In another segment, Dana discusses the shifting perceptions within the Democratic Party, tackling the apparent disconnect with working-class Americans. This engaging episode also unravels the narratives around progressivism, questioning when and how it started to lose its cultural influence. Dana’s sharp commentary provides insights into the current political climate while questioning the mainstream narratives that dominate our news.
Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast, sponsored by Kel-Tec.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s his life mission to make bad decisions. It’s time for Florida Man.
SPEAKER 01 :
Don’t do this. Yellowstone National Park, a Florida man was injured when he was gored by a bison. said the National Park Service. A bison, this is the first reported incident of a person injured by a bison in Yellowstone this year. Park ain’t been open for two weeks. And immediately somebody’s out there getting gored. And guess why? Do you think it was because he was minding a respectful distance from the bison? No. No, he wanted to get up and close and personal with it. So he got minor injuries, was treated by emergency medical personnel. You’re told to keep, in fact, Yellowstone requires that you keep 25 yards away from the animals up there and 100 yards away from bears and wolves. 25 from all large animals, 100 yards from bears and wolves. And bison have injured more people in Yellowstone than any other animal. They’re not aggressive. But when people get up in their faces, yeah, nobody likes that. Not even me. I’d gore you too if I had horns. And then in May 2024, a dude kicked a bison in the leg. And guess what? It kicked him back and injured him. And then he got arrested and jailed because he kicked a bison. Just don’t be a moron and don’t like try to go up and get a selfie with it. And everything’s cool, right? It’s so simple. I mean, this is not hard. If a kid tells you that there’s somebody in their closet, maybe just don’t disregard it. Like if you’re this kid, a Florida man was arrested because he was hiding in a kid’s bedroom closet. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. This Florida man, he ran away from law enforcement, fled into a home and hid in a kid’s bedroom closet. Liberty County Sheriff Robert Arnold deputies got a call on Tuesday about a suspicious person. The guy identified as Bobby McKenzie. He took off on a four wheeler and ditched it, ran into a house. And they yeah, they found him hiding in a child’s bedroom closet. And the individuals who called it in, they said thank you to them. The guy had a warrant out for aggravated assault. He also had, oh gosh, he hid a bag containing a bunch of meth and all kinds of drug paraphernalia under the kid’s bed. Man, oh man, I’m telling you. A Florida man got pulled over and then led police on a foot chase. After they caught him, they laughed and said, you thought you were Usain Bolt. Yeah, well, that’s funny. It is. He led cops on a foot chase through Daytona Beach. Xavier McCall, you don’t need to have an apostrophe after the X. Okay, there’s literally no need because the name is, okay, I can’t even do this story. The name is X-A-V-I-E-R. The apostrophe is there to symbolize the absence of a vowel and yet connect the word. But it’s X-A, Xavier, and that’s how it’s spelled. You don’t need an apostrophe to make your cheap broke ass look fancy. Stop it. That’s so stupid. Who named you? Your mother ought to be arrested because she’s dumb. They could not provide. Who does the name like this? That’s like having your name Amber and an apostrophe after the A and between the A and M. Shut up. They could not provide Daytona, Xavier McCall with an apostrophe, could not provide Daytona Beach officers with his license. He said he was in his grandma’s vehicle. They asked him to get off. He took off. And they were able to catch him, cornered him, and take him into custody. And he’s in the pokey now. So, yeah, they go, you’re not supposed to be breathing like that from a short little run, dude. so clearly he his cardio was bad i love the body cam footage when they’re chasing him too watch under here there this guy was not getting far and he and the cops were like dude you’re younger than us you should be faster than this and one of them said that the dude smoked too much and that’s why he didn’t he didn’t have good blood circulation or cardio he also thought his grandma’s car all the way can i just keep that keep this footage going doesn’t it look like the cop running his arms are just crazy He’s like one of those blow-up dolls outside of a car dealership. His arms just look mad when he’s running. Let’s see here. Oh, by the way, our Bison story came from Florida Man Keith. Or no, Listener Keith. Our Florida Man Bison story came from Listener Keith. So thank you from that. Let’s see. Drunk Florida Man crashes his Tesla. This is a Villages story. It’s a Villages story. A Villages story. A