00:00:00.000Today's episode of Diabolical Lies was brought to you by Hot Pink MAGA Hats,
00:00:04.960the sticker manufacturer being kept in business solely by Turning Point USA conferences,
00:00:10.340Charlie Kirk's orthodontist's file in the Witness Protection Program,
00:00:14.300and that's right, folks, Barry Weiss again, somehow.
00:00:19.180Barry Weiss again, somehow. Wow, she is really driving our reporting forward at every step of the way.
00:00:25.300Caro, before we get into it today, do you want to share a little housekeeping update for subscribers?
00:00:31.800Yes. As a reminder, this podcast is completely funded and supported by you guys, the subscribers.
00:00:37.560If you want to sign up, you can do so through the Apple iTunes subscription option or through our sub stack if you want to access the chat features in the community, which is always hop in.
00:00:46.520We're very proud of that. This previous month, our paid episode was about Sabrina Carpenter and kind of the politics of pop star sexuality.
00:01:05.480We want to always keep it as call and response-y as we can.
00:01:08.860But it's been really fun to see this community take a pretty big jump over the past six weeks.
00:01:13.700So for today, my goal for this episode was to approach the recent Turning Point USA
00:01:19.680Women's Conference and this broader phenomenon of what has been called cultural conservatism
00:01:26.500like an anthropologist would. You're like Jane Goodall.0.98
00:01:31.580The Jane Goodall of conservative ladies, of like bad girl Suzanne Lamberts,0.99
00:01:37.100inside out Suzanne Lamberts. Sorry, I have to continue the bit. Katie's like,
00:01:42.960Katie's like in like a poorly decorated DC Marriott ballroom and these women,0.97
00:01:48.540And these conservative young college girls are, like, carefully walking up to her and, like, taking food from her hands and then, like, explaining why they voted for Trump.
00:02:00.640But I am going to throw it back and I'm going to resurrect the question that underwrote our conversation about Evie magazine, Cara, which is, if you recall, what is conservatism?
00:03:53.220Oh my god, take Shania Twain's lyrics out of your mouth.
00:03:56.840So, the Young Women's Leadership Summit is an event. It is hosted by Turning Point USA,
00:04:01.840and in June, they held their 10th annual summit in Grapevine, Texas, with, as you noted, a record
00:04:08.6803,000 attendees. And what you will often hear is about how well-attended this conference was,
00:04:15.780how more women than ever are flocking to this message. It is true that this is the largest
00:04:22.880annual conference for young women and girls in the conservative movement, and this year's theme
00:04:28.640was Home Sweet Home. So not super subtle. Madeline Peltz, a reporter who's working on a book about
00:04:38.420Gen Z and right-wing culture called Pick Me, attended the event. Great title. She was generous
00:04:44.600enough to speak with me about it, so we are going to get into her observations shortly. But there
00:04:49.640were a couple viral clips that originally pulled my attention to the fact that this even happened.
00:04:54.540The first was a clip that was circulating of a 14-year-old girl asking Charlie Kirk during a Q&A for the pros and cons of going to college.
00:05:07.58014. We are going to watch that quickly now just to get on the same page about what is going on at this conference.
00:05:15.460Do you know how much this conference cost?
00:05:18.300It costs, I believe, $200 to attend for the day.
00:05:21.900Okay, I wonder if that girl paid herself or if a parent brought her there. Anyways.
00:05:26.360Well, we're going to get into the money of it all, because I actually think that that's an important ancillary story for the claimed popularity of this event and the claimed attendance. Okay, here we go. Your face!
00:05:44.780hi charlie i'm addie and i'm 14 i'm a freshman in high school and i was wondering as someone who
00:05:52.320has uh like a different opinion on college um what would you say the pros and cons are because
00:05:58.160i'm interested in political journalism and what would your advice be yes so let me also speak to
00:06:04.320some of the young ladies here in high school where your top if you are who's here where your
00:06:08.620top priority your top priority is get married and have kids raise your hand okay interestingly i
00:06:14.520think there is an argument to bring back the mrs degree and no seriously and just be clear that's
00:06:21.800why you're going to college right don't lie to yourself like don't like i'm going i'm studying
00:06:26.600sociology no you're not we know why you're here and that's okay actually and that's a really good
00:06:31.480reason to go to college actually especially an sec school like you you will find a husband
00:06:38.120if you have the intent to find a husband at Ole Miss.
00:06:42.700Like, it's just going to happen, okay?
00:07:01.220but if you're going to find your life partner,
00:07:02.840like, that's actually a really good reason to go to college.
00:07:05.460you have a bunch of people that are single you know they're at the prime of their you know let's
00:07:12.840just say attractiveness the the the dating pool is as robust as you ever find and they all live
00:07:18.600together over a four-year period like you don't you don't you don't get much better than that
00:07:23.440okay it doesn't get better after college there and so yeah you could go learn some stuff that's
00:07:27.980fine i guess or whatever just don't listen to your professors but um that actually was the reason why1.00
00:07:34.300a lot of women went to college in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And it worked for a lot. Marriage rates1.00
00:07:38.740have plummeted since that. So. Oh, my God. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Thoughts? I told you,1.00
00:07:45.480Katie, that I was like a very competitive athlete for a very long time. Okay. And after I graduated
00:07:49.560from UVA, I thought that I kind of had lost any kind of like aggression or competitiveness that
00:07:56.100I had just kind of like worked it all out of me. And now you're like, damn, I want to beat the shit
00:07:59.960out of that guy it has been through this project with you that i have realized to quote you that i
00:08:06.420actually do still got that dog in me and that i will and that i will do everything in my power
00:08:14.760to have a career that renders his influence not only moot but laughable because it is ridiculous
00:08:22.700but it is also like infuriating to me to a degree that i actually have a hard time finding language
00:08:28.340for that this young woman said very specifically, she didn't come up saying, I want to find a
00:08:33.100husband and I want to have a job. She said very specifically, I want a career in political
00:08:37.300journalism. How do you weigh that out for me? And he basically said, the funny thing about
00:08:41.800political journalism is it's not located on your husband's dick. And that's what we need to be
00:08:46.060focusing on. I genuinely hope that that girl, you can see how uncomfortable she is too. Like she's0.98
00:08:51.240trying to smile. She's trying to laugh along, but she also like had a question that she wanted him
00:08:55.860to answer. And he just basically like shoved her nose in a totally different conversation.
00:09:01.660And I'm just going to spend the rest of my life rendering his work and his impact negligible.
