Pirate Wires - The Coconut Democrats, VCs for Kamala, The Corruption Of Wikipedia, & Europe Summer Is So Over

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

EPISODE #64: Welcome back to the pod! The Kamala vibe shift moves forward, despite the fact that she doesn't have a single policy issue on her website. Are Dems really happy? Or is it just cope to make sure orange man doesn't get elected. We are then joined by Ashley Rindsberg to discuss his piece for Pirate Wires "How the Regime Captured Wikipedia" Also discussed: The VCs for Kamala zoom call was about as embarrassing as expected, strange fan-fiction from Dems, the disastrous France Olympics, and Taylor Swift concerts cancelled due to terrorist threats Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman, Ashley Rindsberg We have partnered with Polymarket! Get your 2024 Presidential Election Predictions: https://polymarket.com/elections Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-the-regime-captured-wikipedia?f=home 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 Ashley Twitter: https://x.com/AshleyRindsberg TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To Pod 1:30 - Polymarket Update On Elections - Kamala in the lead?! 7:00 - Strange Dem Fan-Fiction - Are They Actually Happy?  20:20 - Camo Hats, Kamala is Brat - The Strange Cultural Psyop  31:30 - VCs For Kamala 47:00 - Welcome Ashley Rindsberg To The Pod! Discussing His Piece In PW  How the Regime Captured Wikipedia"  1:01:30 - France Olympics, and Taylor Swift concerts cancelled 1:23:00 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe - Share With Your Friends! #podcast #technology #politics #culture

There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy. Tim Walz is my dad. Kamala is my fun aunt. He buys you groceries and brings them over with a six pack, and you have like a fun time together. Interesting here is not that we're talking about this. It's what we're not talking about.

Kamala Harris still has zero policies published on her website, okay? Paul Graham, I'm so happy. Are you happy? Are you happy? Are you happy with Kamala running for president? It was like a MAGA hat in the bottom and a, and a coconut in the top, right? And I was like, I got to get the fuck out of here. Super brave to like, know that somebody that supports an unrealized capital gain tax, it'd be like, okay, she can be in office, right? What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We've got a packed one for you today. In a little bit, we're going to be talking to Ashley Rinsberg,

who just published a piece for PirateWire called How the Regime Captured Wikipedia. I think there's this open question that we all have of what is going on over there. It just seems incredibly biased. I know that we've talked about it on this pod before, we've written about it before. I'm now having a flashback to Sanj and I discussing specifically the, was it the flag stuff on Wikipedia? Remember the flag that got all the immediate changes? That was fucking crazy. But there's a bigger problem, I think, with Wikimedia, which is the huge nonprofit above it. So we'll get into that in a minute. But first, I think we're actually going to open with the Polymarket betting markets this week, because it leads directly into this much bigger topic that we obviously need to discuss, which is the Kamala-fication of Silicon

Valley, the broader conversation that's happening with her and also Tim Walz. And I mean, I just want to get into it. So here we go with Polly. So on Tuesday, obviously Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as a running mate. Walz's Midwest, this is the, so what I've got here, Walz's Midwest appeal increased Harris's support by 7% in crucial swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin. Now that is an open question and we can talk about it in a second. I'm not, I'm not entirely sure if it was the Midwestern appeal that, that bumped him up in Michigan. It could also be, I don don't know the really super super super

anti-israel uh muslims who live in michigan it's like michigan and minnesota is where they're all concentrated and she chose walls over shapiro who we'll get into as well um here it says he served in in the idf i i this is, did he serve? Did he volunteer? It's not really clear. What's certain is Shapiro, who was the VP who everyone expected Kamala to pick. He is currently the governor of Pennsylvania, a swing state. He's very popular there, but he's also Jewish. And that is not playing super well for Kamala's base at the moment. Immediately, there's a question of, oh, is she anti-Semitic for not choosing him? Am I accusing her of anti-Semitism? I'm not. I don't think she's anti-Semitic. She's married to a

Jewish guy. I think that her base is increasingly anti-Semitic. I think there's a very actual, it's totally fine to criticize Israel. And I think there's a way to do that without being anti-Semitic. I see a mix now on the very far left, just like I see it on the very far right. But the important thing here is like this choice, according to Polymarket, I mean, it's swunger in Michigan, regardless. Maybe you'll say, no, no, no, it wasn't the anti-Israel Muslims in the Midwest. It was the fact that everybody there loves Tim Walz's, what his card hat or whatever the fuck it is, and the flannel. And they're like, he hunts turkeys.

Okay, that appeals to them. But the surge has improved Kamala's overall chances of winning from 43% to 49%. to 49%. Now, I think right off the bat, there's a question of how much of this bump is Walls, how much of it is Kamala, and how much of it is just the sheer determination of people online to be obsessed with this ticket, despite all logic. And we've got a lot here, and I want to set it up for you. I've got Sanjana, in a moment, you're going to be sort of our Gen Z correspondent explaining what the youth are thinking about and the gratification of the Kamala space online. Riley, we got to talk about the way that the Donald Trump administration is goading Kamala into doing an interview

with a mainstream news outlet. But the polymarket stuff here, the numbers that we're seeing on polymarket now, just the way that people are betting on this, it leads me to believe that the vibes are really working. So not even just that, man. I was watching a Kamala, one of her appearances in front of the, she's been doing this concert series in various states where she brings out these musicians and then people come out to see the musicians. And then she's also speaking.

And in it, she shushed one of the protesters. Someone was heckling her. She shushed him and she said, if you don't let me finish, Trump's gonna win or whatever. And he intends to end the Affordable Care Act. You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win,

then say that,, I'm speaking. It was a very simple statement and the crowd roared, like just applause. And the girl, I see this girl behind her shaking with excitement at this meme-ready moment. And I guess I have a giant question mark. I don't know how much of this is real, how much of it is just bots online astroturfing the entire thing, how much of it is people responding to the astroturf. It's confusing. What I do know is that it's extensive. So following the selection of Waltz, we are just immersed in cheerful gloop online. It is people talking about the niceness of him.

It is people talking about how he makes them feel happy. It is him, he's himself. It is Walls introducing Kamala, I believe, at a rally where he talks, he thanks her for bringing joy back to the election. Now, separate from that, you have our boy boy Paul Graham saying, wouldn't it be nice if every president, not even would it be nice, the thing that we need to be

holding people up against henceforth, what we need from a politician, we need to know if he is willing to, not even willing, if he is able to sweetly read to kindergartners in a kindergarten class. And he's just espousing endlessly on Twitter about the importance of the niceness, the importance of the cheeriness, of the importance of the fact that this just makes him happy. This is really the important thing that we need to be talking about. We've seen endless versions of this. One increasingly popular one is just the sort of fictionalization of Waltz. And I'm getting to a point, trust me, just bear with me one more. I do want to pull one of these

up. So we've got the people writing fan fiction. This one's from Aaron Regenberg. No idea who he is. Got a blue check. Bunch of followers. All sorts of stuff, by the way. I mean, we've got 50 different tweets here. Some version of this. Just describing who Walls is, who he is in relation to J.D. Vance. But this one really was the absolute best. Tim Walls is my dad.

