Pirate Wires - Elon Changes X Forever, Nationalism On The Rise, IVF, Anti-Pride, & Gen Z Wants Blue Collar Jobs

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

EPISODE #57: Welcome Back To The Pod! Ashley St. Clair joins us this week for the first time. Packed show! First, we jump into Elon makes “likes” private on X. Will this be good for the platform, or just bring more chaos? IVF has become a talking point online as the right constantly looks for ways to blow their lead in the election. An anon account on Twitter shows up to take down all of the Twitter influencers. His claims don’t seem to have much substance, but it showed a yearning for these people to be taken down. Nationalism is on the rise in Europe. Why is this happening? and why are we seeing the same thing happen in America? It’s pride month! We discuss the silly moments in pride and why we’ve seen an anti-pride movement.  Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman, Ashley St. Clair MERCH DROP! https://drops.piratewires.com/moon-should-be-a-state Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Ashley Twitter: https://x.com/stclairashley TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Welcome Ashley St. Clair! 1:30 - Likes Are Now Private On X 12:00 - Right Wing Attacks IVF 18:50 - Horny Hitler Attacks Twitter Influencers 34:45 - Nationalism On The Rise 01:01:30 - Anti-Pride Month? 01:12:20 - Gen Z Wants Blue Collar Jobs & Cigarettes 1:25:00 - PW MERCH DROP! 1:25:30 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! Tell Your Friends! #podcast #mikesolana #technology #politics #culture

Elon Musk just hid likes, which is very interesting. I just think that no one is going to be really liking almost anything. I also kind of worry that like Twitter just becomes a porn site after this. This dude likes like 80 of her boob pics. He's like all the way back there. He's like, I've been waiting for years to tell you how much I like these tits. Good for you, man. Raging controversy.

Is IVF okay or not? I'd like to call this the Ricardo sphere of the right. So last week, this account called Corny Adolf Hitler, the handle is Petit ****. Oh my god. Speaking of Hitler, I would like to talk about nationalism in Europe. of what's up guys welcome back to the pod i am at matt's brand new studio so give matt a shout out in uh the comment also before we get started please rate review subscribe comment whatever i want like as many comments as we've ever had on youtube i just am curious curious as to what that would feel like. Like anything you're thinking, just fucking say it and let's get this conversation going. I want you to give a warm welcome to the one and only

Ashley St. Clair, author and journalist joining us today. Stoked to talk to you about everything from the new Twitter likes being hidden to the one and only horny hitler um and also like european nationalism uh ivf we have a huge packed show today i want to start however with the place where we all live x.com uh elon musk just hid likes which is very interesting um so for years uh there was the question of i mean you have likes, you have retweets of tweets. And what journalists love to do is sort of dip into controversial comments and see who had been liking it. So I guess there are people out there who maybe were dumb enough to like something publicly that they wouldn't have wanted people to call them out on publicly.

And this became a sort of weird kind of journalism, I think years ago. It was like five, six years ago, I remember this being a thing where people would talk about the likes that people... They would talk about the various celebrity likes of bad things, problematic faves. That's over. The reason it's over though is not really because of this dynamic of people should be able to like the content they want without being called out on it, which is how it was framed by Elon on Twitter. The real reason is because we're sort of just broadly across all the social media platforms

getting away from your follower graph as what constitutes the sort of content you're going to be seeing and leaning more towards engagement. So things that you're pausing to look at, things that you're clicking, commenting on, liking, and it's in Twitter's best interest on the algorithm side in terms of giving you a great feed to incentivize you to like a lot of things. However, we've seen a boost and Elon mentioned it straight away since he made likes private yesterday. I actually don't think it's going to last. It seems kind of cool.

Like, you know, a lot of people are in favor of this. For me, as a Twitter, you know, I guess addict, I use the like as a kind of soft endorsement of something. I use the like as a kind of soft endorsement of something, both to bookmark it and also just to kind of give it like a subtle go you. It's always been kind of public to me. It's like a soft retweet. I'm not liking things just for the hell of it. And now I struggle to understand what I'm going to be liking things for at all. Like, what is the point of that now? If it's not public, it's just my own private list of things that I've liked. I don't really get it. I don't know how you guys feel about it. Ashley, I see you on Twitter a lot. What do you think about the likes? I think it's kind of a double-edged sword. I think it's most important

for X right now because they have an algorithm issue. And I don't know if you guys have the same experience I do, but the algorithm is all over the place. My For You page, all over the place. So engagement is really going to help them rein in that algorithm and find out what people like fine tune the algorithm. But I also don't like it in terms of being a journalist. And I can't see what a government official is liking now. I think that's really important. So I replied to Chris Stanley today, who does a lot of engineering at Twitter. And I said, you know, hey, we should have these public for at least government officials. And I said, you know, hey, we should have these public

for at least government officials. I do agree with you that I don't think it's going to last long, but I think X desperately needs to fix this algorithm issue. And I think this is the fastest way to do it. I just wonder if, I definitely want to know

what people are liking. In fact, I use the likes to go in and see, sometimes people comment ambiguously and I can't quite understand if they're attacking me or not. And so I'll go into their likes and just see what kind of person there are and figure it out that way. They're useful to me for sure.

I just think that no one is going to be really liking almost anything. Right now we have built up that habit, but that habit, part of that habit I think is public. So we'll see. I agree. I would like to see it. I don't think it's going to last because I think that I believe that the likes will go down and this will be less useful for them than they think it will be on the algorithms. Do you think the likes will go down? I don't know because X and Twitter, it was kind of the only

place that had a public likes tab too, which was really interesting to journalists. But I don't know that Instagram maybe gets less likes because they don't have a public likes tab. That's a good point. Maybe X could implement it to where you could search it. If you tap on the likes, then maybe you can see who liked it or search them similar to Instagram or something like that. But it was a really unique feature to X to have, here's a profile tab for everything you've ever liked. Yeah, that is it. I had not considered the Instagram parallel. And I think that you're right. Sandra, what do you think? Well, I feel like on Instagram, I wonder if there's kind of

a divide between people using X as a, it almost, it's a more professional app, right? A lot of, maybe I'm informed by the fact that I use it for professional purposes, but like, it's an app where people talk about current events and the likes were a signaling device right I mean you use them to say I mean I use them Solana in a similar way that you did to kind of signal when I agreed with things occasionally to bookmark stuff but they also have the bookmark feature so that sort of felt superfluous after a certain point and then to look at other people's likes sometimes just for fun to like get an inside look into their personality or something or see sort of felt superfluous after a certain point. And then to look at other people's likes, sometimes just for fun,

to get an inside look into their personality or something or see sort of what weird quirks they had. Whereas on Instagram, I guess I just use it for personal purposes and it's sort of like you like pictures to tell your friends or something that you approve of their content. And I kind of personally resent the idea that I have to like content to tell the algorithm what to give me. It feels almost like too analog.

It's like I'm programming my own algorithm very intentionally. And I've already noticed today, I don't know if the changes has really taken effect, but that my algorithm has served me a lot of content from three specific accounts. That's where I am too right now. Yeah. I have a few people that it is showing me everything they've ever written and something's definitely amiss. I mean, that's the broader thing that's happening with Twitter or X at this point is just, they are in the arena trying things. Twitter was not, Twitter was frozen. It was stagnant. It was the same thing for years and years and years. I was thinking the other day, and this is in a piece that we have coming out Monday, I think we're targeting. But if you think

of a lot of the early products that Twitter released, so you have under Elon, you had the subscriptions, you had the blue check for pay, you had community notes. These things were incubated under Dorsey, they started. Okay. So like Twitter had been working on these things forever. They just weren't shipping anything. This is a different world now. He's shipping things constantly. And this like feature is one of those things. I think he'll figure out if it works or not, and, and then he'll adjust

accordingly. But the algorithm is where it's, you really feel that where you, where you just, you feel almost every couple of weeks, you can feel a real shift in, in the way that your own content is treated. Um, what content you're seeing, It's pretty interesting. Brandon, what's your take of all this? I think if you go by Elon's intent, which is to allow people to more freely like what they actually like without fear of retribution, then like clearly he intends for the algorithm to be more pure. I think there's an analog with Reddit. If people understand, okay, by liking this thing, it will be boosted more into the algorithm. It's kind of just like a vote, just like an upvote on Reddit, in my opinion. So I don't see it as you needing to train the algorithm for yourself.

