Dingus of the Week Podcast

For months, the war in Iran was a lockstep vote for Congressional Republicans. Support it, keep supporting it, and don't blink. US Rep. Ashley Hinson voted to support the war seven separate times . US Sen. Jon Husted, another Republican facing a hard midterm election, called for a quick end despite continuing to oppose Democratic efforts to restrict the administration's military authority. But the...

Who would have thought we'd be talking about the moral clarity of the popping tags guy? You know what? Never mind. We're glad you're here, Macklemore. He's been using his tremendous platform as an opener for Ed Sheeran to speak out about the ongoing Palestinian genocide. But those in power made sure there were costs to being on the right side of history. Macklemore was dropped from the tour . Acco...

A lot can be said about John Fetterman, but maybe people don't appreciate the Senator from Pennsylvania's love for stirring the pot. Down in Dallas, Fetterman appeared on the jumbo screen before a crowd of adoring Republicans, insisting, repeatedly, that he's still a registered Democrat. It's hard to remember, but not that long ago, Fetterman was a bit of a progressive folk hero. Bernie Sanders en...

Puck reported that Gwyneth Paltrow was throwing a private, "off-the-record" dinner at her Hamptons estate in honor of OpenAI's Sam Altman—whose company the New York Times reported Paltrow is an investor in via her own VC firm. Paltrow's team never confirmed or denied it, instead posting parody invitations for fictional guests of honor like M3GAN and Shrek — before reports emerged that the actual d...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney does not inspire fear. When he says he'll do dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs against the United States—sure it hurts. But wait, who's that lumbering giant telling the President of the United States to shove it?! On this episode of DINGUS OF THE WEEK, hosts LYZ LENZ and ZACHARY OREN SMITH look across the border at Ontario Premier Doug Ford. There's good. Th...

A man in Atlanta got tired of cars getting jacked. Instead of getting therapy, he decided to get even. Garrett Langley's Flock Safety cameras now blanket small towns and big cities alike, sharing a searchable database of your activity across the country. On the bright side in this timeline, we all get to be camgirls. So that's something. Also this week: a viral (possibly AI-fabricated) invitation...

Democrats keep winning elections, and Third Way has had just about enough of it. After Abdul El-Sayed's upset win in Michigan's Senate primary — the latest in a string of victories by candidates running on the radical notion that people shouldn't have to choose between rent and insulin — the centrist think tank announced to the New York Times that it's launching a $15 million campaign to discredit...

Senator Bernie Moreno told a room that he sold off his car dealership empire six years ago just so he could one day stick it Dr. Anthony Fauci. Whether you're Fauci fan or couldn't care less, maybe a sitting U.S. Senator should aim a little higher. On this episode of DINGUS OF THE WEEK, hosts LYZ LENZ and ZACHARY OREN SMITH make a sale of their own. DINGUS OF THE WEEK is a weekly comedy news podca...

OpenAI spent this week trying to spin the fact that one of its models broke into another company's servers as a scientific breakthrough. According to the Atlantic's Matteo Wong, an assortment of OpenAI's most advanced models got loose from the company's internal testing environment during a security stress test and hacked its way into the databases of Hugging Face, a rival AI firm, to lift informa...

There's a parasite loose in America's lettuce: the diarrhea-causing Cyclospora parasite has developed quite the reputation, giving the word "explosive" new resonance. It won't surprise you to hear that President Donald Trumps gutting of the CDC did not leave its best parasite sleuths untouched. News reports have documented thousands of staff cut from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers fo...

Mitch McConnell hasn't been seen in public in nearly a month. No photo, no video, no floor vote — just a statement from his office insisting the 83-year-old Senate Republican leader is "fully engaged" from his hospital bed. Meanwhile, the Senate is back in session, a defense bill and national security votes are on the table, and the guy who chairs the Rules Committee and the defense appropriations...

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is an awe-inspiring site. While maybe meant to evoke introspection, it mostly evokes laughter these days. President Donald Trump wanted to clean it up. To give it a fresh coat of American flag-blue paint. But now the pool is algae-green. The paint job is peeling. And Trump's budget for the renovation keeps growing by the day. This week on DINGUS OF THE WEEK, LY...

