Pirate Wires - Everyone Is Racist | Pirate Wires #27 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

EPISODE #27: The Pirate Wires crew is back! This week we get into bunch of controversies regarding race in America involving IBM President, Bill Ackman, & Claudine Gay. Whether you agree with them or not, we do stand by the push for free speech. We also get into the Christmas.. I mean.. Holiday Season. Company Christmas parties have replaced drinking with guac and Pickleball. Finally, River breaks down the fake holiday that we know as Kwanzaa. Packed episode! Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.theindustry.pw/p/ibms-racist-hiring-scandal https://www.piratewires.com/p/abolish-kwanzaa 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 - Like & Subscribe! 1:00 - IBM Gets Caught For Racist Hiring Policies 7:00 - Bill Ackman Gets Involved In Racial Conversation During His Fight With Harvard 13:30 - Claudine Gay In Hot Water At Harvard - Discussing Free Speech on College Campuses 23:15 - Hold up... Roxanne Gay is Claudine Gays Cousin! 29:00 - Wrapping Up Speech Conversation 34:30 - Christmas Parties CANCELLED - Drinking Replaced With Guac & Pickleball 40:30 - Abolish Kwanzaa?! River Discusses The Origins Of Kwanzaa - Why Is It Still Celebrated Today? 50:45 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! Pirate Wires Pod Every Friday! See You Next Week #podcast #culutre #tech #politics #racism #billackman #harvard #Christmas

Asians in the U.S. are not an underrepresented minority in a tech company. However, others are. It's interesting that we can call these policies racist now. Bill Ackman, he's using language that every working class white guy who accidentally found himself on Twitter 10 years ago was saying. Plotting Gay, the Harvard president, is under a lot of fire right now. I think what's damning is the double standard that she's applied to this speech as opposed to speech during the last four or five years. Kwanzaa is a completely manufactured sort of multiculturalism.

The fact that the government is legitimizing it. I mean, there's a new Kwanzaa stamp coming out. What is it in 2024? Welcome back to the pod, guys. We have a packed show for you today. A bunch of crazy fun topics. The very first thing I want to talk about is tech story. I think it's part of a much bigger trend that I've been seeing happening here. We have a racist hiring scandal at IBM right now. Scandal to me. I feel like it's sort of not gaining the traction in the media that it should be. But in both directions, it's neither being defended nor attacked, which is weirdly, in my opinion, a sign of progress. Let's just back up for a second. I'm

going to break it down for you. So James O'Keefe, Monday evening, releases a video from 2021 in which the CEO of IBM with one of his subordinates at Red Hat, which is a subsidiary of IBM, is talking about the DEI policies at IBM. And he just very casually, happily, they're both really chest beating about it, And he just very casually, happily, they're both really chest beating about it, this problem at hand and how they go about it. He reveals that in at least some part, bonuses are tied to the number of black and Hispanic people and women who are being hired at the company. So it's both a positive thing and a negative. The positive piece is if your executives are hiring enough black and Hispanics, they're going to get a bonus. And if they're not, their bonus is going to be taken away. He further says, this is the CEO, further says that Asians do not count.

So we take underrepresented and gender. You've got to move both forward by a percentage. That leads to a plus on your bonus. By the way, if you lose, you lose part of your bonus. I'm not trying to finesse this. So for blacks, we should try to get towards 13 point something percent. On Hispanics, you got to get into the mid-teens. Let me say it, Asians in the US are not an underrepresented minority in a tech company. It kind of perfectly encapsulates, I think, a worldview and a perspective on race in America that lives on the very far left. But I also think it's illegal. I think this is a violation of the

Civil Rights Act, which is pretty shocking. And the way that people in these seats of power have played really fast and loose with this stuff at some of the biggest and most important companies in the country over the last few years is shocking and now kind of being released in this new cultural moment is not being received the way that it once was several years ago when a lot of this stuff was first percolating up and being spoken about, the concept of quotas and whatnot. Critically, what has changed in the past few years is a Supreme Court case in which it was ruled unconstitutional for a college to discriminate against people based on their race when it comes to admissions. We're sort of on the path right now to legal challenges,

certainly at IBM at this point, and I think probably at companies throughout the industry as more of this stuff starts to be revealed in a public way, which I think it almost has to be revealed because there's such an appetite for it online right now, which is the other, I think, much bigger part of the story, which is the culture has just completely shifted on this. It is no longer considered a nice thing to do. It is met with real anger across the country. And these people, I mean, critically, IBM, I read this piece in Bloomberg and I was surprised. The headline was obviously defensive of the policy and went after James O'Keefe a little bit. But when I read the actual piece, expecting more of that, I didn't see it. What I saw was just an accurate description of what

