Pirate Wires - Keffiyeh Karen, Return Of The Bros, Anti-Free Speech Bill, Activist CEO, & A Discussion On France

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

EPISODE #51: Time for the Pirate Wires Pod! We tried to avoid it, but this week the protests around college campuses took over the news. We dive into the craziness of students requesting humanitarian aid and the media circus. The bros made a stunning comeback protecting the flag at UNC. Congress overreacts and introduces a bill aimed to reduce anti semitism, when really it’s just another free speech violation. Smug gives us an update on the state of the Biden White House, A CEO of a publicly traded company decided to play the activist game (good luck!) And finally, Solana discusses his trip to Paris, why he enjoyed it so much, and what America could learn from that city.. Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman, Comfortably Smug Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Smug Twitter: https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Welcome Back Comfortably Smug! 1:30 - College Campus Protests, Keffiyeh Karen 14:15 - Return Of The Bros  22:00 - The Media Circus  25:20 - Antisemitism Awareness Act Passes House Vote 33:20 - Smug Gives The State Of The Biden White House 41:00 - Mission Second - HIMS CEO Tweets Support For Hiring Activists  50:00 - Mike Solana Reviews Paris, France - What America Could Learn 1:01:30 - Thanks Smug For Joining Us! Like & Subscribe! #podcast #technology #politics #culture

It's crazy to say because we're on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for. Kithya Karan at Columbia and her sort of photo negative down at UNC. To even refer to, can I get my meal plan brought to me as humanitarian aid, shows like the level of delusion that these people are operating on. Who stands to benefit from all of this is the media that's getting like a ton of money generating clicks on these stories. If it's 30% Israel, 30% Palestine, it's also 30 is the media that's getting like a ton of money generating clicks on these stories if it's 30 israel 30 palestine it's also 30 the media what's up guys welcome back to the pod uh thank you for your patience we are a day late for the first time ever on this pod because i was um in and for the last 24 hours in France, which we're going to talk about at the end of the episode, I have some French takes for you. But first things first, we have with us today the absolutely legendary Comfortably Smug, one of my favorite podcasters out there, the guy who helped put

PirateWire on the map in the early days, one of our biggest supporters early on. Always a pleasure to have you, sir. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, great to be here. And thank you for that intro. I think, you know, the work you do on PirateWire is the work you folks have been doing. It speaks for itself. And I'm happy to see all the success. Thanks, man. Okay. I have a lot to ask you, and we have a lot to talk about. Let's just get into it. The world has sort of, while I've been gone, descended into madness, really the college campus stuff. We tried not to talk about, really, I mean, it's like a mandate. I mean, I'm like really aggressively trying not to drive us all into the Palestine-Israel debate because this is an American media company.

And I think most of this is not about America. And also, there's just like a no-win situation. I think it's joyless. It's miserable. People hate it. I hate it. But this campus shit is fucking bananas. And I think this week, it hit a boiling point.

There are a lot of interesting stories here just from the cultural element, the way it's all being amplified online. And I want to hit them all. And I want to start with these two are related. I want to talk about Kifia Karan at Columbia and her sort of photo negative down at UNC, the frat boys who protected the American flag with their body. And I think maybe we start actually with Columbia. Sanjana, I know you've been following the story. Catch us up on what is going on with... And just before you get into it, I do want to point out, this girl had the huge glasses that I was talking about. She's like, she's back. The big glasses girl is back. I am always right. It's like, you've got to watch out for those glasses. Here they are. And this is like, I mean, she is just sort of the platonic ideal of the girl with the,

I hate you glasses. But good. I mean, give me the, give me the real story, Saj. Yeah. So she's a PhD student in English and comparative literature. She went viral because she was sort of filmed conveying a list of demands, I guess, for students who were occupying Hamilton Hall at Columbia. So basically, a bunch of protesters took over this student hall and kind of ransacked it. And then they were moved by police later. But while they were occupying the building, they had a list of demands. But while they were occupying the building, they had a list of demands. And one of them was that they wanted the university to either provide food for she basically said, you know, the university should provide food and water to people on campus. And they said, well, you know, students are barricading themselves in this hall. So, you know, they can, they're free to leave at any point and

go to the dining hall. And then she sort of said, she went on this rant where she said, you know, do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you? And then said, it's crazy because, and this is verbatim, it's crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water? It's crazy to say because we're on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water? It's crazy to say because we're on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water? But they did put themselves in that, very deliberately,

in that situation and in that position. And so this was sort of the clip that has now been viewed over 47 million times on and you know people were sort of rightfully pointing out the uh hysteria behind it and the fact that you know she's really explicitly sort of drawing a parallel between herself apparently and like besieged civilians who actually don't have access to humanitarian aid um and they have for so long that they really they really do identify with the version of gaza that lives in their head they really feel like they're a part of this struggle now yeah i mean she she uh

you know the the reporter um to their credit is is engaging with her line of reasoning. He says there was a request that food and water be brought in, and this allows her to go on this rant about how Columbia has an obligation to these students who are, again, willfully barricading themselves in this building. been willfully barricading themselves in this building um and especially if they're on the meal plan she says um because you know they should be i guess since they're paying for the meal plan uh catered to while they trespass on on university property i mean we're seeing a level of site like sort of what would you call it i guess just delusion uh across the college all the different colleges right we have there's there are crazy protests at almost all of the big ones uh the most notable that i've seen online it's like you sail ucla is one of maybe the more silly ones columbia is probably the craziest one at this point because they have the

they have the sort of encampments and now they took over the building you didn't mention this is it true that they held a janitor hostage or is that some sort of like Daily Mail misinformation going around? I didn't see that they... It might be the case. I mean, I know that they locked themselves. Do me a favor. Literally Google janitor hostage Columbia.

