Diabolical Lies - August 09, 2026


Does Hating Influencers Make You a Misogynist?


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

183.99

Word count

3,152

Sentence count

135

Harmful content

Misogyny

18

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.580 Today's episode of Diabolical Lies is brought to you by the Nantucket High-Speed Ferry, 0.98
00:00:05.180 the general category of cultural discourse we could label correctly as rich people shit, 0.97
00:00:10.060 the cute little hand-woven baskets that you first saw dangling off the wrist of the worst girl in 0.99
00:00:14.200 high school. Speaking of the worst girl in high school, Charlie Kirk, the Tupperware parties of
00:00:19.080 the 1950s, the blogosphere ads of the early 2000s, pre-glow-up Hannah Nealman, post-glow-up Paige
00:00:25.500 Lorenz, and the general vibe online right now of low- and high-key right-wing influencers 0.71
00:00:30.200 channeling left-wing feminist thought with all of the confidence and bravado of those
00:00:34.380 who take a Marianne Williamson quote and assign it to Nelson Mandela.
00:00:38.120 Before we get started, Katie, do you want to do a little bit of housekeeping? 0.99
00:00:44.460 Kara's going to have a baby, folks. 0.99
00:00:46.500 We know this. 0.88
00:00:47.340 Allegedly.
00:00:48.060 We've been working up to this moment for nine months, Kara delivering our child.
00:00:54.040 I'm impressed that you know the gestation length of humans.
00:00:56.820 40 weeks. 40 weeks. 40 weeks from the missed period, in fact. Yeah, I listen. I paid attention. That's not one but two parts of a birth episode coming home to roost right there.
00:01:08.120 And as such, because Caro will be birthing new life into the world, we are going to tweak our regularly scheduled programming. 0.95
00:01:18.120 And we were just going to drop off at the face of the earth, but then both of our internalized capitalism got the better of us, and we decided we can't fucking do that.
00:01:25.200 So instead, we are going to release one episode per month during Caro's quasi-maternity leave, and it's just going to be the paid episode.
00:01:35.360 So, big apologies to our free subscribers, those freeloading on the backs of the paid subscribers.
00:01:43.120 So, Caro has time to, I don't know, we haven't gotten that far in the birth series, so I don't actually know what happens after the baby comes out, but she'll be doing something with her boobs and probably a lot of sleeping.
00:01:57.220 There you go. Wow, incredible.
00:01:58.480 How was that?
00:02:00.180 Should we pivot to lemon varietals?
00:02:02.140 I was just, I'm going to make you do some lemonade stand metaphors today.
00:02:06.740 Yeah, no, anyways, long story short, I think this has been an interesting conversation for you and I over like basically almost the last year because there are not many comps for what we do in the real world.
00:02:18.340 And so it's been pretty interesting to talk about what a maternity leave would look like.
00:02:21.360 there are some people who run podcasts who have gone on leave and who just keep up with their
00:02:26.080 cadence but they either recycle content they've already done or they basically have the type of 0.98
00:02:30.420 podcast that doesn't require research so it's like you're just shooting the shit and you're 0.74
00:02:33.900 hopping on and I think you and I both feel very strongly that what we do requires a lot of time
00:02:40.320 and it also we don't want to be replaced by other people like it wouldn't really be the same
00:02:44.120 meaningful show if I had like an assistant doing the research and then I was just like hopping on
00:02:48.860 auditioning new co-hosts for those three episodes. And we'll just see if anyone notices.
00:02:55.380 Don't acknowledge it at all. Just like carry on as though it is normal.
00:03:00.280 So I'm giving birth sometime in September and we'll be coming back in the new year.
00:03:03.940 And if you want to keep supporting us throughout that process, that's fine. If you want to pause
00:03:08.560 your paid subscription until we come back with two episodes a month, that's fine too. We will,
00:03:13.020 of course, continue with our redistributions throughout this process as well. And I just
00:03:17.120 want to god bless katie who had no control in me getting knocked up and whose livelihood is now 0.99
00:03:21.740 kind of fucked by it so welcome to america baby my eye twitching when kara said she wants to do 0.84
00:03:27.000 less work i'm like oh yeah that's fine that's reasonable what if i just did the other one by 0.97
00:03:35.720 myself i'll just do it alone dude i would honestly kill for that i think that's a great idea if you
00:03:40.620 have a little nervy bee halfway through and you want to start doing that and talking to yourself
00:03:44.120 and you have like a little sock puppet named Caro,
00:03:46.460 I fully support.
00:03:47.560 All right.
00:03:48.420 Katie, what do you know about
00:03:49.900 what I would describe as the Nantucket influencer drama
00:03:52.840 that has unfolded over the last week?
