In this episode, the hosts delve into the story of Peanut the squirrel, a pet squirrel euthanized by government authorities. They explore the circumstances surrounding Peanut's demise, issue of government misuse of power, and the broader implications of such actions. The narrative includes discussions about bureaucracy, personal anecdotes, and wider political ramifications, ultimately emphasizing the need for systemic reform.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone.
I'm excited today. I'm going to be talking to you about Peanut the squirrel, the unsung American hero.
We've done full episodes on topics where I'm like, this is something I want to know more about. I want to know the full story. I want to know, like, unbiasedly what happened. Or was the right bias.
Speaker: I can feel it oh lord I've been
Malcolm Collins: for people who don't know, the broad story of Peanuts the Squirrel is, Peanuts the Squirrel was a pet squirrel that was euthanized by heavy handed government practices.
We are going to go into how this happened, why this happened, and I'd also say this isn't necessarily a rare phenomenon. So, people are gonna be like, what do you mean not necessarily a rare phenomenon? this is somebody saying, what radicalized you? And it's a black woman, Caitlin Greenidge. She goes, when we lived in public housing, my mom started a community garden to grow food, to save money, and to occupy the kids that lived there. And the public housing authority came and [00:01:00] pulled out all the plants and poured bleach on the ground to destroy it because gardens weren't allowed.
Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.
I mean, Victory Gardens were the most patriotic American government supported thing in World War II. What is this?
Malcolm Collins: I, I just gonna say progressives are evil. But anyway, we'll get into this more like, it, it, it gets more evil than you could conceivably imagine with peanuts, squirrel. It gets into the level of you're like, would they genocide my people?
And then you'll read this and you'll be like, oh yeah, they would, and they wouldn't even think of it as a thing. So
Simone Collins: as a squirrel going to reveal this, I, I'm out of the loop, actually. Oh, okay. All right. I'm glad you're airing this then, because the election kind of. drove right over the election,
Malcolm Collins: hid how severe the peanut, the squirrel story is.
And I think it really shows the true evil that the bureaucracy represents and why we need to fight it [00:02:00] and burn it and rip it from every state and every County in every country, because it is evil in the extreme, but. Peanut's story began seven years ago, when Mark Longo found him as an orphaned baby squirrel in New York City after his mother was hit by a car.
Longo took Peanut home, where he nurtured him back to health due to a severe injury that caused Peanut to lose half his tail. He was deemed unable to survive in the wild. Consequently, Longo decided to keep him as a pet, sharing their adventures on social media platforms. Like Instagram, where Peanut grew up to 720, 000 followers.
Simone Collins: Okay, so this was a celebrity squirrel.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this is why it matters as well. It was a celebrity squirrel, and it may have played a part in handing Trump this election. What? Oh,
Simone Collins: wow. The plot thickens. Sign me up for this. This is good. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: On October 30, 2024, so right before this election, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, [00:03:00] DEC, executed a raid on Longo's home in Pine County following an anonymous complaint about illegally keeping of wildlife.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): There was rumors that somebody named Monica Keithley. had admitted to it in a Tik TOK video. And then everybody went and attacked somebody else called moniker Kessler, but then they attacked Monica Keesler. And it has since come out for a freedom of information requests that she was not the person who did it, or at least there is no proof that she was the person who did it.
So I'm. Just trying to clear this up, but basically the evidence seems to cite to our turn, not being the person who did it. But a lot of people think it was her.
Malcolm Collins: So, this is very similar to like how haters about us will say something like, Oh, you know, let's raid their house with the Child Protective Services, which we've had called on us twice by haters. It's
Simone Collins: similar to swatting. So people used to just, I think now swatting is more rare because it was abused so much.
But now people call CPS or they call animal, some kind of like [00:04:00] animal humane service. Remember the llama farm had, had the, had like some kind of department called on them a bunch of times. The trans llama farm.
Malcolm Collins: But but it during this raid and you'll see how completely unjustified this was in a second during this raid authority seized both peanut And Fred, a raccoon that Longo had recently rescued.
The DEC reported that Peanut had allegedly bit an officer during the inspection, which led to both animals being euthanized for rabies testing. Both animals, the raccoon bit nobody. They euthanized both animals. The decision sparked outrage. Hold on, hold
Simone Collins: on, hold on. Because you and I, we had a rabies scare this summer and we were, it was, there was a bat that was dead in our yard and we actually did have to send it in.
It was still alive. And what happens is if, if there is potential exposure, you know, maybe someone like a child was bit by an animal, you are supposed to send it in for testing so that you can tell. This
animal couldn't [00:05:00] have conceivably had rabies.
Yeah, that's the thing is, is squirrels don't. For my understanding, squirrels don't carry rabies.
Rodents don't carry rabies.