I see it as it becomes this sort of contest where the thing that gets the most likes is distributed most broadly and that's the thing that most people want other people to see so it's like an advocacy situation yeah um i also kind of worry that like twitter just becomes a porn site after this if there's a lot of people did you see that one the one on the whatever and then suddenly there's there was that tweet about the i think it was a i'm assuming it was an only fans creator because she said this dude liked like 80 of her boob pics the moment right right after the likes went private he like just went on her

went crazy and she's like finally yeah he's in 2021 now or something yeah yeah he's like all the way back there he's like i've been waiting for years to tell you how much i like these tits good for you man yeah so i don't know the stat i mean i don't know if anybody here knows how much engagement porn accounts get versus a average big account um but porn account engagement is probably definitely part of it seems crazy part of it seems unbelievable unbelievable to me i don't understand why someone thinks this is you're safe liking content when almost explicitly the reason for this is to improve the algorithm which means there is a record of your likes like like it feels like there's more of a record now in some sense. Um, so I don't know, I guess we'll see, I think we're about to see just

how simple people are. Um, one thing people expect is for the likes to explode on like based right wing or even extremely right wing content. And, um, that's an open-ended question. Uh, I guess just how that sort of stuff is growing online and how this is going to affect that. I've already sort of noticed it, and I think it's what has resulted to a certain extent of the mainstream of some topics. One in particular is fertility. So there's a whole big bucket here. The one I want to talk about today is IVF because the Southern Baptist Convention just voted to, I guess, condemn IVF. It was not a grand slam. There were plenty of people, plenty of Baptists who spoke up in defense of it.

One interesting thing I learned was there are votes. I'm Catholic. So I know about sort of like a magical sort of priest king, and he just decrees things. This is much more democratic. And I didn't realize that. It was interesting just to learn about that. Southern Baptists matter in America because they sort of indicate the direction of the evangelical right. And to come out against IVF is a big deal. So now online, that is sort of the raging controversy. Is IVF okay or not? Obviously, the problem with it among the pro-life contingent is IVF, generally speaking, in the process, you create a handful of embryos and select the healthiest,

which would sort of seem to someone who's hardcore pro-life, like the destruction of life, regardless of the life that it creates. So I think that's maybe the moral question that they're answering. I think IVF is great. I think it's sort of like almost unambiguously good based on the number of human beings that it has created. I've met at this point a number of adults who would not exist were it not for IVF. And I have a lot of thoughts on it, but I want to know what you guys are thinking because the debate is sort of raging right now.

It does feel suspiciously close to the election. The Democrats are going to get a lot out of this. This is a very popular issue. There are plenty of Republicans who are using IVF. It seems to be in their favor. I don't know. Ashley, what do you think? I'd like to call this the retardo sphere of the right. This is exactly like there. There are these people who are really loud, but have actually no influence outside of the internet. And they tend to be the loudest and the stupidest. And for whatever reason, the right has become the perfect caricature of what they said the right was for so many years.

And now all of a sudden you actually want Handmaid's Tale. You don't want IVF. It's all reproductive issues. And I think there's a couple things going on that I want to know. One is that the evangelicals do not have the stronghold that they did during when Trump first ran, right? Because the Republican Party has really become the Trump Party now. It is the MAGA Party. What Trump says goes. And Trump has already come out and said, IVF is awesome. Abortion, that's up to the states. We love it. We want all of the IVF. And we have the most IVF out of anyone.

So he's already really taken a stance on this. So the issue though, with these retardo sphere Republicans is that Democrat opposition researchers, this is the best day ever because they can make so many ads out of it. And then there's going to be voters, especially women voters who are like, this is actually what Republicans believe when it's a small contingent that are really riding on this grift of reproductive rights for women, which really kicked up after Roe was overturned. Because after Roe was overturned, they're like, we can grift in all 50 states now. And so it turned into this big industry of reproductive rights that they can grift on. So it turned into this big industry of reproductive rights that they can grip on. And this is really prominent when you look at the fundraising of groups like Live Action,

which is a pro-life organization. You look at their fundraising, they're raising $13 million and only 20, 30,000 of it, of $13 million is going towards actual grants for crisis pregnancy centers, whatever. So these people are ideologically inconsistent. They don't actually believe these things. And I don't think they have a lot of influence, but I think it's really important to shout these people down because they will be used for Democrat opposition. Yeah. They're also, I mean, they are, Brandon, you used to refer to this as right-wing hell. And that's very much, this is like a very dark corner of the internet. It's very angry. It is very, I feel like the tactics, not I feel, certainly the rhetorical tactics used are pretty

malicious, sort of inventing fake sex crimes type stuff. Like that's the space of the internet that we're in here. I don't want to characterize all of them as these terrible, incel-y type, sad people. I think a lot of them believe in what they're saying and they feel empowered to speak for the first time in a long time, which is an impulse I understand given for years, you really couldn't express any kind of contrarian opinion on this stuff. And so they have a lot of opinions, but this is one where not only do I think they're just totally wrong, and IVF is really important, especially now we're talking about fucking population collapse. And they're like, but what if we had less kids? What are you talking about, pro-life? Are you joking? Separate from that, it's just tactically retarded we're talking this is the election is in

a few months what are they doing why now I'd like do not understand why they're making this an issue now um Ashley have you been following the legislative activity that's kind of tracking this at the same time a little bit but I know there's initiatives in a lot of states um there's a lot of issues being put on a lot of ballots right now. Well, so I'm reading that the Senate is actually expected to vote today on a Democratic bill that would guarantee access to IVF nationwide. And it's expected to fail because of GOP opposition. Which is weird because Ted Cruz just put something out.

Yeah. I don't know if you guys saw that. But Ted Cruz said, you know, I asked for unanimous consent to pass my legislation that would protect IVF and Democrats objected to my bill. So they're doing this back and forth. Now we want to be you know, the saviors of IVF. And what happens is the end in the end is women just end up getting used as pawns, as we do every election. So they're both saying the same thing. I wish that I had looked at the bill today, because my assumption is they're probably introducing other shit in both, and no one wants to talk about either. So IVF is just the thing that most people like that everybody's hiding behind, and maybe really we're having

a conversation about abortion again or something else. I wonder what the Democratic bill, what else is it going to codify in the sort of sphere of reproductive rights? That's, I mean, that's 100% true. And I can't wait till Grok can analyze these bills or read them or chat GBT and just read them and summarize them for us and tell us what other garbage is in it. But I think we really can't discount how much attention nowadays is like heroin. So you give these people a little bit of attention and they get a little bit of attention and they get a little bit of clout because this was a really controversial thing to say on IVF.

And then they keep going and they need a harder and harder hit. So they get these harder and harder stances. But these people are just attention addicts for the most part. And I really, I just don't think this is going to go very far with IVF. I think abortion is going to be more of an issue here.

Well, I think we're going to find out. I am willing to bet that the Republicans want to get this shut down as quickly as possible because it is going to be, I mean, IVF is a huge deal. Women are having a lot of fertility, parents, couples are having a lot of fertility issues these days. It is a bipartisan issue and it makes no sense to be having this fight right now, just separate from even the morals of it. It's like tactically really, really bad. So I think they're going to probably try and shut it down, but we'll see. We'll follow it on. But speaking of dumb people online who have a lot of power, I know we were maybe going to talk about right-wing or not right-wing. We were maybe going to talk about the European ride and the rise of nationalism.

We're going to do that in a minute. I do. I think I want to go to horny Hitler first. Brandon, tell us the story. Okay. It's like a saga so last week this uh account called horny adolf hitler um the handle is petite retard oh my god yeah which is like jeff's kiss right so he uh this this account like started going viral basically um because because he started posting um what appear to be like

takedowns and allegations of fraud of um influencers and what is known as real estate twitter and like real estate twitter i don't want to try to explain it too much but it but like the influencers there kind of do these long linkedin style posts where that are like parables right it'll be like you know in 2021 i was 20 years old and down on my luck you know and then it'll like end and you know now he makes two million dollars on five separate side hustles right and so this is like what characterizes this area of Twitter that horny Adolf Hitler is targeting, okay? So that's kind of the setting where all this is happening.