00:03:55.080 Uh, well, I guess some store in Nantucket
00:03:59.280 put up a sign that says no influencers 0.94
00:04:01.740 and an influencer named Paige Lorenz, 1.00
00:04:05.620 who I'm going to be honest,
00:04:06.940 every single photo I see of her,
00:04:09.000 she looks like a different person.
00:04:10.600 So I, to this day, 0.98
00:04:12.360 I don't think I would recognize this woman
00:04:13.940 on the street if she was walking toward me. She posted something where she basically just 1.00
00:04:19.920 implied that influencers are a group that is discriminated against and that it is misogynist
00:04:25.680 to call out influencers specifically as being a group that you maybe don't want in your store.
00:04:32.860 I was very interested by this conversation almost immediately. I think it's because I'm
00:04:38.160 watching a conversation take place here that is basically identical to the conversation that I
00:04:43.720 feel like I have been circling around for the last two years in terms of what I think about
00:04:48.320 with the influencer space. Obviously, most of my focus has been in the trad wife influencer realm,
00:04:54.180 but I saw a lot of really interesting parallels in the conversation that has unfolded this week
00:04:58.640 to the conversations that I was directly a part of two years ago and that I have seen
00:05:03.000 while on book tour and while talking about yesteryear. So when this discourse came up in
00:05:07.560 the last few weeks, it just seemed like a good opportunity for us to deconstruct an argument
00:05:11.260 that I think we have danced around in a number of episodes, but haven't like focused on explicitly
00:05:16.800 and a generalized attitude that I often see in the world of influence and in the conversations
00:05:22.520 we have around the influencer industry. So the argument that I want us to think about today
00:05:27.760 is this. It is that the influencer industry is at least partially feminist by nature 0.94
00:05:32.640 because of the fact that it is driven by women and because of what it has offered to women.
00:05:37.820 okay okay a feminist because girl exactly you're a feminist because girl did it exactly and the
00:05:46.260 part two of this argument that people will make is that if you dismiss this theory of empowerment
00:05:50.780 in any way you are in some way behaving misogynistically it's this idea that there
00:05:55.940 is a coin and on one side of it is misogyny on the other side of it is feminism and they are
00:06:00.140 always inextricably connected okay so i want to give definitions for both of these words before 0.99
00:06:05.340 we get farther, Katie, I'm going to have you read the definition of feminism from Merriam 1.00
00:06:10.280 Webster. I'm not going to make you define it on your own terms like you would do to 1.00
00:06:15.360 me.
00:06:18.160 I'm like, so you own a lemonade stand. 0.99
00:06:20.060 And you only sell lemonade to women, okay? So are you following?
00:06:28.720 All right. Feminism is the belief in and advocacy of the social, political, and economic equality 0.99
00:06:35.060 of the sexes, supporting equal rights and opportunities for women. It is also an organized 0.99
00:06:40.320 movement that works to fix unfair rules and treatment based on gender. Okay. Okay, and then
00:06:46.680 this is misogyny. All right. Misogyny is the hatred of, aversion to, or prejudice against women.
00:06:54.440 It often shows up as an active dislike of women, a belief that men are better,
00:06:59.660 or actions meant to keep women down when they want power or freedom. Okay, great. 0.98
00:07:04.720 So people often interconnect misogyny and sexism, and I think they're very similar. But TLDR sexism is more of the establishment of like legal discrimination or some sort of reinforced discrimination against women. And misogyny is more of behavior. It's more of a characteristics that we can all have that's harder to identify. And it's also pretty hard to punish.
00:07:27.820 Like, it's not necessarily something that you can ban in the same way that you can, like, legislatively try to ban racism or sexism.
00:07:34.820 sexism. Well, I think the other thing about misogyny, and actually this is analogous to,
00:07:39.840 I think, things like racism as well, is it is so ingrained in the social fabric and in the culture
00:07:46.440 that I think everyone to some degree is going to experience feelings like that just based on
00:07:53.520 their presence in the culture that we live in. And I think that there is a kernel of truth
00:08:00.180 in this discourse around some of these claims about influencers are rooted in misogyny where
00:08:08.000 I will often have to catch myself when I'm feeling exceptionally annoyed at the behavior
00:08:13.820 of a particular woman to kind of check like, okay, am I experiencing internalized misogyny
00:08:18.960 right now? So I think it's not even as simple as whether something is or is not misogynist.
00:08:24.400 I think most things do have misogynistic elements literally because it is the water we are
