monday morning in 2001 became. Big news in the media, Paramount closes $110 billion Warner Brothers deal. The company is now called Skydance and it owns CBS, CNN, HBO, DC and the Harry Potter franchise. The merger closed Tuesday morning and combined company trades on the New York Stock Exchange as SKYD and holds Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Studios, CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Paramount, DC Studios and the libraries behind Mission Impossible, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. David Ellison, 43, is the chairman and chief executive. Mark Thompson stays at CNN and Barry Weiss at CBS News. Both report directly to Ellison. His father, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and the second richest person in the world, financed the Paramount acquisition and made this one possible. The road ran through the White House in July of 2025 Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over a 60 minutes edit that legal analysis across the spectrum called meritless. Days later, Brendan Carr's FCC approved this Paramount Skydance merger with Carr announcing the new owners would install a ombudsman and review complaints of bias and NDEI programs.

Trump called Ellison a great man who would do the right thing. Larry Ellison gave $45 million to a pro-Trump group. Oracle then anchored the administration's $500 billion AI infrastructure project and became a lead investor in the US version of TikTok. The family now controls two of the three legacy network news brands and a slice of the platform where Americans under 30 get their news. They are also open Christian nationalists, very good friends of the Trump administration, and are taking part in what is called the Seven Mountains mandate, the Christian nationalist ideology founded in the 70s, that Christians should control the seven spheres of society and influence before the return of Christ can occur. This is all part of the Christian nationalist paradigm, not because they actually believe in the truth of Christ, but because they want power. It is all for propaganda. This will dramatically shift, especially in the wake of Trump TV, our first kind of state TV channel. It will dramatically alter the news that people get, the bias that's inserted and the propaganda that is produced for channels like HBO Max. The Independence Board, meant to protect CNN, will be appointed by Ellison's own board. The Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general cleared the deal under the consent decree requiring a five member news editorial Independence Board within 180 days. Journalists with 10 years of experience, no more than two from one party, empowered to set principles and arbitrate biased decisions. Its members are chosen by Skydance's board of directors, which Ellison chairs. Connecticut's attorney general, who signed, called it a compromise rather than a victory. Again, the Seven Mountains mandate is a doctrine from the charismatic Christian movement, popularized since the early 2000s by figures around the new apostolic reformation. It holds that Christians are called to take dominion of seven spheres of society, government, education, family, religion, business, arts and entertainment, and media. Adherents include figures around the administration like Paula White, Trump's faith advisor. She's preached it. Speaker Mike Johnson has appeared with its proponents. There's no public evidence that the Ellison subscribe to it, but they do subscribe to Christian nationalism, which is woven into it. What the doctrine describes is a strategy, capture the institutions that shape belief, starting with the one that tells people what happened today, i.e. the news. What closed Tuesday is the largest single consolidation of the media mountain in American history approved by a government that announced in advance what it expected the new owners to do with it and overseen by a board the owner appoints. AJ. Liebling wrote in 1960 that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. The number of people who own one got a lot smaller this Tuesday.