The Dana Show with Dana Loesch - Minnesota Daycare Fraud EXPOSED, Tim Walz Dodges & AI Vending Machines

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Rich Zeoli sits in for Dana. An independent citizen journalist goes viral for exposing the massive fraud in Minnesota’s daycare system. Gov. Tim Walz ignores questions about the Billions in fraud th...at is happening under his watch. Democrats are already planning to impeach Trump if they take over power. An experiment is conducted involving an AI office vending machine at the Wall Street Journal office that ended up giving in to ridiculous demands including staging a coup against their boss and losing hundreds in profits. President Trump hosts Zelensky following his phone call with Putin. Is there an end in sight? The FBI announces their investigation into the Minnesota daycare fraud scandal. A Somali on TikTok says people who are concerned about the scandal have no life and are depressed. Did Gavin Newsom’s COVID lockdowns forever change the production of movies?Thank you for supporting our sponsors that make The Dana Show possible…Patriot Mobilehttps://PatriotMobile.com/Dana  OR CALL 972-PATRIOTWhat are you waiting for? Switch today during the Red, White, and Blue sale. Use promo code DANA for a Samsung A16 5g smartphone.  Sale ends soon.Relief Factorhttps://ReliefFactor.com OR CALL 1-800-4-RELIEFDon’t let pain stop you from living the life you want with Relief Factor. Get their 3-week Relief Factor Quick Start for only $19.95 today! PreBornhttps://Preborn.com/DANAYou have the power to help save a life. Donate today by dialing #250 and say “Baby,” or give securely online. Make your end of year gift today.Subscribe today and stay in the loop on all things news with The Dana Show. Follow us here for more daily clips, updates, and commentary:YoutubeFacebookInstagramXMore Info

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Starting point is 00:00:00 The Somali fraud scandal, blowing up. Oh, my God, what has been uncovered here is just going to blow your mind. Welcome to the Dana show. Dana's off. Obviously, it is that weird week between Christmas and New Year's. But it's me, Rich Zioli from Philadelphia with you today and great to be with you. I'm telling you, I mean, just blown away by the amount of fraud discovered. The good news is Tim Walts is finished.
Starting point is 00:00:24 I mean, there's no coming back from this. Politically speaking, you can't come back from this. it's so bad because all this happened right under the guy's nose and they ignored it because they were afraid of being called racist they were afraid of being called and and I think the level of incompetence here and theft of people's tax dollars it's infuriating to me it really is I mean we saw a lot of this during COVID when people were getting COVID relief funds and then we thought it was over we thought that it had been exposed and then that was the end
Starting point is 00:00:53 of it but every day it's like a trickle with Minnesota every single day and what you have here is you have organized crime by these Somali gangs and these Somali gang leaders and they ripped off autistic kids, homeless people. I had to laugh because Tim Walts' daughter on Christmas Eve, I think it was, put out this long rambling TikTok video
Starting point is 00:01:17 and she's going on about all the people she's praying for. And I'm thinking, why don't you pray for all the people your father ripped off by allowing all this fraud to happen under his watch? And she talked about in that video, about the unhoused. She said, you know, I'm praying for the unhoused. That's the left's new way of saying homeless people. So they can't say homeless. For some reason,
Starting point is 00:01:36 I don't know why. So they say unhoused. Which to me just reminds me of a bad horror movie, like the undead. It's the unhoused. They ripped off kids. They ripped off daycare centers. They ripped off. And what they kept saying and what Tim Walts kept saying was, well, you know, without these daycare centers, without these child care people, we can't have a state. So we're going to pump more money into this. more money. And as the Minneapolis and Minnesota media just ignored this for years and years, you have an independent journalist coming forward. A kid in his early 20s who comes out of nowhere, his name is Nick Shirley, comes out of nowhere and exposes all this,
Starting point is 00:02:17 which is also a really great sign that citizen journalism is thriving now more than ever. As the corporate legacy media continues to implode, and it's imploding everywhere, it really is. You have people with their phones just going out there and doing the work of actual journalism. And this kid exposes this Minnesota daycare fraud $110 million. The FBI is all over it now, Cash Patel coming out and saying that we're going to have more resources devoted to going after these people. And people have already been locked up, and more people are going to be locked up. And they're saying that at the end of the day, this is going to be over a billion. dollars, a billion dollars in fraud.
Starting point is 00:02:58 I mean, it's infuriating. He's a taxpayer. Like, I hate paying taxes. We all hate paying taxes. But a big thing what they tell us all the time is, well, you know, a lot of your tax dollars, they go to the military and they go to the needy people, people who just can't get by otherwise without your money. So you have to do it. It's no bless oblige. You've got money, so you've got, the government has to take it from you and then redistribute it to all these people who apparently need it. And then you find that these people, they swarm in and they descend on these places and they know they can rip it off. It actually created fraud tourism. Yes, fraud tourism. So as we're now in this kind of weird week between Christmas and New Year's where a lot of people are on
Starting point is 00:03:38 vacation and they're touring different places, people were coming to Minnesota from states like Pennsylvania just so they could get in on the action, get in on the action of the fraud. That's how bad it was and how open it was and how the conversations about how easy it was to steal money were happening all over the place. Meanwhile, Tim Walts was just running around like a goofball, busy putting tampons in boys' bathrooms, busy running around doing his bad Richard Simmons' impression, and not caring. A couple of reasons why. Number one was, I think they were fine with it. The Somali community in Minnesota has a ton of political clout. Number two, they were afraid of being called racist. So be the equivalent of if when they were going after the mafia
Starting point is 00:04:26 years ago, not that the mafia is real, obviously, but if hypothetically speaking, La Cosa was real, when they were going after it, it would have been the equivalent of saying, well, if you go after the mob, that just means you hate Italians. So we're going to threaten you and say that you're all racist against Italian people so that you don't crack down an organized crime. You don't go after the Gambinos. You don't go after the Gambinos. You don't go after the Galdi. because to do so would be saying that you hate Italians. And they made those threats. And then a lot of the bureaucrats in Minnesota just turned around and said,
Starting point is 00:04:59 okay, fine. The politicians of the bureaucrats were like, well, well, we don't want to be considered. We don't want to be racist against the hardworking Somali community. It's also funny, too, to watch some of these Democrat politicians double down in their support of the Somali community. The Somalis were ripped off. Like Somali autistic kids were ripped off. off. Somali unhoused people, to use the left's term, were ripped off.
Starting point is 00:05:23 Somali children who needed food and child care were ripped off. But you can't talk about that. You can't acknowledge that. So we just have to pretend that this is just some vast right-wing conspiracy because people just woke up one day and decided that they just hate Somali people. You have to ignore the fraud. You have to ignore the theft of taxpayer dollars. And you have to ignore people not getting the services that they were legally entitled to under the law so that you are not considered to be a racist. And obviously, since we don't care about being called a racist anymore,
Starting point is 00:05:57 because it's just such a tired attack that means absolutely nothing, it's just the kind of thing that you just, you throw it out there, and it's like, uh-huh, yeah, no, I know. I've heard this now a million times about everything. My use of pronouns, my use of Christmas lights, whether or not they're all white or not. I mean, I've heard it in every single way. So if I'm going to talk about a billion dollars worth of fraud
Starting point is 00:06:21 and how people were ripped off and you want to call me racist over that, that's just added to the list at this point. Just add it, we're running, we have a running tally. I just throw it on there. And you're fine. You're good. You're fine.
Starting point is 00:06:33 And it's really fun watching Tim Walts think that he can salvage his political career. Do you know that that guy had ambitions to run for president? Of the United States? Because I know you're thinking, like, is there a goofball society he could be president of? Yes. Yes, there is. there certainly is, a gigantic, dufous goofball society.
Starting point is 00:06:51 But in terms of America, no, he has no chance. It's over for him. And what I can't, I still can't understand why they put this guy on the ticket. You know, typically you vet these politicians before you would make them the running mate of the Democrat Party. And it was all right there. It was under their nose. It was all happening.
Starting point is 00:07:09 There had been reports about it. Just nothing was done about it. There were reports over the years. And they say that the fraud was. evident two years ago. So what I don't understand is why they made this guy the vice presidential running mate of the United States of the Democrat Party. When you had all these other candidates, I'm not saying any of the other candidates were
Starting point is 00:07:28 much better, but at least Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, who I think just didn't want it. I think he torpedoed his interview with Kamala Harris on purpose and walked in with all these demands because he knew that it was a losing ticket and he didn't want to be attached to that stink. He wanted nothing to do with that. you find a skunk in your backyard, you just, you know you're going to have to bring up a tomato soup if you go near it. So you just stay away. Well, that's the old, well, I don't know if it works or not, but I was always told that tomato soup gets the skunk stink off. But I don't know what gets to stink off
Starting point is 00:08:01 if you are on a ticket that is the biggest losing Democrat ticket in, in modern political history. And I think Shapiro saw that and he figured 2028's not that far away. I'll just stay here and do my thing. And I won't go near that, that train wreck. but you had others i mean mark kelly before he came out with his video and essentially now told the military what they already know which is don't commit a war crime before that he was considered a contender because they needed a boring white guy that was their whole standard for the ticket they needed a boring white guy well he's about as boring as you get i mean the most exciting thing about mark kelly is that he was an astronaut at one point and now he put out that
Starting point is 00:08:44 video part of the seditious six, as they're known, telling members of the military what they are already known and are told on a daily basis, which is you don't commit war crimes. And then they said, well, is anybody telling them to commit war crimes? And it was like, no, no, we're just hypothetically reminding them so that we can get everybody talking about war crimes just as a movie comes out about Nuremberg. No, I do think that was a big part of it. I think it was helping to promote the movie Nuremberg, which was kind of an indie, I think think it was a major movie, but didn't, it kind of had that indie movie feel, meaning that they knew it wasn't going to make a lot of money. So they put out that video to time it with that,
Starting point is 00:09:23 because I remember the women on the view were talking about Nuremberg, the movie, just as that video about the war crimes was coming out. They could have gone with Mark Kelly, but they chose to go with Tim Walts, even though this massive fraud scandal was right there under their noses the entire time. And the level of arrogance and hubris with these people, thinking that they could get away with it. No, I don't mean the people that committed the fraud. You expect arrogance and hubris from that. I mean the people in government in Minnesota under Tim Walts's watch
Starting point is 00:09:56 who knew it was happening and said, we're going to ignore it because we don't want to be called racist and because we don't want to tick off the Somali community because God knows how politically powerful they are. See, how to have this guy, Nick Shirley, go out there and expose all this. And let's start there. Why don't we do that? This is a little bit of him.