Kamala is my fun aunt who lives next door they just found out I'm being bullied by the shittiest kid in class, JD when they try to talk to his dad, Don it becomes clear he's the real problem they go back to their car

Kamala pulls out her cop badge Tim grabs his old baseball bat they walk back to Don's porch as Tim reaches for the doorbell, they look at each other and smile. This is going to be fun. Okay, we've seen endless tweets of this kind. There was one this morning that I read that was just describing Tim Walls as the kind of guy who cuts your grass. And JD Vance, I believe, is the kind of guy who maybe does it, was it like he calls the cops on you for cutting your grass. And JD Vance, I believe is the kind of guy who maybe does it. Was it like,

he calls the cops on you for cutting your grass or something. And then comments underneath that there was a guy who was like, no, no, no, he doesn't just cut your grass. He buys you groceries and brings them over with a six pack and you have like a fun time together. Now who cares about all of this, right? Okay. So people love him. They think he's like a vibey old man. They're, they're wearing flannel or something now. They, why does it matter? What, what's interesting here is not that we're talking about this. It's what we're not talking about. Kamala Harris still has no zero, zero policies published on her website. Okay. This is a woman who does not have a platform, which I'm being like, I feel like I keep referencing this and people kind of give me an eye roll like Solana, like, obviously,

we're beyond that. It's 2024. We don't do things like policies and platforms anymore. It's weird that she's not even lying about one. Okay. It's weird that she's not even doing a moderate sort of like fake pivot to the center type thing. It's fucking weird. It's weird. Speaking of weird, which they keep saying weird, weird, weird. What's weird is that we're talking about the word weird. What's weird is that we're not talking about the border or, I don't know, inflation, things that should matter in an election. Waltz is the other thing that we're not talking about. So the second you pick Waltz, who is the governor of Minnesota, which has voted for Democratic presidents for 50 years, since Reagan

was the last time they voted for a Republican. And that was the election where everybody voted for a Republican. Everyone voted for Reagan. Nobody liked Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter, I think, was it one state that voted for Jimmy Carter? It was probably Massachusetts or something. Maybe Vermont. It was something stupid. But most people voted for Reagan that election. Minnesota, you didn't need Minnesota. What you needed was Pennsylvania. That's weird. So just begin there. The other thing that's weird that we're not talking about are any of his platform policies. So we've got him now on clips that are going super viral because we have nothing else to work with because these people are not talking about what they believe in today. But we have on clips throughout the 2020, one of them is the free speech thing, right? Where he says free speech isn't guaranteed.

I think we need to push back on this. There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy. Okay. Hate speech, speech misinformation these things are not protected speech obviously people are freaking out that's an authoritarian speaking we can't obviously social media has been a problem with this stuff but you can't legally ban people from this stuff then you have uh espousing support for rioters you have his wife talking about how she opened the windows so she could smell the burning tires sort of implying how important it was for her in this moment. This is, again, this is the summer that rioting was legalized in America.

Now you have the stolen valor stuff. So that's not really a policy position. And it's not something, I mean, it's something that I care about, I guess, morally. But what Kamala should care about is what it's going to mean electorally. So Tim Walz is being accused of basically lying about combat experience, and that's going to be a problem. But these are the things that we're not talking about. And this is why the entire, I guess, glupification of the discourse is so interesting to me. It's because you always expect some amount of this, but it's sort of coursing and writhing through the substance, even with Donald Trump, right? He is a tremendously cartoonish, clowny kind of guy who brings all sorts of bullshit

with him wherever he goes, insults and weird fake news that he either attacks or creates himself. But there are policies there and there have been forever. In fact, they're the things that seem to really freak people out on the left. The first one of them all being build the wall. That's a policy position. You can attack it, but you can't say it's not a position. He said he was going to, not only was going to build it, he was going to make Mexico pay for it. That was on his site back then. And here we are today. And it's still a thing that people talk about. It's still a thing that matters. I do want to get into more of this. But first, just rough cuts. Like, how have you guys been experiencing the goop online? entire Democrat response to the sort of the Democrat machine response to what their disgruntled supporters may or may not have to say about Kamala's coronation. I mean, I have to give

the Palestine protesters a lot of credit for some of them are actually like sticking to their principles and saying, okay, no, we don't support this coronation. This woman is a continuation of Joe Biden. And this is an insane anti-democratic process that just happened. And that we're all sort of expected to like roll over and go along with. It does suck to be a communist in America. Like, I mean, they're annoying and they're everywhere and they affect the media, but if you're an actual communist and you're in the DNC, like they do abuse you. They do. They abuse you. And there's always been this kind of, you know, well, if you don an actual communist and you're in the DNC, like they do abuse you. They do. They abuse. And there's always been this kind of, you know, well, if you don't fall in line and vote for whoever they select.

I mean, they did this in 2016 with Bernie and Hillary, where, you know, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC kind of colluded to basically give, you know, Hillary the nomination. And when people spoke out about it, it was like, well, how dare you not rally around Hillary? And, you know, you're trying to give the election to Trump. So they, you know, they always kind of pull this like, well, you know, if you don't rally behind whoever we've selected for you, you support the fall of democracy. And to me, the, it's almost like they're reveling in not giving a policy position like they're reveling in the brat memes and the camo hats and all this bullshit

that like their army of paid influencers which i can talk about in a bit uh if we want to get into that is is pushing out and you know they're kind of rubbing in the faces of voters who actually want to know like okay what are kamala's positions that they just are not gonna they don't have to give them right because kamala clearly um i mean she was media to, you know, make sure, I guess, as best they can that she's coronated in November. So on brand. You were talking about the pose that she gave at the speech when she was shushing the protesters. This is a really, this is going to be a crazy reference and none of you are going to get it. No one in this chat is going to get it. None of our readers

are going to get it or none of our listeners are going to get it. My mom might get it. I'm not sure if she's still watching. I did just watch what will probably be the last episode ever of The Real Housewives of New Jersey with any of the original people. Teresa is the last one for a lot of reasons that I won't get into. But what I do want to talk about is a lot of the tension of that show revolved around Teresa and her hatred of her sister-in-law who also hated her. And it's a really dark show. And I didn't even watch most of it because it's so dark. They hate each other that much and it's finally fallen apart. But in the last episode, they have this dinner where they just call each other like a whore and a bitch and a whatever.

And they just, it's gloves off. No more pretending. Your husband with the boobs and you got the bra, honey. Oh my God. Motherfucker. Put it out. Put it out.

You're the queen of this shit. F*** you. F*** you. F*** you. Come on. You animal. They learn from the best white trans whore. you're the queen of this. And they both do this bizarre, like I'm a bitch pose and they do it to each other. And Matt, I'm going to charge you with finding that pose and putting it up and then doing a side-by-side with Kamala because they're giving the exact same thing man they're giving reality

television like me like i'm a bad girl and i'm standing my ground that's what they're giving um i also though i want sanja i do want to hear about the paid influencers first i want to hear more about that post that you brought that up what about that do you think represents all of all of what's going on i mean i know you get the coronation thing but what is it about the pose about about kamala shushing the protester yeah that moment what is that oh you're saying because she's shushing the leftist you're saying yeah well i mean i think it's that but i also think it's kind you know her whole part of her brand is this kind of you know mamala oh my god no the prosecutor, right? Like there is, I think she's, she's playing into that, which is something that the Democrats, cause they've always loved the idea of having, you know,

like a smart, confident woman who can speak truth to Trump's lies and kind of, you know, shut down, uh, what they, what they think is, is kind of like puerile whining and that kind of thing um and and to me like shushing i mean shushing is it's something you do to a kid right it's like it's very condescending um sort of teacher-like thing to do to a first grader um and you know they i think they love it because that's kind of been their modus operandi in some ways for a while online with the way that they kind of cancel people. I mean, the right cancels people too. To her credit, what she said to the protester was, stop talking or we're going to lose. And I think there's something to that.