It doesn't matter if the squirrel bit them. The squirrel was not rabid. And also, if the squirrel was rabid, this guy would know because it was in his house and he would know that the squirrel was lethargic and then aggressive. But that's just
Malcolm Collins: by another animal. How was it bit by another animal?
It was in his house and they knew.
Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah, the raccoon could have been rabid though, but the raccoon didn't bite, right? Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: so, and it gets, so, so just, you know, how overreaction this was in terms of like wasteful government spending, six to eight New York Department of Environmental Conservation officers arrived at the house.
They spent hours inside the farmhouse searching every part of the home. He described it as quote We weren't allowed to move. We were police escorted to use the bathroom end quote
Speaker 2: Arms of the angel From [00:06:00] You find some comfort here.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): There has been some recent speculation that this may have been over an only fans account that he and his wife ran because they also do babysitting. Sometimes the reason he suspected this might be the case. Is because the first question that was asked of them is, do they have any. Cameras in their house. However, I kind of doubt that because we know the agency, these individuals came from, they came from the animal protection agency.
And because of that, you can't have animal protection agency. People do an investigation into. Porn that just makes no sense.
Like they, I don't think cross departments to do things like that. So I think that this is just him freaking out. And the reason they were probably asking about cameras is they wanted to make sure no footage leaked of them doing this because it would have made them look bad.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: Also side note, apparently they made $800,000 a month on only fans and they bought a [00:07:00] 358. Acre property with this money and. What should I be doing? I did not know. You could make that much money on only fans that's in the scene. $800,000 a month.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: I mean. Look. I may have some misgivings around pornography, but they are not $800,000 a month misgivings. I can, I can get around any scruples I have for that kind of money. So should Simone and I be starting an only fans account in the comments, by the way, this is a joke. I would never actually do that even for $800,000 a month.
Malcolm Collins: They had a search warrant which they used to seize a quote unquote unlawfully possessed gray squirrel and raccoon And any other, well, no other unlawfully possessed wildlife, that's all he had.
And they begin to aggressively question his wife, Diana, about potentially being an illegal immigrant. Which, by the way, people are like, Republicans do this? No, [00:08:00] Democrats do this. The Democrats, and we saw this in our election video for anyone who wants to see this, the moment they don't think that somebody's supporting their cause, they will not only deport you, they will sterilize you, they will kill you because that is who they are as human beings.
They use you because they think they own your identity, not because they give a flying fuck who you are.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: How cavalierly the Democrats weaponize political institutions against their opponents. It's just wild to me. They do it so frequently. Now they don't even notice that they're doing it. , so they'll say something like, oh my gosh. Now that the Bellin Trump is elected. He will hit his opponents with frivolous lawsuits.
And I'm like, you. You understand that felon isn't like a slur. It's a sign that he was targeted by a frivolous lawsuit by his political opponents. It's wild that Trump hasn't done this to his political opponents and yet his political opponents [00:09:00] regularly do it to him. And his supporters, you know, like Elon Musk was pointing out the, , oh, we can't let you launch a rocket because it may hit a whale. When it, when it enters the ocean, like. What and. To give you an idea of how delusional they have gotten around this is despite the fact that everybody knows, and they constantly remind us this whole, every time you mentioned that Trump's a felon.
All, I think it's oh yeah. You weaponized politics to hit him with a frivolous lawsuit and they're like, no, it was, , I'm like, why is he a felon? They're like, um, he, um, do you want me to remind you why he's a felon? He's a felon because his lawyer told him that the way that he should make hush payments to a prostitute was to give the lawyer money and then the lawyer would make the payments.
And then New York said, no, he needed to label those payments. Hush money to prostitute. , which of course no one's going to fucking do. , and Andy, his lawyer told him this was an okay thing to do, and it seems like something that would be okay. ,
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: And then you're like, well, you know, he shouldn't have paid hush money to a prostitute that kind of textual impropriety union [00:10:00] of itself makes him unfit to be president. And I'm like, oh, you know, who else was paying hush money? Uh, yeah, Campbell, his husband who knocked up the maid and then paid her hush money to keep her quiet about it.
Or how about Kamilah when she was in her twenties and was sleeping with a 60 year old to get a political appointment. Yeah. That happened to. Oh, you didn't know about those things while they're pretty well documented. If you don't know about them, it's because the media you're listening to is actively hiding it from you.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: and this was only supposed to be a misdemeanor, but then they said, oh, he was doing this to cover up another crime.
What crime. They didn't mention. Cause he obviously wasn't. , so very clearly just a politically motivated thing. It is wild to me that they will make these accusations.
With so much confidence that this is something that Trump would do. When they just did it to him in a reminding you, they did it to him.