villager, Minecraft, crashed his Tesla in a roundabout. Of course he did. And then when police came, he made up a fictional girlfriend and said, no, it’s, yeah, Stacy, my girlfriend Stacy. He literally made up a whole woman. and fabricated a name, and told police that Stacy crashed his Tesla and ran away. I know. And so the man, after he crashed the roundabout, he flooded the village of Hawkins, and they found 63-year-old Jeffrey Treadwell dead. Uh, it matched descriptions. He began blaming his girlfriend. He said, Stacy did it. Stacy ran away after she crashed into the roundabout. And, uh, he goes, it’s a girl I met in Brownwood. Stacy’s her name. And, uh, he was drinking. I mean, clearly. And they concluded that Stacy was completely made up. So they booked him in Sumter County detention center and he was released on $1,100 bond. Yeah, that’s not, can you imagine? Yeah, it was Stacy that did it. Yeah, I’m going to start using that excuse. I didn’t do it. Stacy did it. Stacy also crashed that car in that roundabout down there in Florida. Did you hear about that? Did you hear about what Stacy did? That floozy.
SPEAKER 05 :
Stacy’s mom’s got a good one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, man, she’s a floozy. They’re all floozies. Stacey Senior and Stacey Junior, floozies. Hey, folks. So I want to share something important that every American should be aware of. We’re seeing a lot of economic uncertainty right now. You have the national debt rising, global trade tensions impacting markets and tariffs with higher prices on the stuff that everybody uses every day. It’s not about panic. It’s about preparation. So this is why I partnered with GoldCo, the top-rated precious metals company, to help you take a step towards protecting your financial future. Smart investors look to hard assets like gold and silver to help weather the storm. It’s a strategy that’s been used for generations. And right now, you can get a free 2025 gold and silver kit that breaks it all down for you. And if you qualify, you could receive unlimited bonus silver. Real silver matched to your account with no taxes or penalties. It’s a smart move that could help you feel more secure with what lies ahead. Visit danalikesgold.com to get started. That’s danalikesgold.com and move forward with confidence.
SPEAKER 04 :
The Democratic Party has in some ways become too much seen by too many Americans as the party of elites and institutions that have failed them. If you were talking about democracy over the dinner table, you probably didn’t have to worry about the cost of the food on that table. If you had to worry about the cost of the food on your table, you’re probably talking about that. And so I worry that the party of working people, the self-styled party of working people, is perceived by working people as elite and disdainful and removed from their experience.
SPEAKER 01 :
So that’s David Axelrod. kind of giving like a postmortem of what has gone wrong with the Democrat Party. And I talked a little bit about this on Jesse Waters’ program last night. And over at Substack, I have a piece up about this right now. It’s not cool to be progressive anymore. Welcome back to the program. Dana Lash with you. Bottom of this second hour now. Keep in mind that when I say, when I’m talking about progressivism, because I asked this question on X last night, and I am fascinated by the responses to this. I asked, when do you think progressivism became uncool? And by uncool, what I mean is, and you know this, everyone and everything that was considered included in our cultural zeitgeist was liberal slash progressive. Like Reagan ruined the word liberal for liberal, so now they changed it to progressive. Hollywood, art, academics, all of it. In order to be seen in those industries or be considered of influence in those industries, you… have to be from the left right that’s just the nature that’s something you all accept you know that if you’re not that you would but if you were to watch the Oscars you know that it’s going to be all leftist stuff right that’s just the way it is so that’s that was accepted it was always considered cool right the left was always portrayed as being the quote-unquote open-minded or intellectual and deep-thinking kind of movement, right? They wanted the veneer of classical liberalism while being illiberal themselves. So that’s what I mean when I say cool. Not like anyone thought they were hip or anything like that, but that’s what I mean by this. And I was thinking about this last night because I read this piece Over at, where is it at? It’s the Wall Street Journal. And it was called, quote, how MAGA is taking back the culture. And the subhead is in sports, entertainment and marketing displays of conservatism are crowding out progressive postures. And it was it’s an interesting piece. And I cited it in my sub stack piece that I sent out to all of you subscribers yesterday. So, like, for instance, this is