Pirate Wires - Mostly Peaceful Firebombing (ft. Bridget Phetasy)

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

EPISODE #91: The Telsa and Elon saga continues for yet another week as the derangement continues to ramp up. A group on the internet is doxxing Tesla Owners, and major figures on the left cheer on the terrorism of their fellow citizens. Internet slop is everywhere, what can we actually believe? We dive into the latest slop controversy involving Democrat cheerleader Harry Sisson. Also this week, Gavin Newsom is learning, JFK files were revealed, and what is actually going on with Ilhan Omar and the “fact checkers” at Snopes?Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Riley Nork, Bridget Phetasy, Kartik Sathappan, Ashley RindsbergGet Your Moon shirts before they sell out! Special 15% Off Discount Now! https://store.piratewires.com/drops/002We 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/dailyPirate Wires on X: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike on X: https://twitter.com/micsolanaBrandon on X: https://twitter.com/brandongorrellRiley on X: https://x.com/rylzdigitalBridget on X: https://x.com/BridgetPhetasyKartik on X: https://x.com/sathaxeAshley on X: https://x.com/AshleyRindsberg Topics Discussed:- https://www.piratewires.com/p/slop-world- https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-snopes-buried-the-truth-about-ilhan-omar-s-father?f=homeTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod!

You guys like pediacs of domestic terrorism, huh? Cool. Wow. DogeQuest, that apparently published the names and addresses of Tesla owners across the US. You guys are calling everyone Nazis while you make lists of people. Yes. I feel like I'm on an acid trip. I think I could kick most of their ass.

I do think one. Gavin Newsom is learning. Yeah. I was like, oh, yeah. He's like the Borg. He's the apex predator on the left right now where he's just quietly sitting in the corner. It is all a massive plot to make him seem. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the podcast. We have the legendary Bridget Phetasy in the chat with us again today. Here to talk about a lot of stuff. I think we're about to get into terrorism in a second. Before that, a couple of quick announcements.

AdQuick, stick around for our ad read somewhere in the middle of the chat. We'll talk about the guys who brought you the Moon Should Be a State campaign in Times Square. And on that note, the note of Moon and the topic of whether or not the Moon should be a state, we only have a few of those shirts left. You can get them on our site.

There should be a little promo tab in there and we'll do like, I don't know, 10% off or something. How much should we give? 15%. 15%. There you guys go. Sprinkle, sprinkle. Okay, oh, and this is, I mean,

if you want other shirts up there, they're not discounted, but this is a new Pirate Warriors merch. That is pretty cool. That's pretty sweet. That's what the kids call drip, I think. Yeah, and then there's like a salmon color. It's not pink.

Don't get it twisted. Okay. Is it terrorism? Riley. It's a huge important question. Nobody knows. Nobody can tell. That's right.

But in what is unfortunately becoming somewhat of a recurring segment on this show, Tesla owners are facing hostility from America's mentally unwell left-wing anarchists, possible terrorists. In this week's edition, we have a few notable instances of encouraging acts of vandalism and other crimes against Teslas online. One person from the UK, because of course, started a GoFundMe to raise money for stickers that say, don't buy a swastika, which they're slapping onto random Teslas. Meanwhile, another started a website called DogeQuest that apparently has published the names and addresses

of Tesla owners across the US, as well as the locations of Tesla dealerships. And on DogeQuest, they of course made the mouse cursor a Molotov cocktail. But all of this hasn't stopped prominent Democrats and those in the media from cheering some of this stuff on. Bridget as you flag Jimmy Kimmel had a moment where he sort of gave a wink to the Tesla vandalisms.

Vandalizing Tesla vehicles, new Tesla vehicles, please don't vandalize, don't ever vandalize Tesla vehicles. please don't vandalize, don't ever vandalize Tesla vehicles. And so I. The Daily Show aired a segment recently showing some of the Tesla fire bombings while their studio audience like clapped and cheered. They're taking to the streets or the the parking lots. Tonight the FBI and ATF now investigating multiple cases of possible arson, targeting Teslas and cyber trucks.

Wow, you guys like petty acts of domestic terrorism, huh? Cool. Wow. Okay. And while you have had some prominent individuals on X also calling all of these attacks on — some have been calling these attacks pretty much the definition of domestic terrorism. Mike Cernovich I've seen has had a lot of good recent tweets about this. Meanwhile, others are striking a bit of a different tone.

I'll go ahead and read some of the recent centrist takes, then I'll let you guys cook on those. So Claire Layman tweeted this week, I'm sorry, but the world's wealthiest individual leveraging their wealth for political influence and power cannot claim victimhood when the inevitable backlash engulfs his business interests. After which Thomas Chatterson Williams responded to her saying, right, property damage is wrong, but trying to frame the destruction of unoccupied EVs as domestic terrorism is obscene. destruction of unoccupied EVs as domestic terrorism is obscene. Okay. I have, I mean, I, Bridget, you want to go?

I have a lot. You have a lot. We have a lot. I know we both have a lot. Yeah. Everybody. So much. There's one thing that you didn't loop in there that I think is worth bringing out,

which is Tim Walz had that segment where he was celebrating the fact that the stock price had tanked. I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. 225 and dropping. And if you own one, if you own one, we're not blaming you. You can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know, and take out just telling you. And I'm going to bring that up just as a point of contrast, because I think that that the celebration of Tesla doing poorly, a lot of people were upset about that.

Obviously it's retarded and he shouldn't say that given the fact that his own state had Tesla in its portfolio. And so his constituents are being harmed by this. Any number of Democrats could be Tesla workers. That's going to have an impact on their jobs. They don't care about the environment, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Table it, don't care. You cannot, as Elon Musk, enter politics

and expect people to not have a reaction to your brand. We've talked about this before. What is a car but a brand? And it's like, Elon's a big part of that brand. And so if Elon's out there taking a chainsaw, literally on stage to everything that Democrats care about, they're going to have a reaction to it. And Tim Walz's reaction to me, again, while stupid seems obviously well inbound and kind of inevitable. And that's the thing that's inevitable. That's like, if Claire had said that was inevitable, I would say, she's sure right. That's inevitable.

That's what happens when you enter the arena and start talking about politics. People just get heated. What is not inevitable is fucking terrorism, okay? That's not inevitable. That's not like a oops, it's just something's happened and a dude threw a Molotov cocktail at a car, which is a flashback to what we saw in 2020.

This kind of bizarre excusing of like truly anti-social and deranged behavior. We're not even talking about, just to kind of set the table, we're not even talking right now about Tesla dealerships being destroyed only. We're talking about, for me, where this really lights up is this DogeQuest thing, where you have a list of people who own cars that is going viral with the Molotov cocktail cursor. And I just think that in the context of the cars being lit on fire,

the point is obviously to make these people terrified. On that site, there's a segment where it says, do you want your name removed or something from this site? where it says, do you want your name removed or something from this site? And it's, if you want your name and information removed from the site, sure, we're happy to comply. Just send us proof that you sold your Tesla. Okay?

That's terrorism. That's what is going on right now. I don't even understand why we're having this conversation and why someone like Thomas needs to stand up as a little centrist. That's all he cares about, right? He cares about stand up as a little centrist, that's all he cares about, right? He cares about his credibility as a centrist thinker. And so Donald Trump is this very clownish, enormous, huge personality on the right, and

he has to be against that at all times. And so he can't, same thing with Elon Musk, especially Elon Musk right now. So he can't defend Elon Musk. And I don't think that you need to in this situation. I think it's pretty simple The question is are people right now afraid to drive their Tesla because of people lighting them on fire The answer is yes that is being done for political purposes. It's terrorism Bridget. What do you think? I just love too that they're trying to argue that it's not politically motivated when When you go,

like NBC had a whole clip and it literally says, resist on the door. And then the guy had a note in his pocket, one of the guys who was arrested that was like, fuck Trump and long live Ukraine. Like how many more political signs do you need that it's wild to me that they're like, well, this we don't know what their intentions are. We have no, we can't read their minds. Like we don't need to. They're tagging these cars with swastikas that say fuck Trump and Elon. The Thomas one was very that, right? He was saying in his responses, cause we went back and forth online and his whole thing is to always be like, I'm the thoughtful guy. And, you know, framing me as like, you're being heated and

rude and I'm like, but you're defending firebombing Tesla's. Okay, like, I don't understand that. Like, maybe I get a little heated. I have never had a hard time not defending terrorism. That's never been a thing that I've had a difficult thing navigating. Never. That's never been a challenge for me. But his pushback was what is their ideology? Because my question was, you know, Thomas, Thomas. Thomas. I did a little research, Thomas, and it looks like you have talked about terrorism

in the past. For example, when those deranged environmental activists glued themselves to a painting, which you referred to as verbatim, terrorism. In fact, you said just plainly, it's terrorism. It was your third tweet in a series. Following that, after getting a lot of pushback, because that's not something, by the way,

that I hate those people. I never called them terrorists. I was like, they're acting like children and they should be spanked like children publicly flogging. We've had multiple segments about this. Everybody knows where I stand on the question of the painting people. They're not terrorists. That's not like Mohammed, whoever the fuck blowing up a car. Okay, that's just an idiot who needs to be

dealt with. But he called that terrorism and not this. And the reason he said is because after being pushed into it, they lack a coherent ideology. Who are these people? What do they want? Why could they be doing this? We don't know. And if we don't know, it's not terrorism. I mean, is that valid? What do you guys think? I also love, too, that they're like making these.

