Pirate Wires - Elon Musk Tells Advertisers "Go F*** Yourself!", and Racist Football Fan | Pirate Wires Podcast #25 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

EPISODE #25: We're Back! This week on the Pirate Wires podcast, we discuss Deadspin calling a child racist for dressing up at a football game, Elon Musk's insane interview with the NYT, Ireland policing speech, UN attempting to stop meat consumption in America, the morality of having kids.. and Pirate Wires BIG week in the news!! Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro - Welcome Back To The Pirate Wires Podcast! 0:30 - Deadspin Doxxes Child NFL Fan For Being Racists 8:20 - Black Face Discussion (Uh Oh..) 20:10 - Elon Musk Interview - Tells Advertisers To Go F*** Themselves 27:30 - Twitter Discussion - Adverts leaving, Peter Zeihan leaving, Elon's Media Battles, Misinformation 32:20 - Ireland Wants To Ban Speech 41:00 - The UN Wants Americans To Eat Less Meat - What?? 47:45 - The Morality Of Having Kids - Elite Liberals Think Having Kids Is Bad 1:00:00 - Pirate Wires Is In The News!!! Shout Out Sanjana 1:03:00 - PW Is Coming For You All! Thanks For Watching! See You Next Week #podcast #elonmusk #disney #racism #politics #culture #technology

Go f*** yourself. Go f*** yourself. Little f***ing racist. The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in blackface. I'm sorry, I'm already laughing. I've never seen a ratio like this. This is totally f***ed up. My kid is a Native American. The internet's not going to accept this. The internet's different. Twitter especially is different. accept this. The internet's different. Twitter especially is different.

Welcome back to the pod. We have a packed show for you today. Last week we were off for Thanksgiving, obviously. Hope you all caught the Peter interview. I want to get right into it. I want to talk about this little kid. I don't know if you guys saw this. This little kid wore blackface to a football game. Do you guys see this? Anyone see the blackface kid? Messed up the way that kid wore blackface. That little fucking racist. Seven-year-old, five-year-old racist. racist. Obviously, we're talking right now about a Deadspin article, which erroneously accused a small child of being racist in the hopes of having my guest canceled, shamed on a national stage, international stage. Not entirely sure. A lot to unpack here. Brandon, why don't you break down the actual news item for those of us who may be listening, but not quite as extremely online as the people in this immediate chat. Sure. So on Monday, Deadspin published a, an article with the hero image of a kid at a Kansas city chiefs game, which took place on Sunday,

the day before playing the Las Vegas Raiders with his, his face appeared to be in blackface and he was wearing a native American headdress. Um, yeah. So the headline, what was, what was the headline? Do you guys remember? Little racist likes football. The headline was little racist. The headline was the NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan and black face and native headdress. I'm sorry. I'm already laughing. The NFL needs to speak out against the five-year-old. Yes. The caption of the image that they included, which was just a screenshot of the CBS broadcast of the game, is Chiefs fan on Sunday and native American headdress and black face.

This caption remains. I'm looking at the article right now. So they've, they've not changed it yet. Anyways, it was, it was sort of quickly the internet kind of came to the rescue and quickly establish the fact that only one half of this kid's face was painted black.

The other half of course was painted red because those are the Chiefs' colors. And he was at a football game. As we have seen people dress up at football games since football has existed, maybe ever, but certainly on television. I don't think I've ever seen a football game where some idiot didn't have half his face painted in two different colors. The headdress a little maybe a little more difficult to explain well so kansas city uh their team is called the chiefs the chiefs yes so um and chiefs refers here to a native american chief so um and it's it's so it's basically their mascot uh and it's quite common for people to wear headdresses to the game as well in support of their team. And so this looks like five-year-old kindergartner was just essentially supporting his team. Within a few days, it came out.

So his mom posted on Facebook and said, basically, this is totally f***ed up. Why did you guys do this my kid is a native american which is true so his grandfather you can look this up is literally on a tribal council of santa inez band of chamash indians and like you can like look this up he's like a tribal elder Indians. And like, you can like look this up. He's, he's like a tribal elder. Um, so, so, so basically like the, the internet comes to the rescue is, is like, look, number one, he's not wearing blackface. He's just supporting his team. Number two, he's native American. Here are the receipts. And today, which is Thursday, we're recording on Thursday, Deadspin finally updated their article. It took a long time, but they finally did.

But when I looked at it, I was kind of dismayed to see that all they did to update the article was to double down on the blackface accusation and the headdress accusation. The update is now a state, they included a statement from the Santa Inez Board of Chumash Indians saying that they do not endorse wearing regalia as part of a costume. So, I mean, there are a lot of interesting things about this one, obviously. I actually was surprised it was still happening because my sense immediately on

seeing the controversy was like, the internet's not going to accept this. How do you write a story? We're not in 2017 anymore. We're not in 2018, 2020 anymore. The world's very, very different. The internet's different. Twitter especially is different. And you don't get away with this kind of stuff anymore. These fake accusations of racism when other stuff comes out. Let's say the worst case scenario here was this kid for some reason had painted his face black to go see a cheapskate. He's still five. So you're attacking a five-year-old. This is the obviously sort of zombie corpse of Gawker Media, which one, it's surprising that Deadspin, I forgot they were still publishing stuff. I thought they were completely out of business, but they're not. Two, it's funny that they're still totally evil. And now three,

this reaction that Brandon was just alluding to, I mean, I've never seen a ratio like this. Truly, I'm not exaggerating here. I've never seen one quite so extreme because it has extended beyond the tweet. So every single tweet that this guy and Deadspin, not just the writer, but Deadspin, everything they put out gets ratio. We're talking like a week later, people are mad, like thousands of tweets on each, well, hundreds at least on each thing. In aggregate, probably tens of thousands of tweets about this, if not more. People are pissed. People don't like fake accusations of racism, and they really don't like you going after children. And they really don't like when you