Speaker 8: Controversial new ad from the Trump campaign rolled out this week depicting a montage of all the people the former president says he'll kill if he's elected in November. The largely [00:11:00] silent commercial, which openly promises the murder of various political rivals, celebrities, and even a handful of ordinary citizens,
Speaker 9: I think Trump is putting forward a clear and forceful vision of vengeful bloodshed, decapitating Pete Buttigieg on day one, ending the lives of Kim Kardashian, Jake Tapper, the Golden State Warriors.
This is the kind of thing that has proven to be successful with firing up his base, and the campaign believes it's a winning message.
But I think it's worth pointing out that the ad is not entirely partisan. Don Jr. appears in there several times,
Speaker 8: thanks for joining me, Mark. As someone who is featured prominently in the ad, I'll be keeping a close eye on this story as it develops.
Malcolm Collins: This is, this is just so wild to me that this happened, and I can think of nothing as a better message for why it's important that the entire Democletic establishment, whether you're in New York or Pennsylvania, we need to [00:12:00] start fire Bye. Bye. Torching the bureaucracy because it's evil.
Malcolm Collins: It doesn't. And do you not see that Simone and I'm like this, these are people who would like callously kill someone for no reason.
There is no reason for them to do this.
What are your thoughts?
Simone Collins: There's
this issue when, when you, and I think pretty much everyone can identify with this when you get caught in a bureaucracy and something is obviously wrong and you're obviously not being treated well, you're like, well, there's nothing I can do, you know, policy dictates that I have to do this. And you're like, well, yeah, but someone could die.
And they're like, well, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I can't help you. This happened. For example, when we have the rabies scare with our family, right? Like the County was able to give us you know, a thing saying, you know, this family has been exposed. You know, we recommend that they get [00:13:00] rabies shots, but no one was willing to provide them to us unless we went to an emergency room and paid 10, 000 for emergency room admittance.
Yeah. And then rabies shots, which we couldn't afford to pay. So it was just like, well, then I guess you're gonna die, but there's nothing I can do because we don't have a policy of you know, prescribing rabies shots. The policy!
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They're like, literally, and I'll, I'll try to put some things here of like
Speaker 3: People of Earth, this is Prosthetic Vogan Jelts of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you are probably aware, plans involve the building of a hyperspace express route through your star system. And your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.
There's
no point asking all surprised about it. The plans and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning office in Alpha Centauri for the 50 millionth years.
Simone Collins: I think that's really real, you know, and it's scary because I think people are experiencing this more in Canada where like euthanasia is the option. They're just like, well, like, Oh [00:14:00] my God, let's
Malcolm Collins: talk about the euthanasia thing in Canada where somebody was like, Oh, you know, it's been a few years and you guys were supposed to install this thing in my house so I can get to the top floor of my house.
And I haven't been able to go up there in years. And they're like, well, have you thought about killing yourself?
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's pretty hilarious, but yeah, I think this goes to show that. And people accuse very common conservatives of being evil mustache uniform people from Germany, but really, in the end, you know, this dehumanization and willingness to just kind of let people fall by the wayside, take things from people.
It can happen in any bureaucracy. Especially when it becomes large and people just sort of blindly follow rules and the amount that the number of atrocities that someone can commit. I think we don't normalize just how quickly humans can do that. And you just assume that that can't happen unless someone's like actively evil and ha ha ha, cackle, cackle.
And that's [00:15:00] not at all. Bureaucracies
Malcolm Collins: are actively evil and we don't categorize them as the true form of villain that they are. I mean, consider the people who called CPS on our family. Right. They're like, they're not living the way I want them to in the same way, the people who called, you know, the environmental protection service on this individual.
Simone Collins: Let's be clear. These are people who vouched online to not stop fighting until our children were taken away from us. They, this, it's the same kind of thing of like. I want your squirrel taken away from you. I want your children taken away from you. Like whatever it is, the people who are triggering these raids and these visitations really want these people to lose their livelihood, to lose their families, to lose, you know, the, the, the, the animals and people that they love most and even their careers.
I mean, if this girl had that many followers, maybe he also was making money from like ad revenue and stuff. So like, he probably also lost income. And yeah, I just it's. It is scary. It is scary.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I [00:16:00] mean, not most, but what I see is that the same action that somebody, it took this guy to a million followers before somebody decided to do this to him.
But these people are just vile. They just want to see other people suffer because these people are not like them. And bureaucracies give them power because they listen to them. Things like swatting should not even be possible in any sort of a normal society. It's scary. Things like this shouldn't, they could have six to eight members of an administration like paid for a full day searching his house.
And then one of them gets bitten because they were rough handling his animals. Like did they even get bitten or were they just like convinced like we're going to go in there and murder everyone? You know, like that's, that's sort of the thing, right? Like this comes off as dystopian and evil to an extent that I almost cannot conceive.
And I am just so shocked [00:17:00] that we live in an environment that's so close to this and yet anyone can still vote Democrat. Even a single human can still vote Democrat knowing that we live in this world.