There's something to the fact that the far crazy left is very galvanizing for the right. It is very motivating. You want to go to the poll and vote those people as far away from office as you possibly can. So I think that in terms of substance, I mean, she doesn't have policies, but in terms of tactics, she's not wrong about that. And she does offer, I mean, this whole thing is an exercise in tactics. I mean, you just circumvented a primary to select somebody who you think has a better chance of winning after the guy who was running for president, actively running for president, to the point where there was a debate between presidential candidates, between the Republican

and the Democrat. There was a debate. We forget that. We forget that Trump was almost killed. We forget that there was a whole ass fucking actual presidential debate. We forget that Trump was almost killed. We forget that there was a whole ass fucking actual presidential debate. We forget that she circumvented a primary and she's now just running. All of these things have been memory holds. She's just, it's like she's always been running, I guess. So tactically, we see these things in play, but it's less on the substance. On the tactics, I don't know that she's wrong. I think that she's sort of right.

It is. I mean, I love to see an annoying protester shut down. Personally, always have, always will. I'm a bipartisan supporter of that. I really am. But I would like to see even one policy proposal. Let's just start with one. Let's just start with one. Let's start with one about Israel. She wants to talk about it. She wants to shush the pro-Palestine people. The pro, I mean, are they, is it pro-Palestine at this point? Is it pro-Hamas?

I mean, we've seen the pro-Hamas graffiti. We'll save that for another podcast. I would like to see her talk about it though. Saj, before we get to that, if we get to that, I don't know what Brandon and Riley are thinking about the overall vibe, but this is part of that. Let's talk about the paid influencers. Let's talk about the plaid. Let's talk about the

hats. I want to talk about all of it. Yeah. I mean, well, so Kamala chose Tim Waltz to be her running mate a couple of days ago. And immediately after that, so when she chose him to be her running mate they posted team kamala posted this obviously staged video um of tim receiving the phone call where he's wearing you know uh khaki pants and this camo hat which is very important and like white sneakers and you know he joyfully accepts the nomination um and so this is immediately seized upon apparently organically i guess we're we're meant to we're meant to imagine by um online influencers who are like oh my god tim waltz's camo hat looks like the camo hat sold by chapel rowan who's this uh like midwestern pop star, basically, who sells

camo hats as part of her merch. And so they instantly sort of meme Tim Waltz and Chapel Rowan being Midwestern princesses into existence overnight. And instantly after this, I mean, I think it happened within hours,

the Kamala campaign puts out camo waltz harris hats on their website the limited edition release at first um which they claim counterfactually is the most iconic political hat in america i mean of course the most iconic political hat in america just in terms of name brand recognition is the maga hat obviously yeah never in history never in history having a hat feels reductive at this point. Yeah. So they're trying to basically usurp the MAGA hat, but they released this and it instantly

sells out. I think in like 30 minutes, 3,000 of these spontaneously designed hats sell out. And then within, I think, a day, time team team teen vogue publishes the scoop um you know obviously team vogue has long well they recently pivoted to politics and i think they're probably getting info from comal hq um by the time they publish their piece on this the campaign has sold a million dollars worth of hats um and you know it's clear to me i mean the kamala the pivot to kamala has been a boon for influencers there's actually a pretty good piece in the otherwise unreadable wired on this where they basically talk about how certain influencers

who post you know democrat political content their views have just skyrocketed since kamala's um was not got the nomination and uh so you have to kind of ask is this really an organic expression of like influencers are seeing these amazing you know memeable things in the the Kamala campaign and deciding to make viral posts. Or what I tend to think, obviously, there is kind of communication between the comms operators at the Kamala campaign and some of these influencers. And they're clearly, I think, designing these PR campaigns. I mean, how could they have come up with these hats that quickly i don't know um so i will say that it's fun to talk about this stuff i mean the coconut thing the brat thing it's it's definitely it's perfect for social media and so i understand

wanting to participate in the memes. I can see how that would be organic, but obviously it's not an organic political movement because there are no politics. How do you have a political movement that's not grounded in politics? What does it stand for? If you had to write, I would really love to actually read a piece from one of the mouthpieces of the state in, say, the New York Times op-ed section. In the way that there were endless anti-whatever think pieces about what Donald Trump represented politically, there were politics there that they were talking about, grappling with. What would you talk about here?

The fact that you can't should matter. That should at least be interesting. What does that mean? that you can't should matter. That should at least be interesting. What does that mean? When you have otherwise intelligent people like Paul Graham not interrogating that question because he hates Donald Trump to the degree that he does, to get you to a point where you say, well, look at the VP reading in front of kids. Isn't that great? You know who else was reading in front of famously, famously reading in front of other kids was george bush famously was out there talking to little kids when he learned about 9-11 and then kept reading to him uh or kept what reading to them right is that my

am i getting that meme right in my mind it's that so it was so long ago that that was the that was the chain of events like does that make george bush a good president does that mean that does that is, is that where we are right now? I mean, come on. I know that we're not, I know that we're not, um, Brandon Riley, what do you guys make of the goop? Yeah, I think it's, it's interesting. It isn't just the paid influencers who are like going to defend, uh, Kamala and, uh, Walt's like, you also have like washington post-commalist monica hess who delivered my favorite defense of notes yet which was in respect to one of his other pretty out there proposals the um uh proposal to put menstrual products in uh classrooms of ages like fourth through twelfth grade i think but also notably like the men's restrooms giving him the nickname that has since sprung up

tampon, Tim. Um, she says actually, uh, the people who are handing out period products when I was in high school, they, they were king of the, they were King stud. She says, which yeah. If you, if your defense is saying that like carrying around feminine hygiene products is Riz, like there's no there's no low that you won't stoop to defend the ticket i didn't understand this one because like when i was a 15 year old 16 year old boy i didn't no girl was talking to me about her periods ever that was not a conversation and i noticed there is this really weird sub-genre of feminist writing online where they're very obsessed with their periods and they want to talk about them and they want to,

it's like a, but it's even among, even among leftist feminist women, that's not standard. That's like a very niche position. And I think maybe they would be into this, this idea of like men walking around with tampons to hand out to their female friends. But even if that were the case, even if we were all doing it, what woman would ever ask a man in class? Not even a woman. We're talking about girls, 16, 17 year old girls, which one of them is going to ask a boy in class for a tampon? I mean, maybe I'm wrong here and they just, maybe I just am not, maybe I'm the sort of demeanor of a guy that is not a friendly, you know, I don't seem like the kind of guy who would

give you a tampon. I would if I had one, by the way, and I would not be weird about it, but that's, it seems like a weird thing to expect of a guy. And I certainly have never heard of that. What was that, Brandon? I mean, it's obviously weird. I just, I mean, just try it. I mean, any guy that would go out in the street right now in New York City and ask random women if they need tampons would be the creepiest thing in the world. Like, it's totally obvious that this is not real. I mean, I don't know. That's all I have to say about that.

It's just clearly not a real thing. You would be seen as a total creep if you're walking around asking women about if they need a feminine if they need a pad because i mean i think that you should back do you remember how much shit what was uh the one who destroyed bud what was her name again the she she destroyed by Light. Mulvaney. Dylan Mulvaney. One of the greatest controversies of Dylan Mulvaney's time

becoming a girl, that was her series, was like X days of being a girl or whatever, was when she said that she would carry around tampons in case a girl in the girl's room asked her for one. Now, Dylan Mulvaney, to her credit, I mean, Dylan Mulvaney doesn't look like i i might i understand that kind of that i understand i sort of understand that maybe you know and and it's also i mean it's weirdly about her it's weirdly her sort of wanting to

be one of the girls but that the performance of a girl right that's what's happening there right it's like girls carry tampons and they or share them with other girls i think isn't that i don't know i feel like i'm starting to feel uncomfortable talking about this should i should i give my female perspective yes i mean well first of all i have a lot of thoughts on on the tampon thing um well maybe i just have two thoughts on the tampon thing the first thought is like i don't actually see i mean ostensibly monica was making a very weird argument which is that this is somehow like the goal of this was to get boys to carry around pads and tamp like you know males to carry around pads and tampons and give them there are a lot of funny tweets about you know the situations

where people would give them to to women um which i guess 20 years ago would have been seen as really sexist because it'd be like hey you are you on the rag take a tampon and calm down um which is definitely how it's gonna happen in high school yeah exactly um but the policy was intended for, you know, trans kids, basically. And, you know, whatever, we can debate whether or not that category is real. But that was what it was intended for. boy, I guess, who's trying to use the men's bathroom, wouldn't you not want them to put pads and tampons in there? Because it kind of reminds all of the other boys who are in the bathroom, like, oh, there's biological females in here. And it's a reminder that you're not a biological male. We're making a classic sort of mistake here which is like trying to understand it rationally i think yeah we're breaking it apart and we're looking for a reason and there's no reason it's just vibes and so in a way it's perfect

all of it maybe waltz is the perfect guy for kamala like it's all vibes like why would you put a a tampon dispenser in the male's restroom, right? Like, that's vibes. That's not a rational decision. That's a vibes-based decision. That's like you are just like ingesting left-wing memes online and you feel a kind of way and you're like, fuck it. I'm the governor. I'm giving the boys tampons.