I'm like, you guys are calling everyone Nazis while you make lists of people and then go door to door demanding papers of proof that you Sold your Tesla so that they don't destroy your material possessions like I feel like I'm an on an acid trip Yo, it's like it's a kill list really yeah I mean that's like what we're talking about like go get them boys like I don't and that's not terrorism It's like it's it's very bad. Like, you have to, once you really corner them into this,

they're both Claire as well. I want to just pause on Claire. I love Claire. Claire is someone who stood up for sanity in a moment when very few people did. And I'm always going to have a lot of respect for her for that. She built this company, Colette. I think it did a lot of good back in like the sort of 2019, 2020 era. She became crazy. I don't want to say crazy. She

took a sharp turn in a different direction than I would have under the COVID era when she became a masked up forever kind of person. I give her that mostly because she's Australian. And I just think they do things differently over there. I'm like, I don't know what the fuck's going on in Australia. But now she's entering the discourse on the question of what's going on in America. What about domestic terrorism in America? No, that's not terrorism. No, firebombing is inevitable. And it's like, girl, I love you, but we're not doing pro-terrorist content here. And I'm going to have to stand against that. Yeah. I think we can just all... I don't know, I want to live in a world where there's not

political violence. You know, I think it can. I was kind of questioning myself, though, I, because did they consider the January Sixers domestic terrorists? Some of them did. I mean, the New York Times is really good on this stuff where they wouldn't even refer to it as a coup or an insurrection. They were very careful about the language. It was a riot, which I agree with. I was considered a riot. OK, I guess I meant like the media and the people who prosecuted them.

I wasn't sure what. But then I don't think anybody I think this is the weird thing is that I think legally it's quite hard to. I don't know what the definition of terrorism is for somebody to be prosecuted legally for like domestic terrorism. Well, I'm not a lawyer. I know you guys are shocked. Let's see.

Chachi PT. Chachi PT is basically the fifth member of this band. Oh yeah, I use Grockmore. What is the legal definition of terrorism per... Domestic terrorism. Like a court case, and I'm gonna throw that like in there too. Acts dangerous to life, violating laws to intimidate civilians or influence governments by coercion. So...

Okay. Exactly that. So basically, literally that. Kardig, what are you thinking? Yeah, I mean, this really pissed me off. Okay. about this, that it's very normalized. We're getting back to another peaceful protest BLM kind of thing, where I have friends who are normally rational and they'll be like, I, oh, I, you know, I'm not seeing it in New York. I said, what are you talking about? A guy chased a cyber truck, just banging it with like a baseball bat or something. Like you're just being willfully ignorant because you don't want to contend with this issue because

there's no winning this argument. Like this is deranged. And they just don't want to contend with this issue because there's no winning this argument like this is deranged and they just kind of want to wipe it away and then they'll bring up January 6 or something else and it's like okay this conversation is over because that has nothing to do with this. Don't you feel that they have I want to say that they have a right to ignore it though they have I ignore things every day that you know I think that that's the part where Elon has really not done himself any favors. You know, when you come in as a victor and you kind of rub it in people's faces, that's going to set people off in a way that infuriates them, even if they kind of agree with you or they only slightly disagree with you. And so now he has no, I don't want to ever force someone as people did during the BLM era to be like, you better talk about this right now.

So I don't want to talk about it, but just, you know, just don't buy a Tesla. Problem solved. I mean, cause I also got a lot of pushback bringing up, you know, target or whatever beer it was. I don't even remember which one it is. Yeah. Budweiser. Sorry. And people just, yeah, they just didn't drink it and they didn't shop at target. Yeah. Maybe some dumb tweets, maybe some mean tweets. Okay, great.

But no one firebombed a target as far far as I know. And like, that's the core difference. If people just didn't want to buy Teslas and the stock was affected, who cares? I don't care. Yeah, I guess no one has died yet. And so they're like, well, no one has died. Well, they don't believe property damage is a crime. So they don't believe in the concept of property. Right. We're dealing with communists here. Riley, what are you thinking? Yeah, I'm with Cardick. Political protests with the intention of hurting a company whose values you disagree with,

that's not unique to the right. Like you mentioned, we saw that with Target and with Bud Light. In those cases, all the companies had to do was issue an apology or for Bud Light, I guess, get Shane Gillis and Post Malone to do commercials for them or whatever. But that was enough to pacify the right apparently on those issues. But I don't think the opposite is true. Like I don't think if Tesla hired some liberal spokesperson that this problem would just go away.

Because this seems to be less about making a political point and more just about causing chaos. So I'm not sure that trying to pacify them politically would make this issue magically go away I want to be clear to like bringing up January 6. I was only interrogating my own when when this was when we were having this discussion Yesterday, I was kind of like did I think of the January Sixers as domestic terrorists because I tend to Downplay it on our last time I was on here I was like I didn't care about it then and I don't care about it now when they were all getting pardoned. And I think it's because,

I was talking about this with my husband today, I think it's because I lived in Los Angeles in 2020 and saw all the riots unfolding in real time and the destruction and how it was all hand waved away and wiped away and kind of like encouraged by leaders and Democrats. And it was infuriating to me because it was like I don't it always when you're pitting these like so I think part of me is like, well, they're taking it to the people in charge with January six and like that civilian on civilian thing. It always you don't know who's like business you're burning down. It was small business owners and, and nobody, it, it was so that was so crazy to me. I do think it like did something to my brain.

Yeah. You just want some fairness. Well, no one cares. I mean, it was, it was wild. It was a discourse. I mean, it was a riot wild like discourse. I mean, the it was a riot. It was of the same kind of riot that we had seen for at that point. Six months on nonstop entire neighborhood taken over in Seattle. No one gave a shit. The police office, but police had abandoned like they fled. The police officers left on fire with people inside of it.

It's crazy. But no one cares. And so we have to always be revisiting this. And that's, I think reflexively your right to bring it up because that's really where the J6 discord, like the kind of, I don't care about this thing. That's obviously where it's coming from. You can't make me care about this

if you didn't care about this other thing that was much more serious that lasted for six months. And not only didn't care, but encouraged it. I guess I do have a question for you though, like because of Jimmy Kimmel, right? He is a comedian. How do you navigate that as a comedian yourself? I mean, he says something crazy,

but like his audience laughed, his audience have sort of hired, I don't know, those monkeys that clap, those like wind up monkeys. I think he had them. They were laughing. Yeah, I think I like look, he can say whatever he wants. And he can make whatever joke he wants. I think he gets a I will give comedians like I said this on Twitter, I'll give them a long leash for being comics and saying crazy stuff. That's

insane. I say it all the time, too. But I think he also stopped being a comedian a long time ago. There's, at a certain point, he's just, he feels more like an activist to me who is pretending to be a comedian. We see this with journalists, where, okay, your activism has now superseded journalism or being funny, and I don't have to consider you a comedian anymore

or even give you the kind of consideration that I would give a comedian or a lot. Like I don't care. He's gonna say, I do think like Lee, he kind of doubled down and backtracked last night. And there was another clip going around today where he was talking about it again, but he also was like, Hey, don't go burn cars.

