From the fires of Los Angeles, characteristically exacerbated by the failure of California’s endemically incompetent government, to the inauguration of Donald Trump and the ascendance of the nascent tech right, 2025 opened with a wild string of national stories bizarrely in our lane — the kind of shit we’ve been writing about for years, now central to the national discourse. And this weekend, as I reflected on our coverage over the last twelve months, it occurred to me we’ve been ahead of stories all year. We tend not to talk about this much internally, or even notice, as it’s really not our culture. Everyone on the team pretty much just focuses on out-writing each other every morning, and celebrates the telling of gripping, or funny, or important stories. Bangers, if you will. But the fact that we are sort of constantly correct about everything should at least be mentioned.

So before I get to our standard issue annual recap in this Year of Wires, 2025, I do want to quickly touch on this dynamic of, again, our pretty much living ahead of the curve, as I am slightly nervous my team is writing the story of America like that guy in Stranger than Fiction. And if this is the case, we should probably start doing more utopian sci-fi? Though, there was some of that as well, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Right out of the gate Pirate Wires took over the Jumbotron in Times Square, and shared one of our most important messages with the world: Moon should be a state. Ten months later, the President of the United States announced America is headed back to Moon. While it’s not yet clear if he reads Pirate Wires, we know his administration is filled with people who do, so you’re welcome.

Moon wasn’t the only story we covered many months or even a full year ahead of, however. Pirate Wires has been writing about de facto European trade war for years. Back in February, I finally made the complete case against the Old World in a piece called Sucks to Eu. These “friendly” countries 1) actually suck in many ways entirely out of keeping with American values, and 2) are robbing us. This is not the behavior of a partner. By the end of the year, following a new, potentially-crippling “fine” on X, the issue went mainstream. The question of this relationship is now table stakes in Washington.

We were early to the right wing schism between tech and populist factions, which we addressed in Right Wing Civil War, and we were early to the very real threat of the business world, and especially tech, breaking up with Delaware, which Mark Pincus wrote about all the way back in February.

Finally, we closed the year out with a piece on California’s looming (potentially) wealth tax ballot prop. Since I first covered it back in November in a piece called Relax, It’s Just the End of Private Property, billionaires have begun packing their shit up and leaving the state. Incredibly, mainstream outlets are still not reporting on this. If the proposition actually makes it to the ballot, this will be a major national story. And since you were reading Pirate Wires, you knew about it first.

As ever, it’s been a pleasure writing for you fine people, and thanks as always for your support. Now grab an elegant, moody glass of something strong, cozy up by the fire, and remember the bangers.

February

We Should Turn Guantanamo Bay Into the Next Hong Kong by Tomas Pueyo

Gitmo needs a rebrand. Back at the top of the year, Tomas Pueyo argued America should put its perpetual lease on Guantanamo Bay to better use by building a deregulated capitalist paradise. He laid out the vision for a dazzling epicenter of global trade and innovation that would give the finger to Cuban commies, avoid regulatory bloat as a Special Economic Zone, and rake in massive amounts of money for the U.S. If all goes to plan, catch the Pirate Wires staff writing our morning takes from a brand new little tiki joint on a Cuban beach.

March

Slop World by Mike Solana

How much of our internet is real? From bot campaigns and undisclosed paid influence to the increasingly AI-generated dreamworld we live inside, it’s starting to seem like… not a lot. Honestly, I almost don’t even enjoy fighting with strangers on social media anymore, long one of my great pleasures, as when they aren’t literally just robots there’s a very good chance they’re engagement-farming foreigners posing as Becky from the block (confirmed, btw, after Twitter nuked geo-anonymity, which I reported in November). The dead internet is on our doorstep.

April

Shower/acc: How Congress Throttled Indoor Water Flow, and Why We Must Liberate It by Rob L’Heureux

In 1992, Congress elected to make their lives (all of our lives, actually) worse by limiting shower flow rates for handwavey environmental reasons. Rob L’Heureux breaks down how Congress’s attempt to save water actually backfired, making everyone so pissed they actually waste more water, and leaving us with unsatisfying showers. Hours after publication and an Elon RT, Trump signed an EO to “make America’s showers great again.” So yeah, I guess we memed an EO into existence this year?