Now, horny Adolf Hitler went viral first with a post about this guy called Nick Huber. And in this thread, a post about this guy called nick huber and in it in in this thread um the account analyzed huber's like uh he's got a self-storage business where he like buys up distressed self-storage facilities and then he like marks up the prices on storage and then he makes a profit so this thread like analyzes this guy's businesses his business the fundamentals and he basically concludes that you know this business is probably underwater and its investors are going to lose a lot of money right so that like goes that that was like the first moment for horny is he like

goes viral with that you know and shortly after that he targets this girl called Cody Sanchez, who is sort of in the same world. She's an influencer. And he, he basically claims that Sanchez, who sells consultations, where she charges like $2,000 a course, or a consultation for business advice, that she's actually lying about her history. And like, didn't work at, for example, Goldman Sachs for as long as she says she's had, right. So generally, like he's like taking down these, like, to be fair to him, like, and didn't work at, for example, Goldman Sachs for as long as she says she's had. So generally, he's taking down these, to be fair to him, somewhat annoying influencers who tend to use their LinkedIn-style Twitter posts as top of the funnel for ultimately getting one of their followers to pay them. Does all, hopefully all that makes sense. And you guys can feel free

to just jump in and ask questions. Well, I just, I think for, for my seat, it was pretty obvious that once he started going, his DMS were just flooded with people who hated these people who were like, I have a hot tip on so-and-so you need to talk about this one. Oh, get her. Like she's the worst. And like you sort of said, they were, a lot of these people suck that were being targeted. Um, but pretty fast for me, I looked at that and I thought, I don't, a lot of this doesn't seem real or it seems complicated. At one point he went after, um, he went after what's his face the morning brew austin from morning brew for having a fund and he's like well you don't talk about it anymore it's like that's he raised the fund it's why would he what are you talking about this is not how this works it's like he

went after jason it was um for uh only one of your like it was like one company of of 10 or something did well it was like that kind of analysis. And that's just how venture works. And actually, the one company did incredibly well, even by Horny Hitler's reporting on this. I thought, that seems Jason's doing better than I thought. And this is a man, listen, not trying to defend Jason Kalkanis every day, though I do have a lot of respect for what he's built with the All-In Pod, and we can talk about that later. But he was jason jason didn't do anything wrong um horny hitler just didn't know what the fuck he was talking about and i wonder how much of it seems like a lot of that brandon would your assessment be like a lot of it was just he didn't know what he was talking about a lot i mean when you start looking into the specific claims um now he makes

so many that i don't want to generalize completely about this but a lot of them are very thin and some of them are so thin he'll be like some he'll quote tweet somebody saying you know quotes quote tweet like somebody putting a chart up that shows their revenue of their side hustle like going up and reaching a million dollars and he'll be like nobody believes you made a million dollars and he'll be like nobody believes you made a million dollars and it'll get like tons of likes and retweets and that's the whole thing it's like okay well i i don't know what the allegation is but it's clearly like i understand again like why he's targeting these people it's because they're annoying

yeah you know and like there's this subsurface like latent like yeah get them type thing even if it's not even if what he's saying is not true or doesn't have much substance so i would go back to just really quickly just to like i want to tell the whole story of sanchez i mentioned that he alleged that sanchez cody sanchez was lying about her bona fides. But I looked into that and he uses a thread in which he, she says in again, this like annoying parable format that she was at Goldman Sachs for eight years. But then further down at the end of the thread, she corrects that. And she says, Oh no, sorry. Like I actually made a typo and I couldn't edit it because there was no editing at the time because like Jack was in charge and Elon had not taken over. And I actually did only work there for two years. Right. So that

was just like a big lie. And that, that, uh, the horny post got like 400,000 views. Right. So like a lot of this stuff is like, it's not even real. So this is where it gets interesting. I started to look into, actually I had some contacts who I reached out to in the real estate community, real estate Twitter community, and they think they know who Horny Hitler is. Uh-oh, basically. Yeah. So I can't say 100% sure. This is going to be interesting. Interesting. Yeah.

I don't know 100%. This is all kind of like deep lore. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But basically, there's this guy called ****. And people in real estate Twitter think he's Horny Hitler. And if that's true, Horny Hitler is actually like a really bad serial grifter who's been, for the past like five years or so creating and growing all sorts of social social media accounts running scams getting busted then like going dark and then re-emerging for another scam so under various social accounts this jacob guy again we don't we're not sure he's horny but the jacob guy is alleged i mean he's not horny adolf hitler he might be horny

um actually horny adolf hitler's posts if you look back are like really sexual and weird um that's a it's always like this it's this combination online of like the weirdly perverse and also the sort of um contrarianly political and strangely, uh, investigative, you know, it's just, it's, that's the nature of,

of, of social media today. It's like the most degenerate 4chan user has a Twitter account and he's, he's like publishing scoops on real estate influencers. That's really what it's like. But anyways, so this Jacob guy who potentially is horny Adolf Hitler, he, um, he's known for he at one point he raised bitcoin for kids and then pocketed the money allegedly um

he grew a real estate influencer account to like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers um and started booking money for consultations, and then he never held the consultations. He was outed for this. There's an article in TechCrunch about him running a scam on Polish startups. He was promising to connect them to American investors, and either he would get paid for a contract and not deliver anything, or he would flip out on them,

and he was acting very erratically. He actually seems to have a warrant out for his arrest i've got a link that you can pull up matt for that um and then the real the thing that really took him down was he organized a crypto conference um i think it was called massive adoption and it it was like what's that thing? Fyre Fest, right? Like it failed. Well, did Fyre Fest fail? I don't think it failed.

Fyre Fest actually happened, right? So this crypto conference- I think Fyre Fest lives inside of our imaginations in a way that few festivals do. In accordance with the laws of the internet today, I would say Fyre Fest is one of the great successes in modern history. But carry on. Great food, it looked like too.

Yeah. So the crypto conference actually just didn't happen, right? But this was after he collected money for tickets for the conference and they were expensive. And all throughout the lead up to the conference, he would run these promo tweets where he would say you know like you know buy now within 48 hours and you'll get like more crypto than the ticket is even worth like a hotel stay blah blah blah right so he cancels it and it appears that he didn't refund many people's money and he actually gets sued for it and he has to declare bankruptcy because he can't like he can't make everybody whole right so those are like that's all the dirt on this jacob guy and all of that is like allegedly right like i didn't have enough it's interesting i mean if this is really the guy then you have someone who's targeting

himself in a sense he's going after people who he perceives like him i um I get where the anger towards these people comes from. I mean, Instagram and Twitter, this version of it, this sort of my life is awesome version of it is exhausting for the average person to see every day. And it just builds up a lot of anger and resentment. And that has been the case probably since the beginning of time. This is like, I'm pretty sure why old money has a rule about sort of not talking about wealth and dressing it sort of more modestly and things like this. Well, it's survival. Human beings hate to see other people peacocking their wealth and talking about how great they have it. And we are all online. The internet is super primal and um you know it's like stripped of all of the weird niceties it's people just mobbing and that's

why we saw that dynamic it's like the social rules are different there and people are a little more animalistic and um it was only a matter of time before there was a massive witch burning yeah this did it did seem to be sort of neutralized by the fact that i think most people looked at horny hitler as he got progressively more crazed and was like what is really going on here at one point there was a picture with like him and jason calacanis like he had done photoshopping and they were like dating each other in this picture and it was like very weird and sexual and then jason obviously loved it and leaned into it. And it just kind of deflated the whole thing. I don't know. Ashley, did you follow Hitler at all?