You know, I feel like he someone was like, Hey, you can't tell people. Isn't he on like CBS or something? This is not. This is not. No. And he and it drives me crazy because they don't suffer any of the consequences of this at all. So that, and I was saying this on Dumpster Fire today, like the kid who got arrested,

all these guys who are getting arrested, they're the one, they're bipolar, they're crazy, they're mentally ill, they're trans. They just snuck that one in there. They don't suffer any of the consequences from these guys being like, hey, go out there and do this. And now people are putting these, these like bumper stickers on that are like, I got this before Elon went crazy, which feels like a BLM poster in front of your house during the riots. Like remember that where you're like, don't, don't loot my house. I'm an ally. Have any of you seen one of those in real life?

Because I actually haven't. Oh, I've seen one. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. When I was in Tennessee, I was obviously them anywhere that there was like a lot of violence happening. I would see those things out there.

Interesting. It's in the Bible where you paint the, the blant, the, the lamb's blood on the door to fend off the Holy Spirit from taking all of the firstborns, right? You're trying to signify like I'm one of the good ones. That's what's going on there. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I still fundamentally, the interesting question here for me is, is it terrorism? And, and Thomas really threw me for a loop there because what he's really asking for is like, what is it like, sort of like a, before you can be called a terrorist,

maybe you have to take a license. Do you have to take a terrorist license? You know, is it maybe only terrorism if it comes from the sort of terrorist region of France, which to his credit, to his credit, a lot bigger these days. Okay. There's like a lot of surface area there that's been exposed. I just want to know, Bridget, what is your, I mean, how, how is it, is it terrorism? Is it not? What's going on here? He had that really funny tweet that he retweeted. Someone else responded to him and they were like, it was like a postmodern word salad that basically was saying terrorism just in all of these nonsensical words.

I should have pulled it up. But I was like, this is the, this is the like, what is a woman of terrorism? You know, you're like, can you define what a woman is? And then it's like, well, actually, we need to like get into all of these weird postmodern gender, like break it all down. And it's like, just shut the like shut up. You're just being pedantic. You know, you know what this is. People you're this is like it's funny.

We were talking to a friend who is like very right wing. His he's kind of come center. But he was like the right when they wanted to ban burning flags. Their argument was that burning something fire is not free speech. It's an action like you don't want to conflate fire with be like being free. Now we can have this debate all day long, but he's he was like they were kind of right because now you see all these people with these there. You know, they have like the on the Facebook pages where it's like, defend your first free speech rights.

And like a Tesla dealership is on fire in the background. You really don't want to conflate destruction with free speech. That's probably not great. It's important to, as chaos is happening, not be on the side of it as well. And that's why for something like this, it's like, okay, stay out of the conversation. If you don't maybe like the way the word terrorism is being used, I don't understand where you're coming from personally.

This seems like domestic terrorism to me. But you could also just say nothing, because clearly the use of the word terrorism here is I think not as important as the fact that it's happening. And I guess maybe the pushback there would be like, legally it's going to matter. And maybe that's what they're getting ahead of is like, some of these mentally ill people who were caught

are gonna possibly be charged with domestic terrorism. And that will be a different thing though. We'll have to take that, I think, by a case by case basis. I look at that list though, for me it's that list. And there is a difference, like I said before, between, you know, vandalizing a Tesla store with spray paint and putting people on a kill list.

I found the tweet. Oh, go. It's not terrorism. It's a rage culture with the directed association of political protest to fire back at the any enemy symbolically Elon's ride. Metaphorically, you're not the boss overlord of me. And psychologically, activists threat all violence, stabbing at the heart of darkness. Like what? So terrorism. He brought up the people who were hand waving the Elon Musk Nazi salute, the Nazi salute.

There are people who will, you know, have a nuanced conversation about that, but not about this. And I think, well, at the end of the day, there's a class of thing that's called speech and a class of thing that's called cars being firebombed. And that's the one that I care about. That's the one that really bothers me. That's the one that I do not wanna see. And no, he's not a Nazi.

That's the other thing. Are you really gonna pull this up right now? Like Thomas, are you a Nazi believer? Like you're the one, this is like really what, you're on that level now. You're on like a speech is worse than fires and Elon Musk is a secret Nazi. You're supposed to be the centrist, like reasonable person.

Don't make me take that from you. Don't make me be the reasonable one. There was someone on Twitter and I can't remember who it was and they they were like all centrists are just two drinks away from going full Antifa. Like all center left us. I mean it's one or the other. I was thinking today there are some centrists where I'm like are you you're just a Republican and you call yourself a centrist and then some of them are like...

That's a California Republican. Right. And that's very much how you survive. That's how you survive. Maybe we have to start... When someone says they're a centrist, you have to just see what state they're living in. Because if they're living in California, they voted for Trump. But if they're living in Texas, they're an Antifa member. And that's just how it goes.

Those are just the rules, I think, of centrism. That's actually the textbook definition of centrism, I'm pretty sure. That scene plays out in like the most recent White Lotus, too. The lady from Texas says she's an independent. Oh, yeah. And they're like, oh, you voted for Trump. Well, she's so careful about it.

You know, it's like, I'm an independent, but my husband. Yeah, my husband is a conservative. He's a Republican. It's like, well, how do you talk to these people? And she's like, oh, it's like, I'm an independent, but my husband. Yeah, my husband is a conservative. He's a Republican. It's like, well, how do you talk to these people? And she's like, oh, it's fine. That's such a good scene. White Lotus is so good, man. And it's always been like this.

People try and project their culture stuff on it. I think that Mike White is just so good at seeing us and just showing us us. And I don't feel judgment. I feel like he kind of loves all of those characters and he's just showing them to, and it feels like such an honest conversation that we've all been at a table and had such a good scene

and such a good show. Any white lotus disrespecters in here? Cardi, you seem like you're probably one. I think the season's pretty bad, but you know, I don't wanna rain on your parade. I knew it. I knew it. Any white lotus disrespecters in here? Well, we got season two, but yeah, last thoughts on the on the great fire bombing of 2025. Can we sick doge after the sticker guy because stickers are really really cheap like ten cents. So if he raised money, I think he's pocketing most of it. Wait, what's Doug's guy? What are we talking about? I'm saying, you know, you brought up earlier that someone did a go fund me first to raise to put stickers on Tesla stickers cost like hat like a cent so

Well, that's the other big giant question mark is like who is funding all of this versus how much of it is grassroots and that's kind of the person that's I think the perfect segue into the next segment which is titled slop world and this is about a piece I wrote a piece published a piece this week called slop world. Yeah so in addition to Tesla Elon also happens to own a social media platform and in our social media landscape today, one thing that's increasingly becoming hard to parse is how much of the content we're seeing is even authentic.

Solana, like you mentioned, you have a new piece out talking about exactly this, about the prevalence of content that is paid for by certain entities boosted by foreign bots or generated by AI. That's called Slop World. Everyone should go check it out. It's on our site. But we also simultaneously have to talk about Harry Sisson, who is himself quite slop-like. He's certainly bought and paid for, I think. The DMC, I think, like, directly pays him. And now he's apparently asking girls for sexy pics.

The story goes, according to a user on X named Sarah Fields that Harry Sisson convinced 11 different women, he quote, had no roster and respected them more for their bodies or respected them for more than their bodies, excuse me, while persuading them to send explicit photos of themselves through Snapchat. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say the connection is pretty important between the two stories. So I think the way that they're connected is I think the most obvious reading of this, let's say, because it's not what I actually think, was there was a coordinated campaign to destroy this person. And it's framed as this organic me-too moment. But that's the internet. And that's what Slop World is about.

Unfortunately, Harry, I did not write about. I should have. That was a miss on my part. But broadly, I'm writing about just the question of how much of our internet is real. And I think it's not a lot. I think between foreign ops, domestic ops, little stuff of the kind that we've also been reporting

at PirateWire is that we see out of Reddit and whatnot, where you have small groups of people who really believe in some important cause to them. For example, the Palestine stuff, and they run massive information ops across multiple platforms from X to Wikipedia, also on Reddit, the upvoting thing and they try and game that to now with the introduction of artificial intelligence,

you have whole bot armies amplifying content that in a very obvious way. So anything weird stuff, trade, for example, on Twitter, I've noticed if you're coming out strong against tariffs, like those tweets do so well right now, that makes no sense to me. The average person doesn't give a shit about trade, doesn't understand what's happening. The tariffs have not even hit anybody's pocketbook yet. We're not there. We're not there for 50,000 likes on an anti-Trump trade policy tweet. That to me is Chinese bots. And it's bigger. It's like the whole, in the context of the sort of AI-generated slop, it's like we're living in this it's bigger. It's like the whole, in the context of the sort of AI generated slop.

