Critiquing Fan Fiction and Internet Culture

In this episode, we explore the intriguing story of 4Chan's downfall and the rise of SoyJack Party. The discussion delves into the history and cultural shifts within 4Chan, its eventual corruption, and how a new ironic far-right culture emerged from SoyJack Party. We also touch on the significant hack known as 'Operation Soy Eclipse' that exposed 4Chan's vulnerabilities. Join us for an in-depth analysis of how internet culture is evolving and what it means for the future of online communities.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I'm excited to be with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about the hacker known as four Chan and how he died, you know, no, no. Four chan is, and I would argue, and one of the arguments of this episode is gonna be, you don't even, to be so sad, the four chan environment had become.

So corrupted by the time of its death that nothing of the host survived. Wow.

All right. I'm not talking to that thing in your head. I'm talking to Skara. Nothing of the host survives. Your friend had a feeble mind. It suffered greatly and gave it easily.

Malcolm Collins: You know, it, it was, it was no longer the site that it used to be. And that its death was not like wokes or something coming for it. It was the new form of new Right. Culture coming for it, attacking the old rights, [00:01:00] pathetic extremism.

Right. You know? Okay.

I always thought the Freakazoid theme song seemed bizarrely spot on as a theme song

For OG four Chan culture.

So let's see if I can get away with posting it. Is

textbook case by Seman. Check your computer.

Malcolm Collins: Anything you wanna say or you know about this before I go deeper?

Simone Collins: I actually don't know anything about this and so I am extremely curious to see what has happened because I remember for a while it was four chan and then there was eight Chan and I don't know who's what or where's where. It all seemed so ephemeral to begin with, so I'm very keen to hear what's going on 'cause I never really hung out Fortune, unfortunately.

Malcolm Collins: [00:02:00] Yeah, I mean, I've always been adjacent to it and everything like that, and I've read it, but I've never really enjoyed like posting in it. Mm-hmm. I, I just, I might. Be a humble man. But I just really enjoy when people aate me for my post every Yes. This, this I, this

Simone Collins: anonymity thing really

Malcolm Collins: isn't

Simone Collins: our

Malcolm Collins: game.

Every other major new right figure, you know, you, you talk about like Bronze Age pervert or like R nationalists or like any of these people, they all started pseu anonymously, not me. Oh, no, no. Even just play video games

Simone Collins: to no audience at all. You either play as yourself or as one of our kids. So like you're still like, it's always you in some way.

Yes. Everybody must

Malcolm Collins: praise me. I, why would I write something without expectation of adoration?

Simone Collins: Well, no, but even in video games, that's my point though, is even when there's literally, I. No audience, you still want to be yourself or us. 'cause you identify as your family

Malcolm Collins: or Yeah, yeah. I typically do. Well, or [00:03:00] one of my descendants or something like that is like, what am I, I'm like, okay, this is like a hypothetical descendant or something.

So that's, that's just the way I interact with the world. It needs to be me. Okay, buddy. But anyway, and I, I love that this is antithetical to the new Right. In many ways because all the other new Right. We're all, you know, whether it's, it's, it's, you know, zero HP or Bronze Age pervert or R Nationalist, and yet I'm like,

Simone Collins: here I am.

Malcolm Collins: But it doesn't mean that I wasn't influenced by four Chan culture and I didn't enjoy four Chan culture, but I do think that it lived out its lifecycle. So let's talk about why. Let's talk about what happened.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Wow. This is the end of an era. If, if this is real, how it's playing out, and it may

Malcolm Collins: not come back.

It really may not. So the, the what took it down with a hack called Operation Soy Eclipse. And I'm gonna try to give you guys the most comprehensive view of this. Okay? Anywhere fine. The story begins in September, 2020 when four chance's, QA questions, an answered board was banned. This board originally a space for meta discussions has become a hub for [00:04:00] a specific subculture of users who reveled in creating and sharing soy jack memes.