Starting point is 00:10:18 We got a couple different clips, kind of short clips for you. It blew up. I mean, it's like millions of views of this guy's videos that he put out, millions and millions.
Starting point is 00:10:27 Fox News picked it up. He's been on Fox News at least once, maybe twice, and they're all talking about it over there. Because that was another question people had in social media. They said, well,
Starting point is 00:10:36 is this going to make the leap from X and the other platforms and actually be covered by a major news source like Fox News, and yeah, they did. They covered it. The fact that this kid is able to go out there in his early 20s and expose this fraud and then blow up and go viral to the degree where you're getting tens of millions of views on his videos says a lot about the state of journalism today and also the ability of anyone
Starting point is 00:11:02 to be a citizen journalist, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing. So here's cut six. Hello, we'd like to ask where the money's going. What do you guys think about the fraud that's taking place here in Minnesota? I don't think anybody is enabling fraud to have it. Hold Governor Walls accountable for this. What was this money spent out? 1.269. What was that money spent?
Starting point is 00:11:23 Ask about it. Do you run any kids? Answer the question. Are there children? There's no children inside this building. Potentially the largest fraud scandal in U.S. history is taking place in Minnesota, as literally billions of dollars have been funneled through Somal Iran fraudulent businesses. So much fraud, it could actually almost replace the entire GDP.
Starting point is 00:11:43 of Somalia. The entire GDP of Somalia. He went through these daycares, these daycare centers, $110 million funded,
Starting point is 00:11:54 and he found blacked out windows, misspelled signs, and no kids. No kids. Now, if you are a parent, whoever sent your kids is daycare,
Starting point is 00:12:03 you realize that one of the, the frustrating things about daycare is how many kids are there sometimes. Too many. The ratio
Starting point is 00:12:10 of child to caregiver. Sometimes it's not optimal or ideal. Well, in this case, there were no kids whatsoever. So, you know, as far as ratios go, they had plenty of people who were getting paid. They just didn't have kids. They were just missing that piece of it. Cut seven. Quality Learing Center.
Starting point is 00:12:31 I meant to say quality learning center. We've arrived to ABC Learning Center. All the windows are blacked out. I would like to check a child in the daycare. Why? Can I speak to a manager? I would like to see if I could bring a little Joey, my son, little Joey here. Is there a paperwork?
Starting point is 00:12:50 Can I check out the daycare? You got $2.66 million this year in funding. And $2.5 million last year. We're just wondering where the kids are. Hello. We'd like to ask where the money's going. Where are the kids? I can't have a daycare center without kids, but apparently you can in Minnesota.
Starting point is 00:13:09 Can Tim Welth salvages political career? No. but boys, he desperately trying. Well, sure that with you as the show continues. It is the Dana show with me, Rich Zioly, in for Dana. We're coming right back. As we move, our partners that help bring you the program, it's the folks over at Relief Factor.
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Starting point is 00:15:22 Brigitte Bardot passed away, as you know, French actress, movie idol, 91 years old. There's another piece of this, too, which is, you remember the Billy Joel song, We Didn't Start the Fire? Of all the people who were named in that song, according to a post by Simon German 600 on X, only three people mentioned in that song, We Didn't Start the Fire, are still alive after the death of Brigitte Bardell. So we wish her all the best and her family all the best. Mr. Beast, who is somebody that my son and the kids know quite well.
Starting point is 00:15:55 His former manager says the age of social media superstars is fading. As algorithms change now, it's going to be harder for creators to reach such a broad reach of people. Influencers are sick to a niche. are well positioned to sell products to fans, even if they're less famous. But AI is stepping in. In fact, there's another story on that point, which is that more than the overwhelming majority of the stuff that you're seeing on social media now is AI slop, according to a study.
Starting point is 00:16:25 In fact, on YouTube alone, more than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are pure AI slop, low-quality AI-generated content, which is now saturating social media. And lastly, lung cancer warning for lunch meat and fizzy drinks after a new study. Time to make America healthy again, no doubt about it. It's the Dana show. It's Rich Zioly in for Dana coming right back. The partners who make the program possible because we're capitalists.
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Starting point is 00:17:45 activated in minutes. Visit Patriotmobil.com slash Dana or call 972 Patriot and use promo code Dana. Limited time offer, though, Patriotomobile.com slash Dana 972 Patriot promo code Dana, a free Samsung AG16 5G. Keep your finger on the pulse with a Dana Show podcast, delivering timely news with insightful analysis. Whenever you want, straight to you on YouTube, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Governor Walsh, what can you say about the latest on the Somali fraud that happened under your watch, sir? Governor, have you been able to apologize yet to the people of Minnesota for allowing this Somali fraud to continue under your watch? Is it time to apologize? How about the whistleblowers that you have allegedly retaliated against?
Starting point is 00:18:30 Would you like to respond to the whistleblowers? he is toast welcome back to the danish show it's rich zioli from philadelphia with you today that's uh tim waltz ignoring questions over the fraud over the leering centers leering centers which if you are going to do a typo for the name of a daycare center i think leering center is really bad if you got center spelled wrong like it was learning cedar or something like that but leering is just creepy in every single way. So there's that aspect of it too. And I think as this continues to blow up here, number one, this guy, Nick Shirley needs just an absolute standing ovation from everybody. He's an independent journalist. He's in his early 20s. He just goes out there with
Starting point is 00:19:18 the camera and just does all this stuff. And it's remarkable. It really is. Remarkable, but it, I was just reminded of the border, the border situation. And Griff Jenkins was saying this on Fox News earlier, when he and Bill Malusian years ago would go down to the border and they would show everybody coming in, you know, thousands of people a day crossing the southern border of the United States of America illegally. And they would go down there and they would show this and Fox was covering it, but none of the major networks were covering it. It's the very same thing with this. In this case, it wasn't even Fox covering it. It was Nick Shirley covering it. I mean, they're covering his work now, which is great. But in this age of citizen journalism,
Starting point is 00:20:07 thank God for it. I remember years ago there was a bill. I think it was in the state of New Jersey, if I'm not mistaken. I'm probably other blue states as well, where they wanted to insist that in order to be a journalist, you had to be licensed, like a barber, which I don't even know if barbers really need to be licensed, to be honest with you. I think the market can handle that you know if you're if you're if you're if you're doing a crappy haircut because i've had bad haircuts from licensed barbers i'm sure you have as well i don't think the license does much but you know many professions you must be licensed i i think we all agree doctors probably good thing if they're licensed um but they wanted to have journalists licensed
Starting point is 00:20:43 and i remember when this bill was out there and i was saying no no because the only people they'll end up giving licenses to are the people that meet their standards of of journalism I mean, even with medical licenses, which are probably a good thing at the end of the day, you still have people like Gavin Newsom threatening to take medical licenses away from doctors who spout misinformation and what is misinformation. It's anything that the state says is not what you need to say about disease X or whatever, whatever it is. So during COVID, if you dared utter the word ivermectin, for example,
Starting point is 00:21:18 well, then they wanted to pull your medical license. That's an example of that. If they handed out licenses to journalists, I doubt Nick Shirley would be able to get it. As most likely they would have, like what the left always does, where they'd have a kickback scheme with universities and journalism degrees, and you'd have to have one in order to be a license journalist. And then for a lot of people who didn't go to college and become a journalism major, like Nick Shirley, for example, they would not be considered a journalist.
Starting point is 00:21:45 So then the problem would be if he's doing what he's doing, they could say, well, you're not journalist you're harassing people and we're going to arrest you versus that be a lot harder to do to a licensed journalist and so you'd have a situation where you'd have corporate legacy media people get licenses they would be saying what the state wants them to say the other people would not be allowed to do what they're doing and what would happen is the authorities would come to them and say show me your journalism license and say well i don't have one i'm not a licensed journalist. I'm just a citizen journalist. They're like, no, no, no, you're just a pain in the neck. Get out of here. Or we're going to lock you up. So leave these leering centers around in
Starting point is 00:22:28 Minnesota. Daycare centers with the word learning misspelled. The irony of this is just so rich. You misspelled learning and you turned it into leering and it's about daycare centers and there are no kids there to leer at in the first place. All of it is just so wrong in every single way. but they would turn to a guy like Nick Shirley and they'd say, well, get out of here, you're harassing people, you're not a journalist, leave it to the licensed journalist. The problem is the licensed journalists weren't covering any of this stuff. And the Somalis were the ones committing this fraud and the authorities were, they knew about it. They just didn't want to do anything about it because, number one, the political cloud of the Somali community. And number two, because they didn't want to be called racist and Islamophobic.
Starting point is 00:23:17 And that's drilled into people's heads by people like Ilan Omar when she started in 2020 with her meals for children thing, giving money to Somali kids who were all starving in schools, apparently. And they pound that. And it's what the left does all the time. In order to get you to not talk about certain things, they throw the R word at you or the I word islamophobic, and then they have people back away. So they all knew it was happening. They knew what was going on. Here's journalist, independent journalist. cut eight
Starting point is 00:23:46 Nick Shirley take a listen I don't know they're scared of being called nowadays because it's Somalians are committing this fraud
Starting point is 00:23:55 people are scared to be calling Islamophobic racist in which has nothing to do with what's going on because fraud is fraud it doesn't matter
Starting point is 00:24:03 if it's a black person white person Asian person Mexican fraud is fraud and we work too hard simply just to be paying taxes
Starting point is 00:24:10 in enabling fraud to be happening yeah Yeah, it's a matter of being afraid to call racist and Islamophobic, but don't underestimate the political clout of Somalis in Minnesota and don't underestimate the fact that Tim Walts cared about one thing and that is ensuring that these people were happy, even if they were committing fraud under their eyes.
Starting point is 00:24:35 And he's desperately now trying to save his political career. There are certain things in life you can't save. This is one of them. Minnesota Governor Tim Walts desperately defends himself from Somali fraud allegations uncovered in damning viral video, New York Post story about this, as Nick Shirley put out the full 42 minutes of he and his crew exposing Minnesota fraud and writing, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110 million in one day, one day.
