Journalist Catherine Heritage faced challenges with CBS as they delayed broadcasting an important story about Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the midterms. Her determination offers a critical insight into media biases and the power struggles within major news outlets. Additionally, this episode discusses the impact of leaving political narratives unchecked, and how such media strategies might influence public opinion and election outcomes. Join us for a deep dive into these crucial conversations.
SPEAKER 01 :
This podcast is supported by Midi Health. Are you in midlife, feeling dismissed, unheard, or just plain tired of the old healthcare system? You’re not alone. In fact, even today, 75% of women seeking care for menopause and perimenopause issues are left entirely untreated. But it’s time for a change. It’s time for Middie. Middie’s not just a healthcare provider. It’s a women’s telehealth clinic founded and supported by world-class leaders in women’s health. Their clinicians provide one-on-one, face-to-face consultations where they truly listen to your unique needs. They offer a full range of holistic, data-driven solutions that isn’t one-size-fits-all care. This is care uniquely tailored for you. At Middie, you will find that their mission is clear, to help all women thrive in midlife, giving them access to the health care they deserve. Because they believe midlife isn’t the middle at all. It is the beginning of your second act. Ready to feel your best and write your second act script? Visit JoinMiddie.com today to book your personalized, insurance-covered virtual visit. That’s JoinMiddie.com. Middie, the care women deserve.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I actually don’t want to talk yet. This is so great. This, by the way, is a World War II veteran, Dominic Citrelli, playing the national anthem at 104 years old at a hockey game for the New York Islanders. This is so awesome. Here are the two more. ¶¶ I feel like I shouldn’t play all of it, but I want to play all of it. But anyway, this is Craig Collins filling in on the Dana Show. DLash, DanaLashRadio on X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to the show. One of the cooler things I saw over the holidays that went very viral, 104-year-old World War II veteran just crushing it on the saxophone before a New York Islanders hockey game. This is the kind of thing we should see more in our society. And I figured out of all this stuff to talk about today, it’d be nice to at least start on that note because it’s uplifting and it’s something totally different than what the rest of this crap is. All right, let’s get Zoran Mamdani, who was sworn in as the mayor of New York and said horrible things, things that seem very different from any of the, um, I guess, core values, belief systems, all the stuff that has made America great. This seems like it’s the opposite. Here is one of those moments that went very viral where he said what is going to replace individualism, which again seems bad. This sounds a whole lot like communism, baby. He calls it social democracy or socialism’s democracy, democratic socialist. I don’t know if that’s what this is. And actually, I will say this before I actually play on this. I do know that both are eerily similar anyway. They’re not even trying to pretend they’re all that different.
SPEAKER 05 :
Communities have existed as distinct from one another. We will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. What?
SPEAKER 03 :
If our… I love how only some people cheered for that. There was a moment where a lot of people were yelling something very different. But the warmth of collectivism sounds a whole lot to me like the government is going to take care of you, baby. Just let the government handle everything. And then all of a sudden you have no rights at all. And all of a sudden the government is in charge of everything, controls all the means of production, and we’re full-on communist. This is scary. Some of the stuff he says… as legitimately scary. I will go a step further in my discussion here, though, and say a thing that you may or may not hear a lot of places in news media talking about Zoran Mamdani. I do want to wait to have the receipts match the expectation. Very, very often in news media, a lot of people tell you they do this a lot to Trump. And I’m not pretending as though I think things are going to go well in New York City. I definitely don’t. But I do want to dive deeper into that after the failed experiment that is having basically a communist in charge of the biggest city in our country. um because without the receipts if it was a lot of campaign promises that he doesn’t attempt a lot of things that don’t actually happen then all you’re really left with is talking about the stupidity of the voter to believe that someone’s going to do things that they can’t do if it’s the opposite if these things are actually attempted What I think the nice aspect of a probably terrible story will be is we’ll hopefully be able to point to it as a thing we shouldn’t do. It hopefully will be the opportunity to learn the lesson from the mistake when it’s made here in our country. Now, granted, I know a lot of that is expecting or accepting something to happen that you’d rather not see happen. But he is the mayor. He was elected. The people there chose him. He’s going to be able to wield that power in unique ways. And how he chooses to do it will demonstrate, I think, what the future of the Democratic Party is. Because I doubt very much that one thing will happen that Democrats are probably hoping to happen, that he does the things he promised to do and that good stuff happens because of it. It’s either going to be that he doesn’t fulfill his promises or he fulfills them in horrible ways for that society and for our country, or at least that city. So we will see. That’s my expectation. But again, I’d really like for the results to match the prediction. Let’s do this here. This is what people actually were chanting before Zoran even took the stage and said things. I think he was sitting on stage, actually, but not actually speaking up at the microphone yet. Because this doesn’t sound bad at all. This sounds totally fine. That everybody sees the enemy of the city as being anyone that’s doing well. Tax the rich. They just chanted it over and over again. That went on for about 30 seconds or so. And Zoran was smiling on the stage as he was hearing them do that and point and yell and scream things. And guess what? The rich are going to move. The rich are going to move will be my response to that because a distribution of wealth isn’t going to work. very well if that’s one of the main things that’s a focus of the city of New York, as we’ve seen a bunch of other places and in New York already. People with the means to do it, if you provide them no alternative, meaning if there aren’t loopholes created so they can continue to avoid paying whatever ridiculous amount of money you’re asking them to pay. And yeah, of course, the rich should pay taxes. Everybody should pay taxes. But there is a difference between designing a political platform around the idea that people who are wealthy are bad, because that is essentially what the left is doing. They’re trying to say that people who are wealthy is bad, acknowledging that people are wealthy and that some people might not be paying a fair amount of their money into a system is just simply a true thing. It happens. People skirt all kinds of laws and figure out loopholes the way that we might not want them to. But darn it, they have the money and they have the employees, the accountants to do this sort of stuff. And I’ve said that before in every regard. is that when you create a avenue to circumvent some of these control things, the people who are going to have the most access to it are the people who have a system of support in place that can prevent it. So even when you say you’re going to tax the rich, actually doing it is much harder. But anyway, none of that is actually the point, because just believing that the bad guys are not you, because they’re over here and they’re successful… Causes your society to chase them away. And then you find out how bad things go when none of those people live there. When everybody that was creating the jobs in the first place leaves for some other state, things go poor and poor. But I just thought that was interesting because I do think a misconception within this conversation is like some conservatives don’t want the rich to be taxed at all. Like, don’t make them pay any money. Let them keep all of it. And that’s not true. Although I’d actually love for everybody not to be taxed at all. If I’m being truly candid, I’d love for income taxes to go away entirely. And President Trump has alluded to that being an aspect of doing more tariffs, which to a lot of people is a tax anyway. But hey, if you do the tariff and then I get to decide what items I want to buy or not, and you no longer just steal part of my money, I think I feel happier about that. I think if I have to choose between one of the two, I go with the one where I get more choice over who my money goes to and what I spend it on than the one where I don’t. And where a whole bunch of it is just spent on fraudulent daycares in Minnesota that I’d rather not be funding and that a whole lot of other people would rather not be funding. But I digress. As I said a second ago… I think the misconception between the left and the right, at least from the left’s perspective on this, is that the right doesn’t want to tax the rich at all. And that’s not necessarily true. We want everyone to be treated the same. We don’t want people who are successful to be treated uniquely unfairly because it’s not going to be good for everyone if you do that because they’re not going to stay. That’s the most simplistic one. That’s usually the one that I say to a liberal, like a friend of mine who’s very liberal, that they eventually acknowledge. Like, okay, yeah, you know, the rich person could leave. And they don’t actually think it’ll happen, but it will. Anyway, I’ll move on. Other things out there. I thought this was really interesting. Producer Steven actually sent me a lot of great audio today. This was one of those things. Former CBS reporter, Catherine Heritage, talking about how Weird it was to work at CBS and have her story spiked about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Now, a couple things are really important about this story. First, no one did the thing, at least in mainstream news media, that Catherine eventually did before the 2022 midterm election. No one did this in 2020 leading up to the presidential election. And by her admitting that you can find a forensic expert to check the authenticity of the data that came from the laptop, which of course you can do that. Um, the fact that you can actually do that is something media denied for a while. So she starts there and then she goes on about how the story was buried till after the midterm elections. So not only was it prevented from impacting the presidential election of 2020 and CBS News actively tried to stop it from being something that impacted the midterm election of 2022, which is just insane. Then when you finally get a story on the news at all, what’s crazy to me is that this reporter says it obviously opened the door to additional reporting that CBS said wasn’t important, partially because they had buried the story for so long it became something that they could try to say with a straight face people were no longer interested in. But here is part of her description of just how odd it was to be told no several times at a major news outlet as she thought she was doing some darn good journalism and And I think she was too.
SPEAKER 07 :
We eventually broadcast a story about the Hunter Biden laptop after the midterm elections in 2022. We commissioned a forensic review. got a copy of the laptop data. I have it here still. That’s amazing. I went to a lot of effort to get the cleanest copy of the laptop data, the same data that was provided to the FBI, because I didn’t want to have any professional journalistic risk for CBS News. I wanted this thing to be totally locked down. When we did the story, we did it after the midterms. I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms. And my training is that you should always do the story when it’s ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle.
SPEAKER 03 :
You should not be.
SPEAKER 07 :
Once we got the laptop story on the morning news, I felt that there was so much there that we could still do. For example, in the text messages, there’s unfortunately… The use of the N-word, the liberal use of the N-word. And I thought this was worthy of a story, but I was told that it was not something that interested CBS News.
SPEAKER 03 :
It is crazy to hear that, too, because if you flip the sides of the political aisle, they’re tremendously interested in that any time of day, any time of year, regardless of what’s going on in the political cycle. They would run that nonstop. If it’s a member of the Trump family using certain words instead of a member of the Biden family, it’s just surreal to hear her say that and how far she went to be at the utmost of the integrity, top of the pyramid in the world of her profession. And they still spiked so much of this. And she’s just one person. I can’t imagine the other people, if they even attempted this stuff, who were obviously also told no. But this is what everyone is talking about when they say you can no longer trust mainstream news media. This is why, and we’re getting more of those receipts, and now has to be the time that we pay attention, not the time where we tune out. A quick break, a lot coming up. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana Show.