Caricatures, mocking perceived weaknesses of their ideological opponents. So if you're not familiar with soy jacks, I will throw some on screen for you here. You definitely know what they are. They're those little like, outlines of characters. When you think of like a meme face, that's soy jack, frequently.

When four Chan's moderators shut down qa, these users felt betrayed, accusing the site of stifling their community. In response, a user known as Scoot launched soy jack party or soy jack party, a new image board dedicated to soy jack memes and the irreverent culture that thrived on qa. Now, I want to take a, an aside here because I was in like, okay, why did they ban?

Soy jack. Well, yeah. I mean

Simone Collins: it's, it's four chan too. There should be nothing off limits,

Malcolm Collins: right?

Simone Collins: No. Presumably,

Malcolm Collins: but literally the only reason they banned it and this, this, this, I think shows the beginning of the rot. Okay. They banned it because they were mad that it had become low effort [00:05:00] posting only soy jacks.

And it's like, yeah, because this is where the soy jack culture had grown. You didn't. Yeah. And it'll pass.

Simone Collins: Like if it's not funny, it will pass. You don't have to worry about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but they didn't like the mods. Literally, like, it wasn't like it was offensive. It wasn't like it crossed any boundaries. They just didn't like their culture and style of humor.

And I am like, okay, that is where you, this is, this is for many people who don't know, like. Four chan is where the Brony culture originated. 'cause people wanted to be subversive against the extreme hate. You know, often you get hatred, often you get like condescension of certain groups. And when you had, that was in the four chan culture, the first culture that grew in opposition to that were brony.

This was a group that was being like, Hey, let it subversively. Be sincere about the things we like. Be sweet, be loving, be kind to each other, like let us subvert [00:06:00] the subversive culture's expectation. With kindness. Yeah. And then they'd get banned from all the boards at first, and they're like, okay, we'll consolidate you into the my laurel pony forms.

And this is where mods are asleep, post ponies comes from because they still love to mess with the other boards by being sweet and wholesome in a culture where, you know, CAP and everything like that was how you like, freaked people out. It was like, let's show Sweet Ponies because that'll really annoy 'em.

But within this. What soy Jack represented, and we'll get into this in a bit, is in contrast to the right-leaning extremism of Fortune Chan, like sincere hatred. It was an ironic hatred. It was like a post ironic lifestyle and way of engaging with content and information. Mm-hmm. That is much closer to say the way you and I live when you know there the newspaper written about us recently and they were like, I don't know.

Where the, where the trolling ends and where the, the sincerity begins and it's like, [00:07:00] no, there is no place where the trolling ends and the sincerity begins. Yeah. Those two things are integrated entirely. Yes, they are. We troll you with sincerity. Yes. All right. Anything you wanna say before I go further?

Simone Collins: I just can't believe they stopped it.

Is Chris Poole still like moot still? Oh well you

Malcolm Collins: sold it a long time ago.

Simone Collins: Okay, so he's been out. Okay. That explains more of it too. So like really Fortune Chan is 2015, 10 years. Oh my gosh. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Wow. No, but it's funny it soy jack party was also sold at one point. Okay, so we'll get into all of this. That's

Simone Collins: crazy.

Malcolm Collins: Approximately 218 moderators, managers, and janitors had their information leaked, but specific counts for.gov and.edu are not disclosed by available sources. The total volume of leak data was 120 gigabytes, including internal communications and user ips. So [00:08:00] to, to get this more. They, they lost the source code.

They lost user ips, which means people can now see who is using four chan. They lost the mods, the janitors, and you know what they found out? Now, I wasn't able to get an exact breakdown of this, but this a different

Simone Collins: janitor and a mod on four chan.

Malcolm Collins: They're just different categories of janitors with different levels of power,

Simone Collins: but the

Malcolm Collins: point being.

Is that when they were all leaked all of these positions and people of power, I think it was something like the majority or like a huge chunk had government domains. Like they were using their government emails, a lot of them.edu to manage these accounts. And it showed that it had been. Likely because, you know, if the Feds, they're not gonna be like Dot Fed or something, they're gonna use like Harvard or something.

