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wherein GQ asks sydney if she only pretends to be a private person to stir up internet controversy, among other super sane questions

NEW: @dodgeblake watched the whole Sydney Sweeney GQ interview and it’s even worse than the clips. The Euphoria actress refused to take the bait, proving her IQ is just as voluptuous as… you know. Full story 👇 piratewires.com/p/inside-the…

Link here: piratewires.com/p/we-legaliz…

NEW IN PIRATE WIRES: A pair of federal indictments just exposed NBA players and coaches tied up in illegal gambling. The investigation uncovered both illegal betting on NBA games as well as rigged high-stakes poker games, sweeping up basketball stars Terry Rozier, Damon Jones, and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups. It’s the latest in a wave of sports betting incidents among athletes, all of which raise a simple question: was legalizing sports gambling worth it? Since the Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting it in 2018, sports gambling is now legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Apps have turned any sports game into a casino — and it’s impossible to turn on a game without being bombarded with ads telling you to gamble. Now, the players are getting in on it, too. This isn’t just a technology-enabled version of your dad’s bookie. What we’re seeing is categorically different: a 24/7 algorithmic machine built to keep users hooked, pushing ever-weirder bets (“how many players will cry during the National Anthem?”) and lowering the opportunity cost for cheating. Libertarians advocate for legalized vice to give consumers what they want — but an ever-growing string of incidents is eroding trust in the game. Some states (like Ohio) are already starting to pull back with regulations. Tech accelerationism is great for stuff we need, but for vices like gambling or p*rn, it’s harder to steelman. We built pocket casinos and gave them to everyone for free. Maybe it’s time to rethink that. Read the full story in Pirate Wires from @CharlesFLehman 👇

NEW: Wikipedia’s estranged co-founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, have reunited... to both criticize a Wikipedia page about “Gaza genocide” for violating neutrality standards. @AshleyRindsberg on the unlikely reunion and ensuing backlash 👇 piratewires.com/p/did-gaza-r…

hey guys please address the cost of housing I don’t want communism thanks

Read it here: piratewires.com/p/did-gaza-r…

NEW IN PIRATE WIRES: Jimmy Wales slams Wikipedia’s editors for biased coverage on the “Gaza genocide” page, saying it violates the site’s neutrality rules — and, in an unlikely twist, Larry Sanger, his estranged co-founder, agrees with him for the first time in over a decade. “I’m not sure when the last time was that the two co-founders were able to agree about something,” Sanger says, “So that’s great.” The highly contested page’s first sentence declares that genocide in Gaza is an undeniable fact. Wales and Sanger call this an “egregious” violation of the site’s neutrality rules, and demand editors rewrite to reflect that the “genocide” claim is contested. Now? Editors are rebelling. One of them tells us it’s “pandemonium” internally as they argue against Wales, recommending him for disciplinary action and even trying to ban him from editing the page himself. Read the full story from @AshleyRindsberg 👇

Full analysis here: piratewires.com/p/what-can-m…

NEW IN PIRATE WIRES: What can Zohran Mamdani really do as mayor? Attempting to pass his lofty policy proposals will likely set the stage for a barrage of court battles and funding fights... #1) “Freeze the rent” The mayor in NYC doesn’t set rent; the Rent Guidelines Board does. The law requires them to raise rents yearly based on property taxes and operating costs. Mamdani wants them to ignore that law and vote for four consecutive years of 0% increases, likely provoking an “Article 78” legal challenge. #2) “Free buses” The MTA is a state agency, not a city one. The MTA has already pledged bus fares to its bondholders — so if it wants to get rid of them, it will need to find an equally reliable revenue source and renegotiate with the bondholders. #3) “Build 200k units of public housing” Mamdani pledges to do this with… more bond funding. He’ll have to raise the city’s debt limit, which was set during the 1970s fiscal disaster. #4) “Government grocery stores” Mamdani probably has the power to do this, but cities that have tried it are closing these stores… because it turns out the government isn’t great at running businesses. #5) “Tax the rich” (to pay for for all of the above) The mayor-elect will have to get Governor Hochul to agree, and she’s famously promised not to raise taxes. These are just a few of the obstacles Mamdani faces. Many seem to expect the new socialist mayor-elect to arrive in office with a revolutionary bang — but as @CharlesFLehman and @JKetcham91 explain for Pirate Wires, we’ll likely witness a slow grind of lawsuits, budget fights, and some (possibly failed, maybe successful) isolated pilots. Either way, we’re in for four years of intense lawfare. Buckle up 👇

teen vogue died, and while most blamed its politics... the more interesting question is how a site about lip gloss and celebs became politically obsessive at all

