Pirate Wires - Jeff Bezos Changes The Washington Post, Left Wing Media Collapse, and Reddit Is Pro-Terrorist

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

EPISODE #88: Welcome Back! Jeff Bezos sent shock waves through left wing media. The opinion section of the Washington Post will be undergoing rapid change by emphasizing personal liberties and free markets. This, of course, sent the media into a spiral. It's been a bad month for leftwing media with the AP being banned from the White House Press Room and now MSNBC is cancelling shows like Joy Reid's. The resistance is fighting back with sw*stikas on Teslas and waiting outside Luigi Mangione's court room. Solana gives us his EU update, and we bring on special guest Ashley to break down what the hell is going on at Reddit. Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Riley Nork, Ashley RindsbergWe have partnered with AdQuick! They gave us a 'Moon Should Be A State' billboard in Times Square!https://www.adquick.com/Sign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyTopics Discussed:- https://www.piratewires.com/p/listen-up-bezos-shut-up-and-pay-me?f=home- https://www.piratewires.com/p/sucks-to-eu- https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-reddit-pipeline?f=homePirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolanaBrandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrellRiley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigitalAshley Rindsberg Twitter: https://x.com/AshleyRindsbergTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod!#podcast #technology #politics #culture

I told you all Jeff Bezos was feral. By the way, I love the word feral there. What the hell? Yeah, feral is a wild way to describe this letter. He's saying like, I don't want to do communism in the opinion section of a paper that I own. If you came to PirateWires and you said, I'm gonna publish a piece about how Mike Solana

is a f***ing slob, I would say that's not for me, you know? Trump's second term is like the media's worst nightmare. Like they're living in a fucking waking nightmare 24 seven. What do they even stand for? It's not even clear to me. If the AP has a right to be in the press briefing room, which is by the way, the president's house, he fucking lives there, okay?

What's up guys, welcome back to the pod. Thank you for your patience last week while I was recovering. I am for the most part recovered, glad to be not in London anymore, which we'll talk about a little bit later in the episode. We're also live in LA. Well, not live. We are in LA. We are in person in LA. We've got Brandon and Riley here today.

Cardi Camm Molly are off. We've got a special guest star, Ashley Rinsburg, who's going to be coming on the pod at the end of the episode to talk about his Reddit piece. I've got two pieces this week I have to talk about of my own. I've just been cranking them out. There's a lot of news. Why even wait? Let's get right into the biggest story of my life, which is Jeff Bezos pissing off Kara Swisher. Riley, take it away. Yeah. So beautiful story. So three of Jeff Bezos' favorite things, everyone, personal liberties, free markets, and Latinos. Okay. The last one wasn't on the list, but the first two were in the Washington Post owner's recent tweet, announcing some of the changes

at his paper's opinion section. Bezos said of those changes, quote, we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. Personal liberties, free markets. Those are pretty much universally appreciated things, right? I bet the reaction was pretty level headed and rational. Well, my sweet summer child, you've clearly never met Kara Swisher

who led the firestorm of left-wing outrage to this announcement on blue sky because of course, um, writing, I told you all Jeff Pezos was feral. By the way, I love the word feral there. What the hell? A wild describe this letter. She continued. He's now killed the Graham Bradley legacy of justice, the First Amendment and basic humanity in a vomitous spew of nonsense, testosterone fueled and HGH double talk

that is more than a little pathetic and utterly shameless. Elsewhere, Bernie Sanders said that this is what oligarch ownership of the media looks like. And for his part, Keith Olbermann kept it more to the point, tweeting out, fuck you Nazi. So what do you guys make of the change? Was this a good move by Bezos or is he a feral Nazi oligarch?

I mean, there are so many different places where we could go here. I think that there's, just right out of the gate, there's the question of the First Amendment and like, what is it actually and how is this a violation of it? I think... I'll maybe leave that one up to you in a minute. We can come back to it.

What I think was the most exciting thing for me about the story was just the amazing entitlement that these people have. So, Karis Wisher, I mean, what is she really reacting to? And it wasn't just her, right? Like, I just wrote a, so I wrote a piece about this. It's called Shut Up and Pay Me. It's in PirateWires, just put it out today.

So yesterday, by the time this thing is published, I think I don't understand the concept of someone giving me money and then me thinking that they have to publish whatever opinion I want. Now you had a bunch of different journalists reactions to this and some of them were more, I think, sober. Still, they were conflating something. They were conflating the reporting at the Washington Post

with the opinion page. And there was this idea that Jeff was, like, crossing the firewall or something they call it, and he's getting involved in the editorial process at the paper. If he were to be getting involved in the reporting side of things, first of all, that's also within his right. Like, that's also not a violation of the First Amendment.

He owns this paper. He owns the Washington Post. He can do, that's also within his right. Like that's also not a violation of the First Amendment. He owns this paper. He owns the Washington Post. He can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. But I think it would hurt the paper. I think that would be like sort of unambiguously worse for the paper to know that it's just, you know, Amazon's blog or something. That's not what he's doing.

He's saying like, this is my paper. This is the opinion section of my paper. And I don't wanna do communism in the opinion section of a paper that I own. That's completely valid. That is an editorial perspective that every single one of these places already actually has. There's just a question of who sets it. And that's the question across the entire media landscape. That's a question that we ask at PirateWars, where I set it, and then I do it with help from the team. But it's like my standard, right? That you're going to have a standard at the Washington

Post, and before it was the editor, and he's now leaving. But if he was still there, this idea that he has a right to set the standard is crazy to me. I think I know roughly where it comes from. But first, Brandon, what do you think, having followed the media as long as you have, am I correct about that, do you think? Roughly, broad strokes?

I don't know if you remember when Gawker started to attack its advertisers in its own pages. I don't, but that sounds fair. And it was in reaction to the sponsorship team that brought ads in and they would do, you know, sponsored editorial, they like had some more power than the writers liked. And so it was like Sam Biddle on Gizmodo,

like wrote this big thing about how Charmin was like really bad. Like Charmin toilet paper was really bad and it was just to piss off the advertisers. And this kind of reminds me of that where it's like, look, like you're kind of biting the hand that feeds you, the Washington Post writers are, and you seem to have forgotten that you actually work for a company that needs to make money and that you have a boss and that you are ultimately accountable to him.

And so, yeah, I think you're on point. And you're right. It's like, I don't really understand the entitlement that they have. And you said it in your piece, you were like, these people just think that they're doing a public good by sharing their thoughts. Like that in itself is a categorical good for society. And it's like, well, then my thoughts are a categor public good by sharing their thoughts. Yeah. Like that in itself is a categorical good for society.

And it's like, well, then my thoughts are a categorical good. Like that doesn't actually, it doesn't scale at all. You know, like why are you in this position? You know, like why have you dained yourself so important? And then I think that premise is absolutely flawed. And I, yeah, I don't think it's true. They start from this position of my opinion is correct. I am a professional opinion-haver,

and these people, these plebs that I'm talking to are not. And therefore, me giving this to you, like you just said, and I wrote about in the piece, is a moral, it's like a public service. Now they take it a step further in some sense, because I actually think, and I'm not even being hyperbolic here, from this point, not only do they believe it a step further in some sense, because I actually think that I'm not even being hyperbolic here. From this point, not only do they believe it's a moral ill to stop them from speaking,

to take away a platform that they have for any reason. And again, what we're really talking about here is like, some editor who worked for Jeff Bezos was setting the tone before he was deciding what was acceptable. And now it's Jeff Bezos is finding a new editor who has a different viewpoint. Like that's actually what we're talking about here. But they would take it a step. There are many people who I think will take it a different viewpoint. Like that's actually what we're talking about here. But they would take it a step. There are many people who I think will take it a step further.

And they'll say it's actually, it is illegal to take away a platform from them. And that's where, so this didn't just happen in a vacuum. While the Jeff Bezos thing was going on, you had the White House revoking press badges from the people who've sort of been in that press room, the briefing room in the White House for many, many years. It's changed quite a bit, but it's,

there's been this tradition, they said, for about a century where this group of journalists were deciding who they wanted there, and then they were getting a rubber stamp of approval from the White House. And they're freaking out because the president's like, actually, I don't want you there. Now this started, we didn't have a chance to cover this

as I was out last week, but this started in the context specifically of the Gulf of America, which the AP insisted on deadnaming, which the administration found just like a heinous breach of journalistic integrity. And they said, sorry, AP, you're no longer allowed in the White House. Now, is that ridiculous? Is it where I would have drawn the line if I were Trump? I don't know. I probably wouldn't have drawn the line there myself. You know, we're not doing like I thought that like we're sort of no longer in the era of kicking people out of rooms for saying the wrong words. Yeah, however, AP's response was to sue the press secretary on First Amendment grounds.

They're saying we have a First Amendment right to be in that press room. Now this, like, I don't need to talk to a fucking lawyer because as you used the word scale before, this does not scale at all. There's no way to see, if you have a right, if the AP has a right to be in the press briefing room, which is by the way, the president's house, he fucking lives there, okay?

If the AP has a right to be there, then so does every other person. I have a right as well. PirateWire for sure has a right, but like random people have rights. Like, there's no reason that a, you would have to have a media company to have a right. Every person in America would have a right

to walk into that house and ask the president a question. That doesn't make any fucking sense whatsoever. So what is the actual scheme that they're talking about there? What are they really upset about? It's not the democratic process. It's not a Republican process. They are talking about some kind of like hereditary aristocracy, where these these like chosen houses, the New York

Times, the AP, the Washington Post, and the NBC, they have a press badge that they can use however they want. They then talk to each other and decide who else gets a press badge. And what like that's just weird. That is not a value. Whose value? That's not my value. That's not even like, I'm not even being an asshole. That's just crazy. If you just break it down, who would ever defend that? That makes no sense. This is like the media's... Trump's second term is like the media's worst nightmare. They're living in a fucking waking nightmare 24-7. -♪ essential question that I've had for a while, which is like, why is Kara Swisher so insane?

You know, like, what is it? Is it like an age thing? Is it a mental illness thing? I don't know. Who knows in general. Her position is being assaulted. That's why. She's losing power.