00:09:07.140Yeah. Charlie Kirk, your days are numbered. You piece of shit. I also just love this shout out
00:09:13.300to the University of Alabama because I'm like, as a bitch that fully went to the University of1.00
00:09:17.280Alabama intent to find a husband, no, you fucking won't. So let's get that out there.0.94
00:09:23.320He married his wife far after college.
00:09:26.300Oh, Caroline, Charlie Kirk didn't go to college.
00:09:29.400Shut the fuck up. Oh, okay, so he's bitter. Okay.
00:09:32.780It's like, oh, you're talking about an experience that you never had.
00:09:36.540It's also so funny, the extent to which people like Charlie Kirk and J.D. Vance just couldn't locate Riz if their family had guns pointed to their heads.
00:09:44.400What he could have said, if I were going to red pill myself, my response to that would be, you can have it all. You don't need to go to college. Join a Substack newsletter. Write a little Substack newsletter while you're popping out babies. It's so important to have it all. That's what the good conservatives do. They basically flip the message and go, you can do it. You just don't have to do it their way. And for him to just be like, no, don't go to college. Just marry a man. It's just like he's bad at it. He's bad at what he does.
00:10:10.840Yeah, we're going to spend a lot of time on that today. The second clip that called my attention to the fact that this conference happened was a video of Alex Clark in this tweed faux Chanel getup and these like periwinkle platform Louboutins, which honestly, game recognize game. I will admit I looked them up after the fact. I'm not proud of that.
00:10:32.300shimmying around on stage during her speech and saying...0.99
00:18:55.960So, something that jumped out at me while I was reading the reporting was the emphasis on this fact that the girls seemed to clock the incongruities and contradictions of the speakers and the material that they were hearing.
00:19:09.140Like, I spoke with Madeline about what she saw there in the crowd, and she told me that she interviewed a number of women who were there, around a dozen of them, and said that there were a few trends that emerged, that many of these young women were, quote, socialized to be extraordinarily submissive, quote, very close to their families, very uncritical views of the role the father plays in their house, extremely polite and religious.
00:19:37.240She emphasized that more than once, that the Turning Point crowd was super, super religious.
00:19:43.580One woman she spoke with was like 16 or 17, had recently lost her best friend to leukemia
00:19:50.040and was there because her dad was a listener of the Charlie Kirk show
00:19:54.240and like told her to reach out to the field rep.
00:19:57.360Her poor dad is like maybe actually just trying to help out.
00:20:00.960I'm going to actually send a little bit of empathy to the dad.
00:20:03.160Maybe he was like, this is a girl's thing happening and this is the only girl's thing I know about.
00:20:07.240So they lived in the Pacific Northwest, and she reached out to her local field rep there,
00:20:12.100who was like a former youth pastor. She didn't have any money to attend. Turning Point paid for
00:20:17.320her to go. And Madeline told me that this girl, like, cried when she was talking about this and
00:20:23.360said, I just can't believe the blessings Jesus brings into my life. So that's kind of like the
00:20:29.760sort of attendee, really, that you're dealing with here. Mostly, Madeline just noted that the
00:20:35.380women she met there who were in attendance were much more practical and far less dogmatic
00:22:20.340Erin Wexler, a 31-year-old probably Arian influencer, told me.0.99
00:22:25.300Whereas we think women are beautiful and serve a great purpose, and we elevate them in our own right.0.99
00:22:29.640In this world, instead of a machine to rage against, there was a vision of more babies and beef tallow, less blue hair and birth control, as Alex Clark put it in her speech.
00:22:39.520An attendee could leave that talk and wander over to the merch tables to buy We Heart Nutrition Omega-3 Supplements, 10% of your purchase goes to pro-life pregnancy centers, a sign next to them read, Maha Red lip glosses, and $70 pastel crewneck sweaters that read, healing a sick culture physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
00:22:58.960All right. Now I'm going to show you the sweatshirt, and I want you to describe.0.57
00:23:07.360Caroline, how are you going to heal the culture physically?
00:23:10.520Oh, my God. This is actually, this graphic design is taking my breath away.
00:23:15.700So healing a sick culture, it's kind of like extremely, extremely cursive.0.89
00:23:20.200It almost looks like antique portraits, like gold portraits you would hang on the wall.0.97
00:23:24.600And there's a portrait of butter, a portrait of an engagement ring, and a portrait of, like, very elderly hands clasped in prayer.
00:23:33.740I'm just obsessed with the idea of we're going to physically heal the culture with a stick of butter.
00:23:40.880It's so incoherent that you must walk out of that conference feeling like you just, like, are emerging from an acid trip.
00:23:48.560Like, it's really Alice through the looking glass.
00:23:50.660So what you'll find, and this is if you watch a lot of the programming on their little YouTube channel, which we are going to do today, is a lot of advice about dating, parenting, fashion, and nutrition.
00:24:05.020pretty fucking light on literally any discussion of anything actually policy related. And you would
00:24:14.500think that given the position the United States is in right now, you would have heard a mention
00:24:19.600of something about immigration or trade or the deficit or taxes. They're like, no. When they say
00:24:26.300that women should care about culture and not politics, they really fucking mean it.0.99
00:24:30.100The great irony, too, is that they move very quickly between individual and societal responsibility for getting there. It's like, all you have to do to get what you want is just marry a man and have babies and don't work. But then they're also like, well, we need this whole conference and we need to change the government. But then they're like, but don't ask any questions about that.0.86
00:24:48.820We've talked about how there was this glaring contradiction between the women on stage and the women and girls in attendance, and nobody embodies this contradiction more than Alex Clark.
00:25:00.360Alex Clark is a fascinating character to me because her star is rising as one of the most well-paid women in right-wing media.
00:28:18.820Skyrocketing chronic disease, infertile young women, kids who are totally morbidly obese, and families who don't eat together.
00:28:26.820Okay, I'm going to pause it one more time just to point out, if you are a newer listener of this show, nothing that she's saying about, like, increasing infertility among young women to, like, this nod to the obesity epidemic, none of that is supported by the data in any meaningful sense.
00:28:42.880and I think it's easy when you hear that stuff
00:29:08.500How is this political in the least?1.00
00:29:12.880Feminism told women to chase their corporate dreams for their validation while their kids were eating sea oils and their marriages were collapsing.1.00
00:29:24.120Well, we're done pretending that a cubicle is more empowering than a countertop.0.97
00:29:32.140When we reclaim our food, we reclaim our health and we reclaim power.
00:38:45.960Let me ask you, raise your hand if you had to choose between amazing career,
00:38:49.860amazing family. You have to choose. Who here would choose amazing career?