SPEAKER 16 :
Partners, that’ll make it happen. It’s our friends over at Patriot Mobile. It is the only Christian conservative cell phone service in the nation, and with Patriot Mobile, you know what you’re getting, and you know what your money’s going to, because it’s a like-minded company, right? With Patriot Mobile, they’re like-minded. Your money is not going to wind up in some political action, leftist political action committee promoting gun control or DEI. They give a lot of momentum and a lot of muscle to the things that you believe in, and they really back it at the ballot box as well. And the causes you matter, First, Second Amendment, veterans, first responders. And when you switch to Patriot Mobile, you know, you’re voting with your dollars, really. You’re defending freedom every time you make a call, every time you text, every time you’re on social media. It’s easy to switch. Keep your number and phone or upgrade. You can get help from their 100% U.S.-based team. If you’re stuck in a contract or you owe money on your phone, they have a contract buyout program. They make it so easy to switch with their 100% U.S.-based team. team and their premium access that they have on all three major U.S. networks. I’ve had them for over 10 years. I’ve never had an issue and I’ve used my service all over the world. So what are you waiting for? Visit PatriotMobile.com slash Dana or call 972-PATRIOT and use promo code Dana to get that free month of service. Switch today. PatriotMobile.com slash Dana. Code Dana. 972-PATRIOT.
SPEAKER 01 :
This podcast is supported by Midi Health. Are you in midlife, feeling dismissed, unheard, or just plain tired of the old healthcare system? You’re not alone. In fact, even today, 75% of women seeking care for menopause and perimenopause issues are left entirely untreated. But it’s time for a change. It’s time for Middie. Middie’s not just a healthcare provider. It’s a women’s telehealth clinic founded and supported by world-class leaders in women’s health. Their clinicians provide one-on-one, face-to-face consultations where they truly listen to your unique needs. They offer a full range of holistic, data-driven solutions that isn’t one-size-fits-all care. This is care uniquely tailored for you. At Middie, you will find that their mission is clear, to help all women thrive in midlife, giving them access to the health care they deserve. Because they believe midlife isn’t the middle at all. It is the beginning of your second act. Ready to feel your best and write your second act script? Visit JoinMiddie.com today to book your personalized, insurance-covered virtual visit. That’s JoinMiddie.com. Middie, the care women deserve.
SPEAKER 10 :
And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right. It’s time for a quick five on the Dana Show. D. Lash, Dana Lash Radio, and X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to her at Radio Craig C. If for some reason you want to follow me and my very small social media followings, I have to talk about college football as one of the quick five. One of the two teams that made it into the college football playoff demonstrated a deservingness to be there. That would be number 10, Miami, which beat number two, the Ohio State Buckeyes. The Ohio State Buckeyes 24-14 in a game that probably feels close and was close throughout, but definitely seemed like Miami was coming away with a win there. Their defense demonstrated one of the biggest reasons they deserve to be in the college football playoff. Then there’s Alabama getting absolutely shellacked by Indiana, which either means that IU is destined to be this year’s national champion or Alabama should not have been in the playoff or a little bit of both. maybe, because that game was hilariously one-sided, especially for anyone like me that would have hoped that a different team, that would be Notre Dame, would have been in the playoff instead of Alabama. I have no idea how the game would have actually gone, I-U-N-N-D, but I’m assuming it would have been more competitive. Oregon and Texas Tech was also uniquely uncompetitive. So in the quarterfinal round of the college football playoff, you had two uniquely terrible football games. which at this point, trying to get the absolute right teams to the round that they’re getting in in the world of college football. Texas Tech had a bye. For them to be beat up that bad either means the bye is what caused the problem or they’re just terrible. No, I’m kidding. They’re probably not terrible. Football Texas Tech was pretty good this year. But again, it shows that no matter how hard they try, I’m not really sure that the best teams in the country are all competing at the level. There’s no way Texas Tech would have missed the playoff. But again, losing 23-0 to Oregon does not make you feel like a team that really had a shot. All right. Other things out there that I thought were interesting. What underwear you wore on New Year’s Eve might tell the world what’s expected for you in the new year. Essentially, it might guarantee you certain things. This is unsurprising. Social media influencers are going viral with photos of themselves in their underwear color of choice. Which again, not surprising. That’s the kind of thing people do. But green means you might be wealthy. A yellow means you might be lucky and or successful, whether it’s wealth or not. A black means you might gain some power. And then finally, and my favorite, brown means you’re indecisive. and likely to continue to be indecisive into the next year because you wore brown underwear. I did not know that was a thing. I do now, and mostly because of the amount of young model-esque people who decided to put photos of themselves in their underwear all over the internet and couch that in, we’re just trying to tell you what we’re hoping for in the new year. Because of course, that’s the only reason to put that stuff up there. And then finally, one last thing, many, many people are now taking GLP-1 drugs, apparently so much that people are buying less groceries. That’s a big story that’s out there. Maybe we’ll touch on that more in a bit. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
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SPEAKER 03 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. DLash, DanaLashRadio on X on Twitter are great ways to stay connected to her and everything going on there. Nick Shirley is very hated by a lot of mainstream media right now. Very much liked by a lot of people who think mainstream media lies to you all the time, which of course they do. But CNN tried to go after him. They tried to do a gotcha segment with him where they asked him if he believed the things he was saying were the truth. Now, I want to be really specific about this. Nick Shirley and someone who I think is a follower of his that must watch his YouTube show and had the goods as far as the information printed off from government websites to track down a lot of the facilities that seem to be fraudulent daycares and whatnot. He put up a video where all he did was visit them. And he asked the people in the places if they answered the door, if they were there at all, if they were legitimate businesses. And he let you decide if what was happening was real or not. He didn’t actually go as far as to say without any proof whatsoever that these businesses are 100% fraudulent. He just decided to try to visit them and see how many of them looked legitimate. That’s exactly the thing mainstream media is supposed to be doing. And of course, like local news media is supposed to be doing. And to be honest, it’s something that Minnesota news media has done before. It’s just been years. You can find video from 2018 of them talking about some stories involving Somalian communities and daycare fraud and how ridiculous it got. So this is something that media at times has been willing to discuss. Of course, not recently for whatever reason. But here is CNN trying to get you with Nick Shirley. And I love the second half of this audio because it’s somewhat more hilarious. It’s entirely more hilarious than CNN intended for it to be. But here we go.
SPEAKER 08 :
I mean, they would say, look, these fraud cases have been going on, but they’ve already done like 80 indictments. The cases have been going on, you know, for years.
SPEAKER 17 :
And why did I show up one day in Minnesota and go to all these daycares? No children. They’re receiving millions of dollars. We encourage nearly $110 million in fraud in one day.
SPEAKER 08 :
How do you know that all the allegations that you’re making are true?
SPEAKER 17 :
How do I know that they’re true? Well, we showed you guys what was happening, and then you guys can go ahead and make your own analysis.
SPEAKER 08 :
So we can make our own analysis. Are you 100% sure you’re true?
SPEAKER 17 :
Yeah, I am 100% sure I’m true.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s a weird way to say that, by the way, for both people. Are you 100% sure that the things you depicted in your video are legitimate? I could have been the way to say it, but you don’t want to say it that way, because of course they are. He put things in a video where they walked up to places, knocked on doors, showed them. And so, again, one of the biggest takeaways from Nick Shirley’s video is the amount of places that didn’t answer the door at all, that were supposed to be operating but weren’t, that were taking in millions of dollars in child care. This is the part of the video that’s hilarious, though.
SPEAKER 08 :
CNN is looking into Shirley’s claims. Hi, my name’s Whitney Wild. I’m a correspondent for CNN. We reached out to several of the daycares featured in the now viral video. Only one daycare facility answered and said they are…
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s my favorite part. And she tried to breeze right through that. She goes, we called a whole bunch of the places. We didn’t go knock on their door, which is exactly what Shirley did and what you should have done. But you let it be one step lazier, one step more removed. And only one place answered the phone. And when you ask that place, hey, are you a legitimate daycare? They said, yeah, we are. Is that it? Can we be done now, CNN? And then she even went further on one of those phone calls.
SPEAKER 08 :
Or a legitimate business. Knock on the door. Have you seen the videos purporting that some of these daycares don’t have kids inside? Minnesota Republicans.
SPEAKER 03 :
I love that they didn’t let the answer to that air. That she asked one of the daycares, the only one that answered, that there’s no kids there. And the response, we don’t know what it is. We have no idea. She asked somebody their opinion of how terrible this whole thing is with Nick Shirley. And who knows what the answer is. Maybe the answer was, yeah, there’s no kids at ours right now, but we have an excuse for that. By the way, my other favorite thing that happened on the internet over the holidays was the group of people, the Somalian daycare center leaders, one of the daycare centers, whichever, that said that they got broken into and only all of the paperwork was stolen. This is the funniest story out there. There’s even now a video of WCCO CBS in Minnesota going through with news people to show the hole in the wall that somebody apparently created to then get into the business, to then steal a bunch of documents that say what teachers work there, what students go there. And for some reason, stole some of the checks, but not all of them out of the checkbook. The reason I find this so funny is many people who’ve seen this video say the hole created in drywall could only have been created as cleanly as it is if it was made from the inside of the building. If you were making that hole from the outside of the building, it wouldn’t look as nice. You would have broken more of the drywall. So hilarious. that they might have even demonstrated a way that they couldn’t recreate of how the people, quote unquote, broke into the business in the first place. Going above and beyond to try to prove that even though they’re not going to pass an audit now, that it’s not their fault that some big bad guys stole things from them. All right, let’s do something that I plan to do later in the show, but I might as well do now. Uh, CNN is very proud of its very drunk, um, uh, new year’s Eve show that it’s been doing for years. Uh, Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper are the two main hosts of it. Uh, Andy Cohen at one point broke real bad, uh, with mayor Eric Adams, who is leaving, uh, the, well now has left the office of mayor in New York so that Zoran Mamdani can be sworn in over a Quran, which is also crazy. Uh, that that happened and not a Bible. Uh, but nonetheless, here’s what Andy Cohen had to say about mayor Adams. Uh, when the rest of the show seemed to be begging him not to say stuff. Uh, but he said things about pardons and, you know, don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you. Basically. He didn’t say those words, but they’re basically the tone, uh, I’m no defender of Eric Adams. I just think it’s weird CNN is so proud of their New Year’s Eve show that’s so uniquely terrible. I don’t think that many people watch it, but a whole lot of us see clips online of how bad things probably got during the show. Here we go.
SPEAKER 11 :
I would like to say, watching the final moments of Mayor Adams, chaotic. Are we going on a de Blasio style? I just want to say, I mean, he got his pardons.
