Pirate Wires - Fake Nazi Story, Trump Wins Iowa & Banned Words | Pirate Wires Podcast #30 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

EPISODE #31: Your favorite pod is back for the weekly Friday episode! Mike Solana and the Pirate Wires writing crew is here to discuss the week that was. We dive into the Casey Newton fake Nazi story, the legacy media trying to control speech, The media meltdown over Trump’s win in Iowa, an absolutely insane story regarding eBay. Also, we get a little spicy. We discuss a certain word that has been removed from our vernacular and might be coming back. Finally, the vibe shift continues in the place you definitely thought it would.. RuPaul’s Drag Race! Do our PW fans watch RuPaul? Comment below.. Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/overton-collapse https://www.theindustry.pw/p/crisis-on-the-red-sea https://www.dolorespark.pw/p/grim-new-record 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 - Welcome Back To The Pod - Like & Subscribe! 1:10 - Substack Is Full Of Nazis According To Casey Newton - Except It’s Not.. 7:00 - The Speech Police On The Internet Who Want To Control Everything 19:45 - Davos Was This Week - Surprise! They Also Want To Control Speech 23:00 - More Examples Of Media Fake Outrage 26:30 - Trump Crushes In Iowa - The Meltdown Has Begun 37:00 - INSANE ebay Story - eBay To Pay $3 Million For Harassment - Stalking, Pigs Head, Cockroaches, The DOJ Involved 46:00 - eBay Still Exists?? Who Uses It? 50:00 - Babylon Bee Caused Trouble.. Which Leads Us To A Light Conversation Regarding A Particular Word 56:00 - Vibe Shift Continues! RuPaul Contestant Is A Villain And The People Love It. 1:01:00 - Thanks For Watching! Like, Comment and Share With Your Friend - See You Next Week!

There is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things. This huge Nazi problem on the internet being catalyzed by Substack, the Nazi platform. First of all, there are no Nazis. When I think of an extremist, it's the person who wants control of the platform, who wants to determine what can and cannot be said. We know what her solution is. It is like draconian control over what can and cannot be said on Twitter. I just think the media has done a really good job of self-humiliating throughout this whole thing.

The video of Rachel Maddow, extraordinarily paternalistic, and says, you know, we're not even going to show Trump's speech. We do, as we've been discussing for weeks now, have a kind of freedom that we haven't had in a handful of years on social media. Pretty sure this counts as a slur still, but the word is... Welcome back to the pod, guys. We've got a packed show for you today, but first I want to start with, or today I want to start with these Nazis. We've got this huge Nazi problem on the internet. You've probably read about it, all of it being catalyzed by Substack, the Nazi platform. I learned all of this from famed Nazi hunter, Casey Newton. First of all, there are no Nazis. There are no Substack Nazis.

The story begins in the pages of The Atlantic back in November. They published the piece on sort of Substack's Nazi problem. And the author of that piece references, I think, 16 different Substacks on the platform, cites one person making a full-time living, one Nazi, a famous Nazi making a full-time living on the platform, creates this sort of massive moral panic. This has been going on kind of surrounding Substack, moral panic surrounding Substack, the kind of people who are posting on Substack, which is just for folks, I guess,

not extremely online like us, a newsletter platform. So Pirate Wires has been using Substack from its inception. So are many writers, including Barry Weiss, activists like Christopher Ruffo, mundane people. Who is the woman? Does anyone remember the name of the woman, the number one earner? She does reporting from...

It's like history or something. Letters from an American. That's the one I'm talking about. It's like a very diverse service. but it's a new it's a newsletter platform and uh i think it as it became popular you know maybe three years ago among folks who were looking to not be deplatformed which is just a fact right like i was on twitter uh thinking about where i was gonna to be writing longer form, or even just producing

things longer form. I think originally it was a podcast I had called Problematic. And I didn't want to monetize it with Patreon because Patreon was nuking people left and right from the platform. I wanted people who kind of... Not only were they kind of walking or talking the talk on free speech, but could not actually stop me. And so the thing about a newsletter platform that gives you control of your email list is there's really nothing that they can do that... I mean, yeah, it'll be kind of annoying if they were to de-platform Pirate Wires in some alternate dimension where Substack wanted to do so. But if they did, I would have my email list and I could go somewhere else. That was what was important to me. But I think what people, sort of anti-tech press and the pro-censorship people, they correctly spotted a place where subversive thought, certainly things that they don't like, could proliferate.

Now, that includes, of course, everything sort of right of Joseph Stalin, but we often have this conversation about white nationalism. That's the easy one that everybody agrees is horrible, and so that's the one that they focus on. And that's what The Atlantic focused on. And I think the high-level thing here that's happening is an attempt to really take Substack off the table in advance of the next election. But sort of, I guess, in the short term, what this did was generate a conversation about what's going on on the platform. It continues earlier this year, January, with Casey Newton, picks it up, investigates himself, confirms that there's Nazis on the platform, sort of demands that Substack change its rules to remove the Nazis from the platform. Then comes Jesse Single. Jesse's reporting sort of contextualizes this. What he discovers is Casey Newton, the Nazi hunter, actually in his research only found six platforms that consisted, sort of had white supremacist content um none of them

were making money on the platform there was one i think that was making money through like another service somehow related to to the platform of substack and in aggregate all six of these of these substacks um they had less or i think around 100 readers. So for context, Pirate Wires has something like 65,000 at this point. For further context, Casey Newton, the Nazi hunter, has something like 170,000. So basically, we invented an entire moral panic surrounding Nazis to target substack, to kind of convince people to ban, to run from the platform, to flee the platform. Substack to kind of convince people to ban, to run from the platform, to flee the platform. And it's worked a bit. A lot of people left. A lot of Casey's own readers left. And then he himself left, I think, to save face because ultimately Substack refused to change its