I'm doing it. I'm fucking doing it. And you can't stop me, which I don't know how Minnesota law works. I don't know. Is he responsible for that? Did he just unilaterally do Which I don't know how Minnesota law works. Is he responsible for that? Did he just unilaterally do it? Don't know. Don't care. It's not his policy because he doesn't have any new policies for the election. I want to pivot a little bit, not even a little bit. It's the same topic in this sort of, it's related to now it's venture. So the venture reaction to all of this, I did dip in briefly last night to the VCs for Kamala webinar, like a Zoom chat thing they did.

And where do I begin with this? My God. So it opens up with the creator and she was just you you could tell she was pleased with herself okay she was very happy to be there this is the first time that anyone has heard this woman's name and uh i mean she was just elated with what she had done the sort of bigness of this the historical nature of this i think she might have used the word historical. She is, she opens up with, she talks about how, so VCs for Kamala really quickly is the group, I think it was two weeks ago now, a week ago or so. It was a sort of an open letter that was published to the internet with a bunch of people, VCs, who were supporting Kamala, is the long and the short of it. You can discuss maybe why they were doing it, what the motivation

was. Was this a sort of, we got to get back to the sort of bullying the right-wing people days of the past, this sort of new MAGA VC thing in which a small handful, as we've reported, VCs are willing to talk about their views online, whatever. They sign this open letter, they raise some money, they get a lot of press because to the journalist's credit, the story of, you know, is the magnification of Silicon Valley is an interesting story. Is it true? Is it not?

You have all these people talking. I mean, I'm interested in it. What is the truth there? So this is now a part of it. We now have a webinar and she says she opens with, you know, she wants to thank everybody who signed that open letter, those first few people, because it really took courage. You know, it was, what was the exact, let's get the exact fucking phrasing. Let's just pull it up and be journalists about it, folks. That's what I am. I am a reporter for Pirate Wires coming at you, not live, but it took a lot of bravery

to sign this thing, she said, of the open letter supporting a Democrat for president in the technology industry. Okay. When is the last time that the technology industry hasn't voted for a Democrat for president? It's mind-blowing that she turned this into a victim narrative, okay? Like, I really don't know how it's possible.

Then you have, so that's her going off about whatever. She's just excited to be here, excited to be in the venture conversation at all because she wasn't previously. But then she did get some big guys. One in particular, Ron Conway pops up and he says, just very casually, like, I've known Kamala for many years. We don't need to do due diligence on this candidate. This candidate is absolutely qualified. Again, this is a woman who, first of all, just circumvented a primary, so has not even gotten a vote, should not be there. Okay. Definitely not qualified to be there

just in strictly democratic terms. But second, just in terms of separate from her experience running whatever, I mean, she was the VP. Maybe that gives her some experience as a senator. I frankly don't think any senators, I don't think that should count as executive experience. America disagrees on both sides of the aisle. I don't care. But in terms of what she's going to do, right? Again, and I keep coming back to it because it's fucking important. She has no policies on her website. So this is a group that has said, if Kamala is not elected president, the industry could vanish. The industry could cease to exist. Let's just say that she had some pro. I don't know. Maybe there was some reason you believe.

Maybe Trump has on his website. I'll have to go Google it in a second. Maybe he says, I have a delete Silicon Valley platform position. It would still be crazy, right? But what policy of hers are you drawing from other than the ongoing existence of Lena Cotton, who has tried at every turn to dismantle the tech industry, okay? Other than the very left wing of the party. So I just was looking at Paris Marx. Now, he's not a Democrat. He's in the Democratic Party, but he's not like a, he's not a Democratic operative or something, but he's talking about dismantling Silicon Valley openly on X.

Okay, that's what you get from the far left. And then honestly, you know, move on from there, VCs for Kamala. It turned into, there was one guy who did like a pitch deck. It was like a MAGA hat in the bottom and a coconut in the top right. And I was like, I got to get the fuck out of here. And just as I was trying to exit,

they started this panel of people. There was a woman who was, I don't want to make fun here because it seemed unstable, but she was crying over this, sobbing in tears about the hope that she felt with Kamala. That led into the people talking about, there was one woman who said, if Kamala is not elected president, there will be fewer female entrepreneurs in this country. And again, it's like, one,

I don't know why this is a weird thing to be talking about. I disagree with the premise there that women should be forced into starting companies if they don't want to. But more importantly too, what makes you say that about Kamala? Just citation needed. Show me what she has said. Show me what she said. Show me the bad policy even. Show me the bad DEI policy that is going to get you to that end point. What did she say? Where? What are the resources that she's planning to put this into? I'm not even sitting here saying it's wrong to do it. I just want you to prove to me that she said she's going to do it. So the whole thing was crazy.

They raised, I think, $180,000. I will just say, in my life as a billionaire media mogul, I have met a few billionaires. And I know one in particular is an investor who will pay more money than that to end an uncomfortable breakfast, okay? He will give that much money to someone to go away. And I don't think that was a lot of money. And we'll see what happens moving forward, how powerful they'll be.

But I would love your takes on this or anything we've been saying about the goop. I mean, have you guys followed the VCs for Kamala stuff at all? I've been following. I have a contrary take. Okay. I think they were absolutely brave to sign that letter for Kamala. I think it's like, it's super brave to like, know that somebody that supports an unrealized capital gain tax

under the Biden administration may be president. That seems like a really courageous thing to do, to be like, okay, she can be in office, right? Because that'll just build the startup ecosystem. Does she still support that though?

I mean, I would give you that. Well, so she was part of the administration that made that a pillar of their go forward economic strategy. She also had a big hand, I read, in the AI executive order, which imposes totally arbitrary limits on compute and essentially would establish a regulatory moat for all but the biggest AI companies in the space. The flip side of that, it would hurt startups, which VCs are, you know, obviously, that's a big deal for them. I actually, I was looking for, so I was confused about her positions on business too. And I thought, cause I was looking at some of those slides, Solana, that appeared online after the VC, VCs for Kamala's Zoom. Did the coconut slide make the rounds? Well, it's on Twitter. Yeah. There's, there's a few on Twitter. I experienced it live, but.

And I was like, okay, well they, they had, they must be referring to something. Cause one of their, one of the slides I saw was that like, there's three reasons you should vote for Kamala. because one of the slides I saw was that there's three reasons you should vote for Kamala. One is that she's more stable than Trump. The next is that she's normal, and that refers to the weird thing. And the third is that she would be good for startups. I said, okay, well, there must be some logic to this. And I asked Grok and GPT, and they could not give me an answer. I found one article in Forbes that was making the case for why Kamala was good for business. And it's almost hilarious how much of a stretch they need to make on some of these items.

