The episode takes a sharp turn into the world of mainstream media with a critical look at the controversy surrounding a 60 Minutes piece that was pulled from the airwaves. Craig examines the arguments surrounding the decision, highlighting the prevailing media narratives and biases that necessitated such an editorial choice. He doesn’t shy away from expressing the absurdity of how media stakes its own credibility on controversial topics while simultaneously turning the lens on Hunter Biden’s latest public declarations. The narrative takes his words on Burisma board membership and scrutinizes the political landscape of the Biden family, presenting arguments
SPEAKER 13 :
The holidays are already in full swing. The lights are up. You got good people, good food, and good vibes. And there to help keep that energy going is Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry. With that crisp cranberry flavor with a smooth winter spice twist. It’s the drink that livens up game nights, gift exchanges, or just catching up in the kitchen with a burst of holiday flavor. It’s a seasonal favorite, but it’s only here for a limited time. So grab it while you can. Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry. Right. Obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 06 :
Life with CIDP can be tough, but the Thrive Team, a specialized squad of experts, helps people living with CIDP make more room in their lives for joy. Watch Rare Well Done.
SPEAKER 29 :
An all-new reality series, Rare Well Done, offers help and hope to people across the country who live with the rare disease CIDP. Watch the latest episode now exclusively on rarewelldone.com.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. A bunch of stuff out there to talk about, including President Trump giving a what I think is hilarious answer to the question, what are you going to do with that Venezuelan oil that we took back on October or excuse me, December 10th, I think it was. I’ll play that answer, but I actually want to dive a little deeper into that topic. There’s a lot of stuff to get to today. 60 Minutes and everybody behind that show are up in arms over something that actually seems incredibly reasonable for the brand new leader of CBS News to do. I’ll get to that story in a little bit. Jamie Raskin is out there being a moron. And then, oh yeah, Hunter Biden has been doing interviews and doing certain things. So, of course, we’re going to play some Hunter Biden audio, no matter how annoying that is. But here, this is President Trump being asked about oil that was seized and ships that were seized earlier this month and what’s going to happen with the oil. Now, a lot of people seem to think that all of this fighting between Venezuela and the United States is really just about us trying to gain access to more oil, their oil, one of the most oil-rich countries in the world. It’s not. I don’t believe that even remotely is what this is about. And I’m sure some might call me naive for that, but I’ll get into it. But here’s how President Trump responded.
SPEAKER 17 :
Speaking of Venezuela, oil. What are we going to do with the oil that we have?
SPEAKER 16 :
Going to do with what? The oil that has been seized. The United States seized 1.9 million barrels of oil on December 10th.
SPEAKER 15 :
We’re going to keep it. We’re keeping it. Are we going to sell it or put it in the strategic? Maybe we’ll keep it. Do whatever we want with it.
SPEAKER 25 :
Maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserves. We’re keeping it. We’re keeping the ships also. Yeah, please.
SPEAKER 12 :
Love this answer. And I love this answer so much because the question is designed as a gotcha. It’s designed as a, hey, what are you doing with that oil you took and all the claims that you’re actually trying to essentially prevent Venezuela from being as awful of a country as it is to both itself and the rest of the world and its partnership with places like Russia, China. The regulars in the world of people who are not always friends of ours. But what I think is really interesting about this is instead of falling for any version of the gotcha, Trump just blatantly said the thing that the left is going to freak out the most about and the right’s going to laugh about. I feel like this happens a few times a week where there’s a moment where President Trump might say or do something. And if you have a lefty friend in your life, they’re going to go crazy about it. They’ll post it on social media. They’ll say this is dictatorship or whatever that is. And the funny part is, I actually think it makes sense. the president more attractive as a political candidate to the side of the aisle that he appeals to and the people in the middle, because a lot of people are just fed up with crap. They’re fed up with all the inauthenticity that goes on in politics and the world and all the gotcha questions and the sound clipping or sound biting out of certain things. So this is amazing to me. Yeah, we’re going to keep it. I don’t know why you keep asking these questions. And actually, talking about inauthentic, I have some audio of Jasmine Crockett that I have to play, the Texas politician who’s going to try to be a senator and hopefully very, you know, shockingly fail. Hopefully it’s a ridiculous and utter failure. But I’ll get to that in a little bit, too. All right. I want to talk about the 60 Minutes piece for just a bit. There was a piece that was supposed to air this weekend. It had been previewed heavily by CBS News and 60 Minutes where they were going to take down the Trump administration and talk about some of the illegal things, according to them, that are going on and removing people from this country. People that shouldn’t be here are not giving them due process or whatever, not allowing them to to argue and fight before they’re sent to some sort of prison somewhere else in the world. That would be the decision of the people who are getting these individuals back. The U.S. is not like negotiating to make sure that we put people in jails once we kick them out. They have to deal with whatever the problem is, wherever they came from. What I think is so interesting about all of this, though, as far as 60 Minutes is concerned and as far as Barry Wise is concerned, all she really wanted to do was make sure that the organization that she’s in charge of now tried harder to get the other perspective from the current administration in power. It doesn’t mean it’s never going to air. That’s how a lot of mainstream media is reacting to this. That’s how crazy blowing up of the topic and exaggerating of the idea, as they always do, this whole thing is. But here, let me play a version of that, an example of this. This is Jamie Raskin. on MSN Now or whatever the crap they’re calling themselves, talking about how this is yet another example of the authoritative leadership of President Trump and his state media-esque control of other media outlets. This is hilariously stupid. The only problem with it not being, you know, funnier is that it’s also something a whole lot of people believe that then radicalizes them even more. But here, let me play this first.
SPEAKER 36 :
You’re a constitutional law professor in addition to being a member of Congress. Can you explain in non-lawyer’s terms why it is a matter of national interest, a matter of our governance and our democracy, what happens at a privately owned news organization?
SPEAKER 12 :
I got to stop it right there. That question, by the way, annoys me because she was essentially trying to say you’re so smart and we all are going to struggle to understand your smartness and how genius the words that are coming out of your mouth are. So please dumb it down as much as possible for us. The riffraff.
SPEAKER 27 :
Well, every ruler in the world would love to be able to control what private TV or private newspapers are publishing about them. And Donald Trump is using his power over the Federal Communications Commission to make it possible for him to have minders, either formally denominated minders or people like Barry Weiss who are just going to do his bidding.
SPEAKER 12 :
It’s so stupid. It’s so if this actually airs in the coming weeks, if the 60 Minutes producers who are up in arms and trying to protest do the thing that Barry Weiss was asking them to do, we was asking them to do and actually go out and try to get people on the record from the Trump administration and then inevitably still air the piece. None of these individuals who, you know, screamed and yelled that this was bad will admit that that means nothing happened. News media is so obsessed with itself that the only people who care right now about a piece that’s been shelved but not necessarily completely canned forever are the other news media people who talk about it. Because as far as the general public is concerned, if and when this is on television, it’s still on TV. And, you know, essentially nothing changed. But here I want to play a snippet that’s now been making the rounds and gone viral to demonstrate how one sided and ridiculous the original version of the story was going to be. And you can’t find an easier 15 second clip than this one to show you how insane the conversation would have been and how ridiculous it would be to not try as hard as possible to have credibility as a news organization to get someone from the Trump administration to comment on this. They’re doing very little in that regard, if anything. And the people that are now, well, the person in charge of CBS wants that to change. But this was a real part of the preview of the part of the 60-minute story that didn’t inevitably air.
SPEAKER 05 :
Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration’s immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal. Crossings are now at a historic low.
SPEAKER 12 :
OK, OK, wait a minute. I want to replay that one part back because it is the part that most amuses me just because it is like full on to me. Hilarious. They actually said in the report that people who cross illegally into our country are And get this, this is shocking. They’re thought of as criminals by the Trump administration because they illegally came into the country, thus committing a crime. And that is part of the reason why we now have a historic low in people illegally entering our country. It seems like they’re missing the point where, duh, is the reaction to this. Here, I want to play it again.
SPEAKER 05 :
…part of the Trump administration’s immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal… The legal crossings are now at a historic load.
SPEAKER 12 :
You can’t write something stupider than that. You could try. And I don’t think it would come out dumber than the way that that came out there of them saying it as if it doesn’t make sense. It does make sense. It is a crime. There are other crimes that people commit once they’re in our country, having already done that first part. And that is worse. And actually, you know what? I’ll play a little piece of audio. I didn’t even intend to play so much later on, if at all, on the show. This is the catch a predator guy. Chris Hansen, he was behind the scenes at Fox recently, and he was talking about how whenever they do a sting operation now, and no, I’m not trying to paint the picture that every single person who’s in this country illegally is committing this type of crime. For anyone in the cheap seats who wants to pretend that’s what I’m saying, Even if I don’t care if you claim and yell stupid racist stuff at me or claim that I’m a racist, whatever it might be. But nonetheless, he’s actually saying, Chris Hansen, that every time they do a sting, it is now someone who’s here illegally. Like, it gets so ridiculous, they can’t even do it anymore. The Catch a Predator guy is talking about how people who are in this country without the right to be here… are likely to commit other crimes because they already feel like they’re playing on the House’s money. This feels like it should matter. Of course, it’s going to be ignored by most of media.
SPEAKER 23 :
We have seen an increase in illegal immigrants being caught in our stings across the country. And it seems today that we can’t do a sting, whether we’re in the South or the Midwest or West Coast or East Coast, without catching somebody who’s in this country illegally.
SPEAKER 12 :
That is profoundly important information from the Chris Hansen, you know, catch a predator guy, as he’s often called, that you cannot do a sting operation for people that are trying to root out pedophiles without catching someone who’s here illegally. Yes, it is, in fact, a crime to come into our country in and of itself when you don’t have the right to be here and to try to stay. But there’s other crimes you can commit on top of it that do make situations even worse. I think it’s ridiculous the way that so much of this is talked about. Right. One last thing before I take a break. I just want to tease some of the Hunter Biden audio because there’s so, so much of it out there. And it’s so, so stupid. And part of me doesn’t even want to play it. But I have to because it’s Hunter and he’s saying dumb things. He was asked if he should have ever joined the board of Burisma. And of course, he said no, although he doesn’t seem to understand the reason why. And it’s that it looked incredibly corrupt because it was corrupt, not that it just made for bad PR. But this is how Hunter Biden answered that question.