Golden Age by Mike Solana

Walt Disney gave us the blueprint for special economic zones almost sixty years ago, and while China took that vision and reshaped itself from first principles, Americans forgot what’s possible. In states like California, building anything of meaning is prohibitively difficult. A humble suggestion: we need a series of new cities on federal land, deregulated to the point that we can mine and process rare earth metals, build abundant housing, connect it all via high speed rail, and make this country proud again.

I Used AI to Email 3,800 Ivy League Bureaucrats, Now My School Is Investigating Me by Alex Shieh

The kids are alright. A student at Brown lit the internet on fire after asking the school’s small army of non-instructional staff to justify their jobs, receiving coverage from Newsweek and Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Then, he chronicled the project and his motives — administrative bloat driving record tuition costs — in an exclusive for Pirate Wires.

May

What I Saw, as a Former Blob Media Journalist Who Is a Girl, at the Hill & Valley Forum by Blake Dodge

We sent our newly hired, reformed “blob” (mainstream media) reporter Blake Dodge to the Hill and Valley forum, the preeminent tech <> policy hang, where she interviewed (and bummed Zyns off) absolutely everyone — and ultimately levied a gentle critique of the “rah rah we have to sell off all the national forests to power data centers to beat China at AI” narrative (what fresh bounty can y’all produce other than crushing enemies?).

June

Frankly, this is where it all started to get a little too depressing. We covered what we were seeing all throughout the early part of summer, and I crawled into my birthday borderline depressed. (Apologies, but sit tight, Dan Savage was correct: it gets better).

Free Mexico! by Mike Solana

Los Angeles, a city on fire at the top of the year thanks to God and our malignant government, decided to light itself up in June. In a surreal string of weekend protests apparently in favor of an open border and LA-based Mexican nationalism (?), activists targeted Waymos specifically, which temporarily left the city. (side note: the communists haaaate Waymos btw, expect autonomous vehicles, along with data centers, to remain a main character in 2026).

All of these activist ideas are actually the same idea, it seems. Just, everything good is bad, everything bad is good. In fact, that same week of the LA protests, Kat Dee covered an online death cult preaching the virtues of human extinction.

The YouTubers Preaching Human Extinction by Katherine Dee

After a group of antinatalist YouTubers inspired an attack on an IVF clinic in Palm Springs, internet ethnographer Katherine Dee spoke to the leaders of “Efilism” (“life” spelled backards) a subculture whose adherents believe no one should be alive because life is pain. (Efilists also allegedly motivated Adam Lanza to carry out the Sandy Hook shooting.) Dee interviewed one of the movement’s founders on record for the first time, resulting in a fascinating and kind of wild profile, and some of Dee’s finest work to date.

July

ChatGPT-Induced Psychosis Isn’t Real by Blake Dodge

There was a steady trickle of these “ChatGPT is driving everyone insane” pieces all year. The gist, across these dispatches, is generally: a not-insane person encounters ChatGPT, asks it about simulation theory or AI sentience or blood offerings to Molech, a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice, and then poof: ChatGPT leans into their “delusions of grandeur” and causes them to believe they have interdimensional lovers named Kael. Our critique was, um, a lot of these people were already, um, insane… obviously…

August

Mercifully, after a hellish couple of months, our hot ass summer (freezing in SF, actually) gave way to something more inspiring. Every single writer on the team discovered something positive (or at least extremely funny) that captured their attention.

American Power by Mike Solana

At a chance meeting in 2023, Founders Fund partner Scott Nolan realized microreactors are useless without domestic fuel — and nobody in government or industry was seriously solving enrichment (enter: our ongoing dependence on literally Russia). In a major Pirate Wires feature, and one of the better pieces I’ve ever written tbh, I profiled Scott and his new startup, General Matter, which is figuring out, from scratch, how to make fuel for nuclear power plants. In an incomprehensible trend, Boomers have failed to hand down significant, critical knowledge to Millennials. Now, as the machines of industry we haven’t exported to China slowly rust and break, we’re rediscovering this knowledge as quickly as we can.