This is a list. It's like six or seven things, reasons why is she good for business? You can, you can find it, Matt. One of the reasons is that because it's because she consistently participated in small business Saturdays by visiting one and encouraging consumers to shop small. So basically she went shopping on a weekend and made a PR, like made a, you know, a sort of a PR campaign about it. And the other ones that are listed is that she helped with the executive order about ai she played a critical role in passing the covid stimulus which i don't think is a reason right so there's there's really like nothing out there about

kamala's position except for potentially negative things? Like she's in the administration that wants to do the capital gains tax and wants to throttle AI and won't regulate crypto, which is completely throttling the startup scene in that sector. So, I mean, if you want to get, if you really want to be serious about startup policy, you have to be very brave to sign something supporting a candidate that you have to default is like assume that it's not good for business compared to Trump who has put out statements

and has a policy platform on his website saying that he's going to accelerate AI in the name of national defense. He's going to embrace Bitcoin and stuff like that. So yeah, it's sort of mystifying what the VCs are thinking. They have nothing to work with is the problem. And you're right. It's the negatives even that we're drawing from here. And I'm reluctant to do it. I mean, I think it's true that she believes in all the negative things that she said as a left wing when she was running in 2020. So when she was running in 2020, just for the nomination, before she was actively running

for the presidency somehow, when she was running for the nomination for the Dems, she said all sorts of crazy shit. And you could judge her for those crazy things that she said. And obviously, her administration that she was a part of, I don't know how much you can really blame to her since the Biden administration kept her locked in a closet for the last four years, and we just saw her when suddenly she was going to be our new president. So I don't know that you can really blame her for what Biden did. But yeah, maybe that's something that you could grasp onto. There's nothing in the positive, not even fake things. And that's her fault. I mean, people are dying to talk about

her fake policies, but they can't because she won't give them any. And so maybe that, you know, to bring it full circle, maybe that is what accounts for this cheerful gloop. Maybe that's where it's coming from. It's because there's nothing else. And you know what it really reminds me of to do another bizarre reference in this episode of them, I think, is do you remember when Chelsea Handler did that commercial for her life where she was talking about how happy she was? She was just talking about how happy she was to be single and childless. And I don't think it's... I'm not one of these like anti-cat woman people. I think that if you're single and childless at whatever age and you're happy, I think that's definitely a possible thing to be. I think that there are people out there who are happy without kids. I think it's very strange when you have to create a commercial for yourself,

telling the world how happy you are. When you're like, I'm so happy that I'm going to tell you how happy I am. And every few seconds, I'm really happy. I'm so happy. I'm doing drugs and this is her, not me. He's talking about this and I don't have kids and I'm happy guys. I'm really happy. Aren't I? Don't I look so happy? That's what I'm getting from the internet right now with the memes and the cheerfulness.

And like, I'm so Paul Graham. I'm so happy. Are you happy? Are you happy with Kamala running for president? Are you happy that you didn't get to decide? Are you happy that she has no pro-business policies that you could possibly believe in? Are you happy that she's the person that you're running against the guy that you think is a dictator? Are you happy? I'm not convinced that you're happy. I don't know. Are you guys convinced? Are you guys convinced that they're happy? It's cope.

The Chelsea Handler thing is such a blast from the past. And I just want to say like, she got so much shit for that video. But I think she really did deserve it because she was actually, her framing of it was like, she was goading people who had kids on and being like, I don't have to wake up and bring my kids to school and that kind of thing. But yeah, i do think i think it's cope basically from from the dnc left uh which again is not the entire left but that they have to they take anything i mean they literally they any

candidate the party decides for them they have to like feign this kind of sycophantic affection for um and then pretend to care about democracy i mean it's kind of a pathetic position to have to be in yeah i think the happiness mostly stems from the fact that their nominee is no longer brain dead like that'll make you pretty happy. I guess there is some reason. Yeah, you're right. To give them some credit, they were not happy. They were not happy a few weeks ago. So the happiness

is there, but it does feel so played up that, I don't know, it's like, it gives Chelsea Hamlet. I mean, the whole thing is really online and my hang up here is like, I don't know that they needed to go with an online forward, you know, sort of campaign strategy here

because those people would have voted for Kamala anyways. The brat stuff, everybody who thinks brat is awesome or whatever that meme is, like they would have voted for Kamala anyways. I'm more interested in what their electoral strategy is going to be with the actual people that they need to bring into their coalition. I think there's some of this with walls. I think his camo thing and his Carhartt thing.

I think this represents an evolution of the Democratic Party, where they notice that the intersectionality, the BLM, the anti-white stuff is just not working. And now they're basically allowing that white people who were turned off by the constant intersectionality stuff, they're letting them back into the party and they're making them a part of the conversation. And so, I think that is a good move in general, or it seems like a savvy move to me, but the brat stuff and the coconut stuff and the fan fiction, that's never going to get out of Twitter, I think. And I don't know how much that actually matters in terms of the outcome of the election in November. Well, we'll see.

I'm sure by next week, at the pace of information evolution, we will have a new vice president, a new vice presidential candidate at this rate. I'll tell you what does make me happy is this Wikipedia piece that we just published in Pirate Wires. Now it is my great pleasure, honor to introduce Ashley Rinsberg, who just wrote a great, great piece for us at Pirate Wires, How the Regime Captured Wikipedia. This is a piece that we've wanted to do for, we wanted something like this at Pirate Wires for a while. This is a topic that comes up just again and again and again,'s the question of Wikipedia, how it's edited, what is going on

over there, is there bias? Ashley has done a bunch of poking around over there and I think has probably a few stories in him when it comes to the topic of Wikipedia coming up. But as he started this one, he sort of started pulling the threads and entered a story that I think is just really, really fascinating, really important, absolutely blew up online. Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, retweeted it, said it was a must read. Elon giving it a shout out. I do think that we have here sort of like the canonical story of what happened to Wikipedia over the last five years. And I think it's just, yeah, a great important story. Ashley,

welcome to the show. Welcome to the PirateWire sort of extended universe. Take us through it. Take us through what you found. Yeah. I think the thing about Wikipedia, what we're seeing, people are talking about bias, and I think that's pretty established. David Rosado is a colleague of mine, did a study, computational analysis of Wikipedia bias and shows it's pretty clear cut if you look at it against politics and ideological expression. But always when it comes to these big institutions,

and that's what we really need to understand Wikipedia, and more importantly, Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia as their massive institutions and hugely important in everything we do today. It's not like any other NGO. So in that framework and in that context, trying to understand all this talk about money, you know, we started to kind of bubble up conversations about people not wanting to donate to Wikipedia because they have hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and revenue. revenue. And that kind of thing, I think it raises an alarm at some level, and we saw that happen online. So trying to understand the story, where this money came from, is what really led us down this rabbit hole of Wikimedia Foundation's alliance with a very, very high profile, progressive NGO, social justice NGO called Tides, Tides Center, which runs the Tides Foundation in addition to other funds. And they had sort of stitched themselves together around 2017, where we see this big shift at Wikipedia, definitely towards

something that is more ideological. I think in their eyes, it's about equity and it's about justice. But if we take that as something apart from Wikipedia's original founding mission and its current operating principles. So that's kind of in the big picture of what the story's about. We're happy to discuss more of the detail. I think, why don't we start just what... This comes up again and again and again, this concept of wikipedia's uh founding mission how would you describe that to someone just peeking in i would say for the first time wikipedia is something that we all use we don't think much about we know it's sort of community edited i don't think the average person knows much more beyond that so what was that mission what was uh the stew in which the sort of internet cultural stew in which wikipedia emerged and then from there i think we can talk a

little bit more about what happened yeah that's a great great question because wikipedia has this really fabled storied origin of you know a mission of open contribution to an encyclopedia that would one day contain all the world's knowledge or an effective dose of it. So the mission was about being open. It was about no one having control over the content, over the policies, that it would all be determined by the community who are adhering to this kind of structure that was built into early Wikipedia. And it's really quite amazing because by and large, it does function that way today. However, what we saw in 2016-17 with this pivot is that Wikimedia Foundation, the NGO that owns the site,

the one that basically holds all the assets and all of the money, started to set a direction, strategic direction for Wikipedia that is really divergent from that original mission. This is really about what they call knowledge equity, and that's about intervening. So Wikipedia has kind of always been this receptacle of knowledge. They don't create new information on the site. They use other sources to corroborate statements or facts that get onto the site. And it's never something that they're actively doing, except for editing Wikipedia itself. Can we talk about knowledge equity?