SPEAKER 26 :
Was it a mistake to go on the board? Yeah. Yeah, it was absolutely. a mistake not because of anything that i did that i am embarrassed about or in any way whatsoever feel conflicted about as a swing and a mess right there with that part let’s let him continue relates to what i did for prisma but because of the political position that that put us all in they use that as the as the the toe in the door to be able to call my family the biden crime family yeah
SPEAKER 12 :
And you are the Biden crime family. A bunch of other things you did all seem to land in the same place as joining a board on a Ukrainian energy company when you did absolutely no work for them and got paid money you didn’t deserve. But darn it, I love the fact that what he actually says in that answer is it just looked bad. It wasn’t actually bad, and I don’t regret doing the thing that I did. I just regret the fact that people found out about it, and we had to deal with a PR version of a discussion instead of the real version, which is all the other times that money seemed to get embezzled and change hands, and the amount of Biden family members who had bank accounts with crazy amounts of money in them that just conveniently seemed to somehow also be tied to Hunter Biden. But anyway, that’s just a snippet. There’s a bunch more. He talks about the exit in Afghanistan, the laptop. He actually claims the laptop’s not real, which is insane because the laptop was used as evidence against him in a courtroom when his father was still in the White House. But we’ll get to that. We’ll talk about a bunch of this. Thrilled to be here filling in. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana Show more in a bit.
SPEAKER 32 :
Our partners, our friends over at Patriot Mobile, the only Christian conservative cell phone service in the nation. Patriot Mobile wants to save you money. They’ve got plans that they can tailor for any business, any family of all sizes. And also you get just great coverage all across the nation, all three major U.S. networks. This has been my service for over 10 years now. Get unlimited data, mobile hotspots, the whole nine yards. But the big thing is that your bill, what you pay, doesn’t go to undermine what you vote for at the ballot box. They’re not donating to DEI and gun control or things of that nature. They’re backing your first vote. amendment rights your second amendment the sanctity of life veterans and first responders easy to switch keep your number keep your phone right now they have their red white and blue friday promotion so you can get a free smartphone just for switching so switch today and take advantage of that offer patriot mobile.com slash dana 972 patriot get a free smartphone with promo code dana
SPEAKER 04 :
Fed chair Jay Powell seems like he’s straight out of Reservoir Dogs, stuck in the middle. With inflation on one side and unemployment on the other, Jay Powell’s acting clueless. With a dual mandate coming in from both sides, there’s not much else he can do.
SPEAKER 03 :
Check out the Watchdog on Wall Street podcast on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season. Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made.
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 21 :
And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 12 :
That’s right. It’s time for a quick five on the Dana Show, DLash or DanaLashRadio on X. On Twitter, I still call it that, too. Best ways to stay connected to everything going on in the world of Dana. A lot of sad things are out there. Barry Manilow revealed that he was diagnosed with lung cancer at 82 years old. Also, Ben Sasse put a post on social media. Ben Sasse is only in his 50s. You probably know him as the former senator of Nebraska, that or the president of the University of Florida. For the last couple of years, I think he may have resigned in July of 24 or something like that. But Ben Sasse at 53 said he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. And in his own post on social media, it says it will kill him. He will die. So sort of surreal to read it and awful, horrible stories as far as things out there, you know, at a time of year where it’s got to be even uniquely harder. But I felt that those deserve to be put in here and maybe even talk about them more beyond a quick five segment. Another thing out there that I saw that I thought was pretty interesting, Paramount’s new hostile offer to Warner Brothers Discovery as a takeover. Larry Ellison will personally guarantee $40 billion. There is infighting with Netflix and others as to who actually winds up owning some of these properties. And there are also concerns about some sort of, you know, monopoly type of arrangement existing here. But I think that a lot of what’s cannibalizing each other in the world of entertainment and media is the fact that so few of these sources are places that people overwhelmingly turn to anymore for news and or entertainment. Even if you look at some of the bigger movie releases, Avatar that just came out, it’s box office numbers pale in comparison to the numbers you might have expected for an Avatar movie. Even if they’re huge and big and people are saying they’re giant, it’s not what it used to be. So all of these giant, you know, profound entertainment organizations, I think, are dealing with a problem of becoming less and less profitable because we care about them less and less in general. But that definitely is a thing that seems like a bigger story out there, too. And then finally, one last one. Turning point. A turning point poll revealed conservatives are all in for J.D. Vance in the 2028 presidential election. They think that he’d be a great candidate and he gave a good speech. I do want to talk about the infighting between some of the Republican voices that happened at America Fest or AmFest. But that’ll come up in a bit. J.D. Vance apparently won over a lot of the crowd at Turning Point. Quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana Show.
SPEAKER 32 :
We’ve got a lot more on the way as we roll towards the headlines and our partners that help bring you the program. It’s the folks over at Super Beats. The turmeric chews. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. In fact, you can get five dollars off right now. by going to Sam’s Club. Turmeric, it can be kind of difficult for the body to utilize effectively. It’s known for its antioxidant properties, but most forms are a little difficult to absorb. But this is where the Super Beats folks have changed it with the turmeric juice to support a healthy inflammatory response. They use a clinically studied turmeric curcumin complex. And so the complex helps to solve the issue of utilization by making it into a highly absorbable form. And so it tastes great. It’s like one orange and orange orangey orangey it’s the word citrus flavored chew and it’s a really great way to help boost your body’s ability to support healthy response to inflammation right and it’s a clinically studied turmeric curcumin complex and it offers significantly higher absorption than the other conventional turmeric extracts the basic ones so your body actually gets more from every serving And right now is a perfect time to try it. They have an exclusive deal at Sam’s Club and you can get $5 off turmeric chews. But that offer ends December 29th. So it’s the high absorption formula, clinically studied turmeric chews. Head to Sam’s Club today and grab your turmeric chews while the savings last.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. It’s a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite. Obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That’s with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture Research with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season! Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made!
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 31 :
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.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is The Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you at The Lash at Dana Lash Radio on X. It is a great way to stay connected to anything and everything going on in the world of the show. Great job by both her and her producers making that stuff, stuff you must pay attention to. All right, I do want to play a couple things. First, there’s audio about how great the GDP is this time around. 4.3% beat the expectation of 3.3% in this quarter. So good news as far as our economy is concerned. This is something the president, of course, has talked about a lot, that he thinks the next year will really demonstrate how many policies he’s put in place or agreements, deals he’s made because of tariffs and whatnot that actually will wind up benefiting the United States of America. So if you think things are bad, they’re hopefully going to get much better very soon. And some underlying numbers seem to say that that’s true. Here we go.
SPEAKER 30 :
Welcome back to Squawk Box. Rick Santelli here live at CME HQ with some delayed but very important data points. We’ll be looking at October preliminary durable goods, Philly Fed and GDP. Second time around the block delayed. Third quarter numbers. We’re looking for 3.3. Zoom, zoom, zoom. 4.3%. 4.3%. Yeah, baby. That is a nice jump, and I know many may question data gathering, but on the surface, this would be the strongest quarter going back to the third quarter of 2023 when it was 4.7%. That seems good.
SPEAKER 12 :
That seems like a good thing. I love that the reference to data gathering is already out there. To distrust it, to not be sure about this information. You just have to live your own life. And you have to decide for yourself if things are good or bad. Uniquely, this time of year, people put a lot of money on credit cards. Americans do this every holiday season. Some are worse than others for the amount that we depend on debt to give people what we want to give them over the holidays. But I do think that it’s interesting that this is a time of year where we also hyper fixate on something like poll numbers for the approval rating of the current president. Every president does bad around this time of year. Trump is not alone in that. And actually, as far as support goes within Republican places or conservatives, people who identify as voters of the president, he’s still doing real great. So it is interesting how some of those numbers, I think, get misused or they persuade you to think something different than what we see all the time. He is not alone, the president, not against himself or against others. That does include the Obamas, of course, the Bidens of the world, and having a pretty big dip in approval rating, especially in regards to the economy around this time of year. All right. I Do you want to play one other thing? I’m not going to shy away from it. I’m definitely going to talk about the Epstein file drops and the information out there and all the discussions about it. The biggest headline in mainstream media about this is that Trump was on a flight with Epstein and a 20-year-old woman. Not an underage woman. That’s something that I feel like the mainstream media outlets are desperate to find. They want to find a way to say that Trump is responsible for the horrible crimes that Epstein committed. They don’t actually want to protect anyone from, you know, the criminals who co-conspired with Epstein to do all that horrible stuff to children. That’s not really important for mainstream media. They would rather just find a way to blame Trump for something. So that is a headline out there. There are descriptions of some of the more ridiculous stuff that happened with Glenn Maxwell and others in how they coerced people to do some of the things that they wound up doing with Jeffrey Epstein. And it’s really horrible and awful to read through some of that stuff. Again, not in mainstream media. They’re not focused on that. So President Trump was asked a question about Epstein, and he gave a pretty interesting answer to this question where he said he was friendly with a lot of people. And there are a lot of photos out there of Jeffrey Epstein with a lot of individuals, not just President Trump or former President Clinton, who seems to be in a ridiculous amount of photos with the known sex abuser. But here is how President Trump responded to a question about Epstein.
SPEAKER 28 :
Thank you, Mr. President. Were you surprised by the number of photos of Bill Clinton in the Epstein files, and can you commit to their full release by the end of the year? Some of the victims were protesting that too many of them were redacted.
SPEAKER 25 :
I know there are a lot of people that are angry about All of the pictures of other people, you know, but I think it’s terrible. Look, I don’t like the I like Bill Clinton. I’ve always gotten along with Bill Clinton. I’ve been nice to him. He’s been nice to me. We’ve always gotten along. Respect him. I hate to see photos come out of him. But this is what the Democrats, mostly Democrats and a couple of bad Republicans are asking for. So they give me their photos of me, too. Everybody was friendly with this guy. Either friendly or not friendly, but he was around. He was all over Palm Beach and other places. The head of Harvard was his best friend, Larry Summers. That’s true. And Bill Clinton was a friend of his, but everybody was. I actually threw him out of Mar-a-Lago.