I hate to, I feel like that's almost a cliche to say, but it's definitely true. Right, because if you look at- The floor, she's getting rugged The floor, she's getting rug pulled. It's the end of a system of patronage that supported the left in which billionaires were on the other side of things. The huge institutions were on the other side of things. Twitter and Instagram were on the other side of this. Every single media company might have been owned by a billionaire, but again, there was this bizarre rule where just random people who worked there could decide what

the acceptable bounds of opinion were. Think about the New York Times opinion page. They had to... Did they not take down the Tom Cotton op-ed? I know that the editor got fired or resigned. Right. The editor had to leave. But I don't remember. I think they did take it down. Over this. We can fact check that. Every single person at the company saying

that my black colleagues are not safe because this op-ed was published. And what was the op-ed? The op-ed was saying, we're gonna put down the riots that were happening back in 2020. Like this is, they want, not only want, they always had, they maintained control

over the discourse in a way that was artificially amplified. Like, they should never have had the voices that they had. You had people who just didn't actually earn the platform that they had, and that has just been taken away. I don't fully know what's coming next. Like, I don't know what the media landscape is going to look like fully.

I think probably it's not as bad for them as they think. In fact, it's maybe a little bit good for them, which I'll get into after the Joy Reid stuff. But I don't know, last thoughts on just like the patronage thing. Just the notion of like billionaires should pay me for my opinions is so bad because it's never been so easy to start your own media company. You can start your own sub-stack,

and if people like your opinions, they'll pay you for them. But if not, you don't have some right for these billionaires to just pay you for your opinion. Well, and that's really the theme of the last few years in media is... you had all of these writers who were actually getting underpaid at their outlets, which you could just metric yourself. Suddenly, you were publishing and you were getting paid for it. And it was like, whoa, I'm worth way more to this audience

than all of the other writers here combined. This is like the Glenn Greenwald intercept situation. He leaves, he's wildly successful, and the intercept fades into oblivion. This is gonna keep happening, and it's actually, this is not something where it's like, oh, only right of center voices are benefited by this. You know, you look in the world of streaming or whatever,

and Hassan is killing it. That's a total sociopathic, violence, fetishizing monster of the left, but he's killing it. He's doing totally well. Like, the landscape is wide open. If you have an audience, you will get paid, and if you don't, you won't, and you're not entitled to one.

No, Jeff Bezos, there's no such entitlement that he has to allow people to come into his house and say that he should not exist. That doesn't make any kind of sense. Who would ever do that? Who would ever pay for that? Nobody, and they shouldn't have to. That's actually the First Amendment,

which to go back to Kara's original point, saying this is a violation of the First Amendment, she can't, like, does she believe that? I would never say, it's like, I would never say something like that. I would never, ever write, just because I wouldn't wanna be made fun of, right? Like, I wouldn't want people to be like, oh, you're an idiot who doesn't know

what the First Amendment is. I would never say you have a First Amendment right to listen to me speak. That's just fucking retar... That's like a very stupid opinion to have, and she's just making it publicly. And it just makes me wonder, like, does she believe this? Like, what is the actual level of IQ

that we're dealing with here? And I don't, I suddenly don't know. I suddenly am at a loss. She has tweeted though. I want to say, or not tweeted. She's posted on blue sky over 20 times about this issue. And 24 hours, right? 24 hours. Yeah. So she's having a complete meltdown. Um, does she just, does she work there? No, no, no. She doesn't work out watching. She just has that podcast with Scott Galloway, where they said the Doge boy should be in prison. That's what she has. It's a wildly, it's like a popular podcast. That's why we keep talking about her.

Like she has, it's not like she's without influence. She has a lot of it. She makes a lot of money. That podcast, Jason Calcanis tells me that that podcast makes millions of dollars in ads, which you all are for some reason paying for. Can someone who actually in the comments, if you guys watch Kara's show, can you pop off in the comments and let us know what it is that you like about it? What do you hate about it? Why are you giving this woman money?

I don't understand. I'm at a loss. I really am. In that tweet, she referenced Orwell. And it's like, okay, like, we're not even talking about the fact that she's mad that Jeff Bezos said personal liberties, which means like freedom is good. And she references Orwell and says something about fascism in response to this. It's like, what are we talking about?

That's what the free market is too. I mean, we're talking about classic liberalism. We're talking about what the word liberal actually means is free markets, individual liberties. This is like very basic stuff. Yeah. And like Bezos even like backed it up. He was like, look, like markets,

free markets are ethical because they enable the highest degree of freedom and freedom of choice. You know, it's like, this isn't, I think Swisher's over there saying crazy stuff and Bezos is actually right. Well, we agree with, it's hard to like, you know, cause obviously I think we probably agree with his opinion.

And so I wanna just agree with this opinion. And so I want to just remove the actual opinion if Jeff Bezos said We're only doing We're henceforth. We're only doing pro Stalin comment content in the op-ed page of the Washington Post. That's what I believe That's I love Stalin. We're only doing Stalin 24-7. I would be like that's really stupid That's like a really bad business decision Stalin, we're only doing Stalin 24 seven. I would be like, that's really stupid. That's like a really bad business decision. There's not it doesn't seem like there's a huge market for pro Stalin stuff.

It seems like, you know, do pro Stalin people pay for newspaper subscriptions? I have a lot of follow up questions about that. But I would never in a million years be like, this is not he does not have a right to this. You could even say you can make an argument like, listen, he's destroying the paper, which a lot of people, I think Mike Isaac said something along the lines of, why did he even want to buy this paper in the first place? And I quibble with that because I think it's like, it's very clear that he bought it for the history of Watergate reporting more so than the unhinged

ramblings of Jennifer Rubin in the op-ed page. However, that point is a better point than Kara's point, which is a crazy thing to say. And it's not just Kara, right? It's like across the... You go to Blue Sky, Bezos was trending yesterday over this. Like, this was for them, this was... Like, Hiroshima was nuked. They fucking went wild. Yeah, it's a waking nightmare for them.

Yeah, 100%. I think they don't think he has the right to do it. I think they see it as some sort of coup. They've been seeing everything as a coup lately. But I think that they're like, whoa, you know, like, this guy has invaded our territory. And they forgot that he was actually their boss. I think that's what's happened.

Who is this asshole telling me what to do? He's signing your paycheck. That's who he is. It's not pro-Stalin content. It's like something that most Americans, I think, broadly agree with, makes it like, if you're not a blue sky, makes it even worse, the freak out to it. Because I've always felt that like the fact that like,

the views of mainstream outlets being so discordant with the views of the broader American public is something that's like probably not good. Like if you're, if you're center left at best and half the country is Republican and every single swing state in the last election just voted for the Republican, the fact that every single mainstream outlet is presenting a view that's like center left at best, probably not great. So this move by Bezos is like just bringing his paper more in alignment

with the views of the American people, which is why the freak out is even more stupid. Right. So now what they said though, in response to that, they were saying, um, we're not a left wing outlet. We're not doing left wing stuff. We're covering a broad range of ideas. And so there is this question that is, I think an interesting question to kind of play around with right now, which is like, does a paper like the Washington Post, which is supposed to be a paper that does, as you said, cover the entire country, have some kind of right to cover a broad range of opinions that include what everyone in the country thinks? Ben Frick I don't actually know when it happened,

but at one point or another, I think, I guess it was when Trump was first elected, this meme tore through the journalist community where all of a sudden it was okay. The journalist job was no longer to present a neutral point of view, but to essentially editorialize based on to further a certain cause. And that's just still happening. You know, and like, I think that's okay to do, but not if you're saying that you're actually... You're just unbiased and you're not... You're presenting the news in an unbiased way.

Right, maybe this is the thing that they're just refusing to grasp, is that... they have an opinion. And on the opinion page especially, it's crazy to say that you don't have an opinion when you're publishing op-eds. You're not like, it's not even like they're hiding behind the reporting stuff, neutral language,

but framed in a weird way that is obviously telling you what someone thinks, which is kind of the stuff that I typically am picking apart in my pieces, in my writing. These are straight up opinions. You are saying, this is the bound of acceptable speech here and you're precluding stuff like saying, the riots should be put down.

So you're making editorial judgments. So I guess I just reject the premise that this was a collection of opinions that covered the span of what people were thinking in America. I mean, how many pro-Trump pieces were published in the Washington Post? We're not even talking now about like crazy,

like, oh, pro-fascism or something, or like Nazi shit, white, the KKK. It's like just straight up, how many people got in the Washington Post op-ed page and said they supported Trump, because guess what? Half the country does. So if you're publishing a broad range of things that speaks to the country, where are the pro-Trump op-eds? They're not there. And then it's like, that's in the age of the internet. I don't even know how you could justify a need for something like

this separate from like the, are they doing it or not question. Do you really need that? Does the Washington Post need to be providing a cross section of opinion across the country? Like we've now democratized opinions on the internet. You can go online and find whatever opinion that you want. I don't need the, I don't, I don't know that the Washington Post does need to be including everything. If they want to not do far right wing stuff. And I don't think they do because Jeff's not, I mean, I doubt that Jeff

even supports Trump. I think he probably likes Trump more than the Democrats, but he doesn't strike me as a Republican. So let him have whatever the fuck paper he wants. I don't care about that. Yeah. So I just don't think there's a moral imperative to do this. And I don't think they're actually doing it. So what they're really just talking about is like, I lost a platform that I had essentially stolen. These people found a way to hack the system and just capture every institution in the country. There's like an NGO version of this story. There's a media version of this story.

And that's over. BOWEN Yeah, did they even lose it though? I mean, he just said, we're gonna be publishing pro-capitalism, pro, pro individual liberty op-eds, but he didn't say we're stopping these other op-eds. He said we'll be publishing about other things too. We're just doing this new thing as well. They're just not publishing things that are... Oh yeah. They're not going to do... Yeah. They're not going to do anti-individual liberty and they're not going to do anti-free market.

So when you break that down, what are we really talking about? We're talking about like no pro-communism stuff and no pro-censorship stuff. No pro-censorship stuff. And they're like, oh, well, you're a hypocrite because you're a censor. He's not censoring anybody. It's not censorship. You don't have it. Like if you came to PirateWires and you said, I'm going to publish a piece about how Mike Solana is a fucking slob, I would say that's not for me. You know, like I understand where you're coming from. I get it.

I fucking get it. But like, we're not doing that here, you know? And that's not censorship. That's called get the fuck out of my house, is what that's called. Well, we should talk about, I mean, there's a, this is sort of happening in the context of like, I guess what you might call a broad media reckoning, a self reckoning.