As I was reading through your piece for the first time was the phrase that jumped out at me. I'm always really interested to learn about new dystopian phrases. Break that one down for me. What is knowledge equity? And then maybe we just pause and talk about knowledge equity for a second because I have some thoughts. Well, I think for Wikipedia in that context,

they had a big problem that they recognized really early on which is that at some point it was up to 90 of the editors on english wikipedia were male and it's probably similar across other languages and even today that's like at best 80 20 are women and 80 are men and but you said they recognize they had a problem with that or they felt they had a problem? Internally. Okay. Yeah. So they started to address it around 2010, maybe even earlier. But really, this is about, if you're saying this is all the world's knowledge in this encyclopedia, but it's written mostly by men. And we've learned a lot about from the equity discourse about the value of our perspective, the gaze, whose gaze is it?

In that case, Wikipedia would be the male gaze in this reading, right? So that's a big problem. The male gaze of history, the male gaze as it relates to history. Yeah, history and everything else. And, you know, again. Okay, before we, I think, I guess I fail to, are we going to sit here? Maybe, are we going to be debating the merits of this? Or is it worth it? Are we on the same page?

Is anyone able to steel man this? Because I really, for me, the concept of this is already pretty offensive. For me, the concept of this is already pretty offensive. The idea that, I don't know, women and men, like you need some sort of like equal number of voices to do some sort of task. I think that it automatically invites some kind of sexism into the conversation, not just against men, which is the sort of obvious reading of the sexism, but against women, the idea that women are going to have some very specific gender-based reading on something like, I don't know, the reign of Louis, whoever the fuck in France or something, you know, what is it about having XX chromosomes? And I know it's a complicated discussion as per last week and our talk on the olympics what is it about that that is going to influence the way that you write on a post i sort of do i if i were to give them a little bit of credit here i kind of i would understand maybe

why it would be important to include women in a conversation on women's health or something like that at the policy level like yeah you should be speaking to women about this. I don't understand how this affects the global knowledge base or something. That's a really crazy concept to me. And it's a crazy concept that was really normalized really quickly that we never really had a chance to talk about as a culture. We never came to agreement on this concept that women are going to have a fundamentally different perspective on history than men. Even as I'm saying this, I'm realizing that I've internalized their language to a certain extent. I've internalized their arguments to a certain extent. I reflexively feel like, oh my God,

we do... I better be careful with this topic or something, but it's great. What they're saying is new, not crazy. Let's say it's definitely new. And, um, I don't know. What do you, Sajan, what do you make of this? Um, I mean, I find it condescending. I think it's, it's, you know, not to usurp your place, Ashley, but I think it's interesting to me it makes sense that most of the the Wikipedia editors would be male because it seems like a um a job I mean it's unpaid but this kind of you know somewhat nerdy community of people who are very uh interested in maybe nitpicking the facts of different niche historical events and definitions and that kind of thing. Not to say that there's not tons

of women who are interested in that, but it just kind of seems like an online milieu that would skew male. And yeah, I mean, I think a kind of top-down attempt to correct that. It just feels like, I don't know, some weird form of affirmative action for women, which I've always found a little bit condescending and unfortunate. Yeah. And it's kind of what led into this scandal that the piece kicks off with this scandal where an administrator was banned for a so-called harassment, but there was no evidence or examples of the harassment provided. It was just kind of a vague, Cuban dance. And the other editor that he was accused of harassing, of course, was a woman

who was in a romantic, who was married to one of the most senior people at Wikimedia Foundation, a woman named Maria Cefedaris. And this is the chair. We've had a lot, by the way, there's been a trend on PirateWire recently of sort of evil lesbian couples.

I don't know if that's rude to point out, but I think it's interesting. I think lesbians, I think evil lesbians are having a moment and I'm pure for it, frankly, as someone who loves a good story and loves like a different cast of villains. We haven't seen evil lesbians in a while.

Sorry, carry on. Yeah, no, I think, you know, I'm sure that they had good intentions and they have good intentions, villains we haven't seen evil lesbians in a while sorry to carry on yeah no i think you know i'm sure that they had good intentions they have good intentions but they always do there was a there was clearly a moment there at wikipedia um where things boiled over with this band because it just because it was handed down by the foundation and it didn't come from the community itself the community itself has mechanisms to do this kind of thing. They have an arbitration committee that would normally do it in every other situation. But in this case, and this is lining up with the timing

where they're kind of flipping over to the Tides Foundation, where things are becoming more top down, one of the very few isolated cases where the foundation itself hands down a ban and that set the community alight. And this is where we're seeing the divergence between the community and the foundation. Well, yeah, because the foundation is centralized, the community is decentralized. And if the centralized entity has control over the decentralized encyclopedia, then it's no longer decentralized. Clearly it has authority over what's being edited and how, and you have a lot of great details in the piece about that. There was one piece that, I mean, as I was reading it for the first time, I didn't quite

know where you were going to take this. And you and Brandon did a lot of, I think, great back and forth on this, by the way, I want to get Brandon his props as well. So I went into it with fresh eyes. It was a different thing when we first started. I didn't realize when you actually built to the Catherine Mayer, I think I knew that Catherine was at Wikimedia. I just forgot. It wasn't on my radar. Now, Catherine Mayer, you'll probably remember folks from NPR.

So she's the new... What is she? Does NPR have a CEO? What is their structure over there? She's the CEO. She's the CEO of NPR. So she's the new, what is she this? Does NPR have a CEO? What is their structure over there? She's the CEO. She's the CEO of NPR. It was a huge scandal when she was announced because all of these tweets of hers were on earth. They're of course, incredibly biased, incredibly. And when we say biased too, it's not just, oh, she's voting for Kamala Harris. Okay. Nobody cares about that. It's like, we're talking about extremely left wing, drank all of the Kool-Aid throughout 2020,

has gone down all of the patriarchy subreddits. And she is out there talking about things like, for example, knowledge equity. I had no idea that it seems to me based on your reporting that she really started the entire evolution of Wikipedia. It was her. Yeah, that was very much under her leadership. And I don't know that she's drinking the Kool-Aid so much as making it. But yeah, the New York Post did this story about her saying that Wikipedia, the open ethos was something she opposed because it was like a vestige of white male colonialism. That was what it was. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That there was something inherently male about the concept of openness. Yes, exactly. It leads to like domination by men, which is what

exactly what we just talking about at Wikipedia 80%. You know, the explanation could easily be that, like men just like doing it more than women, and women just don't like doing it as much. It's a different thing. It's a specific thing in the world. That's okay. But they take it as something that is product of and cause of injustice. You know, this stuff, this is really a long...

It was a long... The most virulent form of the kind of gendered everything discussion that we've been having really has been ongoing for since 2017, which I think is the beginning really of all of this stuff. Stuff that was brewing long before that. But 2017 is when it all came to a head. I think it's when you had these battles in boardrooms across the country. It's where the virulent new strain of leftism won, I would say, almost everywhere. I don't really know anywhere that it didn't succeed. I mean, obviously there were niche, like little, there might be some VC firms or some shops or whatever that weren't extremely woke.