SPEAKER 12 :
That is also true. By the way, I do like that that eventually comes up when Trump talks about Epstein, that he became uncomfortable with Epstein and threw him out of Mar-a-Lago because of the creepy stuff that Epstein was doing, which inevitably was actually a whole lot of horribly illegal things. But nonetheless, what I think is most interesting about this is how Trump says he likes Bill Clinton. And it’s part of the reason I wanted to play this, because Trump is at a point, not that he’s ever really been anything other than this, where he doesn’t give a crap what the potential fallout is for saying something here or there. You know, having a sit down moment that goes viral where he seems to be friendly with Barack Obama and Obama has to somewhat crap on it. But Trump doesn’t care. He is just at a point where it doesn’t matter. None of this is important. All of these gotcha question, whatever they’re designed to be things for media. Just ignore them. Move on. Who cares? And also correctly blame the left for being the people that begged and pushed and are still begging and pushing for more information from Epstein to come out because they say we haven’t seen it all yet. And it seems like every time something does come out, it seems to overly hurt Democrats and not Republicans, which then, of course, makes mainstream media not really care about it. Because the goal, again, has always been, and at no point ever really was, to protect people. It’s just to find Trump responsible for something, anything, as best they can. All right, another piece of audio I want to play. This is interesting to me. This is a conversation about the insane amount of fraud that exists in Minnesota. It is absolutely ridiculous the amount of discussions we’re having right now about how profound and how large the stealing is coming. You know, the information about that stealing is coming in. It’s just it’s incredible. And there’s no way that there aren’t a bunch of people that have to be involved in this and people that won’t do anything about fixing it because, darn it, the individuals who they’re paying are people they expect to help them continue to get elected in any kind of political race. That is something that James Comer actually talked about recently. We can go ahead and play some of that audio because Governor Walz. And many, many other people have no interest in doing anything other than preventing more of this crime. And the only reason they’re going to prevent more of it moving forward is they’ve been caught now. Now they have to prevent it moving forward or they’ll get caught even worse, you know, next time. But they’re actually not going to harm anybody that’s in this country that’s, you know, taking advantage of us because they expect very much to be voted into power again and again, as I said, by these people. Here we go.
SPEAKER 37 :
At the end of the day, for Governor Walz to say Republicans on the Oversight Committee should stand down, he’ll fix it. I don’t think America believes that. He’s not going to do anything because they don’t want to offend that population. And the early numbers that I’m getting in on the Somalis in Minnesota is 75 percent of the Somalis in Minnesota are on full government assistance. That’s full welfare.
SPEAKER 12 :
75% of people that live there from Somalia are getting full welfare from us. A whole bunch of fraud, a whole bunch of abuse, a whole bunch of stealing going on, and billions of dollars as far as the number goes. You wonder at times how anyone could possibly take Walls seriously, and you easily can figure out why Trump has started to say the word retarded tied to Governor Walls. And of course, also get media attention for that, for the use of that word and all the different weird things that come out about it. All of it is just designed to play the game against people who also play games. All right. One last thing I want to do address here in the first hour. or at least wanted to talk about a little bit, is the discussion about the oil that was taken from Venezuela and how recently Trump said we’re going to keep it. And that’s really designed to be a trap question for media. But more than that is everything else going on between the U.S. and Venezuela. The Armada, as Trump calls it, that is built up in that area in case Venezuela decides or thinks they can do anything tough or stupid. If they did something like that, Trump says it would be the last time they do something stupid because the United States would respond to any sort of action or any sort of military strike taken by Venezuela. But what’s this all really about? might be the question a lot of people are asking. And sure, there’s been a bunch of times in the history of this country where oil seems to be a motivating factor in many of the things we do. And so I think a lot of people out there are saying, now it’s just about oil. We’re just trying to take oil from that country. That’s all it is. The truth, though, is very different. Because we don’t need the oil ourselves from Venezuela. That’s not something that we desperately need to be a more successful country. What we need to do is prevent the trade in oil that occurs between Venezuela, Russia, China, any of the places we try to harm with sanctions. We need to make those sanctions more effective. And this black market trade thing that exists between some of these countries that definitely oppose us helps them circumvent any of the financial penalties that we’re creating. So instead of creating a world where we try even harder on paper to win a fight, you can’t win on paper. We’re doing something away that actually does have an impact. The more that we disrupt the exchange of certain products between certain countries, especially when Venezuela is concerned, which is ridiculously corrupt and incredibly poor, a vast majority of the country, because all that money goes to very, very few people who live there and pull all the strings and control everything. But the more we do this, the more we actually see the underbelly of the bad guy. is the way I would say it. We see what else there is that we have to fight. This is, I think, a direct assault on one of the things that most harms the United States throughout the rest of the world. And I think that Trump is a genius. And I don’t say that lightly. I’m not trying to be a Trump guy who loves and thinks everything he does is incredible. But I think he’s a genius in how he’s waged this war and how he’s talked about it as a fight against drugs. and the amount of drugs that are brought into our country, or even, honestly, that go other places from Venezuela that harm people. He’s talked about it in terms that are quite different than saying out loud the thing that everyone knows, and it’s that you want to prevent these countries from having an outstretched ability to go around any harm we try to do to them. Sanctions that Democrats and Republicans put on all of these places because we know that they’re doing things that hurt us. We want to prevent them from harming us, from harming our interests throughout the world, and we can’t seem to get that done. This is an avenue to potentially actually take that control string back. And I think it’s great. I think it’s a very important and very, you know, intelligent way, as I said, genius way to go about doing this. And of course, mainstream media is missing the point and talking about it in the most basic, the most simplistic terms and trying to make it seem like a simple corruption. And I guess I’ll just say one thing in response to that. If everything I said, you don’t believe. If like everything I said is like, ah, I don’t know. This guy’s biased. He’s on his side. He’s saying stuff about Trump that’s too nice. Whatever. The other thing that’s interesting about the actual oil itself is we could more easily buy it than we can take it. It’s cheap. It’s something we can very easily acquire if we want it by means that are much different than means that involve ships, that involve seizing assets and keeping them and keeping ships, all that stuff. We could do something much more cost effective and we’re not. doing it that way. So the goal can’t possibly be the thing that we could gain for less money. It has to be something else. And this something else that I told you is by far the most obvious thing for it to actually be a way to gain more control back that we’ve lost because of the complexity and the partnerships that exist beyond us. We’re one of our quote unquote enemies or certainly not someone who’s always trying to help us. China, the most among them, is trying to work with other people to do things that harm this country. We’ll take a break on that note. A lot coming up. We’ll have some fun. It’s almost a holiday. We have to have fun on the show. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana Show.
SPEAKER 32 :
Ammo Squared. Ammo Squared is a company that makes sure that you are always stocked up no matter what happens. It’s America’s ammunition reserve, a worry-free solution to stockpile ammo for the future. Avoid getting caught empty-handed. Got over 70 calibers to choose from. Set a monthly budget. They’ll automatically curate and grow your ammo reserves. Set it and forget it, and it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Everything stays stored in a secure, climate-controlled facility until folks want it shipped. No minimums, no hidden fees. Free shipping on orders over $2.50. Visit AmmoSquared.com. Set up your ongoing ammo supply. Don’t run out when it counts. Stock up before and after training to stay ready. That’s AmmoSquared.com. Tell them Dana sent you.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. It’s a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite, obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture Research with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season! Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made!
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you at Radio Craig C. If for some reason you want to follow me on social media, not exactly as prolific as at DLash or DanaLashRadio on X on Twitter, she is crushing it. So I would follow her. I do follow her, actually, but at Radio Craig C. If you’d like to follow me as well and occasionally see tweets about the Yankees, which is by and large what I actually tweet about, if I do that at all. All right, I do want to play some audio quickly, a few different things. First, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett is telling us how great a 4.3 number looks for the GDP in Q3. Just another example of them kind of living up to the thing they’re saying. This is the Trump administration and the president telling us things are going to get better and things are getting better. Some of the underlying numbers seem to demonstrate that. This is one of those things. Here we go.
SPEAKER 09 :
let’s start with that gdp report it’s a great report uh what made this happen kevin sure well uh you know it’s a fantastic report 4.3 percent that’s just about as good as gdp numbers get and especially coming you know on the the heels of the cpi report consumer price index report we got which you actually showed some interesting data that it’s consistent with this showed that quarter inflation is all the way down to 1.6 percent So I think that these numbers are showing that President Trump’s trade policy and his supply-side policy, which is really increasing factory production and so on, is having a big effect, as is his trade policy. So if we abstract from the reduction of the trade deficit, then the 4.3% number would only be 2.6%.
SPEAKER 12 :
So I have no idea what car is doing some crazy like truck thing behind him as he’s speaking from the lawn near the White House. It feels like someone is picking up the trash, to be honest with you. But yeah, those numbers are great. They are very good. And they seem to demonstrate something that the president has been saying and others have been saying for a little bit, which is next year will be even better. Next year, it’ll be more noticeable for the American people that things are potentially going well. because we are also still in record amounts of debt, just individually and as a country. So it’s not all roses. I’m not trying to pretend that. But one of the most impactful things here seems to be the way that Trump went about creating trade deals through tariffs. The entirety of mainstream media claimed to you that it was going to be awful and horrible and that prices were going to skyrocket because of tariffs. The exact opposite has happened so far. Surprise, surprise how shocking it is that they were so wrong. All right, I delayed it as much as I could, but Hunter Biden did a podcast, and there’s a bunch of audio out there, and some of this stuff has to be talked about. My favorite thing, and producer Steven actually sent this along to me, which is great, is a promo for the podcast in which Hunter Biden is claiming there never was a laptop, but then also referring to the laptop multiple times, making it sound like it definitely existed. And by the way, of course it did. The government actually even used it against Hunter Biden in a lawsuit. They entered it into evidence in a courtroom. Be weird to enter nothing into an evidence in courtroom, but who cares about the truth if you’re Hunter Biden? Let’s go ahead and say two things at the same time. This is a minute of audio and he claims there is no laptop and then claims there’s a collection of social media things that are the laptop and then just says the words laptop way more times. than anybody should.
SPEAKER 26 :
Here we go. There was no laptop. I have no recollection whatsoever of ever dropping off a laptop to John Paul McIsaac.
SPEAKER 12 :
By the way, real quick there, that’s not proof of anything, sir. The amount of drugs and things that you did, not having recollection of dropping someone off to someone, Not exactly going to be trusted. Continue.
SPEAKER 26 :
He goes to repair the laptop, but then he starts to read the files. And he reads a file and he sees files about Burisma. And he says the only thing that he can think of doing is calling Rudy Giuliani. He’s a laptop repair shop owner in Wilmington, Delaware, whose store is three and a half miles at most from where everybody knows my parents live. So if he had a laptop that he wanted to return, he thinks that the best thing to do is call Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Bob Costello, and give it to my sworn enemy? But there was no laptop. They cobbled together all of this.