was going on, just sort of details of the story. And that says to me, I mean, the sort of lack of defense of this policy, this, in my opinion, clearly racist hiring policy was telling. That says that we're sort of entering a new, not only cultural moment, but even a media moment. I was really surprised not to see any defense of this. I don't know, what do you guys make of this? It's interesting that we can call these policies racist now. In 2020 and 2021, it was really not okay

to call these policies racist, even though on their face, they definitely are. And that vibe shift is very interesting to me. People are just saying, this is racist. Yeah. There's no pushback at all for that. I haven't seen any. I mean, I used to get, I would get dunked on constantly and it's just, it's completely over. I think that you see a little bit more, it's, you know, a lot of this is also X or Twitter is a different platform. I felt it was very different even before Elon took over.

I think I wrote about the vibe shift at the time. Or maybe just like a little bit after, before he had made any changes. Just the culture felt like it had kind of, it was over this sort of discourse. But even, I mean, you would still expect something. You would expect stories in the press. You would expect something from maybe not the Times, but at least Vox or someone sort of jumping in and defending the CEO. And you don't get that at all. I've asked readers, and I'm asking you guys now, anyone listening, if you guys have any more details on what you've been through at any of these companies when it comes to this stuff, any kind of racist hiring practices, any racist language, policing, weird contracts you had to

sign that were coerced against your will, the culture, anything that felt hostile on these racial lines, I would love to hear about it. I think we are pretty close right now to a reckoning when it comes to the DEI stuff. We've also seen, you see tech figures now, sort of previously fence sitters, openly talking about DEI and using this like it's racist, right? These are not people that you think of as the right-wing trolls, as many of the early canaries in this coal mine were labeled. These are regular guys. I think you could say maybe thoughtful people who were scared, or they're just the kind of people who capitalize on attention trends. And in either case, what it says to me is things are very different now than they were

a few years ago. Which brings me to Bill Ackman. So Bill, a big hedge fund guy, took a bunch of money back from Harvard during this sort of yay Hamas shit that's been going on, or yay Hamas drama over the last two months, which we're going to get into in a second as it relates specifically to Harvard's president, Claudine Gay. So what I found really interesting about him is he's really like his, for whatever reason, and maybe we can parse that in a moment, his perspective on Israel-Palestine has shocked him out of the DEI discourse, and he's become sort of like a crusader online against it. And he's using language that is super reminiscent to me of what like every working class white guy who accidentally found himself on Twitter 10 years ago was saying and was being called a total racist

for. These are things like, hey, treating people differently because they're white is wrong. Or, hey, if you're black, it doesn't mean that when I criticize you or disagree with you, it's because I'm racist. Or, hey, not everyone who disagrees with you is racist. And it's amusing to me that this is a complete shift, not only across the country, but among the elites. This is a billionaire who was insulated, I think, from a lot of this. And I guess there were some inklings, Brandon, you mentioned earlier that he had donated some money to Musk for the Twitter stuff. So there is a chance that Bill is one of these guys who just quietly all along really resented

what he was seeing in the culture, but now for whatever reason, feels like he needs to speak up. But generally, I mean, vibe shift, real, not at the companies. What do you think about that before we get into the Harvard stuff specifically? Yeah. I mean, Bill Ackman's dad was like a real estate financier. And I think this is a trend with a lot of people who, white people specifically, who went along with the DE dei stuff in the beginning and like are all about affirmative action um it's you know they feel like they had an advantage um because they were white it was actually just because they were like grew up rich and well connected and so like now that the tables have sort of turned or whatever, um, I guess with like some of the Israel Palestine stuff and,

um, you know, Jewish people are seen as not a minority or like an oppressor class or whatever. They're, um, I guess like kind of getting a, a bit of a taste of,

um, what other people maybe were feeling. And I mean, it was not true for everybody, but I think there is something to be said about like people who grew up with a lot of like wealth and privilege projecting that onto like all white people in a way that just doesn't actually make sense and that's why like something like 30 or 40 percent of white uh students lie on their college application about the race they feel like the deck is stacked against them because they are white right they definitely or even if it's not stacked because stacked against sounds

i think there's less evidence that well i mean maybe that's just what i'm just gonna take it on the other side which would be it's not maybe necessarily stacked against any one specific person it's just there are all of these gifts if you are you happen to to be able to say you know i am this or that race whatever sort of popular uh category exists but i guess i don't know maybe that's just the same thing i guess it's i mean it uh but i i also i just yeah i agree generally that this seems to me to be, these were people who had never met a middle-class person in their life and probably had not met many black people in their life. And poorer people tend to meet more black people. And that is why poorer people tend not to understand when they are white and poor, when people tell them they're privileged, because they're in the same fucking places. And it just doesn't make any sense. I was thinking