Simone Collins: And it's scary. So what, well, what happened after this? Like, was there backlash? Were there ramifications? Were people questioned? No,
Malcolm Collins: people freaked out, but you know, New York being so Democrat, they're not going to be able to shut down this department. You know, in, in. If we get into the administration, this is one of the things I may want to see is, is promoting bills to dissolve these sorts of departments at the state level.
They're like, oh my god, how could you do that? Well, they shouldn't have had the right to do this.
Simone Collins: So I feel torn because, you know, a lot of animal control departments and in human safety departments do really, really, really important work. Like I don't believe that
Speaker 5: Welcome to Animal Control. Let me show you around. Those are some chairs. That's a cat or a possum. , this is a nApkin where I wrote down a cool name for a dog. Bark [00:18:00] Obama.
Oh, yo, yeah, we found this bird outside. We tried to turn it into a work whistle, like in the beginning of The Flintstones.
Tougher than it looked, though.
Malcolm Collins: Animal control famously does very little of meaning.
Speaker 6: It does seem to be very poorly run, but we've only been here for two minutes. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Speaker 5: Four. There's four ways to skin a cat. Ow!
Speaker 6: Ow! What is this?
Speaker 5: Coyote
Speaker 6: trap, dude.
Speaker 5: You're fired. You're fired. The whole department is fired.
Malcolm Collins: And I feel like that's probably what we were looking at was in this circumstance, is an animal control that was mostly a self masturbatory effort. There's even recently been an entire show done about animal control, about how feckless they are. A reality TV show or reality TV show. It's supposed to be like a, because they don't want to do cops anymore because they see the medievals.
So now they're doing animal control. It, I think it was done by the people who did, or, or in relation to, because they had some of the same actors who did that, a cop show. What was it called? It was Brooklyn nine, [00:19:00] nine. Oh
Speaker 7: Should I be concerned? They are violent and have famously bad temperaments. It's starting to feel extremely targeted! This
Malcolm Collins: and they did an animal control show because many people in the last season of Berkeley nine nine were like, Oh, I feel so uncomfortable.
The actors because we're promoting cops and like suddenly they were supernatural bastards.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And so they couldn't even
Malcolm Collins: humanize cops. They were like, that's evil. So while humanize you know, murderers of little peanuts,
Simone Collins: I, yeah, I, I feel more conflicted than you. I, I, I think I'm the one who interacts more with government.
related officials and employees on my part. And pretty much everyone I've interacted with has been pretty great. Hardworking, well meaning.
Malcolm Collins: Who would authorize this? It's not just like there were at least six people in this guy's house.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:20:00] Yeah. None
Malcolm Collins: of them stood up against this decision.
None of them said, what are you doing? You psycho.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, clearly there are bad actors here. Clearly, clearly there are toxic policies. I mean, I could see this play out in a way where these people were just doing what they, they were following standard operating procedure. They, they don't deviate because they don't care.
And they've dealt with so many at this point, like, Just random squirrels and, and random animals. But you want
Malcolm Collins: to know, rodents don't carry rabies!
Simone Collins: Yeah, but I'm sure that there's some kind of policy where they're like, Well, an animal bit me, like, we have the right to just take it and euthanize it and test it anyway, because, you know, whatever, like,
Malcolm Collins: I don't, I don't buy that.
I think they went in there with the intention of killing these animals.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: probably. But why? Like, why were they that cruel? Why were they that messed up? Why did [00:21:00] five to nine people, they, this is what I read of this situation. The, the fact that like five to eight people went in there to me says one, They looked at this guy beforehand, they saw that he was famous and two, they wanted to send a message about how much control they had and how much power they had over people who were more publicly famous than they are.
Simone Collins: This could be, and there could have also been a meeting behind closed doors about this person promoting squirrel ownership and that being a thing that they didn't want to start dealing with because then people would start owning, you know, all sorts of like possums and raccoons that they found on the road.
And the girls are not
Malcolm Collins: positive in raccoons. They are rodents and they
Simone Collins: get it, but you could see that this, them having this meeting in this government building where they're like, Hey, this guy's making people think that they can just find, you know, find roadkill and adopt it. And that that's okay. And we can't have, you know, we already deal with people who have raccoons and their addicts and all these other things.
And, you know, children, children, like there have been, [00:22:00] so there have been people, just, let's, let me still mean this. There have been cases, actual real cases of couples who decide that I'm going to adopt a raccoon and then they go out and they leave their sleeping baby in their house with a raccoon and the raccoon eats the baby's face off.
Like literally. This is
Malcolm Collins: so much less than pit bulls. Why don't they go out and kill pit bulls?
Simone Collins: Well, but you understand that like encouraging people to own wild animals is not a good idea. And I think that they probably wanted to show a very prominent case of like, here's what we're going to do to you if you try to do this.