It's like we're living in this weird fantasy world. Harry's a part of that. And now I guess I mean, we could take it in a few places. I have a theory on this, but let me bridge it first. What's your first cut on? I mean, is this like the dead Internet theory? Yes. Yeah, that's the slop thing. And I write about dead Internet theory in there.

Yeah. And the sort of generation of that idea. Yeah, that's the slop thing. I write about dead internet theory in there. Yeah. And the sort of generation of that idea. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really fascinating idea to me because it does seem, I mean, there's so much to this. I love this idea of the slop everywhere and it being inescapable. And I see people fighting online with people and I'm like, guys, I don't know so much of it. Even like the whole Israeli stuff and the rise in anti-Semitism, so much of that feels bought, fueled, where it just seems like a very easy way to get people to fight with each other and make it seem much,

also make it seem much bigger than it actually is. I really hadn't been online for a little bit and I went back on to Twitter after when you go off Twitter for a while and go back on, you're like, holy shit, everyone here is deranged and they've all lost their mind. And that must include me when I'm here too often. So I do think it's like really something we have to reckon with now. It's totally poison for sure.

And I had the same experience when I took a week off at Christmas. And that's when I missed the whole H1B debate. And I came back and I was like, what the fuck kind of mental illness is this? Jesus Christ, you all are broken. Not me though, I'm back and I was like, what the fuck kind of mental illness is this? He's right. You all are broken. Not me, though. I'm pure and happy.

And then like three days later, you're like, I'm broken. No, I am broken. I am broken. Yeah. But I mean, what do you make of in the context of all that? Like, what do you make of Harry asking about or asking to see random girls tits? That's OK to do, I feel like. I mean, it's not like maybe the best behavior that a young man can, can have. But, um, you know, it's kind of like one of those he who throws the first stones thing for me.

I don't know. It seems like me too, to me, frankly, my question is why, why are there no people of color, why did he not ask any people of women of color? Oh, I did not even, any people of women of color for this? Oh, shit. I did not even connect. Any people of color in that list of- Not one black girl. He's a Democrat.

Yeah, so I don't know. He might be dealing with a closet Nazi here. I can't even get it. I've not seen that take yet. Where are the black girls, Harry? Where are the black girls? Straight up. Or you don't want to sexually abuse me because I'm black? Unbelievable. Where are the black girls Harry? Where are the black girls?

Actually abused me because I'm black unbelievable not even one DEI request for nudes Unbelievable. Yeah, you gotta have one Okay couple questions who's Organizing this takedown and why is this like a right wing thing? I don't understand girl coordinating it on Twitter, but all of the girls who are blowing up seemed to be doing so organically on TikTok and she was kind of collecting them.

And their left wing? They are. Girls? I mean, listen, if you're showing Harry your tits, I'm assuming you're a Democrat. Like why else? But that's, but let's get to it now because my first question is who would show Harry their tits?

I don't believe that. Like just ground floor, I'm like, nope, that does not pass the sniff test. I don't think a woman would do that. I don't think, let alone an attractive woman, I don't know how that would happen. But then- Maybe.

But then I start to think, Harry has been dogged by accusations or let's say suspicions about his sexuality for years. This is all happening at the exact moment that the Democrats are on a soul search for their next Joe Rogan. And they're obsessed with the question of masculinity.

It's like, oh, podcasts are for men. They have this very weird idea of what podcasts are in their head. And it's like, Man-osphere,Sphere, men talking, we need to do something like that. We need men acting like men. Harry himself has engaged a little bit in this discourse and talked about the need to reach men. And that's what he's here to do. But everyone's like, it's like, that's all good and fine. But I think, I think that, how do I say this respectfully? I think that, how do I say this respectfully?

He comes off as if maybe he's not never seen someone else's penis. Do you know what I mean? Like he kind of gives off that vibe. And so this, this feels like an optime. This, the idea of like, oh, eight girls have come forward with this horrible accusation that he asked to see my boobs and I sent them to him. That is like, first of all, if you just break it down, that's not that bad of a claim. That's,

that's a me too, that you're like, Oh, I'm going to survive that easily. That's not like, Oh, he will me. They're talking about a text based relationship. He didn't even meet a lot of these girls. They're just showing him their tits on Snapchat. That's, I don't think that even young zoomer girls are that mentally broken to think that this is a massive scandal. So why come out and reveal the fact that you showed this guy your boobs? Again, it's embarrassing to do that.

So why would you do it? I think it's because I don't think it. Maybe I'm like, I'm a little over 50% that it is all a massive plot to make him seem less gay. It has to be that. I think it has to be that because the other plot doesn't make sense. Why are they trying to take him down? Who's coordinating it? Why all at once? How did it happen in the first place? Don't believe it. I think he's in on it. Maybe they realized that this kind of stuff raises their profile too, like with Huberman.

Remember when they tried to be like, Huberman had so many women and he was like juggling them all. And then it just made him more popular. He was meeting them though. Yeah, I know. This is even less than that, which is what raised alarm bells for me or sounded alarm bells. Who I'm it's it's weird like the from the from the perspective of taking it on face value young women, we've come it's like watching the me too thing has been fascinating as a woman who came up in the 90s. Because now it's like these young girls have they've only been raised and like the consent, you know, like everything is about consent and so it's there's no like he's just a scumbag or like he's just a like there's There's also just like he's just a dude being a dude

No one ever told them that dudes lie and do that and if it's so that it's like everything is either Assault or not. Like there's they have like a very strange framework in their brain. We need new words for this kind of stuff. Or old words or old right scumbag. He's a scumbag. And that's fine. It's not fine, but like scumbags exist and they're not necessarily racist.

Howard Stern was a scumbag and he had a show for a year. He like his show was about him was a scumbag and he had a show for a year. His show was about him being a scumbag. That was the whole lost chapter of American history. Sorry, Brandon, what was that? Just the point about the left being confused about masculinity is super apt, I think. Do you guys remember the first time The Atlantic wrote about Joe Rogan. And it was like this breathless hysterical piece about how Joe Rogan was popular. And the problem with him was that he was like, he was like a jock that you spent time with in high school.

And like the writer acted as if he didn't, like this was an alien species of human. When in fact, everybody knows exactly what type of person that is. And that's not a bad type of, that's not a bad person necessarily categorically. He's also not a bad person. He's also not a job. He was like a comedian on fear factor and smokes a lot of weed and talks about aliens.

If you don't understand, sorry, go off on that. I don't have much to go off on, but my point is like they've, the left has totally just obscured and made confusing the concept of masculinity for people on the left. And now they're it's funny. They're they're like trying to figure out what like they're trying to get back to masculinity somehow. They all know what it is, but they can't kind of can't admit it either. Like the thing with Tim Waltz, you know, like America's dad, like that was supposed to be some sort of stand in for leftist masculinity. It didn't work.

Oh, he's still trying. He's still talking about it. He was on Newsome's podcast and he's like, yeah, you know, I'm a man, they're kind of scared of me cause I can fix my truck. It's like everyone thinks you can fix your truck and we don't care. He didn't just say that.

He said that he could beat them up. You gotta respect people you disagree with even, and you can't just dismiss people. This notion of- How do you fight it? And well, this notion of tux- I think I could kick most of their ass. I do think that. I think one of you and Noah can both run them.

He went straight to- Oh my God. I don't know about that. The man went straight to toxic masculinity. I was clutching my pearls. I was like, Tim, you can't say things like that in 2025. That's terrible, Tim. You know what was terrifying about that clip?

Gavin Newsom is learning. Yeah, I was like, oh, fuck. Gavin Newsom, you know, he was pushing back. He was like, well, because he was saying all the thing like toxic masculinity and it's racism, misogyny. And and he being Tim Walls and he was like, Steve Bannon, he's a bad guy and we need to put them under the rock. And Steve Bannon and Gavin Newsom was like, no, we need to, you know, we need to listen. We need to meet them. I was like, shit, he's learning. We need to stop this man.

