00:00:37.220Well, look, I mean, like, if that comes up organically, we also think we are really thrilled that you're joining us and that you would grace this little award show with your star wattage and charisma, you know, for the third year in a row.
00:00:49.860So, like, we want to be very mindful of your time.0.96
00:00:51.880I'm taking time out of my busy reading terrible bullshit schedule to read some terrible bullshit with you guys.0.95
00:00:57.960Well, I also heard that we took you away from a bouldering wall.0.99
00:02:01.600Because this is our tradition, but perhaps not every listener has come with us.
00:02:06.600This is our annual rundown of, as you may have heard, the most cursed discourses around sex and gender of the year.
00:02:15.340We award these very special awards to several different themes every year.0.93
00:02:21.440Michael has joined us for all of these.
00:02:23.600Yes, and it's very scientific. It's not something we just put together in the last hour and 45 minutes. It's something that's, like, super deliberate. We think about it all year long.
00:02:30.860Like an Atlantic cover story, this has been deeply researched.
00:02:36.820Yeah, I think you're right that, like, we do this now once a week, right? We are a prolific podcast. Like, there's a lot, but we had to sort of dig a little deeper this year. We were like, all right, let's expand our horizons.
00:02:50.260Also, it's weird because I feel like bad gender discourse has now just infected literally everything else.
00:03:08.120So what we decided to do, given this problem, we were like, well, you know, they have the big Academy Awards.
00:03:12.860Then they have the ones that they sort of like rattle off like right before the commercial break.
00:03:17.120Or like they have the daytime Emmys and whatever.
00:03:19.080Like, the ones that you kind of give out to, like, people that you don't really care about.0.98
00:03:23.260But why don't we do the daytime kirsties or the technical kirsties or whatever, and we were going to focus it on achievements in anti-wokeness.0.97
00:03:31.100Because I think it was a banner year for anti-wokeness.0.95
00:03:47.720But they got around to talking about it's dead, or it's back, or it's not dead, or it has changed, or it's now right-wing rather than left-wing.
00:03:58.760And so, in the spirit of clowning on those who have already plentifully beclowned themselves, here we present for your listening pleasure the third annual Daytime Cursedies.0.98
00:04:08.500We're only going to get through like one-tenth of the shit that we identified, right?0.98
00:04:28.120Because it was, as we said, a banner year for it.1.00
00:04:30.760And we feel like celebrating our special friends before they, you know, take over CBS, CNN, or, I don't know, fucking cigar aficionado for all I know.0.96
00:05:14.080And that's the thing with Atlantic cover stories or Atlantic stories.
00:05:16.900Like you clown about it for like six hours and then something else happens in your life and you forget it ever happened.
00:05:22.560You're like, why is that guys are complaining about pronouns for the 33rd time this year?
00:05:26.380In fairness, that's how long it takes them to write these also.
00:05:29.020I think part of what has become really fascinating to me about these discourse cycles, the anti-woke discourse cycle or the cursed gender discourse cycle is that it is so iterative.
00:05:39.740It's so often the same thing in like a slightly new package.
00:05:43.800Like often some of the same actors, basically always the same complaints, right?
00:05:47.980So one of the things I think we – I hope we get a chance to do is like tease out some of the recurring themes and be like this was really distinguished in pronoun panic or this is a quintessential example of a campus moral panic, you know, and just try to like figure out what it is that makes these stories tick a little bit and why I think that they are starting to have for their peddlers a little bit of a diminishing return.
00:06:12.160Yeah. It's also our brains are so broken that whenever you see these, you can only put them in categories because you've seen so many. It's like your plumber comes over and he's like, oh, that's this kind of problem because they've seen everything so many times.
00:06:22.260Here's your problem right here. That anecdote isn't even true and you've got two of them.
00:06:28.580I apologize for the ethnic accent. Mark, you gotta edit that out. I'm going to get canceled.
00:06:33.940You're insulting Mario and Luigi already. We've just barely made it into the seven minute mark.
00:06:39.900Yeah, never get the German guy to do an Italian accent.0.73
00:06:44.700But the other reason I think we're focusing on anti-wokeness is because part of the experience of 2025, of course, was that for years, people like Michael Hobbes have been pointing out when places like the Atlantic have shot out these gigantic pieces.
00:06:59.380Don't we have bigger fish to fry with an incipient fascist movement in this country?
00:07:03.640Well, now the incipient fascist movement is here and doing a whole lot of stuff, which makes these kind of even funnier because you kind of sense that these people are reckoning with that or understanding it to some extent.0.97
00:07:14.980But because they're all, frankly, dum-dums and absolute wusses, they're not, with very few exceptions, genuinely reckoning with this, but try to like pull their old bullshit because it's the only trick they know how to perform in a moment that couldn't be historically less suited for it.0.97
00:07:32.820Totally. And also, I think that also explains the woke right thing, where they have to think like, oh, I didn't waste the last four years of my life complaining about these excesses of wokeness. Actually, the right learned it from the left. And it's actually all this stuff that was going on on the left, the totalitarianism on the left, has now fed into the totalitarianism on the right, which doesn't hold up to any empirical scrutiny whatsoever.0.99
00:07:52.020But it's like, they fill a psychological need for people.0.99
00:11:05.560But they have to write up against the fact that, like, and I don't have to love every part of this, but, like, it's very manifestly not going broke.
00:11:22.940And this has to like cut across both of those intuitive associations. Right.
00:11:28.060Like on the one hand, you're saying that like fancy people are ruining this game that has exploded in popularity and become very widespread. Right.
00:11:36.820So, like, it's only so popular because the elite have taken it over is kind of a contradiction in terms.
00:11:43.260But then the other complaint is, like, wokeness as coded as young is about, like, oh, these young people have ruined my children's game.
00:11:52.220And it's like, well, I think it might be kind of more for them anyway.0.62
00:12:24.520Like, if you know anything about D&D, you know that it's pretty hard for anyone to invade your realm, right?
00:12:29.640Like in the end, like you buy a book, you buy some dyes, you sit down around your dining room table and you play it, as you say, exactly the way you want.
00:12:38.420If you don't like something in the module as it's written, you change it, right?
00:12:42.000I did that in the 80s and 90s with stuff that was super homophobic.
00:12:45.560And now if you are super homophobic, you get to do it with stuff that's less homophobic.
00:12:49.600If you really need that homophobia in order to really have this campaign land or whatever.
00:12:54.720This reminds me of like Tradcast and the Latin Mass.
00:12:57.180They're like, how dare you take the anti-Semitic stuff out of the mass, Vatican II?