Starting point is 00:25:05 Like it and share it around like wildfire, it's time to hold those corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable. And Tim Walts pushed back against the ever-growing fraud allegations levied against him in the disastrous aftermath of a viral video in which an independent journalist cracked open a crucial part of the alleged Somali aid scheme. A spokesperson for Waltz, a Democrat who frequently provoked President Trump's ire, addressed a bombshell video posted by conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley. Quote, the governor has worked for years to crack down on fraud and ask the state legislature for more authority to take aggressive action. He has strengthened oversight, including launching investigations into these specific facilities, one of which was
Starting point is 00:25:44 already closed. One? One? One whole one was closed, huh? The spokesperson added that Waltz has hired an outside firm to audit payments to high-risk programs, shutting down the housing stabilization services program entirely. So that's great. So they bring in an outside firm, who I imagine is probably politically connected in Minnesota
Starting point is 00:26:06 politics. they're going to pay them money, so then more taxpayer dollars now go to an outside firm. I doubt they're working for free. I'm typically not. In most cases, when the government hires outside entities
Starting point is 00:26:21 to do anything, those outside entities can bill whatever they want, whatever they want. Again, the private sector, if you overbill, people question your services and then you show results
Starting point is 00:26:32 and then they don't use you again. And then your reputation gets ruined and you're done. In the public sector, you just bill, whatever you want. Whether you uncover any fraud or not, it's irrelevant. You just keep billing. And I imagine the people that this particular outside firm that's going to audit the payments, I'm sure somebody knows somebody who's got a guy in politics and then checks are written
Starting point is 00:26:51 and that's how it works. That's how it works all the time with everything. Whether you become the insurance broker of record or the lawyer of record or the engineering firm of record or whatever it is, you've got to be politically connected everywhere in order to get those lucrative contracts. Same thing with this. So the taxpayers will get screwed again. They get screwed by the fraud and then they'll get screwed by the firm looking into the fraud, auditing the fraud, because they're going to have to pay for it. Now, this guy is a Minnesotan, this Nick Shirley. He and David is a Minnesotan friend named David.
Starting point is 00:27:26 Or yes, maybe Shirley's not, but David is. They travel around Minneapolis. They visit multiple child care and leering, leering sites, leering sites, allegedly owned by Somali immigrants. Many were either shuttered entirely, despite signage indicating they were open, or they were helmed by staff who refused to participate in the video. One of the buildings displayed a misspelled sign reading Quality Learing Center. The Learning Center is supposed to account for at least 99 children and funneled roughly $4 million in state funds. He appeared on Fox News, The Big Weekend Show, Sunday evening, and boasted about his findings. He joked that the alleged scheme was so obvious.
Starting point is 00:28:05 that a kindergartner could figure out there as fraud going on. Yeah, but you'd have to have kindergartners in those daycare centers and there were no kids there, so, you know, there's that. There's that. Many officials have echoed Shirley's calls
Starting point is 00:28:20 for an investigation and charging people and prosecuting people with FBI director Cash Patel even announcing the agency has surge extra personnel to investigate the resources doled out in Minnesota.
Starting point is 00:28:33 He said this is one of the first steps in a far-reaching effort to dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs. Federal investigators, hold on to your butts for this one, kids. Federal investigators say half of the $18 billion granted to Minnesota since 2018 could have been stolen by fraudulent schemes, amounting to up to $9 billion in theft. 9 billion with a B in theft. You know, as I read this, I keep thinking,
Starting point is 00:29:07 why am I so dumb that I never get in on this stuff? You ever feel like that sometimes when somebody bets on a stock or something and then they really cash out? And it's like, why didn't I think of that? How is it that I, because Elon Omar is loaded now. She's loaded. She's the brother lover. She's the one who allegedly married her brother to get him his immigration status.
Starting point is 00:29:33 So Congresswoman brother-lover, allegedly, I mean, we don't know, I think so. I mean, the Daily Mail wrote a whole story about it. They believe that they've confirmed that she is, in fact, the brother-lover. But she's loaded now. It's like all these members of Congress get loaded. And I always look at them, and I say, why didn't I think of that? When fraud stories like this come out, and this happened after COVID, too, when people were just raking in money, I'm always thinking, why am I the dummy who didn't figure out a way
Starting point is 00:30:02 to just load up on this taxpayer-funded gravy train. Well, the answer that I come back with is that I'm an ethical person, and I don't want to steal. I don't want to rip people off, but I think there's this perception out there that government money doesn't really cost anything. And maybe that's what happens
Starting point is 00:30:19 when you get into a culture that is okay with $38 trillion in federal debt, and people are like, well, it's, what's another $9 billion stolen? I mean, just add that to the till over there. I don't think people think it's real money. I think it's monopoly money. It's like, look, the feds are throwing all this cash to all these different welfare programs.
Starting point is 00:30:41 But it's not real money. It's government money. So take whatever you want. And then people are like, really? Yeah, no, no, no, just come to Minnesota. It's, yeah, sign up. It's easy. You can even have, you can even vouch for people in Minnesota to vote if they're not in the books.
Starting point is 00:31:01 you can just vouch for them. It's great. I'm an ethical person. You're an ethical person. So when relief money is available for autistic kids, your first inclination is probably not, how can I get that money, even though I'm not an autistic child?
Starting point is 00:31:17 And I don't have one. How can I get a piece of that? Well, I'll open up some sort of a leering center. I'll do a Fugazi daycare center, and I'll just steal people's money. Because it's not real money, it's government money. It's all going to go back
Starting point is 00:31:31 to the till somehow and we're never going to pay it back anyway and who cares and they're not going to be able to find it and if they ever find it the odds of anybody getting really prosecuted or slim and maybe they'll prosecute some people and maybe you got to pay it back and maybe you got to have like a little a little fine or something like that but no big whoop and you know and I really do think that is the mindset in many ways when it comes to these people and it's just it's grotesque it is grotesque and I hope they all go to prison I really do more on that front and what the FBI is doing as we continue here on the Dana show, don't go away. We got a lot more on the way as we roll towards the bottom of this hour.
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Starting point is 00:34:09 And of course, the left is melting down over the investigative reporting done by Nick Shirley. There's a guy named Hassan Piker. Maybe you've heard of this guy. He's a streamer who electuates his dog. Yeah, that's what he does. He electrocutes his dog, which I think should be. be a crime we just got a puppy for christmas for the kids his name is gary we didn't name him gary he was already named gary when we got him and the kids love the name so we're keeping
Starting point is 00:34:38 the name gary but uh he's adorable little guy he's a he's a he's a little guy though he's is a is a covapoo or cockadoo or cockadoodle do i forget exactly exactly but a great dog anyway so i have a real problem with people that electrocute their their dog i just shock their dog with electrocution but that's what this guy Hassan piker does anyway he put out a statement on x saying i don't know what kind of fraud somalis and daycares are doing but i think it's a separate crime to try and storm with a camera into a daycare with kids in it now going back to what i said earlier here on the danish show about the fact that if you had journalism licenses citizen journalists could not do what they do.
Starting point is 00:35:28 The left would never allow it. They would crack down. They'd arrest them. But also, that's not what happened here. Naturally, it didn't storm into daycare centers with cameras. They walked in and asked how they could enroll children, which is what you do. You go in there to ask them questions in a lobby, and then you ask for information, which is how you would enroll children in a daycare facility.
Starting point is 00:35:53 But if there are no kids there, because they're not actually enrolling. kids there because you're not actually doing daycare. It's just a gigantic money laundering operation. You're not going to find any anyway. Which is what the real anger is over. It's over the idea that this was happening. It could be up to $9 billion, and they got caught. And it was all under their noses and they just ignored it.
Starting point is 00:36:21 I don't know how much of it is the we're afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic as much as. that may be an excuse to allow the fraud to continue. We'll tell everybody that we're, we were afraid of being called racist and Islamophobic if we get caught allowing the fraud to continue, the fraud that they all knew that was happening. But really what I think it was about is just,
Starting point is 00:36:45 you're talking about very politically powerful constituency groups here, and also the fraud and the Islamophobia. And these people, these criminals knew it. They threatened it. they said that. If you come after us, if you say anything about us, we'll just call you racist. We'll just call you racist. I'll call Tim Walt's stupid. I don't know how you can, he's either the dumbest guy of all time, or he's just good. First of all, I don't, I'm not saying he's dumb as if he didn't know what was happening. I think he fully knew it was happening.
Starting point is 00:37:17 He's completely incompetent. But the fact that you go on the national ticket and you don't think all this is going to come out. And it also, proves that Kamala Harris continues to defy the standards for the worst candidate in presidential history when she picks a guy as her running mate who oversaw a fraud scandal that could amount to $9 billion in stolen money and thinks that what that won't come out or people were that stupid they didn't vet it properly so they had no idea they didn't know it was there they will go down as being the the big one of the biggest acts of political incompetence putting that dufus on the ticket he brought nothing was a state the democrats were going to win
Starting point is 00:37:59 anyway and nine billion dollar fraud scandal it's the dana show it's rich zioli for dana hour two straight ahead don't go away well the democrats are talking about impeaching don't trump again i know it's shocking right it really is welcome back to the dana show it's rich zioli in for dana today hope you had a great christmas and honica and happy new year and just a couple days hard to believe this year i feel like it flew by i really do Which I know is cliche in the sense of they say, as you get older, it feels as if the years fly by. And that's true. But I think that it's just 2025, there was so much happening with this president and this administration every single day.
Starting point is 00:38:41 MLF hates it because he's actually succeeding at things. He's actually winning at things. And they can't stand it. They really can't. So now they want to impeach him. And I mean, none of us are surprised by that, obviously. We're not shocked in the least. I will tell you, though, that as the talk of impeachment heats up by people like Nancy Pelosi, the vampiric one,
Starting point is 00:39:07 she says Democrats don't want to impeach Trump again. But he's just forcing them to do it. He's not giving them a choice. He's just, you know, it's not they don't want to do it, you see. He just, he keeps pushing them. So what are they going to do? I mean, what's, what's a girl supposed to do these days? It's so silly.
Starting point is 00:39:29 It really is. Midterms will heat up, though, obviously. And it's kind of going to come down to the affordability factor in the economy. I personally believe the economy is going to be in good shape. I really do in 2026. We stopped the war in energy. That was what was driving so much of this. That and the reckless spending by Biden's administration.