I'm telling you, janitor hostage Columbia. Fox News, Daily Mail, the college mail the college yes i see that the i think that they held a hostage i think this is technically a hostage situation um i do want to see like i would generally ignore like i don't think it's just crazy dumb college stuff but it is very interesting um this person is first of all she's 33 she's a phd candidate which means isn't she teaching classes so she's sort of she's not just like a dumb student of all she's 33 she's a phd candidate which means isn't she teaching classes so she's sort of she's not just like a dumb student she's she's your child's teacher um and she believes that what it's it's like we've really gotten to the point where i guess

you're just you're raised with so much money that you genuinely believe um if you're not able to have food delivered to your protest, it constitutes oppression. Absolutely bananas. Smug. What is your take? Yeah, so Bill Ackman actually highlighted this really good tweet from Alicia Le Bon, which said, I can't believe I have to explain what's happening here,

but here it goes. Elite students of Ivy League schools have glamorized oppression so much that they have now reached role play status to satisfy their fantasies. Here, the students have appropriated the suffering of Gazans and are cosplaying as living through a humanitarian crisis. Like to even refer to, can I get my meal plan brought to me as humanitarian aid shows like the level of delusion that these people are operating on where they want to try to feel like they're freedom fighters and struggling instead of you know a 33 year old phd candidate waiting for us to pay off their student loans it's it's completely absurd yeah it's i saw someone talking about this online

he was like you know the optics of this are so bad to have this be the thing that is representing gaza you could never imagine something like this taking place during the civil rights era for example like you you would just never have seen someone like her speaking for a cause so significant i am confused as to why there was even a press conference which maybe brings me to my sort of what i think is actually happening here which is that um the protests don't really matter it's just like they're dumb college i don't i really just strongly disagree with uh the kind of like hysterical boomer right-wing press about this where it's like this is you know the world is on fire and

these kids are crazy and it's like they are crazy they're always they've always been crazy there's never been a year that they weren't bananas. Like they've always been insane. And again, like I mentioned last week, 2020 was a thousand times worse. Okay. You had six months of real rioting. This is not that this is just idiots being idiots. And now we're sticking mics in them because it's like the reason there's a microphone in front of this girl is because people are, I think, enjoying this. Okay. I was watching a bunch of ucla students get carted off um this morning and like demasks and everybody is just what's people are celebrating like they're genuinely enjoying the carnival of it all and um it's just this weird kind of symbiotic relationship, I think, between the sort of the protesters,

the sort of like performative protesters and the, what is it when you, the voyeuristic maybe public, who's just sort of like popcorn emoji enjoying the chaos is kind of my read of this. Yeah, it's content everyone loves seeing the state use power to go after their political enemies and and now we get to see it you know live streamed yeah i think it is the arrests do feel i mean again it's like another weirdly

performative thing so they just arrested a bunch of ucla students and then immediately released them with packed breakfasts as well. It's like only white people, right? Like only like some like 18 to 20 year old white girl is going to get a packed breakfast on her way out of jail, which she didn't actually enter. You'll see she has a citation. She also has her breakfast here and she certainly will be supported by other protesters who have also been released in front of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Arrested, released, given a breakfast, sent on her way. But like all of it, like the protests are performative.

The arrests are performative. I really believe the outrage is performative because I've not seen any. I mean, every now and then, yes, you see a crazy person with some horrible anti-Semitic slogan. But for the most part, they're really just like, it's like a bunch of losers in kiffia scarves who are just like white people doing Muslim prayers and stuff. Like it's a fundamentally goofy thing. It's not like, oh my God, I'm terrified of these people. It's not like they're standing in front of burning buildings. In fact, I saw one on the loop.

It was CNN had these people on a loop at columbia and it was the same it was like this one hammer broke a window and they um they just i saw that hammer break a window like 15 times and again it's like really dumb and it's really bad and like definitely arrest some people but um it i don't know it doesn't feel like the world is ending to me there have been a lot of like hoaxes and psyops that have cropped up through these protests like there was the whole protester who supposedly stabbed in the eye there was i think i've seen several videos now of people um like there i think there was one at ucla where a student wearing a star of david was like they're not letting me enter you know they're not letting me me get through you know this uh they're not allowing me ingress. And he was looking at the

camera of a reporter who was there. And it, you know, maybe this is actually a real live event happening that is not staged, but it certainly seemed in some cases, like you have a lot of sort of staged events that then get picked up by the media to fuel this outrage cycle. And the fact that all of these protests have now cropped up by the media to fuel this outrage cycle. And the fact that all of these protests have now cropped up in the exact same pattern at universities across the country just seems completely memetic and very divorced, I think, from what's actually happening in the Middle East. Right. You have these two different kind of groups of people who both have extremely pronounced interests abroad who are very incentivized to um frame each other as totally psychotic and unhinged and i do i mean

listen my heart is with i think the protesters the palestine side is fucking crazier i really do um but it's like i don know. It's all kind of ridiculous to me. Where I draw the line, however, is the American flag. So this is always how I am. What I don't fuck with is people with a foreign flag in my country, period. I don't even like the Olympics that much, honestly. I feel like it's sort of important. I'm like, why are you waving a Spanish flag in America? It's rude. And it's like, if you're going to come here and get, I guess your swim team is going to get defeated or whatever will allow it but i'm not like in love with it uh this when i see a foreign flag being waved in an aggressive manner in america becomes a little