But all of the huge companies, everything in academia, everything bureaucratic, every institution became hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper. The media. The media. Not just left wing, but left wing in this specific way when they've adapted a really radical frame for looking at the entire world. It's this radical oppression lens. It's when suddenly we need equity, not equality. So the hammering down of everybody to get to the same sort of place. But what it reminds me a little bit of, because I was just about to say, why do they never care about something like, for example, I play a lot of Magic the Gathering,

and there aren't many women who do. When you go to a draft or something, it's guys who are playing Magic. I don't even know that I've played with a woman. I'm sure there... I know there are women who play. You see at the conferences and things. I think I personally, when I go to a comic store to do a draft, I don't think I've played with a woman before. It's all just very, very nerdy men. and different kinds of nerds you've got like your you got like your gay nerds you've got like your gym like bro nerds um you have your classically presenting revenge of the nerds nerds they're all there but they're they're male they're different kinds of nerdy guys uh and then i remember gamer gate and i remember just video game the sort of

video game reckoning in general, gaming was super, super male dominated as well. And you would say, you would think like, who gives a fuck if mostly guys are playing these first person shooters or whatever it is, like who cares? People actually cared. There were a bunch of people who were like, we need to change this. We need more women playing video games. So I can't even say necessarily, because my impulse is to say, we only really care when it's a super high status thing, but it's not necessarily. There are these weirdly low status things that people care about. For example, video games. I mean, they still haven't come from Magic, but I guess it's only a matter of time.

They definitely came from D&D. Yeah, there was some of that, but what was the D&D controversy again? Wasn't that more about who was creating it than who was playing no it was like different races had slaves of other races and that wasn't okay and just i don't know different races were coded as black according to feminists or something and they had to erase that it was the nerds have the nerds are trapped in the longhouse man at this point i remember the first time i was in a bar i was in a gay bar in williamsburg in 2010 this is before so if 2017 is the high mark for all this

fucking craziness 20 i would say i don't think I really encountered it online. I encountered it early via Thought Catalog where Brandon was working in the comments section is when I first started hearing really crazy shit like, for example, the phrase systemic white supremacy, which now we all know what that means. At the time in 2011 when I first read that, it was like, what the hell are they talking about? Systemic white supremacy. White supremacy is the KKK. That's not America. That's a really, really, that's a crazy person's view of what's going on in America. But that was like 2011. So I would say 2010, before I even encountered that, I was in this bar and someone said Lord of the Rings was racist. And I was with my most

left-wing friend that I had, overwhelmingly, like sort of a crazy left-wing person, but she also is a nerd and she loves Lord of the Rings. And that was her, she said, no, not today. No, no, no, no, no. That's just, that's some crazy shit. We're not, we're not accepting that. And they got into it there. And then we talked about it later and we both like confirmed to each other, it's not racist, right? Like, how is Lord of the Rings racist? That's so strange. I don't see it. And now if someone says Lord of the Rings is racist, you might disagree, but you can't say that you don't know where they're coming from. You know exactly what they're referencing, the sort of strange new philosophy, political philosophy that they're

tapping into. And it's just funny how quickly culture has changed. Not only changed, but really seeped into these institutions, like you said. The Catherine Mayer piece of it all is just really wild. So she launches this initiative. It sort of moves forward through the institution. It takes out one of these editors. It affects, I think, the coverage, the Wikipedia, what is going on there to a certain extent. One standing question I have for you, Ashley, before I let you go is just, what is the relationship at this point between Wikimedia, the nonprofit entity that you were reporting on and Wikipedia, how much control do you think they have? How much control do you think they exert? And what is the danger for the platform moving forward? I think the danger, just answering backwards, reverse, is that Wikipedia becomes, you know, the most outside, farthest danger would be that it becomes a tool for this top-down, mass-level censorship we've been seeing arising over the last five years through COVID.

years through COVID that Wikipedia has used as a tool to sort of control narratives and silence people that stray from the official narrative. That would be the worst danger that this is heading towards that. Because so much of the language coming out of the movement strategy, the 2030 strategy is about knowledge equity, but it's also about the global information war that we're in. I mean, they know it. So that's how they see it. They see it as a war of information and they can be a positive force, but that positive force might mean that they get on what they believe is the right sign, which we've just been talking about that for the last half an hour. So I think that's the danger. What is the relationship right now? I think there's probably grumbling within the community that, you know, I would need to dive into that further, but the whole Fram thing, the ban on the mail editor, it's still

kind of, it's still kind of a rotting wound there. It didn't just go away. Like the, it was also weird. It was also strange. And Fram was still, and he is today one of the best editors on the site. So, you know, I think it's going to be more and more fraught. But with that kind of money that they're pulling in, I mean, we're talking about the endowment that was set up within the Tides Foundation. It's at around $120 million now, though, Brandon, I've also seen 140. NPR actually reported 140 by January this year. So that's a huge amount of money, separate from the foundation, Wikimedia Foundation's own holdings at something like $250 million. So at some point, when you're

dealing with a billion dollar, you know, projecting out a few years, we're going to, they're going to get to a billion dollars in assets. And that amount of money and that amount of power will crush a community. We know that. So that's my fear. And that's where I think this all gets very difficult. Do you have a sense of how, I mean, what is the clear and present danger, I guess? What is going on right now? I mean, the Graham thing was pretty bad. I think that they're charging up sort of, or they're tapping of people to sort of gather information top down was pretty bad how much of that is going on today or do is it still sort of open question i think it's

an open question i mean for sure what we know they're doing is that they're funneling money into other ngos smaller ngos so they're kind of becoming a pass-through or a grant maker and funding a lot of these very, some of them radical, some of them extreme left, some of them, you know, progressive NGOs that are out there doing actual activism on the ground. And some of those are feeding into other smaller NGOs. There's this crazy, like this whole food chain, but they're passing through a lot, a lot of money to activism. And, you know, my guess, and this is what I think remains to be investigated is that there is still some kind of pressure mechanism. Um, there's the way funds are used on the site. There's decision-making about policy that has to be done. So there's always going to be some

influence. I think the question is just how much it is right now. Awesome. Well, great job on the piece. I encourage everyone to check it out on PirateWires. It's up there right now. And thank you for joining us. Thank you guys. All right. Let's see if I can set this one up for you guys. So there are a lot of, we don't like to cover, we try not to cover Europe too much, but it's the summer and there's a lot going on in Europe for Americans right now. And I have kind of this, it's, I'm giving, it just like living in her idyllic universe, the sort of fake Disney World version of what France is. And I realized today, as I was reading the headlines about the Taylor Swift concert that was canceled because of Islamic terrorism, that perhaps there's a disconnect between the american expectations of europe

and the reality uh one other version of this now i'm not here to trash france you know that pirate wires has a weird thing for paris and france um it is now canon it's just unfortunate we're maybe going to be a little bit contrarian about this we're big france defenders here or at least i am and i know sanjana is uh brandon riley not about this we're big france defenders here or at least i am and i know sanjana is uh brandon riley not sure you guys land on france i'm rooting for them personally but the fact that their politicians forced the olympics to make swimmers at the peak of their health swim through is it it's the river sen right yeah am i pronouncing that right sanjana yeah swim through the sen and one of them got a coli his fucking bananas so that's it's not it's e coli but she was hospitalized there's

several swimmers several several triathlon swimmers who are forced to swim in the sen which has you know historically been a cesspit like an actual cesspit of just sewage um have been hospitalized with bacterial infections do you want to break down so i want to um let's just talk about the react we have it's like it's a it's a summer in europe uh possibly a thing for you depending on uh i don't know whatever your circumstances are certainly it's in the culture um i want to start with with the olympics and then i want to move into islamic terrorism so um beginning with the olympics sanjana uh do you want to start with the Olympics and then I want to move into Islamic terrorism. So beginning with the Olympics, Sanjana, do you want to just like, I mean, how much do you know about the river? It seems weird. Like, it seems like there's some weird other thing going on there that has nothing to do with the Olympics. What is that? ongoing kind of controversy with the Paris Olympics. The Paris Olympics, for those who have been following, has been a kind of logistical shit show from the offensive,

bizarre opening ceremony to now. But one of the kind of hallmark programs for Paris politicians who were hosting the Olympics was that they were going to clean the Seine because they really wanted triathlon athletes to swim in the River Seine. Bizarre. I mean, you know, London hosted in 2012. No one swam in the Thames, which is just like polluted as well. They swam in a little river, like in a random suburb of London. But for some reason, Paris was fixated on swimmers swimming in the thames sorry in the sen and um so they poured a remarkable amount of money in this like hundreds of millions of euros at the least in this cleaning campaign um where they said they were gonna disinfect the sen and um as part of this at the end the the mayor of paris um sw the Seine and sort of, you know, had a big photo op where she said, you know, it's clean.