A little bit. I was totally uninvolved. I was like, you know, if he's going to take down grifters, let's go. But someone named Tony Hitler is probably going to be a little bit unstable. And I'm not surprised by anything coming out here, especially if he's got this animosity towards, you know, people in Finn to it. Of course, he's going to be a grifter himself. I don't find that surprising. But, you know, Godspeed, Horny Hitler. Yeah, I wonder how long before he launches his own, like, Hitler coin or, right? Like, it's like, it can't be, it cannot be long. Sandra, what do you, what do you make of all this? it cannot be long. Sandra, what do you, what do you make of all this? I mean, I think the thing that interests me the most actually is this point about what explains the confluence between like weird sexual, like loudly signaling interest in sex online. And then also this like sort of investigative, um, contrarian type. And I wonder if it's just like misdirected libidinal energy or something like

that but it does seem i mean he i haven't followed horny hitler either but from what little i've seen from you know brandon and you guys talking about it mainly on slack it it has seemed like uh this weird mimesis where he's i wonder when he's going to monetize the like attention he's gotten from calling out these people who i kind of find innocuous because they're like the parable form of talking about their wealth and stuff to me is so transparently like it kind of comes off like they're selling you a pyramid scheme just in the way they're framing it. So I've never even found it remotely tempting to sign up for one of their courses or get a consultation. And maybe that's just because that kind of obvious marketing turns me off and maybe it doesn't turn everyone off. I mean, there's a reason why it's a genre, but I don't know.

I think that's right. a genre but um i don't know i think that's right like to be again to be to be fair to horny adolf hitler which i don't know if he deserves that but you know like hugh nick huber who's one of his main you know arch enemies he's got this uh pinned post it's like his 12 step 12 step strategy for growing companies to millions in annual profit. And literally four of the strategies are to pay him for doing one of his businesses. So sign up for my SEO company to establish a search presence and run ads with my Google Ads company. So I think the backlash is because it's again, they're selling this this advice but it's actually the top of the funnel for you to pay them to for for them to give you more advice right and so it just seems

like this circular grift um but there's nothing illegal about it i want to say one more thing um horny hitler said buried deep in the comments of like one of his early posts, literally, I am Jake. So I would leave us with that. I have a link to this post and I have a screenshot of it in case he deletes it. I don't want to get sued. It would suck if Pirate Wires went down because horny Hitler sued us for defamation. He posted it, you know, and I've got a screenshot of it so i don't know if

he's being if he was joking he clearly knows who jake is um but everybody know everybody kind of knows who jake is in real estate twitter it seems like it reminds me a lot of um yeah i mean i think the thing driving it that impulse is sort of what we saw a handful of years ago. We had VC Braggs became a huge account and he would just retweet or do screenshots of tweets of VCs bragging, which is either a humble brag or whatever brag. And I mean, people, this count blew up all the way up until the point that Brag started targeting smaller people. And once that happened, the crowd turned against him and it sort of blew the whole thing up. And it does. It just is. It's like this populist impulse and these like populist heroes rise. And I think Horty Aylor could have and, and sort of threw it away pretty fast,

but you could surprise me and, and change the game tomorrow. Yeah. I don't know. I do know that speaking of Hitler, I would like to talk about nationalism in Europe. We have, it was a huge deal. Now I, for the devoted Pirate Wires fan,

you know how I feel about France. And you certainly know how Sanjana feels about France. I've liked France for a while. I've been interested in France for a while because it was super like not woke was one of the reasons throughout the sort of, I guess, America's period of insanity from like 2017 onward. They were bad on all sorts of economic issues. Like there's still a socialist government. But on wokeness, it was like identity and things like this.

They're like, no, they're super based about just loving France and being French. They're super based about just loving France and being French. I also read a lot of Peter Zahan, who introduced me to just French geography and how goaded their geography is and just more of the history of France. And I think France is in a good place to – it's in a good position to thrive. It's certainly in a good position to become more nationalistic, I think, as America recedes from the world. And we saw a lot of that. This was about a week ago. So you have the European elections, which I would like Sanjay to just sort of, why don't you just break down a little bit of what we saw in Europe?

And then let's talk about its relevance to, I think, us here at home as well. Because this is really what I'm looking at. It seems like it's much broader than'm looking at. It seems like it's much broader than Europe to me. It seems like we're looking at a real backlash against globalism globally. Yeah. I mean, last week there were the European parliamentary elections. So basically this is Europeans electing their rep. So they have every European country has like a set number of seats in their European parliament. Um, and they get to elect people to fill those seats essentially and so what you had in these parliamentary elections was a kind of surprising in some cases resounding victories for pretty nationalist aligned right-wing parties france was the most, I would say, clear-cut of those cases, where you had

Marine Le Pen's RN, National Rally, I guess, party, which won 31.4% of the vote, so the plurality of the vote. They beat Macron's party by more than double, and he's the the sitting uh president there so that was france germany had a similar thing happen where um the afd party the sort of nationalist party there uh won more than the party of the chancellor they didn't win i think they placed second but they won more than olaf schultz's party italy um maloney's party won uh as well plurality um and you know the only i guess in scandinavia some of the left wing and green parties took the victory but it was really um this pretty surprising show of broad popular support for these parties that you know we've been told for for decades are kind of not decades for years are um you know

these fringe extremely far right in some cases nazi aligned uh parties and in france what macron did in response to this these results is he basically dissolved parliament and he called snap elections that are going to be held in a couple weeks and the thinking for him i think is that you know this is a gamble and he's basically telling French people, okay, if you really want Marine Le Pen, then vote for her. And I think he was gambling on the fact that the right wing would fracture and that he would be able to form a sort of centrist coalition that would win.

And yet, since he's done that, it's been a total it's been a total shit show actually for the right um so he might have actually been on to something with that i mean basically there's a really there's a great thread on twitter uh detailing this that i think went went viral a couple days ago but in the past week in france you've essentially seen the right wing loving to lose. Um, because basically, um, what happened was, you know, all the parties have to sort of come together and present these coalitions for the parliamentary election. And they only had a week to do it in France. Um, and the left wing immediately formed a coalition. You immediately had, you know, I think it was like 24 or 48 hours after he calls the uh after he dissolves parliament you

had the socialist party the party of um menon shone they all come together and they they form a a coalition um and then the right wing there's this sort of fracture where marine le pen's party clearly has tons of support from people because they won in the european parliamentary elections but they're also seen as politically toxic by a lot of these center-right people who don't want to be associated with, you know, the founder of the party who sort of said some nice things about Vichy France and, you know, made some, he's been accused of Holocaust denial, basically. And so he's always been, the party's always been a little bit like untouchable there. But the leader of the party, the Republican party, which is basically the party of

Sarkozy, I believe, it's the party of Chirac. The leader comes out and says, okay, I'm going to align with Marine Le Pen. And immediately his deputies say say we didn't approve that and we don't you know want to co-sign that basically so this guy eric ciotti then barricades himself in the uh republican headquarters in paris and there's like this amazing press conference where one of these deputies he disagrees with him is like standing outside and talking to the press and he's like we're going to call the emergency services and we're going to get this guy out he's a lunatic um eventually someone comes with like a a copy of the key and they open up the building um and concurrently there's been this fracture with um marion melon uh what's her name uh

maloney yeah marshall she's she's uh marine le pen's relative um who runs this party with eric zamore um and she has come out and said she's gonna align with marine le pen as well uh and eric zamore wasn't informed by this so they're basically trying to like kick him out because he's politically toxic um so the sort of tldr of it is that you've seen the left immediately come together um and form this coalition that you know may stand a chance i guess in in the upcoming elections i mean they'll probably win a lot of seats and the right wing which should have this it should be able to capitalize on this clear wave of like resounding popular support is now fracturing

into sort of, you know, people who are aligning with Le Pen and RN and people who are basically just sidelining themselves in an interesting way. So. Yeah, it's interesting what happens in, it's, you effectively have one party throughout the Western world that controls culture or sort of one political pole. And that's very powerful psychologically. The feeling of not wanting to be associated with the really bad right-wing people, I think. All of this is being driven by immigration. It's very obviously what's happening in every single one of these places. And as bad as immigration

is up in Sweden or whatever, Germany, France, Italy, Italy is the sort of gateway in many cases, these are the front lines of these things. The parties would not do anything about it. And the demographics are changing rapidly. Naturally, there's a backlash. And this feels both at home in America and abroad to be the thing that is galvanizing people, or really just maybe animating the whole right, which is why it's so frustrating to me when people start talking about things like IVF. It's like, that's not what is happening right now. It's like, if you're not going to focus on the thing that is animating people um you know what is the point of this political system but i guess what's happening in europe i i wonder um based on sort of what

you're saying here if that's if anything's going to come of it um it is a total disaster and uh it almost feels as if you know just people don't want to solve the problem i did say uh so you talked about the dissolving of the parliament um i saw the redheaded libertarian on twitter say you know she freaked out she freaked out about this she was like oh my god they're dissolving the parliament in france because the right wing won elections and it's just funny how little people here know about anything other than here and then still, though, have very strong opinions about it. Obviously, she just didn't know how French government worked. She thought he was doing a coup or something?