i become more concerned and then when i see the american flag lit on fire i and i guess you know this is a leftist this is like leftist protesters have been lighting the american flag on fire forever because of this you know they see people like me get mad about it and that's why they do it. It hits different when it's like, not only is an American flag being destroyed, but a Palestinian flag is being raised. That feels really conquest adjacent. And that is kind of what the optics are. And I guess if we're all going to be living in you know the fantasy world of the internet that's you know essentially what we're fighting over our ideas and this is an idea i really don't like this is an idea a lot of americans

don't like and down at unc you see the sort of photo negative of kipia karen demanding food at a protest when uh at sort of one of these events drains Drain's mob, what did they do? They sort of, they raised the Palestinian flag. Campus police came out and were like, no, shut this down. Put the American flag back up. The mob descended, tried to destroy the American flag. And at that point, a bunch of frat boys walked up

and saved the day. At least this is what the photo sort of indicated. There's just like an amazing, it looks almost like a renaissance painting um of just like 10 uh sort of zoomer broccoli perm haircut uh frat boys pastel colors one of them had a hooter shirt um one of them sort of like filming the crowd from the other direction laughing uh water being thrown at them the sort of you could just see the edges of like an angry crowd around them and different pieces of photos confirmed all of this.

But that one shot is just fucking amazing. And what really is happening there is, at this point, you're projecting yourself, as we do in all of these stories, onto this. And you're feeling good because someone is finally doing what you wish someone would have done a month ago or whatever when all or whatever, when all of this bullshit started and stepping, they sort of stepped in and stopped it. Uh, what do you guys make of, I guess the strangeness of this, which is that frat boys for, I don't know, my entire life have been demonized and all of a sudden, um, you know,

and exiting the world of, uh, the era of me too world of the era of Me Too and frat boys were immediately suspicious in every which way. I haven't seen really a single takedown of them. I haven't seen anyone. I saw people sort of expecting them to be called racist and whatnot, but I really haven't seen them attacked. I haven't yet seen the crazy Rolling Stone piece about why this is actually white supremacy at work. It seems like people just love them. What do you make of that? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you bring up a really good point about what the optics of the situation look like. If you're just the average person seeing these images, what kind of takeaway would you get from this? And I think you're right. It was like a Renaissance

painting. Clearly, you're seeing some people standing up and defending the flag of their country as opposed to some angry mob. And the only imagery we see of the angry mob is these masked hordes making demands of meal plan humanitarian aid. So from that side, it's very clear who is doing a better job of trying to project an image of a movement that other folks would want to get involved with. At the same time, again, it does feel content-like because a GoFundMe was started for the fraternity and they got hundreds of thousands of donations. And then this morning I started seeing at Ole Miss, you saw the same thing,

a bunch of fraternity guys showed up and they were trying to get news coverage of being like, yeah, we're standing up for America here too. And it feels like every piece of information gets digested and turned into a content mill as fast as possible, where yes, you had these people who made the decision that I'm not going to let someone disrespect the flag of my country here. And that act itself of bringing down the American flag and then trying to destroy it, I think it really does kind of show the end game and where we were headed with, you know, the whole idea of like a DEI critical race theory approach that's, you know, really

spring forth from the campuses and just got completely magnified and multiplied during 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer. But the Ole Miss this morning I saw, they began using, oh, this is in the South. Look at all these white people. This is whiteness in action. They're trying to silence protesters of color. And it's like, does that argument even move people anymore at this

point after all these years it kind of feels just very tired yeah that's a good i love that point um i was thinking something similar because for sort of a slightly different did because there was what looks like to me like a quite kind of racist thing um so you had a lot of things at omis i don't want to paint the whole protest as this mostly what i saw was a lot of things at Ole Miss. I don't want to paint the whole protest as this. Mostly what I saw was a bunch of people mad at the protesters for doing bullshit in the middle of the yard. And you have people singing the national anthem and whatnot. I think mostly it seemed positive. I saw one dude for sure do like a monkey chant at a black woman, which I don't know if like, maybe I'm going to hear some piece of news that makes that not racist.

Maybe she was saying you're a bunch of monkeys and he acted like one. But my sense, my gut sense is like he was just calling her a monkey, which in any other age, like that's a smoking gun. That should be on every single news headline if you're a leftist. And I haven't, it's not even hitting. Like, how is that? I saw someone said something interesting. They were like the overt racism on the palestine side um this is their you know their pro sort of israel position but they were like there's been so much racism already that people are it's like the the bounds of acceptable discourse have totally broadened here and now there's no sort of anti-racist argument that you could even make because the whole entire thing is fundamentally a racist conversation you're talking about two ethnic groups at war with each

other and um both sides are i mean it seems like to me fairly racist about it all um i don't know but i definitely did see what looked like a little bit of racism i don't know if that's that's shocking it's like it's the deep south um but know if that's shocking. It's like the Deep South. But I guess what's shocking to me is that it really is not... Maybe I'll be wrong. Maybe tomorrow the outrage begins, but I was surprised that it did not get more attention. No, I think... So, Smug, I always

want to call you comfortably, and that doesn't sound right. So, Smug, I was thinking about the Ole Miss video too, and I felt like it seems so coincidental that the one or two days after the Frat Boy flag media event, in which they looked quite good, I would say, most people had nothing to complain about that. Everybody was sort of cheering them on.

The Ole Miss media event seems kind of like a rejoinder, like a really good response from the left because of the monkey, like the guy doing the monkey dance or whatever towards the black lady. Don't do it, because I don't know what the rules are here. I'm not sure. Okay, sorry.