SPEAKER 12 :
Okay. That’s my favorite part too. When Sean Ryan, who’s doing this interview is like, wait a minute, but you said there’s not a laptop. So why are you now talking about who they decided to give the non-laptop to?
SPEAKER 26 :
Digital material that had been stolen from phones that had been taken from the dark web and they made it out to do this thing. Then the story doesn’t become about the laptop at all because there’s nothing in the laptop other than a record of me being a degenerate at the worst moment in my life, smoking, doing drugs,
SPEAKER 12 :
Wait, but I thought there was no laptop. Yet again, he’s referring to a thing that he knows does exist and he doesn’t recall who he dropped it off with or how he forgot it. And by the way, my favorite part in there, too, of doubting the legitimacy of the actual story that existed surrounding that laptop is that someone would call Rudy Giuliani. Why would they want to just deliver it to you or to your parents or to anyone at all remotely tied to the Biden administration? if it seems to be incredibly damaging to the Biden administration. Who do you think’s going to hide it if you return it to them? You actually do want to give it to someone that you think will turn it into news and actually give the truth of what’s in there. Not saying Rudy Giuliani has to be that guy, but why would I ever bring it to the Bidens if I find all this crazy stuff on it that talks about Burisma and everything else and the big guy, et cetera, et cetera. That’s insane. Hunter Biden also was asked a question about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Talk about a voice I don’t need in that discussion. But he actually admits that it was a terrible thing, that it was a failed exit. So I thought that was at least interesting to play because Hunter seems to be more willing to blame Pop for things that definitely the president got wrong. The former president and President Biden got wrong. The exit from Afghanistan, probably one of the most significant things. mistakes of the mistakes that he made um but then when talking about himself when referencing things like the laptop that didn’t exist a second ago or even referencing being on the board of burisma he continued to forgive himself like only only a degenerate can but here he is talking about the withdrawal from afghanistan what do you think some of those failures were
SPEAKER 26 :
I think one of the failures was the way in which they executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think it was an obvious failure. I think 13 Marines are dead. I think that there was a better way to do it. And I think that I can blame it on his generals. I can blame it on the people, the way in which we did it. But my dad always knew this also, is that the buck stops with him. I think that that was a failure. I don’t think…
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, you know, hold on. What I think is amazing about that, too, that he says the buck stopped with him. Of course it does. President Biden ran on certain things. One of those things was ending the war in Afghanistan, and he did it terribly. He did it the way a politician does, who only cares about being able to say, I made one of my political promises come true. He didn’t actually want to do it to protect anyone. And even though Hunter Biden references the loss of military lives, if you have listened to the individuals that were actually impacted by it, whether it’s the family of some of those individuals who died or some of the other military people who were injured and survived, the way they talk about how Biden treated them, how much he disregarded and didn’t care about the sacrifice made by the men and women in our military. is much more significant than the degenerate, you know, drug addicted son of the former president telling us that he thinks that’s one of the mistakes that his dad made. Well, his dad was the auto pen and president. It’s just it’s ridiculous. And I can’t believe that it’s the kind of thing that goes viral more places, because by and large, I honestly just don’t want to hear from Hunter Biden anymore. But I have to play it, especially that there is no laptop. And then he continuously references the laptop that he claims doesn’t exist. All right. Another couple of things. First, this is out of Minnesota. The assistant attorney general in Minnesota or in Minneapolis, excuse me, will be suing the state and the city because of public school decisions that were made that seem to be racist and they seem to be anti-white. Things like the black men teach fellowships. And, you know, certain underrepresented populations being the target employees of Minneapolis and their school districts. I just think this is profoundly interesting because by and large, people on the left will claim this stuff doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. It’s not true. And it’s racist to even talk about it. And yet there seems like there’s going to be at least a court case in the near future, one of several, to be honest, that demonstrate just how much of a reality this is. And it does matter. And if you’re anti something, if that thing that you’re anti is, quote, racism or anything else, you should be anti it across the board. You should be like, oh, it’s wrong no matter who it happens to. And it seems that we might have a demonstration of that. More and more of what’s going on in Minnesota seems to be the most broken anywhere in the United States. Just a place that seems proud of the fact that it’s absolutely corrupt and terrible. And, you know, fraud and abuse and all kinds of things are happening to a scale that seems to make no sense in a place that shouldn’t be capable of the billions of dollars of fraud that they’re capable of or allowing for it to happen the way they have. There’s also this Boston mayor, Michelle Wu, talks about the accomplishments that she’s had and that it’s all thanks to the Somalians who live in her community. And this is sort of surreal. But hey, if you’re defrauding Minneapolis and Minnesota for tons and tons of dollars, I guess you can donate some of those to some of these other politicians. So they don’t want that money truck to end. So they’ll give you an attaboy when they’re speaking. Here we go.
SPEAKER 02 :
You cannot talk about any achievement that the city of Boston has had in safety, jobs, and economic development, in education, without talking about the Somali community that has lifted our city up. We are proud and we are grateful for our Somali community and for our Somali American neighbors. Boston and the country are clear that hate has no place in our society. It does, yeah, it has no place. Every attack to actually strengthen and expand the services available.
SPEAKER 12 :
All right. So hate has no place in our society. I agree with that wholeheartedly. And stop. You can put a pause at the end of that statement. That’s fine. But I also think this ridiculous version of praise for the sake of donation dollars is also bad and ridiculous. And I do think it’s insane for someone in Boston to claim that the only reason things have gotten better has to do with a specific community there and nobody else. It’s 100% because of them, and we’re all grateful, and praise be, and all this and whatnot. It’s surreal. All right, I’ll take a break on that. More coming up in a bit. I was really, really interested in Phillip Rivers’ game number two in the NFL. He played on Monday night last night. I wanted to see what a 44-, 45-year-old guy can do after a week of getting to play in the NFL, after being on the couch for the last few years. And I think at least for half of that game, he didn’t disappoint. So I got that and more coming up in a bit. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana Show.
SPEAKER 32 :
The folks who helped make the program possible. It is our friends over at Preborn. We’re coming up on Christmas. Let me just tell you about Preborn. These are folks who really are just devout. I love the folks who run Preborn. And they’ve been saving about half a million babies. since 2007 that is not an exaggeration you heard me say that right it has been a lot and everyone a precious life with a future a purpose and a story this is an entire generation of people they are saving they don’t get taxpayer dollars like these ngos you hear about this is all done privately your donation makes it possible they meet these women where they are while these women are being pummeled by messages from society that they can’t bring these babies They can’t raise them. They just need to have an abortion. Preborn introduces them with a free ultrasound. These women hear their baby’s heartbeat. Studies show the chances for baby’s life to continue living double. $28 is all that ultrasound costs. Imagine you spend $28 this Christmas and you save a life. I mean, what treasure you’re storing up for yourself in heaven. But you think bigger. What about, you know, $100, $150, $700 reaches women online and also helps them make appointments at preborn clinics and gets them seen. You could even do a super powerful year-end donation. dedication or tax shelter opportunity $15,000 purchases one ultrasound machine and this year because of a matching grant your gift is doubled so these clinics get two life-saving machines think of the thousands of babies you’re saving and every machine serves thousands of mothers and babies this Christmas join them in standing for life support the mission of pre-born because of that special matching grant your gift is instantly doubled donate securely Dial pound 250, say the word baby, visit preborn.com slash Dana. Every gift is tax deductible and impacts eternity. Dial pound 250, say the word baby, make your life-saving donation today.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavors fusion, Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sippin’ season, and only for a limited time. Sprite, obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season! Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made!
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 21 :
And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. Time for a quick five on the Dana Show. Five lightning fire topics to get you into the holiday spirit or whatever. This one to me, I loved. This isn’t holiday related. It’s just in general. Although I guess it’s the kind of thing I wish I could get as a 40-year-old guy for my Christmas. A chance to play in an NFL football game. Phillip Rivers has been living this dream the last two weeks after years, of course, of being a great NFL quarterback and then having to retire and sitting on the couch for several years. Here he is calling a play, something that was viral on social media. I think a couple of people even said, please inject this kind of thing into my veins. Just because of how cool it sounds, and I think how a lot of us of an age that’s a little older than what would be typical for a professional athlete see ourselves more in Phillip Rivers than we do in other people out there. Here we go.
SPEAKER 22 :
And he was able to get the ball to Taylor for a first down. 180! like a traffic cop putting guys in place and he’s got a man wide open
SPEAKER 12 :
For half of that game, it was a bunch of fun. Phillip Rivers and the Indianapolis Colts hung in with a much better team in the San Francisco 49ers for half. And then the other second half of the game happened and terrible things occurred. And Rivers didn’t seem like he could throw the ball as downfield as he needed to to really be competitive in the second half. But nonetheless… I do think he’s one of the feel-good stories of the NFL season this year and the last couple weeks, and especially in Indy. The show airs in Indianapolis at WIBC. It airs a lot of places. Indy and the Colts looked like a team that would do very well this year, and then a lot of things fell apart. So just having the Philip Rivers story at the tail end of the season is at least a reason to keep paying attention to a team that’s very, very likely not going to be a part of the playoffs. Some other things out there as far as quick five topics go. The FDA approved the first GLP-1 pill for obesity. It is from the makers of Wagovi. And it’ll be interesting to see if it’s as effective or more effective or less effective than the shot version of the GLP-1. And also how cost effective it’ll be. How expensive for you to spend money on this sort of thing. I know more and more people… that are on some form of weight loss drug. And it is sort of shocking to see how quickly they drop weight. And actually, sort of a tangential story to this one, Chipotle has put out a GLP-1 menu which just is simply lesser portions of the food you would normally get at Chipotle if you’re not on a weight loss drug and if your appetite isn’t curbed as much as it would be by taking one of those. So it’s more protein, rich, less carbs, and just less overall food. I thought that was interesting. that Chipotle wants to lean in to people who might not be eating a whole lot because of some sort of medication they’re on and claim that they’re actually going to over-serve those people with less stuff. And I assume it still costs about the same amount of money. One final thing, and just quickly, and we’ll talk about it more later, there’s a viral story about Santa, elves, and a robbery in Montreal. Not exactly a Disney movie. I’ll give you details for that in a bit. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. It’s a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite. Obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That’s with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. That’s with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season. Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired.