Right. You know? Right. So do

Simone Collins: you think it was the same kind of thing that was happening with Reddit whereby

Malcolm Collins: it was a hundred percent? Yeah, I think four chan had been, so the government was

Simone Collins: trying to seed information on four Chan

Malcolm Collins: totally captured and corrupted by the feds. At this point, that's basically what we learned is that there was no what it was.

Okay, [00:09:00] well, oh wow. A alive of feds and that's what was left.

Simone Collins: Oh, that is brutal. Okay. Wow.

Quickly. Child, we're running out of time. Lich you. You mess Billy up. You just wanna mess me all up. Mess everyone up. You tricked me.

Malcolm Collins: But I think everybody, come on, everybody's still around today. News four chan with a bunch of feds at this point, like the feds obviously were drawn to it. Like all the cool stuff has on eight chan or whatever, like, you know, on one of the other image boards, like four chan, like when I think of it today, and we'll get into this a bit more.

I always thought it was kinda like old school and antiquated and like a little woke. And we'll get into how it got that perception, right? Like. But anyway it's uncertain whether fortune will ever be back up. Some sources speculate that this could be the end of the platform due to the exposure of 120 gigabytes of internal data, including source code and moderator [00:10:00] emails.

However, restoration is theoretically possible if the site addresses its security vulnerabilities. Though this is gonna require substantial effort and time. And so now we're gonna talk about the founding of this alternate site soy jack party that led the raid. Okay. Okay. Okay. So the site's founder, soot, SOOT, is described as an alt-right conspiracy theorist.

So again, this is not the left took down four chan, it's the. Ironic. Right. Took down the overly sincere. Right. And we see this in our own fans where people are like, what? How can you be okay with, like, how can you be okay with like, it's like, don't take yourself so seriously. You nerd like, yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, oh

Malcolm Collins: I'll just keep reading here. And the site has hosted a faction known as tis named after the founder, the Alrich Conspiracy Series Oh, who expose a form of site specific conservatism called Tism. Sutm is described as extremely conservative compared to other site factions, but this conservatism is more about psych.

Culture and [00:11:00] insularity than explicit far right. Politics.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So they sort of want the site to be like this unique niche thing and they also have conservative politics. Okay. Soy jack party was sold by its founder. Suit to Yuri or K Ovv in July, 2022 for $2,000. After months of negotiations, I sold basically nothing.

This transfer was known as the great purchase and occurred due to suit's, shifting personal priorities, including college commitments who was still in college.

Simone Collins: Okay. That's why $2,000 was enough for him. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And CO's persistent efforts to acquire the site. The sale concluded the second, so Soy V War, A conflict between pro soot and proc factions that involved CP spam doxing and website rate because a Russian cyber crypto businessman.

Exhibits a complex political profile. You might think, oh, so it was bought by a [00:12:00] lefty? No, far right. Associations hosted extremist content via the Coman network, including sites like Goro, Chan, OO, Goro Chan, I don't know if I'd call that far right? That's far per that's perv, right? So sorry. For people who Dunno.

Guro Guro is a form of erotic material that is just like. Like what it's meant to masturbate was in the human mind is like, it's sadism without any caps. Just like extreme nightmare fuel, fuel violence, nightmare fuel. Yeah. Like in sex eating people's brains and stuff like that. You know, like, the people being ripped in half that, that, that, that sort of stuff.

Right. And so, okay, so that's, that's very much like a, I am extreme, but he bought this like subversive ironic site, which is very interesting. And oh, and he promoted anti-vaccine disinformation. It says so also, you know, again, not [00:13:00] lefty for good measure. Yeah. Authoritarian tendencies implemented strict moderation early in his Zoey jack party reign before reverting to such laissez fair style conspiracy leanings, shared North Korean propaganda narratives and nine 11 truther content.

Cyber crime ties allegedly orchestrated DDOS attacks, false flag operations, and Bitcoin fraud schemes. More broadly, he is. Embodiment of early four chan culture. Okay? Like this is, this is clearly not antithetical to four chan culture since the Poul and the subsequent great purchase when the site was sold to, because sparked ongoing factionalism and power struggles was so does frequently clashing.