policies. They banned five of the six accounts that he surfaced based on their own pre-existing policy which was uh it's just incitement of violence um and they changed nothing they actually i mean hamish at one point really just his response to the initial controversy was just like we adhere to the first amendment which i really did find like shockingly based um they don't care they kind of at every turn refuse to relent in in this uh in in controversies like these in this class of controversy they they adhere to the first amendment they uh they will to platform incitement of violence but they believe that their role is not to determine what does and does not constitute um legitimate political speech and i don't know what do you guys what do you guys make it the nazi understory it gives like i'm leaving

twitter vibes there was a it was a big one big round of people quote unquote leaving substack or saying substack was full of white supremacists something like a year ago or a year and a half ago um i remember taylor lawrence led the charge now i think if you go to her twitter account her literal name is follow me on like subscribe to my sub stack or it's in her bio in all caps or something like that or was for quite a long time um there's this strange trans writer called jude doyle who i believe was helping lead the charge back then to get off substack and the funniest thing is which happened this time too is they all went to ghost which has whites it probably has way more white supremacists and nazis was built to house Nazis, one would say.

It's a Nazi establishment. I don't want to say that for good. I don't know much about the ghost founders. I don't want to be throwing them under the Nazi bus. I will say of ghost, when I was considering where to put Pirate Wires round one, way back in, I think it was the summer of 2020, when I started writing Pirate Wires, Every one of my sort of crypto-y anarchist friends insisted that I go to Ghost rather than Substack. They were like, you're a total idiot. They're going to de-platform you. And I just remember thinking like, I don't care if they do because I have the emails. And that was the main, the only thing that I cared about. Like if they, right now they're sort of walking the walk or they're talking the talk on on free speech if they if they pivot it's not going to kill me so i might as well trust them for now and i kind of like them i liked chris

specifically chris best uh one of the co-founders um and now here we are fast forward and it's the anti-nazi people the people who see nazis and everything the people who you know think that we're nazis um going to ghost people who think that we're Nazis going to ghost. And I think that, by the way, is really the central issue here. It's like, who gets to determine what is and is not extremist beyond the pale? Because for me, I hate the white supremacy stuff. I hate what I see on Twitter right now. I think there's a huge resurgence of the hardcore, stuff i hate what i see on twitter right now i think there's a huge resurgence of like the hardcore obnoxious like there's like trad and there's like the the the idiot trad right um there is a lot of like weird like race science and shit i see on there and i'm like why are why

are we doing this um but that to me is just as important as is like real ass communism uh hammer and sickle and bio like straight up the rich should be guillotine kind of thing. Like that's pretty, not just pretty, it's like deeply horrific because they actually mean it. And, and it's like, we used to live in a world on Twitter where only half of the horrible things were censored and, and the left could never be censored. That feels, you know, that's, that's dangerous to me. me. I don't know who gets to make this determination. And I know who wants to make the determination. Casey Newton wants to make that determination.

And that's a dangerous kind of person to me. Like when I think of an extremist, it's the person who wants control of the platform, who wants to determine what can and cannot be said. And I think it's something that we have to just resist as like a people, as a civilization that believes or adheres in any way to the concept of liberty. This is a very important quality in a person to be weary of, cast out, I would say. It's a beyond the pale for me in terms of extremist views that I don't tolerate. It is this power-seeking thing. That that i'm that i'm most worried about in people yeah i mean i think another really important component of this story too which we touched on a bit earlier is just that this nazi problem doesn't exist at all like it's it's not even like we're discussing substack you know has these nazis that's permitting uh to write on the platform and

monetize like i really do think people should go and read jonathan katz's original article in the atlantic because it is just a textbook example of how to fabricate a story i mean jonathan katz essentially violates like every principle of journalistic ethics in that story he at one point and you know jesse single goes through some of these points in his takedown of the original atlantic piece but like, exerts a sort of thing from one of these alleged Nazis, and basically says, you know, this guy's making money on Substack, even though he's banned from Stripe, which is a violation of Substack's policies. But what it turns out this guy was doing was he was not monetized on Substack, he was using Subscribestar, which is this third-party platform. And he says this explicitly in this text where he doesn't at all imply that he's

making his living on Substack. And Jonathan Katz then presents it as, in his article, he says, you know, this guy launched a free Substack newsletter. Months later, he set up a paywall getting around Stripe spans by involving a third-party payment processor. The extent to which this workaround and Casey's presence on Substack more generally contributed to his livelihood is unclear. And so it's just a really interesting example of how somehow this gets around the Atlantic's editors who don't think that this sort of very vague claim that this guy has this third party workaround that isn't made explicit. No one's questioning it and it goes viral. And then, you know, months later, Casey Newton picks up on it. But it's just like really shitty journalism. And it's insane that it got

that far. The Atlantic does seem, I don't want to give them too much credit, but they do seem historically a little bit better than this. You this. Casey Newton personally on his own sub stack has never been better than this. Jonathan Katz, they like Casey. What we're talking about are, and I always, I often will put journalist in quotes and call these people activists rather than journalists. And it's sort of a pejorative, but it's true. Casey Newton is an activist. This is an activist tactic. When you investigate a subject and you find out that it's not as bad as originally reported, and then you frame your own story to make it seem worse than it was originally reported, that's activism. You could go through the things that both Jonathan... Well, Jonathan, not as much because he made some actual fairly

egregious errors casey's is all about omitting the truth right it's like he omits very important context to make it seem um everything from uh the number of actual subtext to until he until jesse forced his hand and then he finally revealed the number um to critically the names of them because what i wanted to do when i first was reading about this um from from casey was i wanted to go and i wanted to look at the extremists i actually wanted to take a look at what was being published and i couldn't because he wouldn't publish the names and um and he says the reason he didn't do this and he didn't want to share the numbers and whatnot was because he felt not safe

um you know casey newton's life was in danger from these Substack Nazis with in aggregate 100 subscribers total. And it's tedious because we know what's happening here. You're just trying to push a cause. And your cause is Substack is not a safe space. It is not a truthful place. It is a place for Nazis. And this is all kind of laying the groundwork for the way that media is going to be discussed throughout the presidential election. Through the back channel, I have a source at the company that shed a little bit more light on what was being demanded and what continues to be demanded throughout this controversy, because Substack is still getting hit with wave after wave of angry emails about the Substack