double, triple, quadruple down when it's very clear that you just made a series of mistakes here and got the whole story wrong and uh and shot your math off but for me this is like a major vibe shift situation i mean we've talked about it for a while the vibe has shifted but this is just if you if there's any doubt at all i think now this story is just a perfect the perfect tell i mean you guys maybe don't remember and i bet you guys i mean river and s you guys maybe don't remember and by you guys i mean river and sasha you probably don't remember um gawker at the zenith of its power because that was back in 2015 really when they were just like and you would have been yeah not super online at that point or not like we were um but what a fall from grace i mean these used to be the the internet gestapo like everyone feared gawker

and now it's just like um obviously gawker was assassinated by peter um but this these like sort of remaining vestiges of the once horrifying beast are just sort of like as they try and recapture the glory days they are just constantly embarrassing the legacy of uh of evil i don't know what is your what is your take on this river asajana i thought it was funny that the i believe it was a writer of it or somebody else that's been when it was revealed because originally the reason people said it was blackface is because he was like a profile like it it was, you can see out of his face. And when they showed that the other side was red, he was like, well,

actually this is worse because then it's like red face or whatever, which is even great now because like the kids in Indian. And so it's like, it's like, can Indians do red face? Let's talk about blackface really quick. Like, yeah.

I'm not going to Megyn Kelly it right now to be like, what's wrong with blackface? Like I, like I understand what's wrong with blackface like i like i understand what's wrong with blackface if you're doing like a minstrel show um but my question is actually more like what is blackface if your face just has black paint on it is that blackface like there are surely many reasons why you might be painting your face black in costume uh or red or a mix of the two um what about that star i was thinking about that star wars dude uh the scary one with the

double-sided lightsaber from the like new ones from the early 2000s that dude is like like is that blackface is that yeah darth maul is darth maul blackface i don't like what are the rules here because you would think, no, obviously, a sane person would say, that's of course not blackface. It's not a mistral show. He's an evil alien. But I don't think that everyone would say that. I mean, there are people who say that the ogres in Lord of the Rings were blackface, even though they were a mythical evil creature. It has nothing to do with race. That's a completely made up thing. But people kind of will call anything blackface. And so it's like, one is just is black paint on your face, black face to how much black paint has to be on your face before it constitutes blackface? Does anyone have an answer to these questions? I don't want to make any mistakes here. I think there are two.

There are basically two elements of blackface to qualify as blackface. One, your face has to be painted totally black. And two, you have to be in costume of a black person. And in this situation, neither of those elements are there with the kid because his face is not fully painted black and he's not in costume of a black person. In the old minstrel shows too, it wasn't just

that like these were white actors dressing up as black people i think they were dressing up as like exaggerated like they would draw on like big red lips like it was to make fun of black people so like i mean i don't know just like the idea that just like even i mean not to defend justin trudeau or whatever but it was like like for people like doing like halloween costumes or whatever they like like they're pretending to be a black person like is that really are they is the intent to make fun of like black people like probably i mean there's never been a man in history who's loved blackface as much as much as justin trudeau but we've only so far we have we have i think two i remember this is an old controversy. Man, I wish that we were around at Pyrewire's for when those blackface pictures were coming

out of Chateau. And point taken about it, it wasn't a minstrel show he was doing. He just... The man loved to color his face black for whatever reason. But when those pictures started coming out, by the time we got to the second one, the first one was a huge controversy. The second one was like, bro, are you kidding me? People were flabbergasted that there was a second and then his response was not just sorry they implied i forget what the exact verbiage was

but i was reading i'm like they're implying that there are more pictures out there like we need to embrace we need to brace ourselves for like a third fourth possibly fifth black face justin trudeau picture um never came out i'm still waiting um but uh yeah it's not that's not i think this reminds me of um this whole conversation of not the little kid obviously little kid that wasn't blackface even in the way that like deranged people online tend to think of blackface uh also he's little and it's just like it was like the whole thing was really crazy um but the question of like the more nuanced blackface question, perhaps that River, you were just alluding to is like, are you being made fun of or not? Is that what is the spirit

behind the blackface perhaps? This reminds me of all of the irony questions that would come up when it comes to humor. So when Stephen Colbert, I believe it was, made fun of, he was making fun of a racist person and in so doing employed like anti-Asian jokes. But he was making fun of people who do that. Like he was his whole, the whole point of his joke was that like the person he was parroting was a racist against Asian people. And then he was attacked online. This was in the height, this was in 20 teens, like heart of darkness for this kind of stuff. He was attacked for being anti-Asian because he just said the words. And we had this weird conversation online where it was like, but you understand the point of his joke, right? He's making fun of racists. He's saying racist is bad. For some reason, I have two thoughts on it here. We're not allowed to address the actual point behind the sentiment. And I can't understand if it's like they know what the point is and they don't care, or maybe these people just actually,

They know what the point is and they don't care. Or maybe these people just actually fundamentally lack humor, which would explain most of the last five or seven years. So I don't know. What do you think, Sanjana? I think that it's a combination of both. I mean, I think that there's an extent to which they probably do lack humor. But I also think they're just grasping for content and that like this was a this was a form of content that worked for a while like there was a time when you could get a lot of clicks by writing a story about someone i don't know doing blackface or um yeah like a five-year-old kid doing something apparently morally reprehensible um but i think the vibe shift that you're talking about shows

that this is no longer i mean you're going to get ratioed if you do this kind of stuff nowadays um and so i think that this is probably like whether or not these people just don't have a sense of humor or if they're just um you know sort of unable to grasp irony um to me is almost besides the point because i feel like the more interesting thing here is that like this form of media is falling out of style and Deadspin is like breathing its dying gasps. And the person behind the article, I think, was just completely humiliated. So. Yeah. I mean, again, he did triple down.

