GFY, Cybertruck Deliveries, Seth Rich's Laptops
GFY, Cybertruck Deliveries, Seth Rich's Laptops
The People's News for the People's Coin 11/29-12/5
Hey everyone,
This news digest covers :
1. Elon’s GFY heard ‘round the world
2. Cybertruck Deliveries
3. Seth Rich’s Laptop
4. Top videos
Don’t miss memes and news bites at the end!
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The GFY Heard ‘Round the World
Last week, Elon gave an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit.
Interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin opened the discussion by asking Elon if his visit to Israel was intended as an apology to woo back advertisers who left 𝕏 after he was accused of anti-Semitism.
Elon responded by saying he hoped the advertisers stayed off the platform: “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.”
Moments later, he waved to Disney CEO Bob Iger, whose company led the advertising boycott against 𝕏.
When asked to clarify his feelings, Elon explained, “What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Fuck them.”
The moment was an instant meme classic. The first to catch fire was a variation of the clip with commentary from Joe Rogan.
The next day, another meme went viral framing the exchange as a question from Who Wants to be a Millionaire, featuring Iger as Elon’s phone-a-friend from hell.
The incident also set off a lively discussion about the impact of advertising on journalism. Mike Benz called it “the GFY heard round the world.”
Glenn Greenwald said the episode revealed how much control advertisers have over journalistic speech, and argued that the world needs more journalists willing to tell advertisers GFY.
In the legacy world, Elon’s comments inflamed existing rifts.
After the interview, hundreds of companies continued removing advertising from 𝕏, most notably Wal-Mart.
Similarly, corporate media coverage sided with advertisers against 𝕏.
At the same time, a counter-movement emerged of regular people canceling the advertisers carrying out the boycott, on the grounds that the companies were trying to kill the only free speech platform on the Internet.
The day after the interview, searches for “cancel Hulu” and “cancel Disney plus” exploded on Google. In the blink of an eye, the Disney brand became synonymous with censorship.
The reaction to Disney strikes at the core question about the episode: are corporations leaving 𝕏 because they actually opposed anti-Semitism, or are they using anti-Semitism as an excuse to target free speech?
On Friday, Elon pointed toward the latter, asking why Disney was still advertising on other platforms with significantly more anti-Semitic content than 𝕏.
He proposed that Disney’s real problem was not with anti-Semitic content, but free speech itself. He added that the brand was “the world’s biggest example of go woke, go broke.”
As the dust cleared, the focus shifted to another question: if advertisers are leaving for good, how will 𝕏 generate revenue?
Elon has already been moving the platform away from dependence on advertisers over the last year. It may be the case that in 2023, doing business with large corporations is incompatible with allowing users to speak freely.
One intriguing possibility is that Elon is setting the stage for 𝕏 to transition to a financial app, in which ad revenue is replaced by transaction fees.
Yesterday, he highlighted a post with the news that 𝕏 has acquired several money transmitter licenses in anticipation of the transition. The post included a picture of a Dogecoin and the Wall Street Bets logo.
The idea of turning 𝕏 into a full-blown Internet economy to compete with Amazon, eBay, and Etsy has been discussed since Elon acquired Twitter last year.
Now, he has no choice: 𝕏 may have to become the Everything App by necessity.
What do you think: is Elon backed into a corner? Or does he have his adversaries right where he wants them?
Cybertruck Deliveries
Last Thursday, Tesla held its Cybertruck delivery event.
The event’s most eye-catching moment was a video of Cybertruck outracing a Porsche 911—while pulling another Porsche in tow.
After the event, the first batch of Cybertrucks went out to the public, and customer reviews began rolling in.
The most commented-on feature was the truck’s wire steering: there is no physical connection from the steering wheel to the axels. The truck automatically adjusts sharpness of turns based on how fast it is traveling.
Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian gave Cybetruck a positive review, praising its interior, appearance, and futuristic vibe.
The wait list for Cybetruck is over two million people long, and production is expected to take at least a year to ramp up, meaning a lot of folks won’t get their trucks until sometime in 2025, or later.