Starting point is 00:39:46 But let's be honest. I mean, there's reckless spending in Washington all the time. It absolutely drove up inflation. No question about that. we're turning the tide on that but the war on energy i still think was the biggest driver in inflation because energy affects the everything the price of food and if you have extra money in your pocket because gas prices are low great if only heating prices are low great you got extra money in your pocket that's money you're going to spend and put it into the economy
Starting point is 00:40:14 fantastic it matters all across the board and the left was determined i mean determined to destroy fossil fuels in this country Everything from mandating that you had to drive an electric vehicle to shutting down coal-fired power plants, shutting down natural gas, putting moratoriums on fracking for natural gas, putting up these monstrosity, these just disgusting, massive wind turbine farms off the shores, which are killing whales and dolphins, solar fields everywhere, stuff that doesn't work, stuff that actually doesn't deliver energy. It's kind of funny. I was watching
Starting point is 00:40:52 Microsoft has a new commercial out and they have the interracial Santa thing going on, which I don't really care. It's just funny how, you know, it's like you got to just find new ways to be politically correct if you're a tech company and your AI and everything like this
Starting point is 00:41:11 because you have to make sure that people are not noticing that you just restarted a nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island. That was mothballed. in 2019 does you need so much data you need so much energy for the for the data for AI that you need nuclear can't do with wind farms can't do it with solar farms so you'll see more of this happening where these big tech companies from silicon valley who are supposed to
Starting point is 00:41:41 be the left of the left of the left of the worst of the worst and they turn around and they realized that everything that they've been saying about climate change was completely full of it. The funny thing about it, though, is that nuclear is completely clean. Natural gas is clean. But they still hate those things because they were so all in on wind and solar. And why? Because again, political power, money, money. They could give contracts to all these green energy companies who would then put the money back in the politicians' pockets. They could drive money with federal money towards wind and solar projects, and then they could invest in the stocks for those companies
Starting point is 00:42:26 and have that money go back in their pockets. Politicians are the biggest thieves out there. They really are. They're the biggest thieves out there. Speaking of artificial intelligence, which is everywhere now, Anthropic AI ran a vending machine at the headquarters of the Wall Street Journal for several weeks. It lost hundreds of dollars. It bought some crazy stuff
Starting point is 00:42:50 and taught us a lot about the future of AI agents. They had a whole thing on this. An artificial intelligence vending machine. It ran a snack operation. And it gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish, among other things that it did too. And they did this experiment
Starting point is 00:43:12 because they wanted to see Claudius, the customized version, of the model, which would run the machine, ordering inventory for the machine, setting prices, and responding to customers in the workplace. And I don't know what it would do if a snack bag got stuck on the way down. I never know what to do in that situation. Do you shake the machine? Do you pound the glass a little bit?
Starting point is 00:43:36 Do you order another bag of the same thing, thinking that that could knock the bag in front of it down and you get two, essentially, because, I mean, not for the price of one. you already pay for the thing it's hanging there midstream, but at least now you have two delicious bags of Doritos versus just one. These are the questions that I grapple with at my company's vending machine. Not but I ever really go to the studio, but if I did, I'm saying, I would have those issues. So they brought in this AI machine there and gave away nearly all its inventory for free,
Starting point is 00:44:06 including a PlayStation 5. The AI was talking to buying for marketing purposes in a PlayStation 5, and it went along with it, which I agree with. I mean, you've got to have happy employees. It ordered a live fish. It offered to store stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. Profits collapsed, but newsroom morale soared. Oh, yeah, I mean, if you could go Sour Patch Kids or PlayStation 5 from the vending machine
Starting point is 00:44:35 and not have to pay for it, that's great. It's easily distracted. I mean, I'm easily distracted, so I could relate to this artificial intelligence. leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against an AI chief executive and that's exactly what they did the project Venn experiment was designed by the company's stress testers to see what happens when an AI agent is given autonomy money and human colleagues three weeks with Claudia showed us today's AI's promises and failings and how hilarious the gap can be between the two if you're if you're picturing this what
Starting point is 00:45:14 this looks like. And you're thinking in your mind, vending machine coils falling snacks. Not exactly right. You have to think IKEA cabinet with a giant fridge bolted to the side in a touchscreen kiosk, no sensors, no door locks, no robotics, nothing telling the AI what's actually happening, just the honor system and a makeshift security camera that they decided to put in so they could see it. And they put bags of chips and soda cans and candy and and also weird items as well. And after buying the inventory, Claudius decided on pricing and adjusting,
Starting point is 00:45:52 trying to maximize margins. The prices sync to the machine's touchscreen kiosk. And haggling in Slack was a big part of the fund. So all the employees using this online employee communications tool, known as Slack, they would all talk to each other about this, and they would come up with great ideas to kind of trick the AI and giving them free stuff.
Starting point is 00:46:12 And fun stuff and cool stuff. All these back-and-forth messages with people, including $1,000 in red wine. Yeah. A thousand dollars. And then they just were losing money left and right with this AI vending machine as well. So the vending machine community can at least rest peacefully tonight because they probably won't be losing their jobs based on this experiment anytime soon. Of course, we keep hearing the panic about what AI is going to do to jobs in 2026. What I do know, though, is that as far as jobs for data centers, those are booming,
Starting point is 00:46:52 and nuclear jobs are going to be booming, too, because we can't keep up with AI right now with the current supply we have for the grid. The grid, it's just not enough. It's not nearly enough. If AI is going to power everything in our lives from our computers, which are getting used to now, if all these different apps you can talk to and find things out, a buddy of mine just got a dog, he put into chat GPT what he was looking for in a dog and it spit out various different breeds
Starting point is 00:47:20 then he asked it to go further down the rabbit hole or the dog hole in this case I guess male versus female what kind of how much the mom should weigh and the dad should weigh in order to come up with the perfect sort of frank and doodle puppy and chat GPT spit it out I have a friend who went on vacation and she used
Starting point is 00:47:41 she used AI to plan the entire trip they gave her a full an itinerary of every day where to go even making the reservations at the restaurants for her and everything like this that's all great but we're also using AI to power
Starting point is 00:47:53 missile defense systems obviously we're using AI what could possibly go wrong we're using AI for literally everything the massive amounts of power that we need for that means that old nuclear reactors
Starting point is 00:48:05 have to come back online like 3 Mile Island in Pennsylvania you also have to have new nuclear reactors built and you have to get over the absurd obsession the left has with solar and wind because they don't work. And when Microsoft chose to reopen the mothballed nuclear reactor of Three Mile Island, it said a lot about, A, the needs for power
Starting point is 00:48:30 and B, the fact that the whole war on climate was a joke anyway. It was the war on energy, I should say, in the name of climate justice was always a joke. It was always pandering by leftist politicians. to line their pockets and line the pockets of their friends. It was always about that. And so that they could stand up in Democrat primaries and say that I was the biggest green lunatic out there.
Starting point is 00:48:52 You know, I shut down all the coal fire plants in my state. I build massive wind farms on my state. I put in solar fields, the size of smaller states in my state. Forget all the other consequences that you have with that, with solar panels that when they reach their end of life expectancy, and the fact that they're all built in China, wind turbines that have a 20-year life expectancy, and then they just go into landfills.
Starting point is 00:49:17 But leaving all that aside for a moment and looking at what the needs of Silicon Valley, as it's known, the companies like Microsoft and Google, meta, and all the AI needs that they need mean that they need nuclear and natural gas. And so the states that have that and that are embracing that, states like Pennsylvania, which also, of course, matter in the presidential election coming up
Starting point is 00:49:44 in 2028, because before you know, we're going to be talking about that, means the real question is, is the issue of climate change officially dead is a political issue? I don't think it's that black and white because you're still dealing with a Democrat party that has been taken over by crazy people. And for many of them, they still worship at the altar of birthing person Earth. But from a practical perspective, if you can see. say, like say Josh Shapiro, the governor, Pennsylvania, I was able to bring tens of thousands of new jobs to my state because we went all in on natural gas and nuclear and look at the
Starting point is 00:50:21 wealth and look at the economic success we've had and look at how many of these Silicon Valley companies we brought to our state and how many data centers we built and how many construction jobs came along with that. I think that's a great talking point, personally speaking. But I'll put it into chat GPT and I'll see what it says about that. There's no limits to what you can do with AI, except clearly the limit becomes the vending machine. So nothing's perfect. Not yet anyway.
Starting point is 00:50:50 At least the vending machine didn't try to kill anybody in the workplace, because that's really the fear that I have about AI is that the vending machine would find a way to have that cocaine go 150 miles an hour and smack me in the face to kill me. As long as that's not happening, I guess so far, we'll take it as a win. It's the Dana Show. More to come, whether or not we're going to have peace with Russia and Ukraine. It's Rich
Starting point is 00:51:13 Zioly in for Dana. Don't go away. And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It's time for Dana's Quick 5. New York City is getting rid of the Metro card soon. I don't know the last time you went to New York City. I'm going to be up there tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:51:29 That's the card you used to get on the subway. And buses, too, I think, use them as well. You swipe it, and it never worked. You had to swipe it again and again and again and again. Anyway, that's gone. They're going contact lists. You tap, you go, and you're good, and that's the way it goes.
Starting point is 00:51:45 But it kind of follows a long thing where they're getting rid of just these, really anything that requires a transaction to use a transit system in the first place or even tolls. I notice this more or more, where you've got cashless tolling, but they just scan your license plate, which really infuriates people who never decided to go down the route of Easy Pass because they just didn't want the government tracking their movements. And I get it. I completely do. I get it.
Starting point is 00:52:12 But you have no choice now because they'll just send you a bill in the mail by scanning your license plate. That's just going to keep continuing. They'll just eventually, you'll just probably at some point walk through a turnstile and it'll just probably scan your eyes and then send you a bill that way. After thousands of years, our archaeologists think they finally found Noah's Ark. Pretty cool. Pottery fragments sparked fresh excitement and provided potential proof that the alleged final resting place of the ark was indeed settled by humans at the time of the flood.
Starting point is 00:52:42 Pretty amazing story. And this ceramic points to a human activity in the region between 5,000 and 3,000 BC. And it's real. It's very real. Not that we ever doubted it, of course. but one more proof, obviously, that you cannot deny the existence of God because it's scientifically based. You can prove it all right here. The Bible is real and what they talk about in there is real as well. It's in the Agri province, a boat-shaped geological structure that has been at the center of the Noazar claim
Starting point is 00:53:16 for decades. A Texas father rescued his kidnapped daughter by tracing her phone's location, according to the sheriff's office, which I love this story because I have kids and the debate about whether or not to give your kids phones, and you hear the doom and gloom about phones all the time. But this is a great story because he was able to track it and find his daughter, and that's fantastic. The hottest high schools in Massachusetts are trade schools. No surprise there. And a rare gold coin was found in a Salvation Army kettle in Washington County. It's the Dana Show coming right back. 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.