SPEAKER 21 :
I’m just saying great you got your Martin’s go off Will will fiddle with what we have with what you’ve left us with
SPEAKER 03 :
This is so weird. And again, they’re proud of this. They put this on every year. And yes, at some point, Cohen, whenever there’s an outgoing mayor in New York, also breaks bad on that mayor. But they just get absolutely blitzed on television for some reason. There was another… Another moment that went very viral. A lot of people on the left are up in arms. They’re upset about this. Both of the hosts seem to not like this joke. But Amy Sedaris made what I thought was one of the best jokes of the night when asked a question about where the best place would be to find a man in 2026. Of course, she’s standing there with two gay men who are the co-hosts of this show. And the joke she made, uniquely hilarious in the world of all the things we talk about, about men saying that they’re women and then going to women’s restrooms and whatnot. I’m burying the lead here. I’m ruining the joke for you. But a lot of people all over the internet and a lot of the people on the far left thought this was deeply insensitive and wrong. I don’t know. If you’re going from the rules of humor, this is genuinely funny, I thought.
SPEAKER 19 :
Where’s the best place to meet a man in 2026?
SPEAKER 15 :
Oh, really? Well, where’s a good place to meet a man? I’d say in the ladies’ room, but I don’t know. Where can you meet a man? Maybe… Silent.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I like that you actually even see her cheeks get a little rosy. She’s a comedian, so she probably didn’t care that much about the swing and the miss with the audience that was there. But that’s a great joke. That’s all the levels of a thing that you want in the world of humor. It is surprising, not what you were expecting the answer to be, and it’s definitely grounded in a lot of the conversations people have been having over the last couple years. One of the biggest one being that people on one side of the political aisle would rather not have people be able to declare that they’re women and then go to have, you know, go to the restroom in the women’s room, even if they’re actually biologically a dude. That feels like that’s wrong. Somehow that’s controversial in the society we live in to say that, though. And the left thinks you’re mean and terrible. which, of course, they thought Amy was during that part of the show. I thought that was really a good and funny moment on the show that, again, I didn’t actually watch, but saw later via all the reruns. I actually saw headlines of news articles talking about that joke. Which is kind of funny, because again, the CNN audience itself, I don’t think is that large. So most of the other people who wrote about how offensive it was probably also saw it as a clip and not as a real thing they watched on television at night, like live. But when I read the headlines, I then went to go search for the clip, saw it, and was like, no, that’s hilarious. Every part of that is exactly what humor is supposed to be. One last thing that I thought was kind of interesting, and I’ll get into it in more detail a little bit later on, but Tim Walls, who of course is potentially going to be in a whole lot of trouble for the amount of fraud that’s going on in Minnesota that he was at best asleep at the wheel, at worst benefiting from, as many people I think assume it’s going to be the latter that’s going to be the problem. He went viral online for giving us a fit check over the holidays. He was out in the snow. He said he was wearing, you know, a Brooks hat, some winter windproof pants, excuse me, a Nike zip up thing and other crap. And it’s just hilarious to me to hear a guy like this, try this hard to separate himself from the biggest story in the country. I think in the world of politics over the last several weeks, by doing something uniquely stupid and woke, the quick fit check, that this guy probably had some younger person on his team tell him he should do. But he’s a uniquely desperate individual when it comes to the performative things he does, the political ways in which he outs himself as being just a giant piece of crap, stolen valor, whatever you want it to be. There’s a litany of things he does that show how disingenuous, how inauthentic he is as a human. And this is the latest one. when he is surrounded by one of the biggest controversies we’ve seen, even though I think it’s probably just the tip of the iceberg as far as stories like this that we’ll see in 2026. But he’s certainly surrounded by something bad, and he’s on the Internet doing a fit check in the snow. All right, quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 16 :
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On the go and need a quick news fix with a fun twist? Follow Dana’s Absurd Truth Podcast for bite-sized informative episodes, perfect for your busy schedule on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
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This is The Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. Lots of stuff out there to talk about. D-Lash, Dana Lash Radio on X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to her. At Radio Craig C. If you want to follow someone who still calls it Twitter and barely tweets at all, that would be me and my 500 or so followers. I’d love to have you be there too. I don’t promise any content remotely valuable compared to Dana’s though. I think that’s about as good as I can do. All right, a couple quick things out there that I thought were interesting. Alex Earl is the name of a social media influencer. Not that it matters normally, but I’ll go ahead and throw it out there. She’s worth about $20 million, according to the internet. She is 25, and she spent her holiday in St. Barts with Tom Brady, who is 48 years old. So 23 years her senior. Tommy’s worth $300 million, at least. I made more than that during his NFL career, but that’s the latest net worth projection of Tom Brady. People are upset, at least some people are, that the 48-year-old would spend time with the 25-year-old, even though, as producer Steven pointed out, Bill Belichick, older than Tommy by a bit, has a girlfriend who is younger than Alex Earl. So there’s that out there. I love when people get mad about this stuff. Mostly because, come on, is usually my response to it. I even had a family member go on a long rant about how disgusting it was that Bill Belichick would be attracted to a woman in her 20s and date her. When I think the reverse is probably the thing that’s grosser or the thing that’s less likely to be true, that the young woman is actually attracted to Bill Belichick. No offense, Bill. Not trying to be a jerk. Just assuming there might be more challenges in that department. Anyone who doesn’t get it when a older than 20 something dude dates a woman in her 20s is simply pretending the world isn’t what it is or life doesn’t exist the way it does or that almost all people who are models are models of a certain age. Just like most people who are athletes are only athletes up until a certain age. Tommy staying in the NFL longer than most. by the way. But all these things are things we know, but don’t often speak out loud. All right. Also this, I thought it was interesting. A list of the words that should be banned in 2026. This isn’t your typical like woke, whatever university trying to say for a certain dumb reasons, we shouldn’t say these words anymore. This is just a school that wants words banned because they’re annoyed by them, which I thought was funny. Six, seven. which is not a word, but that phrase was at the very top of this list because so many people think it’s so funny whenever it’s said and do the stupid 6-7 juggling thing. It just became such a viral moment for so many that it became annoyingly done all the time. Similar to 6-7, demure is also something that people would like to have banned because the internet became obsessed with that word and often described a whole lot of things that are not demure as demure because they were just using the word to basically mean anything instead of reserved or modest in manner, which is what it actually means. So I love that people are up in arms about the use of that one. And then two more, cooked is a word that people think they should stop using. That’s when you’re essentially screwed. I think that one is far less annoying than some of the other ones I’ve already mentioned. And then finally, one of the ones I thought was interesting that made this list full stop. I don’t know that that many people that often in the actual everyday life in which we live use full stop to a ridiculous amount, but that’s fine. I’m okay with that also going away, even though where it comes from is a much better place than internet slang that I find just so much stupider. I find internet slang to be some of the dumbest stuff that we deal with today. I’m the guy yelling for the kids to get off my lawn for sure. But that’s because I think the existence of Internet slang is the convenience of using it while typing on the Internet, not the ability to speak these words in public around other people or someone wants to slap you. They’re probably not going to slap you, but they do want to. I’m just letting you know that’s true. Someone in your vicinity, when you’re saying a bunch of the Internet slang words out loud to them, would like to hit you. All right, other things out there. DoorDash driver was caught doing the unthinkable, according to the internet at least. The DoorDash driver was accepting orders and then creating AI photos that seemed to demonstrate the orders had been dropped off at the locations that they were supposed to be delivering them at and instead just eating a bunch of stuff. So every delivery that this guy went to, he picked up the item, he went online to find the address, added the item into the photo, and then sent it to someone. Caught very quickly, mostly because some of these photos were very dated as far as the locations were concerned, and the photoshopping the AI did was not exactly convincing for some of the food items that were put in front of some of the doors. This was a con that was snuffed out pretty quickly, but also probably one you’re going to see more of. I imagine that more people might use AI to make the fake photo, especially in this world, and then just keep a bunch of stuff. One of the funnier things is that a guy did this when someone only ordered one food item from a store, meaning he really just wanted that one burger or whatever it was. It wasn’t even really a terribly expensive purchase to begin with. So stealing five to ten bucks from someone and losing your job over it seems like it’s not worth the risk there, bud. But nonetheless, the guy did it and he got caught because, again, easier to figure out than the criminal had hoped. And then one final one. I waited till the end of the segment to mention this because it’s adult in nature, but I found it uniquely amusing. A brothel manager was interviewed by, I think, the New York Post and described how festive her establishment gets in Europe over the holidays, how they have Christmas trees and presents, and all the things you’d expect at any sort of heartwarming, family-friendly location. And it just so happens to be at this location. And that part of that story went viral, is that everybody decorates for Christmas, everybody decorates for the holidays. You have the inflatable decorations outside. Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to get more salacious with that. All the things you’re expecting, you just so happen to have them at an establishment like this. And then she also mentioned how some of the clientele they get at that time of year, some of the customers just uniquely don’t want to be anywhere near their family because it’s not a whole lot of people. who come into places like that over the holidays. It’s only people who really don’t want to be around any of their loved ones, which probably isn’t great. But hey, at least they have somewhere to go. At least there’s that. I’m not advocating for it. I’m truly just interested and amused by how everybody decorates for Christmas. Bah humbug if you don’t. Quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show. This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. A bunch of stuff to talk about. CBS News new evening anchor Tony DeCoppo talked about. Hold on, Tony. I talked about how honest he’s going to be about, you know, reporting the news to you. And he said how many people have talked to him about how dishonest a media was before it. So let’s go ahead and play on his big intro to being the new anchor of CBS Evening News.
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has changed since the first person sat in this chair. But for me, the biggest difference is people do not trust us like they used to. And it’s not just us. It’s all of legacy media. Yep. And I get it. I get it because I’ve been hearing about it from just about everybody for more than 20 years as I’ve traveled America on this assignment or that. My mom’s neighbors in West Virginia, my own neighbors in New York City. Thousands and thousands of conversations in between.
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Sometimes, by the way, it is interesting that he admits his own neighbors don’t fully trust him. That doesn’t sound good. I know that he was handpicked and many say that he has much more integrity than the average person at mainstream or legacy media right now. Continues.
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People want to talk to me about our coverage of NAFTA or the Iraq war. Other times it’s all about Hillary Clinton’s emails or Russiagate. or more recently, COVID lockdowns, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or the president’s fitness for office.
