Reddit in Full Panic Mode Over Trump

In this episode, we delve into the unexpected resurgence of Fed News on Reddit. Once thought to be inactive, the subreddit is now bustling with federal employees voicing their concerns and resistance against the Trump administration's policies. We explore viral posts and comments that reveal the extreme measures some government workers are willing to take, the ongoing discussions about the inefficacy and political biases within federal agencies, and the implications for Elon Musk's involvement in governmental reform. This episode uncovers a passionate, sometimes incendiary, debate about the future and integrity of America's bureaucratic system.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I'm so excited to be speaking with you today because I have received so many suggestions from our listeners to visit Fed News on Reddit, which we had previously talked about being basically dead. But I guess dead with the caveat that it was mostly government workers who were posting on it.

So

Malcolm Collins: I guess it's not dead when it specifically means Reddit being dead, not Fed News being dead. Yeah. And there was a great graph I saw of our Fed news on Reddit. And then it looked at work hours, like Fed work hours. And basically people are only on our Fed news during government work hours.

Whoops. But I want to talk about what they're talking about. I want to show, you know, how extreme Reddit has gone, how extreme parts of the federal government has gone. I showed you one thing recently, the hour parks, which has changed their sign to like a, a handheld up fist. I don't know. All U. S.

National Park Service and it has on the website, ourparks. org, a message for President Trump. , you've [00:01:00] previously shut down our social media use and eroded environmental protections, but you can't silence our collective voice.

Our parks is a stand to safeguard our environment and prevent four more years of destruction. Join us to protect our national parks for future generations. Sign the pledge now. This is a great list for who to fire, Elon, by the way. Good list.

Oh my gosh. I'm so glad they're putting this together for us.

By the way, if you're wondering what this organization is, this is a group of federal parks employees that specifically got together to oppose the elected will of the people during the first Trump administration, , and now is trying to redouble their efforts and was in Reddit as seen as sort of a champion.

They're like, oh, there was a top post recently about how all parks employees are going to stop Trump. , and if you're wondering who's funding this stuff, , it's being funded. To, , the tune of a hundred million dollars by the Lilly Endowment, Inc. That's the Eli Lilly Foundation's that is supposed to be giving money to, , religious, specifically Christian [00:02:00] focused issues and education focused issues.

But, , nope, they've been taken over by far leftists. And this is what we repeatedly see of, , Christian non profit institutions that were set up in the past.

And, and if you're like, oh, come on, you shouldn't be that mean to like. The people who are hanging out on Reddit. So I go to Reddit and the top post for me, the top post which is not under fed news,

Simone Collins: just on the homepage, right?

Malcolm Collins: On the homepage

Note, it doesn't have that many upvotes, but it must have gotten a number of them very quickly to shoot it to the top. Also, if you check Reddit today versus Reddit of the past, top posts do not have as many upvotes as they used to. The site is not used as much, even though its numbers would imply that it is.

I have to assume they're fed bots. See our other episode on this.

is six random young people working for Elon.

25, 22, 19, 21 with just. gross mischaracterizations of them posted based on the original strong, bad sort of meme from Homestar Runner.

Speaker: [00:03:00] Team Girl Squad! Cheerleader! So and so! What's a face! The ugly one! Hey, guys! Let's go get ready to look so good! Work, work, work!

Malcolm Collins: So they have the Jesus one, age 25, the lactose intolerant one, age 22, the chronic masturbator, age 19, the murderer, age 23, the date grapist, age 24, and the serious one, age 21.

By the way, the one who, who looks a little brown, guess what they named him? The serious one. Right. The actors tellers one is the Asian one, but then I went to it to see what the most like upvoted things were.

And the kid here, who they doxed and listed as a murderer in this chart. , let's see the type of 20 year old who Elon is finding to do this stuff.

I think when you learn who these people really are, you'll understand why they're so terrified of it.

Speaker 7: One day I was just [00:04:00] listening to a podcast back in March. It was with Nat Friedman. He just kind of got on the podcast, explained like, there are these burnt up scrolls that were buried in the Pompeii eruption.

No one knows how to read them. But some professors have created CT scans of these scrolls and they uploaded the data on the internet as a competition to see who could find writing inside of these scrolls. And when I heard that, I was just immediately like, oh my goodness, this is such a cool project. I have to work on this.

I just went home from work that day at the end of the day and I've been working on it evenings and weekends ever since. I run most of the things from my laptop. It's just a normal Macbook, don't worry. But then I've just got like five surplus computers in here. Um, this is what I do most of my work from.

I just spend hours upon hours staring at flattened pieces of the scroll like this, trying to find these patterns which are Um, part of the writing. At the start of the challenge, we had not been able to find any writing at all within these scrolls. There are hundreds of these scrolls that are from the mansion, we've scanned a couple of them, and no one had been able to find [00:05:00] any writing in them using these methods.

Late one Saturday night, I was sitting at a party at a friend's house in Omaha, and I get a text from another person on the challenge team. And he says, Hey, I've just uploaded this new kind of piece of the, of the scroll. You should take a look at it. I remotely accessed my computer. I type into it like, please run the algorithm on this new piece of scroll.

And then I just kind of started. I pull out my phone again, just nonchalantly like, Hey, I wonder how that went. And there are three Greek letters on the screen. Letters I'd never seen before. It was, um, really cool, because it's like, oh my goodness, like, we actually detected new writing in the scrolls using AI.

That was the moment I realized, like, this is actually going to work. Like, we were probably going to read the scrolls. And I completely freaked out. My friends were there, and I was cheering, jumping up and down, you know, screaming, crying, all the stuff. Now, we're reading entire paragraphs from the Scrolls, and hopefully we'll be able to read the entire book, and read the hundreds of other books that were buried in this condition as well.

Malcolm Collins: The entire thing was shut down, couldn't see any comments, and it turned out the most upvoted comment on it when I was on it was a nine negative down vote one.

Why was [00:06:00] this a top comment? I don't know. Reddit is jank these days. No, I didn't accidentally have my filter set to most controversial.

And it was somebody saying, while this entire situation is effed, this post is still just blatant slander. They're basically kids and you call them quote unquote murderers and quote unquote date grapists. Really? And then under that people are