This is not like even a situation where I think, you know, MSNBC is getting nuked. They're sort of self adjusting. Riley, why don't you talk a little bit about the joy read of it all. Yeah, so this all prefaced Jeff Bezos's letter. So, yeah, like you mentioned, the mainstream media sphere is just going through some pretty big shakeups this week. First, MSNBC announced some major changes, including the cancellation of

Joy Reid's show. Joy gave this emotional interview where she says her show had value and that she's, quote, not sorry for going hard on Trump. Meanwhile, Joy's colleague, Rachel Maddow, opened her show with just this scathing critique of her network for letting go of Joy Reid. And even sort of tacitly calling her network boss as racist because two of the people in the primetime spots had now been let go. But also this week, as you mentioned earlier,

a federal judge denied an emergency motion to restore access for the Associated Press photographers and reporters at White House events. They were of course initially banned, like you mentioned, for dead naming our incredible Gulf. But all of this prompted the Trump administration to, this week announced that they're sort of switching up the traditional media rotation in Washington of who gets to cover White House

activities. Caroline Levitt said, quote, The White House press team in this administration will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One in the Oval Office. A select group of DC-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House. So it sounds like the perfect condition for PirateWires to get our press badges and join their ranks. I think I saw Mike Cernovich in the press room.

Yeah. That was surprising. I was like, damn, they are going... They're really going all in over there. What is Cerno? I thought he was just a big Twitter account. Does he have a media company? No, he's just a guy. He's a citizen journalist and they were serious about it, I guess.

But I want to maybe just talk about Joy Reid for a second. It's pretty interesting that MSNBC is doing this. Joy Reid is someone who has actually openly said that she is herself a product of affirmative action. She said it multiple times in the context of the DEI thing. She actually, I mean, she loves to bring it up. She says, if it wasn't for affirmative action, I never would have gotten into Harvard. And she says it over and over and over again, as if it's some kind of wind. It's crazy. It's like crazy that she says it over and over and over again, as if it's some kind of a whim. It's crazy. It's like crazy that she says it. And I think it's interesting,

because it reminds me of the way that the writers think about their entitlement to Jeff Bezos' op-ed page, right? Because she's starting from an interesting premise. Where the writers start with this idea that, my opinion is a public service, therefore taking away my platform is a public... It's a public evil. It should maybe even be illegal to do that.

She is starting from a premise. It doesn't matter how intelligent she is or what her test scores were or anything like that. She starts from a premise that she belongs at Harvard, which is just amazing. I don't know how you get that kind of confidence where you just start ground floor. You're like, you come out and you're like, of course I belong in Harvard. It doesn't matter like any of my qualities.

I belong there. She's just like, I'm really stupid. My IQ is super low. There's no way for me to have gotten into Harvard. Yeah. So she's never said she's never admitted that she has a low IQ. You know, I don't, I don't. What's your show about? I've never seen it before. It's about white racism and things like this. It's just like racism. Yeah. It's like, it's like the white people.

It's the white tears network. The whole thing. The whole thing is just clips. Like she like famously talks about white tears and mayonnaise sandwiches. And like, I mean, every other day was like a racist tirade. Um, and it's like, you know, use your standard MSNBC cat mom leftism, but with the sort of Black Lives Matter edge, I would say. What's a mayonnaise sandwich? Well, I think this is like a thing that black people who are racist think white people eat. Oh.

I think it's like, it's like their version of saying black people eat watermelon or something. Okay. But does it land the same? And which I would say, by the way, I acknowledge, like when someone says, oh, don't say cracker. That's racist. It's like, it's not really the same thing as an M-bomb.

Like, let's be honest. It's like, who cares if someone calls me a cracker? I think it's just telling that someone would call me a cracker. Like, that's weird. It's weird to be like, I'm gonna use a racial epithet on national television. Like, it doesn't matter.

That doesn't bother me. It's like strange that you think that's okay to be racist. Um, and she does, and she's gone now. And I think what's important about it is that she's gone because of ratings. So the show, Megyn Kelly, our new friend, now that she put me on her show, guys, give Megyn Kelly a shout, what's up, Megyn? Thanks for having me on.

So Megyn Kelly did a piece on this, where she, I mean, she really laughed about Joy's crying, because Joy is saying, my show had value, narrator's voice, it did not. In fact, actually, I mean, I think it had negative value. Like Joy Reid probably helped really do serious damage between black and white Americans over the last few years. I think that she is probably contributed

to a lot of the chaos that we've experienced. Megan's laughing about it. And she brings up the fact that when she was at Fox News, on a sort of good night, they'd have like 600,000 viewers, I think. And Joy Reid was something like 65,000 on her most recent show. So just...

Yeah, so she's not pulling any numbers. She's not pulling numbers. And so for the woman who admits that she got where she is because of affirmative action, it's really not a surprise to me She's not pulling numbers. And so for the woman who admits that she got where she is because of affirmative action, it's really not a surprise to me that now in this world where there's this reckoning over the concepts like affirmative, like DEI, that the DEI hire,

which she definitely was, is no longer there. MSNBC has to make money. Even Rachel Maddow is not making money. Rachel Maddow was like 150,000 when Megan broke the numbers down. So, but that's, you expect them to be a lot less than Fox. That same night, I think, what's her name? I forget now, the conservative woman, blonde Laura Ingram, had like 350 or something like

that, between three and 350. So MSNBC is like half, we're dealing with like half of where Fox is. And that's Rachel Maddow. That's the best, that's the biggest gun that they have. So they need to bring in talent that's able to compete or they're going to go out of business. And that's just, it's kind of as simple as that. Rachel had to say what she said.

She had to say this was because of racism. Keith Obermann, who is, I think, what is up with him? Is he- He's mentally deranged. Is it mental illness? Is he an alcoholic? He's like schizophrenic. Yeah, so something going on. Who said that he just gets drunk and posts, which maybe that seems like a

good theory could be it because it's really off the reservation. I feel bad. He's not a Nazi. The base is. Yeah. But he also went after Rachel Maddow when Joy Reid was fired. The moment she was fired, he was like, Rachel, if you don't say anything about this, you're complicit. He referred to her. I forget now. I wish I had this at my fingertips. Um, and then Rachel responded. I think that she was getting pressure from the left to do this.

BOWEN I heard that, uh, Joy Reid used to be a conservative news anchor in Miami. BOWEN Well, she was. She did hate gay people. She... Did you remember this story? BOWEN No. BOWEN She famously had blogs on Earth. Mehdi Hassan also hates gay people. Mehdi remember this story? No. She famously had blogs on Earth. Mehdi Hassan also hates gay people. Mehdi Hassan, that one makes more sense

because he's Muslim and like was super into this shit when he was younger and he's on stage talking about the evils of homosexuality or whatever else. But Joy Reid said very similar things. She had a blog post that went on and on about it. It gets unearthed. It's a huge controversy a few years ago. And she just says, I was hacked. And then people were like, you weren't hacked. We can just prove that you weren't hacked. And she's like, well, I just forget it. I forgot about it.

I don't think I wrote that. And she never, she's like, still has not taken ownership of it. It was, it's, it's like, Are more religious, more religious? Yeah. I mean, socially conservative. Yeah. Religious. This is why the abortion stuff always hit differently too. It was always kind of complicated, the abortion dialogue. It was not so simple as the right liked it and the left hated it.

The left was divided in lots of ways. In any sort of religious circle or whatever, it was gonna be a more confusing conversation. Listen, I don't know why they're crying. It's just actually a good thing for them, for the left. What I see on the left, you've had this decimation of these outlets where people could formally just spew their bullshit to millions of people.

You know, they're sort of revoking the privilege of that that they've had. But the audience for crazy left-wing bullshit, while probably diminished, is still exists, right? It's still reasonably there are lots of people who want this stuff. And now there are fewer of them than ever out there. And so if all of these huge media companies are trying to pivot to the center, then what that says to me is there's a lot of room for the first time in a long time on the far left for a new media company. And that's what I think where I think all of this

is going. It is never as you said, Riley, a little earlier, it's never been so easy to start your own thing as it is today. You could spin up a new media company on Substack overnight if you have the writers. The far left has endless talent that is looking for work right now. And I think there's a real hunger

for a kind of sociopathic, willing to get in the mud and fight and be nasty, left-wing media company that will go after the right-wing bogeymen. And I really do see this as kind of like an opening for a new Gawker, which I think is coming. Probably bad for culture though. Bad for culture. I'd rather have Joy Rita MSNBC than like the fucking

unhinged like Luigi Mangione fan site, you know, like, cause that'll be really, really bad in terms of cultural influence. Well, listen, I think fragmentation probably is net bad for culture. I mean, what are you doing? You're siloing people off into, I've tried to be careful over the last handful of years, never to celebrate the fragmentation and say that it's a moral good, just to say that it's happening and then also to operate within that frame. Like that's just the reality, that's the oxygen for us. That's the environment that we live inside of. And so the question is,

well, how do you operate now within that environment? But I think there are certainly pros and cons. And one of the cons is that- The brakes come off, you know? Yes. Yeah. You're now living in your own reality. So you look at just what's happening on Blue Sky and Twitter. On Twitter, you have not, it's not like, oh, it's only right-wing people there.

What happens is you have people create new polls. So there's like a new, like the left-wing on Twitter is now like the center right position. And then there's like the far right position, which is divides in a bunch of different ways. And blue sky is something similar where you have center leftists and then like pro Luigi Mangione people running wild. That's always going to happen. The Overton window is spreading and that's good because you can say things like, you know, riding is bad, but it's bad because you can also say things like, hey, we should kill political leaders, which is now happening. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's bad because you can also say things like, hey, we should kill political leaders, which is now happening.

I don't know if you've noticed, but it's happening constantly. That's like every day I read someone who is actually explicitly saying this, or I see it on Instagram or TikTok, where people are calling for Trump's assassination and Elon's assassination and things like that. I never saw that before on Twitter. Not even targeting right-wing people, right?

I never saw, and that's a new thing that's happening now. Really ironic about MSNBC struggling right now is you would think that in a Trump presidency is when they would be sort of like thriving. Like it's the outrage that draws you into the news. Like if like a Democrat was in charge and passing liberal policies that they agree with, they'd be more likely to just be like,

oh, well, like the world is fine. I don't need to tune in. But it's when like Trump is enacting things that these people hate, that I would think they'd be more likely to tune into the news. We saw that in the first Trump presidency, like ratings were doing great. And then in the second one, it's they're falling apart and they're firing hosts. And I think that speaks to how this is like uniquely something that's bad about MSNBC and the fact that they just aren't palatable to viewers, especially younger demographics because while they're struggling, like Hassan is getting thousands of streamer viewers every single day. So it's something that is a problem with MSNBC and because they should be

thriving right now, but they are very much struggling. Such an interesting and good point, I think. That is true. It's so different than the first term. And you saw that out of the gate. The moment the election ended, the ratings at the other networks crashed, but Fox went up. Fox went up. You wouldn't expect, I didn't expect that.