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point is on too many stories the press has missed the story because we’ve taken right there by the way i’m pretty much fully on board with them the press has absolutely missed the story they neglected it they ignored it they purposefully silenced it there’s a bunch of ways to change the word miss to be the honest version of what’s happening but miss the story is fine now he gives some excuses i don’t love as much into account the perspective of advocates and not the average american
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Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you. And I know this because at certain points I have been you. I have felt this way, too. I felt like what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn’t reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life and that the most urgent questions simply weren’t being asked. Yep. So here’s my promise to you today and every time you see me in this chair, you come first. Not advertisers, not politicians, not corporate interests. And yes, that does include the corporate owners of CBS. I report for you, which means I tell you what I know, when I know it and how I know it.
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Alright, here you go. Here’s the thing about that. I don’t love when he couches it on some of the misses in news media of not involving enough the opinion of the everyday person. He says that we didn’t often enough rely on your version of events here. And I know he’s not necessarily trying to say it that way, but I just want the truth. I just want him to tell me the things that are real, which is the promise that he makes at the tail end of this video. I don’t need him to couch it in any kind of opinion by anybody or any version of narrative from anyone. I just need the version of events that is accurate. And the problem with mainstream media is is so very often you can get a more thorough description of the actual things going on by going beyond it, by going to some independent news person or person who claims themselves to be an independent journalist who is actually showing up and knocking on doors at places that news media isn’t going. People like Nick Shirley. And you get to judge for yourself when you see the totality of the video, even though you know they’ve edited it. And even though Elon Musk has now just recently said that they’re going to up the amount of money they give to their content creators on X, which might actually be more money than you make per video on something like YouTube. And sure, money will always corrupt people. There are people who will just 100% try to get things that go viral for the sake of that and won’t necessarily be reporting anything new to you. It’s easier to corrupt one individual than it is to corrupt a whole organization. The problem, though, is these organizations are already fully corrupt. None of them actually are independently capable of preventing this, and I think it’ll wind up that CBS is still among those groups. I think no matter how much good intention, how many people are involved from the higher levels desiring to make things that are not as one-sided as they’ve been in the past, you’d have to do a full bottom-up uh… version of recreating uh… the employee structure at these places because the for so long they’ve hired people on one side almost entirely i’ve told the story before on this radio show of filling in for dana lash in other places i’ve worked at organizations like this organizations were a decent amount of the people no matter what the product was on air all had a differing opinion than the on-air product and all crapped on it constantly There were people that even though, you know, the strategy of the company seemed to be one way that behind closed doors would tell you how much they hate it, how terrible it is. And you don’t think those people end up having an influence on the inevitability of the product that gets put on your platform, whatever your platform might be, please. I’ve even told the story several times of a meeting I was in, a large meeting with a lot of people in it, where one of the leaders of the group said that they were no longer gonna hire any white people, especially any white guys, to be producers, which is the job I held at the time. i looked around at the other people there and i’m like that’s a weird thing to say out loud now granted it was woke and it was probably popular with the people who weren’t white dudes i like myself but you shouldn’t say that out even if you do it which i think is still wrong you should just hire people who have the most uh merit for the job you should hire people who are deserving i don’t care what you look like i don’t care who you are man woman you know white black none of that should matter If you’re the best candidate for the job, you should get the opportunity to have the job. That’s the right way to say it. The wrong way is I’m going to be racist against some employees or I’m going to be unfair in some way. And yet it’s so commonplace. So many places do it. And when you hear leaders say stuff like that, you know that there’s a certain amount of things you might say or believe that are not going to make them happy. And so at places like CBS, the whole point of telling you my own anecdotal experience is to convince you that it’s not going to matter if someone at the top of the food chain is willing to have the product be something that maybe it hasn’t been before. You need all the levels. to go. And I know that that means that Barry Weiss or anyone else can just spike down story after story and just say no to this and no to that and keep going that direction. But it won’t matter. At the end of the day, it won’t matter because you’re going to need a whole lot more people to create the product you want. And Tony might be the start of it for CBS Evening News, but he won’t be the end of it. He won’t be the tell-all. And a version of demonstrating this by something totally different in the news is this topic to me. Eric Swalwell is trying to be the next governor of California. And in an interview on MS Now, he said something unique about how he’s going to go after members of ICE who try to hide their identities in public. These are people who are just doing their job. Their job is to remove people who are in the country illegally, or at least detain them, arrest them, all that stuff. They’re being told by the federal government who they work for, not for you if you are a state leader, but the federal government how to do their job, and they’re doing it. And for some reason, Democrats want them to be uniquely held responsible. It’s part of the game they play. The Democratic message to their supporters is to be up in the face of Republican voters. The MAGA movement, whatever they want to call it, whatever the horrible, terrible thing out there is. Of course, they try to make the guy that’s the face of the party, whether it’s Trump or someone else, evil incarnate. But they also want you to pretty much hate everyone who votes on that side of the aisle and criticize them. Of course, we saw a bunch of that during COVID as far as the things you should do to your friends and family who weren’t doing what you think they should be doing. This is just another version of that. This is not something the right advocates for the same way. They do not tell you to harm other people or desire for you to have the ability to know who someone is so you could harm them, which is at the heart of this whole conversation. I just think it’s amazing. how willfully ignorant or maybe not ignorant at all people on the left are to the own radical harm and violence that comes from that side of the political aisle. But here we go. Here’s Swalwell saying how he’s going to punish those who are just doing their job and also trying to protect themselves and their family from being attacked for it.
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What would you bring to the table as a governor of California? You have immense powers as governor of California, and your responsibility is to protect the most vulnerable in the state. So if the president is gonna send ICE agents to chase immigrants to the fields where they work, what I’m gonna do is make sure that they take off their masks and show their faces, that they show their identification. And if they commit crimes, that they’re gonna be charged with crimes. falsely imprisoning people if it’s kidnapping of assault battery they’re going to be held accountable i also think if the governor has the ability to issue driver’s licenses to people in california if you’re going to wear a mask and not identify yourself you’re not going to be eligible to drive a vehicle in california there’s a lot you can do but most importantly you have to go on offense otherwise the most vulnerable in our community will always be on defense
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The last one, the most punitive one in all of it, is truly insane. They’re going to take driver’s licenses away from people who are just doing their job. Again, whether you like the job they’re doing or not, I think the conversation you have to have is with the people in charge of the individuals who are carrying out those orders at a federal level. You can’t try to go after the people on the lowest level of the totem pole, but you’re doing that on purpose because you see them as the most accessible. I mentioned before some of the issues I’ve had in some places I’ve worked because of the absolute difference in opinion from the people who were in positions of power and the product that inevitably was being created on air. I think one of the reasons that I wound up being embroiled in some of those issues is because I was an easier target. that people higher up in the food chain, wherever they might be at these other places, are harder to reach. They’re harder to get to. So the same is true in the fight between Democrats and conservatives. Since these Democrats don’t want to fight any differently than they’re fighting now, the powers that be in the positions of authority who are making the decisions, they want to try to upend the system from the ground up. They want to harm the people at the lowest level of the totem pole because that’s the way they get what they want. And this works. far more often than the opposite this this and effectively allows you to get whatever you actually want wherever you want it instead of going from top down where it would be much harder all right quick break a lot more craig collins filling in on the dana show and now all of the news you would probably miss it’s time for dana’s quick five That’s right. It’s time for a quick five on the Dana Show, D-Lash, Dana Lash Radio, and X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to her and everything going on. Anthony Joshua’s driver has officially been charged with four different crimes in the crash that killed two of Joshua’s coaches and injured him. The person who was responsible for driving the vehicle has been charged with negligent driving, dangerous driving, driving without due care, all things about just driving in excess speeds and driving in ways that are truly reckless. And then finally, driving without a valid driver’s license, which seems like that’s a bad thing. But this is the driver of the vehicle that caused the accident that Anthony Joshua was in the backseat of a car and it actually killed two of his friends. Just sort of a shocking story coming out of Nigeria days after Anthony Joshua had beaten the crap out of Jake Paul in a fight. He then wound up in a pretty horrible car accident that injured him and took the lives of two of his coaches and two of his, it appears, best friends. Another story out there that I saw that I thought was interesting. People are doing a California sober January, which is different than a dry January. A dry January is where you drink no alcohol at all and you remain sober the entire time. A California sobriety is where you’re high instead of drunk the entirety of the month. Apparently, a lot of people plan on having a whole bunch of pot if they’re not going to have any sort of actual alcohol this month. And they think that’s a pretty good thing. They’re saying this is better than the drinking. I’m not going to weigh in and tell you which one is better or which one is worse. I just don’t think you can call yourself sober if you’re not sober. And any version of being intoxicated and or high feels to me to be the antithesis of what sober is supposed to be. So I just think it’s kind of interesting that people want to take that version of what other people are doing and change it ever so slightly so that they can also feel good about themselves, even if the reality is they’re doing a profoundly different thing. And some of the people who claim that they’re going to do this actually barely ever smoke. So they’re going to do this instead, I guess. Another thing that I thought was interesting… I mentioned it very quickly earlier, but one in eight Americans have now tried or are actually being treated with a GLP-1 drug. This is causing a lot of things to be surprising within our society. One of those is the amount of people who are spending way less money on groceries. There are more people who are just having far less appetite than they had before because of GLP-1 that are buying less at the grocery store. I think the version of a take on this story that I don’t necessarily need to go down, but it’s out there, is that this might mean that grocery items become more expensive because there’s not enough demand and there’s too much supply. And then grocery stores are trying not to lose money from all the wasted product Unlike other industries, we’re saying when items don’t get bought, prices go down. In this world, in the world of certain food products, since things are finite and they go bad, the expectation might actually be that some of the costs go up, which seems weird because supply and demand usually goes the other way. But that’s a take again that I’m not committing to. I just thought it was out there as a thing. And then finally, one last one that I thought was amusing. Rock star Mick Jagger’s workout has gone viral. The man does a whole lot of stuff to keep himself in shape. I’ve seen the Rolling Stones in the last few years in concert, and I can tell you Mick still behaves a lot like the guy you heard of him being when he was in his 20s, even though he’s now in his 80s. These include ballet lessons that he still takes. Yoga, Pilates, meditation, all kinds of stuff. And then just regular workouts, too. A few sessions a week at the gym. He also does swimming and kickboxing. So the man stays in about as good a shape as anybody in their 80s can stay in, who’s also lived a heck of a life. I think Mick Jagger has also done some things and maybe had some California Januaries himself that may have taken a different toll on his body. But apparently still doing OK, still doing fine and proud of it. And many people now would like to do the fitness routine of one Mick Jagger, which I find amusing because I don’t think you’re going to do everything that Mick does in his life. You’re just going to do the working out. And I would actually go even a step further. I don’t care how good a shape I’m in. I’m not doing ballet. It’s not something I’m doing. I’ll do some of the other stuff. I’m not going with the ballet thing. It’s not for me. Quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
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Keep your finger on the pulse with The Dana Show podcast. Delivering timely news with insightful analysis. Whenever you want, straight to you on YouTube, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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This is The Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. A whole bunch of stuff out there to talk about. One of the funnier things out there in the news, at least funny to me, but I have a dark sense of humor sometimes, is the group of people that are saying that their daycare got broken into. That’s not funny. If I actually believed that it happened, it would be the opposite of funny. But since it really doesn’t seem as though it happened, it seems very amusing. So what they’re saying now is that someone actually tunneled in from the outside of their daycare. I think WCCO actually reported on this in Minnesota. That would be a CBS affiliate there showing the new evidence of the new things that seem to show that not only are some of these businesses that Nick Shirley visited actually legitimate businesses, but that they’ve now been hit with horrible, terrible things. in response to the stories going viral and the people who think that these places are fraudulent. But my favorite part, as I said, is showing the hole that seems to be cut in the wall that some people say people use to break in to the facility. The problem is that the drywall on the inside of the building stayed too well intact, meaning it looks almost perfect, whereas the drywall on the outside of the building is the part that seemed to crumble. If you were cutting a hole into drywall, you would think the side that you were putting the knife in through is the side that would be cleaner, and the side that you weren’t actually trying to aim through is the side that would be more broken. That’s just one of a few things that seem to demonstrate that this story is ridiculous. But I do have some of the audio of them showing how it worked. Now, granted, I know you can’t see this. So just please picture an incredibly clean hole from inside of the business and a much more damaged exterior version of something, which makes you wonder how exactly that occurred that way, how it didn’t wind up being messier on the inside of the facility somehow. And you don’t have questions. You don’t have answers. You just have questions. But here we go.