SPEAKER 18 :
Except for the guide we made. In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 31 :
Not able to catch all three hours of The Dana Show? Subscribe to the full podcast and get news and laughs delivered in short, easy-to-digest episodes. Ideal for your busy lifestyle on YouTube, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is The Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. A bunch of stuff out there to talk about. DLash, DanaLashRadio on X, on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to everything she’s doing. At Radio Craig C, if there’s some reason you want to follow me too. I’m just going to keep throwing it out there. Maybe I’ll break 500 people. That follow that account by the end of that or whatever it’s that I don’t even know by the end of helping fill in on this show. I do want to talk about the Republican infighting just a bit. And so if you don’t know anything about this, good for you. America Fest 2025 happened over the weekend. That is the Turning Point USA event. One of the bigger ones, certainly something that the absence of Charlie Kirk was a noticeable part of. But there were shots taken by Ben Shapiro in the direction of some. I think Tucker Carlson took shots at Shapiro. People were firing at each other. I think Megyn Kelly got hit with strays for some reason and then had to deal with that, the fall to that. And certainly Candace Owens was criticized a lot, mostly because it’s fairly easy to criticize Candace Owens. She is right now one of the biggest names in the world of I’m just asking questions, even if I have no proof or logical reason to ask some of these questions. I’m still just asking them, which by and large is the same as investigating. Candace Owens feels like to me, before I get any of the rest of this going and play some audio for you, like someone who’s part of an investigative team, maybe the most recent person hired on a team of detectives or cops who’s just saying crazy stuff. And you’re looking at that person, you’re like, I don’t know if that’s right. I don’t know if aliens did this or whoever it is did that. And she’s like, I’m just trying to help. Every idea is a good idea. Sometimes those can have a detrimental effect, not in the sense that you got to shut up, keep saying whatever you want to say, but in the sense of if you never have any proof of them, you’re going to convince people of things without any reason to actually stand behind them. And that seems bad. And I think by and large, that was Shapiro’s point. Now, Shapiro certainly has a lot of things you can criticize him for. Many people do, whether you’re on the right or the left or what have you. So here, let’s start with this. Let’s start with some audio of Scott Jennings on CNN talking about J.D. Vance, what the vice president said about this, essentially saying that let’s have the infighting within our party stop. Now, I actually profoundly disagree with this, but not because I agree with the craziness of some of what people are saying. But here, first, let’s play the audio of Scott Jennings and how he summarized what Vance’s message was at AmericaFest.
SPEAKER 33 :
But it was pretty stark when you lay it out that way, right? When you saw Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro going directly at what are some of these conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism, let’s call it what it is, that are in some corners of the movement. How do you see the way that JD Vance kind of threaded this needle?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, J.D. Vance was and is trying to appeal to the most people possible because he anticipates being the nominee of the Republican Party in 2028. And he has had relationships with a lot of the people whose names you heard on the stage. You know, there’s more information today than we had yesterday. They took a straw poll of all the people who went to Turning Point’s event. So this is thousands and thousands of people. Eighty seven percent of them in the straw poll said that Israel was either a top ally or an ally of the United States. the people who were there, what are the biggest issues facing the United States? Number one, radical Islam. So when you look at what the people who were in the audience think, it sounds like they were really more with Ben Shapiro than they were with some of the other people who were attacking Ben Shapiro. They were rather clear-eyed about who our friends are and the difference between right and wrong, at least…
SPEAKER 12 :
I agree with him on that, that they’re clear-eyed. A lot of people seem to be clear-eyed on who’s right and who’s wrong, regardless of what you think of the actual person of Ben Shapiro or anyone else. And I know that there’s been some shots taken at the character of Shapiro and some of the things he’s done in the world of media. The other people in media, Candace Owens among them, who said that she got fired by Ben, which she did. But nonetheless, here’s what I think is more interesting than that conversation and telling you whose side I’m on. If I agree with Shapiro or I agree with Vivek or I think that Tucker was right, all that, whatever. It doesn’t really matter. And honestly, if you listen to the show and Dana, she knows a lot of these people way more than I do. So she might have. way more information and better things to say about some of this infighting. So I encourage you heavily to listen when Dana’s back hosting the show to anything she says about this. But my very simple point is I think that the Republican Party, or at least the people who are the most notable names and voices within it, continue to demonstrate how they’re different than Democrats in a good way. And I’m not trying to echo any one of the points that they make as being valuable in and of itself. I’m not trying to be anti-Semitic on this show or anything like it. But I am saying that not shutting up voices, not telling people that you’re not allowed to say what you think and, you know, not allowed to target people within our movement or within our side of the political aisle is the exact opposite of what Democrats do. Their hive mind, monolith thinking is damaging. It’s something that I think is inherently bad in the world of politics in general. And I’ll give you a couple examples of why I think this is actually kind of a good thing. The first one, obviously this happened a while ago, but I really enjoyed when it took forever for Republicans with a majority to pick the Speaker of the House. I didn’t enjoy it because I thought that some of the names being thrown out were good or bad. It wasn’t even that complex. I enjoyed it because I think that’s what our political system is supposed to be. You’re supposed to have infighting, people who disagree with each other, who raise these opinions or raise these voices and say, I don’t want this or I don’t want that. You don’t have to have people who all think and work in lockstep. And Democrats demand it. Republicans don’t. Even Republican voters and supporters don’t demand that everyone thinks exactly like them in order to be a part of the party, part of the movement to vote the same way. And I think that was J.D. Vance’s overarching message. But I do think that part of this is also a lot of people who think they’re more important than they are. No offense to Ben Shapiro or anyone else. I like him more or less and some of the things he says. But I will say that the movement is beyond any of these voices, the movement, the political party, whatever you want to call it. And people are going to have differing opinions. And I think it will always be better to allow those opinions to exist in the public square and to essentially attack the ones that you think are horrible as opposed to the opposite. So I think what Ben Shapiro did on stage was fine. I think what Tucker Carlson did was fine. I think all of them are doing things by and large that I think help demonstrate that this party is more complex, that it’s actually all the things that, quote unquote, woke people want to say they are without woke people being any of this stuff, which is what I find is kind of amusing. And I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but I can’t help saying it. When I’m around people who vote like I do, I vote Republican, I vote conservatively. I’ve been doing it since I was eight. I’ve been a registered Republican since I was 18 years old. So it’s something that honestly, my family has done for a long time too. And there are notable people within my family and the party that I won’t reference right now. But nonetheless, what I think is interesting about this is when I’m around those individuals, you can have a more complex conversation. Like people can heavily disagree with each other. and call people a moron and an idiot in sort of a lighthearted way, or maybe a serious way, I don’t know. But you can talk about this stuff. Honestly, the way you see Republican pundits or Republican politicians being willing to do an interview on any platform You see people like Trump taking questions all the time from the right, the left, the middle, whoever. And honestly, when they say that Trump’s brain isn’t working anymore, I find that uniquely hilarious because of how often he’s willing to be challenged by anybody. and let whatever the results of that challenge are be something that speaks for itself, be something that exists in the world. Biden was hiding, and Biden was using a list of names to call on when he did do any sort of interaction with the press. That is much more damaging and demonstrates a person whose brain is broken far more than any of the crazy stuff they say about Trump. But here, by and large, I guess the overarching message of what I’m trying to say, and it might be something that you care about very little. I doubt the average American person is sitting home at night thinking, man, why is there so much fighting within the Republican movement as far as some of the bigger names that exist within this party, pundits and or actual politicians? I doubt that’s something that runs across your mind very much compared to what’s going on this Christmas. But I will say that if you do pay attention to it, If it is something that you more closely monitor, I think it further shows you what is supposed to be the way that a party functions, meaning that it does have dissenting opinions. It does have outside voices. I’ll credit Dana Lash for sure as being a human being that will challenge anybody on anything. And it’s one of the more fascinating things about how fearless and I’m not trying to kiss up to her. I know I’m filling in on her show, but how fearless she can be. It’s like, ah, screw it. I’ll say what I think no matter who it offends, no matter who it hurts, any of that stuff. And I think that is a much more common, not to the degree that Dana does it. She’s exceptional at it. But I think it’s a much more common principle of the right than the left. And I think most people would agree with that and understand where that comes from, because on the left, that woke, crazy ideology that they aspire to have. is all also uniform hive mind thinking that seems to be much to the detriment of everyone. And really, the kind of stuff that gets you further away from knowing the truth or understanding a complex issue in the most valuable way possible because you just want the snippet version, the highlight version, or the version that’s a true narrative. that you don’t have any sort of sense of what part of it is being given to me for deceptive reasons and what part of it is actually authentic. It’s just amazing. Again, one more time to see that all play out because I don’t think you would have a democratic convention quite like the one that Turning Point USA had or fundraiser or whatever you want to call it, where so many people on the same side of the aisle took pot shots at each other. And yet you do have that with the Republican Party and the conservative movement and MAGA or whatever you want to call it. And I still think that’s good, regardless of what the shots are and the ones that I easily can say I disagree with. At least they’re still not being silenced the way they do it on the other side. All right. I think I’ve made my point several times. But again, that’s the only takeaway I had. from all of this coverage and some of the media obsession and the reaction to it, pundits who are trying to tell you how this is bad or good for the midterm elections, is you still want a party that seems inclusive, and that’s a very woke word to use, by being willing to have any discussion. And that party is not the one that screams it actually is. you know, woke and all this stuff because they hate with a passion and they hate their own side with a passion when the few that do seem to speak out at times against them, like the Jon Stewart’s of the world, say one thing that they disagree with. And that side goes crazy on their own. It is quite a bit different again than the right. All right, quick break. A lot more Craig Collins filling in on the Dana show.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. It’s a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite. Obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That’s with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture Research with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season! Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made!