Yes. I mean, I'm sure she's walked it back now and has framed it all as a joke. But it wasn't a joke, okay? It was not a fucking joke. She was like, red alert. We've got to save the right-wingers in Europe. They're taking over the fascist left. That's not what happened. It's just clownish politics from abroad.

I think it's very interesting how similar things are here though, when it comes to immigration and how that is really just animating, I don't know, the entire political map. Ashley, what do you make of it i would agree 100 on immigration um animating a lot of this i've spoken in europe at the identity of democracy rallies i've spoken with uh salvini um and we had le pen who spoke at these events as well and immigration is the driving force for all of this more than any other issue more than uh economic issues it is it is immigration you know in switzerland you have nearly half of all rapes and homicides are being committed by non-swiss citizens um and this rape crisis in europe is really picking up steam too which is

switching over some of these female voters um and that cannot be um ignored the rape crisis there it's something that is an under-discussed issue, but the women in Europe know that it's happening. And they know that it's a result of mass migration of people coming from areas that their cultures do not have a concept of consent or rape. And so then they're coming into these countries and women are just told to kind of take it. And I think they are a driving force for the changes in Europe. I do think that despite all of the tomfoolery going on in France,

that we're going to see a massive shift in Europe just globally, and then we're going to see that in America too. And I really do believe it's all because of this immigration issue and that they're not allowed to do anything about it. So we see Salvini, he's facing jail time. This man might go to jail and face serious lawfare actions

because he dared to try to stop these asylum seekers coming in and the NGOs shipping boatloads of migrants in. So I do think this is going to be the end all be all for Europe. And yeah, there is a sense of nationalism finally for some of these countries that are rejecting this uh this mass migration it's interesting the idea of you know why might someone be afraid to talk about the rape crisis and it's just obviously the label of racism and no i i would disagree it's the fear of being called a racist? No, I think it's wokeism. Wokeism, which is just Maoism, Marxism,

redesired to destroy the West. Because when you're woke, you're not allowed to believe those who have less systemic power can do any wrong. So the only villain is the one who holds the institutional power. And so the migrants committing the rape, that can be overlooked. Those rapes can be overlooked because they're systemically disadvantaged in a woke world so i think it has less to do with racism and more to do with this

institutional woke power and the redistribution of of these powers in their minds i mean the muslims are it's the immigrants are muslim they're mostly, I mean, they're not white, right? No. I mean, I think that's sort of the elephant in the room. It's people don't want to be going after, they don't want to be seen as saying, you know, Muslims are rapists or something. And I mean, we see Donald Trump is still being told that he said Mexicans were rapists eight years later. That is the danger in this kind of a conversation i think that that just doesn't it doesn't that term does not affect people the way that it did eight years ago it's like you couldn't possibly for you just say it so many times and people get numb to it um so people are starting to have a conversation about like culture you know what does happen to a

country when you bring in a non-trivial number of Muslim immigrants, for example, who aren't interested in assimilation? You either become more Muslim as a country, or you have, and sort of assimilate that way, this reverse assimilation, or you have two different cultures within your culture. In America, there is some of this, and mostly I think it's language-based. People have a hard time crossing the language barrier at first from Spanish-speaking to English-speaking, and you have whole regions of the country where people are only speaking Spanish. I went to a car wash. I was in Miami the other day, and I went to a car wash off the beaten path and um nobody spoke english there nobody

spoke english next door uh i needed to use the atm machine because everything was cash only it's like there was zero english um that will change over time i think our cultures are similar enough uh but the muslim thing feels like a much more difficult bridge to cross that is a different culture that is a different language that is a different faith especially um there's also a long history of the sort of west first east that has been like the christian europe first uh the muslim middle east i mean it's like it's it's part of it's a part of who we are that conflict which has been weirdly sort of um retconned in culture the sort of cultural conversation is like how long the conflict between Islam

and Christian Europe has, has gone on. I don't know. All of it's pretty interesting to me. What do you, Brandon, what have you made of the trends, if anything?

I don't have, I don't have much on the, on the France thing. Yeah. I'm curious what happens with Macron. Well, I want to know. So on the immigration stuff thing um yeah i'm curious what happens with macron well i want to know so on the immigration stuff here at home that you have biden saying that he's going to it was the executive order on the border right so that just happened as well i mean he's feeling the pressure of this immigration is i think it's like immigration inflation these are the issues

that people are talking about i think immigration is the one that's going to determine the election. His executive order said that we are going to limit the number of people crossing the asylum seekers to, I believe it was 2,500 a day. So I've been down to the border. I can't tell you how many times. And actually, San Diego is seeing an increase since this executive order too, because even if they um so i've been down to the border i can't tell you how many times and actually san diego is seeing an increase since this executive order too because even if they illegally cross the border border patrol picks them up they go to the processing center and they claim asylum anyways so it essentially becomes the same process whether you go through this board of entry

or whether you're walking across at eagle pass or in lukeville wherever it is so his executive order isn't really doing a whole lot. And they're still dropping them off by, you know, the thousands over in San Diego. I'm speaking to officials over in San Diego who are telling me it's gotten worse since this executive order. And now Border Patrol is getting, you know, these orders, hey, here's the hard to deport countries, let's just go ahead and dismiss this and basically soft green light their asylum claims. And so that's what's happening. They're pretending to fix the issue through this limit on ports of entry, but that doesn't do anything because they're coming in by

the thousands everywhere but the ports of entry. Right. I mean, I think even if we were limiting to, Sandra, did you say it was 2,500 a day? Yeah, I guess it fixed it. That was the right number? So even if it worked, let's say, that's still almost a million a year. And it's like, the problem is that we're pretending that they're actually seeking asylum. It's like, that's not, what are you talking, like, there's not, what is the crazy war that's happening, you know, throughout all of South America and Central America? Can you explain to me why people are in danger for their lives in every single one of these countries? That doesn't quite check out.

I've been to Mexico. I know there's a lot of problems, but it doesn't seem that bad. For as long as that asylum thing persists, we're going to have this problem. And also, it just seems like the Democrats actually want the immigration to happen. At some point, you're going to have to acknowledge that. And then there's a question of, and mean, it just seems like the Democrats actually want the immigration to happen. At some point, you're going to have to sort of acknowledge that. And then there's a question of, and I think it kind of, they might not be wrong. I mean, what, I don't, I think it's a little bit more complicated than just like they want immigrants to come and destroy America. We have a declining population and we have a lot of old people that we have to take care of. And I wonder how much of this is just a straight economics question.

Like someone did the math and said, if we don't have more young people than old people, the society crumbles. And it could be that simple. Like that is really the thing. Like we're never going to fix the border because there's nobody in charge at a certain level that really wants that possibly. A lot of it is about a labor crisis. There's a lot of giant corporations like Tyson and other corporations that are lobbying for these

work visas for these illegal immigrants. We're seeing that here in New York. They're having a hard push for the work visas for illegal immigrants because of the labor crisis, because like you said, our working population is decreasing and decreasing. So that is part of it. I don't think it's just they want to come in to destroy the country. But I also do think they want a voting demographic eventually, because, you know, as these asylum, and they're not going to vote in this election, it's not going to be some crazy thing where they're secretly voting. But once those asylum claims are approved, eventually, there's going to be this push for critical immigration theory, and why they should all be citizens.

I'm not kidding. Critical immigration theory is coming. I'm telling you. And, you know, we already had bills here in New York City passed to allow non-citizens to vote in our local elections. We're struck down by a higher court, but it is coming eventually. And I don't think people really realize the gravity of the situation, especially as it relates to where everyone's coming from, because it's not just South America. We've seen like a 900% increase in Chinese nationals, people from Africa, people from the Middle East. So we're essentially like an open border to the world right now in untold numbers.