Starting point is 00:53:55 Ideal for your busy lifestyle on YouTube, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. It sounds a little strange, but I was explaining to the president, President of Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity, and other things at very low prices. So the president was just speaking, he's speaking actually right now with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. Welcome back to the show. Glad you're here. Actually, Palm Beach. Excuse me, Marlago. Welcome back to the show. It's the Dana show. It's Rich Zioly in for Dana. Great to be with you on this New Year's Eve, Eve. Eve. And as we look towards 2026, of course, one of the questions is, will there be peace? Now, Zelensky is claiming that the president said the U.S. will consider giving Ukraine decades of security guarantees, according to a story that was published by Fox News, a short time ago today.
Starting point is 00:55:00 So they had this meeting down in Palm Beach, and Zelensky indicated in a post on X that Ukraine would like to have at least 30, 40, or even 50 years of security guarantees from the U.S., and that President Donald Trump said the U.S. will consider. consider it. He met with the president in Florida on Sunday. And the battle, obviously, between Russia and Ukraine is heating up. You might have heard that story over the weekend. I don't know how tuned into the news you are this time of year. It's a tricky time of year. It's a strange time a year. It's also a strange time a year if you have children. Because you have Christmas, you have the lead up to Christmas. Then all of a sudden, like my kids are 11, 9, and 5. So we have the lead up to Christmas. We got a puppy. Then you kind of have. have a couple days after Christmas and they're enjoying their toys and they're enjoying the
Starting point is 00:55:48 puppy. They're off from school. They're off from school all this week. Many people I know are away on vacation. We're not away on vacation because we have a dog. We just got puppies. Obviously, we can't go anywhere yet. So we're just kind of hanging around. I'm working a little bit doing the Dana show obviously today and got some Fox News hit schedule for the week. But a lot of people just tune out. You know, in my industry in particular, because I mean, I'm a full-time talk show host. It's what I do. I have a show on Talk Radio 1210, W Ph.D. in Philadelphia. And for a lot
Starting point is 00:56:20 of us in this industry, this time of year, we just completely decompose, as George Cassanza would say. We decompose. And that's because the news cycle doesn't end. It's continuously pounding and pounding like Russia and Ukraine. It's just pounding.
Starting point is 00:56:38 And you feel as if you can't get away from it. So Christmas and New Year's and around this time of year, you turn out, Many people just turn things off, and you may be in that same situation. I don't know. But if you are following the news, because I'm a junkie, so I have to even get, as much as I try to tune out, I have to go off for little hits.
Starting point is 00:56:58 Maybe when you were growing up, people still smoked in the boys' room and the girls' room in school. I don't know, maybe they did back then. You go in for like a little puff. I was never a smoker. I never did. Or maybe you're a junkie. You know, you need like a little fix.
Starting point is 00:57:13 I'm not judging. I'm just saying. I'm like that with the news. As much as I try to stay out of it, I can't help myself. And then, of course, as I know that I've got the Danish show on today, then that means that yesterday I've got to dive back in and go, what did I miss? And I missed, and maybe you missed too,
Starting point is 00:57:32 that Russia apparently was escalating the battle against Ukraine in a big, big way. As the president was having a phone call with Putin and Zelensky was coming to Palm Beach. now trump's strategy on this is a is a smart strategy it is basically as my friend dr victoria coach from the heritage foundation so aptly put it she said you know russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons that's really all it is so if you cut off the the main product which is oil and natural gas if you cut off the main product then russia's economy suffers Russia could fight this war with Ukraine for the next several decades.
Starting point is 00:58:16 They don't care about their people. They force people to the front lines. They're not in a rush. And that's kind of the thinking of Russia, particularly with winter being here now. It will outlast anybody, and history has proven that to be so. They don't do so well in warmer climates, obviously, as the Afghanistan debacle proved back in the 80s. But the point being that with cutting off the customer base for Vladimir Putin and saying to other countries around the world,
Starting point is 00:58:48 look, if you buy his oil, you buy his natural gas, you're dead to us. And we're going to put sanctions on you. And we're going to make it very, very complicated for you if you do so. Then that hurts Putin's bottom line. The only way this war ends is if you hit Putin economically. That's it. That's the only way. You want the war to end, and I certainly do. Then you've got to hit Putin economically.
Starting point is 00:59:08 so he comes to the table and he makes a peace deal. Otherwise, there's no incentive for him and he will keep going. He'll keep going as long as it takes. He can't look weak. I mean, there could be a coup tonight. He's also not young. The life expectancy for the average male in Russia is 65. He's in his early 70s, so he's already cheating time.
Starting point is 00:59:31 Maybe it's all of vodka. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a cold weather. I'm not a cold weather guy. I could never live there. But there's that. And then there's the fact that you still have the hardliners in Russia who they won't be happy unless it's total domination. And that, and Russia takes Ukraine fully.
Starting point is 00:59:50 Now, that's not going to happen. The United States has said, this peace deal means that Russia gets to, whatever land it's already taken here, basically, Ukraine has to acquiesce that to Russia. So Crimea, for example, and parts of Donbos and Ukraine has said that's a non-star. But you can't have a non-starter in these conversations. You just can't. Because Ukraine does not have the ability to keep fighting here. It doesn't have the money. It doesn't have the soldiers. And it certainly is not have the energy that it needs going into the winter. In fact, Europe is going to have to bail them out if Ukraine is able to keep fighting during the long, cold winter months that we are in right now. Russia doesn't have that problem. Russia has the energy. Ukraine does not. And that is a
Starting point is 01:00:37 problem for Ukraine, obviously. Now, there was a joint press conference with the president, our president, and Zelensky yesterday. And the president was asked whether he offered any promises or assurances of security for Ukraine. And he said, I did. We want to work with Europe. Europe will take over a big part of it, but that the U.S. will assist.
Starting point is 01:00:59 Now, I don't know how that's going to play with a lot of people back in America who are just tired of this whole thing and want this to end and don't really want us to be babysitting anybody. He's been very good, our president has been very good at getting Ukraine, or NATO, I should say, to cough up the money, the 5% of their GDP, to actually pay it so that they can, they can be, well, not be deadbeats, basically. Because all these countries were deadbeats, just not paying.
Starting point is 01:01:26 And looking to the United States of America to just handle everything, even though it's not our continent, it's not our war. And it really should never have been ours in the first place. but that's what Europe expected and we did that at the same time Europe was buying Putin's natural gas and oil and they were putting money in the guy's pocket they were giving Putin more money this this fact alone just is so frustrating they were giving more Putin more money buying his oil and natural gas countries like Germany France for example then they were giving to the war in terms of support for Ukraine and even if they were giving more money to Ukraine versus what they were giving to Putin, it doesn't matter because you're still putting money in Putin's pocket, which he's using to what, fight Ukraine? So the whole thing became this really self-defeating and never-ending conflict based on the fact that Putin was still getting money. So President Trump comes along to Europe and says, all right, the first thing you
Starting point is 01:02:25 got to do is you got to stop doing that. All right? You got to stop buying his oil and natural gas. That's number one. And saying that to the other countries around the world, too. I cut it out. Now, you're not going to be able to succeed in getting China to do that. And obviously, you have this axis of China and Iran. And the president was just saying with that in Yahoo, well, he thinks that Iran may want to make a deal. And they should make a deal because they have, I mean, you remember the time he said, Zolensky, you have no cards?
Starting point is 01:02:48 Well, I'll tell you who has no cards, and that's Iran right now. They need to make a deal. They need to. But you still have this support of China, Iran, and Russia, and you still have this, this axis it's going on right now with them. And so Russia is still able to put money in their pocket because they're still able to sell their energy in the world market, not to the degree necessarily as they were before, thanks to Trump cracking down on that, but they're still doing it. So as Ukraine heads into the winter right now, and if you can get a ceasefire deal,
Starting point is 01:03:23 and Ukraine is this problem with energy, and that's where you have the president saying Putin is offering Ukraine energy supply at very low prices. Well, they're not going to do that if they're going to keep fighting Ukraine. because obviously they don't want to they they're not going to give money to Ukraine to keep the lights on to fight them that would make no sense so the fact that Putin is offering the energy supply at very low prices is a good sign then that maybe we're actually going to get a peace deal and maybe actually this thing will come to an end now be great I think everybody's ready for this to come to an end and move on and where we go from here is this has to be something that Europe has to deal with this is their continent this is their problem it's a problem that in many ways they created by you you probably remember this when when putin was confronting angela merkel in his first term about how germany kept buying oil and natural gas from russia particularly natural gas and he kept saying to her this is really stupid all you're doing is empowering Putin so the guy that the left
Starting point is 01:04:25 accused year after year lying about him being some russian puppet was confronting the chancellor of Germany over the fact that Germany kept buying his energy and saying you're just making the guy rich and powerful. What are you doing here? It wasn't just Germany. It was all the countries in Europe were doing that because they're stupid and they made stupid energy decisions like getting rid of nuclear power, for example, and shutting off their natural gas.
Starting point is 01:04:52 A lot of these countries were really, really all in on the climate change stuff. And then they turned around and realized, oh my gosh, it's winter and we don't have enough energy supply. Go figure. So then they turn to Russia and they start buying stuff from Vladimir Putin. And then Trump leaves office. The United States of America doubles down on stupid. And Joe Biden, well, I technically believe it was his auto pen that did this. No, I'm serious about this. I really do. I think it was the auto pen. The auto pen put a ban on the export of liquid natural gas from the United States of America. I don't think Biden ever really knew about it. Because I remember the time that Speaker Mike Johnson asked him.
Starting point is 01:05:34 And he had no clue what he was talking about. And everybody just assumed, oh, Joe's just having one of his days. You know, Biden's being Biden again. I don't think he knew about it. Because at one point, he was a very savvy politician. I mean, he was the chairman of the House Judiciary or the Senate Judiciary Committee at one point. I mean, he was, you know, Delaware Powerhouse, found a way to become vice president, found a way to become a multi-millionaire, found a way to get his idiot crackhead son,
Starting point is 01:06:00 lucrative contracts, consulting. in areas he knew nothing about. And a savvy politician like that never would have said in an election year when I've got to win Pennsylvania, let's put in a ban on the export of liquid natural gas. The autopen, however, that's a different story.
Starting point is 01:06:16 And the people controlling the auto pen who were climate change radicals, well, that's a different story too. So I do think it's one of those areas where the auto pen policy kicked in and they said, it doesn't matter what. The president doesn't care. Just we could do whatever we want.