Nazis. And there are several people they point to. None of them are the six that Casey surfaced. The person who people are most angry about and want gone is Chris Ruffo. He's the extremist they're talking about. But of course, Chris is just an activist who is anti- ruffo he's the extremist they're talking about but of course chris is just an activist uh who is like anti-dei he's not a white supremacist he said not one thing that you could ever interpret as nazism uh and this is how the weapon is always used it's like we've got to get rid of these extremists like nazis and everyone's like yeah and there you go and then they add on they're like and christopher rufo um who is what he's just a successful conservative activist um yeah so that's how i see it i see it as a i see it as a

war of activists and and we kind of have to stop calling casey a journalist not just because i like to be an asshole but because it confuses it sort of muddies the conversation yeah pretty much anywhere where um you can write without corporate like without um sort of like a liberal editorial line or some sort of like institutional backing or corporate backing or whatever um like that place is always going to be accused of basically being the eagles nest i mean like i feel like we've seen this forever like on twitter on uh youtube until they struck down a bunch of stuff on twitch like i've heard there are nazis everywhere you know what i mean just a million little bases out everywhere and it's basically anywhere where you can like upload or post something without um i don't know some hr lady looking over it like that's

basically like this this story's just going to keep happening even if you got rid of like it'll there'll be a story in like 10 months or something where it's like ghost is you know the new eagles nest and then like then the ghost will get rid they'll make a new one then that'll be the new eagles nest it'll just like it'll it'll be happening forever as long as like people are able to publish freely on the internet which is you know something they fundamentally don't want yeah you're touching on the i think the correctly touching on the broader context of the moderation police and we've seen them at every single turn for years now uh it is just like what was it it's like the Ben Collins the really hysterical one Ben Collins from NBC and uh his colleague the ex she was a former librarian

I'm forgetting I'm blanking on her name now um another super she's like one of the famous anti moderation people and of course Taylor Lorenz who uh really I don't want me to harp on her librarians are the fascists of our age by the way like they are like librarians and like middle school teachers like there's something weird going on there um yes so these are the people who went after just so giant the social media giant moderation policies and they maintained a lot of cultural power in the tech industry that led to the really draconian speech censorship rules that we saw throughout covid which were i mean in my opinion without saying too much because we're gonna get flagged by youtube uh which is what

happened to us when we discussed global warming which by the way definitely exists and is real please do not fucking demonetize this channel um life-threatening i think that the moderation policies could actually be considered like life-threatening i think that the moderation policies could actually be considered like life-threatening the things that we couldn't talk about were important to our life and uh that is just like you kind of take that problem off the table when you allow people to discuss things i guess you do have this problem of um not i guess i know that you have this problem of misinformation and disinformation, there's just always a kind of question of what is more dangerous, authoritarianism or the bad sort of wrong facts.

And that's, unfortunately, an experiment we can't run twice for civilization. And everybody kind of lands in a different direction there. I'm a little bit more freedom-oriented, and I would say the Casey Nunes of the world are a lot more authoritarian oriented yeah and i i do think that if people have to like go on the dark web or something like download a tor browser to like be able to read like a racist essay on the internet that only like is going to further make people extremist i think you know what i mean like it's it it adds like a level of of seriousness to what

you're looking at. It's like, oh, they really don't want me to see this type thing. That's an interesting point. I think it depends on how thoroughly it really is censored. So in our world where, let's say in 2020, 2021, let's say, it's like partly censored, you know, like you could still read the Hunter Biden laptop story, for example, you just couldn't share it on Twitter briefly. But the fact that it was censored, and everybody knew it was censored, radicalized people on the subject of the Hunter Biden laptop story. And I do think like really accelerated the radicalization process generally, like, I mean, people freaked out at that point. When you can't share things, but you can still access them elsewhere, it makes you feel like, you know,

the powers that be are against you. Whereas China has done a very good job of actually successfully censoring a billion plus people. You know, growing up, I was super libertarian for a very long time and still kind of orient myself that way a bit. And we used to always say, you know, like things like information wants to be free.

And genuinely, I remember believing that censorship couldn't even happen on the internet. I thought that there was no way anymore to censor. And it was just like inevitable that we would have freedom of speech. And that was just like the right side of history, let's say. And then I saw just like how well china censored all those people and i got nervous i think that that is a kind of world that we could really see here just this week at davos we saw uh the german woman i'm blanking on her name or so it was like very german like yeah like a car yes it's like a cartoonishly german name um sort of get out i thought she was

dutch the no i looked it up because i wanted to um sort of get up i thought she was dutch the no i looked it up because i wanted to make a joke about the fact that she was uh like my grandfather fought nazis uh not so i would have to listen to a german woman tell me what i could and could not say and um so i had to double check that she was german she's german the bad person is german um so she stands up before davos and says this is the biggest problem that we're facing right misinformation and disinformation uh i want to jump ahead to the solutions because we know what her solution is it is like draconian control over what can and cannot be said on twitter which the eu is separately like super going after the reason they're all so animated about this right now is because we do as

we've been discussing for weeks now have a kind of freedom that we haven't had in a handful of years on social media. You kind of can say whatever you want, and we're seeing what that looks like. It's deliberating. It's at times very ugly. It is really of kind of, it's the truth is what we're seeing for for better and for worse what do you guys think about that ursula the ursula thing or davos in general right we could maybe like seamlessly transition here what do they think the outcome is going to be i mean people it's not like trump would not get i mean trump was not originally elected because of misinformation. People who were quite aware of who Trump was voted him into office. He's not going to not get elected this time because of some viral misinformation that misinforms people about Trump's true position. It's just in the context of like the EU, I think that what they're actually concerned about is some sort of like populist right wing insurgency, like through the electoral system. Because, I mean, you've kind of already seen that in a lot of countries like Italy and Hungary.