00:13:02.680And it's like, well, you can always put it back in if you really want to.
00:13:06.100The Stranger Things generation is ruining Vatican mass.
00:13:10.760Yeah, I mean, so it's just the chef's kiss of like kind of bad faith framing, I would say, right?
00:13:15.760Like any person who's been playing different editions of the game will tell you that like it was far woker like 10 years ago, like depending on what we mean by that.
00:13:23.980There's also this kind of bizarre generational conflict being constructed here.0.94
00:13:27.180Given the fact that Stranger Things, I don't know if you've seen the new season yet, but that shit's 10 years old.0.98
00:13:41.420The people who got inspired by the first season of Stranger Things are out of college probably by now.
00:13:48.100If it hit for them at 14, 15 or whatever.
00:13:52.040And this whole funny juxtaposition between long-term fans and a new generation is really telling.
00:13:58.320The whole framing is clearly meant to invoke sort of a Gamergate logic of the real fans versus Johnny-come-latelys, basically.
00:14:06.820And A, it doesn't really matter as much in the TTRPG space as it does in video games,
00:14:13.520where presumably you might all hang out on the same Discord server or whatever.
00:14:16.840But also, just in case I need to keep digging on that hole of nerdiness I started with, I have been to Gen Con, the large D&D convention that happens annually several times.1.00
00:14:27.920And I'm telling you, I've been over the space of a decade and like, it's a pretty gay ass and pretty genderqueer place, right?0.98
00:14:34.060Like, science fiction fandom, fantasy fandom tends to be pretty queer.0.96
00:14:37.920And this game where you get to pretend to be someone else, like, bingo, like, it tends to be enjoyed by, you know, by people who don't see themselves fitting into sort of the dominant modes of our society.0.70
00:14:52.440This is outcasts are sort of the top demographic for this game, I think, since 1975 or whatever.
00:15:00.220Yeah, they're pissed off that, like, weirdos are finally into D&D.0.51
00:15:03.460It's like significantly less weird than it's ever been.
00:15:05.660Yeah, and so this thing has been blowing around YouTube for a long time, which is probably where this Telegraph writer got it from.
00:15:13.260But the evidence, this is something I know, Michael, you posted about on Blue Sky, that the evidence in the article is just something that, even if you don't care about D&D, has to be seen to be believed.
00:15:23.620Yeah, because we both know how thin these articles always are.
00:15:27.500So whenever you see a headline, you're like, I want to see the evidence.
00:15:30.080Because isn't the premise of the piece, it's kind of like old D&D people are like sick of all the wokeness.
00:15:35.660It's trying to be, it's pretending to be descriptive, and you're like, okay, what is your example of, like, a classic D&D person who's, like, mad about the wokeness?
00:16:33.140Like, it used to be, like, orcs were the bad guys, and then there's this reclamation of, like, well, maybe they're more three-dimensional than that.
00:16:38.260But then this person was saying that the problem with that is that then you have all these, like, characters and classes and stuff that aren't that different from each other anymore.
00:17:24.540And there are definite complaints, and I think there's something to them,
00:17:28.100That has led to sort of top-down decisions from a toy manufacturer that maybe doesn't take the way people actually play this game into account.
00:17:39.400Because things did get kind of fucked up for D&D in 2025, but had nothing to do with this.
00:18:15.140Now, this tweet is from 2024, right?0.99
00:18:17.960The story was ostensibly tagged to the new edition of D&D coming out,
00:18:22.600which Elon Musk could not have read at the time,
00:18:24.800Even though I guess maybe he read it in exactly the same way that like he also has played every video game in the sense that he paid for someone to do it and then lied about it.
00:22:35.760It seems like it's just a fancier way of saying people on Twitter were mad about this image in 2024.
00:22:42.060Exactly. Right. Like the idea that like people sort of do kind of romantic-y stuff with this game, that's of course something that like, you know, like true war game heads probably don't like.
00:22:51.860But that's been going on since the 80s, right?
00:23:23.740Well, and I mean, like, the other thing is, like, it's a nerdy hobby, but it's also really appeals to theater kids, another group that famously loves a good orgy.0.98
00:23:34.280I went to LARPing once with a friend of mine who's really into it, and I was like, this is great, glad for you, but these are not my people.
00:23:42.640And this is, like, where to me, like, the historian alarm bells go off.
00:23:46.620For instance, the article says, like, there's also been a heated debate around new adventure books such as Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, which draws on the storytelling traditions of non-Western cultures and includes a helpful pronunciation guide.
00:23:58.020And, like, this is where I, as a 45-year-old nerd, go, like, point of order, I have books from the late 80s that had pronunciation guides.
00:24:07.080Like, AD&D in the 1980s had settings that were kind of based on the 1001 Nights, on the Arabian Nights, right?
00:24:16.480There was one that was kind of based on ancient Japan, blah, blah, blah.
00:24:20.840And, of course, they had pronunciation guides, and they had little very 80s kind of, like, notes about cultural sensitivity, right?
00:24:41.220But that being said, it's all fully available.
00:24:43.240And when you read through it, you get the idea that, like, yeah, this is, of course, a community that is interested in different cultures and in different fantasy worlds.
00:24:50.640And the idea that it's all just, like, knights in shining armor and, like, return with a hard V kind of medievalism.
00:24:58.980It's just, like, that's probably what that guy who wrote the article thought.
00:25:02.260But, like, that's not, in fact, true of the game at all.
00:25:05.120And also, all they're mad about, really, is the availability of these guidance documents that you can feel free to just ignore them and mispronounce the words.
00:25:11.880Like, again, there's no, like, Dungeons and Dragons, like, lifeguard who's stopping you from doing what you want to do.
00:25:17.680You can just pronounce it however you want to pronounce it.
00:25:20.060And then the final exhibit in the article, I think it's the one where the real rub is, like, why this guy cared and why it's in the Telegraph.
00:25:29.740Quote, hand in hand with these changes, D&D has dropped the term racist in the context of the elves, dwarves, and other creatures that gamers can play as.
00:25:38.640I think that's what it's about, that they're just like, oh, no, you got rid of the word race.
00:25:43.320But what do they call them now? Categories or something?
00:25:45.800I'm not even sure what the new edition calls them.
00:25:48.340I think lineages is a pretty common thing.
00:25:50.860Like, yeah, they've just replaced it and they're like, we don't love that word and why would we do this?
00:25:56.540I can't believe this boils down to a vocabulary complaint.0.99
00:25:59.140Adrian, the first time this ever happened, they're just complaining about a fucking word they don't like.0.98
00:28:32.380Complaining about woke becomes this way of cutting across the actual ways in which our world is changing.