It was weird to me that he would, but then I guess like what else can you do at that point other than kind of try and frame the reaction to your bizarre racial tirade as itself racist and that's i think what he has to fall back on is you maybe really have to just drink your own kool-aid and uh i don't know pretend that you didn't just embarrass yourself on a global stage which was named k something. Let's, let's give him a shout out. Karen Phillips or Karen.

What was it? Jay Phillips. C-A-R-R-O-N. Karen Phillips. Yep. So he's a Karen. Policing the world of racist five-year-olds. We all are really grateful for the job.

Well done. What was that River? Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, like, I think the context is kind of important too. It's like this is that a chiefs game and they've been there's an effort to try to get like them to change their

name like they got the redskins to change their name which i guess redskins does hit a little bit harder than the chiefs but like yeah it does they um yeah like it's some it's some native americans but it's actually a lot of like i saw like white people who are like oh we're like making caricatures of like native americans or whatever but like in a way like it's kind of like peak multiculturalism and you know what i mean it's like we're like celebrating like it's like the the whole thing with like native american warriors is like they are like celebrated even though they were like technically the enemies of the United States it was like even even like at the time

like it was their sort of like bravery or whatever and like defending their land was like can seen as like kind of like an honorable like cool thing like I think even Ulysses Grant I think his middle name was like Tecumseh or something like there was like always this weird

interchange where it was like yeah like weseh or something like there was like always this weird interchange where it was like yeah like we were taking their land but we also kind of thought they were badass for like defending it yeah but it i think because also it wasn't i was thinking about this a lot lately in the context of israel palestine which don't worry we're not getting into today um but the question of like what is your land and that that's been thrown back on america a bit who are americans who are engaged in this conversation it's like well what is your land you know you stole it from the indians or whatever and when in israel palestine people are talking about you know well who ran the who owned the land a hundred years ago and then who owned it three thousand years ago or whatever we're

talking about different kingdoms and governments. North America, or I'm sorry, Turtle Island was never that. It was, we're talking like hundreds of different South America and Central America. Yes, you had actual empires and that you could say like this land belonged to something. In North America, it was like tribes didn't think of the land that way. A lot of these people were nomadic. They were like nomadic peoples roaming the land. Not all of them nomadic, but many were.

And there was no real official ownership of the land. No government, no people who were like, this has been our land for millennia, no history, nothing. So when Ulysses was middle named, whatever he was middle named, we're talking about a time when actually various tribes would be helping Americans in this or that context. The French allied with some of the Indian tribes against the British. They were just a part. Multiple tribes were a part of history in many different ways. So it wasn't just this, I don't know, we have this weird cartoonish version of American history where there was this Native American people, this monolithic culture that was here first that then we then took land from. And because that's not

true, history doesn't make sense in the context of that. So when we talk about history, people are often, I think, confused about how the Native American piece of it all fits in. It just doesn't because like Native American, that's not a people, that is not a thing that existed. It wasn't Grant, by the way, it was William Sherman, who was another Civil War general. But he, Chukwumasay was like, he was like a Native American chief who like united a bunch of tribes like against america ulysses ulysses takuma hey would be wild um ulysses wasn't his first his his original name i forget now i'm forgetting i'm blanking on what his original name was he gave himself ulysses which is also such a badass thing to do like i'm changing my name from bob to ulysses like that's wild um i want to talk a

little bit about uh i mean first like last thoughts on native americans blackface redface i mean when's the last time one of you dressed up with feathers in your hair would you still do it today anything i actually i did it as a kid yeah yeah i was gonna say there are now deleted instagram pictures i think from when i was like 12 or 13 um and my friend i think i think later said it was we dressed up as birthday cake or something um but it was oh you were chocolate no no no we were we had more headdresses um what we said oh i thought you said it was you but then you try to play it off as birthday cake how do you play off a headdress as birthday cake uh i don't know like sort of candles they were poorly made headdresses we didn't buy uh it was handmade stuff um but we were not informed really at the time so i dressed up as tonto from the lone ranger when i was a kid because i used to

watch the old like 50s tv show with my grandpa and i liked him so there's i i was a ninja a ninja turtle for like three different years and so i had dark green face um and i gotta i mean i want to just get that out there now i don't know what happens if these pictures get out there um but i'm definitely in green face somewhere uh i believe i was rafael at first and then michelangelo um none of this matters let's get on to elon musk i want to talk about yesterday uh without two days ago i'm sorry uh end of the day we're about to put out the uh the industry newsletter and elon is in this interview that goes live with the new york times you guys should really check out the full interview there is there's a lot of crazy

shit in here i mean there's one moment where elon i don't want to say crazy i think by crazy i don't mean he sounded maybe we can talk about that in a minute i mean it was fun this was a fun interview there was one moment where he tells this sort of aghast like globalist type audience that he himself is like the single greatest force for environmental good in history like better than any living human alive but like like forever. There's another part, and he just like totally deadpan. Another part where he says to the guy interviewing him, he says, I'm only doing this because I'm friends with you, Jonathan. The guy who was interviewing was Andrew Ross Sorkin, like not named Jonathan at all.

who was interviewing was Andrew Ross Sorkin, not named Jonathan at all. But the one that got the most play was Sorkin is grilling him on advertising revenue. This has been a major conflict at the company for a while now. So huge companies have been dropping, have been pulling their advertising from the platform on grounds they say that it's unsafe. This platform has all sorts of antisemitism and blah, blah, blah on it. And it's all Elon's fault because he doesn't believe in moderation, et cetera. In reality, as we've reported again and again and again here, and we've kind of mapped the whole thing out, the way this works is you have a whole bunch of nonprofits that exist solely to try and mainstream censorship, specifically political censorship on platforms like Twitter. And the way they do that is they drum up a bunch of totally fraudulent

research stories on the rise of whatever sort of speech or how hate speech ends up next to brand advertisements and whatnot. And they do a report on it. They send it to their friends in the press who also want to see censorship on Twitter. They write articles about it. And that either... Here it gets ambiguous. It's like that either spooks the advertisers for real, or the people who are actually buying these ads are... I think they want the censorship as well. It's like this unofficial alignment on the issue of like, how do we make sure that people can't disagree on topics like, for example, COVID at the height of the COVID pandemic. So advertisers have been dropping recently, especially. Elon's pressed about this on stage. Sorkin actually invokes Walt Disney. He says, you know, we just had Bob Iger on the stage.