NEW: The next mayor of NYC ran on a platform of freezing the rent, free buses, and city-run grocery stores. But does Mamdani have the legal authority to actually do what he’s promised? @CharlesFLehman and @JKetcham91 take a closer look 👇 piratewires.com/p/what-can-m…

Inside California’s New Mandatory Ethnic Studies Course It teaches students “How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist” and claims race is a “Eurocentric biological fallacy.” Soon, it will be a high school graduation requirement in the state. Full analysis from Evan Milenko 👇 ──────────────────── California is finally ending racism. Or something. For nearly a decade, the state has been molding an Ethnic Studies course that will soon be a graduation requirement. Already, many high school districts across California have been mandating the course for freshmen. Government bureaucrats desperately want your kids to take this course. Parents don’t. It’s not hard to see why. Ethnic Studies is just one of California’s schemes to use taxpayer dollars to canonize radical leftist identity politics into K-12 education. If that wasn’t inherently obvious, State Senator Jose Medina was kind enough to spell it out. When the initial attempt to require Ethnic Studies in high schools was vetoed in 2020, Medina — the author of the bill — responded by saying it was “a failure to push back against the racial rhetoric and bullying of Donald Trump.” A simple glance at the state’s model curriculum also reveals the activist nature of the course. The 696-page document reads as if it were a not-so-subtle parody of tired liberal cliches. Just one snippet of the insanity includes “intentional respellings, to challenge various forms of oppression and marginalization.” Old classics like Herstory and Latinx appear, joined by their new comrades: Hxrstory and Latin@. Perhaps more offensively, there is not even an explanation of how these words could possibly be pronounced. But in order to murder language even further, Xicanx is proposed as an alternative Chicano. Maybe the two x’s symbolize the chromosomes that you’re no longer allowed to acknowledge as having any meaning? Ostensibly, Ethnic Studies will help “students to engage critically in the gray areas of controversial topics.” In order to facilitate difficult conversations in the classroom, the curriculum links a resource which instructs teachers to “Establish a Safe Space” in the classroom and have students watch a video titled “How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist.” The course outline also mentions that many teachers begin lessons by acknowledging that they are on native land. Such framing undermines any chance of students engaging in real debate over these topics. In sample lessons, students are expected to analyze and debate the Black Panther Party and their Ten-Point Plan. Omitted from the provided information is any mention of prominent members like Eldridge Cleaver, who famously wrote that he considered his rape of white women an “insurrectionary act.” Also neglected are references to the BPP’s internal violence, such as the torture and murder of Alex Rackley. More revealing of the general thrust of the course, race is defined as a “Eurocentric Biological Fallacy” which in the US supposedly breaks down as “people of color (POC) and white people.” Throughout the document, “Black” is capitalized while “white” is not. The curriculum assumes that anything Western is oppressive, while anything non-Western is framed as liberating. As Christopher Rufo reported, a call-and-response “community chant” was included so students could honor the Aztec deities of war. Overall, the course can be summarized in just three words: White men bad. These are not cherry-picked examples but are indicative of the true purpose of the course. The curriculum’s own “Guiding Principles” state that it is designed to “Critique empire building in its past and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression,” and to “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systematic-racism society that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.” All of this is bad enough, but the finalized curriculum is actually the product of multiple rewrites that toned down the initial draft’s most radical elements. The 2019 curriculum ran into backlash because it wore its radical roots too openly. It explicitly put capitalism alongside white supremacy when listing oppressive systems of power. To remedy this, the updated version replaced the word “capitalism” with “exploitative economic systems.” Problem solved! Much of the uproar over the first draft came from the Jewish community. The course notably featured extremely one-dimensional coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict. The proposed glossary, which defines microaggressions, Islamophobia, and glowingly praises the BDS movement somehow “forgot” to include anti-Semitism as a term. The natural enemy of any educator is the concerned parent. These relatively minor edits led to all the writers and members of the original Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum penning a letter asking to have their names removed. So, in the five years it took to simply finish a curriculum, it managed to alienate large swaths of the public and turn away its own writers. California then took this mark of success to the next logical step: making Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement. Technically, the course does not have to be offered yet, as the estimated $276 million a year it would require has not been allocated in the state budget. But school