How is that related to misinformation? I guess I'm not really. Information is anything that you don't like basically i mean like i think a lot of it just comes down to control over the narrative and this is why i think that you know they they want to target misinformation because it's problematic for their narrative about you know whether or not it's sort of their political narrative or their environmental narrative or their uh veganist narrative or whatever. But, you know, I think that there's, this is why when we're talking about solutions to this censorship regime, I think it's not enough actually to just say, you know, these people are censoring information that

they find politically problematic for them. I think that there also has to be, because that's not, people know that, right? And they sort of, that doesn't really inspire emotion. I think what needs to happen is for there to be a counter narrative. Like in the case of this Substack Nazi thing, for example, it's not just that like this narrative is that there's these extremist Nazis and like there's some, you know, false falsehoods in this narrative. It's that there's this activist class of as you're saying solana like journalists um and bloggers basically who have like on some level financial interest in creating these false stories yes um and so that's the counter narrative that i think people can then understand and get behind casey hired um this journalist zoeiffer, who we've covered at Pirate Wires a handful of times.

And I noticed after a while that I kept, and it was always by accident, because I would cover a crazy story about unhinged activists, typically inside of a company like Apple. And I would see that, I mean, after a couple of these, I realized it was always the same person. It was Zoe Schiffer every single time. And the game there is you have a very small group of people who are totally disaffected with reality, working at these companies, at these giant tech companies. They want very crazy things. For example, my favorite one ever was the demand internally for Tim Cook to speak out about Israel and Palestine. They wanted a denunciation of Israel. And this was several years ago. This was before the most recent one. So they demanded this denunciation. And this leaked to Zoe Schiffer.

But what of course happened was she's friends with these people. And they hit her up. And they're like, hey, this is the crazy thing we're doing this month. Can you write a story about it? Maybe they don't say it explicitly like that, but they offer it up to her and she wants to write about it because she wants Apple to speak up about Israel and Palestine. This is an exciting story to her because she's a left-wing activist. So she does her job. She writes about it. And now it seems like this is a big story. This is a major deal. We're putting pressure on Tim Cook to say something about Israel and Palestine. Now, this one was sufficiently absurd that it never happened.

But that's not the case, usually. Antonio Garcia Martinez, another story that we wrote about, another story that Zoe Schiffer was a big part of, also fired from Apple for this. And not for this, for writing a book chaos monkeys about facebook uh in which and it's like a kind of a gonzo-y book so it's written in a super literary style and um it made a couple of off color comments not a comment so you just described women in kind of a sexual way in a couple of passages it's like a it's a literary book uh i think it's one of wards the best-selling novel um he gets fired and that happens why it's like people are really upset internally uh some activists say who do

they say it to they say to a journalist who's also upset about the existence of antonio martinez who separate from his book was also published or tweeting things that were a little bit right of center um um, or a little bit critical of, I don't know if they were right of center. He was just like sort of critical of the kind of, uh, woke industrial complex. And that's really why he was targeted. And, uh, and that's what these people are doing. This is truly the game. It is like, how do we make it seem like there is this uh huge moral issue that the whole country needs to get behind to make a company act in a manner that we want and that's on every topic from firing a random person that we don't like because he tweets things that make us angry to uh in instantiating like incredibly racist and sexist regressive hiring practices, which these people

also want. I don't know how you get people excited about that, but that is what's happening. We should move on to Trump. Let's talk about Trump. Donald Trump, absolute grand slam in Iowa, massive victory for him. People expressed surprise the next day. I don't really know why it was polling this way. I guess the big surprise was that DeSantis came out a little bit ahead of Nikki Haley in second place, whereas people sort of expected him to be a little bit behind her in third. Vivek, out of the race, immediately kissed the Donald Trump ring on stage. And it's going to be a big, probably surrogate for Trump throughout the rest of the election because he wants to be the vice president. I don't know what is really even left to glean

here. There's a question of the media's involvement. I saw people saying, hey, it looks like icing him out of the media didn't work. I don't think the media really did that. I think Trump didn't really want to be in the press. He's not even on Twitter and it's because he didn't have to be. He was absolutely winning. The real thing, the real reason that he's, I think, this runaway train is because the entire country feels like the Democrats are trying to use the state to keep them out of the race. And that makes them feel like the country is being taken from them. And so they feel, I think I know tons of people who are voting specifically for that reason.