what the article says. Instead of taking a knee to call for social justice, NFL players are now doing the Trump dance in the end zone of football games. Mainstream entertainers, among them the country singer Carrie Underwood and even rapper Snoop Dogg, agreed to perform at events celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration, something the Wall Street Journal adds music stars largely shunned eight years ago. A new generation of Trump-friendly comedians and wellness influencers are populating YouTube and other social media, while a snippet of audio featuring Barron and Melania has become one of the hottest online memes. And celebrities such as Paris Hilton and brands, including Frontier Airlines, use it in their TikTok and Instagram posts. And I was thinking about this. I’m like, so think about how hard… the left had to work to go at Trump and make him look toxic. Like it was very contrived and it took all of the left and it took all of their, their, influence in academia. And it took all of Hollywood and all of the film industry and the music industry and everybody in the media, magazines, you know, it doesn’t matter if it was a news media, it could be Vogue. It took all of these people colluded. They all worked together, this contrived hatred for not just Trump, but the right. And look how fast it dissipated. after the election. Look at how quickly, look how quickly. That’s the other aspect of this that is so fascinating to me. It entirely dissipated after the election, except for maybe a few strongholds within the left, right? And they made an entire industry out of fomenting hate for Trump and for the right, an entire industry. And then when voters got the chance to choose between normal and bat crap crazy, they choose normal. They chose normal. It was the normie election, right? They wanted normal prices, normal lives, normal bills, normal problems, normal things, a normal society, a normal world. They weren’t asking for the world. They just wanted normalcy. It’s all they wanted. You had Democrats like James Carville, to his credit. Now, I think he’s wrong about so many things, but he’s not unreasonable. I think he plays up the nastiness for the base sometimes. But he was sounding the alarm on this forever ago. And we played those audio soundbites on air and you just heard David Axelrod. David Axelrod started about a year or so ago. warning about, well, wait a minute, do the radicals know what they’re going to get if they keep pushing this? Because they were watching voter enthusiasm. They were watching voter turnout amongst the left for midterms and then municipal elections and things like that. And they were also watching the coalition dwindle. You might remember, I think it was 10 years ago. No, I think it was longer than 10 years ago. When Democrats changed their plan, they changed their platform. They used to have pro-life Democrats in the Democrat Party. You used to have Democrats like Zell Miller. Even like Joe Manchin, who’s now an independent. Kyrsten Sinema. They are actually considered moderates now because the party went so far ideologically left that they ran out even mildly pro-life Democrats. They were primary pro-life Democrats. There were certain issues that Democrats would allow for disagreement on so long as they came together on everything else, the 80-20, right? But something happened and they changed their platform and they ran them out. They began going after them. They wanted complete and total ideological and cultural hegemony. They wanted everything to be uniform. No daylight. Contrast that with what you’ve seen from the right. Just in the past eight years. Maybe a little longer. It’s caused some problems. That aren’t, you know, huge, but it’s been a very kind of tricky to navigate. And it is a burgeoning coalition that the right created. where you have the old school evangelical republicans that are sitting next to uh you know maybe libertarian folks or shaved head you know they call them freaks probably back in the day uh you know like uh alternative type people who agree with them on 80 but maybe not on 20 so there’s this like very interesting coalition that they’ve that the right has been able to create and The left used to be the valedictorians at making coalitions. And now it’s like they don’t even know how to anymore. And now it’s the right. When you start that, that helped to normalize a lot of the things that the right wanted to do. So I asked this yesterday. I’m like, when did progressivism become uncool? Because they were, as I said in the beginning, I don’t mean like cool like you think it’s up. I mean, they were the standard ideology for all of art, film, music, everything. And I don’t know if it was when women started wearing pink knitted vaginal hats or when Hillary Clinton tried to pretend that she was down with black America by having hot sauce in her bag. Or, as someone suggested, maybe it was when they tried to mentally force-feed