00:38:53.360That's fine if you do. Please, like seriously, please raise your hand.
00:38:56.440There's a couple hands. Amazing family. All the other hands. Got it. Okay. So,
00:39:00.600So, for everyone that rose at the hand of amazing family, how many of you every single day, it's your purpose for being is finding a husband then?
00:41:11.540It's actually incredible to me, though, I will say, that every single woman who is presenting here has so much more charisma and intelligence and ability to effectively communicate their little propaganda than this man.
00:42:40.680Something known as the diminishing chance of matrimony myth.
00:42:44.240Now, I want to spend a beat there because I think that there is this sort of fear-mongering
00:42:49.140you hear a lot from men on the right, particularly when they are speaking to young women, that like
00:42:54.08030 is this statistical cutoff beyond which your life will end if you are not already a wife and
00:42:59.980mother. And it turns out the prevalence of that myth began with a Yale-Harvard study that was
00:43:08.060the cover story for Newsweek in 1986 that claimed women over 30 only had a 20% chance of getting
00:43:17.360married. And it established this idea in conventional mainstream wisdom that like 30 is
00:43:23.940the cutoff, that a 30-year-old woman is like a hopeless spinster. Now, of course, it has since
00:43:29.980been debunked. The real figure is like almost 70%. But I ended up reading this 1991 book for
00:43:36.780this episode called Backlash by Susan Faludi. And I didn't end up using much of it in my notes,
00:43:41.880But a big emphasis in her book was that the media apparatus in the Reagan era 1980s, so like think about the era following all the feminist gains of the 1970s, was just on an all-out warpath to discredit sociologists whose work found that women were happier with more freedom and autonomy and instead amplified these quacks who claimed that feminism had made women unhappy.
00:44:09.720Like, there was a steady drumbeat of that type of story in the news back then, and that era was really the source of a lot of the narratives that we still see the right cling to and amplify today.
00:44:21.620There was this one guy in particular she wrote about who, like, had columns in multiple major newspapers who was peddling a lot of this shit.
00:44:30.560Eventually, it comes out that, like, all of his schooling, all of his credentials had been fake.
00:44:37.060But the damage had been done and there was no sort of major retraction or, like, course correction. He just, like, sort of quietly stopped being published. So the dominant cultural narrative becomes this idea that women's gains from feminism were essentially a pyrrhic victory because they had made women unhappy.
00:44:55.000and like, ooh, sorry that all your freedom has made you so miserable.
00:44:59.020The data just did not support that, but it didn't matter
00:45:01.660because there had been such a steady beat of messaging
00:45:25.840After it concluded, Charlie said, quote, I'm not going to hire you. I'm going to date you.
00:45:34.120Oh, my God. I want to bring Charlie. I want to do what people do with bad dogs and be like, yeah, we sent him to a farm upstate. I want to take Charlie Kirk to a farm upstate, if you know what I mean.
00:47:09.960win the country, but their official mission and how they classify the work of their philanthropy
00:47:16.080is to, quote, educate students about the importance of fiscal responsibility,
00:47:22.420free markets, and capitalism. You know, what I'm just thinking about right now is the way that I
00:47:27.620am viewing this, the way that you're describing it, this isn't actually even about women quitting
00:47:32.500their jobs or, like, having kids or becoming moms or being subordinate. This is just voter suppression.0.94
00:47:38.880This is just like them figuring out a very effective propaganda tool.1.00
00:47:43.060With Black communities in Georgia, they make it so that you can't show up and you don't have enough papers.1.00
00:47:47.720With white women in wealthy towns, they scramble the fuck out of your brain so that you still don't show up on voting day.1.00
00:47:54.640This is just fucking voter suppression.1.00
00:47:56.600They don't care if you have kids or if you get married.
00:47:58.900This is just another tactic to gerrymander the outcomes of all of these elections.
00:48:03.640There's a historical thread here back to like the founding of the Heritage Foundation and conservative economic interests. But it is relatively unique today, I think, for a right-wing organization that prides itself on its dominance of culture to so overtly name capitalism as one of its goals.
00:48:26.560Because, like, free markets as a value, assuming you're taking that at face value, that's, like, a way more libertarian thing than a conservative thing, especially, like, the way that the conservative party works today, which is, like, very protectionist.
00:48:49.360If you will please look at this screenshot from their tax return about what their grants were for. I think this is from their 2018 tax return. I can't remember. I looked at a lot of them.
00:48:59.340God bear me strength. Purpose of grant or assistance. Awareness of free markets. What?
00:49:07.760Are we aware enough, everybody? Are we aware of the free markets?
00:49:11.100I think there are two options here. Number one, it's that they genuinely think that we need to promote capitalism all over the world the way that the U.S. will do that and pay for pro-capitalist propaganda in other countries. Or do you think, honestly, that this is also just indicative of a wildly disorganized organization? Because I almost don't want to give them more credit than they necessarily deserve.
00:49:33.700They have to find some way to justify the fact that they're tax-exempt.
00:49:38.980I don't know how much of it is earnest and how much of it isn't.
00:49:42.540Turning Point started in 2012 when Charlie Kirk was 18 years old and he was headhunted,
00:49:48.320or like, honestly, I feel like he was kind of groomed, by this 70-year-old rich guy named Bill Montgomery,
00:49:55.380who like heard him speak at some thing when he was 18.
00:50:00.660And again, was talking his erection into the seam of his pants. You know, it's funny. Ironically, given Turning Point's relentless mocking of mask mandates and vaccine misinformation during the pandemic, old boy actually died from COVID in 2020.
00:50:19.420Kirk and Turning Point, more broadly, really rose to prominence in part from maintaining watch lists of professors on college campuses who were spreading, quote, leftist propaganda.
00:50:32.340Recall that Charlie Kirk did not go to college.
00:50:35.080So I'm going to have you read from a 2018 Politico profile when Turning Point and Charlie Kirk were gaining relevance.
00:50:41.360On a warm January in Tempe, Arizona, John Willis was walking down a palm tree-lined path on the campus of Arizona State University when he saw something that made him irate, a student wearing a t-shirt silkscreened with the image of Che Guevara.
00:50:56.920I thought, kid, you don't even know who Che Guevara is, says Willis, a commercial real estate broker in Mesa, Arizona. God help me.
00:51:04.760A Che shirt on a college campus might not stick out for most people, but for Willis, 36, it touched a nerve. It was just the latest confirmation of his worry that more young people today are embracing socialism, even Marxism, instead of American capitalism.