I thought that everything would just actually be suppressed after that. I thought people would be over the election. They would want to break. And that's not what happened at all. And I don't know, I don't understand it. I don't understand that trend. I don't know what's different. Yeah, I think maybe the conservative demo

is more likely to still turn to cable news as their main source of information, but the Democrat demographic is like, it's Twitch, it's TikTok, it's so many other outlets. And cable news just isn't their main go-to, I think. It's just the vibe shift. I mean, like, we had not yet experienced the vibe shift in the first Trump presidency. I think a lot of people voted for Trump this time around

that were horrified by Trump in the first presidency. I think the culture has just completely shifted underneath the left libs, feet. And like I said, it's like a waking nightmare for them. Every single day, some new bomb has dropped on them. And like in 2016, between 2016 and 2020, that wasn't happening, you know? Like everybody was like firmly against Trump.

They were making Trump wanted to, like, they were trying to get Trump to kill himself at the time. And it was like fully okay, you know? Everybody wanted Trump to kill himself, I think. Well, I think the biggest thing is actually just the difference in the size of protests. We saw right out, was it like two weeks ago, there was that the Trump protests in New York City. And obviously it was framed by the press in New York Times. I saw this New York Times article that was like, it's thousands have taken

to the street in New York City. And I thought- Like 2000. A couple thousand people. That is what I remember is when the ladies put on their pink vagina hats and took to the streets in every city in the country. And I was like, how many people was that? Went and looked at millions, between three and five million were out in the street protesting. Speaking of Mike Cernovich, I remember Mike Cernovich at the time saying, you can make fun of these vagina hats all you want, but this is a real movement. And he was, and he turned out, in hindsight,

that was not true. There was no movement. It was just like, it was a one day of very angry people in vagina hats. Um, and then that was it. But it was millions and millions of people. There was a lot of resistance out of the gate, and there is none now. The Democrats don't have that. Yeah, they lost their base. Like, I don't, yeah, like, I don't know.

I'm trying to think of what happened. I think Biden, I think Biden is responsible for a lot of the situation right now. He completely took the air out of the Democratic Party. I mean, he's just like, the fact that, I imagine the Dems are so demoralized by the fact that that was the leader for so long. And then Kamala was pitched as the next one, another completely

vapid, empty shell of a human being. You know, it's like, there's nothing for them to get behind. Yeah, like who were they? Who were they? What are you? What do they even stand for? Yep. It's not even clear to me. You know, like now they're anti personal liberty. Like, I don't know. I don't see it

taking, you know? I don't, I don't, so I don't, I don't see a direction for them right now. And so they're, what are they going out and protest? Like there's protesting. Trump, I guess. Yeah. It's like kind of generic. But which also doesn't work, right? Because Trump is not the, the, the anger, which people for sure do feel. I mean, there are lots of- People are mad.

Furies, right? There's no denying that. But they're not even really directing it at Trump. A lot of it is going to Elon. Yeah. And so it's divided. So like, who are you even out there protesting? Are you protesting Elon?

And then that just kind of, that's so buffoonish that it collapses on itself because it's like, well, why would you go outside and protest a man who works for the government? He doesn't even have any real power. He's out there making recommendations about who should be fired. That's remind. We're reminded of this almost every day. Some Republican gets up and says, Hey, yeah, so we talked to Elon and he's not actually firing anybody. He's making recommendations for this. He doesn't have that power, blah, blah, blah.

So like, why would you go out and protest him? Um, which I guess, um, which I guess brings us to our next segment, which is everyone is a Nazi. Fun development, a big week for Nazi stuff. So not only did we have the the a few more Seagiles at the CPAC conference this past weekend, but a lot of people have apparently found their new favorite way to protest Elon and it's by drawing giant swastikas on Teslas. That'll definitely show the Nazis painting their favorite symbol on cars everywhere. Really got them there, Antifa protesters. But that's not the only anti-Elon sentiment.

I'm not sure if you guys saw, but there have been a number of assassination attempts into him obviously. One of them posted a video where she not only bragged about not paying taxes for eight years. She also in this video did like a throat slashing gesture when talking about Elon and said, I guess like we need to X him trying to make like a clever pun. It's a girl named Sarah Carter, who I guess is like an influencer. This is a viral post, a viral post that she made recently.

So I mean, trying to make her pun ex him. But I think maybe where she got this idea of assassinations being normalized, our boy Luigi had his first court appearance this week. And photo shoot. And photo shoot met by adoring fans, people complimenting his drip, his sweater, which I do have to admit was pretty good. He's got drip. But I'm not going to commit murder to get the romantic attention that he does, but steal

his drip. I will, I will absolutely do. But yes, both Nazi stuff and assassination discourse being normalized this week. We gotta get, we gotta start the business where we're selling like the Luigi Mangione bulletproof vest that he wore in the courtroom. That thing's like fire. And then there was that photo of like his ankle.

Did you see that? Mm-mm. Yeah, it was like on Reddit, it had like a million upvotes. Just like Luigi Mangione's like bare ankle with his like loafers. Women are not okay. He is really good looking. I mean, like he's good looking.

Yeah, but there are lots of good looking people who are not assassins, right? Like there's something specifically, and I think that if he was an assassin, people would not think he's so good looking. I actually don't think so. I think that there's something about the fact that he's a murderer.

He's a bad boy. I'm more interested, let's just start with the Nazi stuff. We've already, we've dedicated so much time to Luigi Maggio. Like I don't I don't want to do it again. I just can't do it again. I'm not prepared to do it again right now. Maybe if you guys want to go there you can. No, I don't know I want to talk about them just riffing. Yeah, I don't have even much to say about the Nazi thing I want to maybe hold on to the RIP Nazi stuff. But unless you want to go we can't say it

You don't want to say RIP RIP Hitler What I don't want to get it. I don't say it. You don't want to say RIP, RIP Hitler. What? I don't want to get it. I don't want it to be stolen from us before we write that. All right. We'll have to bleep that one out. Well, yeah. What are we talking? Well, then what, what are we saying about Nazis? Just every, everything.

Everything that comes to your mind. I know you think about Nazis a lot, Brandon. I just, I know. So I wanted to start with like, there is something interesting to me about the fact that both neo-Nazis and people who say that they like, hate neo-Nazis as an identity, people who, for whom that's a really important thing,

both paint swastikas all over the city. They both are doing it. Like, it's that meme where they're shaking hands. Like that's what they can agree on. I think it's, I guess just, it's just funny. I mean- It's just like unconvincing, you know? Like, I don't know.

I don't care. Do they really believe it? I don't think they believe it. No, I don't know. No, maybe they do. I think they're just so like, I don't know. Like I don't, I can't even hear it anymore. Like it's just like, what are you talking about?

Like where are the concentration camps? Like I don't know. Like what are we talking about? Like I don't see any Nazis around and I don't, I'm just not convinced anymore. But what do you make of this, the SIG, I don't want to call them SIG heils because they were just, they weren't.

But the kind of, the Nazi hand looking gesture of Steve Bannon and the other group. I don't know, I think he was doing it. I think he was doing it. Yeah, I think he's playing it in the back. Like he was trolling, which is like really stupid, I think. It's weird. It's weird, it's like why, what's the point?

It's because he wanted this. He wanted people to be like, oh my God, Steve Bannon did a Nazi salute. And it's like- I put him above that before this, before this incident. I thought he was like kind of a smart, evil man, you know, just like a very conniving, high IQ, high agency killer. Well, let's put yourself in the shoes

and then why would you do the hand gesture? I think it clearly worked. It had people talking about him. He centers himself now in the conversation and he gets to be like, these people are clowns. I'm obviously not a Nazi. Yeah, I guess maybe that was the play the whole time just to like have an excuse to dunk on the left.

And a bit more to the point now, like him and Elon sort of have this feud going right now. Has Elon actually said anything to you? What's the feud? He has in the past. I'm not sure if he has recently, but Steve Bannon is like very much hot. I heard him on Ross Douthat's New York Times podcast.

It's just very sort of hostile to Elon right now. So I wonder if it was his way of sort of just like clapping back to him. Why, why? Oh, a lot of reasons. So I mean, I think that probably the most important reason is that Elon has influence and he has influence that Steve Bannon wants.

Riley, Elon is everywhere. Elon and Trump are close. This is... Steve Bannon hates Elon for the same reason that the liberals hate Elon, the left wing hates Elon. Because he's very good at what he does. He's very effective. And because he and Trump together are... They amplify each other.

Like, they're both much more effective together than they would be apart. Even cumulatively apart. Like, they're just together, this unit is really, really powerful. So Steve Bannon, one, wants that influence. And then two, he sees in Elon Musk, a bastardization of everything that he cares about on the right. So it's like Elon Musk's personal life, right? It's all of the kids with all of the baby mamas. It's Elon Musk saying that, like, H1B is a good thing, and if you don't like immigrants or whatever,

I'll fuck your face and something. Steve Bannon sees that as a total... The end of everything that he cares about. Like, the opposite of everything that he cares about. I feel like it's also like Bannon didn't do what Elon's doing now. Like, Bannon scared... Like, the fact that Bannon was in Trump's cabinet in 2016,

and then, do you remember the whiteboard? It was like the first hundred days, there was a huge, there was a picture of the whiteboard. And it was literally a whiteboard of things to own the libs. And it was like in the Oval Office. This was Bannon, this was of things to own the libs. And it was like in the Oval Office. This was Bannon. This was Bannon was like the mastermind. And he didn't like, I don't think he was very effective, frankly.

Yeah. And my point is to say, it's like Bannon's probably like, I could have done that, you know, what Elon's doing, but he couldn't have. And so it's just coming out. He's like a cope or something, in a way. I think part of it's like a cope or something, in a way. You know what I mean? It is part of it. But I think part of it is also a huge ideological difference between the two. Yeah.