Was other political factions on the site such as Clause the, the liberal Poe? Because as moderate, so the, the, because faction right. They are the liberal faction of the site. The, even though

Simone Collins: they had harsher moderation, oh, I guess that's considered more liberal these days. Yeah. That

Malcolm Collins: is [00:14:00] considered more liberal was in online years.

That's

Simone Collins: weird. That's so

Malcolm Collins: weird. The the nine 11 Tru Pro North Korea crypto scamming Guro Chan. Russian businessman who thinks vaccines are a scam? That is the liberal faction. Okay. Of this particular war. I'm just, I'm just pointing out here if people wanna frame this in a wider cultural context.

Right. Soy jack party quickly grew into a rival to four chan attracting users who saw themselves as outcast from their former home. The two platforms, while sharing similarities in their anonymous meme driven environments, developed distinct personalities. Four chan remained a sprawling unmoderated space where anything from groundbreaking memes to far right extremism could flourish.

Soy jack party. Meanwhile, carved out a niche with a focus on soy jacks and playful, often ironic tone that set it apart. So it was ironic in it extremism, which four chan was not, and I think that [00:15:00] this represented a second subversion, the brony subversion of four chan in terms of the online cultural, uh mm-hmm.

Background and, and what was happening here. Okay. The 2025 hack with a culmination of this rivalry. According to posts on soy jack party, the hacker had infiltrated four chan systems for over a year waiting for the right moment to strike. On April 14th, they executed their plan. Defacing four chan was a message you got hacked laughing phase reopening the long band QA form.

Leaking sensitive data including source code, moderator emails, and user IP logs. A soy jack party user. Posting under the name chd. Again, these are not progressives. Describe the hack as. Cathartic suggesting a deep seated resentment towards four chance leadership and policies. The motivations appear multifaceted, the reopening of QA to claim a lost space that soy jack.party users felt was [00:16:00] unjustly taken and it was completely unjustly taken.

The leaking of moderator information reflects a broader dis change for four Chan's moderation environments, which many users both on four chart. Four chan and soy jack party viewed as inconsistent and authoritarian. Additionally, the cultural differences between the two platforms was in soy jack party's ironic humor clashing with four chan's, often earnest extremism likely fueled the animosity.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Now I asked it to describe the politics of both. I don't need to go into the politics of four chan. Most people know that they, you know, I earnest extremism. It's the best explanation.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Four chan made. Trump 1.0 as as president. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. But I think that he was already showing the ironic extremism that soy jack came to embody.

Yeah. So soy jack party came to embody ironic far right culture. Soy jack do party shares four chance right wing leanings, but approaches him with a layer of irony of self-awareness. Described by as an alt-right image board, it hosts content similar to four Chans, including bigoted [00:17:00] rhetoric and politically charged memes.

However, its users often. Called soy, teens or jackers are known for their playful irreverent tone using soy jack memes to mock a wide range of targets from leftist four Chan's own right wing users. For example, the CH jack meme popularized on soy jack party character rises the stereotypical four chan poll user as angry for right extremist.

This suggests that while story Jack party aligns with right-wing ideologies in many four Chan's, more in sincere extremism with a degree of mockery and detachment, some sources described to E Jack that party users as self-aware chds indicating their political views while stronger, often expressed through humor rather than dogma.

Thus, before I go further,

Simone Collins: I'm assuming all the Jack names come from like BoJack, like is it kind of. Back that? No, I don't. So,

Note the correct answer here is it comes originally [00:18:00] from WO Jack. Wo Jack comes from a Polish user who popularized the image on German image board crotch on around 2010.

The image was originally named Woe jack after the user who posted it was Woe jack being polish for soldier.

Simone Collins: because it makes me think of just the original Scots-Irish irreverent Jack stories that you have in that book. You got yeah. Yeah. So a lot of people

Malcolm Collins: don't know this, but the greater Appalachian cultural region or the backwoods cultural region in the United States had a tradition of folk stories.