00:51:19.740Okay, wait, I want to come back to that. Some of these kids have no real desire to build something on their own, says Willis, who works for a firm founded by his father. Incredible, bravo. As long as these kids get something for free and they get taken care of, they're happy. What they don't know is that the world that works that way, the socialist world, leads to extreme poverty and eventually death. Please reference Katie's recent episode on the rise and fall of capitalism. Seriously.
00:51:44.500I have a three-hour podcast episode for you.
00:51:47.480I was just about to say, if you haven't listened to that, guys, please go listen to it.
00:51:50.900The donors I spoke to for this story will see that essential to this mission.
00:51:55.100One thing I like about Turning Point, Willis says, is that it is educating these kids right in front of their socialist professors' faces that what they are being told about capitalism is wrong.
00:52:04.700Quick cutaway to, like, all the econ professors who are teaching everyone about trickle-down theory, but whatever.
00:52:09.220But Kirk, not unlike the GOP overall, has become split between Trump, an ardent trade protectionist whose policies could push the federal deficit over $1 trillion, and the free market limited government principles espoused in the group's charter.
00:52:24.540Can I just say something really quickly? I find it really interesting that these people will always claim that there is a conservative revolution taking place, but then they also claim at the exact same moment that they are fighting back against a socialist revolution taking place.
00:52:38.780And that really, I think, gets to the heart of what you and I talk about all the time, which is, oh, are people running towards your theories or are they running away from neoliberal economics and running towards anything that even, like, hints at the discomfort that has been caused by that, you know?
00:52:54.220Yeah, I think the thing that really jumped out to me about that piece was it made it click for me that a lot of these people seem to believe that the only reason young Americans are critical of capitalism or interested in socialism is because their professors or educators are like pushing it on them as if they aren't like living in the breakdown of capitalism at every moment of every day.
00:53:19.640And like, they couldn't possibly just be reacting to the actual conditions of their lives. And so, of course, the antidote for this is more, quote, awareness of free markets.
00:53:31.020No, no, no. Let us explain how good you have it. How good you have it. How good you have it. Shut up. You have it good.
00:53:36.600That's also ironically, like, the position of the entire marketing campaign behind Bidenomics, but I digress. By 2020, Turning Point was embroiled in an election fraud-related scandal. The affiliate Turning Point Action had paid minors to post misinformation about coronavirus and mail-in ballot voter fraud.
00:53:57.140This was like before the election happened. They were already seeding the internet with this idea that the 2020 election would be stolen. The Washington Post worked with an independent data science firm and identified no fewer than 4,500 posts as part of this effort.
00:54:13.360I found this quote from a parent of two teenage girls. They said in the piece for the Washington
00:54:20.340Post, one parent of two teenagers involved in the effort, Robert Jason Noonan, said his 16 and 17
00:54:27.000year old daughters were being paid by Turning Point to push, quote, conservative points of view
00:54:32.520and values on social media. He said they have been working with the group since about June,
00:54:37.680adding in an interview, the job is theirs until they want to quit or until the election. So I
00:54:42.900found in one of Turning Point's tax documents that they, looks like they paid the firm who
00:54:49.440orchestrated that astroturfing campaign $530,000. At least some of the supposedly grassroots support
00:54:56.740for this stolen election idea came from this very highly organized paid effort that began
00:55:03.600in like the middle of 2020 before the election even happened. In 2021, they paid to send 80
00:55:09.900buses of, quote, patriots to the Capitol for January 6th, and then later, of course, downplayed
00:55:15.240that they had any involvement. This was the same year when they tried to open a school. They wanted
00:55:19.120to open Turning Point Academy that was going to teach a K-12, quote, America-first education.
00:55:24.600They had projected their revenue at $40 million per year. By 2023, they came under fire again
00:55:29.420from more middle-of-the-road GOP people, all of whom have since been fired, who called their
00:55:35.140worldview, quote, radicalized and tried to essentially sideline Kirk and his influence.
00:55:40.360They, like, basically thought he was bad for the conservative party. I talked to Madeline about
00:55:44.640this, who's been studying Kirk and Turning Point for a long time. She told me that this was around
00:55:49.200the same time that Trump ousted the leaders for the RNC and outsourced his field operations to
00:55:55.620Turning Point. So when Trump won, Charlie did this big victory lap claiming that, like, it was him
00:56:01.100and turning point in their influence that turned out the vote for Trump, essentially.
00:56:06.440However, I think it's fair to say that that claim is pretty dubious. I think this is echoed in the
00:56:13.860Politico reporting. It's also in some New Yorker coverage that their presence and their influence
00:56:20.940on college campuses and elsewhere is most likely vastly overstated. The Politico piece is from
00:56:28.4802018. So, like, clearly this was a much smaller organization with a lot less money at the time.
00:56:33.160They've grown really rapidly in the last couple of years. But the Politico reporter reached out
00:56:38.740at that time to, like, a half dozen candidates for student government who Turning Point had
00:56:44.160claimed to have trained and backed or, as we like to say, incubated.
00:56:48.880And none of them corroborated the claim. Some were like, yeah, they reached out to me,
00:56:54.320but I never responded. Others, like, outright denounced Turning Point.
00:56:57.660So it's pretty likely that Turning Point is overstating how much influence it really has.0.89
00:57:04.060I'm glad that you bring that up because I think that something that I have talked to you about in the last few weeks that is kind of like tricky to work with and I think you have to contextualize is the amount of power that all of these female conservative influencers have.
00:57:18.440where it's like Brett Cooper, oh my God, she has all these subscribers, Candace Owens, all these
00:57:22.680people, all these women who have frankly pivoted away from politics who are talking about celebrity0.83
00:57:27.140culture. When you contextualize that with how many influencers there are with millions of followers,
00:57:34.580on Love Island alone, there are multiple influencers from that show who have
00:57:38.600millions of followers. Think about Hailey Bieber in Road. When you think about just like how crowded0.99
00:57:43.200the ecosystem of attention is, just the extent to which that we can so easily deduce the level
00:57:49.320of impact they are having in a real way on our culture and politics, I think is way more
00:57:53.260complicated than some people have led us to believe. The distinction to be made is that
00:57:59.340it feels like supply outpaces demand in the turning point space. They are extremely well
00:58:06.980funded. They are extremely organized, but their ideas are not that popular. Madeline told me one
00:58:14.340story about a field representative going through the followers of the Pepperdine Republicans Club
00:58:20.320before this women's conference and DMing every woman that followed the account and offering them
00:58:26.340a free trip to Dallas for the conference. So earlier in this episode, you were like, how much
00:58:30.360did this cost? And I'm thinking like, I don't even know how many people that were there actually paid
00:58:34.100to be there versus we're on the receiving end of outreach and like, we will pay for you to go to
00:58:39.960this, who they might be receptive to the idea, but they're not like seeking it out, spending money on
00:58:45.880it, paying for the travel themselves. And so I just think it's, there's a little like fog of war
00:58:51.340around how this organization is actually working and like how many people genuinely support it.