I wonder how much of it is social media. These laws have existed forever. It's a loophole, right? It's a strange sort of loophole to our immigration process. And once the information spread virally throughout the rest of the fucking third world, it was just open season. And I don't really blame a lot of these people for wanting to come to America. America's awesome. You were one of the only people to mention it. And it's so true. Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok are responsible for a lot of the dissemination of this information. Because when you go to the border and you talk to these migrants and you're

like, well, how did you hear about this? They're telling me. They're telling me on TikTok, we love Joe Biden. On Facebook, we love Joe Biden. And then they come here and social media is also facilitating their entire transition into the United States. So most of these folks, especially that I talked to here in New York, they're using Facebook to rent out Uber Eats and DoorDash accounts. They're using Facebook to buy IDs. They're using Facebook for all of this. So social media, I think is the biggest factor for this. I think you're absolutely right. And I'm so glad you said that. Well, I think even more separate from like just the tools that you're talking about, which obviously are being used, the idea of viral sharing in general of information, right?

Because yes, it's being facilitated on Facebook and TikTok because that's where all information is being facilitated or spread. That is the gateway for everything now. We as a culture have never had instant viral sharing of information before the last decade or so. And we don't quite know what that means. We're still encountering these strange second order effects of that. And I do believe that the immigration, it's not so much the immigration crisis as a second order effect. It's the loophole of our immigration system being exploited as a second order effect. We can share really good information, important information, healthy information. But we can also, you know, it's like something like this gets out

and now we have a rush at the gate and our government doesn't react fast enough. It's not built to react fast, right? The internet is designed for rapid movement and our government doesn't react fast enough. It's not built to react fast, right? The internet is designed for rapid movement and our government is designed to slowly change, which is important. You don't want rapid change in a democratic system of government or a republican system of government. It sounds really frightening actually to have a government that can just rapidly change fundamentally before your eyes. But now it has to move faster than it is. And if it doesn't't you end up with i think we're at like something like 10 million that we know of and yeah 12 is the better estimate but yeah that's pretty bad what is that it's almost three percent of the population um that's

a huge deal that's that changes a lot that changes the culture that uh brings all sorts of just social strife with it. And that has maybe like a third order effect. Now we're talking about the black vote changing, perhaps. I don't think it's going to really go to Trump, but any chipping away of that is going to affect the next election. And that is coming from, I mean, I saw these videos in Chicago when immigrants were coming in and the town hall meetings were almost entirely uh almost entirely black locals who were like what the fuck is going on here and why do you keep doing it while we keep telling you to stop um it's going to be interesting um last thoughts on on the immigration i would just say well two things one is also that a lot of them become homeless and so then you get the massive

apparatus of the homeless industrial complex that has been built up over the past 15 years to cater to drug tourists, at least in on the West Coast, which we've written about a lot, that then gets mobilized to care for these people. And so you see in Denver, for example, a few months ago, the Wall Street Journal had a really fascinating article about how Denver has had to absorb like tens of thousands of migrants who have immediately become homeless because they don't have work visas and because they don't have any you know form of sort of financial sustenance and they've had to cut the budget of like all city departments to pay for supportive services for these people because of

course you know they're not I guess they're i think they're a sanctuary city but also they have you know these right to shelter rules and all these you know regulations regulations about what services they have to provide to people um and so i think you're going to see and and the the left is going to sort of conflate all of these things right and say okay now we have this housing crisis that's driving these people onto the streets but of course there's going to be different cohorts of homeless people that you're going to have to sort through. And I don't think that's going to be trivial because that comes with a lot of second and third order consequences when it comes to public safety and public nuisances and all the stuff that we've seen forever in San Francisco. I'm just going to say it.

A lot more people are going to be listening to their iphones without headphones on let's be honest let's just call a spade a spade i'm in london right now i am against it a lot of people put your fucking headphones on a lot of people were doing it in on the on the underground today so oh and uh your asanjan is in the uk right now what's going on over there by the way tell me i mean what do you see well it's it's funny the immigration conversation is funny because i am in london and i've often said that like you can't it's really hard to find any service worker or store clerk in London who actually speaks good English. They almost all are recent migrants, usually from Eastern Europe or somewhere in the Middle East or

India or Pakistan or something. And it's very, very difficult to actually understand what people are saying to you. And there's also a very clear, there's clear cultural tension that sometimes comes up. I mean, an example is I was shopping on Regent street yesterday, which has this really garish pride flag display. It's the progress flags that everyone's seen on Twitter, the like totalitarian looking, uh, quasi fascist, like rows of progress flags they have. With the new circle, it's the new intersect circle.

And it's like in that yellow triangle part of it. It's a hideous flag. Yeah. So they had these flags up for display. And then I went into this, I was going into clothing stores and was looking for shirts in the men's section. And these store clerks, these like immigrant store clerks

kept telling me where the women's section was. And I was like, why does it matter to you what like clothing section I'm shopping in? kept telling me where the women's section was and i was like why does it matter to you what uh like clothing section i'm shopping in and it sort of felt like this weird incongruous thing where at once you have this like signaling of the progress flag is up everywhere and then also there's this concurrent like mass migration of people who clearly have very different values um and are not they're not assimilated yet into whatever's left of like the the sort of indigenous that is so interesting and exactly what it is it is the

performance of i guess our values um as defined by the state uh while the door is open to people who are in, you said they're not assimilated. I don't really believe that assimilation ever happens ever and ever has in American history. We become who we are and who's in the country. And every immigrant wave brought a sort of update to American culture. And it's always been the case. Things have evolved based on who is here and that's going to continue to happen in every one of these countries that has waves of immigration and you see this like through history like this is not a first time the first time that people have entered the uk right it's like if you have histories of french invasions and nordic invasions

and roman invasions that have brought cultural updates um there's no difference. I want to talk about that fucking flag though, actually, because there is this interesting, it's pride month. Happy pride. And you, last year, I mean, someone was saying, oh, it's like, it's anti-pride. This is the first anti-pride. Last year was an anti-pride. There was all sorts of pride backlash last year. I would say much more backlash, actually. The Target pride backlash was pretty intense. I'm pretty sure it wasn't last pride. That would have been the summer of Bud Light's disaster.

I mean, last year, 2023, was the anti-pride. June 2023 was anti-pride. But this year, we do have a handful of weird backlashes. One, those kids on the scooter who got arrested for scuffing up the flag in the middle of the street. Two, NASA raises the flag, Sanjay, that you were just talking about with that weird intersex thing on it. And then three, you have the Philly Pride Parade with the pro-Hamas people who block it off. And you have this very interesting clash again of cultures on the one hand, the left, on the other hand, also the left. It's like Muslims tend to be pretty

leftist and Palestinians tend to be pretty economically leftist, but they're just socially, I don't know what dark age status, whatever the fuck that is like throwing people out of buildings and things. This is not like that clash, whatever that is, not looking forward to it as it progresses. And I think in all of this, it's just the thing that is really captivating me and continues to, it's like, it doesn't have to be this way. On that new pride flag, which weirdly now includes intersex people. What is intersex? Intersex is a medical, it's a biological, I don't want to call it a disorder, but it's an anomaly, let's say. Intersex people have nothing to do with the LGBT whatever movement. They are neither gay to begin with. They are not trans. They are just people who have strange sort of

ambiguous genitalia. It's a super rare condition. They don't consider themselves, generally speaking, to be having an issue of sexuality or gender identity problems. And it is like they didn't ask to be on this flag. Like who asked NASA to do this? Nobody asked for this except probably some very crazy person who you just don't have to listen to anymore. And I wish that people would stop listening to the crazy people who are telling you that you have to raise a flag, a pride flag that has like weird new stripes for black people on it for some reason. And also now like an intersex circle. It's just stupid. It's dumb. Stop doing it. I don't know. It seems it's a religion of ideology, though. And I think the

final form of this ever changing pride flag is just a solid red background and then a yellow hammer and sickle. Because that's where we're going. Because every time I see them, and I think this is why people have this like pride fatigue, because I live in New York City. And these flags are all they're all over all the time. I see more pride flags than I do American flags. And it feels like living in occupied territory sometimes. Like what is going on here? This has nothing to do with gay pride anymore. And then you have, you know, you're like, oh, it's ridiculous. And why are they doing it? But then you have people like Admiral Rachel Levin, who was, you know, in military blues, Biden's health secretary, who's getting up and speaking as a health secretary saying, you know, happy Pride Month, but actually not even just Pride Month. Happy Pride Summer,