And the one that you are probably most familiar with is Jack and the Giant Beanstalk.

Simone Collins: But Jack, Jack actually got up to a lot more than that.

Malcolm Collins: It was huge. Yes. J Jack stories were an entire collection of stories from this cultural region where you would have the, the blank Jack and the Y Jack and the Z Jack.

I don't think it came from that, but I can see because that culture really embodied this ironic, you know, well, Jack gets up to, you know, a very, [00:19:00] tom Sawyer esque, I'd say. But a bit more, you know, irreverent. Yeah. And, and vulgar when used Tom Sawyer. Yeah. So again, yeah. Really fits this sort of cultural narrative.

From Wikipedia. Unlike moralizing fairy heroes, Jack is often thi vish, lazy or foolish, but emerges triumphant through wit and trickery, resembling the trickster or rebel archetypes.

Malcolm Collins: Wouldn't that be beautiful if they actually had some sort of cultural understanding, but I don't think they did. Okay, so, just take a bit back here. I wanna be like, okay, well let's go into four chan, right? Like, was four chan sold in the same way the other site was sold?

What happened? Because I remember, like in my circles, the perception is four chan went, woke. And of course when I asked ai, I, I was like, no. Well, I mean, some extremist saying four chan went woke, but four chan didn't really go woke. And I'm like, oh, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay. [00:20:00] Well let's see what happened with four Chan and how this perception was in my not far right communities.

Come on. Got the impression that four chan went, woke, and was a bunch of feds and wasn't a place to hang out anymore. Okay? So Hiroki Oma, who acquired four chan in 2015, introduced subtle shifts in moderation compared to the founder moot. Pool's era while pool's tenure was marked by near total freedom.

Naima faced pressure to address legal content due to legal bilities and advertiser concerns. So I'll note here that he ran the most popular message board in Japan at the time, which was built sort of based on four chan, four chan of course. So if you're familiar with like the concept of like Chan, it's like used in anime a lot.

Clearly this was derivative of like anime culture. Obviously they would've had some adoration of this individual. They would've thought of them as as, [00:21:00] oh yeah, I, I can see that they could probably run the site well and everything, but I also understand that if you're not like an absolute maniac who's like living off the grid, you can't be running a site that's regularly posting stuff like CP and stuff like that, or you're gonna end up.

The Feds are gonna come to your house and they're gonna have a little talk with you about why do you, because you do own it. Technically, legally own a bunch of cp, you know, why aren't you dealing with this? Yeah. And so, you know, to be honest, I understand why he addressed this but I see how we could go further into stuff like guro content as well.

Which, you know, isn't strictly illegal, but a lot of people would be like, Hey, can we not post all these like. Ugh, horrifically tortured people and stuff like that. Like yeah, like this is kind of ruining my mood today. Yeah. Ruining my vibe. Yeah. And so then it expands to that. Then people start alternate message boards for that.

But anyway users noted bans for [00:22:00] content like explicit calls to violence, doxing, or certain types of hate speech, which were perceived as more strictly enforced in the past.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Post on X from 2022 to. Complained about moderators Jannie removing threads on poll, politically incorrect or inflammatory rhetoric that users claimed was previously tolerated.

Mm-hmm. The most high profiles of this was when the Q Anon threads were removed in 2020.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's wild. From four chan, what is the road? Yeah, potentially

Malcolm Collins: under pressure of US authorities, almost certainly under pressure of US authorities. You know when the FBI I calls you up? Yeah, that's,

Simone Collins: I can't, I can't understand there being any other reason because the reason.

Normal. Like, well, real people go on four chan is because it's the one place you could expect that to not be moderated. That is so, well I have gone on

Malcolm Collins: four chan for that in age, so that's what, eight Chan's for these days? Yeah. Well, I, I, I

Simone Collins: didn't know. I didn't, it kind doesn't exist anymore. It's standing.