Yeah, I didn't mean to pantomime it. I'm not sure. But my only observation was just like, it seems like pretty coincidental that those two things happened in such almost like perfect symmetry. It's like frat boys are good, but like, no, they're bad actually. Because see, this next thing happened and they were being almost unambiguously, or one of them seemed to have been unambiguously racist, is what I'm saying. So I thought that was interesting um it does like again it seems the whole thing for me has turned in to more of this like arena of hype cycles and like narrative competition as opposed to anything

else like it's totally divorced from reality another another observation I had a little bit earlier when Sanjay was talking about the actual scale of some of the protests. On UCLA, the protests, I don't know if it's still there currently, but if you took a drone shot of the entire campus, you would see that the protest occupies like two percent of the campus it's an incredibly small amount of of space and i've seen one photo of like a bunch of

people chilling and like having picnics like in a different a totally different part of campus like and everything is totally normal so um yeah i guess i would say it's if it's if it's 30 israel 30 palestine it's also 30 the media and this whole sort of scenario so yeah kind of depressing yeah why have i seen more footage of these protests than the actual war right gaza is no longer in the news cycle this is a point i was making actually to a friend of mine because i was having a conversation about whether or not I think she is very in favor of the US ceasing all military aid to Israel and thinks that these encampments are effective means to achieve that political goal. my sticking point with, you know, beyond the actual political goal,

but just thinking about, are these effective tactics? If that's your goal is like, really, I think this is who stands to benefit from all of this is the media. That's getting like a ton of money generating clicks on these stories. And I really do think that, you know, you have this,

as Brandon was saying, this like hype cycle where, okay, one day the frat boys are good. The next day they're racist. And one day the protesters are, you know, these refuse boys are good, the next day they're racist, and one day the protesters are these refuseniks, and the next day they're like crazy kids taking over

University Hall. And lost in this entire narcissistic media cycle is the actual, or the facts of what's happening in Gaza. It's like totally, I don't know. It just doesn't feel effective for anyone,

but, you know, honestly, people like us who work in media and, you know, stand to get clicks from it. Sure, and the kids. Like if you're one of these people, they really seem to get some kind of attention-based charge out of it you know they're living out some sort of fantasy it's the attention piece is a very big part of it um but i would say i would i think it's a great point sanjana i want to extend it beyond

even what's happening at the war just in terms of the funding question i saw this really funny depressing meme where it was like a picture of rockets coming into tel aviv and then the wall blasting the rockets out of space and it just said like our taxpayer dollars and then the one up here on the rockets coming into tel aviv somehow also our taxpayer dollars okay like i would love to be doing to be seeing coverage on people who do... I don't do international stuff, but in Pyrowise in general, it's like we do tech, we do local politics. But for people who do national politics, I would like to see a relentless coverage of the actual funding. Who is it going to? Why are we paying in both different directions? That seems weird. I saw a bunch of Hamas trucks the other day rolling around with all of the food aid.

That seems like a problem. That means that we're paying in a way that means we're paying Hamas. We're paying Israel. And what are we getting out of any of this? It's really unclear to me. And of course, all of those questions are obfuscated by the clown show in front of us, which no matter how much I love seeing those kids defend the flag, it's sort of like the whole thing is really out of hand at this point.

And brings me to something that is very much in our wheelhouse, which is the discussion of free speech and legislation concerning free speech and how that affects everything from college campuses to tech platforms. The one I want to talk about is this house anti-Semitism story. So just to tee that up, and I've got a bunch of thoughts on this, but I would like to kind of just break the story down for folks at home who have not maybe been following it. I do think it's significant. And Brandon, I know you did some research on it.

Why don't you break the story down? Sure. On Wednesday, there was a bipartisan group of legislators in the House, which overwhelmingly passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. And the way that the New York Times frames it, it was basically a Republican bill whose intention it was to put like a quote-unquote political squeeze in the democrats for um tolerating or maybe even purveying anti-semitism and the whole course of this protest october 7th hype cycle um there's been a lot of like actually looking into to what the bill says um tablet has a really good explainer on this in which they come out it's called uh not in our name um they come out against the bill but they also clear up some of the

some of the dare i say misinformation spreading about the bill on twitter um the bill is is pretty narrow in scope even though it is kind of it is bad basically all it does is it mandates that when universities are investigating anti-semitism they have to use the international holocaust remembrance alliance's definition of anti-semitism so it's like they're redef they're basically like codifying a specific definition of anti-semitemitism into law for this specific purpose. And that definition of anti-Semitism is more broad than you might expect. For example, if you say that the existence of Israel is racist, it is now admissible in these investigations to say that that is Jewish discrimination. So again, it doesn't mean that if you were a student or a professor, let's say, that would be more apt,

who says that Israel is racist, that doesn't mean that you will be convicted of discrimination. It just means that it is admissible to say that that is discrimination now so that is the that is the sum total of what the what the what this bill does and it has not passed in the senate yet right it hasn't passed the senate um did pass fairly i mean was it not an overwhelming overwhelmingly in the house yes so that's a that's enough that's crazy to me i also i mean you can't be like oh israel is just like nazi germany or something even there were some crazier ones too um they're linking the

concept of federal funds right to these institutions so if you don't control the anti-semitic speech on campus you lose the federal funds that's exactly title six which is actually much broader than anti-se that's exactly title six which is actually much broader than anti-semitism right title six it's like so this is like any racist language or i'm assuming homophobic language i'd have to go double check this um it's like a very broad thing this redefinition basically precludes you from um criticizing the state of is Israel in certain, maybe really unseemly ways. People say crazy things all the time. And this is just, it seems very strange to be going to such great lengths to protect one group of people. And when you back up and you talk about things like these two in particular,

the idea of calling Israel a Nazi state and the idea of saying Israel is a racist state, calling Israel a Nazi state and the idea of saying Israel is a racist state, that is table stakes for talking about America on college campus. Okay, I've heard those things leveled against me and everything that I care about my whole life. Why is one nation protected and none of the other? It's a fundamentally, the whole entire rule system is the problem. It's not like we need to tweak it to be more sensitive to Jewish kids on campus. We need to get rid of the entire concept of people should be protected from