They feel like this is an abhorrent abuse of power. And whether or not you can make some argument that it is or isn't, I think that's the kind of motivation. I think that's what's generating the real energy behind his campaign, not him, because he's not even saying anything. River, do you have any thoughts about this? I feel like you've been following it pretty closely. I mean,'s like an immense amount of loyalty to trump i think that the prosecutions against him have probably helped more than they've heard in terms of because we're talking about republican based voters most of whom are not even like on twitter or anything like this is it's mostly older people they're like watching fox news which is um i guess not as trump friendly as they once were but

i mean they're still you know they still like him and also to be quite honest as many people have run in the republican primary there's not there's nobody who is really as talented as trump there's nobody who's um speaks to they're all competing for the same sort of sliver of voters who would prefer somebody other than trump which is mostly like college educated uh more middle-class republicans who are a shrinking portion of the base it's increasingly more working class less educated um and more populist and when you have the santas who ran on like a bunch of internet issues or you have nikki haley who's just kind of like a warmonger like that doesn't really speak to the base of the republican party which

just you know wants to see the media humiliated wants a border wall um and wants to be entertained and no i'm sorry nikki haley is not entertaining it's funny to think of because i don't know if this is true or not it feels true it feels true that the republican base does just want to see the media humiliated publicly i think that was the appeal appeal of Vivek. He was very good trashing a journalist in an interview. I just think the media has done a really good job of self-humiliating throughout this whole thing. I mean, the video of Rachel Maddow after Trump won the caucus, where she's just extraordinarily paternalistic and says, you know, we're not even going to show Trump's speech. I just have to do a little bit of business just for a second. At this point in the evening, the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech.

We will keep an eye on that as it happens. We will let you know if there's any news made in that speech, if there's anything noteworthy, something substantive and important. The reason I'm saying this is, of course, there is a reason that we and other news organizations have generally stopped giving an unfiltered live platform to remarks by former President Trump. It is not out of spite.

It is not a decision that we relish. It is a decision that we regularly revisit. And honestly, earnestly, it is not an easy decision. But there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things. It's just, it's so cringey to watch Rachel Maddow sort of portraying herself as like our our guardian angel right uh in matters concerning you know information and that she's really gonna do a great job of like curating exactly what would be best for us to see and and getting rid of what would be harmful i wanted to kind of see it from their perspective really quick if you really think that this is a guy, let's see what they really think. So these people think that he led a coup and only says complete total lies. And they see

themselves, I guess, therefore, as in a war to save America. It's hard for me to take it seriously, even as I'm saying it, I want to start laughing. But because, I mean, this is what I've seen this hysteria for my entire adult life like let's see so that was 18s back in college i would say is when i first started noticing the hysteria um kind of every election is spoken of in similar language none quite so crazy as trump's um leading me to think that like their their sense of what a lie is is just political opinions they don't like right um because realistically like every politician is a liar in a way every single one of them is either lying by omission or lying outright we catch them in lies constantly when

they're on the stage uh you might say it was a mistake or or like they misspoke or whatever but i don't really think so i think this this is just politics and all politicians are terrible. But there is a question of, I don't know, how you would cover one if you really thought they were beyond the pale. Would you not want to platform the lies without cutting away and fact-checking it every second? I don't know. What should the media's responsibility be here? I don't know.

Brandon, what do you think? I think if you're an MSsnbc then you have i mean they wear their bias on their sleeve presumably we all know they're left-leaning i think they are probably explicit about that i don't watch it but um i feel like it's perfectly within their right to um not cover trump right uh if they don't want to do that that's fine um what would a fair and balanced media organization do i think they would cover trump when uh he had something newsworthy to say but i think it's fine for rachel to run her show however she wants i'm sure her her viewers fully support that decision they're probably switching over to fox to watch him though because he can't he's sort of

irresistible as a personality well because they like him better than right-wing people like him he is he gives them meaning he's so important to the far left he is the enemy that defines them by you know through its through its opposite like you're fighting they're fighting him they represent everything the opposite of what they say that he is they think uh without him they sort of they kind of crumble and um in that way i mean that is for that reason alone i almost wish he would go away. There was also a narrative that emerged in the ashes of the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign that said that Trump won in part because a lot of news stations would basically just broadcast his rallies in entirety because they were so entertaining basically and that um they hadn't done that as much for hillary clinton as like they would show like clips and highlights or whatever for speeches but they wouldn't just like set up a camera and essentially walk away go pick it up when it's done um and i mean to a certain extent like trump did get more earned media through that but that's

because it's possible to watch a trump speech for 30 minutes without falling asleep and the same is not true for hillary clinton like this was like a business decision um that a lot of the news companies made where it was like yeah we put trump on then like people are going to watch that and if you just broadcast a 45 minute hillary clinton speech like people are not you know set through that even people who are voting for Hillary Clinton are probably not going to set through that so I think now uh that's part of um what MSNBC is doing is they're like we're not going to you know make that same mistake again of just putting Trump on and letting him say whatever and I think also the other part of that is like they're trying to signal to their audience of like liberal boomers that like this

this guy is so serious and this is why we because i think hillary or uh virginia malice says like this isn't a decision we take widely like they're trying to like raise the gravity of this situation of like he's so dangerous that you know we just can't we just can't take the risk of just telling you what he's saying you know it's melodramatic but just stripped of the morality of it and the question of whether or not he is dangerous and whatnot i don't think he is at all um but tactically talking about him a lot doesn't seem to have worked and not talking about him at all clearly is not working um so i don't even know what their thing i don't understand how they could even i just don't know where their head's at at this

point like you kind of have to just cover it at that there's nothing that they seem to be able to do that can stop him he's just popular at this point he's a he's a very very uniquely popular candidate i mean never in history has there been Never in our life has there been a candidate on the right this popular. That's never existed. I guess maybe... I was too young to remember Reagan, but Brandon and I were alive for that technically. Maybe he was really popular then still. I know he was popular coming in. I don't know how popular he was towards the end, but this is just but he's popular and he's going to win the Republican primary and they're going to have to cover something. I don't know what that's going to look like, but fortunately, I don't have to worry about it because I don't work at MSNBC