Yeah. He's like the Borg. He's the apex predator on the left right now. He's sitting down, absorbing all the information, moving on to the next host, sucking him dry. Yeah. And it's like, you can see it's like, he's like, this is not a serious man in front of me. Gavin's already involved. He's dangerous. Yeah, he had a throwing. He is dangerous.

Yeah, he is. He's like the Omnidroid in The Incredibles, who's learning from every super that he defeats. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be like, we're laughing now, who's learning from every super that he defeats. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be like we're laughing now. But a year from now, we'll be like, oh, no, he's winning. That's what I said. He could win, though. I feel like he looks just his appearance to me is so off putting. He looks like a fucking first of all, he kind of looks like the Joker.

He looks like a Batman villain to me with his hair slicked back. I just can't get over his appearance. Like I just feel like they voted for a man with no brain Yeah, anyone. Yeah. Well some will for sure. So he's got that baked in like 30% that are down for whatever And then Gavin really just has a charm like the 5% less 2% Whatever it is and that very very very middle who look at him and say, he's not so bad, which I do sometimes when I watch Clinton speak and I know who he is.

Like he starts talking and I'm like, oh, why don't I hate this guy again? I have to go into research and be like, oh, that's why I hated this guy. He's learning. I like Bill Clinton. Well, you know what? From a personality perspective, like I find him.

I think I do too. I think I struggle with it, man, because I feel like he and his wife are really the same. They're these kind of reptilian people and I don't, they're not safe. But I like Bill. I like him. I don't like what he did to Monica and I don't like that they all blamed Monica. But that's really, that was like an America in the 90s problem, which is so true, Bridget, what you said about how like we've just this long way when I'm on the topic of like, let's femininity, let's say. The conversation has changed so much that we, we, I just came across a clip of this show. You guys remember this show called the swan?

Okay. They take ugly girls and give them massive amounts of plastic surgery until they're prettier. That is it. That was on Fox. I'm pretty sure it was on. It was like a major network ever, 20 million views an episode, like a huge national sensation. They take out this like busted, overweight, no chin, like fucked nose. And they literally just like, like the bionic woman, turn her hot. And then she's happy. The show concludes not like, Oh, but you were good all along. They're like, you're better now.

And she's like, I am, and my life's better. And that's the moral of the story. That was the moral of the story. Every episode was like that. Every episode was like, aren't you better now that you don't look so fucked up? And that was where America was. That was only like 15 years ago.

That was not that long ago. Maybe 20 years. That was 20 years ago. There are always these memes that go around. They're like, I would kill myself if I was a woman who grew up in the early 2000s. It was like me. I was a young woman in the early 2000s. And they show these. They're always in the videos of these girls being- America's next top model. Yes. And they're fat shaming someone who's just like normal weight. Right, though they're like, you're a plus size model and she's like a size four or something. And like Britney Spears was called, it's crazy. And I didn't even notice it, but I was thinking

too about all the like, when you were just talking right now about all those high school movies where it was an already hot girl with glasses and then she just like got remade when she took her glasses off. You're like, she's hot now. Suddenly she's gorgeous. That was, yeah, that was the, we have come like, it's weird. There was a massive, and I was thinking too, when you guys were talking like the left doesn't know what a woman is. They don't know what a man is anymore. They can't, they've completely lost their way. The only- They don't know what terrorism is. They don't know what terrorism is. The only two, we're saying this on Dumpster

Fire today, the only two options for a Democrat right now are completely out of touch like Tim Walls or violent or voted for Trump. Yep. Three options. Yeah, those are the three. And then the only, there's a way I've talked about Gavin now, our third week, because he's the only exception where he's just quietly sitting in the corner, as you said, Bridget, learning. He's just fucking studying.

And you're like, oh shit. That clip was terrifying. He's learning also from his red pill child. Yeah, I think he really did. I think that's the kid is what picked signaled this to him. He sees his son. I mean, you're the governor of California and your son is like, Dad, you're fucking lame. I'm voting for the Nazis. And you're like, Wait, what? What is going on?

I heard I heard his wife is a is like a EA adjacent, like absolute doomer in terms of AI. Like like when we were doing reporting at SB 1047, I was hearing from sources that like one of the dangers of Gavin Newsom's not vetoing 1047 was that his wife was a doomer and he didn't want to piss her off. But at the end of the day, he's just way too rational as a political agent to do that because he knew he needed tech on his side.

And so it was an easy decision for him because he's a sociopath. But that's like that was a very common thing in the 90s back when or in the in the 2000s even, which I think is really where he was coming up right. The 2000s we have to move on. I mean, do we have any last thoughts on the femininity, the masculinity, the swan, which I would love to see come back? I don't know how it could. What would happen if it came back? That would be wild. Well, now they have all these other weird.

Have you guys talked on this show about like all the weird Down syndrome influencers that are like some are real, but some are not on Instagram? Oh, I have not. I have not seen this. I don't know what you think. Ones. I don't know. They're fake ones.

They're fake. Fake. I saw. Down syndrome influencers with amazing bodies. Oh, my God. Like they put like makeup on their face to give it that like Downs kind of look? No, I think it's like AI generated. It's a filter. Yeah.

That's terrorism. That's kind of as Thomas would say, that's a kind of cultural terrorism. Oh yeah. I think that's top of the funnel for OnlyFans. Like they literally... Oh my god. That's not a joke. Yeah, I think that's top of the funnel for only fans like So I saw one today Bridget where it's you press probably the same one where she's in a gym and she's like she's got huge boobs and

That it wasn't community noted as like this is a this is a down syndrome face filter and The actual person is an onlyFans model. Yeah. Interesting. Like it's a pretty good way to go viral, I think. You're like, whoa, look at this. Look at this like sexy down. I mean, did you see the clip that went viral today that had all the comments? I only saw that one that I described.

I'm going to find it. It had all the comments on this like girl that you're talking about. And it was like they were they were actually, you know, those like comment videos that go viral. It was hilarious. But this was this is a thing that I don't I mean, talk about slop. Like, why are we putting down syndrome filters on only fans models? Was there is this filters on only fans models. Was Harry says,

but it's like you said, and it's to go viral. Jeff Goblem in Jurassic Park, like just because you can, doesn't mean that you should. Wasn't there a Down syndrome thing like a few months ago where like somebody had to take, where like they should be getting drunk or something.

And people were like actually pretty reasonable about it. They were like, Down syndrome people need to be controlled because if they're not, they'll fuck up their lives. Is this- I thought you were about to say that they need to drink. It was part of the condition that I didn't understand, that they needed a certain amount of liquor a week. Or their condition got worse. Damn, I didn't know that that was a part of down. Good for them. You know what? I think we should move on to our ad partner.

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make it larger than life with AdWick. Thanks guys. Let's talk about the JFK assassination. Riley, did the CIA do it? It depends on who you ask. So more than 63,000 pages of records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released late Tuesday following an executive order from President Trump. Not at all, really, in a searchable manner, I would add, but hey, at least we got them.

For those on the internet who did a little bit of 63,000 page light reading, takes sort of ranged from this is like a nothing burger to the CIA killed him. One notable new development was that like Gary Underhill, a US intelligence agent who did special assignments for the CIA, confided to friends that he believed the CIA was, quote, responsible for his assassination. Conveniently, six months later, Underhill was found dead in what was ruled to be a suicide. I thought that information was already publicly known, maybe not.

But did any of you guys sift through all 63,000 pages? And has this release changed your views about who ultimately killed JFK? It was too much for me to read. I'm not reading all that. So I tweeted about it. I hope that someone else would read it for me. Specifically, I hope that someone else would copy it for me. Specifically, I hope that someone else would copy

and paste it into Chat GPT. And that they would read it for me. And that they, I mean, the robots would read it for me and they would tell me what's going on. Some people in fact, did that piece by piece. It's a lot of documents. So it took a lot of time. And it's like the row, I feel. He just kept and then Grok later kept

telling us what we already know. And it's caught. But it could be this other thing. And I didn't really get to the bottom of it by outsourcing my reading to other people. Surprise. There's something weird about these like the Epstein dump and the JFK dump and they just are nothing burgers and now they're I heard they were trying to do an MLK dump which nobody I don't think we've all been waiting with bated breath for that. I don't know what to say about it other than like it's strange to. I think it's just, it's almost predictable that that it's been so anticlimactic.