kids trans ideology in the most inappropriate and uncomfortable of ways. Or maybe it was when they made everyone stay indoors for two years and wear useless masks and inject themselves with experimental non-vaccines that were actually more therapeutic because they didn’t provide any immunity at all whatsoever, and they sent people to jail for trying to pay their bills. Or maybe… It’s when they stopped being able to take a joke. And they chose to be constantly offended all the time. Or maybe it’s when they started writing and burning things down. I don’t know. I do know. I think the epitaph of cool progressivism ended there. with Kamala Harris. I think she’s the epitaph of it. When they sent her on podcasts with people she didn’t even know because they were trying to get her to plant her flag in the cultural sphere and she fell on her face. One of the great answers I got, a listener, Anna Zeigler said, quote, when their policy preferences shifted from focusing on intangible intellectual things like pushing welfare and taxing the rich to public displays of men dressed as women, kids watching drag, men competing against women. That’s a really good point. Like Gamergate smearing masculinity, mocking traditionally American values. People got so tired of this nonstop grievance industry. Nobody likes a person who’s always negative or combative or perpetually looking for offense. They don’t like that. And it doesn’t matter if it’s political or not. So this has been a shift decades in the making. Some of the answers that I got, and there were hundreds of them, are so good. Like someone said, when they started being more for war than peace, that was one of the responses I got. When they came after the kids, when they came after sports, when they stopped talking about the issues that mattered to Americans and began focusing on the issues that only mattered to Hollywood was one answer. someone said when they left the blue collar voter behind. I thought that was very interesting, too, because remember, that was another thing that Democrats used to be known for. Right. And then I love the answers from some people who are like, well, it was never cool from my perspective. And again, I’m talking about like generally society. They it was very interesting. Very interesting responses. I wanted to play this, if we have time, really quickly. Poot Booty Juice, his audio on this. This was, sorry, Audio Soundbite 13. Listen.
SPEAKER 03 :
A little bit of that event you described, and it was a caricature of everything that’s wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us. And we cannot go on like that. We cannot. I also think that we believe in the values that we care about for a reason. And this is not about abandoning those values. It’s about making sure we’re in touch with the first principles that animate them. What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one’s mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia, which I have also experienced? And it is how it is how Trump Republicans are made. If that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions, I will say he’s repeating stuff that Carville has said.
SPEAKER 01 :
But you have to remember, because they were saying that they want their party back, like they got to take their party back. And I’m like, for what? Like to what? Like the zygote stage of insane, illiberal, anti-science Marxism? Like, what do you mean back to what? Because nobody’s there. All the people, most everybody left. They became independents or they went and voted for Trump. These are these are operatives that used far left activists as pawns for the Democrat Party. They needed agitators when it came time to get out the vote. But they messed up because they were determined to keep these agitators happy. And so they placated them so they could use them in the future. So they adopted their stances. They enshrined them in the Democrat Party and they adopted them and made their issues part of their platform. So they’re part of this problem. David Axelrod was part of the Valerie Jarrett orchestration of Obama-Biden. Most of the original Democrats are gone. Democrats use judgment and harassment to keep members in line. And the right makes everybody focus on the 80-20 rule. Last quick thing on this. I love this point that a listener made. They said, quote, it was never cool because it was never progressive. It has always been about regressive. It never moved society forward. It’s always been about breaking society. I think that’s exactly right. Because it was exactly that. I mean, progress where? Progress with what? Bigger government? More taxes? More border chaos? Everyone on prescription drugs? Like what? It was about breaking society because it was only ever a Marxist counter to the conservation of individual liberty, which is what conservatism is. And it nearly damn near did break society. But people woke up and they looked around and they voted accordingly. I