Why

Malcolm Collins: Infinity Chan? There's like 50 other Chans now, you know? Yeah. There's [00:23:00] like, but, but there's like a chan for you. That is what I can say, you know? That's good. Okay. Although the leaking of the four chan source code, you know, if they were using that could cause problems.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway hero. Nama, the founder of two Chan, a prominent Japanese message board.

. And what Pool said when this happened is he described him as a friend and someone I've long admired, which makes sense given he ran this the process of this sale. The sale was a private transaction and had no public bidding or auction being reported.

Pool who had been running four Champ since 2003 cited personal fatigue, was basically the controversies. He didn't like that and financial struggles as factors in his decision to step away. That's Nima already a figure in the image board world was a logical successor due to his experience was two tan channels.

So all made sense there. I don't, I don't really like, I don't see it as bad when I went back and studied it, but like largely speaking, it seems that four chan had been infiltrated and corrupted. Yeah. [00:24:00] To be arbitrarily against irony against you know, anything that broke their, their, their morays, which is, you know, antagonistic to I think what many people on the new right would want.

And so I think that actually this split is the beginning of the new right. Whereas four chan was just extremism for extremism. Take you know, you can look at us. We're like, we were brownies back in the day. Right? Like, we represented the antagonism to this culture because we wanted to be counterculture in a counterculture environment.

Yeah. And what soy jack represents is a new counterculture, but I think a more sustainable one than the brownie culture. Although the brony culture was sustainable for a long time was in a counterculture conferences.

Simone Collins: Remember when we went to that one at the. SFO, Hyatt Regency. We do a

Malcolm Collins: BronyCon. You and I.

Yeah. And I got, and I got so annoyed by so many of the former, like, like what was her name? Like Jenna. Oh.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the one who did friendship as [00:25:00] witchcraft suddenly. Yeah, so she did

Malcolm Collins: friendship as witchcraft and then created a popular YouTube channel. Much more popular than Friendship. Jenny Nicholson. Jenny Nicholson, Jenny Nicholson, and

Simone Collins: she like later disavowed, basically the entire series, mostly on the grounds that she deeply rejects a little running joke that she had in this My Little Pony parody, in which they used the word gypsy, which she.

Was deeply embarrassed about using, because it was a slur. I just think she has really, really progressive parents and it sucks because she, her content is so cute. She, I don't think

Malcolm Collins: it's progressive parents. I think she was brainwashed by her community.

Simone Collins: Sorry, by progressive friends, not parents. I didn't mean to say

Malcolm Collins: parents.

And I think that it sort of scrambled her brain and, and because the content that she made originally was so funny. It was hilarious. Friendship is witchcraft. Might be my favorite, like of any series. My favorite series. Yeah, the,

Simone Collins: it had songs, it had original songs.

As long as it's not one of those s ones with a deceptively

happy tune wing. You were right Ion, there's a simple [00:26:00] explanation inside Crystal ball.

G when, and I was a little gal, boys overtook my city, they tripped me off to the orphanage. Ditch those roots if you wanna. So I on thousand holes and cut a rug with orphans. Now memories are blur in their faces, arms here, but I still know the words of this. When you, all your bangles and.

Simone Collins: The voices were fantastic.

Aren't you afraid the fashion police will come and meet you with their fabulous batons?

Simone Collins: The edits were great.

But I mean, I also just love her YouTube channel and I wish she did more content. It makes me so sad that she [00:27:00] doesn't,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they, they by the way, would take my Little Pony episodes and then like, redo them with like new voices and new plots. But they were very irreverent. They were very, so for people who know me.

My ability to enjoy an art form is typically highly augmented by how far that art form is from a commercial context. Yeah. The, the more iterations deep you go in terms of remixes, the more interested I'm gonna be in that, which is why I always prefer fan fiction. I always prefer you know, remix shows and stuff like that to like originally made.

Stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so, especially if they go far from the source materials intention. So, friendship is witchcraft. It's fun because it's so like. In, in a lot of the ways that it does say you,

Simone Collins: you just, you're crazy about subversion. The more subversive the better.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: The

Malcolm Collins: more subversive or, or, or fallout Equestria is another one that I've always really loved.