Cause it's not. And now here's the problem is this guy was a wildlife expert. He knew what he was doing. He was not at your average Jack off. Like, and he, he clearly was responsibly owning this animal. And you're absolutely right as well. The pit bulls hurt a lot more babies and other people's pets and adults than we Random raccoons, because most people are sensible enough to not put raccoons in their house.
And pit bulls are also way more [00:23:00] likely to, you know, get aggressive and do terrible things. We literally bred to kill children. Well, and well, yeah, like sort of small, small males. So yeah, whereas raccoons just get hungry sometimes, I guess. But like my point here. Is that I, I think that it's important to be aware of how these things actually happen.
And what you're doing is wrong because what you're saying, you're, you're just strawmanning these people and saying, Oh, they're just evil. They just want to do evil. And what's happening here instead, you have to understand the bureaucratic processes that lead this to happen. If you want to actually dismantle it, if you want to actually burn it down.
Way
Malcolm Collins: more evil than you're giving them credit for. I don't think you believe it in human. Evil and human evil is always downstream of bureaucracy.
Simone Collins: No, I know. I know for a fact, I believe this very deeply within me that everyone is doing the very best they can with the information they have. I agree are possessed, we'll say
Malcolm Collins: by evil information.
Simone, I agree with what you're saying. I agree with what you're saying. I do not think that there are individuals out there in the way that progressives frame conservatives, [00:24:00] individuals out there who are like. I'm going to get these people. Oh, I'm so excited to get these people. That doesn't exist.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-5: Outside of bureaucracies the core time when people do evil or are convinced in mass to do evil, if they get lied to and convinced that a group wants to get them. So you very rarely have a group of people. That's like, Ooh, I can't wait to get X people, but what you often have with a group of people that sakes. Oh, X people are victimizing me. So I should in retaliation, get them.
This is how the Nazis got people to target the Jews. They said, well, the Jews are privileged. The Jews have power that Jews have taken your money. , And they used that to get them to target the Jews. This is how the works get all of these people. If you watch these, Progressive's freaking out about losing the election, they believed that they had the right to commit any sort of evil they wanted to against Republicans to hit Trump was frivolous lawsuits because they had been convinced that these people were out to get them even when this is very clearly not true.
Just like [00:25:00] the Nazis.
Did it, Kamel is running the same playbook.
Malcolm Collins: But people who will follow up, there are
Simone Collins: people who are excited to get those people that, but that's because they think that those people are evil.
They think, or they think that humans are, you know, a scab upon the earth that needs to be scratched off and healed. You know what I mean? Not
Malcolm Collins: what conservatives think is what progressive things, but what I will say is there is a category of people who sees their entire life about exercising power over those they see as weaker than themselves.
That's their entire goal. Everything is about how do I exercise power as cruelly as I can upon others? And how can I use the bureaucracy to accomplish this? This is what Cairns are, this is what the Cairn Crusade is about, and this is what led to this. I do not believe that anyone involved in any stage of this was genuinely like, how do I make the world a better place?
Speaker 10: Karen, you're back. I'm here to see the manager. You, you, you can't be here. Oh can't I? No, no. The [00:26:00] Consumer Rights Act says that I can now get me the manager. I demand that you listen. Listen to everything that I say. You are a useless employee.
Look at you. I don't know where he is. You've got the slightest idea of what is going on here. . Look at you now! Is this what you call customer service? Is that what it's become? I'm sorry! Where is the manager?
Speaker 11: There
Speaker 10: you are.
Speaker 11: What is
Speaker 10: this? This is your undoing.
Speaker 11: No, this is impossible.
Speaker 10: Call yourself a manager. No, no, no. We are going to tell everyone about this.
I want to complain about the state of the store, and the horrible service that we have had to deal with. Your hair disgusts
Speaker 11: me. You have far too much makeup on. That Louis Vuitton is a fake.
Speaker 10: How dare you! You take that back!
Her hair is fabulous! Yuck, yuck, yuck. Adam, Rowan,
Speaker 11: I have them in [00:27:00] a temporary rage paralysis. We must surround
Simone Collins: sorry, I'm trying to get a word in edgewise, but like, she's not letting me.
Malcolm Collins: Girl, girl, I've given you so many opportunities to fall asleep.
Simone Collins: You've resisted. Okay. I disagree. I think that this was them kind of like how Martha Stewart was used to this prominent. I'm going to make an example of you because you're famous and we're going to use this to show you that, you know, like no, one's above the law and to get everyone to pay attention to our rules, which we want more people to be aware of.
And they also do not promote wild animal ownership among people. And this was a prominent, you know, with, with a lot of followers person. Who is making it look really cool to own things like squirrels and probably, I bet the raccoon featured in some of this content as well. And that, that is dangerous.
It's not, it's not a good idea unless you really know what you're doing. And he really knew what he was doing, but he was also kind of influencing people who don't know what they're doing.