don’t know how the rest of the story is going to go, but I know for certain Democrats won’t be the ones leading it. And our partners that help bring you the program, it’s our friends over at Kel-Tec, the new Gen 3 Sub 2K, specifically from Kel-Tec, made in America, American parts, American labor. And this is the new third gen. It folds fast. Optics stay in place. You don’t have to detach anything. And you can deploy it super fast, zeroed and ready. And It’s available now in 10 millimeter, which is pretty awesome. Got all kinds of calibers of variety, but it’s more versatile now even with the new 10 millimeter chambering. Single twist and fold motion of that rotating forend. That’s how it folds quickly in half optics and all and just as quickly deploys zeroed ready to rock. Folds down to 16 1⁄2 inches for easy storage and transport. Takes Glock mags. You got a simple, reliable blowback design, so you have ease of maintenance, consistent performance, internal buffer for softer recoil, lighter 5-pound trigger pull. You have that integrated M-lock. You get the rails up top for accessories. Ideal for literally anything. Kel-Tec makes everything right here in the U.S. of A. Innovation. Performance. Kel-Tec. Learn more at Kel-TecWeapons.com. Again, it’s the Gen 3 Sub 2K 10mm KELTECWeapons.com. Tell them Dana sent you.
SPEAKER 05 :
And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, so apparently, here’s a new study. Night owls? face a dementia risk that early birds don’t. I want to arrest whoever did this report. But there’s a twist, according to this stupid study. They say that the problem stems from rigid work schedules that force night owls into chronic social jet lag. I just like staying up late because fewer people bother me. And it creates constant conflict with their night… But they said that, yeah, basically, try to be an early bird. I really don’t care. What, so you can live longer, more miserably? What? Is that it? Is that it? This study’s trash.
SPEAKER 05 :
They didn’t say that in the study, did they?
SPEAKER 01 :
Might as well. Golly. Let’s see. Did you guys hear about the… We have a thing for ugly statues, apparently. So we had the big chonk, the big chonky chonk lady statue. Now we have this obscene 45-foot naked, N-E-K-K-I-D. That’s correct. Naked woman that’s over a major public plaza. Don’t read that as pubic plaza, as I almost did. 45 feet tall, 32,000 pounds. She’s like fully nude and she’s in… I don’t understand what this is… This is a mold. Like, anybody can basically do this. It just looks dumb. How is this supposed to be art? This is dumb. There’s no detail. It’s like the most banal thing that you could possibly, you know, construct. Good for San Francisco that they have it. Because it’s an overrated city. So good. They can have… It is. And they can have this overrated, gross-looking statue. An ex-flight attendant was caught smuggling 100 pounds of deadly nude drugs made of human bones. Oh, okay. Well… I don’t know, but now I’m interested. Her name is Charlotte Lee. She’s from the UK. She was seized at the Sri Lankan airport. And she was carrying a suitcase full of what they call kush. It’s a drug, a new drug, originating in West Africa. I thought that that was like a nickname for pot. I heard that from a hippie movie. Okay. But apparently it’s a new drug that originates in West Africa and it just kills tons of people. It killed like a dozen people in Sierra Leone apparently this week alone. And so it has a street value of over three million. She claims it was planted without her knowledge. I took one look at her and I’m saying I don’t believe you. Let’s see. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed two bills against horrific animal abuse. And that’s awesome. It took about five paragraphs to get to the meat of the story, but it’s called Trooper’s Law, and it was inspired by the dog that was left chained to a fence during a hurricane. So good on DeSantis for doing that. Saving puppies. Stick with us. I mean, I’m fine. Why isn’t the press interested in this? Oh, for the same reason they weren’t interested in any of the COVID stuff. Can we touch on this? The New York Times headline, I could just punch someone in the face over. I really could. I know that you guys saw this. The audacity of this piece from the New York Times. Quote, we were badly misled about the event that changed our lives. They said we were badly misled. Of course, it’s about coronavirus. The woohoo. Here is an actual sentence from this New York Times piece. Quote, yet in 2020… When people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the COVID-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Kane, who treated us like kooks and cranks? The media. Yeah. The left and the media, same thing. The media. The media. And… Obviously, it has been unraveled and now the media wants to claim that they were misled. We were badly misled about the origin. When you were leading the witch hunt