The Dana Show with Dana Loesch - Absurd Truth: The Culture of MAGA

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Dana explains why it’s not cool to be Progressive anymore as MAGA has taken back the culture and why this shift has been decades in the making over things like drag shows, women’s sports and wokeism. Meanwhile, The New York Times finally admits how we were misled about the COVID pandemic origins.Thank you for supporting our sponsors that make The Dana Show possible…Ruff Greenshttps://ruffgreens.com/danaJumpstart your pet’s health with a FREE bag from Ruff Greens. Just cover shipping. Use promo code DANA today!Relief Factorhttps://relieffactor.com OR CALL 1-800-4-RELIEFTurn the clock back on pain with Relief Factor. Get their 3-week Relief Factor Quick Start for only $19.95 today! Goldcohttps://DanaLikesGold.com Protect your financial future with my trusted gold company—get your GoldCo 2025 Gold & Silver Kit today, and you could qualify for up to 10% in bonus silver.Byrnahttps://byrna.com/danaGet your hands on the new compact Byrna CL. Visit Byrna.com/Dana receive 10% off. Patriot Mobilehttps://patriotmobile.com/DanaDana’s personal cell phone provider is Patriot Mobile. Get a FREE MONTH of service code DANA.HumanNFind both the new SuperBerine and the #1 bestselling SuperBeets Heart Chews at Sam’s Club!KelTechttps://KelTecWeapons.comSee the third generation of the iconic SUB2000 and the NEW PS57 - KelTec Innovation & Performance at its bestAll Family Pharmacyhttps://AllFamilyPharmacy.com/DanaCode Dana20 for 20% off your entire order.Angel Studioshttps://Angel.com/danaStream King of Kings, check out fan-picked shows, and claim your member perks.

Dana Lashes Absurd Truth podcast, sponsored by Keltec. It's his life mission to make bad decisions. It's time for Florida Man. Don't do this. Yellowstone National Park, a Florida man was

injured when he was gored by a bison, said the National Park Service. This is the first reported incident of a person injured by a bison in the Yoleston this year. and it only park ain't been open for two weeks and immediately somebody's out there getting gourd they said and guess why do you think it was because he was minding a respectful distance from the bison no 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 a hundred yards away from bears and wolves 25 from all large animals 100 yards from bears from bears 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 goar you too if I had horns. And then in May 2024, dude kicked a bison in the leg. And guess what? It kicked him back and injured him. And then he got arrested in jail because he kicked a bison. Yeah, 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 McKinsey. He took off on a four-wheeler and ditched it and 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. The 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. They let him on a, he led cops on a foot chase through Daytona Beach. Zavir 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 symbol, symbolize the absence of a vowel and yet connect the word. But it's XA, Zavier, 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. 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 Zavier 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.

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 his cardio was bad. I love the body cam footage when they're chasing him, too. Wanched under here. This guy was not getting far. 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 have good blood circulation or cardio. He also thought his grandma's car. All the way. Can I just 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.

Like, 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 is Tesla.

This is a village's story. It's a village's story. A village's story. A villager. A villager. Minecraft, crashed his Tesla in a roundabout. Of course he did. And then when he, 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 and matched descriptions. He began blaming his girlfriend. He said, Stacey did it. Stacey ran away after she crashed into the roundabout. And he goes, it's a girl I met in Brownwood. Stacey's her name.

And he was drinking, I mean, clearly. And they concluded that Stacey 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. Stacey did it. Stacey also crashed that car in that roundabout down there, Florida. Do you hear about that? Do you hear about what Stacey did? That flusie.

But Stacey's mom's got a good. Yeah, man, she's a flusie. They're all flusies. Stacey Sr. and Stacey Jr., flusies. 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 tension, 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 golden 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 dana likesgold.com to get started. That's dana likesgold.com and move forward with confidence. 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.

Right. If you had to worry about the cost of the food on your table, you're probably talking about that. Right. 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 remove from their experience. Hmm. So that's David Axelrod, kind of giving like a post-mortem 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 progressive, progressive, 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 liberals. 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 substack 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 Dog, agreed to perform at events celebrating Donald Trump's inauguration, something the Wall Street Journal ads, 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 Baron 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 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.

could be vogue. It took every, all of these people colluded, they all worked together, just 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 is, 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 bad 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. Kirsten Cinema, they are actually considered moderates now because the party went so far ideologically left

that they ran out even mildly pro-life Democrats. They would 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, 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, it's 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, you know, maybe living. Libertarian folks or shaved head, you know, they call them freaks probably back in the day, you know, like 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 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 Ziegler 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 were like, well, it was never cool for my

perspective. And again, I'm talking about like generally society. They, it was very, very interesting responses. I wanted to play this if we have time really quickly, put bootie juice, his audio on This was, sorry, Audio Soundbite 13, listen. A little bit of that, a venue 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 Trump Republicans are made if that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions. I will say, now he's repeating stuff that Carville has said. 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 independence 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 moves society forward. 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 Keltek, the new Gen 3 sub 2K, specifically from Keltec made in America, American parts, American labor. And this is the new third gen. It folds fast.

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Innovation, Performance, Keltec. Learn more at KeltecWeapons.com. Again, it's the Gen 3, Sub 2K, 10mmmm, K-E-L-T-E-C Weapons.com. Tell them Dana sent you. And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It's time for Dana's Quick 5. All right. So apparently, here's a new study.

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 at Force Night Owls into chronic social jet lag. I just like staying uplit 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? Is that it? Is that it? This study's trash. They didn't say that in the study. It 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 chunk lady statue. Now we have this obscene, 45 foot naked, any KKID. That's correct. Nekid woman. That's over a major public plaza. Don't read that as pubic plaza, as I almost did.

45 feet tall. all 32,000 pounds. She's like fully nude and she's in, like 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 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. It's, uh, her name is Charlotte Lee. She's from the UK. She was seized to Sri Lankan airport. And she was carrying a suitcase full of what they call Cush. It's a drug, a new

drug, uh, 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 woo-hoo. 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 cooks and cranks. Kane? Who treated us like cooks 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, like I, 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. Teslori, we had our videos pulled from YouTube, censored, because we asked questions on this program. I mean, it's, 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 dup too that's how they're I feel like 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 women can't actually be men and men can't have babies we were so misled like what's next well you heard what they did with the vaccine The media was even put it out. Well, no one was forced to take the Vax.

Nobody was forced. No, they weren't. But here's this headline. Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins. If you looked up like 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 people you were the 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 had to accept it now, 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 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, I think that that, 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 like 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 care about investigating anything. You know what? 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's, they were part of the problem. 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, wherever you get your podcasts.