dangerous ideas. And then probably the real thing that we should be doing is getting rid of the entire concept of federal dollars going to private universities. That's crazy. I didn't realize the extent to which that was happening until this bill even came up. And that was what I double-clicked on. I'm like, wait a minute, why am I giving, why is the question of my money going to Columbia even up for debate? It shouldn't be happening. I don't care how much they like the nation of Israel. Sajid, what did you make of this bill? I mean, I thought it, I think it's crazy. I think it's basically, people have said that this is kind of like the rights blm moment in some ways where

they're sort of uh you know pursuing speech suppression through um or attempting to pursue speech suppression through through legislative means i don't think it helps uh anyone really i mean it just seems like the minute you have these kind of, I understand, Brendan, what you're saying that this is not, it's been sort of mischaracterized, I think, on Twitter where people are saying, okay, anti-Semitic speech is now going to be illegal. And it does seem like this is a sort of more circumscribed, you know, it's just going to be defined potentially as hate speech, but it seems like it sets us on a path to criminalizing this kind of speech in a very European seeming way. Um, and I don't think

America wants to be associated with European hate speech laws, um, because those are just vehicles for tyranny, really. I guess smug, what do you, I mean, it does seem it's definitely the Republicans are behind it. Do you think, so it seems like a strategy. Do you think it's an effective strategy with you? You've got your underground in DC. I mean, what do you know? What is the background information here? Do you hear anything? Do you think it's working? I think it can be seen as like a short-sighted political move in the sense that if you look at a lot of the polling that's been done on the presidential election specifically, you see that the battleground states that Trump is beating Biden. It's all except for one. The polling shows that the support

for Biden is soft, especially because of this topic where it's, you know, folks who are angry that they think that, you know, Joe Biden should come out against Israel. It's not that they're going and supporting Trump. It's just that they're not supporting Biden. And there's a possibility that they don't show up on election day. So, you know, I think some Republicans calculated this as, you know, a way to press the issue even more on that and really ensure that that support is lacking on election day. But again, it's incredibly short-sighted, especially given the recent history, especially for Republicans, where for post-COVID, there was rightfully a huge call-out of censorship on multiple platforms for speech.

And while this may seem for the time being as having a more focused scope in the sense of this affects the funding that goes to universities and speech therapy specifically, legislation is always an opportunity for the government to try to run as far as they can and expand powers whenever they're given the opportunity. And in that sense, I mean, policing speech, like Sanjana said, like in Britain specifically, we've seen so many horror stories of where someone can be critical, like cases were open against the Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling. So do we really want to live in that kind of a world here where the forefathers specifically built this country with in mind having the freedom to speech?

Well, I do want to back up and just say, again, it's not like the bill was outlawing anti-Semitic speech, which we're still, I mean, congratulations, guys, we're still allowed to do it legally. It's the question of funding for schools, which the founding fathers also would not have been down with it. Like, there's a bigger problem here. Why is our money going to these people? I have a question on strategy for you, Smug, because let's say, I mean, clearly the Republicans are trying to force the issue of anti-Semitism on campus. It seems to me that there is an effort to, I don't know, hand these protesters to sort of pin them on Biden and be like, look at these crazy people. My sense is like, that's not actually going to matter because 2020 didn't matter. And that was way crazier. So why would this matter? Am I wrong? I guess my question is, do you think these college protests,

like I guess the hostage situations at Columbia, are they hurting Biden? Are they irrelevant? I mean, what's going on there? Maybe hurting him on the left. Like, what is the lay of the land there? trying to seize on this, to me, seems incredibly short-sighted. You have these huge winning issues where, for example, the situation at the border, which surprisingly, about six weeks ago, the media writ large started finally admitting that, okay, so we do have a crisis at the border. But at the time, and I expressed the feeling that I feel like this issue is getting too hot too early to be able to be impactful in a general election. And lo and behold, we're not talking about that. We're talking about kids on campus right now. And, you know, I think in two weeks, we'll probably be embroiled in a new new cycle that has nothing to

do with this. So I don't see there's any real political capital to be gained from this. I think a lot of Republicans just saw it as an opportunity to, okay, especially the time in the House where there's so much chaos of, you know, is there going to be another attempt at removing the Speaker, trying to get anything resembling points on the board. That almost sounded conspiratorial. Like, it was too early to be talking about the border, and so here we are talking about these college protests. I mean, is it conspiratorial? Like you said, so, like, from time immemorial, we've had college campuses essentially being just

where kids go to occasionally be nutty and have a protest. And we didn't even see any imagery from these campus protests of like, oh, police are cracking skulls. This is going to be like Chicago in 1969 or something. So we don't even have it in that sense of it to be occupying so much airtime. I think it's just that the rage news cycle works so quickly to boost clicks on websites and fill the airtime. The incentive is there for media companies to be like, well, this is working. This is a sugar high. We can up the clicks for now. But in terms of actually

moving the ball politically, I don't really see it being that effective. But we do have a convention coming up also in Chicago, and you know it's going to be an absolute shit show. There's going to be crazy protests. I mean, I don't understand the leftist angle here. Do they really think there's some chance that they're going to get Biden to relent? Or are they going to get some new candidate in? I mean, I just don't understand.