That won’t stop Cybertruck from becoming one of Tesla’s most viral advertising campaigns ever. The vehicle is so visually striking that the hype will probably continue rising for a while to come.
Welcome to the Cybertruck Era!
Seth Rich’s Laptops
Last week, federal judge Amos Mazzant ordered the FBI to release two laptops owned by former DNC employee Seth Rich.
Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, was shot in the back in July 2016 at the age of 27, while walking to his DC home late at night.
DC police concluded Rich was killed in a botched robbery. Five weeks after the murder, DC police chief Cathy Lanier retired.
However, shortly after Rich’s murder, Julian Assange appeared to tell an interviewer that Rich was a source for the WikiLeaks dump of DNC emails in the months leading up to the 2016 election. He also hinted that Rich was killed for sharing the emails with WikiLeaks.
The emails have played a pivotal role in several major political stories over the last seven years. Their origin remains a topic of near unlimited consequence for US politics.
Assange’s comments directly contradict the American media’s version of events, which blamed Russia for hacking the DNC and sharing the emails with WikiLeaks.
Corporate media and fact checkers typically cite a US intelligence agency report that claimed Vladimir Putin ordered the DNC hacked because he preferred Donald Trump as President over Hilary Clinton.
Strangely, the intel agencies never examined the DNC’s servers to come to this conclusion, instead relying on the conclusions of a private cybersecurity firm called Crowdstrike hired by the DNC itself.
The whole situation amounts to the media and intelligence agencies essentially taking the DNC at its word that Russia, and not Rich, was responsible for the DNC’s emails being given to WikiLeaks.
This narrative has given the US security state rationale to persecute Assange as a nefarious actor releasing the emails on behalf of a hostile, election-interfering state (Russia), rather than as a journalist publishing documents from an internal whistleblower (Rich).
The idea that Russia hacked the DNC was also used as pretext for the multi-year Mueller investigation into Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia.
The investigation ultimately failed to produce any meaningful evidence that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, but consumed over two years of Trump’s presidency.
The alternate account is that Rich discovered the DNC had rigged its primary for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, and released the emails to reveal corruption within the organization. Rich was a supporter of Sanders.
After WikiLeaks published the emails, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz resigned as a result of clear evidence that the DNC worked to ensure Clinton’s victory against Sanders.
The two accounts of Rich’s murder—that of the US intel agencies and WikiLeaks—are fundamentally incompatible. WikiLeaks offered a $20k reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s murderer. As of 2023, no one has been charged for the crime.
Other details of the murder don’t quite add up: while the police claim Rich was the victim of a robbery, his wallet, watch, ring, and cell phone were still on his body when he was found by police.
After Rich’s murder, the FBI took possession of his personal and work laptops, and have never made their contents public. If they contain evidence that Rich delivered DNC emails to WikiLeaks, it would provide closure to one of the more vexing political stories from the last decade.
Alternate narratives about Rich’s murder are considered “right-wing conspiracies.” However, lefties like Jimmy Dore and moderates like Joe Rogan have raised justifiable questions about the events surrounding his death.
Rich is also believed to be the potential source for the leaked Podesta emails, making his murder a foundational piece of Pizzagate lore.
A lot of speculation has focused on one Podesta email from 2015, in which he wrote he was willing to “[make] an example of a suspected leaker” such as Rich “whether or not we have any real basis for it.”
The timing of the email means he probably wasn’t talking about Rich specifically, but the language he uses, in some lights, looks like circumstantial evidence.
This isn’t the first time the FBI has been asked to turn over Rich’s laptop. Last year, the same judge ordered its release.
In response, the FBI said it would need 66 years to produce the data on the laptops. Prior to the ruling, the agency had denied possessing them at all.
It remains to be seen whether the bureau will comply with the most recent order from federal judge Amos Mazzant, an Obama appointee.
If the laptops are released, it’ll be a major moment in social media history, in which diametrically opposed internet and legacy narratives collide.