00:08:29.920 swimming in. That is kind of inextricable from the broader culture and one another and ourselves.
00:08:36.160 Yeah. I mean, for example, I am feeling internalized misogyny right now because you
00:08:39.480 decided to show up in a cute outfit for a recording without telling me that you were
00:08:42.480 planning on doing that. And I look fucking horrific. So I'm going to have you read a 0.99
00:08:47.000 section from The Cut, which is where this local kerfuffle on a very, very isolated enclave
00:08:53.920 became a national conversation. It was an article in The Cut by Steph McNeil.
00:08:58.260 another another episode of white on white crime on the diabolical lies podcast hey hey i will say
00:09:04.980 from the jump we were interested in the lives of rich white women you can go back to our first
00:09:09.660 episode the receipts no one can say that it was not the original sin of diabolical lies the real
00:09:15.840 problem is when we did our episode on terrorism because we were like let's expand the premise
00:09:19.660 got everybody's hopes up that there was more happening here that was nothing else happening
00:09:24.940 here. And that was because Luigi Mangione was hot, okay? Wait, wait, wait, wait, really quickly.
00:09:30.160 I was talking to Riley today and just fucking yelling at him because I'm pregnant. And I was 0.99
00:09:34.100 like, I want you to go on the podcast and speak on my behalf. And he said he's going to wear a
00:09:38.840 shirt moving forward that says, clocking in as Caroline, clocking in as Osama Bin Laden. 0.93
00:09:47.040 Which is such an amazing Russian nesting doll. Okay, now go. This is from the cut. This is from 0.93
00:09:52.020 the gun. Okay. When John Sylvia decided to hang a sign in his family's antiques and handmade
00:09:57.560 craft shop that read, no influencers, he wasn't doing it to go viral. Quote, the sign was made
00:10:04.140 for people walking in the store or walking by and looking in the window, he tells me.
00:10:08.980 That distinction perhaps illustrates his entire reason for posting it. Sylvia, whose grandfather
00:10:14.360 started Sylvia's Antiques in 1927 and who later merged it with Four Winds Craft Guild,
00:10:19.640 was born and raised on Nantucket, so he's used to seeing the tension that sometimes bubbles up
00:10:24.760 between locals and well-heeled summer vacationers who pour into the 14-mile-long island off the
00:10:30.240 coast of Massachusetts every summer. But as if all of a sudden, tourism has exploded on the tiny
00:10:36.720 island, and he has a bone to pick with some of the selfie-stick-wielding customers this latest
00:10:41.720 tourism wave has washed in. Sure, some of the young vacationers who visit his shop are great.
00:10:47.300 They talk with Sylvia and his staff, asking questions about the famous light ship baskets
00:10:51.980 he carries and learning the history behind them. But then there are the ones who enter and
00:10:57.220 immediately start filming without engaging at all. Quote, a lot of people are tired of feeling like
00:11:03.120 extras in someone else's video, he says. Quote, like, fucking talk to me. Talk to anyone in my 0.98
00:11:08.920 store. Open up TikTok or Instagram this summer and you can't escape Nantucket. A smaller,
00:11:14.320 quote, sister island to Martha's Vineyard, the Massachusetts enclave's pristine beaches
00:11:19.020 burst in colorful hydrangea bushes, and sumptuous lobster rolls are New England's perfection and
00:11:24.500 look positively idyllic through a phone screen. Though Elan Hildebrand's Nantucket novels,
00:11:29.500 and now their screen adaptations, have long drawn fans to the island, residents largely
00:11:34.200 credit social media for this latest tourism boom. Quote, for better or for worse, Nantucket is having
00:11:39.640 a moment Carly Reardon, a longtime blogger and content creator who has been singing the island's
00:11:44.880 praises to her followers for more than a decade, tells me, quote, it's been the preferred location
00:11:49.800 for influencer marketing campaigns. Nantucket, as a concept, has gone viral. Okay, as someone who is
00:11:55.800 a Colorado transplant, this strikes me as like the mirror image or the summer version of what
00:12:03.720 towns in the American West experience in the winter where you have like Aspen and Jackson Hole
00:12:09.720 and these destinations that have now kind of become like billionaire playgrounds where people
00:12:14.720 will go there and like cosplay. We call it like the Aspen costume that you see in the Denver
00:12:21.040 airport where it's like leather pants and fur and like cowboy hats and all this stuff where you're
00:12:26.500 like no one who actually lives in these places actually dresses this way or like comports
00:12:30.920 themselves this way. One thing I want to point out immediately is the distinction in language here
00:12:37.180 between people who view this island as, quote, a concept and people who live there. So again,
00:12:42.500 you have this guy Sylvia saying the sign was made for people walking, looking in the window. He's