Malcolm Collins: Squirrels are not dangerous to own. That's the thing.
Simone Collins: Yes, squirrels, I imagine are quite fine. I [00:28:00] mean, people own all sorts of animals, do things to hurt family members and other animals and their owners.
But I'm just, I'm trying to say how I think this could happen with well meaning people. I do think the person who called this on him, well, again, you know, the people who call CPS on us, Do care about children. Do think we're hurting our children. No, they're wrong.
Malcolm Collins: They care about enforcing their cultural value system, and they have deluded themselves into thinking that equates to caring about children.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah, but I mean, like, your own mother was like, Oh, if you don't spend a million dollars a year on them, you're mistreating your children. And like, Simone,
Malcolm Collins: come on. You understand that that's an unrealistic expectation. I do, but I'm just saying that those people don't realize,
Simone Collins: those people don't realize that.
Those people just genuinely believe that these unrealistic standards are, must be met or that children are being brutalized.
Malcolm Collins: You know what I mean? All I'm saying is that everyone involved in the Peanuts and Squirrel Massacre needs to be rounded up. They need to be arrested, and they need to be [00:29:00] court martialed.
That is something that I think the next Trump administration needs to handle. People need to understand, you cannot, you cannot do this BS.
Simone Collins: I will say that what they did was messed up, and I don't
Malcolm Collins: It's not messed up, it's evil in the extreme, and it's evil in any reasonable person would have known it was evil.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that many people to raid someone's house, you know, it's one thing to be like, hey, dude, like I don't know. Do you know what the rules are?
Like, what rule was this man supposedly violating? No rule. No rule. So you're allowed to own?
Malcolm Collins: So what? Yeah, you're allowed to own squirrels. You're allowed to own raccoons. These aren't illegal to own.
Simone Collins: Then, then can he sue? Like, on what grounds could they go in and do that?
Malcolm Collins: Somebody said this guy was being naughty. This is about authoritarianism overriding the rights of the individual.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well I think that's another reason to [00:30:00] keep the state on both a national and local level as small as possible, because it can be abused as soon as it's too big.
And that's just not, not okay. The more, the more that the state or any bureaucracy could be used as a cudgel against people, the, the worst things get, Oh my God, give up and fall asleep. You know, you want to, Oh, you know,
you want
to,
you're resisting it so much. Oh, she's the worst. I love her so much.
I love her
Malcolm Collins: children.
Don't worry. I'll come and beat her for you.
Simone Collins: People will think that you're not kidding. I, this is, and then we'll have CPS called on us again.
Malcolm Collins: It's time for dinner. I'm excited for dinner. I'm excited to be married to you. I'm excited to live a life with you. Oh, by the way, don't forget to cut up the long hot pepper I got from the grocery store for the fried rice.
Simone Collins: Okay. So you want me to redo the fried rice with the long hot?
Malcolm Collins: [00:31:00] Not redo. I mean, you're reheating it anyway. Yeah, I'm, yeah, I'm
Simone Collins: reheating. Well, I'm going to do a small batch for the kids. I have to do two pans then because there's going to be the non spicy pan for the kids. Ignore it then.
Malcolm Collins: Just do it however you want.
Whatever is easiest. I love you.
Simone Collins: What if I, what if I made a ramekin full of the spiced up long hot, but it wasn't so good? So what I
Malcolm Collins: do is take about a quarter of the long hot, cut it into very small pieces. Okay. Very small. And then we can dust it on top of my part of the fried rice at the end.
Simone Collins: Okay. Just one quarter of it.
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, now she's looking for something that spicy. You're not even going to get that much, you know, by the way, the story of peanut, is it worse than you thought from what you had heard?
Simone Collins: No, I'd heard all of those things. I will. The one thing I hadn't heard. It was how many people were involved. And that is insane.
Also just like, even if you don't care about peanut, even if you don't care about this guy, even if you don't just the, the, the government [00:32:00] waste our tax dollars and we will New Yorkers tax dollars, but still being in New York, when you consider now you fall asleep, the struggle session of these podcasts with irritable Indy who needs to take a nap and the very fricking end.
She's out.
Malcolm Collins: That's sweet, by the way. Oh,
Simone Collins: I mean, and now I don't want to get up because now she's all snuggled. What these children are.
Malcolm Collins: So I'm sorry. Our children are a constant pain in your life.
Simone Collins: Oh, she's so
Malcolm Collins: sweet.
Simone Collins: Oh my God.
Okay. But yeah, that you have to consider, you know, these people are getting pensions.
These people like government workers are actually quite expensive because they typically have full benefits. They have pensions. They, they have insurance, like all it just. And probably they have some kind of car that they're driving around in, like, this is just a huge waste of money. So it's even [00:33:00] egregious in that perspective.