about this in the context of my parents growing up. My parents, when I was really young, and they had way less before I was born, my younger sister and I were the lucky ones. And by lucky, I mean, at that point, my mom was a teacher and my dad was in construction. And so we were living high on the hog. But my mom and dad had four kids. And then my aunt and cousin were living in our house for a while, one bathroom. It was tight. There were Christmases. Every Christmas, parents working two jobs. That is something that I think genuinely people like... I don't want to say people. I don't want to beat on Bill here, but I think this rich, white, private school guy from New York just genuinely can't fathom. And maybe for people like him right now, and maybe I see this a lot online right now, there are people who have been, that curtain has been pulled back via the Israel stuff. What do you think, Sanjana? Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think a worry I have with some people like Ackman and others who have

called for cancellation lists of students involved in pro-Palestine protests, some of whom have said reprehensible things that should probably get them, you know, get internship offers rescinded and things like that. But my worry is that some people who are having this come to Jesus moment where they're realizing that maybe we need to reevaluate the way we talk about these racial categories and discrimination and DEI and things like that are kind of moving toward a mirror image of the cancel culture and insane racial quotas and discrimination that we derided for the past three years and that we've all suffered under. Because I think that at the end of the day, you know, I've seen, I don't know, I don't want to say anything specific about Bill because I haven't actually looked that closely at things he specifically said on Twitter. But I have seen some people celebrating calls for like quotas for

Jewish students only to have certain jobs and that kind of thing. And it just seems like, do we really want to just reinvent DEI from first principles, you know, amidst this anti-Semitism discourse that's happening, you know, the idea that college campuses are rife with genocidal speech targeting Jews, Jewish students don't feel safe and whatnot. There is a congressional hearing to discuss this matter. Three university presidents are brought before Congress to answer questions. And I mean, a handful of clips have gone viral. I would say the president sounded like idiots. I know there's some disagreement here on that. But certainly what they were doing was defending the... They were, to steel man what they were, I think, trying to do, they were defending the right of students to dissent politically i think is how they see it and uh the genocidal speech is always like you know but how do you feel about uh genocidal speech

targeting jews and it would be like well that's not allowed i think the crux of this problem is many people hear from the river to the sea and Palestine should be free as a political idea that Palestinians should be maybe integrated into Israel or something. Many people who are on the other side of this see that as literally a call for genocide and specifically targeting Jews. I think that those people, I understand where they're coming from. You have Hamas, which wrote that into their charter. I think you have plenty of examples now that we could cherry pick where at all these different pro-Palestine rallies, you see the Nazi flag and shit like this. But if you were to separate the edge cases and talk about the issue, are you Palestine or are you Israel or somewhere in between, you kind of have to allow people to talk that out at some point.

And even if it's heinous, it's protected by the First Amendment. And are you a university that values that or not? Now, where it gets tricky is they're not. I mean, this is for years. We know that college campuses are not places where you're allowed to say whatever you want. I mean, way less insane things have been run out of college campuses. And Claudine Gay, specifically the Harvard president, is under a lot of fire right now. Brandon, I know you're a huge fan of hers.

You were just defending her earlier. But she has a background in the speech policing stuff, right? So maybe give me your Claudine Gay take and then bring me through the hypocrisy of it all. Sure. First off, Claudine Gay innocent. Should not be fired. that's the question i don't think she should be fired from her job to think that the things that she was saying in the clips that i saw of the congressional testimony were correct it is context dependent if i'm in my shower singing river to the sea chants am am I putting anybody in danger? The answer is definitely no.

So technically, she's right. This type of speech is context dependent and it's a nuanced question. I think what's damning is the double standard that she's applied to this speech as opposed to speech opposed to speech during the last four or five years. For example, she did not reappoint this guy called Ronald Sullivan because he represented Harvey Weinstein. And her logic was students had a right to feel safe, right? So, this seems to be almost in direct contradiction in an oblique way. He's a lawyer. Imagine the idea that a lawyer, this is the lawyer. If you had a religious tenet of being a lawyer, it is that everybody is entitled to a defense. Yeah. And so students don't feel safe because this guy defended Harvey Weinstein. That seems at odds with her

statements at the congressional testimony this data science professor david kane invited uh charles murray to speak um gay blocked that and then did not reappoint uh david kane's contract which was seen as retaliation for the invite. So another problematic example that's pretty damning in light of her statements at the recent congressional testimony that she gave. And then finally, I'll say that the organization FIRE ranks Harvard dead last at its free speech rankings of all American universities. So under her tenure, it's, you know, according to FIRE, Harvard has not respected free speech at all.