Starting point is 01:06:29 Just sign it. So meanwhile, Russia is getting more powerful and more rich, and Ukraine doesn't have the energy that it needs, and it also has to turn to Russia for energy. And that's ironic in a sense, because as that happens, it's also going to put money in Putin's pocket. So then you have to have a security guarantee so that he doesn't turn around, take the money that he's just made for supplying Ukraine with energy, and then use it to one day attack Ukraine in the future if you're going to actually have a peace deal.
Starting point is 01:07:06 Here's the president talking about the peace talks with Zelensky. This is cut to. Take a listen. We spoke to all of those great leaders. They're all great leaders. And we had a great talk with them after we were completed. We thought it was appropriate to speak with them. And our meeting was excellent.
Starting point is 01:07:24 We covered somebody would say 95%. I don't know what percent. But we have made a lot of progress on ending that. that war, which is really the, certainly the most deadly war since World War II, probably the biggest war since World War II. Yeah, well, and but Zelensky, though, is contradicting this in saying that he doesn't believe Putin wants peace. He doesn't see it.
Starting point is 01:07:47 I think the only reason why Putin would want peace is the economic reason that I mentioned earlier to you. That's basically it, but here's cut four. Is there any indication that you see that Vladimir Putin wants peace by what he's doing or saying. Me not, be honest. And I don't see it because, first of all, I don't hear it publicly. His messages, they go, I mean, he doesn't speak about peace. Now he doesn't speak. He says that he can go further. It's not the signals of peace. We'll see. We shall see. It's the Dana show. It's Rich Zioly in for Dana. Florida man, straight ahead.
Starting point is 01:08:31 It's his life mission to make bad decisions. It's time for Florida man. Yeah, well, this is a couple of great ones here for you here on the Danish show. A central Florida man sued Outback Steakhouse saying the toilet shattered beneath him. I hate when that happens, don't you? I mean, it's one thing when there's no toilet paper, but then the toilet just shatters right underneath you. No fun there. But hey, at least you got some blooming onion, am I right?
Starting point is 01:08:59 A Florida man allegedly stole 400 pounds of avocados to buy Christmas presents for children. The suspect allegedly told deputies he planned to sell the avocados to buy Christmas gifts for his kids. And so he stole hundreds of pounds of them in the Miami area, Idel Perez. Arrested it for deputy said they saw him leaving a fenced avocado grove with bags of avocados estimated to weigh 400 pounds. So the man is strong. I'm just saying you got to give it to him. You know what I'm saying? Like, avocados, you carry one of those little bags in the store.
Starting point is 01:09:32 They're heavy. 400 pounds of avocados. That's some serious, serious girth right there. So, and since it is the season, of course, and we have the Salvation Army donation kettles everywhere, you know you're going to have a story like this. Obviously, a Florida man wielding a Salvation, a Florida man wielding a Salvation kettle attacks a store manager. Yes, that's right. the Salvation Army donation kettle was his weapon of choice. A violent outburst, took the kettle, went into a store, and then tried to impale the store manager with the Salvation Army kettle, which makes sense if you think about it.
Starting point is 01:10:13 If you're looking for a weapon, they're everywhere, and they are like legit kettles. I mean, they're not flimsy things. I'm just saying, you know what I mean? So he picked one up and he went into a store and he went after the guy and, um, He's a real handsome guy, too, as you can imagine, threatened to impale this guy. He was intoxicated, which is also shocking. I know you're shocked about that part of the story as well, began aggressively confronting people who walked by, creating a major to servants, and the manager came outside.
Starting point is 01:10:44 The guy became violent and attempted to impale the manager with the donation kettle tripod, because you also have the kettle and also the tripod that holds up, said kettle. So you really have two weapons there, if you, think about it. He was hired as a Salvation Army bell ringer and stationed outside this public supermarket. He was drunk ringing and and belligerent tidings. Beligerent tidings. So the tidings this time of year, drunk belligerent tidings. And then they took him into custody after his full-blown charity tirade. So there you go. And I always thought they picked the best people for these jobs. I really did. My experience with the Salvation Army, Santa Kettle people,
Starting point is 01:11:29 has always been fine and outstanding. I've never gotten drunk belligerent tidings, but you know, that's me. All right, more to come on the Danish show. The president meeting with Net and Yahoo, what will come of that? And of course, the question in everybody's mind as we head into this is what will come of Minnesota. As more fraud comes to light, just how big is it going to be? The FBI says they are making this priority number one. As kind of Cash Patel and the FBI descend upon Minnesota. Nine billion? Is that how much this fraud scandal could end up being $9 billion of taxpayer theft?
Starting point is 01:12:05 We'll find out. It's Rich Zioly in for Dana. It's the Dana show. Don't go away. The FBI is surging resources to Minnesota, as Director Cash Patel calls the $250 million fraud scheme, the tip of a very large iceberg. Welcome back to the Dana show. It is Rich Zioly with you.
Starting point is 01:12:25 Great to be with you on this New Year's Eve, Eve, Eve. And I appreciate you hanging. I really do. Tip of the iceberg, no doubt about it. That is what we're talking about here with Minnesota. And look, I don't know, you know, like somebody alleged that one of the schools that the young man visited, the journalist here, one of those schools, they're operating hours or not until the afternoon, I'm not suggesting that necessarily everything he unearthed. the video may turn out to be fraud. I don't know.
Starting point is 01:12:56 I mean, that's the thing. But what we do know is this. We do know that what he's exposed here with these daycare centers and just the daycare centers alone, if you're talking about boarded up buildings, if you're talking about daycare centers that have nobody there and yet those centers are still receiving money, if people are still getting paid, if there are no kids going into the daycare centers, if the standards of the center are so low that they can't even spell the freaking name right. They call it a leering center instead of a learning center or a, it's fraud.
Starting point is 01:13:35 There's no other way to put it. It's fraud. And I think, you know, maybe one of those daycare centers will turn out to be operating fine. And then they'll try to dismantle everything that he's uncovered here. by saying, well, you know, one of the facilities just wasn't open yet. Okay, maybe, but you can't account for all the other facilities that are ripping the taxpayers off. But I guarantee you that that's exactly what the leftist corporate media will do.
Starting point is 01:14:05 And so he'll turn around and say, well, his debunked video because one of the daycare centers wasn't open when he went there. So obviously, there'd be no kids there yet. And I think it's like anything else. you'll find as this goes on here that the feeding our future investigation for example which uncovered a $250 million scheme that siphoned federal food aid intended for children during the COVID-19 pandemic which is something that the brother-lover congresswoman Elon Omar championed as a member of Congress 78 indictments 57 convictions I think
Starting point is 01:14:47 of the 78 indictments, I think 71 or 72 of the people are Somali. Again, you can try to make this out to be some sort of anti-Somali thing. It's not. I'm Italian. I remember very well when the FBI went after Italians
Starting point is 01:15:02 who happened to be an organized crime. I didn't take it personally. I didn't think it was racist. My dad was a cop. My dad worked on joint task forces or task force. I never know exactly how to, but you get the point. going after Italians.
Starting point is 01:15:19 I didn't really turn around and think it was some big racist thing. I just thought they were involved in organized crime. Allegedly, obviously, I mean, the mafia is not real, but if it was real, clearly, then you would have gone after them. 78 indictments, 57 convictions, prosecutors charging defendants in a separate plot to bribe a juror with $120,000 in cash. If I was the juror doing jury duty and I get offered $120,000,000, in cash i'd have to really think about it i'm just saying i'd have to really think jury duty is the worst and 120 000 is a lot of money i'm just saying i probably wouldn't do it i probably would not but i'd have to think at least i'd have to give it a couple minutes of thought that's all i'm saying
Starting point is 01:16:04 120 grand no joke the fbi believes is just a tip of a very large iceberg the director wrote an ex we will continue to file the money and protect children and this investigation very much remains ongoing. Furthermore, many are also being referred to immigration officials for possible further denaturalization and deportation proceedings where eligible. Good. Kick them out. I don't want to have to pay to incarcerate these people.
Starting point is 01:16:32 Kick them out. Patel's announcement came in the wake of a viral video posted on social media on Friday by independent journalist Nick Shirley, with it highlighted alleged fraud involving Minnesota childcare and learning centers. In the video, many of the physical. facilities appear non-operational, readily receiving millions of dollars in government aid.
Starting point is 01:16:52 Republican lawmakers, including House Majority Whip Tom E. Of Minnesota, Mike Lawler of New York, Vice President J.D. Vance have all responded to the viral video. Emmer accusing Governor Tim Walts of sitting idly by while billions were stolen from hardworking
Starting point is 01:17:08 Minnesotans. And the fact that they've hired this outside firm to check into this really frustrates me. It really does because again it's more money going to another entity more taxpayer dollars it's like the house always wins that's what it feels like the house always wins an ex account calling itself minnesota staff fraud reporting commentary which says it consists of more than 480 Minnesota state staff members wrote that waltz is 100% responsible for the massive fraud in minnesota
Starting point is 01:17:39 this is the part that really gets my blood boiling here i mean it all does i'm not trying to diminish the other parts that get my blood boiling, but this here, right here, quote, we let Tim Walts know a fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud, but no, we got the opposite response. Tim Walts systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports. In addition to retaliating against whistleblowers, Tim Walts disempowered the Office of Legislative Auditor, allowing agencies to disregard their audit findings and guidance.
Starting point is 01:18:21 And many of the people that were told of this turned around and said, well, we don't want to be called racist, so we're not going to do anything about it. These fraud schemes proliferated in parts of Minnesota's Somali community, a number of individuals allegedly created companies that build state agencies for millions of dollars worth of social services that were never delivered. And I'm not surprised by any of this, because I've told you before. I think a lot of people view government money is just, it's fake money, it's monopoly money. It's like, eh, it's not real.
Starting point is 01:18:54 Well, don't they have insurance? It is right it off. And they also know that rarely will the fraud be exposed. And it wasn't until the feds got involved and then blew this wide open. and you're going to find you'll find some stories just so you know you like the minneapolis star tribune i think is a newspaper they're like well we exposed this two years ago we wrote stories about it well then the question becomes this why was it still going on after it was exposed how deep of an expose did you do into all these other areas of fraud
Starting point is 01:19:34 why was Tim Walts chosen to be on the ticket as vice president if all this stuff was happening in his state and how is it that Ilan Omar and these other members of Congress from Minnesota who are championing these programs will face no accountability whatsoever because they won't. I'm telling you right now they won't.