And it really bothers me. We do with our, our, the business that we run, that's our only paying day job that we're about to voluntarily leave, which good luck to us. Right. We do these RFPs, we respond to requests from various types of governments and government funded entities to do their travel management and our business response to them saying, here are our prices.
Here are our services. And. We'll have these calls where it's just like really simple questions that they, they want to ask us and like eight people will be on the call and we'll have to go whole like hour to talk about it. And seven out of the eight people are doing absolutely nothing. And I'm just thinking about just, okay.
I'm like counting up like, well, Kate's probably costing them an average of 50 per hour per person. Like this call cost. You know, let's, you know, seven [00:34:00] times a 50, like, why are you doing this? Like this, the amount of money that was just wasted for something that you could have emailed me about is so yeah, that, that stuff keeps me up at night just as much as tragic squirrel stories for sure.
But I will. I
Malcolm Collins: love
Simone Collins: you too. Final piece of advice. Maybe I could ask you to share is. Okay, if people are using the government as a cudgel to hurt families, they're calling CPS on families. They're calling, you know, animal services on, on families. You know, this is the new swatting. What should people be preemptively doing to protect themselves?
If raids are now the, a weapon being used
Malcolm Collins: just so little you can do and what you haven't seen is that we have been protected because we are, you know, like a heterosexual married couple. That is, if you're like a single guy, the [00:35:00] first time you get CPS called on you, the kids get taken away
Simone Collins: and 37
Malcolm Collins: percent of American kids have had CPS called on them.
Simone Collins: Well, then maybe. I kind of feel like a disaster preparedness fan, a plan that people need to have.
Malcolm Collins: I know, and this is what I've done recently is say, I'm not taking my kids in public parks anymore. I'm not putting them around public people anymore. It is too dangerous.
Simone Collins: Well, but also like, have a lawyer that you are ready to call who knows who you are.
But also know your rights in your state and be prepared to say like, You are not allowed to do this because I think a lot of what's happening is, is people are letting groups into their house, not knowing what's going on.
Malcolm Collins: That's not true, Simone. In the case of Peanut, they had a search warrant. They had a search warrant.
You are, you are misunderstanding how powerful these I'm just, well, I'm just, I'm trying to think of what, you know, like All you can do is prevent them from seeing you if you don't have the power to resist. [00:36:00]
Simone Collins: So you're just saying people need to be secretive and hidden.
Malcolm Collins: With us, we are only comfortable doing this because we have the power to resist the people who may attack us.
You
Simone Collins: mean all the guns? That's not going to help if it's the government. No,
Malcolm Collins: not the guns, I mean the public profile, the number of impactful and successful friends who could influence government policy. If somebody attempts to take one of our kids from us, if CPS comes here and they say, Oh, we're going to take X kid or Y kid, we would win them back within a few
Simone Collins: weeks.
It
Malcolm Collins: would be, we know the press to contact, we know how to make a story go viral. Your average person doesn't know that. If they take their kids, their kids are taken.
Simone Collins: We'll do
Malcolm Collins: a separate episode on this because they love taking children from people. This is like a mainstream thing at this point.
Simone Collins: Yeah, which is, it's extra disturbing [00:37:00] because The people who work for Child Protective Services or, you know, whatever child services entity there is, these are people who genuinely care about children and we work with some what I'm saying Malcolm is the ones that I've met and we've worked with them both as service providers and as people like the people who come to our house.
These are people who really care about the wellbeing of children. And these are groups that like, for example, child protective services in our area, primarily is just distributing food and clothing and diaper aid to families of limited needs. Oh my
Malcolm Collins: God, Simone, you buy into their BS. It takes one totalitarian bad apple to start taking children for people.
It's true. But what I'm saying
Simone Collins: is. When people are doing that, they're also taking resources away from families that it could actually benefit from the services. I
Malcolm Collins: don't disagree with that, but you just need to be much stricter about these organizations and you need to clean them out, like taking a. a flamethrower to them.
You can't have [00:38:00] any disregard people like, Oh, I've been with this organization for 25 years. Fuck you. How many kids have you taken compared to other people's count? This should be easy to count. Same with this.
People are not fully considering this because there's people like you who say, Oh, many people at these organizations are doing this right. I, the people at these organizations are doing this right, are looking forward to the flamethrower day.
Simone Collins: That's fair. And I, I think that that's something that we see when we bring up this message.
I think it's the same for like effective altruism. Is it when we talk about effective altruism, needing a really big reckoning, pretty much everyone we know who's a real effective altruist is like, I 100 percent agree. We need to clean house. By
Malcolm Collins: the way, check it out.
Simone Collins: Yeah. That's the same with many of these organizations [00:39:00] where, you know, People come in same with teaching schools, right?
Like we know a lot of really amazing teachers who are like, burn it down. Like I came here wanting to help kids and I'm prevented from doing so every single day. And that's I think that's the message is I just I don't want people to come away thinking that we hate. government workers, or that we think that they're bad people, I think that they're in systems that have become inherently corrupted, and I think that they know better than everyone else what needs to be done to clean them up, but they're kind of prevented from doing so.