00:28:37.680And to kind of create this fan fiction about it, right?
00:28:41.040Where, like, everything means something else.
00:28:42.960It's almost like the way, like, QAnon can be like, well, if you look at the hand position, if you look at, like, that word he's using, right?
00:28:48.520Like, it's just this way to, like, not have the conversation that every normal person is having, but get to have your own private, like, twin language conversation with, like, the other, like, woke speakers in your life.
00:28:58.940But this has always been the thing that we've complained about, about the wokeness panic, is that there's also an opportunity cost, that because you're complaining about wokeness all the time, you can't have an adult conversation about things like, like, social media, the fact that we've given so much of our lives over to social media algorithms is, like, a genuine problem.
00:29:14.520but it was all categorized under this like wokeness like they're taking the hunter biden laptop story
00:29:18.960offline and like that that's maybe a subset of the issue but there is a real issue here but it all0.97
00:29:24.300gets subsumed under this dumb fucking topic of wokeness that then ends up like they're bunking0.96
00:29:29.760it and we're debunking it we're having this like binary conversation about whether or not it's like0.98
00:29:33.000a wokeness thing when like there's an actual shift like a really major shift happening i mean they
00:29:37.260even reference this thread on the dnd subreddit which i generally like i spent a while scrolling
00:29:42.560through it. It was, like, thoughtful. I didn't agree with everything, but it was, like, adults
00:29:45.540having an adult conversation about the shifts going on kind of ideologically within Dungeons
00:29:49.400and Dragons. It's like, yeah, this is actually super interesting. Yeah. And you could write
00:29:52.780something interesting about that. Yeah. But it's, like, they don't try. They're just, like, okay,
00:29:56.660what are the three pieces of ammunition I need to make this, like, a news article?0.97
00:30:00.140It reminds me of that, like, you want to, like, make a, like, a dumb bastardized version of that0.93
00:30:04.600very nice Toni Morrison quote. It's, like, the very serious function of racism is to distract0.96
00:30:10.260you from doing your work yeah and it's like the very serious function of anti-woke discourses
00:30:16.240is to distract you from having a substantive conversation about the underlying reality
00:30:20.600from all the horny larping you could be doing that's right well who wants to go next moira go
00:30:26.180go okay all right i'm gonna draw you guys's attention to something that i saw and i wanted to
00:30:32.660bring it up it's new but it felt to me almost like from out of time it felt to me like something
00:30:39.720that would have gone viral like two or three years ago.
00:30:42.700And that is an article that was published in The Atlantic,
00:30:45.120I believe on December 2nd, called Accommodation Nation.
00:30:50.680America's colleges have an extra time on test problem.
00:33:08.760Like, this doesn't actually cite any evidence saying that what it claims is happening, that, like, all of these kids are taking extra time on tests that they don't really need.
00:33:17.160There's no evidence that that's happening at all, right?
00:33:19.320What it does is it cites a few statistics about the rate of student eligibility for extra time accommodations.
00:33:25.200Like, basically, like, students who have some sort of, like, time-related or attention or mental health-related diagnosis at really just a handful of hyper-elite institutions.
00:33:47.700I mean, I guess you could say that that's an elite school problem, maybe.
00:33:52.180But again, it does not have evidence of its central claim.
00:33:54.780How many people are getting these accommodations?
00:33:56.800It just has how many people are eligible for the accommodations.
00:33:59.900That's a completely different phenomenon.
00:34:02.080It's only how many people can take them, not how many students are taking them.
00:34:06.260Rose Horowitz tries to imply that what is happening here is that rich kids are taking on this cynical tone.
00:34:17.100And she quotes like some anonymous instructors, really one anonymous instructor who clearly kind of just hates his students being like, you hear students with disability, you think of a kid in a wheelchair.
00:34:36.280Like, thank you, anonymous adjunct who hates life and himself.
00:34:39.920But this is like something that she says and does provide other statistics saying that, you know, OK, the rate of this diagnosis is less high at less elite institutions.
00:34:51.460And her thesis for why that might be her sort of like causal venture is that rich kids are like evil and cynical and weak and manipulative.
00:35:02.040Right. And not what seems a little more likely to me, which is that rich kids are being screened for mental health problems, you halfwit.0.99
00:35:10.100And like they are the ones being diagnosed with ADHD because they're the ones whose parents are sending them to a fucking psychiatrist.0.97
00:35:17.780Also, after I posted that on Blue Sky, a lot of people, I mean, this is also anecdotal, but people posted saying like it cost us fifteen hundred dollars to get our daughter diagnosed and to get her accommodations at school.0.80
00:35:27.560It's not like, oh, yeah, my daughter's, like, worried sometimes, and they're like, you get double the time on the test.
00:35:32.620It's like a formal process that you have to go through to get these designations.
00:35:36.560And from what I've heard anyway, it's, like, not easy.
00:35:39.580And so, again, this is, like, something a responsible journalist would look into, like, is this being given out too easily?
00:35:45.560And there's nothing in here but the process.
00:35:47.720So in a little bit of a defense of this writer, the adjunct that she quotes, like, you could talk to a lot of people.
00:35:53.640This is something you hear very frequently.
00:35:55.020I, myself, I share exactly your skepticism over the, oh, those kids are too coddled or whatever narrative.
00:36:01.120That being said, you can go into any college campus and find especially older instructors talking like this.
00:36:06.360So this perception does exist, and it does exist especially at elite colleges.
00:36:10.640What I find really interesting about it is it seems to come from a very naive understanding of what exactly college work looks like, right?
00:36:19.400Where it's like, what do we think these kids do where, like, an extra half an hour would matter all that much, right?
00:36:28.100If you're doing a final exam, which is the classic place where this happens, right, like, it's drawing on between 10 to 14 weeks of instruction.0.97
00:36:36.380Do we really think that the 20 minutes are such a huge unfair advantage if you, I don't know, haven't done the fucking reading?0.96
00:36:42.680Like, no, like, whether or not you've done the fucking reading is going to be pretty dispositive, frankly.0.95
00:36:47.020And the other thing, of course, is that like she does sort of these kind of interesting comparison things where I think Maura is exactly right.0.97
00:36:52.760Like it does seem that kids with more resources are getting more readily diagnosed.
00:36:57.400There's two different ways of reading that data.
00:36:59.480But the other thing is, of course, it's sort of saying like these kids have a leg up against kids from other universities.
00:37:04.600Like, well, no, because this is all internal, right?
00:37:07.220If all this were true, it would mean that some kids at Harvard score above where they should be compared to other kids at Harvard due to these diagnoses.