What is it, Ben? Like a Christian or something? I was asked about this a lot when I was in London. And it was something that I was not super keen into. And so I just started thinking more about it. Like, I thought that the divide, the conversation about the divide between the tech right and the maga right was kind of just played up for clicks or something.

And it doesn't seem that serious to me. I think for people who are right wing and not in tech, it's very serious. Like they do. And I mean, but you also have to be like, he's provided your super online as well, in addition to that. Like for the Steve Bannons of the world, men who have podcasts that they create in their basement,

like that kind of guy. Matt Walsh. He cares a guy. Matt Walsh, yeah. He cares a lot. Matt Walsh, that model of person cares a lot about this because there's this question about what Trump... It's not even what Trump, it's like, what should the right wing be? They somehow, they forgive Trump for being weird.

And this is where I always fall on it, where I'm like, how could you possibly be upset about this, about the Elon Trump? Elon and Trump have a lot in common. They have multiple kids with multiple wives. They are like totally fine with the H1B stuff. They are very socially liberal. Like there's no way that Trump is not surrounded by gay men, right? In his life, there's absolutely, it's been like his whole life has been like this famously, there's that clip of them on the apprentice where he asked the dude if he's gay. And he's like, I forget what is it. In his life, there's absolutely, it's been like his whole life has been like this. Famously, there's that clip of him on The Apprentice where he asked the dude if he's gay. And he's like, I forget what is it. In my mind, Trump goes, yeah, that's, you know, there's no way he said this,

but in my mind, the quote is something like, you know, it's not for me, but that's a beautiful thing. Like that's his vibe about, about this kind of stuff. You actually, you know, it really tells you about how fucking weird Trump is. It's that video of his. Do you guys see the Gaza video? The Gaza one? Yeah. Yeah. Totally confusing. That video is crazy, and it is exactly who he is. Trump retweets this video, this AI-generated video

of what Gaza's going to look like after he's done turning it into a resort, okay? It's like gold statues of him. It's him and Bebe sunning, like, just totally guts out, sunning on the beach. It's Elon Musk stuffing his face with croissants. It's Hamas fighters who are transed into bearded belly dancers, right?

Dancing for Trump. Matt Walsh could never. But he just could never. That's like a level of, that is a certain kind of, it reminds me, I've said this before, he reminds me of this certain kind of, it's like Key West energy that he brings. Okay, like my, I think about my parents

who are also, they're like into Trump. They're not, I wouldn't call them like MAGA people, but they're, they voted for Trump. They love to go down to Key West and tear it up. They're like boomers who like to party and get wild. And like that is, they're kind of weird. They're socially open, but they don't like this bullshit about being told what to do and like doing things that are clearly not in the interest of the country.

And that's what he is. He's not this right wing conservative guy. He's just never been that. BOWEN Yeah. Do you know about the freak week in Key West? Yeah. But tell the crowd about freak week. BOWEN Well, Key West is famously like a gay, like a southern gay Mecca-ish, right? In the 70s, it was like...

BOWEN Ernest Hemingway, right? Well, that was part of their legacy. That was before this. But by the 70s, it becomes like Provincetown almost. It's like a wild, but like also straight, but like very gay. And that the gay stuff's kind of died down there. It's still there, but it's not, it's, it's like, oh, it's, it's a part of it. Yeah. So I understand the freak week is just kind of like a low, a sort of lower key Folsom street fair that happens in San Francisco, but it's kind of like Florida's version of it. And I have MAGA relatives that love,

they live in Florida, they love going down there for freak week. And I'm like, bro, like, you know, this is like a guy, like he's like a construction worker. He just loves going down there with his wife. He's like 50, 55, 60 years old. And it's like, yeah, like I think that

the online right that, you know, Matt Walsh inhabits, no offense to him, I think is much, is actually out of touch with what the populist, real IRL populace right, like represents. Yeah. And I think the Flark Week thing is relevant to that. It's very, it's this huge part of Trumpian right wing boomer politics that is totally misunderstood obviously by the left, but as you're noting here, I think more importantly

by the right, by right wing intellectuals. They really, really want, you know, Ben Shapiro, I think really, really wants this like conservative cultural thing to happen. And I think there probably are all sorts of like, you know, socially conservative impulses of boomer people, but the boomer right, the sort of like the Key West right, let's call it.

But I don't think- The Key West right, that's good. I don't think that it's, it's as dominant. It's, it's like, it's conservative in the way that they don't want trans people beating up women in sports, right? That's not about social conservatism. That is about common sense. That's what they're, that's what's happening there. They're not saying like, we got to get back to this world where it's boys and girls and like blah, blah. They don't give a fuck. If adult wants to dress, wear a dress and parade around, you know, Key West wasted, go off. That's, and I'm not

saying that for myself, but that's also my position. I'm saying that like that is how I see them. That is what I think is actually happening here. And if you're going to misread it and do this like social conservatives and stuff, I think that you're missing the broader thing that's happening. I think that's what makes Trump's political coalition so strong, is he has the Key West right, and then also the online Matt Walsh-Magger right. And that's like a pretty wide... That encompasses a lot.

And I think like what Bannon's trying to do right now is, I had a friend describe it to me this way, he is trying to set the edge on like certain immigrant, or certain issues. So like immigration, he's is trying to set the edge on certain issues. So immigration, he's just trying to define the issues to be like, tech, right? You guys can do whatever you want. Just don't pass a go on these certain issues.

And I think maybe that's a helpful way of making sense of that sort of rift between them right now. The funny thing is the key West, right, is fundamentally liberal. That is a very liberal West, right? Is like fundamentally liberal. Like that is a very liberal sort of, they have a very liberal character and the online religious, right?

Again, like the Matt Walsh, right? I think is actually kind of fascist. Yes. Yeah. Like they want, I don't know, they have this weird thing about IVF. Their abortion stuff is like really bad. So yeah. Yeah, I think I've never liked those guys. It's maybe we have a lot of exposure to this, like, oh, I was a leftist before the left left me or whatever. But that tends to be dominated.

That's a like an idea space that's dominated by intellectuals, by there are certain Atlantic writers and things like this, that were anti-identitarian politics, but they were still fundamentally Democrats. And when I say liberal, what I mean is like, what my parents are and have always been, which is, live and let live. Don't tell me what to do, right? But they've been, but that puts them in this Trumpian category because of just the way

that politics breaks down. And they tend to be forgotten even while they are, when I think of what a MAGA, what MAGA is, that's a huge, maybe like the most large part of it is that. Because they were famously not people who were voting. Uh, my parents happened to always have been voting, but they always talk about how people didn't just vote for Trump, they weren't voting previously. There was a whole subset of

the population that hadn't been excited about politics for decades. They weren't even registered to vote and Trump brought them into politics. And I think, yeah, anyway, I think this is what we're dealing with. So Nazi salute though, last thoughts on that. What do you think is actually happening there? I mean, is it just attention or what? The Bannon thing? I mean, I saw an interesting theory about Trump a long time ago that's always stuck with me is that like, he has this talent for being in the center of attention, even if it's negative.

And so the theory is that he actually subconsciously does things that he knows will get him attention, even if it's bad attention. And I think Bannon is kind of pulling on those strings too. You know, he might've like, I bet you he's just, maybe it's just attention for him. Yeah. A quick, a quick ad reading for our good friends over at AdQuick before I get into Sucks to EU. So, uh, AdQuick,'ll remember, this is what I used for the Moon Should Be a State billboard a couple of weeks ago. We love these guys.

One of my things that I think I just love about many things I love about Pirate Wars. But when it comes to the ads, it's cool that I've, so far I know most of the people that we advertise for. And when it comes to the podcasts, I have all of them so far. There have only been a couple. And I can tell you that they actually are really good.

And I'm proud to have them as a sponsor of this podcast. Thank you, AdQuick. So Chris and Adam from AdQuick, longtime PirateWires readers and supporters, came to us and said, Moonshipia State belongs in the real world. Naturally, we were in. We sent them a design. And next thing we knew it, it was seven stories high

in Times Square, towering over Trump's own city. And it just took off. 1.5 million people saw it on Twitter alone. Elon retweeted it. People were talking about it everywhere. But before this, getting something on a billboard was a nightmare. Layers of gatekeepers, confusing logistics,

no real way to measure if it worked. The team over at Adquic made it effortless. It went from an idea to a massive, impossible to ignore statement. You've got a big idea and you're tired of fighting for scraps on the internet. Hit these guys up. It just hits different when your message is out in the real world. Adquick.com.

Thank you for sponsoring Pyre Wires. I feel like I'm doing the Buddy Christ gesture always. I'm always doing the Buddy Christ gesture. Should we call out Adam Singer? Say thanks, buddy. Thanks Adam Singer. There we go. Adam is always reading my pieces and saying nice things. Yeah, I was saying nice things.

Which is helpful because I'm getting a lot of annoying people in the mentions lately who are in the emails, who want to email me and tell me I'm a Nazi. That happened today. Rebecca, I see you. Fucking unbelievable. Well now Ashley's here. What's up Ashley?

What's up guys? So Ashley's here. Ashley is a writer for PirateWires. He's going to talk about his piece today, but I want to quickly get through the last topic because you'll have actually a great perspective on this. Ashley lives in London. I was just in London for a conference. Now I wrote a piece called Sucks to EU, which you should check out on PirateWires.

Of the two pieces I wrote this week, I think this is the better one. Sucks to EU I like. It's a classic, I think, PirateWires b Of the two pieces I wrote this week, I think this is the better one that sucks to you. I like it's a classic. I think Pirate Wires banger. I like great title. It's great title, great picture. Like I went off and I really wanted to talk about and we can talk about it here really quickly. Just the changing relationship between America and Europe, because I think it's really important and underwritten about and under discussed. And I had some maybe extra insight about it when I went over to London. The second one also great, it's about the base of stuff. It was fun.