So it's really, really rich to hear her saying this. I will say it's more about the student body of Harvard. This is a student body that has no tolerance for free speech and when it comes to you know who's going to be allowed on campus and whatnot most of that is that comes down to the students deciding uh and most of the conservative censorship across the country has come down to students running people off of campus not the administration in the gay case that's crazy i didn't even realize the charles the charles murray thing um but. But it is hard for me as

someone who cares a lot about free speech, as you, I think everyone, I know everyone in here, this is something we all talk about quite a lot. It is hard for me to want to see this woman, I don't want to see this woman fired over her comments about free speech being a good thing and should be defended on campus. It's just that she's a liar. We're in a, we're, what is it, caught between a rock and a hard place right now because yes, we have to defend the principle. I believe in the principle. And yet I know that this person does not. And so here we are like the idiots defending free speech constantly, no matter what, even when our enemies, our ideological enemies are sort of, you know, in the crosshairs right now. But the moment she gets back to the college campus, it's like all sorts of things that

I value or care about are going to be censored. So we're living in this totally asymmetrical space of this sort of asymmetric, this world of asymmetric ideological warfare, where one set of ideas is unsafe and therefore censored. And one set of ideas, no matter how anti-Semitic, in my opinion, I know there's disagreement there, but I think calling for war at all or violence against the Israeli people at all could certainly be interpreted along these same lines as a call for violence in the same way that Charles Murray talking about IQ is seen as violent speech on the Harvard campus. If we're living in a world where nothing there is considered unsafe, then we're living in a world of one-party state style censorship. It starts at Harvard. It then permeates the entire corporate world because Harvard graduates run the entire country. And it's really bad. That's how we got to where we are.

So I don't really know what to do here. It's sort of rooting for, I don't want people like this woman in power. And yet, I don't know how we alter culture in an environment where the rules are written so we always lose. So, you know, the freedom-oriented people are constantly, there's no way that you can win in a situation like this. River, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this. Yeah, I was just going to say, the way that, even though it is hypocrisy, it's kind of the same thing when you have her canceling Charles Murray or people trying to get her fired for saying the wrong thing in this meeting. It is kind of, in a sense, the same thing. It's like censorship or whatever, but it's perceived in two different ways. When you're doing it on behalf of black people or Hispanics or whatever, it's perceived as woke. When you're doing it on behalf of Jews, people

are like on the extremes or like that's a cabal or whatever. There are these tropes on like the far left and the far right about Jewish power and control over the media and like control over institutions and stuff that I think people need to be very careful with when they're making these like broad declarations to like shut people down. It's like people aren't going to perceive that.

Even people who hated the woke stuff on you know say the far right they're going to perceive it a little bit differently you know what i mean they're not going to perceive it as what they're going to perceive it as like these people this is like a jewish cabal exercising their power and like that's a really scary you know like you don't want i feel like you don't you run the risk of creating more anti-semitism when you do stuff like this and i mean like it's not even always jewish people doing it it's like you know christian people like sort of i guess trying to defend jews but doing it in like such a heavy-handed way that like two people who are easily influenced could like be used as like

somebody could point to that and be like look see how they like treat people who criticize them and i definitely see this if anything as a moment in which is proven beyond all doubt that the jews don't control the media i mean it is completely not the media is not on the side of of uh of of the of israel right now and has not been since basically like october 10th i would say uh it is i wish they still did the movies would be so much better yeah um yeah uh sanjo thoughts on this well i was just gonna add a little bit of context for claudine gay oh yeah we don't want to if we don't want her fire i mean i don't actually have a strongly held opinion on whether or not she should keep her job. But if we don't want to fire her on the basis of defending free speech, which I do think ultimately is what was happening at that hearing.

And FIRE has written some good, quite legally precise articles about what specifically in a call for for genocide um would disqualify it as protected speech but that aside has fire defended her over this or not sorry i hate to interrupt fire has has written about i don't know if they've defended her explicitly but they've written a good long tweet called why most calls for genocide are protected speech which i recommend people read they mention you penn's president in it. But what I was going to say is she's being canceled because it was found by some scholars. I think Chris Ruffo was involved in this. It would be an amplification for sure.

That she plagiarized a big part of her doctoral dissertation. This one I think that she should go down for. And here is why I think that because she's not, she's just sloppy and an idiot and incorrectly quoting things. It's like, it's clear to me by reading through that she was not trying to pass off somebody else's work as her own. She's just not very good. And that is kind of, these are the mistakes that she made. However, people at Harvard lose their spot in the school for similar behavior. And why is this woman getting a free pass for what is in academia with the safe spaces shit? These are fundamentalist positions that they hold dear to their heart. And why is she escaping from both of them? And I think it's pretty obvious. She represents a lot to the people on the very far left. This

is why the New York Times can't help. They're falling over themselves to defend this woman. She can't go down because I think she's seen right now as a representative almost in some sort of totemic way of the entire dei order and if she goes down that's the end of the whole system and she hasn't gone down so you know for all my talk of the vibe shift uh it hasn't shifted all the way and these people still control um you know the dei fundamentalist still controls every fount of institutional power in the country they're just a little quieter right now because they know that there's a risk associated with this. Tell me about her cousin. Her cousin is Roxane Gay.