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of what they say vandals did. Now, this is where they say the vandals got into the daycare through cinder block and appeared to be unsuccessful when trying many other ways. The daycare says it appears the vandals first tried to saw into the door of the Family Dollar next door in the shopping center, but that didn’t work. The manager claims those who broke in went straight to the office, stealing information of the many children who were taken care of here.
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We are not a part of any harmful things that are being said. We have no problem with CCAP and our licensing has been good, even the inspections. I want to say no intimidation is going to stop us.
SPEAKER 03 :
We’re not going to stop the work we’re doing and potentially the fraud that we’re doing here. And no one’s going to get us to not do it. It’s hilarious that this story to me is a claim that someone broke into the building, stole checks out of their checkbook, not the entire checkbook, but just some checks, and then stole all the documents that would be necessary in some sort of audit to prove that they’re a legitimate company. It’s just sort of amazing. And here, you know, the best way for me to say it, There are going to be times in your life where you know people are lying, where they’re lying to you. And it’s not that you think they’re lying. You know they’re lying. And the thing that’s crazy is the people on the other side who are telling the lie don’t want to believe that part. The people in this fraud thing in Somalia right now, all the people tied to it, don’t want to believe that you know as much information as you do. They want to believe they can still trick you. So they’ll still do as many things as they can. to demonstrate that what they’re saying is true, even though you know it’s not. And that is the saddest part of the interaction between those who lie and those who tell the truth, or at least those who know the truth. And this has happened before. At times when these daycares have been caught, they did exactly what you’re seeing now. They flooded the daycare with kids, they made it seem as though they’re very active, and they waited a few weeks to see if anybody came by to check on them, and then everything went away again. And this was back in 2018 when they caught people for doing this before. They had surges of activity and versions of defending themselves from claiming that things are not fraud. Liars don’t admit they’re lying very often. Almost ever, actually. It takes quite a bit because, and I’m guessing here… More so than anything else. The biggest reason people when confronted with being told that they’re lying and say that they’re not, they don’t want to admit it is now that’s two sins. It’s not just the sin of whatever the thing is that they did in the first place. In this case, the fraud or whatever it might be. It’s the second sin of lying about it. I actually, I even further don’t understand it when really the only big deal is the lying. That to me makes even less sense when there actually isn’t any other sin. But I digress. I won’t even dive there because that to me is even more complicated and convoluted to get through. But in this case, a lot of these individuals who are trying to convince you that the thing you already saw with your eyes isn’t true are really hoping you’re stupid. That’s essentially how it goes, and really hoping that you will believe the new version of the narrative and all the people screaming and yelling, how dare you believe the other version ever, when the reality is, of course, that’s not at all what makes sense in the society in which we live. All right, I want to play this audio. This is interesting to me. This is an Israeli cybersecurity billionaire who is saying that we need to take away the First Amendment, essentially. We need to control social media platforms, what people are saying. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care where you come from. I don’t care if you’re on a certain side of a conflict that I support in all honesty. Anybody who’s saying get rid of the first amendment is someone I disagree with wholeheartedly. And that seems to be the message here. And actually I saw in response to this video, A bunch of people that were commenting that America and X are the only thing standing in the way of what people want, which is control over everything, and what people have, which is no control over us. And we need them to keep not having control over the totality of this country and at least some of the social media platforms out there. But here is someone saying that we really, really need to do away with free speech in the First Amendment because it’s bad, at least for his business, or bad for business in general.
SPEAKER 09 :
I know it’s difficult to hear, but it’s time to limit the first amendment in order to protect it and quickly before it’s too late.
SPEAKER 08 :
What do you mean?
SPEAKER 09 :
I mean that we need to control the platforms. all the social platforms. We need to stack rank the authenticity of every person that expresses themselves online and take control over what they are saying based on that ranking. The government should control.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, that is a horrible idea. That is a terrible, terrible, horrible idea. Again, I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’re the person providing this message and I just happen to agree with you on a bunch of other stuff or not. I definitely disagree here. It is a couple things if it’s even meant in a genuinely good way. And it’s never meant in a good way. I want to make sure you understand that. But if someone thinks they’re well-intentioned when they say this out loud, what they think they’re doing, and this is my assessment, this is my assumption, this is not what I think reality is. I want to make sure, again, people understand I’m trying to describe the psychology of someone I fundamentally disagree with because this is where I usually go in this discussion. But they think what they’re doing is protecting society from from people who have no interest in doing things good. They have bad ideas, bad actors, bad intention, want to convince everybody of fake lies, whatever it might be. You want to silence the people that you think are harming society. And the best way to actually confront those ideas is to give them daylight and argue with them, not to tell them to shut up and they’re not allowed to talk anymore. That’s the thing that those people don’t understand. Whoever believe that they’re well-intentioned while saying out loud that we need to restrict things like the first amendment and freedom of speech. They again think that they’re only going to silence the bad guys. Even though, of course, we know that once the government is capable of silencing people, they’ll silence anybody they disagree with, regardless of who’s good or bad, and inevitably silence a whole lot more of the good guys than any of the bad guys, as we saw during COVID and other times. But beyond that, too, the other thing that I think is so important is the people who believe they don’t even need to have these arguments. And I think there’s two reasons for that. There’s a lot of arrogant people in our society. I don’t think that you’re necessarily one of those people who’s ever listening to this show. So don’t take this as an insult to you. But there are a lot of people out there who think that it’s not worth it to argue with people that they think they’re much smarter than. Like, oh, I’m much smarter than this person. I know more than this person does. How dare I even have to have a conversation? That’s one of the reasons I think they want to silence people that they think are saying things that aren’t true. Whether or not they’re right or wrong or the other person’s right or wrong, it’s irrelevant. Some people are so convinced with all of their opinions that they’re confident enough to believe that everybody else needs to shut up. So you’re just more arrogant. You think you’re more intelligent than everyone else in the room. The other reason you want to do that is you think there’s no value to it. You think that inevitably you won’t convince the other person of whatever the thing is you’re trying to convince them of. So why even have the argument in the first place? And when you’re talking about the town square, whether the town square is Twitter, X, social media or anything else, the value isn’t to the person you’re arguing with. It’s to everyone else watching. That’s the other thing that I think mainstream media often does not understand is that sometimes in an interaction between two opposing viewpoints, the value is everybody witnessing it from the outside. I think that Charlie Kirk, of all people, really understood this and really understood the value of this, because oftentimes when he would go and argue with people on college campuses and it’s still awful tragedy. I think in a lot of ways from just a simple conversation standpoint in our society that Charlie Kirk was killed for what he said and believed. But his his message was, let’s have this conversation out in the open. And often Charlie Kirk would say when people start stop talking, that’s when violence starts. And so anyone who wants to take away the ability for someone to speak is only begging them to become more violent. When the reality is that all you need to do is allow them to speak and You speak in response to them, and at the end of the day, maybe you didn’t convince the person with the strong opinion that they’re wrong. But a whole lot of people whose opinion wasn’t fully shaped yet, who heard the two of you interact with each other, are much more likely to have been swayed by one of the arguments than the other, than the person that’s crazily out there saying the horrible thing. no matter what it is, no matter how terrible, anti-Semitic, whatever the thing might be. And I imagine that’s part of the thought process here for someone who’s in Israeli cybersecurity. But when you see those things, being able to confront them and talk about them is much more powerful to the people that are unlikely to be convinced by the moron in the room that what they’re saying is right than telling that person they’re not allowed to talk and they need to shut up because then you seem to be hiding something. And the more people seem to be hiding things, the more people that are trying to expose whatever it is that they claim is being hidden seem trustworthy. And the more the people who are trying to hide something seem like the people lying to you. It’s the same thing you’ve seen all the time. And you see it all the time, even with kids. You can’t tell a kid not to do something because then they’re going to go do it. That’s not the way to get them to not behave in a way you want. What you need to actually do is tell them why they should do something a certain way, get them to understand it, get them to believe it themselves, and then your kid will act the way you hope they want to act or you’re hoping they’re going to act instead of doing exactly the thing you told them not to do simply because you said don’t do it. All right, quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 10 :