I wrote it while I was on Xanax, like we can just move on. Okay, so sucks to EU. I don't know what I was expecting when I went over there for the conference. Great fun conference. This is the art conference. I was unfortunately sick for most of it, but I did get a chance to meet a bunch of people,

a lot of smart people. I think overall idea of wanting to create value in the world and human flourishing and progress and things like this, but it was in Europe. And one of the first things I noticed was they were really not wanting to talk about immigration, which I thought was crazy, because I thought I'd driven through East London. Like,

man, the only thing that anyone in Europe should be talking about is immigration. Every single issue that you have, it comes back to immigration, including if you think the political instability, instability counts. If you think that right wing populism counts as a problem facing your continent, then immigration is also a problem because that's what's catalyzing the entire thing. So it just automatically struck me as not the way Americans would do it, right? It was just like not the way an American is like more of a head on,

talking about the crazy shit, getting canceled, yelling about it. This was a more polite affair. I would say then my broader experience in Europe was like walking into a restaurant, trying to give them money and sort of being denied, like just a combination of like laziness and incompetence and just like a very strange experience where they're just, it lacked, the whole place just to me felt like it lacked

the kind of excitement about existing that I very much feel in America that I was even sort of feeling to an extent before Trump, but I really feel now, there's like this like overwhelming, like we're here to just fucking do shit and maybe it's gonna be clownish, but overall there's like a great, exciting vibe to it. My piece, my overall thought on the EU thing, there was confusion the whole time I was

there. It was like, why is Trump talking about Ukraine the way he's talking about Ukraine? Why is he talking about America, you know, America first stuff the way he's talking about it. Why is he talking about tariffs? And I was confused by their confusion. Having followed the EU trade war for the last five years, which no one would call it but us, every single time, they went ruthlessly after one of our companies to find them billions of dollars, up to and including this most recent, you have the...

The most recent series of legis... It's a... What is the brand of the piece there? The Digital Markets Act. The Digital Markets Act, which could find up to 10% the most recent series of ledges, what is the brand you have the piece there? What is it? The Digital Markets Act. The Digital Markets Act, which could find up to 10% of a company's, one of these American giant companies, Global Runway or Global.

Turnover. Global Turnover. So we're Google, for example, you're talking about like a $28 billion fine, for example, all framed as a fine for being anti-competitive for selling your products on Google over the products of someone else or something like that. That's a $28 billion fine.

That's a trade violation to me. And I've just seen a sort of drift from the European side of things for a while. But then I start thinking about who the Europeans are. What are our values? What do we have in common? And on the question of liberalism, I think we don't really agree with that word even means.

In Europe, there is no idea, there has never been a right to free speech, not in the way the Americans define it. They hate when you tell them this, but they don't believe that you're able to just get up there and insult people, for example, which is illegal, actually illegal in Germany. They don't believe that you can talk about Islam

in the UK or in France, for example, in the pejorative. You can't say, I hate this religion. It's a shitty religion full of shitty people, which you could definitely say in America, people can say about Christians forever. For my entire life, people have been saying it. That's very well protected here. They don't believe that you have that right. So I think it's like their conception of liberalism is sort of what works for the social good, is maybe the steelman version of what they believe. Whereas Americans is very much as freedom. It's like straight up you as an individual have a right to yourself in your words and things like this, your property and everything kind of falls politically around that. So I guess I'm looking

ahead as I kind of break down the Europe's reaction to Trump and then I kind of throw politically around that. So I guess I'm looking ahead as I kind of break down the Europe's reaction to Trump and then I kind of throw it back on them. And I'm like, well, here are all the fucked up things that you've done. And this is why our relationship is falling apart. And so now we've gotten to a point where if Russia does invade Germany,

I mean, I don't want that to happen, thoughts and prayers. I hope you succeed, but I have this question that I never had before, which is like, why do I care about this? Do we have anything in common? If America was attacked, would Germany actually defend us? I don't necessarily believe that they would. What is the difference between Russia and Germany to a certain extent?

I think Germany is an increasingly liberal place. You have a new election, maybe Ashley, you know a little bit more about this than I do, where the second most popular political party is being blocked from coalition, from building a coalition in the government because they're considered like an illegal party to a certain and they have views that are deemed beyond the pale by the other parties. You have a lack of freedom of speech over there

and a lack of, I think, well, I don't wanna go off on too big of a tangent, but I think that we've actually just, we've drifted in a way that maybe people don't, are not appreciating the degree to which it is, the degree to which it seems like World War II is over and the landscape is very different now than it was before. And Ashley, what's your sense of it over there in London?

London is, it's a really strange place to be because day-to-day life is pretty good and people are happy and it's all green and my green and pleasant land type stuff. But then people are actually getting arrested. But like when you could say, okay, this is just kind of like a meme and it's something online that people are saying, but people I know are getting arrested and not just one or two, but like many for one point you have to for tweeting, for saying the wrong thing, for being at a protest where you're the tiny minority that will be ripped to shreds. And so like

they just arrest, they arrest those people. Like there's a guy here, Iranian dissident who holds up a sign saying Hamas is terrorist. He left out the indefinite article, but he's the one that he got arrested for holding up that sign, not once, but like two, three, four different times. They just arrest him for holding up a sign saying Hamas is a terrorist organization, which is the case according to the British government. So you look at that kind of stuff and you're like, no, this is actually happening. And you start to think to yourself, what is that knock on the door like for a journalist like Alison Pearson from The Telegraph?

They just like knock on the door like one Sunday at 8 a.m. with a query about something she tweeted but won't tell her what it was. So, like, this is actually what is happening here. Whether or not the justification is correct, incorrect, like, that's the... That's where life is left. Well, much like the left journalist here, like the kind of Kara Swisher model journalist, there's a belief that if you let...

If people are left to speak and act freely, fascism will rise. And so I think that what the European governments believe is their job is to prevent fascism from rising. And so it's like, well, if we just stop people from saying fascist things, and that includes in the case of the UK, any criticism of Islamic culture, any talk of what was that Pakistani rape shit that happened, Ashley, that everyone freaked out? They call them the grooming gangs here, which has been going on for decades across the UK, where predominantly Pakistani run gangs were quote unquote grooming and raping and pimping out very young girls. Like we're talking 12 years old, 13 years old. And there was this case, the New York Times actually covered this, where the police walked in on a group of like six or seven men with a 12 year old girl who was

drunk. They had gotten her drunk and the police arrested the girl for drunkenness. That's so dark. What does it indicate? It indicates that there was official, you know, I wouldn't necessarily say buy-in, but I think that's on the table. There was official sanction at some level of what was going on. Otherwise, it would have been shut down in three seconds. There was it wasn't there a cover up to or there appeared to be some sort of obfuscation of of the issue.

Well, there's there still is and that was the whole thing that popped off earlier this year with with Elon Musk tweeting about Keir Starmer because what was going on is they were calling for a national inquiry, like for the government, the federal national government here, it's not federal, the national government, to do a full blown inquiry, which you would think is like, well, obviously, how has this not been done already? And the government, Keir Starmer refused to do it, and he said the towns should do it. But the towns, like the town council, are the ones that are being investigated.

Because they're being investigated for whether or not they participated and covered it up. And now they're supposed to run an investigation on themselves because he won't do it. And you're thinking to yourself, why not? Why wouldn't you? What's crazy is this is classically why you have a First Amendment in America is so you

can speak about these things. It's not, oh, this is an edge case and we have to look the other way when someone's like, I'm going to do a KKK march through the South. And you think you have this whole, which is a famous thing that happened in America and you have the, was it the ACLU actually was, I think it stood up in their defense, the defense of the KKK famously back then. It was a different time in America and a different ACLU. But still, that's a value that we have.

It's like the idea that you have to let someone heinous say something heinous. That's like this edge case and you're like, ugh, like I hate that they're talking, but they have to have that right to talk. This is not that. This is like... I am upset about something heinous happening in my community

that the government is covering up, and I need to talk about it because I'm in danger community that the government is covering up and I need to talk about it because I'm in danger and my children are in danger, my family is in danger. Like this is why you have it and they're silencing it. And this is across the entire continent. And it is like this weird thing that you have over there where the Europeans talk a lot about the value of freedom and liberalism and democracy and these kinds of ascended liberal values. Whereas the Americans...

American Republicans, let's say, like the Trumpian type people, don't. Trump's like, I'm a king and blah, blah, blah. Like, isn't that, like, here's my picture of my mugshot or whatever. But we have a robustly defended right to free speech that no one would actually undo ever. No Republican is ever gonna talk about that. Trump has never talked about it. Trump said a lot We have a robustly defended right to free speech that no one would actually undo ever. No Republican is ever gonna talk about that. Trump has never talked about it. Trump said a lot of crazy things.

He's never said that. He's never said, let's get rid of the First Amendment. Um, he, at the end of the day, is a democratically elected president. He won the popular vote. Not just the electoral college, the popular vote. What was Starrmer's support? I looked at this the other day. It was shocking to me.

He had 20% of the electorate, is how he came to power in the United Kingdom. Okay, so like, everything that they say about themselves, it feels like out of sync with the reality. The reality of it is that, I don't think there's like a... I don't think these are like, you know, fascist countries abroad in Europe. But I think that they are closer to that than we are.

I think that we are actually a more, much more liberal nation than the United Kingdom or Germany. Do you like self-censor over there? Are you on Twitter? Like, how do you treat this specter or the threat of being? I think there are,

it's this natural thing that you think to yourself, because it comes down to a question of like, is this something I'm willing to spend the night in jail for? That's crazy. That is crazy. Is that what happens? Like when they book you, do you just, what actually happens?

Like you get handcuffed and taken in a police car and you go down to the station and you spend the night in jail and then they let you out? Or what's the problem? I guess, you know, I guess you get taken to the station and you spend the night in jail and then they let you out or what's the problem? I guess, you know, I guess you get taken to the police station. Yeah, you get detained and handcuffed. I mean, in some cases, they come into your house and question you. Right. It seems, from what you said a second ago

and also some of the footage that I've seen, because I've seen different versions of this video play out, or this scene play out, where maybe there's like a warning that happens first. Like, oh, we're getting complaints about you. I heard you've been saying things around town. And then if you maybe keep acting up, it's like a public noise complaint or something, then, then they can get more aggressive if you just refuse to listen.