Anticlimactic. Well, are they really gonna release it if it's like the CIA shot them in the head? Is that what people were waiting? Maybe that's what I was waiting for. Like that to me is a successful JFK file release, 63 pages, and they're like, yeah, we know, I mean, the fucking CIA did it,

and there's like a secret, secret war or something. That's what I would need. And instead it was just like, they kind of knew about this or that. And we should probably actually get like a JFK expert on there because I think the real problem with this is I don't have enough context

and most Americans don't have enough context but there are these JFK experts, if you will, who are conspiracy theorists straight up and they have the context. And I think for them, they're still digesting this information. This just dropped. There are how many pages, Riley?

Like 63,000. They have the work cut out for them. They're busy looking for a stray sentence here or there that denotes some other weird thing. And more interesting than the deranged, like histrionic, Jew stuff or why that's happening on Twitter. Is it bots?

Is it Russia trying to sort of divide us? More interesting than the question of what was really in those documents? What did we get? I think is the way that we are incapable with that much information of making sense of it, which is kind of a high level. That's a high level problem we're facing on the internet is there's so much and it's in so many different places that we are in. We're living in a slop

world, man. The JFK files just, they just, it has entered the slop and became a part of it and you can't tell what's going on. The first, the first posts that went viral after the JFK files dropped was a, uh, was a document that was released under Biden. And it was like, this proves like the CIA did it, you know, it's like, wait, but Biden from like his youth. No, like there was some, there were some documents about JFK released a few years ago.

Dude, but I didn't even believe that. I saw those documents going viral and I just assumed they were all fake. Anything that I saw on Twitter that was like a screenshot of some page with a right. I'm like, that's not real. And that's another thing. And do you just not feel that way?

I go on any of the social media platforms now, threads, Blue Sky X and everything I see I assume is Lying to me. I think that's the way right way to approach it now though. I mean Yeah, I think if you if you're gonna be I think you have to start with the default that this isn't real Unfortunately, whether it's video I mean we before AI you really had to start training yourself to do this. Anyone in our space because you would see a clip and you'd react to it, but then you'd find out it was completely out of context. It was only part

of it. So you just were training yourself to kind of wait anyways. And then now I think you just, you have to, any tweet that I see a screenshot of, I mean any video, I just assume it's all fake. And then I have to go prove otherwise, essentially. I don't know how else you navigate how you navigate this slop world. I mean, I think that that would be the interesting follow up to your piece is tools for navigating Slabworld. Well, at the very end of it, I get to the core.

The reason that it even exists is because people have an interest in what other people are doing. And so you want to hack that for whatever nefarious reason you have to create the sense that lots of people care about something or want something, want to buy something as the advertising model, want to have some kind of revolution of the races, which would be like the communist propaganda version of this, whatever it is. That is memetics.

That is just what the natural, the dumbest version of this, or let's say not the dumbest, but like the most sort of mundane version of this is keeping up with the Joneses, right? We kind of know what the impulse is, but it courses through everything. And so I find that there's probably, or my sense is that there's no cure for this. It's just the internet has been designed in a way that amplifies something that's innate to us, which is the desire to know what other people are up to and to game that. But maybe you can have a mnemonic device of some kind where you just build up a, like a new hygiene

that is reminding yourself who, like this, walking into the internet and assuming everything is fake. If you can build that up in your mind, a daily practice every day at 11, no matter what's going on, I remind myself that whatever I'm looking at might be fake. And then you're like, oh wait, is it fake? Let me just double click.

No matter what it is, no matter how obvious seeming, you double click. You could do something like just, I think I shared this clip of Peter's that popped up in my feed. I think it was over the weekend and I found really refreshing and inspiring because I knew him when he recorded that

and it was so long ago and it was like this beautiful flashback. He's asked the question of what to build and he talks about building, only building things that are on the one hand, very important and on the other would not exist without you. I think we have meaningful lives when I find them very meaningful when we do things that otherwise that are important that

otherwise would not get done. So you don't want to be just a cog in machine you don't want to be just doing something that if you didn't do it a thousand other people would take your place. And so it's always, but for you, but for this venture or this company that you're working on, this important thing would not get done. And what that forces you to do, if that's the rule, like you can only be doing things that are both incredibly important and you can only do, only you are capable of doing, then you have to ask yourself the question of, well, what am I?

What am I? What am I really good at? Like, what do I believe? What do I care about? You can't look to other people for answers to those questions. It forces you inward and you have to start asking questions that sound easy.

Everyone's like, this is basic advice or whatever. Like, it's not easy to answer those questions. Those are really hard questions. And some of the smartest people in the world have trouble answering those questions. But that is the only, what happens when you hear that, separate from, oh, that's good career advice, is it kind of, if you sit with it,

it sort of shakes you out of the slop a little bit. And I don't think you can ever be free of the slop, but maybe if just for a second or two, if you could a second or two a day, and remember that like, fuck, we are in the slop world. You know, I'm in the matrix. Like you become awake for a moment, and then you use that time to focus your efforts

in a more positive direction. And then give yourself some grace because like I'm a little bit of a slop enjoyer myself. Like there's no denying it. Come on, like, let's go. I'm gonna be talking about the clown world till the day I die. Yeah. But it's slop and I should have to face that sometimes

and be like, damn, the slop got me. I became the slop. I stared into the slop and it stayed back. Yeah, so that's that. But I don't think there's a perfect solution and it's like, you just gotta remember. Yeah, so that's that. But I don't think there's a perfect solution. And it's like, you just got to remember. Yeah, it's, it's tricky. I mean, it's definitely, I always resisted like making clips and all that stuff. And now we're like, got to feed the algorithm.

Oh, you got to feed the beast. You got to, you got to, but they don't have to be slop. I don't think every clip has to be slob. They're hype. No. I see the Peter clip, for example, is an incredible clip. It went viral and it felt, it improved my life. I walked away from that like, God, I'm so glad I saw that. I wrote about it. I wanted to share it with people because it was meaningful and good. It's like, there are good things. It's not all bad out there on the internet. We have to just remember what's good and important and try our best to kind of tether back to that. Speaking of, some high-cycle stuff is

a little bit of investigative reporting. We're bringing Ashley Rinsburg into the chat. We gotta talk about, what we really need is, it's the truth about Ilan Omar's father. It's an investigative piece about Snopes. I'm retitling the segment because as we're sort of trying to crack the code of what's true and what's not about Ilan, I'm retitling it, Brotherly Love. Some of you will understand that and some of you will not. Ashley, tell us about your piece, sir.

Yeah, the piece, you know, we heard a lot of noise about Ilan Omar over the years, including the, the brotherly love story, um, the, that she may have married her brother, may, maybe probably did looks like she did, but casual, it's a little casual, it's, you know, you know, it's a cultural difference, Fact check. Oh, shit. But one thing that got sort of sidelined by the bigger brotherly love story is the question about her father and whether her father was a military official in the Siad Barre regime of Somalia before its downfall. And this is a genocidal regime that killed hundreds of thousands of people. There was mass rape, torture, like you name it, the whole thing. And that would have made

his admission to the country, to the United States as a refugee, most likely inadmissible. You generally can't come to the United States as a refugee if you were the one causing other people to become refugees. So that was a question that kind of arose at the same time as the brother questions came up and very, very quickly Snopes shut it down along with PolitiFact and the media. So it was really like a week after these claims kind of emerged and they emerged in Gateway Pundit, which admittedly like it's sometimes hit or miss with those guys. Nevertheless, they did bring up a very real, very clear cut claim, something that you could investigate, right?

Without having to just shut it down, call it racist, which is what Snopes did, call it a conspiracy theory, which is what Snopes also did, you could actually just find out. And instead, Snopes relied on this alt news, daily web thing from Minnesota that had no source for the claim that he was a teacher. There was no source listed. Nobody reached out to the reporter.

Nobody did any further digging. They just left it at that racist conspiracy theory, which by the way is exactly what they called COVID lab leak. Same construction. The media of course went with it. This was like great. Ilan Omar was the progressive wunderkind here. She was saving the democratic party, opposing Trump. She was, you know, the squad, the whole thing.