00:37:14.600diagnoses. And it's like, well, it doesn't actually mean anything, right? Like the same
00:37:18.120thing about grade inflation. It's like, well, yeah, if you inflate grades like crazy, an A from
00:37:22.400Harvard is not going to mean that much anymore, right? And it turns out, like, our employers aren't
00:37:26.940the college board. They aren't, you know, our employers are like, did you take this class? Not
00:37:31.880like, did you get an A plus or an A, right? Like, maybe in law school, maybe in some professional,
00:37:37.720pre-professional programs, this might still work. But in the end, like, Google wants to know, did
00:37:42.440you complete CS106A at Stanford? Not like, how did you do? How did the others do? Did you get
00:37:48.060an accommodation, et cetera, et cetera? They're just like, oh yeah, he knows what he needs to
00:37:51.100know to be a programmer for us and we will now exploit him for a couple of years, right? Like,
00:37:54.700that's all they want. So it's like, yes, you're going to hear this complaint at a lot of colleges,
00:37:59.540but it has an understanding of merit and accomplishment that is actually very much
00:38:04.400divorced from the logic of how these places actually internally operate.
00:38:07.620Right. And also, I think on the perceptions thing, I mean, it's just an objective fact
00:38:11.680that, like, there's many more of these accommodations
00:38:13.380than there would have been if you were a teacher 40 years ago.
00:38:16.440That's not really, like, the sort of empirics of that
00:38:25.580There's probably just more you have to do
00:38:26.760on the accommodations of students that, like,
00:38:28.780I don't know, it seems fine that people would notice that.
00:38:30.960But the thesis of the article and of this whole panic
00:38:33.780is that people are faking their status to get accommodations
00:38:37.740and that they are being overly generously given out.
00:38:41.060And there's just no evidence of that whatsoever. You could easily argue that they were under given out 40 years ago when they essentially didn't exist at all. And so we're now in a world where like, yeah, some people are getting accommodations, but I'm sorry, until we have evidence that people with like anxiety and ADHD and whatever else are getting accommodations unjustly, I'm just not going to be mad.
00:39:01.100I'm going to be happy that people are able to kind of go through the process and get the help that they need until we have real evidence that this is a problem.
00:39:08.100I'm just going to assume that it's like, that's great.
00:39:09.920If you need two hours on the test and everybody else gets an hour, awesome.
00:39:14.080Yeah, there's something here where it, like, presumes that the increase in diagnoses among this cohort is due to cynicism.
00:39:19.840Yeah. And not due to like increased awareness of mental health conditions or like lobbying by people who have been historically like exploited or excluded from higher education on the basis of these like mental health conditions in the past.
00:39:33.880Right. And not because of like screening. It reminds me a lot of like RFK's thesis about autism.
00:39:39.480He's like, well, autism rates went up really heavily over the last like latter half of the 20th century.
00:39:45.360It's like, yeah, because they started testing because mental like because health care became a lot more accessible.
00:39:50.860Right. Not because like we can suddenly vaccinate for polio.
00:39:53.960Right. It also rests on this assumption that like kids are coming to you guys as professors and saying like, I have ADHD.
00:40:00.160I'm not going to turn in my assignment. And you're like, OK, I'll give you an A anyway.
00:40:03.480Yeah. The idea that schools are just giving out these accommodations with no process, no assessment.
00:40:08.080They're indifferent to whether kids are gaming the system.
00:40:10.960I mean, again, maybe that's true, but you'd have to show evidence of it.
00:40:13.940I mean, what is the process to get these accommodations?
00:40:16.420Is it just like you ask and you get them or do you have to show a doctor's note?
00:40:20.520It's like there's an empirical thing here of like, is it too easy to get these accommodations?
00:40:25.320None of this is interrogated by the author at all.
00:40:27.460And we always see this in these pieces.
00:40:29.500They look at this sort of tangentially related phenomenon.
00:40:32.580Like there's more kids with disabilities in colleges now.
00:43:29.100This is the campus discourse we want to have.
00:43:31.020When what actually happened on campuses in 2025 was like massive assaults on academic freedom by the Trump administration, right?
00:43:37.800Like these shakedowns in which major institutions, including some of the ones that were name checked in this piece as being too nice to their students, were told to crack down on pro-Palestine speech.
00:43:48.460told to get rid of, like, ethnic and gender studies departments, told to, like, eliminate the ability of trans students to participate in sports, told to get rid of all these student affiliate groups, right?
00:43:58.660Like, real, like, speech and academic freedom extortions coming from the federal government.
00:44:20.740I was just going to say Atlantic got it Atlantic.
00:44:23.000Like it's very much – because I think what they're doing, I don't know if they're conscious of this, is they're taking this right wing – I think this is like the moral panic of next year.0.79
00:44:31.780I think now that they've kind of won on the trans stuff, they're now applying that whole social contagion model to all forms of mental conditions, right?0.68
00:44:41.200Once they're like, well, the internet has tricked kids into thinking they're trans.0.71
00:44:44.420They're now saying the Internet has tricked kids into thinking they're ADHD, depressed, anxious, whatever.0.99
00:44:50.840Like, we're all just kind of, like, rewinding to the fucking panics of yesteryear.0.97
00:44:54.120And this is part of an assault of trying to get rid of disability accommodations.0.97
00:44:58.380I mean, this is what the right wants.0.59
00:45:00.080It's a very obvious assault on anything that would make it easier to have a condition like this.
00:45:04.580But then, of course, what the Atlantic does is they then launder it into, oh, it's actually about elites.
00:45:10.160Did you know rich kids are the ones who are doing this?
00:45:12.660They're joining this effort, essentially, right? Or they're giving it ammunition that you as a left-wing person can be like, oh, I actually kind of also think these disability accommodations have gone too far. There's no real evidence of it. And it's not going to harm the rich kids. It's going to harm everybody else. And these disability accommodations, there's no fucking evidence that they're actually giving anybody an unfair advantage. But I'm going to join the effort to dismantle them, or at least I'm going to be enough on board that when the effort to dismantle them succeeds, I'm not going to be all that pissed off.
00:45:41.100That's basically what they do with trans rights, right?0.98
00:45:43.500That you're like, oh, it's up for debate, whatever, I don't really care about these laws.0.98
00:45:49.100I wanted to give one last beat on this before we move on, because I was like, who is Rose Horowitz?
00:45:54.920This was not one of the people I had on my, like, mental roster as anti-woke writers, like Thomas Chatterton Williams or Jonathan Chait or, I don't know, like John McWalter or whoever it should be.
00:46:04.580Literally the whole Atlantic mass dead.