Right. And that can be weaponized just like all this. This is like, this something we don't talk about with the free speech thing. Cause we usually think about it in terms of the threat of the government, but it can be weaponized by third parties against you. It's so easy. Like you just could report a few tweets on Twitter posts on Facebook. I'm not telling you to go to jail, but it would be good for Pyre wire subscription. If you were a speech criminal,

I would write the sickest essay for you that I've ever written if you went to prison For tweeting so just you know some food for thought if you guys cover the bail Yeah, how much would we do the flight out after that? Yeah, well you figure out how much bail it is and we can talk later Yeah, in the meantime, why don't you tell us about the terrorist propaganda laundering that's been happening on Reddit? Yeah, that's there's that thing, which is pretty wild. I had done a little look digging into this issue because I've done some of the Wikipedia stuff and there's like significant overlap. So Wikipedia, where we have this group of editors that are editing

10,000 articles with 850,000 total edits to change the narrative on Israel-Palestine. Some of these people and some of these groups are also operating in a similar manner on Reddit. And they are running this network of pro-Palestine, but it's also really pro-Hamas. I mean, they're boosting the Hamas message, and not only that, but they're actually taking direct content directly from Hamas, Hamas's own channels, not just Hamas, but Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a lot of different groups, terror groups around the world,

and they post it into this network. It's base camped out of a subreddit called rpalestine, and it's pretty extensive. And the real interesting thing about this is that it's not just like the subreddits you would naturally think would have this kind of material. It's also rdocumentaries, which is the documentaries subreddit or there was an attempt, which these are multi-million member

subreddits that are now effectively controlled by the moderators controlling and running this wider network. It seems like this would be a violation of registered terms of service. Maybe not. What is going on there? That's a great question. You know, I think the thing with Reddit, and I'm guessing that they have their legal people looking at it. But for a platform to allow terrorist

or US designated terror organizations content to be posted on the platform is still considered to be potentially a criminal act. It's still material support. Definitely posting it falls into that question. But you don't have the same kind of Section 230 protections when it comes to terror content. It's a different ballgame. So, I'm surprised Reddit is not, like,

just cleaning house. Maybe they are, but it doesn't, like, I don't have indications of that. That's not what I've been told by sources who are involved in this stuff. So, I don't really know what they're thinking or what they're planning to do. What is your sense of how...

I mean, so you basically find this nest of people who are laundering literal terrorist propaganda from Hamas onto Reddit. Yeah. What is your sense of how the nest is reacting to exposure? I think that, you know, there's a lot of the... What you would expect, like the name calling the insults ad hominem. Yes, they called me a Masad asset is what they call me. Proven. They were like,

it's proven. The connection is proven. They did the meme, the chart going every which way. Yeah, they did the meme. Exactly. They did the meme with the red string connecting all the evidence and all the dots and none of it makes any sense. You know the punches aren't landing when, like, in the first sentence, Peter Thiel is mentioned. Yeah.

It's like, okay, like, yes, he's around, but like, you're not engaging with any of the arguments that we put forward here. Well, I knew that because you know, I was obviously, I was not a part of this. It was you were editing it Brandon and Ashley you were the reporter and the writer and you guys published your piece.

I mean, I read it before you published. I was like, great work, you know, but like I was, that was the extent of my like being a part of this. And I look over at Z Squirrel, who is the one who seems to be the most mentally ill and prolific. And she was like, it's the Mike Solana machine, like the teal Solana, blah, blah, blah.

I was like, how am I involved in this? This is crazy. What that says to me is we're dealing with a crazy person who doesn't know what's going on. Well, I guess, cause I, I mean, I run the company, but. We need a uniform. We need a Teal machine uniform. Yeah. I mean, you know, their version,

their like diluted fantasy world version of what this is, is, it's fascinating. It's, it is. Yeah. They think, they actually think that Peter Teal said to me, Solana, we got to help the Zionists. And also, yeah. And like Teal was like, there's a network on Reddit. There's a squirrel.

There's a squirrel. Yeah. And your job is to fucking kill this squirrel. You fucking ruin that squirrel's life. Do you hear me, Solana? And I was like, you got it, sir. And off I went. And so I hired Ashley and I said,

we're gonna give you some Zionist money to go and eliminate this squirrel. And now we're eliminating the squirrel. And that's that. That's what happened. And that's what happened. Yeah. This is a bigger story for me.

I mean, I've been kind of obsessed, like fixating on Reddit over the past two or three weeks in part because Ashley and I have been working on the story together or the multiple stories at this point. But, you know, what I keep thinking about is when, Ashley, can you like remind me, was the X-linked, like the X-link ban, that wasn't a top-down thing.

That was a bunch of quote unquote moderators all independently and organically deciding to ban X-down thing. That was a bunch of quote unquote moderators all independently and organically deciding to ban X-Links. I think that was the story. X-Links, yeah. And screenshots. Yeah. I mean, like, and that, I, I, I share this, I've shared this anecdote a few times, never on the podcast, but with the team, which is that like the, the arsenal subreddit or soccer team subreddit, um, the announcement that they were going to ban X-Links got like 10 times more upvotes than when the soccer team won the Premier League Championship.

And it's like, dude, what the fuck is going on on Reddit? This is not real. And for me, that's the overarching story. Obviously, Israel-Palestine is part of that battlefield, but I think I'm just convinced that something is going on on Reddit that is like there's just a lot of astroturfing happening on Reddit. And I think that potentially, you know, just to go out on a limb,

like NGO funds are being used for that. You know, like there's actually dedicated money to this operation. It feels a little bit like Twitter before Elon took over, right? It does. You know, like, it just feels like maybe it's this, like, super left-wing institution, left-wing employees, and they're just kind of looking the other way.

But I hope that we can continue doing coverage on Reddit, uh, and sort of, and sort of investigate this sort of stuff, you know, because I think it's a lot bigger than just the Middle Eastern conflict. A lot of people retweeted and reshared the Ashley, your story, and including journalists. Yeah, Kelsey Piper did. Yeah, who are keyed into this thing that you're mentioning as well, Brandon. This idea that we all have a sense that we are being, I don't know, lied to by astroturfed

campaigns of some kind. The internet is very cartoonish and easy to fake things online, right? It's easy to create a bunch of accounts that aren't real, either they're AI generated or they're actual, they're farms of people, the user commenting farms and things like this. Not even easy, but it's possible, reasonably easy, to create what looks like excitement or enthusiasm

for certain kinds of ideas. And there's nothing but incentive to do so for all sorts of people, for whether it's, you know, a Russian or a Chinese agent, or it's the United States government, or it's just a private actor who has an axe to grind about some issue. Like, it's easy to manufacture consent.

And that is, you have this sense that because it's so easy, it must be happening all the time, you're also seeing a lot of crazy things online all the time and you think that people can't believe that. Can they really believe that? That doesn't seem right. And then now here we have a story where we're saying, not all of the pro-Palestine stuff is this,

but a lot of the like, there is clearly a machine in place to make you think that it's a more popular position than it is. 100%. I mean, like how many... How many like major discourse events have we had that were kickstarted by like a synthetic AstroTurf campaign? It's like probably a lot. Like way more than you would expect. We also have a history of this. We know that the Soviet Union tried to create a race war in the United States.

All throughout the 60s and 70s, they were trying to soak discord between black and white Americans. This is like part of the rule book in communist propaganda. This is famously a thing that we know happened. You could just fucking Google this. I had to remind people during the BLM era, and everyone's like, this is racism.

And I'm like, this is history. This was, this was, this is just history. You can just Google this right now and you will see it. Um, but this is, it's just a kind of thing that we've gone through again and again and again. And now here we are once more, but on, on the internet, it feels, um, I don't know, I think it's more serious because this is what people pick up. It's ubiquitous, dude. It's actually the game that's being played. It goes all the way down.

I mean, we covered the Cauchy Polymarket Dust Hub where Tarek Mansour and the Cauchy bros were paying huge influencer accounts to imply that Shane Copland was guilty after the FBI raided his home. If I didn't know that that actually had happened, I would assume that a lot of people were like suspicious of Shane afterwards and that maybe there was something to that. And I mean, so it goes all the way down to like

companies battling for market share. Yep. They're doing this. And it's like- It's like the Lauren Chen thing as well. I didn't follow that one as closely. I remember the right- She was being, she was a really, really big conservative influencer. She worked for the Blaze.

And there was an unsealed indictment showing that she had been working with Russia Today. So she was taking millions from Russia Today and then using it to create content. And you could see the changes in her feed, in her channel. Well, even that, because that would be, that's bad, but to the best of my knowledge, she was never told, or there's no evidence that she was told, you know, you say this one specific thing, right?

It was like, that's like, are you getting money from Qatar or something? I hear that a lot. Or are you getting money from the Israeli government or something? I hear it. And it's like for me, the smoking gun that's necessary is like you were paid money to say this specific thing.

And that it's like obviously bad if you're taking money from the Russian government, but I mean, when you're being told specifically to say certain things like in the case of the polymarket stuff, and I think that's happening all the time. I think that's happening constantly everywhere that you look and I think it's not surprising that it's happening all the time

because that story comes out, or this story about Reddit comes out, and what? People talk about it for sure. People, a lot of people talk about it, and they just fucking forget. And we move on, as if that's not actually a major part of our information ecosystem. That's a huge deal.

That's so much of what we're engaging with every day is just fake. 100%. Digital influence is like one of the most important things in the world now. Like I used to, like, do you guys see these studies of like kids when they grow up, the thing they most want to be is like an influencer. I used to roll my eyes when I see that, but now I'm like, hey, digital influence is like one of the most important things. Like by all means, go for it.

Yeah. And we did talk about this when the Cal she stuff was happening. It's like information warfare is huge for business. And as Ashley pointed out, it's huge and literal war, like very important. Riley rolled his eyes out until it's a gold rush until he became a digital influence until I started it myself. Um, yeah. Uh, so that's that we've got the squirrel on us now. I guess we'll keep you guys posted if one of us gets targeted by Hamas, though I guess they're probably busy, what with the war and everything. They always find time. Don't worry.

I think an interesting aspect that you brought up, Ashley, that's worth mentioning, is that people like Z are, I guess you can characterize them as acting as they're acting in bad faith. They're essentially targeting the mechanics of these platforms and they're exploiting them. Yeah. But they're doing that with people who earnestly believe in what they're in their position on Palestine, for example. And I think that's not problematic to have, you know, to be pro-Palestine or whatever. Fine. You know, I think it's very interesting that she's able to leverage that,

you know, and that's what her project is, is it's leveraging a lot of people. She's kind of duping a lot of people into running these sort of, I don't know, schemes or, you know, the system for her in a way. Are there a major part of her system? Yeah, there's sort of pawns that are going to get played. But I think a lot, there's like a whole, like different layers in the network. And part of it is like people like Z who are top level and organizing and then I think there's like a sort of mid layer which are like

people who are invested in it but they may not be so part of something so deliberate and then there are people below who are kind of what you're saying who are just kind of like they're there you know these messages are extremely persuasive because the language is so radical and the approach is so... it's beyond aggressive. It's like, it's steroidal. It's just hammer, hammer, hammer. There's no room for nuance listening.