It was too good to be true. And on 2021, when, when Elin Omar, her father died of COVID complications, the same claims got trotted out. Once again, he was a teacher, but one journalist, nonprofit newsroom that's focused on minority and communities of people of color or something along those lines, ran an obituary. The first line says basically, or not basically, literally, he was an esteemed colonel in the regime of the siad bar and the national army, etc., etc etc this was confirmed by a few other outlets as

well so it was in fact true and here we have the can of worms open. This is I think obviously the really interesting thing about this is just the role and that's what the piece is really about is the role that Snopes plays in this disinformation ecosystem and I do think you kind of have to call it that right it's not misinformation. They weren't sort of mistaken. It's negligent to the point that it has to be intentional. They know that their job is to protect this woman. And that's where they started,

was we have to protect her from the truth about her getting out. And that is, I look at it when it first came out and it just doesn't feel sort of, I guess the word is trashy. Like the whole vibe of it is like, it's kind of just janky and like, it's like you're in a trailer park and they're like,

that's not true, that's wrong. And then the New York Times is like, as Snopes does, as like the deranged woman with one tooth avowed testified is accurate, It is this thing over here. That always just seemed crazy to me, but it's really how it all works. It was, and it wasn't just Snopes, right? It was, you have a system,

you have a sort of ecosystem of fact checkers that are like this, but what is a fact checker? We're all fact checkers. Ashley, you went and fact checked a bunch of things. Like that's what, we're humans and we have the capacity to check up on facts. But we also have biases and these were just highly biased actors who were fact checking. That fact check was then used, cited as proof that a highly political piece of information

was either true or not and then forced by social media companies down our throats. It was not just like, oh, the New York Times is saying this. It was the New York Times is saying this, therefore your post is going to be censored. Therefore, like the Hunter Biden laptop story is you're not gonna be able to share it in DMs. And that is just, that's like the circle of life there. That is, it starts from insemination to end product. That is how it works. That is how the sausage was made. There has been really no reckoning for that. No one has really been fired.

Nobody has been publicly, I don't know, anything. There's just all these worms just sort of slunk back into the shadows. And we're supposed to pretend that we didn't have this really disastrous information apparatus running the country for what, five years. I think it's really bad. I think that there need to be, I'm just, they're not going to be consequences. I don't know why I say it, but I do think there need to be consequences for this. Well, I mean, the consequences that we're seeing the backlash politically to all of this stuff right now, I mean, that was the big consequence. But to your point about it being trashy, Snopes being trashy, one of the things that we've got in the piece there is that the CEO and co-founder who is sort of head of that whole

editorial apparatus at Snopes was caught plagiarizing dozens and dozens of articles from mainstream media outlets in order to boost Snopes SEO. So the whole premise of Snopes is that you have this elaborate system of protocols or procedures or whatever it is in place that makes sure that the conclusion they come to is accurate and dependable. And the guy at the very top of this entire system is committing one of the most egregious violations in journalism, which is copying other people's work and not giving them credit.

And this went on for five years undetected by the entire Snopes apparatus until BuzzFeed broke in 2021. So the whole thing was this house of cards and it still is, that's the craziest thing. It's still out there. And when the Sahin journal, this nonprofit newsroom in Minnesota came out saying, oh, this guy actually was in the Somali military, they didn't bother to go back and correct it. And they still haven't after our piece came out. They haven't corrected it? No, they haven't corrected it. And none of the mainstream outlets have corrected it.

And they're not going to. I mean, let's be real. This is not going to happen. That's actually a huge deal that we now know that this is true and none of the articles are being corrected. I mean, Wikipedia, I'm assuming is probably also not been corrected. I'd have to go and look at it. Have you looked at Wikipedia? Wikipedia actually has... So the claim was that he was a teacher or they call him a teacher trainer. I've never heard they call him a teacher trainer. I've never heard this term before, teacher trainer. It wasn't teacher, it wasn't an educator,

it was a teacher trainer. Apparently that might be something to do with communist propaganda role, the specific role, but putting that aside, Wikipedia calls him a teacher trainer and says he served in the Somali military. So they actually got that somehow. I don't know where that came from So they actually got that somehow. I don't know where that came from, but they caught that one.

Bridget, what's your sense of the, I mean, cause I know you've been in this from the beginning. How, I guess, quick were you to the game? Cause I feel like that's the game. I feel like that was the information game. And did you kind of key into that pretty quickly or what was your sense of it while it was all going down?

Like this, like in general or this story in particular? Where it's like the Snopes to the mainstream media to the sort of social media platform pipeline. That thing. Yeah. I feel like I was pretty quick to that. So much of that stuff was, I feel like I was pretty quick to that. So much of that stuff was, I agree, your sense that it was like trashy. I think that, you know, when I evaluate like, why didn't I really pay that much attention to this story? Or why did I, what was the resistance to it? Or even knowing that it was probably true.

Why did I, why did I just, it's like one of those stories that I just kind of turned away from because I was like, it's like one of those stories that I just kind of turned away from. Because I was like, that's probably true. And I don't know that I want to know that it is. But I do think because of COVID and being online and seeing just how captured Snopes was, even around the Babylon Bee, weren't they fact checking the Babylon Bee? Didn't Snopes have some weird? Yeah, they did. Yeah. So I think that's when I really became aware of like how partisan they were. And then I just stopped taking it. Once their credibility was gone, I just ignored it.

Isn't it kind of an annoying name too, Snopes? Like you hear Snopes and I'm like, get the fuck out of my house. Yeah, I can see. You imagine like sniffing your underwear and stuff. It's like, oh, I'm just snoping around. No, you're not, not here, you're not. Go, you have to go, ma'am. Like, absolutely not on my watch.

But Ashley, did Ilana Marr marry her brother? I mean, there is strong evidence. She has, you know, It's like her half brother, right? Isn't that what happened? It was like, it was like immigration. It wasn't like she was fucking her brother. It was like some HBO shit.

This is, it was immigration fraud, correct? I mean, who knows, right? I don't, we don't know. I guess we don't know for sure. She might have been, they might've been fucking. They might. We have, there's so when you dig into the Ilan Omar story, it is truly, it's bottomless because there,

she obfuscates everything. For example, she said that she has seven siblings or maybe there's six other siblings. She's only ever acknowledged one of them by name and only been photographed with one of them. So who are these other people? The brother that is in question still lives in the UK, but she claims, you know, she, she married her first husband, then divorced him, then got married to the brother, then divorced him,

then got remarried to the remarried to the first husband who became, I guess, the third husband. It's just on and on and on. And the other thing that really, when you look into Ilan Omar, is her ties to successive Somali regimes like these ties go very very deep. They remain to this day And also those regimes themselves are incredibly weird like just one of the things that I discovered researching and reporting this piece was that one of the guys that she was close to in who became prime minister of Somalia was a

New York State Department of Transportation employee when he became Prime Minister of Somalia. He's working in the New York State Department of Transportation, becomes Prime Minister. She becomes close to him. And then her second husband's brother-in-law becomes this guy's personal secretary in Somalia. So, it just goes on and on and on.

And that's partly why it's so hard to find the truth is because it is so, so tangled. You will spend weeks and weeks and weeks and inevitably you will start doing the meme with the guy in the string of the board because you can, you have to. Well, if she did, I hate to belabor the point, but on the brother marriage, that to me is important because it's potentially immigration fraud. And if it's immigration fraud, she should be charged with immigration fraud and no longer in Congress.

So why are people not pursuing this, do you think? It seems like an easy slam dunk on the Republican side. No, is it just the, how can you not get to the bottom of whether or not for sure she married her brother? And I mean, that seems like a smoke, that's like a, it's either a yes or a no. It's in my opinion, it's because this is the, it's what I call the information stew.

And it's also what we saw with COVID origin, which is that you take some facts, you throw in some clear cut conspiracy theories, you throw in some fabulism, lies, falsehoods, and you mix it all together and you can't pull anything apart after that. So, maybe she actually did marry her brother and that was immigration fraud. But now that it's been sort of glommed up with all these other claims about her being arrested 23 times, which is not true. She's arrested a couple of times, once or twice maybe, with other claims that are just like

completely bogus. And this is exactly what Snopes did. So Snopes and all these different fact checks, they lump them together and Reuters did the same thing in its fact check. They'd be like, these are the five conspiracy theories that we've debunked about Ilan Omar. And one is the one that I just mentioned, the 23 arrests, but then the other one is going to be stuff about her father and her brother. And when you go back to this as a reporter, you'd be like, oh, I don't know. I don't really want to get smeared. And I'd do this months long investigation that I'm going to be called a conspiracy theorist. And maybe to be called a conspiracy theorist. And maybe I actually am a conspiracy theorist because this does sound crazy.