Or Fallout Equestria you know, there, there's a few, what was the big one that I liked that was like a remix of that, that was longer than the original. That was just fall out Equest, not so much. [00:28:00] No. There's Fallout Equestrian and then Fallout Equestria. Project Horizons, I wanna say, oh my gosh. And it was even longer than the original.

These, these are postapocalyptic, my little pony universes. One of the earliest terrify terrifying you could find online from us. Was a like a medium post or a, a Huffington Post post about the fandom because like Fallout Equestria, this remix of the original show became so popular. People started to make like video games of it and art of it.

Well, there's a long

Simone Collins: audio book. It Yeah.

Where would you be when the mega spill hits?

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You might eat your special sunco just like you would want on the surface. And in the few short years you and your [00:29:00] stallion will repopulate our great country

Simone Collins: it's, I mean, so I think more people listening to this maybe familiar with LEI, ows. Which I hate, by the way. He's the demon Harry Potter in the Methods of rationality. Yeah, yeah. Fan fiction. F at Equestria is like that, but with an already more obscure fan base of my Little Pony fans who are grown men.

So, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But I mean, I think Harry Potter and the message of rationality, you know, we talked about this recently because we, we had to go back into it, like neither of us could get very far in it because the, the, the, writing is just too, like self-important and, and too, like the, the main character is a, I saw a really interesting breakdown of it recently where they're like, the problem of it is, is it's a Mary Sue, but not a Mary Sue.

Because like you read the character and you're like, wow, this character is so flawed, like such a. Psychopathic self-important. Unable to see the bigger [00:30:00] picture, thinks he knows science, but like it's all the actual science wrong person. And so you read it and you think, oh, he's gonna learn from this, you know, he's gonna, clearly he's not a Mary Sue.

Look at how flawed, and then you're like, oh. That's just the author of the story. They actually have no understanding of science and believe that they have a deep understanding of science. They actually are like sociopathic in the way they approach everything and very self-centered in the way they approach everything, but believe that this is very magnanimous and intelligent.

And it's sort of for a lot of people, like breaks them. They're like, wait a second, I thought that this was all being written subversively. He was serious.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But I think there's a certain category of artists who don't see this and it, and it like brainwash, they're like, oh wow, this guy looks really smart.

Like if you just are like completely self-important to a certain category of they actually believe it. Sincerely. Especially if you code it in like skepticism and stuff like [00:31:00] this, you're like, oh, okay. Okay. That makes sense. But what, any other thoughts on the four chan apocalypse, the end of the era?

Simone Collins: It seems like the, the era has been ending since four chan was originally sold by Chris Poole in, in 2015, that this has been happening over a long period of time. And also that internet culture is evolving. I also think that this sort of reveals too, that fortune was an inherently unstable thing and you can't really have a resistant movement, a resistance movement that stays in the same place like Rebels can't have.

A centralized rebel camp with a giant flag sticking up saying, this is the rebel camp. Because inevitably government spies start hanging out there mostly, and the original rebel camp is now mostly full of government operatives. So it, it makes sense. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it happened, but I do really miss.

Those days in which the news would report on a hacker named four Chan Hacker and all the lovely things hack. Well, now it reports on us. [00:32:00] Don't

Malcolm Collins: you know, like

Simone Collins: the Guardian

Malcolm Collins: article on you recently was just as unhinged?

Simone Collins: It was, yeah. It was extremely unhinged.

Malcolm Collins: So the, the, the Nazis who hate women and want to send them to the Mar-a-Lago breeding pits, Malcolm and Simone they, they have become the new hacker known in a sport channel.

Oh,

Simone Collins: trolls, the neutrals. Yeah. Good news, gracious. But I love it. I

Malcolm Collins: love you guys. Simone, you are great wife. I love you too. Welcome.

Simone Collins: You are a perfect husband

Malcolm Collins: and thank you for dealing with the news crews that came over today, last minute. That was really tough of you. I don't know. They

Simone Collins: were actually pretty amazing, so I have no regrets.