00:58:57.160And I think that part of that comes back to Charlie Kirk. Madeline described him as
00:59:01.820psychotically ambitious and extraordinarily wealthy. She told me that he went through a
00:59:08.160religious conversion in 2021 with some megachurch pastor named Rob McCoy, who now works for the
00:59:15.700faith division of Turning Point. This guy was like, you know, one of those who refused to shut
00:59:20.080his church down during COVID. And apparently this was when Charlie got really big on the
00:59:24.980Christian nationalism thing. So from a business perspective, Madeline was like, this is also
00:59:30.460but partially because there was less of an audience for Turning Point without tapping into churches.
00:59:36.080If you recall, two different people that I spoke with about this conference told me these attendees
00:59:40.420were extremely religious. So I think it makes perfect sense that this was just as much a
00:59:45.640business move as it was him becoming a sincere Christian nationalist. So his influence, I think,
00:59:53.680to sum it all up, is a little bit of a paradox. It's hard to overstate his presence online.
00:59:58.420His TikTok footprint is massive. I mean, his top videos get tens of millions of views.
01:00:04.500But Madeline told me that she thinks Turning Point itself is actually a bit of a paper tiger,
01:00:09.360that their ideas are just not popular. We've just spent a lot of time on Turning Point. We've spent
01:00:13.840a lot of time on, like, religiosity, the types of women that this is attracting.
01:00:19.180Tangentially related to what you are witnessing at this Turning Point USA Women's Summit0.80
01:00:23.760is the thread of conservatives being hot.
01:00:28.300So I wanted to pull on that a little bit more
01:00:30.320because I felt like it might lead us somewhere interesting.
01:00:33.140And what I found really expanded my understanding
01:02:37.400And a career that started on the trading floor at Goldman Sachs and took me to the startups of Silicon Valley.
01:02:42.660The left doesn't know what to do with me.
01:02:44.800Or we're like, you're welcome for your education and your career.
01:02:48.760Yeah, the left is thrilled that you got educated, honey. I'm not here to echo the same old narrative. I'm all about smashing the status quo and redefining what conservative commentary can be. This reads like a Real Housewives open liner. My quote non-lib takes are about challenging norms, sparking conversations, and injecting some fresh thinking into the mix. Stick around. I've got a lot more to share.
01:03:11.720Okay, I got nothing from that. I have no clue who she is or what she thinks. I could guess.
01:03:16.180Thank you. I ask you, what is conservative commentary? What the fuck does conservatism
01:03:22.760mean? I went and I watched some of her videos, and I was like, again, I feel no closer to
01:03:27.500understanding what any of this has to do with conservatism. Okay, moving on to Jamie Lee.
01:03:33.120Caroline, I could give you a thousand guesses for how this woman's name is spelled. You would be1.00
01:03:38.240no closer by the thousandth guess, but I'm going to have you try anyway.
01:06:26.300They give me nothing to work with in this because I have no fucking clue what that bag of word salad was.
01:06:33.020Whenever we talk about, like, the mechanics of writing together, I remember that I, too, am also an uneducated gunscap compared to you.
01:06:41.860Where I'm like, duh, this sounds nice.
01:06:44.200I should also note, you actually don't even need an education for that because stories are the most instinctual aspect of being, like, humans instinctually understand how to make arguments and how to give stories.
01:06:54.760if they have brains that are designed to do that.
01:06:57.580You have a brain that is designed to communicate,
01:06:59.660which is why it comes naturally to you.
01:07:01.080These women were not gifted by the Lord
01:07:03.440with the ability to naturally communicate,0.99
01:07:05.840and they also didn't pay attention in school.
01:07:07.800And so they're just doing a five-paragraph about page
01:07:12.940with no explanation for what's happening here.
01:07:16.580With that sort of grand vague mission,
01:07:19.560you'd probably expect their politics coverage
01:07:22.420to be at least a little bit on top of it.
01:07:24.600I mean, they're calling themselves conservative politicos in the opening sentence, especially given the last 150 days of legislative horror that we have had in this country.
01:07:45.260So can you go to the conservator's website and navigate for me to the politics section of the site and tell me what the most recent article was?
01:07:57.960Okay. Politics. Okay. All right. Okay. So this is very Evie coded. So I just clicked on the politics tagline and the latest article is from February.
01:09:28.940Mastering the Fashion of the Masters Tournament.
01:09:31.060Yeah, so this is where I get into my theory where it's like, I've had a lot of people message me recently what I think about, like, Candace Owens for obvious reasons if you know my history.
01:11:27.360Mom Donnie openly identifies as a socialist and promotes dismantling capitalism and dramatically expanding government control over private industry and personal life.
01:11:43.580By vilifying business and—wait, by—okay, these women are such bad writers.1.00
01:11:47.940By vilifying business, just all business, and pushing socialist economics, Momdani would choke job growth, raise taxes, and kill innovation, driving jobs and talent to other states, and furthering the cost-of-living crisis.1.00
01:12:02.660Momdani blames capitalism for nearly every societal issue, ding, ding, ding, and wants to replace it with state-driven socialism, a proven failure globally and historically.
01:12:11.500Do you think that someone that, like, one of their conservative bros, like, told them to write this?
01:12:18.000Because why wouldn't this be on their website?
01:12:55.400Mamdani's hostility toward Israel, support for radical anti-colonial movements,0.82
01:12:59.760and they're just pro-colonial, it's hilarious,
01:13:03.320and refusal to condemn terrorist groups like Hamas aligning with anti-Western forces.
01:13:07.820Furthermore, he supports education policies, terrifying, that demonize Western history, promote critical race theory, and paint America's founding as oppressive.
01:13:17.740Western civilization prioritizes individual liberty and equal opportunity, says the girls who are literally fighting against that.
01:13:25.320Mom, Donnie's embrace of identity politics and collectivist ideology is divisive and regressive, turning citizens into competing tribes rather than united individuals.
01:13:51.060So I wanted to include that because I think in my like, oh, everyone join hands and shout, you don't hate feminism, you just hate neoliberalism belief system.
01:13:58.640I like to think that these people just do not even recognize capitalism as a force that is shaping their lives.