Anything that diverges from the exact ideology is pilloried as the worst possible thing ever. It's like Nazi, Nazism plus like whatever the worst thing is that that's what it is no matter how close it is to their position if it's not identically matching. It is, it's a fundamentalism, which is a very strange thing to see because it actually is really successful. It tracks with the Neo-Marxist like progressive left.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's a, we keep saying progressive. It's not progressive. It's actually fundamentalist. Totally. It's a Marxist fundamentalism. Yep. Ashley, when you were doing the pieces,

did you like think at all about the broader question of like, do we worry about the line between terrorist propaganda and legitimate free speech, like being blurred or to like take that steel man even further? Like is terrorist propaganda even something we should want to ban? Like obviously like doxing people or like helping them commit a bombing or something. That's not okay. But just like pro general pro Hamas stuff. Is that even something we need to be? There are some things that Hamas people are saying that are not, we should kill someone

at five o'clock on Sunday or whatever. Like, it's just bullshit that they're spewing and people spew bullshit all the time. So yeah, how do you, that's a great question. How do you navigate the kind of like ethics of that? I don't think that's an ethical question. I think that's a legal question. And in that case, if that information, that particular post is sourced from a US designated terror organization, it's illegal. Spreading that is not it's not a legal act. And so the ethical questions already sort of further upstream been made already by the

government and farther down from that, I think, is where things get a lot more murky, like where you have just blatant, blatant misinformation, disinformation. I hate to use those terms because those were the terms that were weaponized by the blue establishment over COVID and BLM and everything else that we went through, what, four or five years. But that is literally what it is.

It is fake, false, and it is absurd. But, and it is tied into this network, but it's not actually terror source content. And I think that's a question. I don't know what the answer is. I wouldn't say that the right thing to do is censor it. I don't think that really works. The astroturfing is the really big problem in my opinion.

And I don't think astroturfing should be illegal, but you know, the FCC requires you, like when you were sponsored to say a message, right? You actually have to by law, you were in violation of an FCC regulation. If you don't disclose, like, I was paid to put out this message, right? But I think the astroturfing of terrorist propaganda, which makes people think that more people are like in support or like sympathetic to Hamas and Hezbollah and stuff, that seems problematic to me.

At least... If only from the perspective of like Reddit, you know, like I don't think, you know, an American social media comp... Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about the ethics, but the astroturfing is what gets me. Like, I don't think, you know, an American social media comp... Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about the ethics, but... The astroturfing is what gets me. Like, I don't like that. I mean, you shouldn't also forget that when you're on Instagram or something, you're not on there with just Americans. You're on there with tons of Muslims from the Muslim countries

who are overwhelmingly, earnestly anti-Israel. So, probably that is also having a huge impact on your sense of what people think, I would think. But it doesn't take away from, I think, the importance of the issue of the astroturfing and just the importance of, I guess, finding better ways to know who you're dealing with online. I was thinking about the question of, so guess, finding better ways to know who you're dealing with online. I was thinking about the question of like,

so now this squirrel is so mad, and like, she's like, I'm gonna expose you, and blah, blah, blah, and she's talking about us by name. And I started thinking about, like, I don't care, I'm whatever. In Fox, honestly, I sort of enjoy it. Like, I like attention, I like the drama, like, just, it's actually just fine. But there is an asymmetry there when you're dealing

with these people who have huge accounts, but are anonymous, that is, I don't know how to navigate what I think about, for example, like we get her identity and we know where she works. Like, what do you do with that information? And I go back and forth on it, because like you have journalists who are doxing

and people like Beth Jaisos, and I'm like, why did you do that? Like, what is the, what possible public good could that serve? But then it's like, why, why am I, like, why am I, why is my person, like my personal life in the crosshairs but not yours? Like why is she insulated from that?

Why, and why do I have some kind of ethical, why am I supposed, why am I ethically bound according to the laws of the internet from talking about her life in the way that she's now talking about mine, making up all sorts of falsehoods or whatever. And I don't know. I don't know that the, like, I don't know where I am

on this issue right now on the issue of anonymity on the internet. I'm fine with people trying to be anonymous, but I feel like if you get in the arena, if you jump in the arena and you start, like, this one that's going around right now is the, who's that autistic person? The autistic Republican? Dated Republican.

Dated Republican. People are like, she's being doxed or whatever. And I'm like, okay, but her name or her address, that would be a problem. But her name, there were public figures where she's has massive amount of influence on the government right now. There are everyone is listening to her as she's uncovering things. I understand that her name is being revealed as an intimidation tactic, trying to silence her. I get that. And I don't like that, but I don't know why we're supposed to have, I don't know why the rule is just, if I just use my secret identity,

you can't talk about me personally, but you can talk about anybody else personally. I don't agree with that actually. And I don't know how to navigate that, but I don't agree with that. If you are in the arena, you've got to be in the arena, I think, I think. What do you guys, where are we I think. Where are we on that?

Where are we on that? Well, the worst attacks always come from the anonymous accounts, the craziest shit. Yeah, I think if you're in the arena, you're in the arena. Obviously, anonymous posting should be allowed. But if you start fighting with people, well then, like... Not just fighting, right? But we're talking about, you're now coordinating other accounts. You're actually now a really important part of the information ecosystem. You are spreading information.

You are coordinating Wikipedia editors and Reddit moderators and things like this. You have back channels where you're running information ops. Like, and we're not supposed to talk about who you are and what your motives might be and who's paying you and things like that. You don't get to just put a bag over your head and be like, oop, I'm immune from criticism.

Like, no, you're spreading terrorist propaganda and like, we're going to fucking talk about it. That's like, you don't get a free pass for that. But I also, again, I feel that way similarly for people who I agree with. For the data Republican, for example, I think you're doing a value service, like a valuable service, thank you for your service, but you entered the gauntlet

and you chose to do this. No one went after you. You weren't this private person with 10 followers talking about some weird sex shit. You were engaging in very influential political work. And now, yeah, of course the Democrats are gonna have an interest in discovering who you are and who's paying you and who's connected to you and things like that. I think it makes sense. I understand the impulse. Yeah. I don't see anything wrong with it. I guess on the not reciprocal thing, like, they would maybe argue,

like, well, you started to be in the arena as yourself, so it's like that's sort of on you. But I don't know. Maybe the, I don't even know if they would argue that. I think what they would probably, cause I don't think that's like, I don't think that's as valid as the question of whether or not there's real social good to protecting anonymity, which I think there probably is. Like, I think that, you know, when we were living in the last, over the last five years, right, when everything was silenced on Twitter, and you couldn't say what you were thinking. And so there was almost this manufactured lack of...

This manufactured consent, in a way, to the social authoritarianism that we were seeing. Anonymity served this really important pressure release sort of effect, where people could say things that they couldn't say otherwise. And it helps you get a sense of what's actually happening in the world.

So I don't wanna lose it. You know, our founding fathers famously had all these crazy anonymous accounts. They were like the equivalent of 17th century, what is it, like 18th century shit posters. While with their competing subst stacks of the day, their own made up names, like I get it. I get the importance of it for just sharing an opinion.

But then maybe it's like, maybe I just, I have a bar that I hit where it has to do with the amount of influence that you're wielding. When I think I no longer, not only do I no longer care if someone says who you are, I actually want to now know who you are. I want to know who you're connected to. I want to know if you're getting paid by a foreign government. I want to know, I have all these questions that, that are important, I think. Yeah. To Brandon's point, like some of that should be disclosed. Like you already like have to disclose like whether something's an ad, right? Right. It's not too many

steps removed to be like, I'm also paid by this government. Like that's, that's not that far removed. That's legally mandated. It's just not, it's not properly enforced. It's not enforced at all. If a foreign government is paying, you should be, you should register as a foreign agent. The problem is, is like, is that Twitter doesn't want to talk about this either. You know, Elon doesn't want to talk about this either. Elon doesn't want to discuss this

because then he's got to build a whole thing, trying to detect sponsored, like the platform can be held liable for some of this stuff too. This happened at Facebook 10 to 15 years ago, and they built this whole system for ensuring that a creator who was sponsored for their messages could properly indicate this on a post, for example.

And Elon's not doing that. He's not doing that anytime soon. And so, yeah, it's a tough situation for sure. And I think it is, Riley, again, if you're being paid to put out any message, I'm pretty sure you have to, you definitely have to disclose that. And all I see on X is like the community note, like those stake ads sometimes. And that's like not really enforcement. That's like not every, every huge account, not every huge account,

but I think that like 50% of really big accounts, like ship posty accounts, definitely being paid to put out tweets, definitely being paid for the tweets. Why wouldn't they be? Why not, yeah, why would you not? Take that money, gold rush. Yeah, you certainly get offered all the time.

We get offered, I get offered all the time. Yeah, I mean, so if you're like... I don't do it, so I think it's like, I think it fucks up your, I think it fucks up your feed, to be honest. Like even just when friends of yours say, and you're not getting paid, hey, can you retweet this for me?

I just, I have this gut sense that you can see in an inauthentic post. Yeah. And it ruins the whole thing. But like, what's the point of a, what's the point, I'm gonna, what's the point of an account called Clown World that has like nine million followers, if not to like take money to spread messages?

You know, like I don't understand why you're doing it. Just for the joy of posting clowny content. Yeah, sure. I mentioned them because they were implicated in the Caoshi thing. That's the only reason I mentioned that one account. But he does. How are they implicated?

He was posting Shane Copeland arrest content in the aftermath of the raid. Well, listen, we are well over time. It's been a pleasure, my friends. Please rate, subscribe, and review. I'm gonna pause, leave a comment. Tell me about Kara Swisher in the comments. I want you to tell me why you listen to the podcast. I'm looking to learn. Maybe she says a lot of

insightful things. Someone said in the comments the other day that they're on Twitter. Someone was like, my girlfriend listens to her. Great. What is the reason? I would love to decode this and let's help these women who are trapped by Kara. We're going to liberate them. So let me know what's going on. Tell me about, you know, what you think about the Reddit story or either of my pieces. I want you to, you know, let me know what you think about Z the squirrel. Maybe you are on the side of the terrorist propagandist. And like, I'm interested in that.

I'm interested in learning more about you. I this is a free speech chat until you make fun of me and then I'm deleting the comment. And I'm not even kidding. I've it before it. I'll do it again It's been real. Love you guys. See you next week later