And she talked about, you know, how how lovely it was. This was then followed by like angry Parisians threatening to defecate in the Seine. Why did they want to why did they want to why were they mad about this? They were mad. I think it was part of a larger Olympic protest because basically they shut down just tons of streets in Paris and people's movement was restricted. And I think my sense from talking to Parisians is that most of them didn't really want

the Olympics to be in the city. They don't care about it. And it actually hasn't been as much of a boon for some of their industry as you would have thought. So they were protesting the Olympics and they're like, hey, we're going to shit in the sand. And like this is going to undo, you know, the hundreds of millions of euro investment that our politicians have poured into cleaning it. I don't think they ended up doing it. But, you know, now all of these athletes.

It sounds like someone did. it sounds like someone did it sounds like someone did yeah sorry what were you saying brandon i i like i'm interested in like water municipal sanitation now in a way like i remember i was living in seattle a long time ago they literally drained a reservoir because some dumb 14 year old like pissed in it this is like a huge reservoir and it was like what is like presumably like birds fly over it and shit in it you know like what is the what's the level of shit that needs to be in a body of water before it's gonna get you probably a lot it was a lot of but france has a lot of angry people so millions of frenchmen just that's like a super french thing just like their response to the opening ceremony which was basically like it is what it is people are mad they're like oh well it's like well if

you're trying to reveal your cultural heritage to the world i think they did a great job of it sorry sanja i'm cutting you off no i was gonna say i mean it is it's a it's actually a very complicated technical question because they have these specific, like how much, you know, E. coli you're allowed to have for the water to be safe to swim in. Um, but I mean, it's just, they, they ran out of protein in the dining halls at one point because they're trying to do this, like eco-friendly dining, um, sort of-focused dining for these Olympians who obviously have huge, you know, protein and carb needs. Can you imagine? That's like giving your cat a vegetarian diet. That's the level of discourse that we're on, where it's just like this self-evidently

retarded thing to even suggest. And I cannot believe that. The other thing was no air conditioning, I believe was was another controversy yeah i think it broke or something like that um oh i thought it was just anti and they were like you know we don't do that in europe that's an american thing i'm just making that i'm that's me projecting my own prejudices there were things like i mean they made um they made track athletes like walk an hour to get to their race at one point because they had they like changed the policy halfway I mean this is like Olympic lore for people who care but Sha'Carri Richardson an American track star had to walk she like missed her warm-up

and ended up not doing as well in her races as she probably could have because they like switched up the logistics on her last minute. There have been tons of instances like this in the past few days. So not the best look for the Olympic organizers. Well, no matter how bad it was for them, it was a little bit better than Vienna where a massive Taylor Swift concert canceled because as the New York Times,

you really got to, as the New York Times, New York Times, you really got to, with the New York Times, it's always a journey between the headline and then the facts revealed six paragraphs down. Okay. And the New York Times headline is, I think something along the lines of like teenagers implicated in bombing or something.

Just two teens. Let me actually get the exact one for you. Two teenagers planned attacks on Taylor Swift's Vienna concerts, authorities say. New York Times, many paragraphs down. The main suspect is a 19-year-old man, 19-year-old man, who was radicalized online and swore an oath of allegiance to the islamic state uh franz roof okay so when i hear two teenagers planned an attack okay two teenagers planned attack i'm imagining like i don't know, like dumb teens being wild and crazy. Maybe some eggs, like a flower, sack of flour falls down from the rafters and Taylor Swift gets messy. No, no, no. We're

talking about a 19-year-old ISIS fighter is what we're talking about. We're talking about Islamic militants is what we're talking about. And that's Europe. Now, the question, the open question, I believe, is what is scarier, an ISIS militant at a Taylor Swift concert or 10,000 furious Taylor Swift fans? And that's the question for you guys today. What do you think? Which way does this one go? I mean, just in my personal life, I'm more scared of the Taylor Swift army. Like they are aggressive online and I don't really see like ISIS people talking online. I guess they probably all get like censored, I assume but the taylor swift army is vicious and well there probably aren't a lot of them also yet in america that's the thing that i would like to also keep that way i don't know how we do that but i would like go ahead european teens love to join isis like they this is a european phenomenon i mean it's it's not false. There's a stat somewhere that, like, more, this is, like, not PC at all,

but more British Muslims joined ISIS and one of the other kind of terrorist groups than the British Army. You've got, like, scores of French, Belgium, British, whatever, teens who rushed off to syria back at isis's heyday are these teens and like and muslim are these muslim teens and muslim families most are but not all because famously didn't you have that um you had those the girls remember the the girls who went over there and then they were like oh shit we were just forced married to a bunch of terrorists oops and everyone's like you fucked around and found out you're not coming home but i think they got home i did they get home i don't know well there's one very high profile case of this girl shamina begum who she's she's of bengali she's like bengali

muslim who grew up in in london and she famously joined isis famously gave an interview in like a full niqab in syria being like yeah i'm glad i joined isis and then she like three years later after isis sort of got lost power she was located in a refugee camp in syria and was like i want to come back to Britain. And there's been this kind of ongoing battle in the courts, but they just denied her last appeal. So she's- Oh, they denied her. So she's stuck over there. So she's, they removed her British citizenship. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess when you swear allegiance against your country and join a terrorist organization, there probably should be some kind of consequence, but I'm not British.

So I'm going to leave that one up to them. I will say that this is like a way less glamorous version of American radicals in the 60s and 70s who were getting brainwashed. They would say brainwashed, Patty Hearst famously, into these like crazy domestic terrorist Marxist organizations,

which I'm not into domestic terrorism. One, I'm not into Marxism too. I'm not into hippies, number three. However, somehow the combination of them, especially on movies, is like, it's sort of like a Bonnie and Clyde thing for me, where I'm like, you definitely need to be put in jail or something, but it's like smoking also, like there's like a sexiness to it. And I will say that the full, is it the niqab wearing? Yeah. It's not as sexy. It's not giving Hollywood glamor for me.

And I'm very aesthetic, aesthetically motivated. So I'm against the Islamic terrorist Europeans. But Brandon, I know that you disagree on this. Why would I disagree with that? I'm totally with you on that. Yeah, man, you're a, well, vacation's over kids. It's time to come back to America

and let's make sure that we never have the crazy ass, I don't know what they're dealing with over there. I mean, we're always going to have an idiot who wants us to swim in a polluted river. And I think there's no getting around that in America. But I do think that we can live in a world where joining terrorist organizations,

like Islamic sort of fascist organizations is not sexy and cool. And I think we just got to do, we got to meme our way there. We got to give the kids something else to be excited about. We'll save that for another day. Folks, it's been real.

See you on the internet. Goodbye.