01:14:05.780But I fear that is not true. We will come back to the capitalism of it all at the end of this and, you know, the profit motive at play that's driving a lot of this. But in the meantime, I want to talk about the parties because part of what they do is they throw parties and mixers and events for other so-called hot conservatives in New York.
01:14:28.760And from what I can tell, the events are hosted by a number of organizations. You have Date Right Stuff, which is the dating app for conservatives that Caroline Leavitt did SpawnCon for, The Conservator, and another, which we're going to talk about in a second, called Make America Hot Again.
01:14:44.080And Caroline, would you believe that the unedited Google photo libraries from these events are just open for anyone to see?
01:14:52.880It's so pick me. It's so embarrassing.
01:14:54.740who's good at googling do with that information what you will everyone and by do what you will
01:15:01.020i mean i'm gonna put the link in the show notes oh my god these sorts of parties are like exactly
01:15:07.860the beat that the free press loves um when i tell you that i can feel the boner straining against
01:15:14.940the cargo pants of this reporter caro i'm gonna have you read an excerpt from a march free press
01:15:20.920article called Write Young Things, A Night Out with the MAGA Kids. This is talking about the
01:15:29.020cruel kids table piece. You said this is the free press? Oh, yeah. Okay, so we know it's going to be
01:15:37.560well-written, fact-checked, thoroughly reported. Try to get through it without gagging. I'm just
01:15:43.460going to say the quiet part out loud. Hot people don't have to say all the time, I'm hot.
01:16:07.440The image was straight out of Gossip Girl.
01:16:09.680The most beautiful young people you've ever seen with razor-sharp cheekbones and expensive-looking clothes in an opulent ballroom having the time of their lives.
01:16:19.560Yes. Yes. Sell me on it. The associated hit piece clearly meant to reveal what the new young
01:16:24.980right is really like. Awful. But what it actually did was amplify an idea already popular on the
01:16:30.380internet, that being young and right-wing is hot. What does being right-wing mean in this context?
01:16:37.020What makes it hot? Again, I feel no closer to understanding. And so that brings us to Raquel
01:16:43.440de bono raquel de bono is the founder of make america hot again we are going to watch one of
01:16:50.120her videos before we go any further so you can understand what we're talking about here all0.52
01:16:55.040right let's fucking go i don't think enough conservatives talk about the emerging movement0.75
01:16:59.060that is the new right and what's the new right you may ask it is the normal city conservative0.88
01:17:03.160we're just normal people they can have liberal friends they can have conservative friends and
01:17:06.540they just don't really care about a lot of these issues on the dock for example abortion let's be0.60
01:17:10.840so fucking for real as a city conservative my friends and i don't care about abortion would i
01:17:15.520judge someone for getting an abortion no would i ever get an abortion no not at this point in my0.91
01:17:19.760life because i'm almost 29 years old do i think people should just like willy and nilly me having
01:17:24.200abortions like no that's also there's a lot of people in the mega movement have qualities that
01:17:29.160i don't love like for example the super bowl you guys are so mad about kendrick lamar who care who
01:17:34.540care like am i gonna make it about politics no because it's not political who care who care i
01:17:40.280just think that a lot of these issues that conservatives like will die on the hill that
01:17:43.800is certain a city conservative or like this new right or new generation of mega people don't give
01:17:49.140a fuck about and i think a lot of liberals still judge people who are on the right when at the end
01:17:53.160of the day i probably think we could probably have a normal conversation probably wouldn't even know
01:17:56.660i was conservative if you didn't like stalk me on instagram yeah i think it's really good to just
01:18:00.360always have many perspectives and not be in an echo chamber it's funny because the more i hang
01:18:04.000out with liberals the more conservative i become the more i hang out with conservatives the more
01:18:07.620liberal. So it's always good to... Okay, so she's not conservative? Exactly! I literally...
01:18:13.340Wait, wait, Paz, though, I just want, again, once again, when we note how successful this movement
01:18:17.200is, this woman has 19,000 followers. You and I have more followers on both TikTok and Instagram
01:18:22.600than this woman. Would we say the movement is growing? Unclear. I'm sitting there watching
01:18:27.000this and I'm going to go, dude, you're describing liberalism. Like, you are describing, if anything,
01:18:31.660you're describing, like, libertarianism, which is, like, I don't care what people do. You're
01:18:36.720describing apathy. Right? So I've watched this and I'm like, dude, what the fuck does conservatism
01:18:43.140mean to these people? Why does she think that she's a conservative? And so in my effort to find
01:18:49.020out, I looked at all the press that she has gotten for Make America Hot Again and all the
01:18:54.980associated speaking engagements at things like the Turning Point Conference. Something interesting
01:19:00.240about this is that they basically concede that the conservative impulse in many of these spaces
01:19:06.620is about culture not as a means, but as an end in itself.
01:19:12.160And this finally set me over the edge.
01:22:23.660It was totally chill. She was extremely friendly. She did not seem sheepish. She did not ask me what the project was for. There was, like, no suspicion on her part about, like, why I was asking these questions. She was very open about her beliefs. It was very friendly.
01:28:28.360She was like, a lot of these privileged people that I know want Zoran to win.
01:28:34.140She goes, it's this rich guilt that is just hilarious to me.
01:28:38.120And I asked her, do you think it's possible for a rich and privileged person to earnestly feel concerned about the working class in New York City and to actually want things to be more affordable for everybody?
01:28:51.260And she was like, I'll just point you to the map of the votes. The underprivileged communities don't want that. It's the highly educated Democrats who want that.
01:28:59.600And I'm like, okay, first of all, that's not true. There was like a remarkable lack of like class gradation in the people that voted. He won working class neighborhoods and wealthy neighborhoods alike. So we kind of move on from that. And I just ask her like, hey, it feels like a lot of the mainstream press that you're quoted in talks about conservative cultural values. Like, what are those? What do those mean to you?