and I'm not sitting next to Rachel Natto. I want to talk about something a little bit different. It's this crazy ass, deeply insane eBay story uh brandon do you want to just kind of guide us through this hell dimension for sure um yeah the the defendants were definitely in a hell dimension for a while at the at the hands of ebay i was shocked reading this story. So putting together the weekly newsletter, The Industry, a few days ago, I came across an item in the New York Times that described, well, basically it's a story on how the Justice Department last Thursday charged the entire company of eBay, which was the first for me, I was like, what? How does an entire company get charged with stalking, witness tampering and obstruction of justice for some

events that happened in 2019 that involved a small newsletter called eCommerce Bytes. And just to like give you background on that, ecommerce bites is a it's a newsletter slash website that was started four years after ebay was started and if you actually go to it it looks like they haven't updated it since then it's this very kind of podunk um what i would describe as a trade publication for ebay sellers and amazon sellers you know people who are making a living selling i don't know, used stuff or antiques or whatever on eBay. And if you just like go through the headlines, it's like, you know, eBay shipping glitch hits one day after the busiest sales day or, you know, eBay glitch

hampers sellers from making offers this week. So it's really kind of just this like trade publication that covers eBay. And the suit specifically is about, uh, the actions of the security team in 2019. Um, around that time, uh, this, this blog e-commerce bites published an article, um, that revealed that the then CEO, Devin Wenig was paid 150 times more than the typical eBay employee. And this like apparently set off, like it triggered a lot of people internally at eBay and what occurred afterwards is pretty insane. So apparently the security team starts threatening this husband and wife couple over Twitter, sending them direct messages that were apparently very, very threatening. And the situation escalates such that the security team flies from San Jose, where eBay HQ is, to Boston to increase the efficacy of their stalking. Like, they have to be, like, in person. Sorry, the couple is in Boston.

So they have to get closer to the couple. According to the DOJ, the security team proceeds to attempt to install a GPS device in the Steiner's car. They post classified ads in the local papers for orgies that happen where the address is the Steiner's house. They're saying like there's an orgy at the house, come join they sign up for porn magazine subscriptions under uh the husband's name and send them to their neighbors so like their neighbors are getting uh like accidental porn magazines addressed to david which is the husband um this gets even crazier my favorite one was when they sent like they sent the husband a book about

surviving the loss of a spouse yeah and then they sent like a floor like a funeral wreath the next day like they were like for real like sending death threats to these people extremely malicious behavior they send a package of live spiders and cockroaches to the house yeah a bloody pig mask they send to the house i mean this is and then they like do funny things like ordered a bunch of pizza and send it to them you know what it sounds like to me it sounds like what are their names the the couple responsible for this nazi blog david david and ina steiner it sounds like david and ina around and found out i guess so so the the the chief communications officer at the time would agree with you um it's surprising because the doj details how this goes all the way up to the

c-suite um they've got emails from the CCO at the time who says, you know, we're being too nice. She needs to be crushed. The PR person. The chief comms officer. The buck literally stops with him. You know, it doesn't go any higher than that. She needs to be crushed.

He says, sometimes you just need to make an example out of someone uh she he says in another email we're gonna crush this lady wait so what happened to the these people there's money that's all they they do is have to pay somebody like seven people from the security team went to jail a couple of years ago that That's correct. One of them was still in jail, I think. Well, I think it was only, so seven people were charged, all pleaded guilty. Six were sentenced to prison or home confinement. The head of the security team was sentenced to 57 months, which is like five years, something like that,

in prison starting in September. So he's still serving. And somebody's still awaiting sentencing. So now the the doj has filed these charges and they'll be they came to an agreement with ebay um they'll be dropped if ebay maintains a good record which should be pretty easy just don't fucking do crazy shit like this again um the charges will be dropped in three years if they don't stock anybody else um and they have to pay $3 million.

But the couple still has a civil suit that's going to trial starts in March. How much money are they going to make? I don't know. I don't know what they're suing them for. They were trying to reach a settlement with eBay, but it kept falling through, which tells me that they're probably going to get a lot of money. Because you know eBay probably offered them at least a few million to like oh they probably

would have been like we admit no wrongdoing or whatever i think these people they probably want a lot of money and they probably also want it like on record that like ebay basically tried to kill us and for what it's worth the um the now ceo has completely disowned the actions of the previous ceo and executive teams um he said you know the company's conduct was wrong and reprehensible um and from the moment we learned of it, you know, we've been cooperating extensively. And we since we extend our deepest apologies to the Steiners. And so talk is cheap. Yeah. I mean, one of the most perverse aspects of the story, like I think people should go and read the DOJ brief for themselves. It's really freely available online.

It's like only 24 pages and it's extremely disturbing and entertaining. it's like only 24 pages and it's extremely disturbing and entertaining um but one of the weirdest details of this is at one point ebay actually sent one of their employees to like pretend to help the steiners as part of this like white night strategy yeah it's this guy um what's his name david no brian gilbert um who was a former police captain and was, I guess, working as eBay's senior manager of special operations for eBay's global security team. And he goes and he tells this couple, this elderly couple that runs this blog, he's going to help them. And this is all part of this very sophisticated plot. Like, fuck them over. It's so weird uh like the level of detail they put into the harassment oh this is definitely going to be a netflix true crime series and uh

you know within five years maybe we should do it i know we should we should write the we should write the screenplay and option it as a film. This is amazing. I could write a fucking killer screenplay about this. I wonder how, like, maybe, I don't know. I'd have to hire actors and stuff. I always wonder if, like, an audio fiction thing could work. But then I just get bored listening to audio fiction things. So I feel like the answer is just no, even though it's so much cheaper. We could pitch Serial with the story for the next season.