It's crazy. So for people who don't know who Roxane Gay is, Sanjana? Roxane Gay is, Brandon, how'd you describe her? She's the, she's sort of led. She kind of carried to term the toxic brand of feminism that exploded around 2016 and became sort of the foundational knowledge for a lot of, in my opinion, theory around microaggressions being violent and, um, other in kind,kind uh examples of that sort i know she ran a fat studies class at nyu that i had a friend who was like desperately trying to get a syllabus whenever it came out he could have got one she she hopped on my radar when she said nope didn't say asked a question just asking questions is uh drag just woman face you know black face for women so is a male drag queen uh doing black

face basically um and this was at the height of the uh race and gender sensitivity so she was you know roundly celebrated for that comment, which I think is just, I mean, I could talk about, and we have a river in the chat, so I know that we could talk about drag shit for the next three hours. That's full circle. That's what like feminists were saying

like in like the 70s and shit. It's that like you're mocking women and it's like, yeah, but it's funny. I think it's more complicated than that. I think that a lot of, I think that you have a lot of young gay guys who are called a woman their whole life and too girly and too effeminate and whatnot. And that just builds some kind of weird idea up in their head and, um, sort of embracing that like a superhero and laughing at it is not about women at all. I don't think it's ever been about women. I think it's about gay men. And that's what

the broader thing here that I think is so annoying is when subcultures get this giant mainstream spotlight on them and then people don't really understand what's going on. They don't have the context to sort of get it and then they judge it and say crazy shit about it. Yes, there are some people who are misogynists and awful and making fun of women but for the most part i think it's something deeper and uh cathartic and funny and shut the fuck up leave us alone yeah i don't know do you do river what do you do agree disagree is it i i generally agree i mean like it's like it's both like a celebration of women and they're also kind of like poking fun at them. It's like if you're like dressing up as Dolly Parton, but you just make like the breasts like four sizes bigger.

So it's like, I don't know, like it is like kind of a caricature, but like it's harmless. And I don't think you'd find any drag queen that like actually truly hates women. hates what um i mean the most of the time the guys who are like doing drag they're like the type of gay guys who like mostly have female friends work they're like all like hairstylists or like whatever for their like day job they like work in these like very like female dominant industries and i don't think it's like it's just like having it's just fun it's just you know also polya said it was like a resurrection of like pagan cults where like guys used to like castrate themselves and like draws up like the goddess or whatever so it could be that no i'm just kidding never that it's never this car it's

these people the intellectualization i mean poglia go off but it that's not correct this is something but it's great it's a great line she makes a great time a guy in, but it's great. It's a great line. She makes a great case. Sometimes a guy in a wig is just a guy in a wig and that's fine is kind of my rough thought about that. The first amendment is not really what we're talking about here. You know, the first amendment has nothing to do with what happens on a college campus. All of this speech, including, I think, including genocidal speech, unless it's like you could say something horrific, like I am in favor of this thing, unless you're actually calling for violence in the United States,

there's some gnarly shit that you're allowed to say. The question is what's allowed to be said on a college campus where, and this is, I saw I was watching the view because I hate myself the other day. And Sonny Hostin was, she's a huge pro Palestine person. And she has been, and none of the other women are, which has been interesting to watch, strange divide on the left.

And Sonny was sort of backed into a corner where she just kept saying, you know, this is to be protected under the First Amendment. This is the opposite of what she has been saying over the last five years. Like, yeah, it's protected. years, like, yeah, it's protected, which he's been saying over the last five years, was actually correct, which is that, yes, it's protected under the First Amendment, but we're not talking about the First Amendment on a platform like Twitter or on a college campus that is owned by people who make rules on private property, and that's okay. They can make whatever rules they want. The question in the context of Twitter, I never thought that that was a violation of the First Amendment, not allowing right-wing people to speak on Twitter. My question was like, maybe, what does a world look like where a couple of few oligopoly speech platforms control the entire flow of information and they make illegal half of the thought in the country? That seems pretty gnarly. Our founding fathers certainly didn't see it coming. And certainly the principle that they were trying to protect with the First Amendment is now in violation in this more corporatic world. It was more complicated. I don't think on this college campus, it's quite so complicated as a major platform like Twitter or Facebook.