01:29:20.780and she said do what you want say what you want the right has become the party of the rule breakers
01:29:26.840and the cool and the left are the party of the hall monitors who say you can't say that word
01:29:31.980you can't do that as i hung up the phone i was like that just kind of felt like a run it back
01:29:36.300of the cruel kids article like a very similar to your point apathy i think conservatism as an
01:29:43.100identity or political movement has basically lost all cohesion at this point like if it's not clear
01:29:50.080by now, most of the people who are cashing in on the media interest in these ideas and their
01:29:54.520supposed political popularity are chiefly interested in vibes and don't earnestly hold
01:30:01.240really any beliefs. So she said she's a lawyer. She's like in this wealthy elite crowd in New
01:30:06.280York. I would also say that like the most empathy I would extend is that she probably has major
01:30:10.840incentives to perform these beliefs because there is a disproportionate number of conservative white
01:30:17.500dudes who don't want to deal with rules and who are very upset about me too that whole like wall
01:30:21.740street big five law like that whole energy is very conservative and it is also very stacked against0.98
01:30:29.080women doing well in those workforces i almost wonder i mean i don't want to take away her0.78
01:30:34.260ability to have bad ideas on her own but like i also am just kind of like well yeah no shit you0.65
01:30:39.780believe that you're going out to lunch with your little friends you're having caviar and you want
01:30:43.580to play with the boys you want to like stick around and say that like you nothing bothers you
01:30:48.420nothing bothers you when they say something and like there are actual incentives for her life
01:30:52.760that align with that it would be very uncomfortable for her to have to put on a hot girls for mom
01:30:58.820donnie shirt you and i have created ecosystems where like we actually know a lot of people who
01:31:03.660have the same beliefs as us and so we actually both have faced certain career challenges for
01:31:07.480having these beliefs, but by creating a community who have similar beliefs as us, you do feel that
01:31:13.900reinforcement and that solidarity. And it sounds like this chick is really far from that. And
01:31:18.060also, she doesn't give a fuck. Okay, great. You don't give a fuck. That sounds good. I'm glad.0.97
01:31:22.280Thanks for clarifying. And this is something that you've touched on, Caro, but again, I have yet to
01:31:26.540see actual proof that these ideas are actually gaining popularity. I do think that, to your
01:31:31.980point about social media followers, that's not everything. But a lot of these people have been
01:31:37.360profiled in every major news outlet. Raquel Debono has fewer than 20,000 followers. According to
01:31:44.260similar web data, The Conservator, as of May 2025, got 55,000 visits per month. So like to put that
01:31:51.240in perspective, Zoran Mamdani had more individual volunteers door knocking for him than there are
01:31:57.320people who visited the conservatoire website last month. Right. I know you've like dug into some of
01:32:03.180this data around voting and college attendance and like I have dug into the data about how many
01:32:07.760women are out earning or equal earners to their husbands and mixed sex marriages and like none of
01:32:12.940the data around any of these things confirm that people are actually living their lives in a way
01:32:18.240that indicates these ideas are becoming more popular. It is worth distinguishing that like
01:32:23.120Kamala won a majority of women, but Trump did win the majority of white women, which was also true
01:32:29.36010 years ago. So it's not like we've seen some, like, explosive shift. Like, he won the white
01:32:34.580women then, he won them now. And I realize this is, like, a little meta and a little hypocritical
01:32:39.300because we are talking about it right now, but after spending so much time reading all these
01:32:45.040profiles in the major newspapers and magazines about this so-called movement, it really does
01:32:50.840feel astroturfed to me. This is something that Madeline highlighted too. She was like,
01:32:55.320there is such a tremendous media demand and interest in content about conservative young
01:33:00.780women because there are so few of them and they seem like such an oxymoron. So like these women1.00
01:33:06.140are really just responding to media incentives. I'm actually really happy that we're talking0.54
01:33:10.640about this today, number one, because it's fascinating, but I also feel like it serves
01:33:13.420as a counterbalance to the deep dive we did into the Make America Healthy Again movement,
01:33:17.740which is obviously deeply influential but i also think that you have to have this balancing of like
01:33:23.400yeah but this isn't a rising movement and if you were to look at these headlines
01:33:27.440on all of this you would think that it is and you would really get the impression and
01:33:32.100that is a very effective strategy for the gop if you think that they are growing that is almost
01:33:38.780as useful for them as actually growing i feel very optimistic when we talk about this stuff1.00
01:33:44.640because I'm like, number one, they're not convincing women of anything. And number two,1.00
01:33:49.080as we have discussed in the past, women who do what these people say, which is to say,0.95
01:33:55.220behave in a subordinate way, have the babies, marry a man who behaves in a dominant way,0.62
01:34:00.760the reaction period is so fucking swift that it's not going to work. And I think we often reference
01:34:08.220the loss of reproductive rights as evidence of this rising movement. And I think it is here0.58
01:34:13.060where I would say our Roe v. Wade rights were so shaky to begin with. Do not let them make this a
01:34:20.140bigger domino than it is. They are very much trying to make the toppling of Roe v. Wade a
01:34:26.640cultural momentum moment, and it should not be. Abortion was very shaky to begin with. We did a
01:34:32.340whole episode about this you can listen to. From the moment we passed Roe v. Wade in 73, there were
01:34:37.660efforts to chip away at that legislation. Not all women had the right to get an abortion,
01:34:43.380even when we had Roe v. Wade. Like, it was already on very, very unstable ground. And so
01:34:47.560we should absolutely fight to restore those freedoms. But, like, do not let the fall of
01:34:53.060Roe make you think that there has been a huge cultural subversion or inversion because there
01:34:58.020has not been. One of the most important things that you highlighted in that abortion deep dive
01:35:03.780that you did was the Democratic Party never tried to enshrine those rights. At no point was there an
01:35:12.480earnest effort made. So it's like, okay, so if we know that that is true, then what would change if
01:35:18.800it actually did become a priority beyond being like a surface little talking point that you can
01:35:23.780wave around? On the left, we fall into this trap of arguing that same point sometimes where you'll
01:35:30.020see people be like, see, women's rights are being stripped back and you'll kind of gesture at all
01:35:34.380of these things that are going wrong, again, to indicate that there is some cultural sea change
01:35:39.980around women. The feeling that I was left with going through all of this this week was like
01:35:44.120pulling back the curtain and being like, there's nothing there. They got nothing. There is nothing
01:35:49.200there. So when I was sitting back and trying to understand like, okay, well, what is the bedrock
01:35:54.420of the conservative identity? Why does it attract people who seemingly believe so many different
01:35:59.880things. Like how could you have these religious 16-year-olds who want to become young mothers in
01:36:05.300like a Raquel De Bono type in Manhattan? What is the like unifying link? And I went back to a piece
01:36:11.520that Joe Mayall wrote about a study out of the UK called Attitude Networks as Intergroup Realities
01:36:17.460Using Network Modeling to Research Attitude Identity Relationships in Polarized Political
01:36:22.180Contexts. And the TLDR is that so little of modern conservative culture is about policy at all.
01:36:28.340It's just white identity politics. This is what Joe wrote. Pun intended.