It’s his life mission to make bad decisions. It’s time for Florida Man.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right. It’s time for Florida Man on the Dana Show. Thrilled to be with you. My name is Craig, Craig Collins. I will be here today and Monday, and then Dana will be back on Tuesday. A couple Florida Man stories out there that I thought were interesting. The first one, a guy robbed a meat market. There are two things about this story that make it Florida Man and not just anybody somewhere in the world trying to rob a meat market. First, he was naked. He showed up there naked for some reason and tried to rob the meat market in the nude. A second, he wasn’t completely naked. Actually, he was wearing a face mask. I don’t know why. And I don’t know what the health benefit would be to the exposure of the rest of the human and the protection of the face and the nose. But he went that road. He thought, you know, I might as well respect people. Who knows what people might think I have as far as illnesses go. Who knows what illnesses other people might have. I might as well cover up my face while leaving everything else out and into the world. So I thought this was a uniquely funny dude. Terrible guy. I wouldn’t want to interact with him myself personally. But I just think that his version of masking is the most unique I’ve heard so far. And of course, the guy is in Florida. Another story out there that I thought was interesting. A Florida man was arrested at a Publix store, a grocery store, because he attacked the manager of the store with his Salvation Army kettle. For some reason, at some point, a man who was volunteering to collect money for the Salvation Army outside of a Publix got in an argument with the manager of the facility and then attacked him with the donation kettle that you’re using to actually accept the donations from I’m assuming there wasn’t a lot of money in it for you to start swinging it at somebody. But nonetheless, that seems like a bad decision to be made just across the board, especially if you try to go back from the attacking of the guy with the kettle to putting it down again and asking people to put donations in it. because now it’s a weapon. It’s been used in a crime, so they’re probably going to have to confiscate it in some way, shape, or form. But nonetheless, I just thought that was funny. The guy was like, nah, I’m sick of this. I’m done with you. It’s me versus you, mano a mano, and I’m using the only weapon I have at my disposal, my kettle, that people are putting donations in. A one final Florida man story. And this is certainly the most ridiculous of the three that I found. And I feel somewhat bad about this. And even telling you about it because my assumption is the person involved, I don’t know what they look like, is going to be a pretty big person. Because there’s not a lot of ways that this story ends the way it does if it’s a smaller guy. But anyway, a guy in Florida went to a restroom at an Outback Steakhouse and said he got injured. This story actually happened at the very beginning part of this year, like the first few months of the year of 2025, not 2026, excuse me, of last year. But it didn’t really become giant news until recently. The guy said that the toilet that he sat on at the Outback Steakhouse shattered beneath him. when he sat down on it, and it injured him in a couple different ways. This has also got to be a shocking thing to have happen when you sit down on the toilet. He said he was severely injured, and he was suing for $50,000 plus damages. The man’s name is Michael Green. Outback Steakhouse in Florida has said that it was not their issue, that the toilet should have operated just fine, etc., etc. I think this case is still going to be played out in court somewhere for the foreseeable future. And certainly, a part of me was amused by the idea that someone shattered a toilet. And I don’t know why. It would be probably juvenile reasons that I would laugh at this in any shape or form. But I also do feel terrible for a person who might go to the restroom in a public place and have this be the outcome. Because that can’t possibly be a thing that you’re going to have any sort of good memories of after that. And the only thing about it that would have made it worse for me and I apologize for making this low-hanging fruit joke, but I couldn’t help it, was if it was someplace like a Taco Bell. Outback Steakhouse is only so bad, a Taco Bell you would think would be even worse as far as shattering a toilet goes. In his defense, the man said that the toilet was just a terrible condition. It was something that seemed like it was it was very much destined to break. And he just was the unlucky last guy to sit on it that caused it to shatter into a million pieces. Again, I think that’s something that the restaurant is actually going to contest. What’s crazy about this story to me, though, is that it first happened way back in March. And it’s only really been a case that’s in the news now and in a courtroom at the tail end of last year. So it’s really something where someone I don’t mean to say it this way. This is not the pun I intended to be. sat on this story or sat on this case for a while before inevitably trying to make it a thing where they’re making some money in a courtroom. And I guess that’s the last thing that went through my brain about this topic. You know sometimes people sue because they see an opportunity for a lawsuit. Say somebody who gets burned by coffee pretending as though they shouldn’t have thought it was hot when it was obviously going to be really, really hot. And then there’s people who copycat that too and try to make money somewhere else. Whether this is the person doing it the first time or someone who thought they saw an opportunity for a lawsuit, I’d be really afraid if copycats happened. go this road. So I guess I’m telling anyone out there at any sort of restaurant, if you see a customer come in, ask to use the bathroom, and you’re pretty sure they have a sledgehammer hidden on them somewhere, that they’re going to try to shatter another toilet and then sue you. So if this guy makes a lot of money, copycat lawsuits, I feel like, are definitely a potential risk of all involved. But yeah, I couldn’t get over that. It’s not very often you see a headline in the news where someone went to the restroom and shattered something like a toilet. And so, again, I just feel bad across the board. That’s me being as nice as I can be about a story that I also find hilarious. Quick break. A lot more Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show. This is The Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Dean Lash, Dana Lash Radio on X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to the very awesome things she does every day in the world of social media and a whole bunch of other places to find Dana and Dana Lash Radio at Radio Craig C. If for some reason you want to follow me and my very small following on social media, then I probably shouldn’t poo-poo all this much on a show this big because I’d love to have more followers. Then maybe I’d do more stuff. But right now, not a whole lot there. But anyway, at Radio Craig C, if you want to help me, I get over that hump. Other things I saw out there that I will get to, one of them is fairly hilarious. More people are showing up at the Quality Learing Center. Now, actually, with the correct signage to say Quality Learning Center, they’re also trying to enroll their children in the daycare that has been somewhat synonymous with fraud in Minnesota that is all based on daycares that don’t actually operate. Now, there’s a funny part to this video where a guy is standing in the parking lot looking for people. It seems that someone finally pulls up, gets out of the car, including the guy that we saw in the video defending the place in the first place, the person saying that it is a legitimate operation, that its hours of operation are 2 o’clock to 8 o’clock at night, and mostly they’re just having kids that go there that are at after-school hours. It is hilarious the way that this interaction goes because it seems like we have a new… potential weakness in that story. Here we go.
SPEAKER 18 :
Can I get papers?
SPEAKER 11 :
Come back to us when we’re open on regular hours.
SPEAKER 18 :
It’s 348 on a Tuesday.
SPEAKER 03 :
This is not business hours. I love that. It’s 348 on a Tuesday. This ain’t business hours. I thought you guys said you were two to eight o’clock. This is not those hours. But they’re like, no, man, just come back. Some other time we can get you some paperwork. We can figure it out. Maybe we’ll send you somewhere else because there’s obviously no daycare that’s actually operating here, or at least there appears not to be one. That is the influence that Nick Shirley will have on these places. It’s not that they will be prone to having violence occur there, but that more people will also in person check on the validity of the story that’s being told on mainstream news outlets that are allowing for people who seem to be fraudsters to continue to pretend they’re not. and then barely fact-checking the information beyond it, which is something that now more and more people have every right and every capability of doing. Nick Shirley, by the way, continues to say that he’s being trashed all over social media and all over actual television news media for not being a person in the journalistic hierarchy, I don’t know, whatever the bubble is that they want you to be in. He doesn’t work for any of the main news outlets, so how dare he? do our job for us. They’re incredibly mad about that, when at the end of the day, it is still up to you and me to decide how much we believe the stories that are being put out there. The arrogance of most news media is that they still think, not all of them, some of them, that we believe them simply because of the credibility that was once a big part of the organization they work for, even though that credibility has long been destroyed and obliterated. in a whole lot of these cases. They still want to behave as though that’s a more credible thing than the person who’s showing up at the places, knocking on the doors, and showing us what happens next. That is most credible when we get to see with our own eyes what’s occurring. Now, a person who’s gone viral a couple times recently, and this is after some of the changes that have happened at CBF, CBS is Catherine Heritage, who is saying a bunch of different stuff about the terrible time she spent at CBS and the stories they spiked down. One of my favorite of the things that has gone viral now is her describing why CBS said no to an interview with Elon Musk. and how confusing it was to this actual journalist that an organization that would claim itself to be of the utmost in journalistic integrity was really afraid of not having control of where the conversation went. That seems terrible and awful, and here we go as far as yet another story damaging to CBS News from a person who used to have a pretty high-profile gig and work there.
SPEAKER 07 :
I had conversations with some of the reporters connected to the Twitter files. and I was, in my head, thinking that there might be an opportunity to tell that story on CBS News. We had a number of topics under discussion. They didn’t go as far as we had hoped. But at the end of the day, this opportunity to interview Elon Musk was developing, so I went to the CBS executives And I said, this is the opportunity that we have. He’s saying, I want to do it live and on my platform. He’s one of the most influential human beings on the planet. And the reaction from the executives was, well, we can’t do it live. And I was like, what do you mean we can’t do it live? He’s like, well, we don’t know what he’s going to say. I was like, I’m thinking, isn’t that the point of journalism? You don’t know what the person’s going to say?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, that’s the point of journalism.
SPEAKER 07 :
well, you know, it has to be taped. We have to have the ability to edit it. It has to be on our platform. We have to control the platform.