Maybe we're the Democrats. How are the Democrats thinking about this? Well, so to me, the most interesting aspect of this is I'd say it was maybe two or three weeks ago, you saw the Pod Save guys who were, they were the speechwriters, incredibly tight with Obama, come out and be very critical of the Biden administration's handling of the situation, that they are being too partial to Israel. And that was when Bibi Netanyahu was running for reelection, the Obama campaign, after they had already won 2012, they mobilized some of their folks to try and fund and work

for the opposition to defeat Bibi. So for a very long time, they've not been on the best of terms with Netanyahu. And for them to come out overtly and be critical of Biden shows that that is where a significant portion of the progressive base is. And also, they feel that Biden can be moved. And as a result, you did see Biden start ratcheting up overtures to not know how to wrap this up. Let's get a ceasefire done. So he definitely, there is on the left, a little bit of movement that is possible on the subject, especially when the polling shows that the

support for Biden is so soft. Well, and you also saw his hard left uh policies tax policies right the resurgence of this like really crazy leftist idea of the super aggressive cap gains tax and things like this um that felt to me like a direct appeal to the the absolute craziest people in his party and it's like also super not by historically that's just, he's the kind of like swab creature, middle of the road guy. And he definitely is swaying. How senile is he? Is it real? How real is it?

Tell me, tell me what you're hearing. So I talk to a lot of folks in the White House. I always make it an open point whenever there's a Democrat primary of, you know, everyone send me information on your Democrat primary opponents. I'm happy to get it out there. And then in the press, they'll say, you know, the evil Republicans are at it again, you know, spreading this mean info about the Democrats. And most campaigns are on the Democrats that are very eager to help. And so I maintain, you know, contact with those folks after,

you know, if they go to the White House, wherever. But there is significant concern. I think the footage speaks for itself. And these stories which keep coming out of like, at this point now, they have someone who walks with Biden at all times, when he's leaving the helicopter, and they're having to give him a set of directions for, okay, where you're going to walk after you get away from the podium, because they saw what happened a couple of months ago when Biden was at the podium and it just turned into an absolute shit show in prime time. So they really don't want to relive that moment where America is like, wow, this guy is in pretty

bad shape. Things aren't going great. So that's probably the most significant challenge that they are facing is he is in complete obvious decline to everybody. And it gets even more magnified when his opponent Donald Trump is showing up to FDNY firehouses in New York and handing him pizzas. So it's a tough place they're in yeah i saw him at chick-fil-a that one was another just like another donald trump classic yeah um i guess before we move on so the the nature of these protests over israel and palestine has i do think it's this was the week that it became just impossible to ignore because people really got crazy. Not the topic. I mean, the topic's always going to be crazy. The topic's been crazy my entire life. I don't expect it to ever stop being crazy, but people sort of could not stay out of it

anymore. So whether that's the college protesters, that's the media, that is tech people. So we've had this conversation for a bit now. I wrote a piece, which I referred to last week as well, called Mission Accomplished, where we talked about the mission first policy in tech that Brian Armstrong of Coinbase sort of famously championed. He was followed on by DHH and then, I mean, everybody from Facebook quietly doing it to most recently Google. This is sort of now the, I don't want to call it standard in tech, but it is certainly a mainstream acceptable position for a tech company to take, which is we as a company

are not going to be making any kind of statement about any kind of political issue, period, unless it has something to do with our core business. We're not going to be internally making space for people to talk about these really contentious political issues. We are here to work. You are not bringing your full self to work. You are actually leaving a significant portion of yourself at home, and you are going to behave in a respectable collegial, I guess, is that a word, manner with your colleagues. I guess, is that a word? Manner with your colleagues. So, HIMSS took a different approach this week. Sort of right as the Kifia Karen was demanding food be Uber-deliveried to her hostage situation, the HIMSS founder, who I guess his family is from gaza perhaps he's definitely palestinian uh clearly very

into this issue uh ushered he issued a statement on on x where he said you know courage is more important than your college degree um if you want a job we are hiring sort of encouraging the protesters specifically in my mind the columbia ones which were the sort of encouraging the protesters, specifically in my mind, the Columbia ones, which were sort of in the news at that moment, to come and get a job selling hair loss treatments for men. So it's a great, it's like an open, I think it's a very valuable experiment for tech to run to see once and for all if this is going to increase sales at HIMSS, right? I think they also do boner pills. So it'll be, I'm dying to know if this new wave of hires who are storming in from, I guess, we know they weren't really arrested, right? They're doing their packed lunches

or their packed breakfasts and they're going straight to HIMSS to start dialing people and getting them to, I don't know, make these orders. Let's see if it works. I don't know, make these orders. Let's see if it works. I don't know. What do you guys think of the experiment?

The great mission first or mission second versus mission second policy experiment of 2024. Who do you think comes out ahead? Brian Armstrong or, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his name, the HIMS guy. Or, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his name, the HIMS guy. I think people, the criticism of, let's just say Mission Second, was, I think, never really about any particular cause that Mission Second companies would promote or would allow their employees to be activists about. The argument against Mission Second has always been at one point or another in the future, you are going to be on the wrong side of these activists that you let inside your company. And we saw this happen to every tech company

in Silicon Valley over the past two years. So I don't have any reason to change my belief that that will probably happen inside him. But like you said, Solana, I think we'll see. Right. I think it's important because he does, from what I read, he had a compelling story about why he cared about this stuff himself. I think that there's a huge difference between him

speaking out about Palestine and him making a statement like that publicly on behalf of his company and encouraging these activists to come and work with his other employees. Really, in that way, when you're saying you're being hired specifically because of these views, you're really encouraging them to bring those views to the workplace. And now I, as someone who's in sales at HIMSS, have to have a conversation about Israel and Palestine over Chipotle burrito at noon. It's like a very hostile workplace environment at that point that one, I don't know how much longer this stuff can really be legal. When is someone going to sue and cause some real chaos for these companies? And then two, how is that good for your business? I don't understand. I don't know. Smug, are you guys following this at all? Yeah, absolutely. So