00:46:06.640You're just reading names in alphabetical order.
00:46:37.220Wait, no, she fully lists on her public resume that she got summa cum laude on all of her exams at Phillips Exeter, one of the nation's fanciest boarding prep schools, which is, yes, a high school.
00:46:50.180So if this person seems like they are paying attention to things that don't matter and giving them really high stakes, it might be because they're like literally a child and still listing their high school GPA on their resume.
00:51:25.820They're like, she can't afford to own a home.
00:51:28.080And I'm like, well, yeah, neither can most of her constituents.0.65
00:51:30.720Yeah. But what's so weird is this actually became an attack line in the mayoral campaign.
00:51:36.480So she was running against this Bruce Harrell guy who's kind of like our Andrew Cuomo, sort of Tammany Hall-style Democrat guy who's like kind of knows everybody but just like doesn't do anything with power.0.94
00:51:46.020Just like one of those guys who just like wants more and more power but doesn't fucking do anything useful with it.
00:51:49.640Katie Wilson participated in an article in one of the local papers that was called,0.99
00:51:53.660Katie Wilson can barely afford to live in Seattle.1.00
00:53:39.540So I think that's so interesting. Like 2025 is obviously the year when sort of billionaires fully took over our media. And one of the things that I didn't have on my bingo card as a side effect of that is that like more and more of our media is targeted at an audience of like one or 15, like they're 15 freak friends, right?
00:53:58.180I write about this a little bit in my forthcoming book, what Tech Calls Governing, where, like, X became unusual because it needed to stroke Elon Musk's ego.0.97
00:54:06.660CBS is going to be a shit show, not necessarily because people aren't conservative.0.98
00:54:10.740There are plenty of conservatives.1.00
00:54:11.880It's because it's being made for billionaires.
00:54:41.020And so what's very weird about this, like, this extremely strange attack on her is that this attack was then taken up by the mayor himself in, like, his attack ads on her.
00:54:50.540So he sent out, I got this, he sent out mailers to people with the headline, Katie Wilson is not who she says she is, as if she's like an imposter.
00:55:02.800She's never, by the way, never lied about this.
00:55:04.680This comes from an interview where she was like speaking about this openly, like it's difficult to live in Seattle because it's unaffordable.
00:55:09.160This was not like you got like leaked documents showing that her parents helped her.
00:55:13.400Bruce Harrell, the guy who was making this attack line, earns somewhere between $500,000 and $1.2 million a year.
00:55:24.000And it's like, sorry, who's the man of the people in this scenario?
00:55:28.660And then what's also amazing is that then there's follow-up reporting from her parents who say that they're not even really supporting her.
00:55:35.140So what happened is she's been the head of this NGO essentially in Seattle for 14 years.
00:55:39.540She's always been financially independent.
00:55:40.900And when she started running for office, because she'd be so busy, her parents reached out to her and were like, hey, do you need any help with child care?
00:56:23.860So, like, this is actually kind of, like, weirdly relatable, right?
00:56:26.340I also think, like, it's a testament, as you said, Mike, to, like, how little they actually have on her, that they're attacking something that's, in fact, a strength, right?
00:56:34.980Like, with Zoran, you could see them flailing.
00:56:41.860They tried to make the thing where he, like, eats with his hands stick, and nobody really gave a shit about that.0.88
00:56:47.880And, like, so they finally landed on, like, oh, it was actually his second cousin or his first cousin once removed, but he called her his aunt.0.78
00:56:55.020And it's just, like, okay, this is just displaying your own desperation and, like, your own out-of-touchness.
00:57:01.380And it kind of reminds me of that, too.
00:57:21.48014 years ago, after working odd jobs as a barista, baker, lab technician and legal assistant,
00:57:26.120Wilson co-founded an advocacy group called Transit Riders Union to agitate for better public transportation paid for by new and higher taxes.
00:57:33.600Ooh. She says she decided to challenge Mayor Bruce Harrell earlier this year after he opposed a new tax on high earners to pay for housing construction.
00:57:42.040She campaigned on a local capital gains tax, a digital advertising tax, and a statewide wealth tax.
00:57:47.540So this is essentially the case that she is a socialist.
01:01:18.280Well, it has to be undefined because they have to be able to apply it to everything they don't like. Right. When you like bound a term that way, you actually limit your own ability to wield it as a weapon. So I think it's a feature, not a bug that they can't define this, actually, because like then people would be able to say, well, like, no, that's not what that means.
01:01:36.140Right. Or like this is fine. Taxing millionaires 16 percent would be OK. I don't know.
01:01:40.860These are all such documents of like uber-rich self-radicalization. Like part of why these people hate the bus is because they have to share the space with people who are different from them. That is, I mean, I think people have been saying this for a while now, that is really the only filter bubble that matters right now is that our uber-rich find it disgusting to have to share space with the rest of us and are using their pretty substantial political muscle to make that happen.
01:02:08.120to make sure that we don't get into the doom bunker in New Zealand
01:02:11.840and that only they and their closest blood bags get to do it.
01:02:15.820There's also, like, not that I'm, like, disappointed or surprised or whatever,0.99
01:02:47.720It's like Breitbart-level argumentation that's now appearing in the Washington Post.
01:02:51.080And it's like, do you not understand how embarrassing this is?
01:02:53.120That's the other thing about, like, billionaire capture of these mega-mainstream media outlets
01:02:58.520is that, like, more and more of it is really just, like, an intellectual dog creation program for conservatives.
01:03:03.360Right. It's crazy. Yeah. It's nuts how much of a leg up they get. And then you have people who are doing real like breaking news reporting that's legitimate. And they all are just like exiled to Substack now. It's kind of it's kind of amazing how quickly the quality of our national media has degraded over the course of the past year. Right. And Substack is also owned by right wingers.
01:03:24.780The one place that's kind of, quote, unquote, working for independent journalists is also a place that you really can't trust, right, with the algorithms they're showing you, et cetera.
01:05:19.860But like, Adrian, what is Islamo-Gauchism?
01:05:22.520Yeah, so this is a concept that's been around in France since the early or mid-aughts, I would say.
01:05:28.980It's kind of come to the U.S. in waves, but it never sort of lands.
01:05:33.380Part of it is it sounds snooty in French and possibly like a cheese.
01:05:37.540And also, it sort of very obviously kind of rehashes sort of post 9-11 kind of discourses that I think we've sort of left behind.
01:05:47.540But in 2025, a lot of that came back because there was some true post 9-11 style Islamophobia making a huge return thanks to one Andrew Cuomo and his, you know, misbegotten quest to become mayor of New York City.