districts are rolling with the proposed plan anyway. Since local districts can use the model curriculum as simply guidelines, they could have toned down the most ridiculous elements and turned Ethnic Studies into a somewhat benign, if eye-roll inducing, course about diversity. But where the state model told them to jump, teachers and administrators asked if they could do it off a cliff. A prime example is San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), an early adopter of Ethnic Studies long before the state mandate. The state’s recent efforts gave activist teachers a green light to make the course even more transparently political. In 2024, course materials appeared on the SFUSD website that included lessons on “queering Black History Month” and handouts framing prison abolition as a movement for justice. The San Francisco Standard even reported how one proposed in-class activity had “students role-playing as Israeli soldiers herding Palestinians into refugee camps.” Scenes like these are not isolated to one district. All over the state, parents are flocking to community board meetings, concerned that their children are being taught divisive material. At a forum hosted by the Orange County Board of Education, one parent stated, “I believe ethnic studies and critical race theory promotes racism and hate. It focuses on our country’s defeats rather than our victories.” In San Francisco, parents echoed similar concerns. One SFUSD parent, Amanda Fried, summed up the frustration by asking if the curriculum was “teaching [students] what to think or how to think?” and whether it was about “ideology over education.” The appeal to sanity from parents is met with little real introspection from administrators. According to Mission Local, Thurgood Marshall High School principal Sarah Ballard-Hanson insisted the backlash to Ethnic Studies was part of a “national wave against DEI and truth-telling in schools” and that “SFUSD must resist.” A school board member defended the course by comparing the necessity of Ethnic Studies to math. Despite the pushback from admins, parents’ concerns eventually won out. An outsourced curriculum will be used for the current school year while the district develops its own course materials moving forward. Parents are right to continue fighting obvious instances of indoctrination in schools. But this problem will continue to rear its head over and over. The course’s fundamental ideology, viewing everything through the lens of oppression, will continue to shape class materials regardless of any future rework. This ideology is not limited to a curriculum or this course. It’s happening alongside other controversial battles, such as the push for “grading for equity,” a proposed policy the SF Standard reports has faced backlash. Proposed “equitable” changes include revising the grade required to achieve an A as 80 percent, as well as removing grade penalties for late work or participation. As Pirate Wires has also covered, Stanford professor Jo Boaler, who is largely responsible for the new California Math Framework, recommends against teaching middle-schoolers algebra, also in the name of equity. Battles over bias in education have gone on for years before Ethnic Studies and will continue until there is a serious reckoning with how educators view their role in the classroom. It should no longer be acceptable for teachers to mold kids into activists for their preferred causes. It seems inevitable that modern political issues will come up in the classroom. The solution is not for teachers to avoid them, but to address them fairly. Teachers need to present dueling perspectives and teach kids to use their own heads so they can make sense of modern, complex issues. The most egregious aspect of curriculums like SFUSD’s is how it pretends to encourage discussion, when there is clearly no room for real dialogue. When every question is asked using the most absurd politically correct language, students know what their teacher wants to hear. Yes, a few kids will leave Ethnic Studies as true-believing social justice warriors, but the majority will view it as a complete waste of time. If California is looking for more kids to mentally check out of school entirely, they’ve found a great way to do it. The Ethnic Studies debacle is only the latest example of what’s gone wrong in America’s education system. The state attempts to obfuscate the obvious by justifying its curriculum in the introduction, “Why Teach Ethnic Studies In A K-12 Environment?” It claims it will build greater understanding between groups. It goes so far as to say “division is antithetical to ethnic studies.” For a course about ending discord, it sure is causing a lot of it. —Evan Milenko

CITY JOURNAL SUBSTACK LIVESTREAM TONIGHT NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL ELECTION 8:50 PM YOU MUST WATCH THE LINK IS BELOW

Read the full piece from @micsolana on how healthcare unions are leading the charge to enact a one-time wealth tax — ending the concept of private property in California — rather than reforming the state’s healthcare policies 👇 piratewires.com/p/relax-its-…

“Free healthcare for illegal immigrants isn’t happening.” Except in California, it’s literally law, and it’s blowing a hole in California’s Medicaid budget. Here’s how the state ended up spending $9.5 billion per year on healthcare for non-citizens (with plenty of federal funding, btw).

california democrats are proposing a wealth tax, which will abolish the concept of private property, in order to fund free healthcare for illegal immigrants. piratewires.com/p/relax-its-…