I think it's incredibly noble for him to welcome all these activists and let his company soak them up because I think that would really benefit every other company in this country if the activists focus just on taking down one company from within. Because I've never seen an example of where quarterly earnings go up because your employees are now occupying the lobby and making demands like they did at Google. It's the exact opposite. And I think, you know, tech companies did a good job of learning this lesson of where, okay, well, by allowing, you know, the workplace to turn into an activist daycare, it doesn't really actually help us ship anything that doesn't accomplish anything that the company's purpose is actually for. And, you know, it's great to see, you know, it took a while clearly for the lesson to be

learned, but it's great to see that finally the page is seemingly starting to turn on this. Because there was this really great meme this guy made putting the Kefka Karen side by side with the Frabros protecting the flag, where it was like, in 15 years, she's going to be like, the head of HR, demanding you have a talk about whiteness in the workplace. And he's going to be on the sales team taking a client out to dinner, you know, saying, why don't we drop by Waffle House afterwards? So who is actually going to end up bringing more utility to the company? And like you said, like, imagine being on the sales end of that, and now you're going to have to get into a geopolitical conversation with somebody that

you're just trying to sell some Rogaine to. How does that ever help sales? Yeah. I think it's like, they're also not going to hire anybody. It's not like these Columbia kids. I mean, Kifia Karen is 33 um you know this is like most of these phd students are from backgrounds where they can afford to fuck off until they're mid-30s i couldn't dream of doing something so stupid with my life we were i was just handed money where i could go and get a p i don't even what is sandra do you remember what her phd was in it was something totally deranged it's uh let me see romantic um let's see so she's in comparative lit or something right yeah it's comparative literature but it's romanticism

okay her dissertation is on fantasies of limitless energy no limitless energy in the transatlantic romantic imagination from 1760 to 1860 her goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx's term for disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism. So- Yeah. This is not a girl who needs to go get a job at HIMSS. This is a girl whose daddy is paying her rent. And I think that that means that what the HIMS guy was doing was really a classic sort of 2020 gesture from tech, which is we as a company are going to make a statement about this political issue. And I don't, there is no political issue. If he had gone out in favor of Israel, I would have been like, why are you doing this? I think if you're someone like Paul Graham, who has also been very outspoken about Palestine, if you are someone like Sean Maguire,

who has been very outspoken about Israel, it's very different. These are investors. They are not selling a product. I don't understand how there is no potential upside. There is only potential downside. You're not going to solve the issue. You're not changing it by... It's like the nation of... What is it? Palestine does not need men's hair treatment on their side, right? It's like they need, I don't know, a different history, first of all, and I guess significant global support. I have no idea what they need. I don't know. It's like way beyond my pay grade,

but it's also way beyond his pay grade. He should just stay out of it. And I don't know why he can't. It seems like this is the kind of thing that should just end as a practice, not morally, but like it has to breed itself out of the gene pool, right? There's no way these companies long-term survive. I don't see it happening. But again, we're running the experiment. God bless. I hope it works out for him in either the brand direction, or if he does get to hire a few of these people from Columbia, that would be

great for him. I want to talk about a parallel dimension called the nation of France. So I was in Barcelona for a wedding, did a quick just day trip to Paris. And I've not seen Paris, man, since I was a little kid. I was like, not a little kid, I was 15. And I remember, I have not many memories of it. I remember this one incredibly glamorous prostitute. I was looking down from my place at the street and I was like, whoa, Paris is crazy. I remember her being kind of pretty and yelling at some guy in a car. I'm like, damn, they just do things differently here. What I did not remember was how beautiful everything was. It was very crazy.

It was an absolutely beautiful city. Every twist in turn was perfectly well kept. There were gardens. The buildings were all seven stories high. So you had the first ground floor of stores and then six stories of housing on top of them. The architecture was gorgeous. The art was everywhere and gorgeous. The food was amazing. The cops were present. I was there for May Day, which is like a labor holiday. And France, Paris,

tends to commemorate this holiday or celebrate this holiday with some sort of violent protest every year where workers come out and demand more free shit um this year was no exception uh to that it was a little bit smaller than last year but it did technically count as a i think a riot at one point i didn't know anything about it until i googled it later what i did know was on my walk to dinner i saw like a i'm not joking 300 cops cops, 400 cops, maybe.

The whole entire street was lined with cars. They were coming in, they were going down into the subway station, coming out of the subway station. Both streets lined. I saw various French police officers, like really attractive police officers with their helmet off,

like casually like leaning leaning against a banner, smoking cigarettes. It's just like they do things differently there. And I've got to say, I love America. I'm an American through and through, but I'm feeling a little bit like Thomas Jefferson right now. I am enamored of the French people. I've been following them a little bit for a while because they're this really interesting place that is super French, right? France is full of people who love being French. And they defend that again and again, usually against Americans. They're usually like, you know, we don't want to be like America. I remember their sort of moderate president being like, we don't do wokeness here. That's like american thing and we're not bringing we're not gonna import it um i remember even they have these really contentious fights over like immigration

obviously um brigitte bordeaux i think has been fined like three or four times for going after the muslim immigrants and at one point she said something incredible her quote is uh in paris not even the prostitutes are the same and like they're just like the whole way that they go about everything is uh for me as just like looking in very glamorous um very virile and charged and sort of excited about itself um it was not a depressed young people were not so depressed i just i i think there's a lesson here for us to learn. Um, the entire Western world is not like America. Uh, in fact, there are pockets of energy elsewhere. And that was one of them that I, I, while I expected some of this, I did not expect