against all of the people who were raising concerns about this, the New York Times now needs to separate itself from this. I mean, they literally had headlines where they were besmirching good people who are asking questions about the origin. They were asking questions about cover-ups. They were asking questions about all of this. And now they want to play victim. They, anybody who actually questioned the narrative that we were given in the press and asked about any kind of zoonotic origins, they were treated like witch doctors. They were treated like just they were persona non grata. They can’t be allowed into the conversation. And not even on the origin. I mean, they went after people like Dr. Robert Malone that we had on, Dr. Tess Laurie. We had our videos pulled from YouTube, censored, because we asked questions on this program. I mean, it was censorship, and we know it was censorship at the highest levels. And now they want to act as though that oh well we you know we were misled we’re see we got duped too that’s how they’re i feel like they’re they’re trying to act like no we’re victims like you we were so misled you know what’s next like we were so misled you know um uh women can’t actually be men and men can’t have babies we were so misled like what’s next
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, you heard what they did with the vaccine. The media was even putting out, well, no one was forced to take the vax. Nobody was forced. No, they weren’t.
SPEAKER 01 :
Here’s this headline. Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins. If you looked up fringe and coronavirus in the New York Times in their search option, I mean, there’s so many headlines that pop up over that. I mean, and this was a legitimate and taking something now that we we accept as truth because the evidence supports it. Everybody had evidentiary based suspicions in the beginning that were immediately discounted in favor of the political narrative that they wanted to spend, that they wanted to spend. And for them to try to retcon this and act like, oh, we were you weren’t misled. You misled people. You were the your reporters. And this goes back to what we opened the program with. You are the media. Your job is to your entire the purpose of your existence is to question government, is to question elected officials, is to question bureaucrats. That’s your entire existence. If there was misleading, you misled. You weren’t misled. You just swallowed it and took it at face value because it was easier for your political bottom line to do so. They didn’t want to fall out of favor with the powers that be by asking questions. That’s what the left does. And the left is, you know, the media is part of it. They don’t ask questions anymore. Merely asking a question is a sign of betrayal. Someone is not accepting the narrative. They’re not swallowing their narrative pill. They’re asking a question. That means they’re not on the same page. Thus, they are the enemy. That’s how it’s viewed. So questions aren’t even allowed. There’s no intellectual curiosity. Whatever they said went and you ought to accept it now or Now, because it doesn’t cost any political capital for them, they can act like, oh yeah, we’re one of you. We’re questioning this. We were all misled. No, you misled people. We were the people that you tried to mislead. And when you couldn’t mislead us, you wanted to impugn our characters and thereby taint any kind of association in the minds of anyone else that was still maybe making up their minds. I mean, they they went after the best doctors in the world, the best medical experts, the best professionals. They persecuted the media story after story about these people. Now they want to act like they’re one of us. No, you don’t get to do that. Badly misled. Spare me with all of this. There’s there’s that’s what I think that that exchange was a very good exchange. And I like Levitt’s response. You’re the reporter. That’s your job. You investigate this stuff. The bigger question is, why isn’t the press interested in investigating things from the government? Remember the olden days of the old gumshoe reporter? That’s gone. Nobody wants to ask those questions anymore. Everybody just wants a stupid, insipid hot take. They want a part of that attention economy. But they don’t care about investigating anything. You know why? Partly because there’s no rewards in it. There’s no rewards in it. The only reason the New York Times is doing this now is to save their ass. That’s it. They’re trying to act like, oh, no, no, we’re still reputationally clean. You can still trust us. You can still subscribe. But we know that they were part of the problem.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to today’s edition of Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast. If you haven’t already, make sure to hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Absurd Truth: South Park Goes After Trump AGAIN.