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. it’s giving gifts with categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful i really shouldn’t have check out the guide on marshalls.com and gift the good stuff at marshalls it’s his life mission to make bad decisions
SPEAKER 12 :
it’s time for florida man this is the dana show my name is craig collins filling in thrilled to be with you a bunch of stuff out there to talk about d lash dana lash radio and x on twitter a great ways to stay connected to her it’s time for florida man of course as the music tells you um there’s three florida man stories all of them sort of crazy i feel like the ante gets lifted or gets upped with each one of these so let’s do them in the order of what i think are ridiculous First, there’s this one, and I can’t believe that I put this at option three on the list. A Florida man was jailed after he attacked an Eagle Lake neighbor who bought him a beer. This happened in Polk County. A courtesy beer run in that area caused Sheriff Grady Judge to respond and say how a scrum broke out. Apparently, the person who was given the free beer didn’t like the type of free beer provided or just in general some of the other things that happened. It got so crazy that there was a gun involved, but the guys mostly used their fists. So I think the gun was just present. I don’t think it was used in any way. But that is number three on my list of insane stories where people get in a fight and somebody goes to jail over beer and a run for beer. But that does sound very Florida. All right, number two on this list to me, a man is accused of selling 400 pounds of avocados from the Southwest Miami Dade Grove. The guy’s name is Edel Perez. He’s 29. He faces charging of trespassing on an agricultural site, third degree grand theft. He doesn’t own the avocados that he was selling. He just wanted to try to sell them. So he’s like, hey, you see all these avocados? You see how great they look? You can have all these if the price is right. And everybody’s like, do you own those? He’s like, that’s not important. Let’s not worry about that. Deputies on patrol spotted a black Mercedes parked near the Grove. The man was in a black hoodie. He was actually picking avocados himself and selling them. They estimated that he took about 400 pounds of That is a very, very long thing to do as far as the con goes. And it only made him about 800 bucks. You can only sell them for that amount of money. So it does seem like the effort versus the reward, not really there. And then Perez now also faces a $5,000 bond and probably a bunch of actual charges for a crime. It seems it’s going to be very easy to prove he committed. But I just love the idea that you’re like, hey, I see avocados. I see them on a farm. They seem like the kind of thing that I could make some money off of. So let me go ahead and do that. That happened in Florida. And now the number one for the ante being the highest as far as stories go. And this is just a sick person that did a sick thing. Derek Jordan Wright Jr. is the guy’s name. He is 26. He faces charges of digital voyeurism because the first thing he did was he filmed a woman in a South Florida Kohl’s fitting room against her will. So he took a video like a creep is one to do. This already makes him the worst of three people on my list, I think. But then even more than that, he showed it to her. So the creepy suspect of this crime who had a black iPhone 15 decided after he walked out to go ahead and show the video to the person that was the victim of the crime. even as I think she had noticed that something weird was happening and was approaching someone to talk about how bad of a look that all was. But it also seems like maybe the guy might sick or sort of pervertedly get his kicks from this sort of thing. But that story was also out there. that in Miami, a guy chose to record someone else in a fitting room and then eventually had to share the creepy thing he did with said person. The judge imposed bond restrictions and other things, and this person is likely to find themselves in a whole lot of trouble too. I’ve never seen this occur before. someone trying to do a video thing of somebody else. But I imagine a bunch of people like me would react if you saw that and try to do something to the crappy person that’s doing this sort of stuff. By and large, they’re not usually intimidating people. So whether that’s get physical with them or something else. But I just wish that more people would have that instinct when this sort of thing happens. Because you can’t imagine… that the guy in South Florida tried to video record someone in a changing room that she’s not aware is doing it, and no one else noticed anything strange. Because I do think a lot of these people just need to get the crap kicked out of them in the regular world more often for this to stop happening. I think that a lot of the people who do, you know, certain scummy stuff in our society, mostly with technology, deserve to have an immediate version of justice provided to them so that they stop. Although this being in the news and this guy’s name being out there seems to be the kind of thing that’s probably also going to be a decent deterrent. But this guy’s an absolute scumbag. All right. Quick break. A lot coming up. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana show.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavors fusion, Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sippin’ season and only for a limited time. Sprite, obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey, Bowen. It’s gift season. Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made.
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you at DLash, Dana Lash Radio on X on Twitter. A Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everybody out there, by the way. Thrilled to be a part of this show today at Radio Craig C. If for some reason you actually want to follow me on social media, which is fine. There’s not a lot that happens there. I probably should do more. All right. Hunter Biden did an interview. There’s a podcast that’s making the rounds that’s everywhere. A part of me wanted to give the Christmas gift to both you and me of not playing any of this, of just continuing to hope that Hunter Biden will go away. But the man is such an arrogant piece of bleep that he can’t seem to fathom himself going away. regardless of all the things he’s already done to demonstrate how he is the head of the Biden crime family. Case in point might be the answer he gave to the question about joining a Burisma board, an energy board of a company in Ukraine that raked of all kinds of, you know, corruption and ridiculous paying off of a person related to a person in political power to get favor and do all kinds of things. Like every part of it’s terrible. And Hunter was asked about this. He was also asked to be critical of his dad. And he took several opportunities to crapple over his father. But when asked to say just one thing, to honestly be critical of himself, what came out was nonsense. What came out was ridiculous. Here is Hunter Biden saying that it was a mistake to join the Burisma board, but not because it actually, in and of itself, was a demonstration of corruption, just because it looked like that, because it couldn’t possibly have been anything other than that. But here we go.
SPEAKER 26 :
Was it a mistake to go on the board?
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 26 :
Yeah, it was absolutely… a mistake, not because of anything that I did that I am embarrassed about or in any way whatsoever feel conflicted about as it relates to what I did for Burisma.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, I need him to say even more clearly that in his opinion, he did nothing wrong.
SPEAKER 26 :
But because of the political position that put us all in. They use that as the toe in the door to be able to call my family, the Biden crime family, without any evidence.
SPEAKER 12 :
Except the fact that you were on the Burisma board and had no right or no reason to be there. And the work you were doing seemed to be non-existent. Those are potential proof. But here’s the thing that I love about this. It is exactly the type of thing you might get from a friend or a family member who doesn’t know how to apologize or ever admit that they did anything wrong. This is the kind of I’m sorry you were hurt by that version of a response to something as opposed to I’m sorry I did something to be a jerk. This person could literally shove you off a cliff. And as you’re plummeting to your doom, be like, I’m sorry this upset you, as opposed to I wish I didn’t do it. But anyway, that was Hunter Biden being self-reflective. He also at one point claimed that the laptop didn’t exist. before then referencing the laptop multiple times, seeming to indicate that it definitely did exist. That was a funny moment for me. There’s also this. When asked about illegal immigration and how negatively it impacts our society and our country, he essentially ripped his father a new one by saying that it is terrible to let people into this country illegally and to give way too many resources. to those who shouldn’t be getting them and to people who don’t seem to deserve them for any reason whatsoever. This again is a surprisingly critical statement to be made, but it’s not Hunter about himself. It’s Hunter about pop.
SPEAKER 26 :
But we don’t want immigrants that are coming here illegally draining us of resources and also being prioritized above people that are actual literal heroes that are coming home, that are still recovering from 20 years of endless war or anybody else in our society.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yes, the answer is right. I love that Hunter even pauses like, am I supposed to say this? Is this something that’s okay? Can I crap on my father like everyone else has crapped on him? And absolutely, he’s right about that. I’m not disagreeing with Hunter Biden and what he’s saying. It’s just amazing to watch him do it. Because if you’ve learned anything about the relationship between those two people, Hunter and his father, Joe Biden, or auto pen and President Biden. It’s how little Hunter cares about his father. He does not give a crap about him whatsoever. The things he did that made Joe Biden’s life more complicated as a politician again and again and again, even when President Biden was actually in the White House. Not that I think he was aware he was there and the auto pen was running our country. But him selling artwork and stuff was just unapologetic versions of continuing to be someone who wants to profiteer from the position of political power that you find a family member in, not even yourself. Hunter also was critical of the exit in Afghanistan. Again, something that, of course, He should be. We all are. It makes sense to be. But it’s just one late or last example, I’ll move on from this, of how much he was willing to be critical of everybody but him. He is the worst kind of selfish person that exists in your life or the lives of all kinds of people. It’s the one person in the room who’s willing to blame anybody else for stuff and never see any fault that they have in anything. They’re essentially always the perfect person.
SPEAKER 26 :
What do you think some of those failures were? I think one of the failures was the way in which they executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think it was an obvious failure. It was. Marines are dead. They are. I think that there was a better way to do it. And I think that I can blame it on his generals. I can blame it on the people the way in which we did it. But my dad always knew this also is that the buck stops with him.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah. And you don’t have any problem going after your dad as much as possible, which it’s just sort of surreal. It’s just gross. I will criticize President Biden. I’m not anywhere near a fan of him, as you’ve probably noticed any time I’ve ever filled on the show. But it’s just amazing to watch Hunter do it as much as he’s doing it, because of anyone who you’d think would be loyal. It’s the son of a guy who continued to defend his child, even though his child was a ridiculous drug and all kinds of other things criminal that was getting caught time and again, embarrassing the family. And Joe Biden and all of the media that protects Democrats stood by him and said things like, yeah, it’s got to be tough being the father of Hunter Biden. It’s It seems like Hunter has very little love for his own father. Again, I’m not disagreeing with most of the things he’s saying. It’s just sort of crazy to see it out there, to say the very least. All right, some other things just quickly. New complaints are being made by the Clinton camp as far as the releasing of certain Epstein files and not others. They’re demanding that the DOJ release more stuff. I’m going to tell you something that you probably already know. Democrats will never move away from there are files you haven’t seen, regardless of what happens. If every file in the history of mankind that even says the name Epstein, even as Jasmine Crockett and others claim that people who aren’t this Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile who maybe hung himself in jail, but some other guy named Jeffrey Epstein, even if they use those files to claim that there’s a secret, the whole point is to convince you that there is some sort of cover up afoot. Democrats had all the power to do this themselves, release all these documents. They didn’t do it. They waited. And now they’re going to attack anything. I’m not saying that doesn’t mean there should probably be more documents released than have been put out so far. The DOJ dropped even more. after missing the deadline that was put in place by a bipartisan vote on it and a signing of a law by the president of the United States saying to put all this information out into the public. Now, granted, they are allowed to still protect victims and protect ongoing cases by redacting some things. Do I think there’s still more to see here than what we know so far publicly? Yeah, I do. Do I say that because I agree with Democrats? No. Do I care if it winds up agreeing with Democrats? Also, the answer is no. But I think the main message that I’m trying to get across is regardless of how transparent the DOJ inevitably has to be on this issue, Democrats will swear to you there’s a secret because they want Trump in trouble. for his association to Epstein. And if they don’t get a smoking gun, they have to pretend one still exists. It’s what they’ve been doing this entire time. It’s what they’ll do again and again and again. So this is the gift that sadly keeps on giving. You will probably hear this in two months, five months, eight months, that there’s still documents that show how terrible of a person Trump is. Because from jump, the Democrats have never been after protecting victims or children that were exploited by a ring of people that seem to all be interested in sex trafficking of minors. You know, people that are really horrible individuals that most of society, if you vote Republican or Democrat, would like to see get in trouble. The mainstream interest in this has always been just to find Trump responsible, just to somehow get him into some sort of position that makes him look bad. That’s all it’s ever been, which is truly, truly sad because there are a lot of very significant aspects of this story that have already started to come out because of these new releases that show just how prolific of a, you know, operation Epstein and those around him had to exploit children, to exploit victims. Things like Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell, excuse me, saying and convincing people that it was totally normal to be like topless around Epstein because she would do it and convincing these young women that they could act more and more provocatively and then pressure them to do it and trying to make herself seem, as described by some victims, as the cool aunt, which is really terrible when you think about how she was coaching and essentially grooming these people to inevitably do something in a closed room with Epstein that they didn’t want to do. And it’s just it’s truly ridiculous to think that there’s so little interest in dissecting that and talking about the people who made this possible, as opposed to trying to see if Trump is or isn’t in the next batch of files that get dropped. But I will take a break on that note. I do also want to mention that. a little bit maybe later on than here, that the Trump administration has upped the amount of money that they will give people to self-deport. They were paying people $1,000 to leave. I think 1.9 million people have deported themselves because of that offer. That number has changed just in time for the holidays. If you’re someone who’s here illegally and you’d like to get out on your own before you get kicked out, you get even more cash. And so I thought that was interesting that that came out and probably not going to be talked about a lot. But the president of the United States is offering a quote unquote reward for people that are willing to finally admit something they’re doing is in fact a crime and leave. But all right, we’ll talk about that more and other things in a bit. This is Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavors fusion, Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sippin’ season and only for a limited time. Sprite, obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey, Bowen. It’s gift season. Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made.