And he was about to say was that Disney is not advertising on the platform. And Elon says, I don't want them to. And Sorkin's like, what are you talking about? You don't want them to. He's like, I don't want them to advertise here. And everyone's like, what? And the audience is quiet and nervous, I think. It's like he seems... Elon seems very upset. And he says, and I'm paraphrasing here, we should probably just play the clip really quick.

If they want to blackmail me, fuck them. What was the exact phrasing of his... Because he said, fuck you or fuck off a handful of times i want to get it exactly right brandon can you pull that up what is the exact quote go fuck yourself go fuck yourself but go fuck yourself he said it twice he said if you want to blackmail me with money go fuck yourself and then everybody just got silent and then he said go fuck yourself and then and sorkin just like what is going on here and the audience like a bunch of there's

some stifled laughter yeah there's laughter he goes hi bob go fuck yourself bob bob eiger of walt disney world um so this is crazy this is uh obviously i mean people freak out but they can't do anything about it elon has this platform it's like you know it's been dying they say for a year it's still standing um he does need advertising revenue a bunch of advertisers have polled. There's a whole list of it floating around the internet somewhere. But a lot of major, major companies, including, I believe, last I checked, it was like Ford, Disney. I'm not sure if Apple is still polled because Yon's been public about that one and it's gone back and forth. But it is definitely a problem for the company. But he is being blackmailed. What they want is aggressive, they say content moderation. And what they mean by that is There is almost no way to talk about illegal

immigration without being perceived as by the entire open borders side of the conversation as racist. They genuinely believe that. They believe if you want less immigration to the country, legal or illegal, either way, that is a racist position. And if you believe it's a racist position, then that runs afoul of the content moderation policies. And so in this way, you're making an entire side of a very important debate not allowed. So I don't know. What did you guys make of that interview? I know, River, you saw it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's funny. As you were alluding to Media Matters which is one of these sort of like mercenary organizations they

you know found a video that had like no views and then basically allegedly like manipulated the algorithm to try to get an ad to show up to it I think that actually what when he was talking about blackmail i think he was uh specifically talking about why disney uh pulled

out which is when uh there's this infamous incident where elon someone was basically saying that like jewish americans had like supported censorship during blm or something and so uh this sort of whatever like that's happening with like israel palestine now all the protests or whatever like their fault or something and elon said like you're like saying the truth or whatever and that's why disney pulled out and so i think that he's when he's like talking about bob eiger i think he's like yeah like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna say what i want to on my own platform and i'm gonna be blackmailed um so i think it's like it's kind of personal for elon too in a way because like people pulled out due to you know his own posting i mean his that one tweet you're talking about i remember that tweet it was not a good tweet you're talking about, I remember that tweet. It was not a good tweet.

You're right. Yeah. It sounded really bad. He clarified with 15 more tweets about the ADL, which he's been in public war with for months at this point, because the ADL is behind a lot of the deplatforming or a lot of the advertising stuff. They're the ones who, when he's in conversations with executives about why they've pulled their funding, all roads lead back to these people who he insists are... I mean, I think he's suing the ADL, or at least he said he was going to. And now he's, I think, also saying he's going to sue Media Matters over defamation. So that's what he was... He was talking about the ADL. He was saying, you're pushing these anti-white people narratives or blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it didn't sound great. But the broader machine that people are asking for, we just saw Peter Zaihan leave Twitter. Peter Zaihan, the writer, who I liked, still like, I still like his books, but his video on YouTube was pretty disappointing. And he talked about a few things. And one of them was the overall tenor. It was like, make Twitter great again type argument. He's like, back in

the glory days of Twitter three years ago, this was a great place free of disinformation. And it's like, that was never true. Even if you don't count all of the official statements on COVID as disinformation, which in hindsight, they definitely were. There was always people, there's always Russian bots, there were always Russian agents and Chinese agents trying to play with our communication or whatever. It's never been what people are talking about now. All people ever did on Twitter three years ago was complain about how terrible it was. That has not changed. My actual use of Twitter has maybe changed. It is a little glitchy and there are a lot of bots still and there are

some porn bots or whatever, but that's how it's changed. Day-to-day, that's how it's changed. And also, I don't live in fear of saying the wrong thing and being erased anymore. But that's what the advertiser boycott is all about. It's like, can we get back to a place where the state has de facto control over what constitutes or over what is considered true or false information, which we now know the state is in communication with all of the major platforms unofficially. And that was controlling or that was influencing what these platforms considered misinformation and not. And that's crazy. No one should want to live in that world where the state is de facto in charge of what is allowed to be spoken of on a major platform for speech. And so I don't want to get

lost ever in the stupidity of a single Elon tweet, because if you just step back, it is so obvious that there is a much more important conflict here. And that is the conflict over the debate over whether or not the average American is entitled to an opinion or not. And I believe the average American is, even though I disagree with the average American on almost everything, I think that they are allowed to speak and we have to live in a world where they are allowed to speak. The end. Yeah. I think what's interesting to me about this sort of flamboyant advertising, advertisers pulling out of Twitter is that this is still a calculus that they think makes sense. Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time on Twitter

and I'm sort of around a lot of people who are not favorable to this kind of pro-censorship mindset. But it's interesting to me that like, Disney still thinks it's a good idea to, or still thinks it would be financially advantageous to them to do this ultimately. Because I think my sense is that the calculus is always um when they do things like this is this gonna accrue more

like a larger audience to us right is this gonna it is interesting especially in light of what just happened with disney so bob eiger is back because disney was failing on account of all the woke films right like that's that that's they they have publicly said their goal now is to refocus on the joy of the audience. They want to get away from politics and, and back to the kind of stories that I think are a little more universal. And, um, I agree. It was strange that he has like waded into the swamp here.