I declare it the summer of pride. So they just pushing the boundaries from these official points like NASA, like Biden's's administration and you're like what what is going on here how has this evolved so far from just you know i think gay people should be able to get married and have right yeah and also just i mean the game the flag so much of this is driven by bisexual i feel like bisexuals are the most overrated persecuted minority in human history i'm so tired of hearing from bisexuals who want to be like i am a woman married to a man but also don't you dare invalidate my identity as a bisexual person nobody cares and also you don't even care it doesn't affect your life like that you're married it doesn't matter that you also perhaps

in some other world might have dated a woman by the way i don't think you would have. It doesn't matter that you also perhaps in some other world might have dated a woman. By the way, I don't think you would have. It doesn't come up. It's not relevant. Okay. The reason pride even exists, and I will defend pride sort of conceptually for a second. Like, I think when you had pride way back in the day, you know, Harvey Milk era of American history, you're talking about a group of people who were not even allowed to go to bars. That's crazy in my opinion. Okay. People should be allowed to do whatever they want with their own lives. And you're having gay men mostly being arrested for congregating, just congregating, cross-dressing. We're like, oh, don't bring it to the schools. Correct. But also if some grown a guy wants to go to a bar and address and dance around

for dollar bills, that is his prerogative. Okay. And I am in favor of it. And then on the sexuality side, so much of it is shame based. It's like, you know, so much of this persisted because men didn't want to be seen as gay. And so pride was just an alternative to that. It was like, no, we're going to be proud. And it's like, should you be proud for your sexuality? No. But do I understand? You shouldn't be proud. Who cares if you're straight or gay? That's not a reason to be proud. I understand where that critique comes from. But I also understand where pride comes from. And it wasn't for this. It wasn't so bisexual women, bisexual white women, let's be honest, could wear a weird identity like pink triangle on their sleeve and say they were special. They have really infiltrated and destroyed everything.

And for the gays, for the straights, and like you said, Ashley, it's like we're like a conquered nation walking through the streets and looking at these flags these flags it's like everyone has no one has won who has won i don't there's not a group that's like thank god for that flag uh the the black stripes too man that really really bothers me because it's an aesthetic nightmare it is all tell me it is your fault it is it is your people sanjay's from philly originally yeah um well i mean i don't think philadelphia is responsible for the intersex symbol so we're Tell me, it is your fault. It is your people. Sanjay's from Philly originally. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't think Philadelphia is responsible for the intersex symbol. So we're good on that front. But the original modification to the pride flag, which was the addition of the black and brown stripes and maybe the trans colors, but I'm not entirely sure about that. But the black and brown was definitely Philadelphia.

During BLM. During BL black and brown was definitely Philadelphia. Basically during BLM, during BLM, it was during 2020 when everything was actually a race issue, including pride and gay people just like gave it up. They're like, all right, this is the summer that we got to hate ourselves. So whatever you want to do to our flag is fine.

Oh, the gay flag, the game, the gay pride flags. Now a black lives matter. We're fine with it, man. We love black people.

Don't yell at us. That's the energy that was happening. And now we're stuck with that fucking flag. Ph people don't yell at us yeah that's the energy that was happening and now we're stuck with that fucking flag philly put it up first they had a graphic designer do it and they put it up and made it their like official flag or something um for pride and yeah it's so crazy because like what is it it's implicitly saying and it not and often explicitly when you hear people defending it online it, it is a statement that is saying, gay spaces were white spaces, and now we need to make special space for black and brown people. And that's not true. I've been in a lot of gay spaces in my life, and they were always mixed

race. It's a lie. We're being forced to live in this bizarre, delusional fantasy world. Did anybody follow the scooter thing though? i can't tell yes what happened there were they really arrested like what is going on i don't know if they were arrested but i think they kept repainting it that was the last update i saw they kept repainting it and then they just came in with the scooters again the next morning and put the scuff marks all over it so i think but it's kids being kids too it's also like you know if the kids are told you know don't don't make fun of the gay flag they're gonna go make fun of the cave right it's also crazy though to be told that you can't make fun of

the gay flag but flag burning is fine and also you have people outside of the hum what was it the nova thing in new york just a couple days ago, holding banners celebrating the actual Nova massacre in Israel. This is very different than saying like, oh, the Israel-Palestine thing is complicated. This is straight up, I'm glad those girls were raped and killed. And it's like, I am a free speech guy. I think you have a right to hold that banner. I don't know how you have a right to hold that banner, but the kids can't scuff up the crosswalk that has the gay pride flag on it. That's a bridge too far for me. Because the inmates are running the asylum at

this point and they've hijacked all of these movements that you did need at one point. Like you said, you did need pride at one point. My mom used to see gay people get beat up on the corner in the 80s. We did need some sort of movement for people to be themselves and to say, okay, it's okay for people to be gay. But these communists have really overtaken all of these movements, especially pride. And now it's just, it's out of control. And that's why you see them all advocating for this insanity under one banner, one flag that unites all of the woke ideology.

Yeah, I think it is self-defeating. I feel like it's taken the fun out of that entire... I mean, gay spaces were sort of known for their wild debauchery and crazed irreverence and also sexuality. It was very strongly sexual. But this thing is both implicitly and now explicitly asexual. It's like an asexual flag. It is the end, I think, for itself. It's like, I believe it's a sort of self-declosure. But I also think if your goal is to protect gay and trans individuals, that this is actually becoming difficult for them, that gay and trans individuals

are actually facing more discrimination because they have to let all of these kooks under the banner of this flag. And they're allowed to say whatever because it's all inclusive. And we're not gonna push anybody out as long as they say the right buzzwords. And you're seeing people,

especially on the far right, that are now equating just being gay with this radical ideology or equating trans with this radical ideology. So I actually think it's a net negative and we're regressing in terms of sentiments towards gay and trans people. That's fact-based. There's polling data on that. We've not seen a dip forever in our lives until the last few years. And it's clearly a direct response. I mean, there's only so many males winning races against females in high school that you can watch before you start to wonder if perhaps all of it was a mistake.

And that's unfortunate, but it's where we are. And speaking of the youth, I would love to end with a little Gen Z trend back towards the simple things, let's say. Sandra, can you tell me what's going on on TikTok? It's on TikTok and Instagram. Yeah. I mean, basically, so there's two things going on. One is that there is a rise of quote unquoteunquote blue-collar influencers so basically these are people um who well there's a couple people in particular who are profiled in a big wall street journal uh feature this week um an electrician a sort of hot female electrician um who takes videos of herself you know doing electrical work um and i believe a guy who's a plumber who sort of posts uh stuff on instagram and uh tiktok of him doing plumbing work and they've got massive followings um the woman i think has like two million followers she has a brand deal with carhartt for hundreds of thousands

of dollars um so neither of them are actually really blue-collar because they're making at least half a million a year on their influencing alone. But it does show this interesting trend that's actually driven out by data, which is an uptick in interest in trade schools from Gen Z. There's not that much data about how much interest has changed over the past few years because they haven't actually tracked it very well in the past decade. But we know that the highest number of kids enrolling in vocational community colleges has been recorded this year vis-a-vis when they started in 2018. So hard to really extrapolate from that. But it does seem like based on the interest in this plumber and electrician um that lots of people are maybe considering trade school as an alternative to the four-year university and i think that the kind of you know covid is an accelerant of this and online courses obviously in the sort of uh you know decreasing quality of classes is an accelerant. Student debt is an accelerant. And