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 21 :
And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. A bunch of stuff out there to talk about. Of course, it’s time for a quick five. A couple of these topics I think are really interesting and a couple of them make me very mad. So why not for the holidays? Give you a little bit of both. First, a consistent Trump critic, George Conway, the ex-husband of Kellyanne Conway, has filed to be a candidate for Congress in Manhattan. He, of course, is filed as a Democrat. He is a incredibly annoying individual in the world of politics. And I couldn’t fathom someone worse to actually get a position of political power than George Conway just because of how much it would annoy me. I’m sure there’s even worse scumbags out there in the world, in our society. But just as a person who can’t seem to do anything that can at all be thought of as authentic or real or in any way even mildly worth paying attention to, he is going to be running for political office. Another thing out there that I thought was interesting, Americans have no idea what day it is between now and New Year’s Eve because you’re likely on vacation, if not today, tomorrow or the day after, and then staying to some degree on vacation between now and the end of the year. You’re more likely than ever to forget what day it is, to feel like every day is a weekend or to feel like it’s over before it actually is. This is both a good and a bad thing, according to research. but also likely a reason for someone to maybe screw up something, not show up, not be on time, whatever it might be. So it seems as though the real point of this is to just ask people to be more forgiving as your friend might totally forget all the plans you made with them and also forget what day it is. Speaking of things that are inspired by the holiday, I did also think this was interesting that most people checked out on December 15th. So a full week ago, most people were like, I’m done with this month and just focus more on the holidays. So even if you are rolling into a gig somewhere, the odds of you giving your best effort are incredibly low. I would say something about people like us, people here at this station who are doing a lot of things to make sure that you’re having. I’m just looking for a pat on the back. I think is all I’m saying here. I’m making sure you’re having the types of quality of product you’re used to on the Dana Show. We all are putting in the extra effort. None of us are checked out, which I think, again, is just my very indirect or very obvious way of trying to pat myself on the back as hard as I can. Two other quick things. I thought this was interesting. A recent power outage in San Francisco that killed a bunch of streetlights actually also killed a bunch of robo-taxis. Robo-taxis throughout the city just sort of stopped. It didn’t matter if they were in the middle of an intersection or anywhere or several of them next to each other. They just stopped moving. And the power outage, which lasted for a while over the weekend… demonstrated how bad it would be to have robots in way too much control of too many things and how easily it could be to upend our society if and when that ever does happen. There is one other caveat to this story, though. I have a solution to the problem. I think if a car that is driving by itself dies for an extended amount of time, sort of like you get your pizza free if it’s more than 30 minutes late, if your car stops operating for 10, 15, 20 minutes, free car. You get to keep it. It’s yours now. This would definitely encourage the rich companies in Silicon Valley maybe to pump the brakes just a tad in creating driverless vehicles everywhere. If you get it for free, if you’re sitting in the backseat of it, or even if nobody’s in it and you notice that it’s sitting there dead in the middle of an intersection, you get to open that thing up and it’s now your car and do whatever you want with it. That seems to me to be the best prize in all of this. If a lot of things break, then a lot of things are allowed to be stolen. California is totally fine with that. They’ve created all kinds of laws to let smash and grabs be okay. And they seem to have a degenerate amount of violence or at least a thievery going on there. So I feel like they lean in. to this. But who knows? We’ll see. And then finally, one last thing, and I’ll run out of time to mention it. The only place that people like to turn for adult advice on relationships now is AI because it won’t judge you. I thought that was hilarious. More on that maybe coming up in a bit. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavors fusion, Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sippin’ season, and only for a limited time. Sprite, obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season! Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired. Except for the guide we made.
SPEAKER 18 :
In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts! With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com and gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 31 :
Not able to catch all three hours of The Dana Show? Subscribe to the full podcast and get news and laughs delivered in short, easy-to-digest episodes. Ideal for your busy lifestyle on YouTube, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER 12 :
That’s right. Feliz Navidad. This is The Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in at DLash or DanaLashRadio. On X is a great way to stay connected to her. She’s on Facebook. She’s on everything. Rumble. You can find her a bunch of places. At Radio Craig C. If for some reason you want to waste your time with the very small amount of people who follow me on social media, I need to get that up. I need to make that larger so that I look more credible. in this industry, regardless of where I host radio places, you need to have the social media, is what I’m told. But anyway, let’s do this, a few different things. First, the President of the United States talked about the massive armada, as he called it, that is formed around or near Venezuela. This is something that would be important for a variety of reasons, and mainstream media would have you believe so that the U.S. can steal oil. That’s all it’s about. It’s about getting as much oil from an oil-rich country as we can possibly get. That’s a very, very overly simplified, naive and wrong version of a story, in my opinion. But first, let’s play the audio of Trump talking about how much of a mistake it would be if Venezuela tries to be provocative with us in response to our armada. Things will go poorly and the brand new Trump ships would be at the forefront of that. Here we go.
SPEAKER 25 :
He can do whatever he wants. I mean, we have a massive armada formed, the biggest we’ve ever had. And by far the biggest we’ve ever had in South America. He could do whatever he wants. It’s all right. Whatever he wants to do. If he wants to do something, if he plays tough, it’ll be the last time he’s ever able to play tough.
SPEAKER 12 :
That is a very interesting and very Trump way to say that, that if he plays tough, it’ll be the last time he ever plays tough. But what is this really about? I want to quickly give you my opinion of that. It’s actually about controlling the trade of oil between countries that are no fan of us. between Venezuela, Russia, China, as much as they are involved in so many things, when we sanction certain countries and try to make life harder for them as a reaction to anything they do that makes life harder for us, and China’s at the forefront of a lot of those types of behaviors, we want it to work. We want the paper to be an effective deterrent, and it’s not. as Biden woefully demonstrated while he was in office, that when you threaten Russia with sanctions, they don’t give a crap about that. They’ve found ways to mitigate it. One of those ways is to trade in oil with places like Venezuela. And so I do think that having a response to this Having a version of we’re not only going to sanction these countries, we’re not only going to try to harm the corrupt, ridiculous and horrible place that is Venezuela. So many people living in poverty there because of the ridiculousness and how their, you know, dictatorship actually works in a country that really does have. dictator or an insulated version of a leader. What I think is so interesting about this, though, is this will actually work. And this is why it’s making so many people mad and why I think it’s causing so many people to complain about the president and to claim it’s about oil or racism or whatever it must be. It can’t possibly be about actually having an effective version of a deterrent play out in our society. And also a sort of kind thing in our society too, emotionally valuable, whatever the word should be for a thing. Even if the drug trade we’re disrupting doesn’t go from Venezuela to us directly, and if the boats are in our waters, hey, guess what? It’s us for a small amount of time. But even if it inevitably puts those drugs somewhere else, by blowing the crap out of these boats, we are preventing that from being a problem wherever it was intent to go. This is a good thing, even if the mainstream media outlets seem to scream that it isn’t. I referenced racism. Of course, that’s one of the things they accuse Trump or conservatives of whenever they do anything. Jasmine Crockett, is the latest embodiment of accusations of racism. She is someone who says and does things that seem to make her unelectable in the world of her actual political positions or the way that she carries herself. She just seems like someone who would never be a senator again. Certainly not in Texas, but really in a lot of places. But she is running for the U.S. Senate in the state that I live in. And she’s acting as though she’s one of the most authentic candidates. And anyone who doesn’t vote for her is doing it just because of racism or sexism or some combination of both. Jasmine Crockett is a black woman, very similar to how people said that, you know, Kamala Harris didn’t get elected because of things that had nothing to do with her terrible political positions on stuff. or her inability to distance herself from the administration she was a part of, and how many horrible mistakes they were making. Those were just some of the reasons. Or the fact that Kamala Harris couldn’t give an answer to a question without it sounding like we all got lost in a word vomit circle. But here’s Jasmine Crockett demonstrating her authenticity by having two very different accents. I thought this was a great one-minute video that a couple people put up on social media, moments in her career, mostly early on, where she sounded one way, and then later in her career where she sounds very different, where she’s trying to make the way that she speaks a focal point of getting her elected because she’s trying to appeal to people who think that this is a representation of her or of black people in certain communities, whatever it might be. It’s just sort of crazy to hear the polar opposite in both of these. And I’m sure Jasmine Crockett would give the excuse that she knows how to speak one way, even if it’s not how she authentically sounds. And she thought she had to do that at a point in her career to be elected. But now she’s just being herself. I’m sure she’d tell us that much like Harris or anyone else told us that the radical things they believed at one point aren’t radical things they believe anymore. Here’s the problem. Having your authenticity and the lack of it on full display, whatever way it is, one way or the other, as far as this is the real me or that’s the real me, to have a fake version of yourself at all makes it impossible for you to claim that you’re actually an authentic human being, that there’s actually anything we can believe and trust because it was so profoundly different than what it was a short time ago. Once you show us that the performance aspect of your career is something you focused on at some point, we can’t put that genie back in that bottle, essentially. Here we go.