SPEAKER 03 :
We talked at one point about whether we could do it sort of like a simulcast between the streaming network and maybe X. All right, this is the biggest weakness to mainstream news media in today’s society is how easy it is to go viral and be someone who’s live and in the moment. that allows for the least amount of editing to occur. Now, granted, I’m not pretending as though a whole bunch of editing doesn’t actually occur with people who are quote-unquote independent journalists. It does. And there’s a lot of reason to be very skeptical of anything you see from anyone and what motivates them to put it out in whatever way they do. But the strength… of some of these platforms, the places like Twitter and YouTube and whatnot, is the ability to be uninterrupted and fully live and thus viral, and something that media in other places could easily do, but doesn’t. You know what’s funny about this? Totally shifting gears in a way, but landing in the same atmosphere as this story. I work at a few different places. One of the places I work is branching into digital media at a time when everybody else has already been in it forever. And just the people happen to be less familiar with some of this because they’ve never really done it before, even though they want to. And some of the conversations you have, even with well-intentioned people who want to do good things, they’re so far behind where the conversations being had about the technology that exists today is with the people at the forefront of these platforms, people who are now much more influential than even some of these media outlets are. A lot of the television shows that we have on TV right now that think of themselves as being the most impactful have audiences that pale in comparison to some of the biggest digital media audiences that exist out there. They’re tremendously bigger. Nick Shirley’s video, for example, got millions of views on X and at least a million plus views on YouTube. There are a bunch of stories that exist on most of the news platforms out there that won’t get that kind of reach, especially when you’re talking about the 150 million supposed views on something like Twitter. which I know is also a flawed barometer, because I think anyone whose feed the story pops up on will be counted as a view, even if you watch a few seconds of it or you watch a whole lot of it. But still, there is an ability for influence to go way beyond what is typical of mainstream news media. And to be honest, most of those news media outlets, to get real reach from their stories, will inevitably put it on the platforms where the other people are. And so this is the way I’ve had the conversation. I’m just going to have it with you. It might be a little inside baseball. I guess I don’t care. It is fun for me to have this discussion, and darn it, it’s just after the holidays, so let’s go ahead and do it. What I tell people in legacy media or older forms of media that are contemplating getting into the digital game is there’s no reason not to be there. There’s none. Everything that you do, everything that you create is quote-unquote content, the way that people in other places say that they make stuff. You know, you’re already making things. Why not put the things in these other places? And that sometimes is the hardest thing for someone to understand, but is really the way for them to increase their reach the most. I think that people who tune in to mainstream radio, television, what have you, are probably doing it mostly because it’s habit. It’s something they’ve done before. Whatever it is that they’re listening to, whatever station you’re listening to the show on, the odds of us getting a whole bunch of new listeners just from the platform alone, is becoming harder and harder. But the odds of us getting a whole bunch of new consumers of our information by finding it somewhere else, which is why Dana is uniquely so prolific by having stuff so many places, is much, much higher. It’s much, much higher to have influence and value in our society by being in all the places that people normally go to see the small snippets of whatever the things are that a lot of people miss when they’re live. So I just think it’s so amusing that sometimes people in the mainstream media places do not understand that. They sort of think that, well, it’s got to be on our platform. I’ve even had conversations with someone that says, I don’t know if I want to be on those other platforms, man. It might distract me from the thing I’m doing on the platform that I’m supposed to be on. I’m meaning if I’m doing a radio show, I don’t want to think too much about what’s happening in the video that I’m creating in the radio show. And that’s fine. I actually think that a lot of that objection makes sense. I would just say, turn it on in the corner and forget about it because it’s better to have something exist somewhere else than nothing at all. Nothing at all in today’s society is a pretty bad move. And a whole bunch of times, and to get back to the topic at hand with CBS, they refused to do things simply because Elon was leveling the playing field by allowing for his platform to livestream something that CBS wanted full creative control of They wanted to be able to edit it and manipulate it however they saw fit and not have the long stream version out there, which is absolutely bad. Our society no longer accepts that reality because too many of us are capable of creating an unedited thing on our own that some social media outlets will no longer take down or bury and censor. Some will still do it, but some like Twitter won’t. So the importance of Twitter, the importance of X, and Elon purchasing the platform has skyrocketed mostly because of how easy it is now for anyone to get a truly important message to the rest of the world without the censorship version that used to exist in our society. That was a long rant on a very specific topic, but I just thought it was amusing that as I see these people in these other platforms talking about the way that they were censored, whatever their job is, Inevitably, maybe one of the reasons that they’re no longer at the gig they’re at. I see so many parallels with what people are still worried about in some of these legacy media places that is pushing them so far behind the places that now are at the forefront of where we go when we’re looking for information. A quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 10 :
And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right. It’s time for a quick five on the Dana show. My name is Craig Collins filling in the last day in the last radio and X on Twitter. A great way to stay connected. A six point five magnitude earthquake rattled Mexico. This crazy in central Mexico actually caused the president there to have to postpone a press briefing that she was planning. I think that there is not a big amount of loss of life yet reported from this. Maybe one person died so far. But just a huge earthquake that jolted part of central South Mexico happened just the other day. Another story out there that I thought was interesting. This is the craziest food trends that were part of 2026. A very different thing than the last story. $20 strawberries became a big deal. Los Angeles grocery stores stunned shoppers by selling a single strawberry for $20. This caused people that are idiots and social media influencers to buy the strawberries and try to eat them to see if there’s anything about them that tasted special or different than a not $20 strawberry. And guess what? No, it’s exactly the same. Everything tasted the same as the other strawberries, just ridiculously overpriced. Also, I love this. There was a story on social media about luxury water. This is high-end restaurants that would sell a glass of water from anywhere from $11 all the way up to $95. Gen Z specifically, which is drinking less alcohol and drinking other things, whether it’s alcoholic things or not, just other stuff in general, seem the most amused by luxury water and trying out other kinds of water that might be, again, overpriced. And then finally, one of my favorite things that apparently became a trend via social media is taking in a whole bunch more protein without necessarily trying to eat a whole bunch more food. These are people who are overloading on protein items because somehow they are convinced that that protein will fill you up and then you won’t want to eat other stuff and you’ll lose weight, which is not exactly how that works. Although it could be if you’re also working out and then dieting in other ways. But if you’re just eating a protein bar on top of all your regular food items, I feel like we saw that in the movie Mean Girls. But that doesn’t actually go well. It goes terribly. And yes, I just decided to reference Mean Girls on The Dana Show because why not, darn it? It felt like the right thing to do. And then finally, one other thing that I saw. This is also uniquely sad. Another awful story out there, but certainly a story deserving of at least mentioning a little bit. There are families still looking for people from the Swiss ski resort that burst into flames over the holidays. Several people were injured. Several people lost their lives. But some families say they’re still looking for members. One American family says they’re still looking for a missing teenager and they are desperate for any news about it. Unfortunately, the likelihood of good news coming from that story is probably very low. But there are still people in search of family members over two days after a shocking explosion happened inside of a ski resort in Switzerland, which I think sparklers attached to champagne bottles is believed to be the likely start of a horrible explosion and then a fire. which actually tells you a couple different things that you probably already knew in the world of this specific holiday we just celebrated, that it is uniquely dangerous to celebrate some of this stuff on your own and to have certain things, just like the 4th of July is, that you use as part of the celebration. There definitely need to be sober people that are involved, maybe professionally involved, And some of this and not necessarily just a lot of people doing things, you know, recreationally. I don’t know. It’s uniquely horrible story, though, to say the least. And families still looking for family members is awful. A quick break. A lot coming up in a short amount of time. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana show.
SPEAKER 06 :
Brighten up your timely news consumption with a Dana show podcast where every update comes with a little dash of not so serious on YouTube, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER 03 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. A whole bunch of stuff out there to talk about. Let’s do a little bit more on fraud in Minnesota. Because it’s the story that keeps on giving. I don’t mean to keep talking about it. There’s just so many aspects to it here. The latest version is the family leave program that Tim Walls is going to start putting in place there. Which sounds just so ready for fraud. It gives you multiple weeks vacation. It puts the onus on the employer of the employee to… you know, verify that the person is a real worker who deserves all the vacation, et cetera, et cetera. It just seems insane. Fox News was talking about this earlier today, and I figured I’d play some of the audio of just how ridiculous this latest program is and just another awesome candidate for incredible fraud. And then I assume a whole bunch of ridiculous kickbacks. Here we go.
SPEAKER 21 :
Even in the lead up to this new program officially launching, whistleblowers in Minnesota were apparently sounding the alarm about how people were already planning to scam it. The state’s new paid leave program allows for up to 20 weeks of paid leave a year for almost every resident, with it being for medical leave or to take care of family. and taxpayer dollars will pay out a percentage of a person’s salary up to $1,420 a week. As for how much this program is going to cost, the estimates have already gone up since this bill was passed, and it’s now projected to be between $1 and $1.5 billion a year. Shocking! We’ve seen in other state programs now being investigated for fraud how the expected cost skyrocketed within just a few years. And state Republican lawmakers are warning that could happen again with this program they say is ripe for fraud.
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Of course it is. By the way, I do love the fact that it says a percentage of whatever your net income is. And if you lie about the income that you make with, which is something they’re also doing, you can make that $1,400 a week, which is the equivalent of about $70,000 a month. a little bit more than that, a year that you’d be making during these weeks that you were on paid leave for the job that you don’t have and the things that you’re not doing. And just so, so ripe with fraud once again. Just great, great stuff. By the way, there is audio out there that’s gone viral, multiple versions of it. For multiple different versions of essentially the same thing, which is all the people who’ve claimed that, you know, this Minnesota fraud with daycares has been going on forever. There’s even audio of a guy back in, I think this is 2014 or 2015. His name is Jason Lewis, a previous representative, talking about how this is happening. how people are leaving some of the daycares with just tons of cash, putting them in suitcases, smuggling them into other countries at the Minneapolis airport. Like it’s crazy, the ridiculousness of the story. And remember, this is 10 plus years ago that they’re talking about this being a thing. And now we’re talking about it all over again. So obviously the people in charge, like Tim Walls, have done a really good job of going through and weeding out this fraud that they definitely have known about and has existed forever. for a very long. They’ve done so great at trying to fix the problem. Of course, I’m kidding as I say that.
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Here we go on this audio to situation in my home state of Minnesota, where we’ve got a number of daycare providers that are openly violating federal and state laws and regulations, taking money for personal use, using the money to set up a fraudulent child care client and then providing a kickback has been reported. This is a major issue. There are allegations that, well, not just several. You’ve got 23 child care or day care centers either closed or under investigation. The fraud may go as high as $100 million. No, no. Now, think about that. In fiscal year 2018, Minnesota received $120 million in federal funding. The state contributed about $50 million in matching and maintenance funds. And we may have a fraud case of nearly $100 million in this state.