probably the campus insanity of this past spring is going to accelerate all of these trends. But I do think that you're seeing lots of kids maybe thinking they should go to trade school because the jobs pay well and PhDs make less than plumbers in Wisconsin, I think, on average. And then at the same time, and this is maybe a connected trend, you see an uptick in interest in smoking. This is based on a National Economic Bureau study, I think, that basically found that one of the unintended consequences of banning flavored vapes, so certain vape flavors

that were thought to incite the kids to vaping, make them want to smoke cigarettes. So if they can't have their mango vape, they'll just pick up a cigarette, basically. And you've seen a little bit of this in the UK as well, where they've been trying to ban cigarettes for people under a certain age. and there's sort of hypothesizing that this is going to lead to like lots more interest in in smoking um so yeah yeah because the uk did something where it was people under born after a certain year would never be able to buy them exactly that's what they're trying to do they went with they're trying to like fully ban it um we haven't gone that route yet i think it's interesting i really that route yet. I think it's

interesting. I really think it's got to be the economics piece the most. I think we finally got to a point with the student debt where you couldn't justify it any longer. And you could only hear people tell you what the salary was for your average plumber for so long before you look seriously at trades as, um, not just an alternative, but a, a boon to your life. I mean, we, these jobs are really important. Everybody needs them. And, um, they've been sort of really made fun of and, uh, marginalized for years and years and years by the same people who ostensibly cared about the working class. These are people in politics who are like, yay, working class, but if my kid became an electrician, that would be considered a failure. It would be unthinkable if your son was a plumber. That is, I think, an old 20th century model. The future, I think, is going to be more pragmatic because it has to be increasingly.

Like some of these schools, I was just, we were looking at just NYU. What is tuition and room and board is something like, isn't it like close to $70,000 a year or $80,000 a year with tuition and room and board? That sounds right. It's something insane at this point. So like, it's just, we've reached the breaking point.

Like you said, though, these people, the influencers are not, they're not plumbing. And it reminds me a bit of the trad wife trend where you have this trend towards a performative version of this thing that actually exists. Like a real trad wife who's like cooking for her husband or whatever it's like a working class person with a bunch of kids i've seen actually versions of this also on on instagram where it's like a woman living in a trailer with her with her kids and making like very reasonable dinners but the trad wife we see is a woman who's like i'm gonna make chocolate chip cookies from scratch for my husband and she's like in a sundress and her hair is done

and her makeup's done and it's like this madman version of what a housewife is. It is just like, you know, interesting novel forms of content, but they speak to these desires that we have, I think, in the contemporary age that we live in. And especially as I think it's like things that young people are thinking about, right? The trad wife thing is sort of a, it's a question about the role of feminism in a young woman's life and work and things like this. And is it really so much better now today what we had in the fifties, whatever. And then on the male side, I think it's also, it I need to go and get a desk job after I get my college degree for $500,000? Or should I have a job in two years paying me $200,000 a year?

And should I be saving up for a down payment on a house in the suburbs? And it's like everyone is sort of, I think, wondering about what we're going to be doing in the future. Brandon, have you ever, do you know much about plumbing? I've actually been doing a lot of electrical work in my house lately. It's super empowering, right? When you figure out how to fix something. Yes. You don't, you feel like a little bit less of a pussy every day.

You do that? You feel like a little bit less of a pussy every day, right? You do that? No, I think the fact that it's probably more of a LARP than a real trend, so to speak, is support for the fact that it gives a vibe shift to me. It seems like a conservative thing that's happening more than anything like zoomers are kind of saying look we don't um we're not doing like the elite overproduction thing we're smoking cigs and like you know putting on our jeans and plumbing

for me this feels conservative it feels like this it feels more like a vibe shift than anything or evidence of the vibe i think it totally is they're like the count gen z is like the counterculture now and conservative tends to be like the counterculture aspect i think that's 100 right ashley what do you make of the the trad wife phenomenon i think women are longing to be able for it to be okay to be feminine again. Because for me, I think feminism has just become sort of like bio libertarianism, where it's feminism is more just about rejecting everything that's feminine, feminine. And you know, you're only equal if you become a man, so to speak, if we work like men, if we fuck like men, if we do everything like men. So I think there is this innate desire for

women, whether they're able to realize that goal or not, that they do want to just have kids and cook for a husband and have that innate role. And some don't, but I think a lot of femininity has just been repressed. So I saw the trad wife trend coming from a mile away. However, they should know that many of the men who gravitate towards the idealization of a trad wife trying to coming from a mile away. However, they should know that many of the men who gravitate towards the idealization of a trad wife tend to be rather controlling. Right. I saw this thing. Be careful.

Well, controlling and also like, like a little bit abusive. Okay. Well, maybe on the extreme ends. I saw one that was pretty funny. It was,

there was a meme just going around yesterday. It was a women in New York actually being shown two pictures, one of like a jacked Trump supporter and one of like the nerdiest ever possible blue haired guy with like, I think it was like a Biden hat or something. And they were like, you know, pick which one you think is hotter. Which one would you want to go on a date with?

And they're all picking this guy. They're like, no way in hell you would ever in a million years. And I said, the last girl who picked the Trump guy and not because he was hot. She said, I'm conservative. But it's like, if you want, like, are you about that life? Are you about that trad life?

Because that comes with a different set of cultural norms and rules and a different life path for you. And I guess it's a big question mark. We'll see what people really want. I don't know. Sanjay, what did you make of, am I right to bring up the trad wife thing? Do you think they're related? Do you think it's like a broad movement? I mean, I agree with Brandon that the influencer aspect of it really, I think, is sort of signaling. I think Gen Z is kind of signaling their discontent with the college paradigm in a way that maybe the trad wife thing was was a similar discontent with with feminism i will say that there have been some interesting on the like are you about that life

side of things i mean lauren southern i think um has come out now uh and she was like a huge proponent of sort of trad feminism i guess in like the 20 teens and got married and had a kid and then sort of dropped off the face of the earth. And now she's come out again and done interviews where she's talked about how abusive and controlling her, I guess, ex-husband was, and has sort of moderated her positions, I think, on the trad stuff a little bit. I mean, she's still conservative, but I do think that it's the influence. I mean, I think, on the trad stuff a little bit. I mean, she's still conservative. But I do think that it's... I mean, I think people need to understand that influencers are always selling you

an idealized version of something. And there's always going to be an element of fantasy in it. And I think that's why people like engaging with their content. It's like the people Horny Hitler is targeting on some level, where it's like,

you can't really take them at face value and if you do you're gonna get burned because of course they're just they're like actors on some level and it's not that you can't they're they absolutely are yeah everything everything online is fake yeah thinking gay everything online all made up it's like we are living in this cartoon world and you'll be fine we'll all be fine as long as we don't forget that it's all fucking fake um good and yeah i love that you brought up lauren southern too because there's an undiscussed like trad wife to single mother pipeline especially on the right that nobody really discusses. And it's because there is this, they are actors. And there's so many of these people who are pushing this trad lifestyle who one, aren't even married, or two, their marriages are horrible,

and their wives are in secret group chats, like wanting to leave. And so there is there is this bubble that's gonna pop in terms of i think influencers uh globally not just on the trad sphere but this facade is going to burst for a lot of them um and a lot of things are going to come to light uh especially about the trad life sphere that they're not as trad as they purport themselves to be we don't really have a culture set up for that life at this point. Society is not built for... I don't even know if it ever had a trad relationship. Whoever had this life, it was not the middle class. It would have maybe been the upper class. You saw some sort of trad life thing. At this point, you need two incomes to buy a house and life is not just easy. So you

need more of a part. I don't know. I'm not going to spout on this shit. One thing I am going to talk about is we have a merch drop and is our first merch drop is something that I am much more confident about in terms of my morals and the direction that I think we need to be going as a country. Moon should be a state. You guys got to click on a link in the description. You probably got a message already in our email. You got to go buy a shirt very quick because we have a very limited supply. We're not reprinting them. This is how we're going to be doing merch moving forward. It just drops like this. Once in a blue moon. This is the first one.

You don't want to miss it. It's going to be worth millions of dollars in years, probably as a collector's item. I'm sure as we continue to dominate in the sphere of media, Ashley, thank you for joining the rest of you rate, subscribe, review,

comment again, click that link, buy that shirt, tell your friends, catch you next week.