He perhaps tried to do it. Maybe he thought he was going to be quieter about it or something. Maybe he didn't realize that Elon was the kind of guy who was going to blow up a spot, um, at the New York times and like put a big spotlight on him. I mean, Bob Iger is now like the face of the advertiser boycott.

I can't imagine that he wanted that. Uh, I don't know. Yeah. It's, it's, it is, it is a weird weird it was a weird

choice for him like he should have it's like the meme man like you should have just sat there and ate your food like you just did not have to get involved here um this all reminds me uh or not all this all is related to the ireland stuff um i don't know if you guys followed the news in Ireland at all, the riots and whatnot. Anyone? Yeah. I'll summarize it really quick. So you have an Algerian dude stabs a couple little kids, I think. One girl seriously wounded, hospitalized. And it triggers crazy rioting in Dublin. And it is perceived by the media, obviously, as a racist riot. It's a riot over the concept of Algerians existing in the country, which, honestly, it might have been that. Honestly, it might have been that. You have crazy immigration tension across the entire continent of Europe right now.

In every single country that has let in a large amount of Muslims into the country from either North Africa or the Middle East or Turkey, there are just major cultural conflicts. You have a huge population in most of the Western European countries now of people, we're talking like between five and 10%, where you have people who don't know the language in some instances, have a totally different religion, are not interested in assimilation, or maybe don't have access to assimilation, would be maybe the steel man of their position. In either direction, the integration is not happening and you now have a culture in serious conflict. And so there are just tensions across the board. The media and the government in Ireland is like, this riot indicates that we are being bad and racist and we need to pass a law. The way we're going to respond to this is we're going to pass a law about what you can

say online. They're blaming the internet for the rising tensions over the question really of immigration is I think the galvanizing force here. Now, there are always some idiot slew of policies in some stupid ass European country about speech and regulating it. I think the one that makes this one worth bringing up, I don't like to focus on Europe if I can help it, but the one that this is the most aggressive one we've ever seen, not only did the government say, you know, in the language of the proposed bill, not only are you not allowed to create hate speech, which super ambiguous term, we could talk about it for hours, doesn't mean anything is used as a political weapon. You are not allowed to have in your possession on your phone any kind of hate speech. And so what that means is like, and this is, I mean, it's right there in the language.

If you have, so if you have like a based peppy meme that is considered super racist, and it's just like on your camera roll for any number of reasons, that is illegal. And that's crazy. That's like, I mean, you can't carry around certain books or whatever. That's very alarming to me. This is on the heels of a lot of attempts at versions of this throughout Europe and also even in America. In America, they always fail because the First Amendment is so strongly protected legally for over the last century and a half.

There have been endless cases that have gone to the Supreme Court that have refortified the right to speech. So we're at less risk of an official censorship here than we are of the sort of unofficial censorship that has been taking place over the last five to seven years uh online but yeah it was crazy i mean what do you make of the irish law what about the memes are you guys are you guys afraid of traveling to dublin with your camera roll river especially yeah yeah i mean it's like crazy and troubling and especially for like a country that's had with like a very long history in recent history of political violence up until the 90s

like you would think that people would be more uh cautious about like more paranoid about that sort of thing but apparently not i mean the the irish constitution guarantees the right to freedom of expression um but i'm just like looking through i'm using gpt right now um gpt tells me the rights not absolute yeah yeah it's not absolute and subject to public order and morality considerations. Americans always get this, I think, a little bit. We don't realize, I think, how unique our specific tradition of speech is. And it does not exist anywhere else across Europe. And it already didn't exist in Ireland and the UK. In the UK, the cops have gone to houses of people who are posting things that were considered, you know, hateful. And in France, I think it was, is it Brigitte Bordeaux who has been cited by the government? She. Like she's like, she's like a make France great again type woman.

And she's constantly getting in trouble. Like it's very common over there. I think the crazy thing here now is the intersection of the, it's like the digital media piece specifically that I think about and how that impacts potentially all of us. Because these governments are not going to be, they're not done with just like, you know, the UK going to the door of 50 year old Alma May for saying, you know, there shouldn't be so many Turks in my neighborhood. They're going to go to the social media companies and be like, who is this anonymous poster? What is their address? Where can I find them? And people, you know, Elon mark are going and i guess the chinese government are going to

have to either give the information to these governments or cease to operate in europe and they're definitely going to give the names away all of them i think and ireland has a lot of power over tech too because it's a you know a tax haven and like apple is headquartered there etsy's headquartered there there's like a lot of tech companies that is headquartered there etsy's headquartered there there's like a lot of tech companies that are headquartered in ireland for tax reasons so they have like outsized control and that's after so for a small country yeah like do they demand because of this legislation is so sweeping um is there some kind of a demand for fundamental change to the platforms that these companies are going to

have to do in order to operate abroad. Twitter in particular is an interesting case because they don't have many people working there. So if Ireland, if the Irish government, the German government, the French government, they all demand some specific set of rules for Twitter to operate abroad, they're not going to be able to build 15, 20 different versions of Twitter. It's going to be one version of Twitter and they're not going to be able to build 15, 20 different versions of Twitter. It's going to be one version of Twitter and we're all going to be on it. And that is really bad.