01:36:36.160So while any group of modern Trump supporters might have more expansive views on gay marriage
01:36:40.740than a group of Democratic voters, that's because desired policy outcomes are not what
01:36:45.280makes someone a Republican. The GOP attracts Americans with, quote, cultural issues,
01:36:49.840which inevitably centers the straight white Christian male as the head of a traditional0.88
01:36:54.300family and the rightful steward of the country. The closer you are to this ideal identity,0.95
01:37:00.020either physically or ideologically, the more likely you are to be a Republican.
01:37:04.200Conversely, Democrats coalesce around ideas about civil rights, gun control, and other political
01:37:09.400issues. So I've been thinking a lot about why any of this would be appealing to anyone.
01:37:16.060And I found myself continuously going back to the quote from the New York Magazine article
01:37:51.500anytime soon? I don't. No, I don't. And so much of what the conservative movement is offering
01:37:57.900people right now is the same thing that the billion-dollar self-help industry offers people,
01:38:02.900which is solutions that feel realistic and within your control. So, like, the fact that
01:38:07.960the EV Magazine competitor describes itself as a nostalgic oasis, a spirited salon, and a community
01:38:13.760for women who aspire to become the best versions of themselves is the whole ballgame. It's a
01:38:19.120political movement for women who don't care about politics and don't want political solutions.1.00
01:38:26.040It is a political movement with no policy. It's LuLaRoe. It's LuLaRoe. And so in the end,0.88
01:38:33.120I was trying to figure out how these two seemingly disparate variations of the conservative women's0.99
01:38:39.340culture coalesce. Like, what do they have in common? What is the ideological center of that1.00
01:38:44.720Venn diagram because on one hand, you have the trad wife, single earner, heterosexual family
01:38:49.780solution as like the realistic alternative to a hard life that's being sold to low and middle0.98
01:38:54.960income women with low levels of education. But you also have the dark girl boss variation for1.00
01:39:00.580essentially what I would call the high income, high education women who do not want to be made1.00
01:39:05.000to feel bad or guilty or responsible for making anything better for anyone else and just want to1.00
01:39:10.360be able to freely enjoy their privilege without anyone bitching at them about it.
01:39:13.840They don't want to feel the most remote level of friction, which comes all the way down to someone saying, hey, do you mind not saying that word anymore? Like, that's the level of lack of friction they want in their life with the outside world.
01:39:25.720And I started to think about, you know the phrase heteropessimism?
01:39:29.360Yes. Heterofatalist, too. Like, we talked about that with our last episode.
01:39:33.100I started to think about that in relation to, like, capital pessimism or capital fatalism. It's the same thing but about our economic reality, that these women, whether they like it or don't like it, see capitalism as an immutable, unchangeable reality. They are all looking for the path that will allow them to thrive most within that reality.0.88
01:39:52.200And for a while, I was like, oh, okay, we just need to distribute copies of socialist literature and, like, surely they'll all see the error in their ways. But this is where the conservative identity comes in. This is where the identity piece is crucial.
01:40:05.340The center of the Venn diagram is that these people are all outright hostile to the idea of collectivism. They like hierarchies. They see themselves as being at the top of them, whether that hierarchy is whether you're high income or educated or you're thin, fertile, and feminine, or you're a white man, whatever.
01:40:26.600they don't feel moved by calls for equality or egalitarianism because they do not perceive
01:40:31.800those things to be positive. They like individualism. The conservative identity is
01:40:37.680one that feels attracted to and uplifted by neoliberal ideas, not turned off by them.
01:40:43.740They are threatened by the idea of interdependence. And that is why it was inconceivable to Raquel
01:40:49.200De Bono that wealthy New Yorkers could care about working class people and sincerely support Mom
01:40:54.560Donnie, because in the conservative conception of the world, one that sees hierarchies as natural
01:40:59.900and just, that is simply not something that someone at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy
01:41:04.780would ever do. Yes, Katie. Okay, this is, I'm so glad that you're saying this, because this also
01:41:11.160connects to people talking about what's taking place with the Trump administration. We have got
01:41:15.900to stop assuming that people want democracy. There is this assumption that people are going
01:41:21.440to be upset by violations of the rule of law or by expansions of the executive branch because the
01:41:27.080assumption is that people don't want monarchy. Plenty of people want monarchy. Plenty of people
01:41:33.000want authoritarian rule. Plenty of people were sick and fucking tired of the barest, barest
01:41:38.720structure of democracy that we had previously. We have to start baking that into our understanding
01:41:43.960and start breaking apart this idea of the American dream that we all want this democratic vision.
01:41:49.920these conservatives actively do not want Black people in Georgia to have votes that are equal
01:41:55.240to their own. They actively do not want everyone to be represented. And I feel like it is a huge
01:42:01.260breaking through point to start to acknowledge that, that people are fucking fine with Trump
01:42:07.440taking more executive power. They are fine as long as he reflects them and keeps them at the
01:42:11.740top of the pyramid. And I feel like we really need to see more leaders just behaving like you. I
01:42:16.480think you should run for office. Actually, don't, because I want to do this podcast with you.
01:42:22.080But okay, so like at the beginning, I was like, what is conservatism? This is my goal. I'm trying
01:42:26.340to figure out what the fuck cultural values you're talking about. And I realized conservatism
01:42:32.360is individualism. That is all it is. Conservatism is just individualism. It is the identity that
01:42:39.380likes individualism. You like these neoliberal ideas. They appeal to you. You don't actually
01:42:45.560want them to go away. And so you are just going to assess realistically and rationally your lot
01:42:52.740in life. If you are a low-income woman with no education, they're going to tell you to get1.00
01:42:57.700married. If you are a high-income woman like Raquel, they're going to tell you to start a little0.97
01:43:01.480fucking organization that hosts mixers for other hot people who don't care about things.1.00
01:43:06.460And like, there is a solution for you.
01:43:08.560For people who say they're hot. I just really can't emphasize this enough. This is not just,
01:43:13.000we're not just giving them hotness it's organizations for people who self-identify
01:43:17.240as hot that's kind of the thing is like yes the reason that these ideas are popular to the extent
01:43:22.000that they are popular is because some people just like hierarchies and individualism and like
01:43:25.960it doesn't matter how much communist manifesto you show them they don't fucking feel moved by that
01:43:31.620yeah and also there are so many more people who are moved by it and do want who do want
01:43:38.780collective action and who do think that interconnectedness is a good thing. So in
01:43:43.180conclusion, cultural conservatism is individualism, and I rest my case.
01:43:48.000In conclusion, Katie and I are just at the very, very beginning of the bell curve of our success,
01:43:53.040and we already have more influence than 90% of the people that we spoke about today. So like,