It's kind of nice to see the kids in the middle of the day and they were so efficient. So how can I be mad?

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. You can't be mad at efficiency. That's exactly what you say about the Nazis.

Simone Collins: Oh my God. We're going to hell. We're so screwed.

Malcolm Collins: Love you. [00:33:00]

Simone Collins: I love you too. See if I can.

Malcolm Collins: What was that? Whinging, the reporters who called me this morning were like, we're gonna come to your house at 12 today. This was Inside edition was at our house today, and they were so efficient. I have never seen and so Nice.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the most professional team, just wow. Mm. I can't wait

Malcolm Collins: till we're painted as a Nazi Extreme.

The Guardian article about us in being Nazi. Like, I wanna do a whole episode on this article. I think it's interesting. Oh, why would be, are we Nazis? Oh, because they, they really try to paint us. They like for Tim that, like in our home, they, they said that Simone, her outfit. It is a traditional Nazi outfit.

And it's like what they, they, they called her bonnets, what was it, mother Goose bonnets.

Simone Collins: They, yeah. Well, one, one bonnet that makes people look like Mother Goose. And the other one, which resembles Handmaid's Tale, and they're just [00:34:00] one's a regency straw bonnet, and the other is just a normal, like medieval style bonnet.

And they're not.

Malcolm Collins: Did they, did they, did they mention the Handmaids Tale one? I didn't remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. They, they, I love that they're finally realizing that they're being trolled a little and they're like, okay. They know they're being troll,

Simone Collins: but they, they still like some tone deaf kid.

Keep going. They just can't help themselves. But we're hundred percent

Malcolm Collins: ending again. We are 100% going viral again right now. Oh my God. The number of news stories today. Well, Wolf Blitzer, we were on this morning that was crazy. Situation room

Simone Collins: on

Malcolm Collins: CNN. Yeah, yeah. Because like a character in Guin logs attempt to, I, I wrote these executive orders, or Simone did, and we just like sent them in and then we told the New York Times and then the New York Times, and then somebody told [00:35:00] Trump like, what do you think of this idea?

And he goes, that didn't sound bad. It's like, wait, is this how you do politics? Like it's, it's like the gerin la version of combining like,

We'll never know unless we try, will we? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH You see that? What do you think, Fuzzball? We're the same as you!

They were able

to combine, you were right bro, you were right! Sure looks that way, doesn't it? Wait, how could you

Malcolm Collins: That is, that is, I'm sure to all the people who work so hard to have their political views heard. All we needed to do was freak out progressives and to making, making them make this happen.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, because I, I mean, the only way that it, the White House get informed is because they, they keep getting asked by journalists about the [00:36:00] executive orders we submit.

It's really funny.

Malcolm Collins: It's fantastic. Are we on the right sides? Yes. All right.

So when did you start seeing these eggs? When did they come? They come when it was morning. And guess what? It's Easter. It's Easter Day. Who left the eggs, you guys? The Easter bunny. The Easter bunny. Why would a bunny lay eggs? It's a mammal. No, mommy, that Easter bunny, Emma is a secret. No, that Easter bunny comes in the night.

In the night, yeah. So it's nocturnal. Yeah. He's Does it lay the eggs or does it just deliver the eggs? It just, it just because our, our chickens, birds light eggs. But do buddies light eggs?

They just put them, they're laundry in the bottle. Oh, so it like comes with a [00:37:00] box or a basket and then it puts them where No, you just gonna put it on the floor? No, just And then, and then what happens? You guys pick them up? Yeah. And my Steve is gonna help me. You, your Minecraft, Steve. Then toasty. Is your piggy gonna help you find these eggs?

Yeah. Yeah. I My Steve too. I'll get him, I'll get my Steve Pig. He's not a, it's a Minecraft pig. Oh, I see. And Octavian, you're already dressed. Yeah. We gotta get you dressed, my girl. No, I got pocket. I think we could do better.

Hey Steve, can you help me find these? Oh, he's nodding yes.