You are. It's fine. You're up there over here, but you are. Does it have to be a reporter though? Because like you said, there is like a lot of political incentive here and there must be physical record of a marriage, right? Somewhere. I mean, I have to imagine it exists.

There is and we have to imagine it exists. There is, and we have that. That exists. I think it's just like, people just don't care. Like it's staring us in the face and people are like, listen, so she married her brother. It's like that, you guys remember the Leave Britney Alone guy? There's this phenomenal quote.

It's one of my favorite internet quotes of all time. Not the Leave Britney Alone thing. He gets a little older. Chris Crocker, I think his name was. And he's got like this like pretty blonde hair and he looks very like transy, but not quite. And he's like outside of a club in LA and someone comes up and they're like, Chris, Chris, Britney Spears just got arrested for a hit and run. Like, what do you think of that? And he's like, Oh guys, so she hit and run. She's Britney Spears. It was like very,

like there was nothing. Like it was, he goes, he says a verbatim, let her hit. I'm like, damn, that is like how it is. That's like AOC. They're like, AOC, Ilan Omar married her brother. It was immigration fraud. She's friends with literal terrorists. They want to blow up the Capitol. And she's like, come on guys, it just, it sounds a little racist to me. And off she goes about her day. I think it's like, there's nothing she can do that people aren't going to defend. It's like, it's the inversion of the big lie. So the Goebbels' big lie, which is like, you tell a lie so big that the public's just going to believe it because it's too crazy to be

a lie. But in this case, it's like, it's so weird. It's so creepy. It's so strange that you're like, could this really be true? And if it is, I'm not even sure what to make it with. So we're just going to put it aside. I also remember feeling when it first came out that it was racist. My first reaction was there's no way that's true, that there's no way that she married her brother. And what it sounds like to me is people are being racist actually. And I hate it that that was happening because I'm like, it just adds fuel to the fire. Like, why are you fucking off and say spreading these filthy lies about this woman? She's like annoying. Yes, terrible. Absolutely confirmed.

Like fact check, true. But she didn't marry your brother. That's you're just saying that because she came from Africa and Somalia, blah, blah, blah. But then when pressed, she didn't go there. I assumed that the second that she was questioned about this, she'd be like, that is fucking racist. Like, tell me alarms, get a New York Times profile written about you, the racist attacks that Elon Omar endures, instead she's just like, you guys are so crazy.

And she walks off and I was like, holy shit, this woman married her brother. Yes. It happened, I know it happened. Exactly, she's never issued clear cut denials, never. Even to the most friendly journalists, she always just backs away from the question, which is really, really weird.

It did have, you're right at first, like that Obama birth certificate, you know, it felt a little bit like that at first. Where you're like, ah. What is the truth of it? You know what? We're not going to eat the birthday. We're not doing birtherism.

Last thoughts on Ilan Omar. Questions about Ashley or to Ashley or to anyone. Snopes, the fact checking trashy hellscape. We have Ilan's brother. We have, is it terrorism? Question mark. Not Elon Mavar, though I wouldn't be surprised. I wanna know what the weirdest thing was

that you discovered in writing this piece. Cause it sounds like you discovered a lot of weird things. You didn't mention that the the author of the source that Snopes used to prove that the father was a teacher trainer was sued by an education company for maligning them in a series of reports for a newspaper and doing misinformation himself. So, we not only have the CEO is a serial plagiarist, also they're fact checking using sources that are not credible. And so that was an interesting piece of the puzzle too.

Yeah, that was the guy who wrote the story saying that her father was a teacher, and he wrote a powerful piece about her as a profile. Yeah, and that piece was so lame. I remember reading it when we were editing it. I was cringing because it was so over the top. It was. Yeah.

Way too positive about her. Yes. And he wrote the claims about that company that were claims that could have been verified or falsified through the public record. This was all public stuff. And then they refused to correct it. They refused to make the corrections until they got sued and then they settled and they retracted all the articles. The other weird thing about Siav Barre is that they persecuted Muslims, right? And that was like, so which doesn't line up with, presumably she's Muslim, right?

No. I mean, so the thing about that, she wears- It was like this hardcore Marxist regime. I don't believe that she's that Muslim. I never believed that she was that Muslim. When you hear Muslims in America speak about like what they're doing and why, the religion comes into it a lot. She is woke. She is aligned on woke issues,

which says to me that she's using the Islamic faith, which comes with its own set of problems as a body suit to protect her from criticism. And that was much more popular a handful of years ago. If you remember the women's march had the woman in the hijab and everything, Muslims were having a moment and she really leaned into that, I believe. Also it's important for her running.

It's like, that's her constituency, right? I think like 10% Muslim or something, Ashley. Something like that. Yeah, it's a very big population. It's an up where- Is that present in Somali people? Is there, our constituents, there's like a huge Somali population in Minnesota.

Yeah, Minnesota. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think she's, I think that's maybe another like secret thing. I remember Ann Coulter talking about Barack Obama once and they were like, you don't believe he's a Muslim. And she's like, cause that was the controversy.

Like, oh, he's secretly a Muslim. His middle name is Hussein. Get him guys. And they're like, and like, you don't believe he's really a Muslim. And she looked dead ass at that camera and she said, no, I think he's an atheist. I was like, yes, that is what he is for sure. And that, I mean, I don't want to say that I think she's an atheist, but I think that she's woke first. And that's why you can get into this sort of like,

I don't think that's why she, maybe the brother thing, for example, and the Marxist roots, for example. I know that Ashley, you think there's this connection between Islamism and Marxism. And I just, I think there's bleed, but I feel like they're very, at the end of the day, distinct. And you get to a point where you really have to pick a lane.

Yeah. Well, I mean, we're seeing it as this like marriage of convenience because the Soviet, I think it goes back to the Soviet connection where Soviets were trying to leverage Marxism in the Arab and Muslim world to gain a foothold and that became something of a thing to resist Western, what they call Western imperialism. With her, Bren and I went back and forth on this question a lot regarding the Bahre regime because they were, it is a secular regime and that's where she grew up, that was the environment she came up in which is a profoundly secular context at that time. Who knows what happened since then? I don't know what she practices or doesn't practice, but again, it's this tangle with her. And one of the other nodes that really never gets talked about is her foreign policy work, which she's done a lot of work with the Pakistani government, a lot of lobbying by Pakistan that's gone through her.

And because we're all talking about this other crazy shit, we don't talk about stuff like that. And it's a great smoke screen because she can just then claim racism, conspiracy theories, and she's then working with the Pakistani government to advance Pakistani interests in the United States without anybody knowing it. Well, that's Ilan. That's our good friend, Ms. Omar. It's been real.

Last thoughts, you know what, Bridget, you're the guest. Last thoughts, my friend. I mean, this has been really a wild ride. We had all kinds of stuff. We had sibling marriage. This has been really a wild ride. We had all kinds of stuff. We had sibling marriage. We had Slav. Is it terrorism?

The Slav world? The napalm of Slav. Harry Sassone's sex life or Black Arrow? I mean, it's been special. Now, there's a conspiracy from you. Ashley, I would like you to get the bottom of whether or not Harry Sassone has ever actually seen boobs and I think the answer is no. I do suspect it is no. Or he saw them, but like, it was like the lights were off and

he just felt weird about it and still thinking about it. Do you think that he, this app is something that he initiated? I think it was like, he's got a couple of meddlesome girls in his life who were like, Harry, I know exactly what to do. And he was like, okay. And then he just got dragged along for the ride and he's gonna take the fall. I think it's all gonna come out. There's no way you can hide a secret. This big Harry, pirate wire coming for your ass.

Not in that way though, don't get fucking excited. What was that? They were just all a brunch one day and he was like, you know what? Yeah, he's too mimosas deep. And some girls are like, dude, we all know that you got a boyfriend, but we've got a night in for you.

That's what we're gonna do. We got a plot. It's like the plot of a, I don't know, like a Nickelodeon movie or something that just got a little too out of hand. Now here we are and that's America and the Slop World. It's been real guys. Rate, review, subscribe, go to Bridget's podcast, Dumpster Fire, and give her a little follow and check her out every week.

Definitely get your moon shirt if you haven't already. We, I think, bumped it up to 15% off. If you use the code word moon, we only have like, I think a few left. So you better get them while you can. And have a good weekend. Bye. Thank you.