01:06:02.960And so in the coverage of Mamdani's campaign for City Hall and especially his role as a socialist Muslim, you know, you ended up getting a lot of these.
01:06:16.380So, for instance, in the Wall Street Journal, this is from October, James Kirchik, Mr. Mamdani shares the DSA's fascination with the revolutionary potential of political Islam, a seemingly oxymoronic ideological tendency the French call Islamogochisme or Islamo-leftism.
01:06:39.660The famously racist French call it this.
01:06:42.020What it is, is that, like, the anti-Islam beat has lain a little fallow in the United States.0.68
01:06:51.260And I think that they, therefore, our far right draws a lot of inspiration from the continent.
01:06:57.700And what I'm guessing is Kirchik wrote Islamogoshisme, and then his editor was like, you got to explain that, James, right?
01:07:03.960Because what's happening is that, like, people in Denmark, in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany would be fully conversant with this idea.
01:07:12.980But in the United States, you've got to explain it to people.
01:07:15.800And our right-wingers, thanks to, you know, the largesse of, you know, someone like Viktor Orban, like, do spend a lot more time in Euro spaces than the voters you're trying to reach on Staten Island, right?
01:07:28.920So I think that's what's happening here.0.73
01:07:30.220The idea of Islamogushism, it comes out of complaints from the left after 9-11 that a lot of the crackdowns on Islamist terror were ultimately racist and were ultimately violations of civil liberties.1.00
01:07:46.240It is an accurate description of reality.
01:07:48.800But then this leads to the notion on the right and in some parts of what we might call the center, which always seems to go right on this question, that it is a problem that the left and particularly like the young left is insufficiently antagonistic towards radical Islam or towards the forces of terror.
01:08:08.320And I think you really saw a resurgence of that panic, this notion like, oh, it's a real problem that the American left and, like, American young people are not racist enough towards Arabs and towards, like, the Muslim world.
01:08:29.620But, like, the notion that, like, it's a problem that the American left isn't racist enough towards these people really got revived before Mamdani.0.67
01:08:36.200It got revived with the Gaza encampments.
01:08:37.960Like, look at these young people. They don't even think that Arabs are the subhuman disposable population against whom violence is always justified. Like, how are we going to maintain our civilization if we can't instill that fundamental principle in them? It's like, it's a real investment.
01:08:54.000It's all that do you condemn Hamas shit. It's all like, you basically joined Hamas if you're like, I don't think children should starve. Yeah.0.99
01:08:59.860But so remember that, like, after 9-11, like, there were two versions of this, and those still exist in this charge of Islamo-gauchism.0.83
01:09:07.180On the one hand, there was this idea that, like, the postmodern anything-goes-left didn't have the moral fortitude to call out Islamic fundamentalism where it reared its head, basically.
01:09:19.160The other was, oh, no, these people are actually secretly in alliance with them, which is shading a lot more into great replacement theory.
01:09:25.020Now, another piece from the Wall Street Journal from a guy named Sadanan Dume, or Dume, I'm not sure, says,
01:09:33.600All this may not make Mr. Mondani an Islamist, but it does make him appear sympathetic to Islamists.
01:09:39.040Once, someone like Mr. Mondani couldn't have been a member in good standing of the left.
01:09:42.840But for at least two decades, here we go, leftist groups and Islamists have formed a de facto alliance based on their common contempt for Israel in particular and the West in general.
01:09:53.400Me and Peter talked about this exact paragraph and this exact piece in the Mamdani derangement syndrome episode.
01:09:59.920Because he's basically saying, like, well, he's not an Islamist, but he's actually an Islamist.
01:10:04.600Within the space of a paragraph, he just, like, completely contradicts himself.
01:10:07.500And it's insane. There's no evidence of this whatsoever.
01:10:29.240I mean, and as Moira's saying, like, around the Gaza protests, especially from Europe, where a lot of people sort of got sort of drop-shipped into fucking Brown University, like, spoke to students who wouldn't speak with them, and then, like, had to file for, like, Le Monde or fucking, like, Zutatützaitem or whatever the fuck it was, right?0.64
01:10:47.200And what these people would write, they'd be like, oh, you know, actually, like, Hamas has, like, tons of, like, networks, and through the funding, these universities get massive donations from Qatar and from the UAE, and that's how they sink their teeth and their talons into these universities.0.56
01:11:05.680You have to just follow the money, you guys, right?
01:11:07.420And you're like, first of, that's insane.
01:11:10.820Second of, you understand that's an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, right?
01:12:25.120Just very quickly, this is neither here nor there, but, like, I made Hung listen to the entirety of Matt Bernstein's Deborah Messing episode.
01:12:54.800But, yeah, so Islamo-leftism, it's this really interesting thing where, like, it's either a guilt by association, right, saying, like, oh, these people are relativists.
01:13:02.220Although, really, what it is is that they're describing people as liberal.
01:13:05.080People are saying, like, I'm against the surveillance state, even if it sometimes catches an Islamist terrorist, right?
01:13:11.400Like, it's really an attack on liberalism, but a lot of self-professed liberals don't seem to understand that.
01:13:15.720And then it sort of gets lumped together with this idea of post-colonial studies, right?
01:13:23.280The reason Judith Butler is against, you know, murdering children in Gaza is because thinks of them as, like, legitimate carriers of a freedom struggle, not because, like, Judith Butler as a philosopher has a, you know, ethical stance on the maiming of children and, like, not doing it, right?
01:13:40.080And then it shades into this idea, just a straightforward conspiracy theory, where they never actually have to enunciate what the conspiracy is, right?
01:13:48.740They're like, oh, these people are in cahoots.
01:14:06.540And it's just about not distinguishing between a critique of the West
01:14:11.540or, let's say, critical appreciation of the West,
01:14:14.960where you're like, oh, it's got some good things,
01:14:16.520but here are some things we could fix, you guys.
01:14:17.980and outright violent and murderous attacks on those countries.
01:14:22.360It's completely, as with all the terms we're talking about today,
01:14:27.340it lives in this kind of undefined state.
01:14:31.120It's like Schrodinger's Islamo-leftism.0.91
01:14:33.220And that is, in fact, why I think it's never quite made the transition
01:14:38.240because the moment you translate it,0.99
01:14:39.980you kind of have to nail down what the fuck you're talking about.0.98
01:14:42.120Are you accusing someone of actually being on a group chat with Hamas?0.99
01:14:46.280Or are you just saying, like, oh, you make it easier for them to do what they're doing or something like that?
01:14:50.460Well, now it's one or the other, right?
01:14:52.640But you can also—the other thing they can retreat behind is they're not really specific about what the purpose of this alliance is, right?