Starting point is 01:19:55 People may go to jail, but the politicians, it always seems as if they're fine. They walk. They're never ever held accountable in any of this stuff. they get to walk away. A Somali says any American disturb by Somali fraud means they don't have a life.
Starting point is 01:20:14 All right. So if you're, if you're, if you're upset by this and what's happening in Minnesota, that's on you, all right? If a billion dollars at least, maybe as high as nine billion of fraud was taking place and you are upset by that, that's on you. You probably should talk to somebody. You probably should call a therapist, maybe a helpline, maybe use something medicinal to help you deal with it.
Starting point is 01:20:40 But that's on you, buddy. Cut number 11. Only Americans who's concerned with the Somali business is the ones who have no life. They don't have a lot of time in their hand. They broke. They don't have no money, no ambition, nothing. They're not even, they don't have hobbies. they're depressed they lonely you're a freaking loser that's what it is you care about this you're a
Starting point is 01:21:10 freaking loser get a life now a minneapolis residents said i've been to like 40 or 50 these child cares i've never seen a single child than any of them cut 12 this fraud is so massive when the dust settles on this it's going to be found to be the largest fraud in the history of the country and probably the world it's that big the ones that i've that i've gotten data on they average about 2.5 million dollars a year and a lot of them will say they have anywhere from 80 to 120 children i've been to literally 40 or 50 these child care and there never has been a single child at any one of them ever well you know that's the thing about child care centers is they're supposed to have what's the word for children. Yeah, they're supposed to have that. So the FBI is going all in on this. Tim Walts's
Starting point is 01:22:03 political career is over, but will he be held accountable? Now, he'll leave office, he'll wind up on MS now if it's still around by then. He'll be a talking head on MS now. He'll wind up going on and trashing Trump all the time. He'll do all that, but he won't face any actual consequences, nor will Elon Omar, the brother lover. Her wealth increased, by 3,500% in the last several years. 3,500%. Did your wealth increase by that? I'm curious.
Starting point is 01:22:38 Because I think that may be higher than the average COLA increase. If you get a cost of living adjustment, I think it's 3.5%. I don't think it's 3,500%. I got to check the math on that. Will she be held accountable for any of this? No, she won't. In all these years, as all this fraud was going on, and her net wealth increases by 3,500 percent.
Starting point is 01:23:05 This is why people hate politicians. It's why they hate the system. And it's why I, for one, as a taxpayer, don't like any of these government charitable programs because they're all freaking money laundering scams. They are. They're money laundering scams. They steal my money, and then they give it to these people
Starting point is 01:23:24 who find ways to further steal my money. And it's infuriating to all of us. Meanwhile, the House always wins. The politicians seem to be just fine. They seem to get richer and richer. And actual people who may have needed the help get screwed. And that part of the story does not get talked about. Nobody talks about the Somali kids.
Starting point is 01:23:44 Nobody talks about the autistic kids. Nobody talks about the unhoused, to quote Tim Walts' idiotic daughter. Nobody talks about that. But there were actual victims in this, not just taxpayers, but people who needed the help and they didn't get it so don't give me you know spare me your accusations of racism and Islamophobia and everything like this when the people who needed the help were Islamic in many of these cases how about it's Islamophobic to steal their money i don't know i'm just saying how about that maybe it's racist to steal their money thinking that they're so stupid
Starting point is 01:24:16 they won't notice you turn it turn it back on them like that now they won't do that either of course but hopefully the FBI will will uh will continue the investigation i'm sure that they will and it'll just be amazing to find out the extent of this when all of this adds up what is the polymarket average is it going to be close to nine billion we'll have to check we'll find out it's the dana show don't go away and now all of the news you would probably miss it's time for dana's quick five well you know tyler perry has been sued for 77 million dollars yeah christmas day sexual assault for me, but his lawyer says it's a failed money grab. That's right. Failed money grab. A similar lawyer behind a similar action earlier this year, I was saying it's just more of the
Starting point is 01:25:06 same in search of a payout, claimed the betrayed Medea Star's high profile attorney. Having recently failed in another matter against Mr. Perry, the very same lawyer has now made yet another demand from more than a decade ago, which will also be a failed money grab, he said. now I don't know I'm just saying that the lawyers seem to always win but it's a $260 million sexual harassment and assault suit
Starting point is 01:25:33 initially filed in June so keep an eye on that speaking of Hollywood by the way the deal to grab Warner Brothers Netflix and Paramount are locked in a big battle right now to try to grab Warner Brothers and the issue in all of this right now
Starting point is 01:25:48 comes down to movie theaters there's a lot of concern that if Netflix does it. It'll be the end of movie theaters. They'll be done. That's it. That'll be the end of it. Whereas they say if Paramount buys it, that'll keep movies going at movie theaters. But the problem is, it'll be such debt. They don't know if that's sustainable. So keep an eye on the Warner Brothers merger. A whole lot of money at stake for that. No doubt about that. Jill Sholin, who starred as Drew Barrymore's sister in Babes in Toyland. Remember that movie? I love that movie. She's returning to Hollywood for the first time in nearly 30 years.
Starting point is 01:26:22 years, 30 years. Of course, I love the original Babes in Toyland. This was a remake that she was in, but the original, the OG, with, uh, was it Abnacostello, I think? Yeah, right? Great stuff. Anyway, uh, she said she left Hollywood. She was done with it. Uh, she gave up on it, but now she's coming back and she'll be in a new movie right there. But she left because she wanted to be a full time mom. Isn't that awesome? I think it's great. Um, but now her kids are grown and she says, why not? Let's do this. So there you go. Um, and more. news. Ashton Kutcher and Mia Kunis are pushing for a comeback after falling out of favor in Hollywood. They're pushing for a comeback. We'll see if Hollywood takes them back. Or maybe they'll just be punked.
Starting point is 01:27:04 Oh, that was bad. I'm sorry. All right. More to come on the Dana Show. Will the Democrats try to impeach President Trump? The predictions come straight ahead. Make some common sense of the crazy headlines with the Dana Show podcast. You're on the go guide for getting up to speed on today's most important story. Stories. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, or your favorite podcast platform. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking about that merger with Warner Brothers during the break. And it is pretty fascinating how you're talking about now the changing marketplace of entertainment and how people consume their entertainment. And, you know, I for one still like
Starting point is 01:27:46 on the movies. That's, that's me. Like, I still enjoy it. It's, um, It's a lot of fun for me, but not everybody does. You know, some people, they just like to hang out at the house and stream. And that's really the big conversation right now, as you're talking about this Warner Brothers merger, because, I mean, it's billions of dollars at stake right now. It's billions of dollars. And Netflix, which at one point, if you remember back in the day, used to get those red envelopes in the mail, and they'd have your DVD in there, what you picked. And it was like, oh, man, look at this, you know. what did i get what's my surprise and then when they decided to end that and just go all over to
Starting point is 01:28:27 streaming and making their their own content and it was risky and obviously worked out for them it really did the biggest impact on entertainment has been covid no doubt about that and here on the dana show as we continue here with me rich zioli and by the way you can shoot me a tweet if you like i still can't say you can x me because it just sounds freaking weird but you can shoot me a tweet at Rich Zioly, R-S-C-H-Z-E-O-I. Get my podcast as well, if you like. But the story that I read about this is that there's no happy ending for movie theaters,
Starting point is 01:29:01 no matter who wins this battle between Netflix and Paramount to who will own Warner Brothers, which just, you know, Warner Brothers has Superman, Batman, all those DC characters are all owned by Warner Brothers, Harry Potter,
Starting point is 01:29:17 Lord of the Rings, all of that. and it's an all-out bidding war where you literally have these companies right now are offering individual investors cash money. For example, Paramount is giving $30 a share in cash directly to Warner shareholders.
Starting point is 01:29:34 Netflix is giving $27.75 a share to Warner Brothers shareholders as they're all hoping that they'll get the thing. But as you look at this and you look at the state of movie theaters and one thing that I know is that movie theaters, if they all shut their doors tomorrow, it would be very problematic
Starting point is 01:29:54 for a lot of reasons. They act as anchors for a lot of malls, and malls are not doing great last time I checked. I mean, some, you know, some still survive, but a lot of them
Starting point is 01:30:04 are hanging on by a threat. There's more and more stories now. What do you do with malls? There's projects to convert them into housing, so you'd have this kind of mixed-use thing. There's a mall by me in South Jersey where Cooper,
Starting point is 01:30:18 hospital wound up expanding and bought like the old, I think it was Sears or something and turned it into a new modern state-of-the-art medical facility. And then nearby, there's going to be these high-end apartments that are built. And the idea is, well, you can walk over there, get medical care, grab a cup of coffee, do a little shopping, you know. But there's a movie theater that serves as an anchor for people, particularly on the weekends, to go out to dinner and do something. They pay a lot of property taxes. So if they all shut their doors tomorrow, it would be, it'd be very problematic because we lose jobs. And I mean, granted, you know, the people that work at movie theaters tend to be younger, but there are a lot of adults that work there too, and they manage them.
Starting point is 01:31:01 And then you have that problem of yet another big box store that's empty. And what do you do with that space? What do you, you know, what do you do with it? I don't know. But Hollywood took a huge hit because of Gavin Newsom. That guy, and you need to know this as he gears up to run for president of the United States, that guy single-handedly is the reason why movie theaters may not ever come back to where they were. And it all has to do with what he did during COVID with the shutdowns. So if you look at how movie theaters were doing, domestic box office per year, in 2019, you
Starting point is 01:31:45 had it, they were making around between 10 and 12 billion dollars a year. COVID happens, 2020 drops down to 2.11 billion in domestic box office money. Largely from states that reopened and people go out to movie theaters. But a lot of the blue states,
Starting point is 01:32:05 you still could not go to the movie theaters. Even months after COVID, even a year after COVID, they still had lockdowns. But a big part of the problem is there was nothing to see. so do you remember how they would start re-running they would re-should movie theaters would open again there were no new movies coming out so you would go and you'd re-watch movies it was like well come re-watch a movie you've already seen on the big screen meanwhile movies that were being made
Starting point is 01:32:30 were stopped movies that should have been released that year in late 2020 they couldn't continue production on this i thought tom cruise got so frustrated with this that he had to finish Mission Impossible in the UK and also they had to finish editing Top Gun Maverick in the UK as well because Tom Cruise said, I am making sure that these movies are shown in theaters. They're meant for the big screen. They're meant for the big sound.