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I misspoke. I guess it was 2018, so a few years less than a decade ago that they were talking about this. And now it’s in the billions of dollars. So way to go there, catching that $100 million case that has only gone worse and worse and worse and not better. Tim Walz needs to be fired, is what it looks like. He needs to be prosecuted. All kinds of things seem like they need to happen, not just to him, but to anybody. Follow the money. Feels like it’s screaming from every part of that state, every part of that city, every part of the entirety of the country, I guess, to tell people to do better because of how ridiculous the entirety of this thing is. It is truly crazy. And there’s audio I played earlier. I can play it again of some of the individuals who are accused of this kind of stuff that are now fighting back in weird ways. My favorite one is probably the daycare center that says it was robbed. It says somebody broke in. And for some reason, the person stole a whole bunch of paperwork that proves who the kids are that go to the daycare, who the teachers are, who are employees of the daycare. And then this was the best part. ripped checks from the checkbook without actually taking the entirety of the checkbook. This is, I assume, so that they can steal money from the daycare with the daycare being capable of tracking down exactly what checks it was. That’s very nice of them to leave the checkbook so you know what number to not look at and what number not to go past as far as what fraudulent checks have been written. It’s very good that the accounting department can check up on that once the fraudulent checks that they stole inevitably get cashed or might have been cashed a long time ago. That’s probably going to be part of the problem with this claim is when those checks were written and when they were cashed. But darn it, it’s all there. This is a very sloppy version. of trying to pretend as though what’s going on is somehow getting fixed. You know what, actually here, I will play the audio of the guy who tells the story as it first broke a couple of days ago, because who would do this? Why would anyone break into a place and steal just important business records and not a whole lot else? You be the judge. Of course, I don’t think this happened at all. Well, I’m the only Somali who speaks English. Oh, no, hold on. Actually, that’s an edited version. I’m going to go ahead and edit that one out. That one is not the correct one. That’s an AI version. That is not the thing. And we’re just going to skip it because I think that’s the only one I have in front of me. I apologize for that. That was a parody version of that story, not the actual version of the story. But people are saying that they do not believe any part of this at all because it’s absolute crap. All right, one other thing I want to play. something different uh this is border czar tom holman uh talking about the amount of children who were smuggled into this country under joe biden and how they lost track of so many of them and the biden administration has done or excuse me the trump administration has done a very good job of trying to figure out uh for many of the problems they had how to fix this uh this is just one of many things uh that holman is actually working on so let’s play a little bit of that audio
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The last thing that President Trump had me focus on is half a million children were smuggled into this country under Joe Biden. They lost track of 300,000, couldn’t find them. As of this week, We have located over 129,000 of these kids, kids that last administration wasn’t even looking for.
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129,000 out of 300,000 kids have been located by the Trump administration. You feel like this is the kind of story that if it happened the other way, if conservatives were the reason that the problem existed and liberals or Democrats are the reason that the solution existed, that it would be plastered all over media. that people will be talking about this night and day, how great it is that the Democrats came in to save the day and how they’re the good guys and the horrible bad guys that are the Trump administration, wherever it might have been, lost all these children. But since it’s the opposite, since it’s the reverse version of that scenario, this is a story you probably haven’t heard yet. And this is a claim being made by the border czar himself that no one is really taking seriously in any sort of mainstream media outlet, which is incredible because once again, that’s all it takes as far as proof of something. If you’re someone on the left saying a thing and news media wants to run with that story, whatever it might be, they will absolutely tell every single version of those events to as many people who will listen and their credibility will be, this is what the administration told us as opposed to the opposite. All right. One last thing I want to play. J.D. Vance did an interview with Jesse Waters. A lot of different stories or topics came up. Some of them I thought were pretty interesting as far as the types of discussions that are still being had by a lot of people that mainstream media outlets probably aren’t focused on. One of them was the militant transgender movement as described by Vance. And some of the ways in which people validate violence, validate all kinds of behaviors because they say that they are initially the victim. They don’t care if in the scenario they’re defending themselves in, they in every way, shape or form or anything other than a victim. They’re certainly not a victim. They’re in fact someone who maybe killed someone else or did something horrible. But no, no, no. The whole reason they did that is because at some point they were a victim. So obviously, we need to think of this differently. Here’s how Vance talks about this issue. I thought it was a really good job. Hold on. I thought it was a really good job, the way to try to handle this discussion.
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True. transgender movement, is that a domestic terrorist threat? If you are encouraging people to commit acts of violence against the United States government or against your fellow Americans, absolutely, you’re involved in a terrorist movement. I don’t know enough about that particular organization, but what you increasingly see, Jesse, is you see people And the trans community and other members of the far left who are saying they are so threatened by negative rhetoric that they must take arms and attack people. If your movement is telling you to commit acts of violence against people for speaking words that you don’t like, number one, you’re evil. And number two, you are engaged in a terrorist movement. Of course. And that’s part of what we have to root out in the White House. And this is very important, Jesse. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this. I’ve talked to Stephen Miller probably seven times in the past two days. We are working very hard to ensure that the funding networks for left-wing violence, that the radicalization networks for left-wing violence, that if you encourage or fund your fellow Americans or anybody else to commit acts of violence because you disagree with political speech, you are gonna be treated like a terrorist organization.
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That is what you are, by the way. I do fully and wholeheartedly believe this, and I don’t care again what the starting point is for where you inevitably get to the radical position you’re in. And if you think that starting in a certain way can make you claim that what you’re doing is actually totally fine, it’s in fact even worse. And so many people out there will say this until they’re blue in the face. They’ll behave as though, no, no, no, how dare you accuse me of being the bad guy? I was in jeopardy first, and then I chose to commit this action against someone simply because of the words they were saying and how much I didn’t like the things they were saying because I thought that maybe those words might inspire someone else to hurt me. All of these are taking a bunch of steps down a rabbit hole that doesn’t exist to claim that it’s okay for me to harm someone else. And of course, this feels like it is somewhat couched in the thing that happened, the murder of Charlie Kirk, that would be at the forefront of J.D. Vance’s mind and a lot of people’s minds as we go through that court case over the next, I think, few months. All right, we’ll take a break. We’ll do a little bit more when we come back. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
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This is The Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. A lot to talk about. Very little time left to do it. DLash, DanaLashRadio and X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to her. Megan Kelly has shared a list of some of the meanest celebrities she’s ever encountered in her time as a famous person herself. I thought this was really interesting. One of the people at the top of the list for Megyn Kelly was Jane Fonda, who she said was a complete piece of crap to her on several occasions. Unsurprising, I guess, considering Jane Fonda’s very strong political positions that would run in contest to things that Megyn Kelly might think. Another one that was on this list that I thought was interesting was Ellen DeGeneres, someone who took more than enough crap from a whole lot of people because it sounds like she also is a big load of poop as far as a person goes. A lot of people criticized her for being a jerk. Megyn Kelly seems to echo that statement and say that Ellen DeGeneres is in fact a giant piece of poop. I love the way I’m saying this. That’s not what Megyn said, by the way. Megyn Kelly used different words. I just enjoyed the words I’m choosing to use. There were other names on the list. You can go check it for anyone that Megyn Kelly says she had bad interactions with herself, which is the only way that we can judge any of this stuff is people who are a jerk to us. Another person out there that I thought was interesting to be in the news was Ricky Gervais. Years ago, he had said that one thing he wanted was for his body to be fed to the lions at the London Zoo when he died. I think he said this to Conan O’Brien. He wanted to give back any way that he could. That included allowing himself to be fed to lions. At the time, the zoo reacted seriously to what was probably just a joke and said that they couldn’t do it. They were financially struggling. They’d love to have some sort of financial donation from Ricky Gervais sent to them, but they were incapable of using his body for food. I love that. Ricky Gervais has now responded years later to that by saying that he’s seen some of the Lions and how big they are and thinks that they really absolutely could still use them and eat them. And he thinks it’s the easiest way to go about this. So even though they’re not going to use his body for food, he thinks that’s a shame because Ricky Gervais does still think. That it’s inappropriate. I love that. When I saw that the first time, and I remembered how viral it went. Because to me, that is as funny as anything else people say that you should do after you pass away with the body to make it pretty apparent that once you’re gone, you’re gone. And obviously, I, as a Catholic, think you’re in a better place. I’ve always talked about how I wanted the Viking funeral where you push me out into the ocean in the little like rickety boat. And then you use the arrow and you shoot it and you light it on fire. That has always been a cool idea to me. It’s not something that is likely to happen easier than getting myself after I’ve passed away to be fed the lions and certainly less graphic than that situation. But nonetheless, still a thing that’s probably not going to happen. And really, it’s a shame for both of us, Ricky and I, that our dying wishes cannot be fulfilled. That’s really a thing that society itself needs to answer, too. Two other quick things I saw that I thought were interesting. Snopes has once again debunked something in the Babylon Bee article. The Babylon Bee went on social media to celebrate the fact that Snopes seems really invested in debunking things on a satirical website that itself admits the stuff it’s saying is comedic and not actually true. Once again, Snopes has taken one of these stories. It was about Tim Walls and a tremendous amount of money that he was stealing from the government because, well, he’s probably stealing it. We just don’t know how much. But that is something that was debunked by Snopes. They said there’s no proof that Tim Walz took, I think it was like $400 million from a few of the government programs that, again, a satirical website, the Babylon Bee, claimed was true. And my favorite part of the shared photo by the Babylon Bee on social media is that in the corner of the article on Snopes, it says this comes from the Babylon Bee, a place that we have debunked many times. I don’t know why they feel the need to keep doing that. I don’t know if Snopes has continued to debunk The Onion or any of these other satirical places in news. If they’re on the left, they probably don’t care. On the right is the only place that they care about it. But that’s hilarious. Babylon Bee feels that they’ve succeeded once again. And one last one. There’s a horrible aspect to this story, but it is a unique headline for how 2026 is probably going to be a terrible year. Someone on NotTheBee, another funny website on social media, said they saw the worst headline already of 2026. It says that Oakland man woke up from a drunken nap surrounded by child porn investigators. Police say… And then the bottom part of it says suspect has already been released from jail. And that seems bad. That seems like something that you shouldn’t get out of jail quickly for if it happens. The story goes that the man apparently was taking photos of a young person inside of his house, a cousin, I think, or relative of his girlfriend. It’s horrible. A child was photographed when they were unaware they were being photographed. The girlfriend found the photos in the phone after the guy passed out while he was drunk and then informed the authorities. So when the dude woke up from his drunken stupor, he was immediately arrested. And again, the worst part of the headline, the part that makes it feel like bad things might keep happening in 2026, is the man is already out on bond and already out of jail and back just wandering around in the world until eventually, hopefully, he does actually have to serve time in prison for a really disgusting thing that he did. But nonetheless, this does seem to indicate that 2026 will be no better than 2025, at least this early on for a story like this to hit the news so quickly. So I do agree with the not the B and with the Babylon B, actually, that we’re seeing a lot of bad signs. early on already in this year. And one more time, I assume at some point, since it’s a headline on a website that is even somewhat closely mimicking that of the Babylon Bee, although this is a real story, that Snopes will have to get involved, because Snopes will be told that there’s some headline out there somewhere that involves a website with Bee in the title, so they’re going to have to do everything they can to check the validity of this claim. And bad news for them is that it is absolutely true. You can find it in a bunch of other news sources. That is a thing that definitely happened. But Happy New Year, I guess, is the reaction to that for all of us. God bless us all, and let’s hope for good things, not terrible things, for the next year. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