That's, I mean, I don't want to live in a world where the Europeans are determining what our policy of online free speech looks like. That's like chilling and dystopian. Have you ever gotten one of those emails saying that somebody reported your tweet to the German yeah i get them all i used to get them all the time they have stopped actually i don't know i don't know why i don't get them anymore

you know i talked about them once getting too soft so i tweeted about him once and elon commented and he was like we're gonna take care of this. So maybe he took care of it. That was a while ago and I haven't seen one since. Sorry, Sanjana, I cut you off. No, I was just going to say that this is one of the dimensions of a few months ago when Elon announced he was suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which he wrote about on Empire Wires. This is one of the elements I thought was interesting was the fact that the Center for Countering Digital Hate has headquarters in London and dc and it was started by a british guy uh with connections i think to the british labor government um and the labor party and um it it was just it sort of fortified for me the

fact that americans yeah as you said don't understand just how used to censorship Europeans are. I mean, this happened in England a few weeks ago. There was a case where a guy had like posted a video, I think, where he was like pointing out Palestinian flags or something at a pro-Palestine rally. And the Metropolitan Police showed up to his door and arrested him because he had said something that they deemed to be hate speech. And this is the kind of thing that like European, these are like headlines that I don't think really bat eyelashes around a lot of Europeans. For us, they seem like patently insane. Um, but I do think that it's interesting now that we're living in a world with these kind of international social media platforms that we all share where you see these, these, uh,

competing ideas about free speech, battling it out. Yeah. I just want as little international exposure as possible at this point. I just saw the UN come out and, uh, they didn't even come out. This is the, so they have said they're going to come out and request they didn't even come out this is the so they have said they are going to come out and request uh american people eat less meat um the united nations this is like a thing that i guess the general united nations general council or whatever the hell is saying uh and i think to myself like one why does this exist like this isn't it's like a toothless thing we're funding

this like why are we funding this like why are we funding this uh why are we funding you know these random countries ability to go and talk shit about our diet specifically uh but then it too it's like completely toothless um three i don't want to eat i mean what what is what do you i don't i don't want to live in this like bug eating world i i don't want to live in the third world where it's like, why are they not eating meat? It's not because they care about the environment. It's because they're poor. It's like they can't afford the meat. And we want to live in a world where we have abundance and people can eat a nutritious meal. And it's just tedious to me. I hate these

kinds of conversations. And I hate that they spend their time all day talking about shit like this. Yeah, we got to extrapolate or extricate ourselves from this nebulous series of global, I don't know, entanglements. What do you guys make of the meat thing? I mean, maybe I feel like are any of us here? No one is a vegetarian here. I don't think. No. No.

I mean, should we be? Should we be forced? Should the UN be able to tell us to eat less meat, I don't think. No. No. I mean, should we be? Should we be forced? Should the UN be able to tell us to eat less meat? I don't know. What do you think about the UN? It seems like a calm strategy at the end of the day. Like, they'll come out and announce that Americans should eat less meat. Every left-leaning media organization will repeat the headline in America.

And that'll just be another, I don't know, PR campaign for, I don't know, degrowth, decel. I don't know. I have trouble understanding the motivations behind an action like this. I don't think that they could possibly think that people will eat less meat because of what they say. It seems very unlikely to me that people will. It's weird to be targeted towards just America also. It's not like we're the only people eating meat. We're a relatively small population, especially when you look at China and India, which are both.

China has a strategic pork reserve i believe i mean so their economies are growing and as economies grow more people will eat the meat and you know we're talking about populations that are many times bigger than ours so if you cared about just the animal welfare that's where you would look if you care about the emissions there are way bigger culprits also in china and india So they don't. It's like, what is the point of this? I don't get it. Is it maybe, I mean, when you talk about it as a calm strategy, is it just to get attention? Are they like advertising that the UN exists still? This reminds me maybe of PETA. I feel like every holiday PETA says something insane.

Like that's so insane that, I mean, they had the one, and I've seen this image actually a couple of times, they brought it back out. I'm a fan of PETA's honestly. They delight me in a way and I know they're doing it on purpose. So I give them a free pass to a certain extent. They had one of, it was like a, it was a person on the Thanksgiving table, like curled up like a Thanksgiving roast with no head. And then he was surrounded by like these like horrifying alien looking giant turkeys. And it was like, I mean, the framing this year was turkeys wouldn't do it to you. So why do you do it to them? And the community then community notes, noted them and said, you know,

well, turkeys are omnivore and they would do it to you if they could. But in the past years, I feel like they said stuff just like isn't this horrifying you know like how would you like how would you feel if you were on the menu or whatever but their point they want to be ratioed they want that attention they want everyone to see the thing they want just the idea of pita to sort of be um in people's minds that this is even a question that you should maybe not be eating turkey or whatever for them i think that's that's a win's a win. Is that maybe what's happening with the UN? Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, I personally have issues with industrial meat production, even though I do participate in the purchase and consumption of industrially produced meat. But

I think that the UN is also probably just staffed by some of the craziest people on the planet who like think we shouldn't be having kids who think that no one should ever eat meat for any reason. These are like I mean, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but like if you actually go through the plan, the 2030 plan that they put out, it is kind of insane. The sort of lifestyle changes that they want to push for on a large scale. What is it about, because you're right,

the UN attracts a certain kind of person. And it's not like the UN, it's not a formal representative from the United States going to talk about some important issue of foreign policy. It's all of the other people. It's a massive organization and there's a lot of bullshit that happens there. But it's also prestigious. To say that you work at the UN, it means something. And I think that this certain kind of hyper... I mean, they tend to be politically very left. They tend to be degrowth. They tend to be, if not a vegetarian, certainly adjacent. They seem to be attracted to this sort of position. Very prestigious, highly bureaucratic. These are the people who also populate pretty much every local government. I don't know. I still don't know what to make of that. What is it that