I think it's a little bit less complicated. In fact, the college campus can do, I think, pretty much whatever it wants when it comes to a speech policy, provided it's a private university. And in this case, it sounds like the policy is playing with genocidal speech where Israel is concerned, A-OK, and making a large person feel uncomfortable after the incredibly horrific opinion that morbid obesity is unhealthy, that is not okay. Final thoughts. Yeah. I mean, all of this goes back to Title IX. What are the titles that basically said- Seven, title nine. It's one of the, one of the titles that basically said seven, seven. Um, yeah.

Title nine is a sports thing. Uh, yeah. Title seven is, uh, it says that you can't create a hostile environment basically. And that was in response to the integration of schools in the South where, you know, white people would like

threaten black people's lives that's not what's happening and it's become now universities they're just taking like this very subjective approach to what is harassment. And I think it would be better if the laws were amended actually to specify what that entails because it's very vague in the language. So that's why these universities can get away with sort of picking and choosing what's deemed like to create an unsafe or like hostile environment.

Because it's subjective i mean i could find something i could feel threatened by someone using a homophobic slur um and you couldn't or whatever does that make sense yeah yeah yeah i mean i would prefer they just abolished the law completely and leave it up to these schools to decide. You know, it's my law and I can say who is on it and who is not. And I don't really see a problem with that, provided it's a university. I think the broader thing is just like these universities are hotbeds for radicalism and stupidity. system that we've built in America where every young person in the country is expected to go to an indoctrination camp so they can get a desk job for $30,000 a year with $200,000 of student

loan debt is crazy. Got to burn that down, that system. The system, not the colleges. Seriously, I'm not even making a joke right now. The system needs to come down. That's crazy. Most of these colleges should not even exist. And the elite colleges can exist, but whatever, they'll become irrelevant if they keep up with this kind of stuff. And especially with the relaxation of their academic standards, because what is Harvard going to mean in 20 years if it's like a lottery to get in and after you leave, you're a crazy person? It's not something that I care about. I never used to ask people where they went to school, but I might have to start before I hire them, you know, just to make sure that I'm not accidentally hiring anybody from Harvard. It's the holiday season, the Christmas season around

these parts. I want to talk about that a little bit. I want to talk about this very funny article that came out. Christmas parties are, I mean, obviously the war war on christmas is great it's like war on christmas is the og culture war issue i used to uh as a kid um when my grandma was still with us uh she was obsessed with fox news and um she was always talking about the war on christmas that was like the big one back in the day it was they're trying to take christmas from you and it was very you know when i go to the kmart um i say merry christmas whether or not they say happy holidays and this is something that i have never cared about um at all it is christmas for me i say christmas but like i'm not offended when someone says um uh happy holidays or

whatever it's like a weird thing to care about i think uh i guess there is you can make this argument when someone says happy holidays or whatever. It's like a weird thing to care about, I think. I guess there is, you could make this argument, there's this high-level war on Christians happening, and we could talk about that another day, bring in some experts to discuss it. But in the context of workplace holidays, we went from Christmas party to holiday party.

That is being stripped away as well now. It is like every semblance of the Christmas spirit has to be, I guess, just deleted. And far more problematically for me, and this has been a trend for a handful of years now in tech, no more booze at Christmas parties, which is, I think it's immoral. I think it is disgraceful. I want no part of that in this country, in 2023 in America. How dare you take away my drunken inappropriateness at my workplace Christmas party. It's fucking crazy. The quote included things like instead we were doing guacamole and pickleball. Kids are already not having sex. That's the trend, right? Are we wondering why really when we're talking about things like

pickleball at the workplace Christmas party? It's just a complete disgrace. I don't know. What do you guys think about this? Guacamole is not a Christmas party. It's just a complete disgrace. I don't know. What do you guys think about this? Guacamole is not a Christmas food. There are Christmas foods. It's green and red. I guess that's true. It could only be a Christmas food if you

make it look like a reindeer or something. You put little pretzels maybe for antlers at the top. That'd be cute. Some little olives for the eyes. I think that's's the point they don't want it to be a christmas food you know they want you to they want to break your spirit they want you demoralized and pliable so they can just force you through the corporate machine like sausage meat and out you come a neutered blue-haired yes man who i feel like everybody celebrates christmas except for i mean i guess jews don't but you could do you could just do a

you could still do the holiday party and just like adam and or whatever because i feel like even people who aren't christians like i don't know my boss or my mom uh works for an indian doctor her whole lives and they're hindu and they celebrate christmas because they're just like it's american holiday it's fun i don't i don't know like it just seems like everybody who except i guess for like jews who don't do it for religious reasons seem to celebrate it i've even seen like i even think like some muslims kind of do like i guess like a secular version of it like the exchange gifts and stuff i've heard of that it's already i don't know this and i would get in trouble for this with some of my jewish friends i feel like it's already