00:12:47.680 talking kind of texturally about the experience of being on the island. And then you have this
00:12:52.340 influencer, Carly Reardon, who is saying Nantucket is having a moment. It as a concept has gone
00:12:58.240 viral, that really jumped out to me as a novelist who has had her book be described as viral this
00:13:05.760 spring again and again and again, because I understand the implication and I understand
00:13:09.480 what they're trying to say here, which is that this is something that has gained currency online.
00:13:14.560 But when I see that, I often think, no, it's not viral. It's a bestseller. It's actually selling
00:13:19.340 copies in the real world. And it's something that feels quite diminishing to me, frankly,
00:13:23.880 To describe my novel as viral, even if conversations about it are going viral, I have this moment where it's almost like the digitization of a physical product.
00:13:32.800 And when I saw that Nantucket as a concept has gone viral, it felt incredibly ironic for me.
00:13:37.620 When you think about the staging of the war, again, between influencers and people who don't want their lives to exist online.
00:13:45.420 So, I'm going to have you keep reading a little bit more.
00:13:48.120 In 2022, a local survey found the island's summer population had increased by 70% since 2014,
00:13:56.100 estimating it could reach 80,000 or more by 2026.
00:13:59.860 The town government recently approved funding for a study to quantify exactly
00:14:03.760 how many visitors they are getting now, with Nantucket Current noting actual figures have been
00:14:09.000 elusive. For Sylvia, everything about his business is antithetical to social media.
00:14:14.280 The baskets he sells have a unique history that can only be appreciated by fully understanding
00:14:18.660 their origins on whaling ships, and each piece takes months to make by hand. This isn't an item
00:14:24.340 you can click to buy on TikTok shop, something he feels may be lost on those who have just seen
00:14:28.840 images of the baskets online. Quote, they don't care about the history, Sylvia says of some of
00:14:34.020 his younger customers. Quote, I don't want to sound negative, but they come in, there's like
00:14:37.940 a group of them sometimes, and it can clog up the store. It's not a huge space. So Sylvia decided to
00:14:43.360 have some fun with it. He asked a local artist to create a traditional wood sign reading No
00:14:47.900 Influencers and hung it right above the baskets. With the help of his partner, who operates the
00:14:52.820 store's social media accounts, he posted a photo of the sign on Instagram with the caption,
00:14:57.160 came for the friendship baskets, stayed for the shade. Quote, it was kind of tongue-in-cheek,
00:15:02.040 he says. It can be annoying, but I mean, I'm not anti-influencers. Huh, okay. That I think is kind
00:15:09.180 of ironic because it's like you are sort of participating in the same attention capture
00:15:14.540 game so the sign goes viral it gets picked up on reddit other stores start to parody it across
00:15:21.600 the country some use it to also say no influencers other uses it to say influencers welcome and that's 0.88
00:15:27.580 when page lorenz gets involved and that's when this conversation becomes a question of feminism
00:15:31.840 and of misogyny katie you've already kind of hinted at what you know about page lorenz so i'll just 1.00
00:15:37.780 add the little bio for her. So Paige Lorenz is actually now Paige Paul. She was recently married,
00:15:44.260 but one of my little acts of feminism is that I refuse to name women by their marital names,
00:15:48.860 and I'm just going to go by her former birth name. I'm going to dead name her. So Paige Lorenz 0.97
00:15:54.260 is a Nantucket local who grew up on the island. Her mother comes from a long heritage of basket
00:15:59.740 weavers, and her father is actually a fisherman. I'm totally kidding. That's not where she's from.
00:16:04.400 she is an influencer who often speaks up on issues related to feminist politics and women's rights 1.00
00:16:09.300 i'm just kidding again she she's an influencer with several million followers who grew up in
00:16:17.840 connecticut with enough money to go horseback riding and attend boarding school to ski
00:16:21.800 she became instagram famous when she dated such esteemed gentlemen as the actor army hammer and
00:16:27.680 country singer morgan wallet she is now married you are hold on hold on hold on you should have
00:16:35.260 led with that wait let me finish it gets better it gets better she is now married to a tennis pro
00:16:41.100 named tommy paul she runs a pop-up shop on nantucket and this is why she got involved for
00:16:46.060 her clothing brand called dairy boy oh milky boy that sells 90 sweatshirts with such inspired
00:16:52.580 captions like Nantucket Dairy Boy. Up until this month, her track record of speaking out about
00:16:57.660 politics was limited to one moment in the fall of 2025. Do you want to guess what she spoke about,
00:17:02.440 Katie? Fall 2025? I'll give you a hint.