they're attracted to about other than the prestige? I mean, it's like they don't get paid much. Is it maybe the pay? Is it because there's no pay, it only attracts ideologues or something? It's like a trust fund kid's job. It's like a type of thing that you do because you feel like you're doing something important and it's like everybody knows what the un is um but it doesn't make any money but that's fine because you you don't need it like and like that also creates a certain type of like politics in there when you're like telling americans to eat um less meat which i think if you like went through the demographics of like who's eating meat like it would probably be like you know there i feel like something like veganism is like very much like an upper middle class to elite phenomenon like the working class is eating

cheeseburgers for sure yeah uh we've talked about degrowth a couple of times now and saja you just mentioned you know these people who don't want us to have kids and whatnot there was this wild article um what was it was it the atlantic that came out uh the new yorker i think it was the new yorker yeah it was the new yorker so the new yorker comes out with a couple of i think it was a review of a couple of books on whether or not people should be having kids due to climate change and the various horrors of of the day they were like you know is like, is it just to bring kids into this world? Brandon, you've been talking about degrowth a bit. I mean, did you make

anything of this when it came out? Do you think it's part of some broader trend? I mean, how do you feel about that? Well, I don't think it's new at all. And I think that the new yorker probably isn't affected by i mean i don't know who stands to benefit from this message you know and but i don't think the new the new yorker has been you know sort of influenced by some third party to write this article uh i think it's just a they're they're capturing they're covering a trend that hasn't yet been sort of discussed on the on the stage of of mainstream media um we covered this trend or sanji did i don't know when it was like last february um with the i don't know what the subreddit is called i can't remember what it is anymore support collapse support yeah so yeah i don't think it's a new thing

at all. It's just finally made its way. What's interesting though is that it comes from different directions. So, you have people who argue we shouldn't have kids because it's bad for the world. People cause emissions, we're intense on the environment. If there are less of us, there'll be more resources and whatnot. It's like the Thanos argument for population.

But then, you know, you also have people moralizing about the kids. And they say, to bring a kid into the world is immoral for them because their life's going to be so bad.

And it's, this one's, it's unclear if these are actually two separate, they present as two separate groups, but I don't think they are. I think that among both, there is just a fundamental drive right now from a certain kind of philosophically oriented person towards suicide. And that's what this feels like to me. It feels like suicidal ideation. And now we're celebrating it in the pages of our most storied literary magazines in the country. I don't know, Sandra, do you see a distinction between the two or do you think maybe it is this broader trend or? I think they're all part of the same sort of

psychological archetype, if you will, which also has a lot to do with like misanthropy i think um there's just a part i mean i've interviewed some antinatalists um and sort of some for this article that i read a few months ago and what stood out to me reading through the reddit posts and talking to people and um getting a glimpse into their worldview is that like a lot of them also just don't like kids. And there's this kind of like almost defensive rhetoric of like, yeah, but kids are annoying and like, you won't be able to, you know, travel to Bali. Right. You won't be able to have it all if you've got like, you know, kids vomiting at 5am or something and who need to go to school and that kind of thing. I mean, I think that it's, I think there is a sort of death drive component to it of like, this is all part and parcel of this feeling that humanity

is fundamentally evil. And so we shouldn't be producing new technology to prolong our lifespans. We shouldn't be reproducing. We shouldn't love one another we're just fundamentally bad um and i think that's kind of the core philosophy at the heart of all of this um and you can see how i think it's very maladaptive because if you really believe it um you can see how it could easily lead to depression suicidal impulses um yeah yeah it's also like really millenarian too because even if you like accept that climate change is going to lead to like these awful like disasters or whatever if you're like a middle class american and you have a kid and bring them up in the next century even if like all that's true they're still gonna live better than like 95 of people who have ever lived you know what i mean

so it's like i mean i mean there's like people who live in like complete like absolute poverty and uh like sub-saharan africa and like parts of asia and stuff who are still having like seven kids and like actual catastrophe produces there's been studies on this actual catastrophe wars famine and stuff like that actually produce higher birth rates because people are like oh i've got to have like one kid that survives into adulthood to take care of me um so i wonder how much of this comes down to people having a hard time finding a relationship too because if you were happily coupled off and could have children um i don't know that just feels like a much bigger decision at that point you know there's like a real powerful biological drive

to procreate and i i don't know i i see a lot of childless i mean a lot of childless women in their late 30s uh a lot of i mean men, I feel like men, single men never have really been like, I need to have kids right now. So if you're not in a couple and you kind of can't imagine a future for yourself with kids, then maybe you're just more likely to find some kind of moral justification for that and find solace in this. My whole life, I've known one woman who truly just never wanted kids and was always happily coupled off. And she was struggling with it. She would talk about it all the time. It was like she was very frustrated with the imposition on her and she really never wanted them. I think she had serious issues with her mom and whatever it was, I believed her. I was like, I believe that you don't want to have kids and it has nothing to do with the fact that you can't. But most other

people I've met who've talked about this have been either very young and just like very collegey or older and not able to have kids. Something weird happened with the parents of millennials. I'm a millennial and I grew up thinking that if I had a kid too early, it would be like a premature death. I was absolutely terrified of having kids because my parents and the parents of my friends made it seem like you were foregoing some incredibly important period of development if you had a kid before you were 20, let's say. And to have a kid when you were in high school was like, that's just the end

for you. The scarlet letter. And I never shook that. I mean, I shook it off, but it took me a long time to shake that idea off of having kids is a fundamental and quite possibly terrible restriction on your freedom. And your freedom is the most important thing that you have. And I actually don't think that's necessarily true. But I feel like I was kind of brainwashed to believe that. And I think a lot of people my age, who are probably now childless and maybe single um are still affected

by that messaging and i'm still kind of confused where that came from i'd like to maybe do a story on it or something and really figure out what was what was that all about you know because their parents didn't like our grandparents i don't think ever gave that message to our parents, but we got it. And I'm kind of interested. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. Also, we have this from like health class. It's all the protection stuff. It's like you cannot be pregnant.