a secular holiday like it's the christmas tree is not in the bible what do you think we're celebrating here santa claus that's nothing to do with jesus christ and this is actually i grew up you know going to church service and every single year they would sit us down and tell us about the true meaning of christmas and j Jesus Christ being born and all of this bullshit. And it's like, and they'll be like, you know, it's not Santa Claus. That's not really Christmas. And, and then I get out in the real world and the libs are telling me that, that Santa Claus is, you know, representational of Jesus Christ. It's not true. It's a pagan holiday. Let me have it. Let us have it. Let America have its pagan holiday. We have all that. What is it

on the dollar bill? All of those, all those, bill, all that symbology from the Freemasons and shit. That's baked into... That is American as occultism, paganism, as American as apple pie. I think that we need to be allowed to have these things. And at Christmas time, especially, we got to do it. We need a pressure release. I will say, if you wanted to switch it up, I worked at Penguin Books at the earliest part of my career, 15 years ago. And instead of Christmas, there would be no end of the year celebration, but there would be a company-wide Halloween party, which was fire, I will say. That was absolutely incredible. I remember people hotboxing the elevators this

is like a corporate building down on the west side of manhattan um uh everyone would decorate it was like i remember just being totally obliterated dancing on a desk with a couple of giant hot dogs it was like a very crazy surreal experience uh i loved it i i'm open to that if you wanted to kind of switch it up and do a different a different time of year or something um but the main i think the important thing is that we've got to have a time for all of us to get together and um and let yeah yeah i think it should be christ Christmas because then you can like, I don't know. Like it just seems so classic,

you know, like you get drunk and you have to do the secret Santa thing. And you're like, what do I buy? Like Cheryl from accounts. You're like, I don't fucking know. And so you just get her like an anthropology candle because it's

expensive needlessly, but like, it seems nice. And then you like ask your black coworker, you're like, Hey Keisha, Alice Kwanzaa. And she's like, let's Kwanza like ask your black co-worker you're like hey keisha how was kwanzaa and she's like less kwanzaa and you just like you know then you just kind of go on you just like tell me about what you river just wrote a piece on kwanzaa uh it was titled abolish kwanzaa um river tell me why you want to abolish kwanzaa take me first of all what is

kwanzaa who celebrates brand Brandon's title but um I did but the original was couldn't resist it but yeah yeah uh so Kwanzaa is it's a fake holiday like there's really like no other way to put it it was invented in the 1960s by this radical black activist in la named ron coringa who ran an organization called us just us some people said it was like united slaves it's actually not it's just us and this organization started off as this kind of weird thing where they were learning Swahili and doing karate. And it very quickly turned into a psychotic cult of personality around Karenga. They literally went to war with the Black Panthers. They were,

they were funded and they were fun. The us organization, because it was small and weird and focused, like concentrated in la the fbi and the lepd who working together at the time basically were the whole thing was essentially we're going to use us organization to fuck with the black panthers and so they were giving them arms they were giving them like intelligence his downfall was that he kidnapped and beat two of his female followers who he thought were betraying him to the Black Panthers,

forced detergent down their mouths, beat them with rods, I'm sorry, electrical cords, burned them with like hot irons. He just tortured these women. And he got sent to prison. burned them with hot irons. He just tortured these women. And he got sent to prison. Where he discovered the true meaning of Kwanzaa. Right. No, he actually invented Kwanzaa earlier because he hated Christmas.

And he was like, why would you want to be washing the blood of a dead Jew? He also didn't care for Jews. So he went to prison. And then he came out, became a professor at University of California, Long Beach, where he's now the chair of the Africana Studies Department. And his sort of rehabilitation paved the way for Kwanzaa,

which he had earlier. It's a completely manufactured sort of multiculturalism. But it's the sort of thing that people like because they were like, Bill Clinton was the first person to officially recognize it. And he said it's rooted in ancient African traditions, which it's literally not. It's based on

six principles that are also the principles of the US organization. It's all just like Swahili words that this guy taught himself and it's based on like basically just based on the idea of a harvest festival which he said was drawn from various different afric cultures, most of whom black people in the United States are not descended from. Well, in fact, it's cultures that the slave traders were descended from. Yeah. In some cases, right. This is endlessly fascinating to me. I think

to back up one moment, we keep saying most black people in America don't celebrate Kwanzaa. Almost no black people in America celebrate Kwanzaa. Black Americans are Christian, like more Christian than the average white person. They celebrate Christmas. It's crazy. This is like the problem we have, you have one very extreme, extreme group of people who are talking about this in, you know, in favor of it. you know in in in the in in favor of it um and then you have a lot of white people who are clueless who just don't know any black people i guess because if they knew even one they would know that this is not a holiday that anybody celebrates it's so crazy but what it is is it's now on our u.s stamps and um and i think that is that's really it's just very it has been since the 90s they keep releasing new ones. You have the United States government legitimizing a holiday that exists for one reason, and that is to drive a wedge between white and black Americans. Because the common faith is a very powerful bond between people. And the fact that we all celebrate Christmas at the end of the day means something very