so much vibrancy and so much life and so much enthusiasm, um, for really like the Western world, I guess. Uh, I saw, I know the Western world, I guess. Assange, I know you're a, I don't want to call you a Francophile, but I know that you speak. No, I'm a Francophile. Let's go. Tell me about France. No, I love France. I mean, I'm a big Francophile, speak French, love French people. I've spent a bunch of pretty considerable amount of time in France. And I think, Mike, what you're pointing out is there is this kind of, whereas in America, I think like owning the fact that you're proud to be American and that you recognize that there's culturally specific things that you and other Americans do because you grew

up in America is taboo, especially among people my age. And it's sort of seen as like gauche and uneducated. That's not the case at all in France. I think that's the sort of high level takeaway that I have from talking to a lot of French people, some of whom are like, really leftist. They're still like, yeah, I love French food. French people dress better, they say openly. There's no sort of like, well, in a lot of cases, there's not the kind of cultural shame that we have. And I think that's what as an American feels very refreshing about talking to them, is that even when they criticize, they all hate their politicians. They all think they need to retire at 50 and they'll riot over it um but they still do appreciate and recognize that they are like you know different from people in other countries yeah we are so often on different and it's it's like

minor differences of cultural issues or political issues globally um that there is just this weird rivalry maybe between america and France. And there has been probably from the founding. We've always been on the same side of every conflict. This is, I think, the only country that we have always been on the exact same side of. They're our oldest ally and our histories in a weird way are sort of inextricably not a weird way they're sort of in an overt way inextricably woven together um i was just in new york city and i saw um my way home to to miami i see the statue of liberty right and it's like this is it's always been there the the path to france has always been there and i felt kind of like um i remembered a lot about America by being there.

It was a very strange feeling that I have not encountered in any other country. And it wasn't like, oh, I want us to just be like France. It was like I saw some other version of America through it. And there were some very practical things like housing. I really just like France is Paris is a city that was planned. And so I just don't want to hear it from people who say you can't plan cities. It's like, we know that we can plan them and we can plan them well. There's actual evidence of it. I walked through it. It was unimaginably beautiful, every part of it. There is not a city that's more beautiful than Paris.

It can be done. Probably a lot of their policies I would grow to hate if I were there for longer than a day. But I don't know. I loved it. Smug, what do you have to say about the French? Or maybe, I mean, is there any truth to that story about the president being married to a man? Is that accurate?

Because even their conspiracies are more exciting than our conspiracies. Yeah, I mean, I think Sanjana touched on something really key to this, is in America, it's become almost ingrained, especially through the education system, through politically, that you should be ashamed as an American that America is a bad country with a horrible history and we should never forget all the terrible things America did. Kind of like doing everything possible to kill any sort of a pride or spirit that might be present

to have any patriotic beliefs about your country. And you absolutely don't see that in France. Like Sanjana said, there are leftists there, but you won't hear from them that Paris is a terrible place with awful culture and terrible food, where as in America, that's table stakes and understanding that, oh yeah, well, we're an uncultured people, all our people are cows and we can't be saved. It's just been founded on racism and there's no redeeming quality of this country. And for that to be kind of like the zeitgeist right now, especially since 2020,

where it was, well, this is a fundamentally racist country and it must atone for its sins. That's what you end up getting is, the capital of the planet for so long was New York City, right? And if you visit now, I mean, I left there. It became a place where, you know, everyone used to talk about, I like getting the bacon, egg and cheese at my favorite bodega right around the corner for breakfast. All those bodegas are gone. They're all now legal weed shops. shops. The city is rampant with crime. The leadership in that city offers nothing. And there's no excitement or vibrance. New York City is no longer the proving ground for young folks to be like, if I can make it in New York, I can make it anywhere, kick off their career there, and then find their way in the world. It no longer holds that place in the world. And in a similar way, last fall, I spent a bunch of time in Japan and

I saw the exact same thing you witnessed where you have a country which doesn't feel like it has to flog itself, which can have a law-abiding working society. And then you had Biden come out this week and say, well, it's a xenophobic country and they need to deal with that issue when they've been now since World War II an ally of ours. So it's interesting that you see even like the leadership in this country try to like go after and say, here's what's bad about this country. Here's what's wrong with this country. Here's why the people should feel bad about it. And you really don't see that in other places in the world. Yeah, I guess speaking of the race component specifically, I mean, France is dealing with some serious racial issues.

And I traveled all around and I saw all different kinds of people in Paris. It's a super racially diverse city and it's very Muslim. city um and it's very muslim uh and yet it just didn't feel like it just didn't feel like america um again a lot of this is like i was there for a day and i'm sure that it all it all hits differently later um maybe the one thing that for sure can't hit differently i don't need to know anything else about it other than um what i saw was there's not an excuse for our cities to be so disgusting there just isn't like it doesn't have to be that way i don't know why new york city is filled with trash i don't know why the buildings are like in the sort of residential areas are smaller rather than bigger um i don't know why our public transportation is so bad. I would say the

Paris transit wasn't as good as it was in Barcelona. In Spain, it's just cheaper. I have no idea why. I've tried to understand it. It is like a super confounding issue, but it's just much cheaper to build and run rail in Paris. I think that's all I've got to say about Paris though. Went there, felt inspired, want to go back, want to learn French, want to talk with Sanjana in French. Maybe that is my goal for this moving forward. I would love to spend some time there. Maybe, probably not this summer, there's way too much going on,

but I don't know, after that, I would love to follow a French election and just see how it's done on the other side. Yeah, Pirate Wires Paris 2025, Something to look forward to. Until next week, guys, it's been real. Thanks as ever for following. Please subscribe. Please check out Smug's podcast if you haven't already and follow him on Twitter. He's comfortably smug. He is the G, the OG. That's that. Talk to you later. Thanks so much.