And then that feeling, you're right, it still persists. I mean, there are people in their 30s who saw this feeling, but the crazy thing, I mean, there, there is this moment in like your mid to late twenties when I remember people would have kids and friends of mine that that same age, 25, 26, 27 would be like, oh wow. Like she's so young. It's like, no, like we're not, we're all like, that's a fine age. If you're 25, 26, 27, you're married. it's perfectly fine to have a kid at that age. And yet we perceive it, even now, me saying it out loud, I'm like, wow, at 25, 26, they're very young. That's this other thing that we do, this infantilization of people in their 20s. in their 20s. And this butts up against something that River, you've written about, which is like the conversations around, even the conversations around things like age of consent. Can a 23-year-old

girl consent to sex with a 33-year-old man? Because the age gap is so big and she's really so young when you think about it and their experiences and blah, blah, blah. It's like, she's an adult. She's 23. I've been 23. I was an adult at 23. I know what 23 feels like. It is, yes, it's, I don't, it's just prolonging of our youth, which maybe culturally makes a lot of sense. And wouldn't it be nice if we could be in our 20s for the next, I don't 20 30 years but biologically it doesn't work that way biologically i'm now in my 30s and uh my late i'm 38 like this is where this is immutable age is real though we are talking to brian johnson and hopefully have some good news for us uh from the immortality front i don't know river what do you make of the age gap stuff and the infantilization of the youth um i think it's kind of an elite thing uh there's there's

like a big class component to this i think because it's people who have like master's degrees and college until they're like 30 or whatever and it's like okay now i'm 30 now i have a career now my life is beginning but if you're like if you don't go to college like your life begins at like 18 or 19 or whatever like my brother my brother um got married a couple years ago and my friends who were like how old is he i was like oh he's 20 and like his like fiance was 20 and they were like that's so young is she pregnant and i was like no i mean he's just they want to get married and he has he was in like a union apprenticeship he's an electrician now he has to keep like makes more money than i do

and like his wife is like finishing up uh nursing school and it's just like yep they wanted to get married and so they didn't it's like nobody in my family thought it was weird because they all got married like relatively young and but it was like i don't know it was like my friends i was talking to they were just like that's crazy which is also gay people like you know like people thought i was chris and i were young because we had married when we were both like 27 like 25 but you know i mean i it's um it's definitely like it's in the i think that goes along with the age gap thing too because people were just like oh i just felt like i felt like I was a kid at 23 because I had never had a real job and I had never had any real responsibilities because I had been in college this whole time and just partying constantly and whatever. It's not actually, I think, most people's experiences.

I think you also want to look back and give yourself an excuse for being where you are yourself. You know, if you're 35 and single and you see a 35-year-old dating a 25-year-old, you're like, well, I couldn't have dated someone when I was 25 or 23 because I wasn't all cooked yet. I wasn't myself. I wasn't who I am. I need to travel and experience things.

You know, maybe that's the girl version, the guy version would be like, you know, I needed to get my career together or whatever else. And that's just not really the case. Like in reality, you could get married, you know, once you're an adult. I want to finish off with something kind of cool, which Sanjana, you recently wrote a story for Dolores Park, our local politics vertical that covers San Francisco. Why don't you tell us about the story really quick and just a kind of recap? I think we've talked about it on previous episodes, but I want to recap it really quick and then I want to say what happened. Yeah, so the story is about an initiative in San Francisco called the Dream Keeper Initiative, which basically funnels $60 million a year into a bunch of different nonprofits, ostensibly for the purpose of ensuring Black joy in the city.

It's got a bunch of very vague goals, and we go through some of the more outrageous allocations of money in the article. But basically, this is an initiative that was created around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests and George Floyd's killing. Although lots of people left very angry comments on the article about how George Floyd wasn't actually killed. So anyway. Oh, yeah. We have to do a piece about that. Because I also did not realize how crazy that conversation, or not crazy, but how much it had changed since I last clicked in. So yes, we'll table that. We'll come back to it.

Yeah. But anyway, so this piece came out and revealed, I mean, people have for a long time been talking about the nonprofit industrial complex in San Francisco. But this week, there was an ordinance in the rules committee of the Board of Supervisors, which basically would urge the controller to periodically audit nonprofit contracts. And I personally think it's kind of insane that something like this isn't already in place. I tweeted about it right before the the committee meeting but it's like the ordinance is like yeah the controller should should look at how non-profits are spending their money more than once every 10 years that's basically the gist of it um but at the

rules committee meeting a citizen basically um came with uh the dreamkeeper article on her phone and read two paragraphs from the article to the supervisor's president, including Supervisor Shimon Walton, who was a key architect of Dreamkeeper. And it was pretty badass. I'd like to read something from an article in Dolores Park. She just read the paragraphs and she was like, this is crazy. it was uh it was

a cool moment my favorite moment of it it's at the end they beeped her twice and at the end she has to step step off and she wraps off the sentence and the last part of it that she said it was something along the lines of like this nebulous set of uh organizations that like are not um to be a sm reviewed or something and she like was as she's walking away she looks back and she's like it was like a it was like a hmm and she like marched on um and i i've either so many things i love her i love that she hit us i think you up someone up to be like yo this happened today um i love that we're able to share it with uh folks on x um but it is just so funny to think of the board of supervisors in san francisco city hall sitting

there being forced to listen to a pirate wires piece that is just absolutely epic that is like a new like trophy on our shelf. I love it. I hope it happens more often. They've definitely never heard of Pirate Wires. They will continue to hear of Pirate Wires. Sanjay, an excellent job with that. All of you guys, it's been swell. We will catch you back here next week.

Later.