That podcast is still around. Well, I'm going to take a little note to myself. cheaper you can pitch a pitch cereal with uh with the story for the next season that that podcast is still around well i'm going to take a little note to myself and we'll uh we'll circle back with some power wires news in the future about what we would call it what was it i guess it's spiders and cockroaches colon i don't know what comes after that but spiders and cockroaches have to be it would have to be we need to play on like what is ebay we need ebay it's so ebay i was just saying we need like ebay terminology that it occurs to me i have no idea at all what that even is um it's like not a part of culture at all and yet the people on it are obsessed with it there are still there is still like an ebay community that is vibrant um it's interesting how about well yeah like the like ebay bidding my grandma got obsessed

with it for a while and she had to like delete her account because she was like it was getting ridiculous like she was like you just get you get sucked in because in the late i remember when ebay was first hitting uh in the late 90s and it was like almost um in the way that beanie babies was really a craze um it was like ebay i think the concept i mean i think a lot of beanie babies were sold on ebay but i think the idea that you could do this was exciting to people like you could find stuff in your house and put it up for sale kind of like for bidding and you could find stuff in your house and put it up for sale, kind of like for bidding. And you could find stuff yourself on the internet. And like that actually was the excitement about it was you could do this thing that seemed crazy and liberating.

Really like, wow, you can online find stuff. And it's weird old stuff or great stuff. And it felt like super empowering um but then maybe it's just uh the actual idea of it i mean the kind of person who really wants to get into it is just a very unique sort of guy or girl i think it was pre-amazon too and i think it's outdated now you don't want to bid on something and wait you know most people don't want to wait like five days after they bid for i don't know some random you know old jacket or whatever they think that they think looks good well they changed a lot too it's mostly not bidding anymore you can still you can set up you can set like a set prize or you can do bidding i think it's more like ebay is where you

go when you're looking for something extremely specific or you're like a collector or something like my mom really like she collect she likes like antique like tins and stuff with like from like i don't know like the land of lakes indian or whatever on it like stuff like that was buttercookie tins yeah yeah yeah um that's cool and i like oh i bought whenever i have to buy like a gift for christmas or whatever i always look on ebay and i always find stuff on there but like it's kind of like or you know people who collect like i don't know stamps i guess or like baseball cards or something probably use it a lot i imagine i was gonna say i'm a former baseball card collector and i did use ebay a lot but it's quite niche um and yeah the bidding is still an attractive feature of it because you can get good good cards for cheap so well something

to look forward to for me when i turn i guess 65 or. I feel like that's when I'm going to hit my eBay era. We should talk about humor. Kind of round this episode out. Two different stories that I think are interesting. One is the Babylon Bee. Sort of getting canceled on Twitter. It's like we finally found... I don't know if we finally found a thing that you can't talk about. But it's been so long since I've seen a right-wing...

I mean, a cancellation. They're not canceled but like but it's been so long since i've seen outrage over a a right wing thing on twitter i found it interesting um and uh then i'll talk about drag race and i know i'll be careful with that one because brandon said that pirate wires people don't care about drag race but um we'll find a way to make it relevant. Sound off in the comments about that, guys. How did they get cancelled, though? Did they really get cancelled? I will just say that they were trending, and not for the right reason, for the first time since they were brought back

by Elon Musk, that I saw. There were two stories. One was a joke about the the like dei airplane situation so di i'm gonna have art i'm not laughing at these um so it was uh it was a short it was like the dei pilots rode the short plane or something. There was a picture of a short plane too. Of a small little plane for like dumb pilots. And then the other one also,

so it was Vivek gets a job at a 7-Eleven. It's kind of roughly, it's like roughly the entire, it's roughly the entire show. He's in it he's in that 7-eleven uniform they put it they put it on him um and so these things both inspired fury on twitter uh which i found surprising and it was not like they were not being really supported it was especially the especially the short plane one and that has to do with the word that i'm going to spell right now and not for the rest of this segment you that has to do with a word that I'm going to spell right now

and not for the rest of this segment, you're going to hear a beep every time I say it because I believe this is still, we're living under kind of the woke YouTube rules and I'm pretty sure this counts as a slur still, but the word is R-E-T-A-R-D. And I think that you're not supposed to say it, which I have, I mean, we could have a whole segment on this.

I think it's crazy that you can't say this. I'm going to probably get a lot of hate for this. It's outrageous that you can't say this word. I think this word is fine. I don't, I don't, I think calling someone this word who is actually this word, I think, all right, I'm going to start you. I think calling someone a retard. I don't, I don't, I think calling someone this word, it was actually this word. I think, all right,

I'm going to start you. I think calling someone a re who's actually, that's up. But I think calling like, like, like if river says something that annoys me and I call him a retard, I think that should be okay. I think this is America and I should be able to do that.

But I was also raised in like a sort of working class environment in New Jersey. And I'm going to blame that. River, you have a lot of thoughts about the word re- Yeah, I mean it's- Take me down the re- Take me down the re- Why the f*** do you call me a re-

You know what I mean? Like it's just, everybody said it. The only, the thing was, is that you could never call an actual re- Like if you have somebody who's got, you know, a m*** or has some sort of other disability you can't you can say that word too it's just old it's not mean it's just old okay but like if you say like if you call an actual person then yeah you're an asshole but otherwise like it's fine like the word idiot is also like that was what people called

like retweet used to be the nice word yes but this is where it breaks down for me this is exactly where it breaks down for me because you're not supposed to use the word idiot either or moron at the height of people not being able to say online on twitter this was a couple years ago i think was when we reached the z-nails like clubhouse it was uh taylor lorenz writes a piece or writes a tweet about uh mark andreasing using the r word in a clubhouse chat he didn't uh his co-founder used the word to reference uh someone else doing something that he considered bad right like that's like roughly the story she completely lied and had to apologize about it um but at that in that era we were talking about not being ableist and so so it was like, you couldn't call people stupid either or morons either. And for me, it's like, okay, but there are people who are stupid and I want to be able to call them this thing that they are.