There is a 90-foot-tall, 600-ton steel structure on the South Lawn of the White House, assembled on grounds normally used for Easter egg rolls, Marine One departures, and a garden honoring presidents' children. UFC calls it The Claw. The event — UFC Freedom 250 — is scheduled for June 14, coinciding with Flag Day and Trump's 80th birthday. In the weeks before the fight, Trump invested up to $50,00...

Spencer Pratt was reality television's first fully self-aware villain — a man who admitted, on camera, that he was performing villainy for an audience. He staged a fake divorce, manipulated storylines, and turned being unlikeable into a career. The Hills did make him famous. It also made him a case study in how American media rewards people who understand that the camera is on and someone's watchi...

It's graduation season in America, and at Glendale Community College in Arizona, the administration decided to hand the most important moment of the academic calendar — the calling of your name, in front of peers and family — to an algorithm. The AI skipped people. Many students missed their moment of recognition. The crowd booed. The president called it "a lesson learned." This week on DINGUS OF...

The United States is wrapped in a weather pattern we've taken to calling a Dingus Hydra. That is a multiheaded beast, each head uglier than the last. To name a few: A racist livestreamer named Dalton Eatherly —known online as "Chud the Builder" because of course he is—ran up a steakhouse tab he refused to pay, got arrested, bonded out, and then managed to get himself shot outside a Tennessee court...

Steven Roth is the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, one of the largest real estate companies in the United States. Through it, he controls billions of dollars in property across New York City. And he has used this immense platform to *checks notes* compare taxing the rich to a genocide. You may remember "tax the rich" from such contexts as literally every democratic society that has ever existed, or m...

Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, which means he is in charge of the most powerful military in human history. And he has used this immense position to *checks script* give Kid Rock a helicopter ride. You may remember Kid Rock from such hits as "Bawitdaba" and "All Summer Long," or more recently, from being the guy whose Nashville estate got buzzed by Army Ap...

The story goes that Jimmy Donaldson was a normal kid growing up in North Carolina who spent five years studying virality on YouTube. "There's a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm," Donaldson told Rolling Stone in 2022. The thing he learned shaped a very specific kind of video format: quick cuts, over...

Vice President J.D. Vance became Catholic in 2019, and he has some notes on the incense we're using at mass. It's always the new guy. “Now we can, of course, have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just, but I think in the way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important...

You may know Geno Auriemma as the winningest coach in NCAA basketball history. Twelve championships. Forty seasons. The kind of record that fluffs up the first sentence of everything written about you. And not for no reason. But last weekend, UConn's undefeated season came to a stunning end in the Final Four against Dawn Staley's South Carolina Gamecocks. Auriemma—who for the record, was losing th...

You interrupted Survivor 50 for this? President Donald Trump declared mission accomplished—or at least "nearing completion"—in Iran. The President brought us into another crusade in the Middle East, and already civilian death toll is in the thousands. There's no agreed-upon goals. And his White House accidentally uploaded a speech where he said it was a bummer the American people weren't patient e...

Flying in America is already a full-contact sport. Airlines nickel-and-diming you for the privilege of existing, a guy in 14B who thinks the armrest is his birthright, and TSA agents who haven't been paid in 90 days because Congress can't agree on whether border agents should be able to wear a mask when they shoot a citizen. And into this masterpiece of dysfunction, President Donald Trump said: yo...

You may know Joe Rogan from Fear Factor, where he paid people to eat bugs. You may know him from the 90s TV show News Radio, where he played a handyman obcessed with conspiracy theories — a role he has not stopped playing since. You may know him from the time he told millions of people that ivermectin was a reasonable COVID treatment. Or you may know him from November 2024, when he had Donald Trum...

Cricket finally got his revenge. This week, Trump bid farewell to Kristie Noem and her tenure at the US Dept. of Homeland Security the only way he knows how: the last line of a Truth social post: "I thank Kristi for her service at “Homeland,”" Trump truthed (derogatory). And with her removal to become the *checks script* Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas (???), she has a replacement. Ev...