Oh, you're so understanding,
Malcolm Collins: Simone. This is why everyone wants you to be president and not me. Everyone knows that you would never go crazy with power.
Simone Collins: I'm too autistic for that.
Malcolm Collins: I love
Simone Collins: you. I love you. Have good day. You too. Good day, sir. I Good day, man. I said good day.
Malcolm Collins: No, I said,
Simone Collins: I
said, I
said,
Malcolm Collins: I said I Little sun toast.
He does.
Simone Collins: I said, I said, I said
Malcolm Collins: I love you. Yes. [00:40:00] I love you a great deal, by the way. I
Simone Collins: love you too, Malcolm. I'm glad we get some normal life for a few days going forward.
Malcolm Collins: A few days.
Simone Collins: I just want a
Malcolm Collins: documentary living with us for a while We were at hereticon before that we're leaving our jobs. I don't know what to do. I just want to sleep
Simone Collins: I'm not sleep for like But you can't sleep because then there's the kids like I really probably would sleep for like a good 24 hours If there weren't like
Malcolm Collins: How about this?
This weekend, can I take the kids for you and let you sleep for 24 hours at any point? No, because
Simone Collins: then I'm going to spend 24 hours awake cleaning the house to deal with the aftermath. But I would love extra support this weekend.
I'm just really tired, but I love you so much. And obviously everyone knows you got the better. I got the better end of that.
The deal, the pretty one you are, you are, you are irreplaceable. You could buy with money. Every single thing that I do.
Malcolm Collins: Somebody explain this to me. I actually think my wife is pretty hot. Like, but we get mails. [00:41:00] Like she, she has a face that can sink a thousand ships.
Simone Collins: Malformed. Yeah. All of those things
Malcolm Collins: are genetically defective.
And they're only talk about you in this way.
Simone Collins: Yep. Nope. They're like Malcolm's.
Malcolm Collins: They're like, Malcolm, yeah sure, whatever, Malcolm, but Simone, the malformed, genetically defective woman who can sink a thousand ships with her disgusting face, pseudo face. Pseudo, yeah, oh
Simone Collins: my god. You seem normal to me. Well, thank goodness, right?
I don't like the way I look. That's, that's why it hurts, you know, if I were like stunning and I'd be like, Oh, you know, that doesn't offend me. But I look in the mirror and I cringe, you know, I'm like, well, God, like, why do you have to complain? I'm, I have to look in the mirror every day. This is not fair.
But anyway, you don't want me talking myself down. So I'm the best. Everyone knows that
Malcolm Collins: you're, you're great. You're great. No, I mean, I, I don't like it [00:42:00] when you talk yourself down in terms of your prominence. I, you know, if you're talking about your looks or something like that.
Simone Collins: Well, here, here's the thing I, here's what I'm going to put down.
I think that the way that I look is going to actually be at a premium in a post AI world, because in a post AI world, and especially with filters and everything else now. There is going to be value put on clearly real human forms that are flawed because you know that they're genuine and also they're the only thing that you're going to see like this sort of homogenization.
Of faces. You can already see it when you have like AI create images of humans. They all kind of look the same when you see, like, when I scroll through Instagram, everyone kind of looks the same and people who look weird are going to stand out and it is the standing out that makes you memorable. I don't even
Malcolm Collins: think you look that weird as
Simone Collins: a 40 year old woman.
Who's had, I'm not, Oh my God. Ouch. I'm 37. I'm almost [00:43:00] 37 as a mid thirties woman.
I mean, you've made your own point, Malcolm. Okay. I just, I don't know what else to say. As a mid
Malcolm Collins: thirties woman who's had four kids. I think that you look spectacular. And honestly, the only two odd things about your face.
Simone Collins: If
Malcolm Collins: I'm going to be honest here, it's your nose a little big.
I think by a lot of people's standards, they'd be like, Oh, that's a Jewish nose. And it's like, yeah, very Jewy. And the other is your mouse. Like mine is gigantic. Thanks. I'll tell you a funny thing. No. So a lot of people don't realize how much people's mouths change in size.
Speaker 14: What is he up to? He's bringing him out. He's bringing him out.
Speaker 13: So what is Torsten doing right now?
Speaker 14: Torsten [00:44:00] is Completely naked.
Speaker 15: Except for two yellow boots. Out in the 30 degree weather. Filling a bucket of rocks from his rock garden. Died to look a baby deer.
We told that to Tyson because there actually is a deer in the background. But she just looked at naked Dorstan. That's just Torsten. I
Speaker 14: don't see it. You don't see it? Okay, let's, let's help her.
Full Story: The Bureaucratic Murder of Peanut the Squirrel