Age of Balls by Mike Solana

After Edward Coristine, the DOGE staffer known as “Big Balls,” threw his body between a ~10 person violent mob and his girlfriend long enough for her to reach safety, blob media, in the spirit of mocking Edward, spun up the idea that Trump might have the audacity to give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. While this was just a total fabrication some idiot writer first imagined and then, incredibly, became angry about… what if it wasn’t a bullshit made up news item? Edward does deserve the medal. In Age of Balls, I interviewed the young hero, filled in some of the gaps of his story left by the press, and argued that he, having saved someone’s actual life, is more deserving of the country’s “highest civilian honor” than Megan Rapinoe or Bill Nye the fucking Science Guy.

Inside the Furry War Playing Out on Bluesky by Riley Nork

There’s a massive furry war playing out on Bluesky? And, yes, Riley is obviously covering it. Read all about the fun little drama that played out on Lib Twitter™ this summer, in which even the trans-flag-in-bio denizens of Bluesky became enraged by the constant proliferation of unhinged, NSFW furry content on the platform.

And then there was Buc-ee’s.

Buc-ee’s and The Infinite American Spirit by GB Rango

Beef jerky walls. Palatial bathrooms lined with the cleanest urinals in America. A 1950s cartoon beaver with a manic bucktoothed grin. G.B. Rango takes us inside Buc-ees, the most beloved pit stop in America, a chain of 70,000-square-foot gas-stations-slash-convenience stores dotting the American South. It’s the embodiment of (real) American Abundance. Also a ripping business.

Why Thiel Fellows Win by Blake Dodge

When Peter Thiel first started paying college students to drop out and build startups, it was considered evil (because, of course) and “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade.” Today, the Thiel Fellowship is producing billion-dollar companies at a supposedly higher rate than top accelerators, and Blake interviewed the program’s early architects about why that is (hint: Thiel Fellows commit to the craziness that college would have snuffed out.)

September

Abundant Delusion by Mike Solana

I actually do love that the center left has adopted the abundance thesis from the tech right. It’s important we get these ideas out there. But the center left’s framing this as entirely a left wing project, alienating the center right and embracing actual communists? That gives me pause. There is no compromise with people who literally want to kill you. And the left, I argued, has very much entered a culture of violence. Naturally, the liberal think boys had a field day with this, alleging I was full of shit for a day or two.

Then, Charlie Kirk was murdered by a leftist assassin, and leftists across the country celebrated.

Murder Is Bad by Mike Solana

After a few readers reached out to me, worried I was “fanning the flames” of violence by describing, uh, reality, I decided to take a breath and attempt something helpful. In a sincere letter to the (relatively) more sane center-left people, I asked libs to stop policing the conservative reaction to celebrations of murder, and start reinforcing strong institutional guardrails — a taboo, if you will — against said celebrations. Otherwise, the perception on the right is: you want them to die. And look, that’s just the perception. Don’t shoot, or celebrate the death of, the messenger. (Seriously, you people are fucking crazy, this is an earnest request — please put down the gun).

I’m Sorry But You Have to Assimilate by Sagnik Basu

Sagnik Basu, himself an immigrant, wrote a scathing takedown of immigrants who refuse to assimilate, and instead prioritize their original identity above all else. His argument: America is not a money pile for visaholders to plunder and ship back to their home countries. If you come to America, you have to go all in. Assimilation should not only be acceptable, it should be the bare minimum for invitees into the greatest country on earth.

October

The Case for Insane Asylums by GB Rango

I mean, someone had to write it. And luckily, G.B. Rango was up for the task. Today, there are only 37,000 beds in state psychiatric hospitals — and the results (like the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska by a violent lunatic with 14 prior arrests) are all around us. In this banger, G.B. assessed how we got here, and made the definitive case for the return of asylums, a more effective (and humane) alternative for untreated psychosis than jail, homelessness, and wishful thinking.