01:14:58.980It's like, oh, they want to destroy the West.
01:15:11.480Or, like, whatever. It's, like, these little symbols of something, but it's not clear what they're, like, they're always melting down about the dumbest shit. Like, there's a fucking black elf on, like, the Lord of the Rings TV show on Amazon. It's always these, like, little cultural signifiers that they're melting down about. And they often classify that as, like, destroying the West. And I was struck by in that ridiculous viral essay by the Oklahoma student that was, like, a whole big thing this week.1.00
01:15:34.620she mentioned somewhere in her essay she's like i don't think we should destroy gender yeah and0.51
01:15:39.520like this is something that jk rowling says all the time yeah and it's like what are you no one0.60
01:15:43.460can do that no one wants to do that no one even it's not even clear what the fuck that means but
01:15:47.640it's like you can claim this thing in this extremely existential threat kind of way yeah0.94
01:15:52.460but also never really substantiate what the fuck that means or how that would take place and your
01:15:57.900only evidence of it is like yeah there's all gender restrooms now or something like ultimately0.88
01:16:44.340Because a couple of days after that Charlie Kirk shooting back in September, Jimmy Kimmel went on his late show monologue and talked about how the right were, you know, kind of trying to milk the Kirk assassination for all it's worth, which I think is something that's like only gotten more vulgar and obvious in the months since in retrospect.
01:17:07.840But he also said, like, oh, yeah, they're trying to pretend that the shooter wasn't one of them. And for that, supposedly, the Trump administration's FCC czar threatened to revoke ABC's broadcast license if they left Jimmy Kimmel on the air.
01:17:25.780So Jimmy Kimmel was suspended. His show was taken off the air for a few days and caused this, like, massive outcry among, like, you know, consumers, like liberal or middle-class consumers of television that really made Jimmy Kimmel a pretty, like, I think an unambiguous free speech hero.
01:17:48.540We need the Banksy posters of him with his fist up.
01:17:51.220Yeah. It was, like, kind of maddening because I'm, like, the man show guy.
01:17:56.180Wait, do we not like him? I, like, know almost nothing about him. I, like, have not paid attention to him for, like, a decade.
01:18:00.880I don't know anything about him. I just find him annoying.
01:18:03.200I retain the right as, like, the only radical feminist still working to hate men for, like, the same amount of information that men hate famous women.1.00
01:18:15.700I'm, like, I don't like his fucking face. I think his voice is annoying.0.99
01:18:57.620But this annoyed me a little because I was like, okay, this is going on at the same time as a lot of these, like, crackdowns on the academic sphere are going on.
01:19:08.640Yeah, it's like a pre-publication attack, right?
01:19:11.300There's also, of course, like immigrants, like being kidnapped and taken away from their families, like Mahmoud Khalil for like disfavored speech violations.
01:19:21.100Right. So it's a little like, OK, you guys are really leading in.
01:19:40.480There's also at a moment when, you know, I think after November, after the Mamdani election, after like the big shifts in polling, like the vibe sort of shifted back a little bit.
01:19:52.300Right. You know, Trump, I think, is still going to do quite a bit of damage.
01:19:55.360And I don't think, you know, the maximally racist era in Republican politics that he ushered in is by any means over.
01:20:02.820But the notion that sort of prevailed in the spring of 2025, like, oh, he can do anything and there's absolutely no one who's going to stop him.
01:20:09.800absolutely everybody's going to roll over like it's cooked like we're we're kaput that like sort
01:20:15.520of started to recede a little bit yeah in the fall i think it was kind of stuff like this like
01:20:22.000they really wanted to use the charlie kirk death as a moment to like just they were like we are so
01:20:28.460happy to have this corpse right they were so thrilled that they got that assassination and
01:20:32.860they were using it as an excuse for a lot of repression a lot of people did get fired right
01:20:38.240For being like, yeah, I don't think this guy was so great, like, when he was alive.
01:21:52.840Like, Trump is one of the most historically unpopular presidents ever.
01:21:56.500And if you describe his actual policies to people, they literally think it's not real.
01:22:00.420They're like, oh, no, you're mistaken.0.98
01:22:01.420Like, the most important thing is just getting information to people about what is happening, because any decent human being would be like, what the fuck is this?0.83
01:22:08.520Well, it's also interesting, right?0.94
01:22:09.620Like, we have Trump and people like him across the globe have been running under this banner of populism.0.96
01:22:15.800And somehow, because our media themselves are just about as far from populism as anyone can be, they sort of credited a bunch of astroturf billionaire shit as genuinely populist.0.69
01:22:25.740Now, of course, there are people who are genuinely MAGA out there, but the opposite of it was always cast as elite, right?0.94
01:22:33.300Which meant that a majority of Americans were always implicitly cast as inauthentic, inorganic, right, not real Americans.
01:22:57.880And I think that's why they're often unprepared for this blowback when they're like, oh, shit, like there are millions of these people out there and they have opinions and they react poorly towards having our billionaire sugar daddy's opinions crammed down their throat because he happened to like what Charlie Kirk did.0.99
01:23:14.820Yeah, I think it's a revelation that, you know, clearly a lot of people on the far right, one of the things that billionaires have very obviously cooked brains about is the notion that there's nobody who really does disagree with them, right?
01:23:26.180Nobody disagrees with them in good faith.
01:24:02.260It was a thing where, like, voting with your dollar, trying to encourage the massive corporation to, like, calculate that they faced smaller liabilities and smaller risks by actually defying the Trump administration, like, really worked.
01:24:18.660That's another thing that is really important to tell corporations that, like, this is not a dollars and cents decision in every case, right?
01:24:26.340Yeah. And it's like you can push back against these people, actually. They tend to like the Trump administration tends to back down when they experience pushback.
01:24:34.600Yeah, they're chicken shit. And if you and if especially if they can see some way to declare victory, right, like they will obviously back down.1.00
01:24:42.160They always declare victory, but they frequently are like pissing themselves as they do so.
01:24:46.040Well, I mean, there's two things that make me less sanguine about this, though.
01:24:49.120One is that it very clearly shows that the lack of pushback we've gotten from ostensibly liberal elites this year
01:24:54.120is not because somehow the Trump juggernaut caught them unawares.
01:24:58.580It's because they kind of agree on some level.
01:25:00.140I do think a lot of our media corporations, a lot of our universities just think that immigrants have it coming,
01:25:07.160that queer people have it coming, that non-white people have it coming
01:25:09.800and didn't deserve their station within these institutions.1.00
01:25:13.780Like once these houses of cards crumble, you realize like, oh, shit, you didn't lift a finger and you didn't lift a finger for ideological reasons.0.99
01:25:22.120And then the other thing, of course, is that poor Stephen Colbert is still out at CBS News and I'm guessing going to be replaced by Olivia Rheingold anytime soon.