good for race relations in the country and if you are really really interested in driving a wedge between those relations what you need to do is go after christianity which is why so many of the black panthers i think uh found uh muhammad and became muslim is why i think like the muslim piece of black nationalism is so important but i'm kind of, but we could cover that another day. And certainly, I think why Ron Karenga, who is an anti-Christian, is going after this. This is what he... I mean, it's an actual war on Christmas rather than the fake one. And I mean, he's losing. It's all kind of goofy. It seems almost weird to be mad about it,

but it's the legitimization. The fact that the government is legitimizing it does mean it's important to me. I mean, there's a new Kwanzaa stamp coming out. What is it, in 2024? Yeah. And it's also just insane that this guy's been... It's insane that someone who beat and tortured women is a tenure professor. Like, that's kind of crazy in and of itself. How did he survive Me Too?

No one survived Me Too. Tenure, I guess. Or everybody was just afraid because, I mean, he's this sacred sort of figure in the black activist world because he, I guess, recast himself as somebody who was just interested in pan-Africanism and, you know, resurrecting black culture because he thought that the culture of black people

in the United States was actually just white culture, which is not true. There's, like, a lot of traditions, a lot of, like, if you look at, like, AAVE, like, in the old South, like, the dialect and stuff, there's, like, influence. There's a great, like, interchange of culture between blacks and whites in the south where most black people live until a great migration and you see that even in like the food and

certain like customs and stuff like in a lot of uh in black weddings for instance uh people will uh sometimes like do this thing where they jump over a broom and pretty much only black people do it now, but it's actually a tradition from Northern England that poor whites brought over. And in the early colonial era, when you had like indentured servants and black people basically living together in the same quarters,

they pass a tradition to black people and then white people kind of forgot about it. So there's just like, it's this very like complex, like interchange of sort of black and and white culture that created something unique like it created country music jazz uh blues like all kinds of amazing like things for american culture that could not exist in africa and they couldn't exist in England or Scotland, but they could exist in the American South. And I think that's like kind of interesting and beautiful, but, you know, anyway, that's besides the point.

I found the Kwanzaa disrespector. Yeah. Any thoughts on Kwanzaa, guys? What will you be doing for Kwanzaa this year? Well, I just remember I don't have any experience for Kwanzaa this year well I just remember I I don't have uh any experience with Kwanzaa I guess like most people but I do remember being a kid uh and being taught I guess in elementary school that like there were three major holidays around December and it was Christmas Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and I remember vividly that everyone sort of knew

what Christmas and Hanukkah were and Kwanzaa. And I remember vividly that everyone sort of knew what Christmas and Hanukkah were. And Kwanzaa was this undefined third that people know exists. Everyone sort of knows the word. They know that there's candles involved. But I think that's, if you ask most Americans, it's like this weird third undefined gender almost. Yeah, it's crazy. I do remember this as well as a kid. um so yeah it's crazy i do remember this as well as a kid well in the and that was that would have been for me like the early 90s um knowing about kwanzaa in this way even seeing

like a kwanzaa menorah which is just a knockoff actual menorah on tv uh with the red and green candles and it is very confusing for a kid to see that because it's framed as a black holiday um and it is not i mean it's just it's a radical political holiday and uh it is yes it's it's weird the things that we're taught that are just not true even by us you know absorbing it from the media and whatnot i think ironically because it's previously now i think they're sort of tampering it down they're just like it's just about black people but originally it was supposed to be this super radical thing but the only people who celebrate it now are black elites it's like activisty like college professors and people like

that it's not actually any like working class black people who might actually have real problems and you know i am surprised it has not really taken off over the last few years to be honest um it seems like something that you could be very useful uh in the middle of you know the 2020 2021 cultural race wars where everybody was larping just the end of the world um and yet it's just maybe there's something just so fundamentally clownish about the history that no one really wants to embrace it yeah i think it's because in a lot of ways black families and white southern families are similar and it it's just i i think it's a lot of uh even like these super woke people

who are like professors now or whatever if they actually come from like a working or even like middle class background they're like my grandma's gonna like freak out she's like why do you hate jesus like it's gonna be like that sort of thing so they're just like maybe maybe not maybe not do that i think that's maybe why awesome well it's been real, folks. I think we have reached the end of this one. We'll catch you back here next week. Please make sure to rate, review, subscribe.

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