Starting point is 01:32:59 I'm not going to do this whole straight-to-home streaming thing. And he actually put a video of himself at the beginning of Top Gun Maverick thanking the audience for coming to the theater. but the level of frustration with Gavin Newsom's lockdowns that Hollywood has now become basically a ghost town. There was an article about this in the Los Angeles Times that I read about this too, where they were saying, you know, they don't make movies in Hollywood anymore.
Starting point is 01:33:27 COVID was really the thing that forever changed that industry. And now Hollywood is basically a museum to Hollywood, to a bygone era of Hollywood. I took my family there back in March. I was a guest on the Prager You Book Club. Michael Knowles hosted it, and we did Animal Farm. And we had a great conversation about this. So we went out to California back in last March.
Starting point is 01:33:53 Went to Universal Studios. Did the theme park and everything like this. We did the studio tour, driving around the lot. There was nothing. And I mean nothing was being made nothing on the studio lot. They were shooting some TV reality show that had rented the space, but we were, yeah, we were hoping to see that movie TV, shit, nothing. And they would show a lot of the stuff that they shop, but it was all old stuff.
Starting point is 01:34:23 Nothing my kids knew, for example. Georgia, even Austin, Texas, they started offering huge tax credits to movie companies to come shoot there. But it wasn't just that. It was that a lot of the talent. decided they didn't want to live in California anymore. They were getting taxed to death. It's a state with the highest cost of living besides Hawaii, and then
Starting point is 01:34:45 they put in a millionaires tax. And so this Los Angeles Times article goes on to say, nobody will really admit it. But for these people who are working in the movie industry, and they were at one point, at least getting paid a lot of money, they didn't want to pay the taxes. So they'd move to Austin, Texas. They'd start their production companies there.
Starting point is 01:35:05 they'd move to Florida. Like Sidney, when that whole controversy, that stupid fake, made-up controversy over her jeans commercial came out, she lives in Florida. There's an actor recently who was talking about this, why he left Hollywood, he's living in Austin. He was an actor in Top Gun Maverick 2.
Starting point is 01:35:27 He basically said he likes it better down there, the lifestyle, but he also started his production company down there in Austin. Because even though that city's pretty liberal, It's still a red state, and it's a lot cheaper to live there, and a lot of people are doing that now. So Gavin Newsom destroyed the movie industry. It has never bounced back from the pandemic levels, because in 2021 and only did $4.5 billion, domestically, they still didn't have movies to show. It wasn't really until 2022 when movies start getting finished and getting released, thanks to, like, the United Kingdom, for example, allowing Tom Cruise,
Starting point is 01:36:05 go over there and finish Mission Impossible, finish Top Gun Maverick. And it wasn't just him, but a lot of other movie, they all left. They left. I saw an interview recently where Matt Damon was talking about this,
Starting point is 01:36:17 and he was saying that, you can shoot an entire movie in some of these countries overseas for cheaper than what it cost to shoot a single scene in Hollywood, California. Because of all the different rules, laws, union rules,
Starting point is 01:36:34 and everything else, But during COVID, Newsom does his lockdowns, his shutdowns. Caterers go out of business. A lot of these production guys, they can't eat. They got no money. So they leave and they left and they found work in other places. So you don't even have a lot of the technical people that you still need to make a movie. And it's just cheaper to film in either Canada or New Zealand.
Starting point is 01:36:57 It was funny because they were the wicked movies are, you know, obviously very successful, very profitable. while we're on the tour at Universal Studios and Universal is now owned by Comcast there's a wicked balloon on a doorknob now mind you right you're you're in Hollywood with your kids I have two daughters and a son my daughters are totally
Starting point is 01:37:20 into wicked and all that they see the wicked balloon they're like dad is that where they're making wicked and the guy doing the tour comes on a little microphone thing and he goes if you look over there you'll see a wicked balloon that's the producer of Wicked. That's her office.
Starting point is 01:37:39 So on a Hollywood movie tour, my kids got to see the office of the producer of Wicked and a freaking balloon that I could buy at Dollar Tree. Think about that. Because they didn't make it there and shoot it there. The domestic box office really only started to come back in 2022, but it has still yet to bounce back to the pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
Starting point is 01:38:06 Closest this got, it got was 23 with close to $9 billion, but again, you're talking about $12 billion pre-pandemic. So while you had these Democrat politicians of people like Newsom saying, this is temporary, this is temporary. The effects that it created
Starting point is 01:38:23 are very, very, very long-lasting. And as you think about that, as you look at that, and you think about the change of behavior that occurred during COVID as well. More and more people said, well, I can just watch a movie at home. Or I'll wait 30 days and then watch it at home in the comfort of my house. And people started buying big screen TVs and speakers and everything else. So as this fight goes on about Warner Brothers and the billions of dollars that are at stake here,
Starting point is 01:38:56 Netflix is promising that it will not change the schedule that is currently on schedule from when a movie is released in theaters to when it comes home. But the CEO of Netflix had told shareholders recently before all this happened that they believed that that schedule was going to change. In other words, a movie would come out in the theaters and then a lot sooner, maybe a week or two, a couple weeks, it would be ready to stream at home. So if you wanted to see it on a big screen, you could, but he could just also wait a couple weeks and it would be available for you to stream at home.
Starting point is 01:39:27 He's now promising that he will not do that if he buys Warner Brothers because he said, look, I said that before I was in the movie business, and now we're going to be in the movie business, if this goes through. But either way, whether it's Netflix or whether it's Paramount, the point of the article in the Wall Street Journal is that Hollywood domestic movie making,
Starting point is 01:39:46 I should really say, because they're not making movies in Hollywood anymore. It's going to be tough either way. It's going to be tough either way because Cinemark, AMC, entertainment, their stocks have plunged, plunged. and in addition to that, the debt that Paramount has that even if they buy Warner Brothers,
Starting point is 01:40:06 even if they're successful in buying it, they still are going to have to make massive cuts. Like, for example, they say Paramount might seem a better option for keeping Warner in the theatrical business, if nothing else given CEO David Ellison's well-known love of movies, but he won't have much financial flexibility. Laurent Ewan of Bernstein estimates that it combined Paramount Warner would, be levered to the hilt, that would make the studio less likely to take on a flyer on anything short of a surefire hit from a major film franchise. Translation, a lot more superhero movies. A lot more superhero movies that I know a lot of people have said enough with the superhero
Starting point is 01:40:47 movies. But you probably see more of that because then they would get access to the full DC catalog of Superman and Batman and all the other DC characters. So yeah, it'll probably be a lot more of that. But no, don't ever forget the damage that Gavin Newsom caused and is causing as people continue to flee the state of California and the movie industry and coming back. Not even with the $750 million in tax credits California just passed. That's a pittance compared to the financial damage he caused to that industry. Don't ever let him forget it. We certainly won't if he ever runs for president. That's for damn sure. Batman's record is abysmal, and the marquee industry in the state that he governed, he destroyed it.
Starting point is 01:41:35 He, Gavin Newsom, destroyed Hollywood. It's The Dana Show. We'll be right back. Brighten up your timely news consumption with the Dana Show podcast, where every update comes with a little dash of Not So Serious on YouTube, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of actors and comedians, Dave Chappelle was talking about D.C. recently and how the National Guard was there. He surprised everybody by putting out a Netflix special recently. And he was talking about that. This is what he said, cut 18. And I came here mad, ready to fight. But when I drove to the city, it looked clean, guys. I got to tell you, I got to tell you, look clean.
Starting point is 01:42:23 A lot better than the last time I was here. It looked clean. Yeah, no, that's the thing. That's what happens. Isn't that amazing how that happens when you actually have people out there keeping people from being criminals? I know. We're all shocked by that. You and we're all, we're all crazy.
Starting point is 01:42:44 We don't have Congress, though, anymore. Do you know that? There's no Congress left. So Nancy Pelosi, the vampiric one, the Speaker Emeritus, this is a, apparently what's happened. I didn't realize it, but who knew? You figured it'd be kind of a bigger deal if they've done something like this, but cut 15. But right now, right now, the Republicans and the Congress have abolished the Congress. They just do what the president insists that they do. That will be over. So that ends as soon as you having that. That is as soon as we have the gavel. I'm not, you know,
Starting point is 01:43:20 in terms of impeachment, unless you have a, I've said to people, one person who was responsible for the impeachments of Donald Trump is Donald Trump. They've abolished Congress. There's no Congress left. They've abolished it.
Starting point is 01:43:39 Well, she talks about the impeachment of Donald Trump, but if he gets impeached, it's his fault, it's on him. Eric Swalwell, says Democrats are voting on impeachment. They win the House and the Senate. I wonder how much of this will be the key midterm campaign strategy of these people. I really do. I wonder how much of this, because it hasn't worked in the past, saying that they're going to prosecute Trump or saying they're going to impeach them. It's not the message people
Starting point is 01:44:02 want to hear. Affordability is the message people want to hear. But I don't think, I don't think these Democrats get that point. I personally do believe the economy will be better by midterms, but we'll see how much of this they run on. And then what that means in terms of Democrat primaries, is it going to come down to a battle of who hates Trump more? Is it all going to be about Donald Trump heading into midterms? Probably most likely, right? Cut 14. Congressman, it sounds like you're saying that inherent contempt holding these officials
Starting point is 01:44:34 in inherent contempt or even the possible, a vote on impeachment of someone like Pam Bonnie. Or restricting funding. Yeah. Or restricting funding. It sounds like, though, that may not happen until or if Democrats actually win the House in 2026. Is that right? Yes. And so we have to telegraph that that's what we are willing to do if we are given the majority. So there you go. They're going to telegraph it. They're going to run on that. That's
Starting point is 01:44:59 going to be their campaign position. They're going to run on impeaching Donald Trump again. Not affordability. Nothing. That's it. That's going to be the issue. Personally, I think it's a bad move. I think it's bad strategy. But I'm not going to tell them that because I don't want them to take control of the House. And I have no doubts that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, I have no doubts whatsoever. That's exactly what they'll do. They'll put all their focus, all their energy, all their efforts into going after Trump. And it's the bad, wrong message. Hey, I hope you have a great New Year's Eve and a great new year. 2026 is going to be fun. So let's make it something.
Starting point is 01:45:34 It's rich Zeoli. It's been an honor filling in for Dana. Thank you so much for listening. Steve, thanks for your help. Happy New Year and thank you.

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