that word off if you take this like you're taking really not just a word but like um you're taking you're taking a critique off the table i'm i am critiquing your intelligence and i think that you are like adjacent uh like the takes are that bad and i have to be able to actually express that opinion because if i can't express that opinion i'm like well i don't know i don't think anything bad will happen but i want to be able to express that opinion. Yeah. I mean, I think, like, isn't it still used in, like, medical terminology, technically? I think they don't even use it anymore,

which is another reason that I don't care. I think they don't... They used to say something was retarded about, like, there were processes that could be retarded, obviously, and that can still happen, but to be retarded, I don't think they i think they get just got more specific there are all different forms of mental disabilities it's the same thing as calling something effeminate or something gay but not meaning actually gay i think that's the i think that's the argument that the parents

in the comment section of babylon b probably had like you should not you mean like you should not equate that shirt's gay but it's like not like is that what you're talking about sorry no you know how you call something like fake and gay right it's lame in some way right it's not i think people who would be offended by that would say you should not equate gay with this negative quality that you're describing some of this probably has to get cut out i don't know we've been going we've been going ham but it brings me to this place of like you know it's the question of humor and what is acceptable what's not acceptable we bounced around a lot uh in reality television we are witnessing the return of villainy uh both there are a couple things there you have shows sort of celebrating it uh

tiffany pollard um on the the villain show i forget what the name of the villain show was but she's gone super viral just with her epic owns and whatnot but it's a whole show uh it's a reality show in which all of these different villains from different eras like beloved villains i mean america loves a horrible rotted person um they come onto the show and they compete i guess for like top villain um but that was maybe the first signal and then uh this year so this season rupaul's drag race is back you guys i know probably according to brandon don't care much about that i do i think rupaul is super based actually like quietly very based and like very interesting and that's another podcast for another day i just want to talk about this one new contestant.

For me, the interesting thing about this is for years, people were afraid to be canceled. That's really what was happening is like the RuPaul's Drag Race fandom is virulent and rabid and frightening and extremely left wing. And which is, again, funny because of who rupaul actually is and we could break all that down from the fracking to the sort of questionable trans comments uh that he was totally roasted onto the fact that he goes by he rather than she and makes a big stink about that he's a man and he was like the dress is a job stop calling me a woman um um the fact that there's an embrace of someone who is just mean and uh i mean fate that really this this in this scene what happens um is there's like a talent show and this drag queen who's not

good gets up with a giant sign that says it's like their talent is activism and she stands up with a sign that says uh like protect queer art or something and this is the kind of thing that has happened in seasons past and people are like oh my god it was beautiful and then we're all at home like waiting for the next one because like just do flips again please or say something funny like what is going on here um plain jane is just like yeah you know we want to protect queer art but like what are what what are we protecting here like that you have to actually produce the art and and i think that that alone that's like a super anti-woke statement to be said uh on this show that was basically embraced and everybody was like yeah it was bad art um i think that's interesting you know you take away the message and what is your talent holding up posters

girl protect queer art but is she giving us anything worth protecting that's the question i think that you're going to see if you're seeing it there and i think the really interesting interesting about it is where it's happening. If you're seeing it there, this sort of reality check and kind of like a flashback to just let's be funny again. Let's have fun again. I think you might see it elsewhere. Now we're in this election year. So I think it's going to get worse and worse and culture should probably coarsen and become more toxic. It always has. I don't know how it won't again um but i don't know today i'm riding the vibe shift nobody wanted to be a villain again so you didn't really they had to kind of create villains out of like thin air um where people were just kind of a little bitchy they would just like amp it up but now we're seeing a return and just a plain jane perfect villain one of the only drag queens really I've seen in a long time on the show who's attractive as a man like that's a scary combination when they're like you rarely see it and Solana knows I'm talking about there's like hot for drag queen but then like actually hot this one and I think maybe that's where the confidence comes from it's like listen if drag doesn't work out for me i still look like this without the makeup on so i have

options and like i think that i think that was some of the psychology during fifio hera too because now fifio here is just like a twitch twink or something well i mean like 35 but you know like just a hot guy on twitch i think um a lot of the appetite for a villain on reality TV comes from a rejection of mediocrity, really. Because this thing about the queer art, you actually have to produce art in order to protect it, is, I think, so satisfying to people because for so long we've been made to say

that things that are just mediocre aren't to protect people's feelings and i think solana this is going back to what you were saying about how believing that you can change your life and succeed is at odds with the kind of woke belief in systems of oppression it's like yeah if you believe that you have the power to excel in what you're doing then if you're mediocre it means that you're failing right and so i think that like the villain who's willing to call you out on that taps into this kind of desire for people to see shitty stuff get called out on and that we haven't been able to say this for you know

for years and we've all just had to like sit down dei is the perfect encapsulation of that where you literally have to uh you know even the playing field um which means elevating mediocre people to positions that their uh superiors should occupy villainous a villainous statement from our panel of villains uh working at this villainous media company very excited for people to call us uh nazis in the comments please do so uh maybe don't i don't know if that affects distribution don't call us nazi in the comments share this with your friends like it uh review it tell everybody about it get in the comments and say things that you loved about it tell us how much uh you care about rupaul to rub it in brandon's face and we will see you, should Solana and I do a Drag Race recap episode every week.

Sound off. I'm going to get murdered in the comments. I'm regretting my decision to take this stand. I think this one could go either way. It's been real. We'll see you here next week. Got a bunch of good interviews coming. So sit tight and subscribe or die.

Later.