Let’s see what happens…
Top Videos
1. A new Coinbase ad presents cryptocurrency as a generational transition between old and new financial systems:
2. BLM Rhode Island co-founder Mark Fisher is endorsing Trump while remaining a part of BLM:
3. Peter St. Onge explains why interest payments on the US debt are soaring:
4. RFK Jr on how bioweapon development is hidden vaccine research programs:
Dogey Treats: News Bites
𝕏
𝕏 was the only social media site which didn’t censor coverage of Dublin immigration riots. CBS blamed 𝕏 for fueling riots in Dublin.
Keith Olberman returned to 𝕏 less than a day after quitting the platform over Elon’s Pizzagate meme.
X.ai is seeking to raise $1B from equity investors.
SpaceX
The FCC gave SpaceX permission to begin test direct-to-cellphone satellite Internet service
US Politics
Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger testified to Congress about new evidence called the CTIL Files showing military contractors using censorship and psychological operations against Americans over social media. Matt Taibbi told congress that the government is waging a form of class war through censorship. Both argued the government had violated the First Amendment.
RFK Jr told Jesse Waters he took two separate trips on Epstein’s jet and said all of the information on Epstein should be released to the public.
Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn confronted FBI Director Christopher Wray about releasing the Epstein flight logs: “I want to know what awareness you have of the FBI's failure to investigate these claims. I tried to get the subpoena on the flight logs. People need to know who was on those planes and how often they were on those planes. Should those logs be made public? They've been heavily redacted. We never got to the bottom of this. They swept in under the rug and that is wrong and you need to right that wrong.” Democratic Senator Dick Durban blocked Blackburn’s request to subpoena the Epstein flight logs.
Representative Thomas Massie was accused of anti-Semitism for posting a meme criticizing Congress’s support for Zionism. Senate majority leader called on Massie to take down the post. Three Ivy League Presidents were widely criticized for refusing to denounce genocide against Jews during congressional testimony. Investor Bill Ackman defended Elon from the charge of anti-Semitism.
A court stayed the imprisonment of Douglass Mackey for posting memes about Hillary Clinton until after his appeal. Trump celebrated.
Both Joe Biden and the White House received community notes for misleading claims about inflation. Biden told donors he’s not sure he would be running in 2024 if Trump weren’t in the race.
Senators called on the Biden administration to restrict travel with China over the emergence of a mystery respiratory illness.
Representative Clay Higgins said 200 FBI agents were embedded in crowds on January 6th.
Global Politics
Israel’s UN ambassador criticized George Soros for funneling $15M toward groups accused of supporting Hamas.
Elon encouraged Conor McGregor to run for President of Ireland. McGregor wrote back, “I’d clean the fuckin’ dail if it meant our issues were heard and corrected and the public were consulted in these decisions. A true democracy! Among many other things, the allocation of our nations funds has been nothing short of criminal, and without an iota of consideration for the publics thinking.” Elon responded by saying, “I hope you are at least nominated. That would shake things up!”
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Volodymyr Zelensky is turning Ukraine into an authoritarian state.
Israel-Palestine
The New York Times reported Israel acquired Hamas’s 10/7 battle plan last year but didn’t take the attack seriously. Charlie Kirk, who was called anti-Semitic for raising questions about Israel’s intelligence failure in the immediate aftermath of 10/7, said the US should stop sending money to Israel until an investigation is completed.
Reuters reported on evidence that stock markets seemed to anticipate Hamas’s 10/7 attack on Israel.
Global Financial system
Moody’s downgraded China’s credit rating from stable to negative.
Why are banks hoarding liquidity?
Coinbase Wallet added the ability to send cash directly over messaging apps.
Health
Texas AG Ken Paxton explained his lawsuit against Pfizer for misleading the public about Covid mRNA vaccines: “The federal government long ago back in the 80's passed a law that gave protection to pharmaceutical companies when they provided vaccines. There's no liability, complete protection. However, under state law, they don't have those same protections. We have a Deceptive Trade Practice Act, and that's what we're suing them under, arguing that they did not tell our consumers in Texas us the truth, and therefore there are damages because they didn't tell the truth about the effectiveness or the potential side effects of the vaccine.”
A study from Norway found higher incidence of Covid-19 among frequent mask-wearers.
Peter Hotez warned of another pandemic, which he called “Disease X.”
Memes of the Week
Elon’s Memes
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