Heather Cox Richardson’s Revisionist History by Blake Dodge & Katherine Dee

Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Substack’s top individual writer Heather Cox Richardson told her audience of 2.7 million subscribers that Tyler Robinson, the shooter, was a right-leaning follower of Nick Fuentes, false information that she sourced from social media posts by folks like Kellyanne Conway’s ex-husband. And we thought, hmmm, that doesn’t seem very responsible. So: after a deep dive of her essays going back several years, Blake and Kat Dee found other instances where Richardson’s dispatches — which have an external reputation for being level-headed accounts of politics and history — read more like propaganda for the DNC, only more radical. With so many mentions of Nazis and the current, literally-happening-right-now emergency of Trump’s authoritarian takeover. (Like, so many.)

November

In November we simply did the work.

Harris crashed the DSA’s Starbucks protest (it is still happening technically?)

I Crashed the DSA Starbucks Siege in Brooklyn by Harris Sockel

Hours after Zohran Mamdani posted in support of the Red Cup Rebellion (a Starbucks nationwide strike for higher pay and better working conditions), we sent Harris to interview a few of them and just generally check out what was going down at the protest. Turns out most of the attendees weren’t Starbucks workers but just DSA members who didn’t seem to work there (or… work?). A rare, up-close look at the movement that brought Mamdani into power.

Inside the Sydney Sweeney GQ Interview from Hell by Blake Dodge

In one of the most popular PW pieces to date (smh why are you people like this), Blake wrote up the uncomfortable GQ interview with Sydney Sweeney, wherein a reporter (acting like your best friend’s mom who’s not really authorized to discipline you but is mad at you for something that you did) asked Sydney (tl;dr) if she loses sleep over what a terrible person she is, and Sydney was like… ‘I actually put my phone away and don’t think about myself that much, so….. no.’

Does Brigitte Macron Have a Penis? by Harris Sockel

We locked Harris in a room and forced him to watch Candace Owens’ six-part documentary in which she claims Brigitte Macron, the French First Lady, is actually a man, along with all the primary source material (all in French, lol) from the conspiracy theorists in Bordeaux who came up with this idea. It’s maybe the first, and only, level-headed examination of whether Brigitte has a dick. We’re ~80% sure she doesn’t btw.

December

No, We Shouldn’t Ban Waymos Over a Cat by Riley Nork

Should San Francisco ban Waymos because a car hit a cat? Probably not, argued Riley, controversially, as the death of beloved convenience store feline KitKat prompted a full-scale anti-Waymo outrage, complete with scam memecoins and even opinion pieces written from the perspective of KitKat from the great beyond. SF Supervisor Jackie Fielder now wants all autonomous vehicles banned and — ok, we’re gonna save our thoughts. It’s the holidays, and if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all (you should read the piece, however, for an insightful look into this country’s mental illness epidemic).

The Data Center Water Crisis Isn’t Real by Blake Dodge & Harris Sockel

Speaking of things that make no sense, to close out the year, Blake and Harris wrote about the so-called AI water crisis. Basically, according to Andy Masley’s research and town documents we reviewed, data centers use way less water than you think (mere percentage points of the water required by golf courses, mild population growth and agriculture — comparable to that of regular factories) for much more public utility and tax revenue. Contrary to what blob will tell you, this matter is Complicated and Not All Bad and Kinda Good, Actually. Figures.

Well, folks, this idyllic little Christmas Village looking town in France isn’t going to explore itself, and, in keeping with expectations for your favorite one hundred percent real billionaire media tycoon and former mayer of San Francisco, I still have copious amounts of overpriced liquor, fancy cheese, and caviar-based dishes to consume before I catch a train and watch the ball drop (or whatever it is they do out here in third world Vienna). Which is all to say, I’m on vacation. And done with you for now. For the year 2025. Which has been a crazy and funny and heartbreaking year of darkness and chaos and hope.

As ever, thank you for reading along. And here’s to 2026.

-SOLANA