SPEAKER 08 :
And that is actually what they are fearful of, is my authenticity, because it rings true with every single American. You know, no one could have told me that when I went down to Austin, now looks like a little bit over a year ago, that I would be running for Congress. Because these people, they are crazy. Because they always talk about how Christian they is.
SPEAKER 05 :
Wait a minute.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah, I don’t know how many of them on that side are getting divorced because they’re getting caught up sleeping with their co-workers, staffers, interns, all the things. That’s so different.
SPEAKER 12 :
That’s so odd.
SPEAKER 08 :
Let’s let it continue. And at that time, my school hired the Cochran firm. And there was a lawyer who graduated from University of Houston who was assigned to me. You’re not. You’re not. We done picking cotton. We are. You can’t pay us enough to find a plantation. I want the American people to know that when you stand up to a bully, you win. Do not back down. Do not bend. And I’m going to be the first one. You and your little friend off of Twitter. Y’all about to find out, all right? But at the end of the day, I am who I am, and I am authentic.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yeah, you are. Very authentic. Two totally different people at different times, depending on who you’re in front of when you’re speaking or what you’re selling at that moment as far as the personality that you think can get you elected. And again, it probably will be a losing message, profoundly so, in Texas. Texas hasn’t actually nominated a Democrat for a statewide race in a very long time. It’s been since the 90s that we’ve seen that happen. So the odds are against someone. who also wants to pivot from a role in Congress to a role in the Senate because she’s unelectable in the redistricted version of Texas. So she wants to take her biggest shot and then claim racism and sexism when she inevitably loses, which I think is what she’s expecting. to happen. But nonetheless, I just think it’s amazing that so many people out there, Hillary Clinton, definitely among them too, who would throw on an accent or something of some kind, depending on who she was talking to, that claim that they’re authentic when they’re anything but. I think the biggest thing that Trump has in his toolkit of things he can say about himself is that he’s been the same guy the entire time. He’s been a public person, whether it was a politician, or even just like a person in New York that people wanted to talk to. A person that seemed like at one point he supported Democrats on the left and very much obviously seems to be the focal point of a lot of messaging and positions that are taken on the right. He’s been the same guy the entire time, which is to me the most interesting thing about him. And also when you talk about Trump and many people that talk about knowing him behind cameras or off of microphones, say he’s the same guy there too, which is why I think when he gets asked certain questions, the way he answers them is uniquely amusing, not to the left and all the Trump derangement syndrome people out there who go crazy when that sort of question or whatever they are sort of answers happen. And I have an example of one of those. I do. I really like this. So darn it. I guess I’ll play this too before I take a break. This was Trump talking about oil and whether they are keeping the oil that they took from Venezuela back in, I think, December 10th. I just think it’s so funny that a reporter is trying to do a gotcha. where they’re trying to demonstrate that it’s all about oil and all we’re doing is trying to take it from Venezuela by any means necessary. And, you know, he’s going to admit it because I’m going to ask him this question. And Trump’s like, no, yeah, we’re keeping that and didn’t even care to point out the how because he’s so far, I think, in my opinion, at this point in his life, beyond worrying about any of this. He doesn’t seem to care about the fallout of any answer he gives, which actually makes him less likely to actually get fallout from some of these discussions. But here we go.
SPEAKER 34 :
Willie Rosas with Most Peaceful.media. You just referenced the lower amount of illegal drugs that are coming by sea, and you just said that you’re going to start that same program on land soon. Are you just referring to Venezuela, or are you referring to other countries in Latin America?
SPEAKER 25 :
Anywhere drugs are pouring in. Not just Venezuela.
SPEAKER 16 :
Way to go, Mr. President. Continue. Venezuela. Oil.
SPEAKER 17 :
What are we going to do with the oil that we have?
SPEAKER 16 :
going to do with what? The oil that has been seized. The United States seized 1.9 million barrels of oil on December 10th.
SPEAKER 15 :
We’re going to keep it. Are we going to sell it or put it in the strategic? Maybe we’ll sell it. Maybe we’ll keep it.
SPEAKER 12 :
To me, I know that that might seem like an exaggerated amount of laughter. I promise it’s not. And I’ve played this audio multiple times today, actually filling in at other radio stations, other shows. I work sometimes at WIBC in Indianapolis. Shout out to them. They’re a Dana affiliate. I’m also working here in places that used to be Dana affiliates in Houston, Texas. But nonetheless, what I think is so awesome is he doesn’t care. Both of those questions, you can tell, are designed to somehow get him in a gotcha, a version of a back and forth where mainstream news media shapes Trump as as poorly as they possibly can in response to why did you steal oil, sir? And his answers were keeping it. We got it. They came into our water. They didn’t let us do what we wanted to do to, you know, make sure that this boat was on the up and up. So we took it and we’re going to keep doing that. And good luck, Venezuela, in trying to get it back. I think there’s something that’s just chef’s kiss hilarious about that version of back and forth, to say the very least. And I think it’s why Trump is popular with a lot of people, even if they disagree with him on some things. Not that I do, but I’m just saying out loud for anyone that does, the people who can appreciate the humor of Trump oftentimes seem to be like, ah, I guess I don’t care about that, no matter what it is that they think has happened. All right, quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 07 :
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. It’s a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite, obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 18 :
This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture Research with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey Bowen, it’s gift season! Ugh, stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?
SPEAKER 20 :
Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired.
SPEAKER 18 :
Except for the guide we made! In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value. It’s giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto. Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn’t have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com. And gift the good stuff at Marshalls.
SPEAKER 31 :
Make some common sense of the crazy headlines with the Dana Show podcast. Your on-the-go guide for getting up to speed on today’s most important stories. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, or your favorite podcast platform.
SPEAKER 12 :
This is the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins, filling in just before the holiday. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everybody out there. Thrilled to be jumping on for the day, filling in for Dana. A couple quick things before we get out of here. Much like the Warrior Dividend was wildly popular that President Trump announced, he gave $1,776 to members of our military, active members of our military, They are now floating even more and more a $2,000 quote dividend for all of us. The American people get $2,000 because of how effective tariffs have been at raking in money for our country. This would and has to be thought of as popular if it actually happens. But Secretary Hassett and many other people are saying, or National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, excuse me, and many other people are saying that this is likely to occur in 2026. Whether it’s buying votes, I don’t know. If people do this just before the midterm election and Republicans take credit for it, I don’t care. I want my $2,000 check. That’s how I feel about that. Although I probably would prefer money actually goes to paying down our debt, but maybe we do both. It sounds like we could possibly do both. I just love when these things happen that seem wildly popular, though, to everybody on either side of the political aisle is how do you have a more negative response that I get $2,000 than what I just said? I’d rather it go somewhere else, but I’ll take it. If you give it to me, that’ll be fine. That’s how everybody will respond, especially the Democrats who hate Trump with a burning fire in their belly. They will certainly admit that they’re happy to get a check. Other things out there. that I thought were interesting. Gen Z is saying that they’re very worried about losing their jobs to AI. Every generation, I think, is worried about this. The intriguing part for, and I think some millennials, which is the generation I’m a part of, but a lot of people, they’re also still finding many of their jobs by using social media. This can be anything from Excuse me, a friend is posting that they have a job that they’re looking for someone to fill, etc., etc. Or working in social media, working in digital places is something that’s very attractive to young people. But they’re afraid that, you know, the Internet and the computers can take over that gig relatively quickly. And they’re probably right about it. I will say that it does feel like in our society that you need to know somebody more than ever to get a job or even an interview. more so than a gig itself. Maybe you just need a foot in the door to be called back. I know some people who are looking for gigs right now with good resumes that tell me they can’t even get past that first barrier. I think by and large, that barrier is actually created by AI. So there’s a lot of people whose resume never winds up on the actual desk of someone to be considered for a job because of the tools that have been given to these recruiters and these companies that they use and these platforms they use to accept resumes from anywhere. And you get resumes from all over the place if you have a job that’s open. In the same vein, I’ve talked to people who recruit for positions that say, we open a job and we get thousands of resumes instantly. So it’s almost impossible for us to even deal with the volume of applicants we get in the first place. So it definitely seems bad. So I get the whole, I’m using social media to find a gig thing. And then I do understand the idea that that means my gig might be more easily automated. All right, one last thing before I get out of here. Chipotle has unveiled a GLP-1 friendly menu, which is essentially just less food. It would be a smaller serving size, the assumption being that anyone on GLP-1, and there is now a pill that has been FDA approved that would allow you to take a weight loss drug without having to inject it in yourself. But Chipotle wants to lean into that by telling you that you can come in and ask for the GLP-1 menu and get just less food. which seems to scream to me that a solution to a problem in the world of having more weight on your body than you want it would also be to just eat less and deal with feeling hungry. Easier said than done. I get it, but it is interesting that some companies are like, no, we’re with you, man. We’ll sell you less for the same price. That’s it. I’m out. Happy holiday. Merry Christmas. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana show.
SPEAKER 13 :
The holidays are already in full swing. The lights are up. You got good people, good food, and good vibes. And there to help keep that energy going is Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry. With that crisp cranberry flavor with a smooth winter spice twist. It’s the drink that livens up game nights, gift exchanges, or just catching up in the kitchen with a burst of holiday flavor. It’s a seasonal favorite, but it’s only here for a limited time. So grab it while you can. Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry. Right. Obey your thirst.
SPEAKER 10 :
This time of year, most of us are checking off our holiday gift lists. But identity thieves have lists too, and your personal information might be on them. Protect your identity with LifeLock. LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second and alerts you to threats you could miss. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Make this season about joy, not identity theft, with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash iHeart.
SPEAKER 35 :
Terms apply. At CVS, it matters that we’re not just in your community, but that we’re part of it. It matters that we’re here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions. and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we’re proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at cvs.com or just come by our store. We can’t wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location.
Absurd Truth: The Candace Owens Spelling Bee