01:27:18.960I have been especially startled to see Ro Khanna, a House Democrat and one of the most impressive politicians in America, use the phrase, quote, the Epstein class, unquote, in his public statements.
01:27:29.620In an interview with my colleague David Lionart this week, Kana explained that he had gotten the phrase from voters who asked him if he was on the side of, quote, forgotten Americans or, quote, the Epstein class.
01:27:41.600I know a thing or two about the American wheat.
01:28:19.460Yeah, it's basically a word that I don't like.
01:28:21.160Again, it's like you look at this massive moral catastrophe and the only thing you have to say about it is like the people who are upset are using the wrong words.
01:28:30.920That's all any of these people can offer on these like massive scandals.0.89
01:28:34.680Like somebody who's allegedly like an expert in morality, like someone who's put morality at the center of his public career, has nothing to fucking say about Epstein, right?
01:28:43.440And I also think it's a total misstatement of like what's going on here because I don't actually think that when you talk about the Epstein class or like, you know, people are so pissed off about this.0.85
01:28:51.060I don't think people think that every single member of the elite is a mass rapist.
01:28:54.980What they think is that people are protecting rapists and looking away from rapists and aiding and abetting rapists, which is exactly what David Brooks is doing, right?1.00
01:29:04.880He's doing the thing which makes people hate this shit, right?0.99
01:29:08.440He's like, ah, it's not that big of a deal.1.00
01:29:19.780Something that really pisses me off in general about, like, coverage of the Epstein case is that this is a situation in which there's, like, no shortage of victims, right?
01:29:46.180Yeah, it's a shocking number of people who they were doing this to.
01:29:49.280And instead of their lives or what was done to them or, like, their dignity or what they might be owed in the wake of all of this, basically none of that is getting passed around in these discussions.
01:30:18.380You know, it's like the reality exposed by the Epstein case is about the moral rot of elites and I think more generally about the, like, ubiquity of sexual violence in, like, young women's lives, right?
01:30:43.360Like, there's actual people who are actually hurt here.1.00
01:30:45.740This is also the sickness that I think, like, I've dedicated a lot of my recent career to is everything has to be at this kind of meta level about, like, what is the best messaging?
01:31:05.020You could just talk about this moral problem as a moral problem, and that's it.1.00
01:31:08.160You don't need to do this, like, second, third, fourth order shit.0.99
01:31:11.360Shout out to Michelle Goodwin at Miss Magazine who actually did do that.0.99
01:31:14.340She has a very good interview with one of the Epstein victims on her podcast that I encourage people to listen to.
01:31:20.120Like, there's real stories to be here.
01:31:21.760It's not just a matter of, like, who's polling best or who it's hurting electorally, you know?0.97
01:31:28.160Yeah, one of them just published a book and read the fucking book and tell people what is in it.
01:31:31.560Like, it's not hard to do this, but it's like everyone's brain has to go to this higher meta level and to somehow place themselves above it.0.99
01:31:40.720That's exactly what's offensive about this.
01:31:42.380I mean, I also think not to come back to sort of like the elite complicity that is sort of David Brooks' whole deal. He, I think, is not implicated in any of this, obviously, directly. But the thing is, I think David Brooks is deeply invested in a world in which everyone has and knows their place.
01:32:01.120And I think on some fundamental level, he thinks that it is not the place of Larry Summers to be scrutinized in this way.
01:32:10.520And he may not say this outright, but if you hooked him up to a lie detector, I think you'd find out that he may think that what happened to the Epstein victims was their lot in life.0.75
01:32:19.660And that is exactly where they deserved to be.
01:32:22.100And I think that is, in a big way, what enabled these people to thrive, that they had a very clear, very active sense of who was due what, right?
01:32:33.720Like, what was due to the people of their station and what was due to those who they deemed their lessers?
01:32:38.380And the problem is that a lot of our elite media think the same way.
01:32:43.540They wouldn't do what Epstein or his friends did, but, like, the value system behind it is not foreign to them.
01:32:49.620Totally. And also, I feel like one of the main things that come out of the Epstein emails was also just what a fucking mediocre guy he was.0.99
01:32:56.160And how, like, mediocre and shitty, like, Larry Summers was. Like, the whole thing is this weird club of, like, just shit dudes.1.00
01:33:04.940Just, like, midwit fucking dumbasses who are running, like, most of the institutions of American life at this point.1.00
01:33:10.920And, like, we're all supposed to be marveling at these people's intellect or how great they are, but it's like, no, like, burn it down. I don't fucking care.1.00
01:33:17.860They're petty. They're narcissistic. They're small-minded. They are needfully social-climbing. A shocking number of these guys actually were going to Jeffrey Epstein for sex and dating advice also.1.00
01:33:34.220Which is what seems to suggest, at least to me, that they saw what they all seemed to know he was doing with these girls or to these girls as aspirational, right?
01:33:43.480And also what's amazing to me, too, about Epstein is that if you look into his record, right, he was like a donor to various institutions and stuff.
01:33:50.040He was also a totally explicit eugenicist.0.99
01:33:53.140So even if, I mean, I don't think this is plausible, but even if you didn't know about the sex stuff, he's a guy that gives money to, like, weird biological garbage.0.99
01:34:00.780He wanted to have, like, a breeding ranch.0.98
01:34:50.940I also think that one prediction for 2026 I have is that we're going to get another meta discourse about hasn't the punishing of Epstein's friends and fellow travelers gone far enough?
01:35:30.080Like, the cancel culture stuff has always also been just about the fact that they think they naturally deserve our respect and our admiration independent of how they conduct themselves.0.85
01:35:41.700It's like, no, man, you send that email and people are going to lose all fucking respect for you at the very least.0.98
01:35:48.460Maybe more should happen, but the very least that's going to happen is that people are like, oh, fucking A.0.98
01:35:52.700But we're going to get a story next year about how, like, they've been punished.0.98
01:35:56.740And the punishment would just be our withholding our admiration, us being like, yikes, dude, that's fucking gross, right?
01:36:03.880He's like furiously Googling for someone specific who has been called a member of the Epstein class so he can write like a long feature story.
01:36:10.780I guarantee you guys there is already a group chat or like a really sad group email where guys in the Epstein files, your Larry Summers, your who have yous are already talking to guys from Me Too.
01:36:25.640And they're already, like, cross-referencing lawyers and PR people.