Jamie Loftus
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
No, no, no.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
That is so true.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Jesus Christ, Robert.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
The show is called text notes behind the bastards.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Like, huh? Him?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
I'm still mad about last episode.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
So much funnier than it should be.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
No, I would never replace Jamie Loftus. Never.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
You've watched that Silver Springs video one too many times.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
I'm definitely not going to say Tom Cruise is a good man.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
I don't like that, man.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Stevie Nicks would have come out on top just like she did in real life.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Absolutely. That's a guy who was born and raised in Germany, had to leave in late 1945 for some reason, moved to Argentina and started calling himself Sergio. That's the kind of Sergio that is. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
You could like, this is a guy who you could show that picture and then show a picture of the same guy in like an SS uniform in 1943. And that would be like the big moment where like, oh my God, it's the same guy. He's identical. You realize they've been vampires the whole time. That's how this man looks. That's Sergio Gore.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Wow. Take them out for the picture, bro. What are you doing? What is wrong with you?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
You read and I'll scroll through these posts.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I've never been actually. I think you'd love it. It's really, really fun. I've heard only good things.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I'm actually extremely angry by this because they've taken a quote from Galaxy Quest, which I would say is one of the chief accomplishments of our civilization is that movie.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
No, no, no. Let's just go right on because we've looked into Sergio Gore. That's good to know. I think we have an understanding of who he is as a man.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Choosing to believe the song Hey Sergio by Streetlight Man. Well, it was originally Thomas Kalanicki with Catch-22, but it's been with a bunch of bands. But I'm choosing to believe it's about him. What a pull. It's a poll. That song gets more relevant every year, Jamie.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
You know what I think we're going to do first, Sophie, is we're going to poll to ads real quick, and then we'll come back and do that.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
And that seems like a town where there's competition for the title.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I would say Pittsburgh and Detroit would be like the hot dog cities that would be most impressed if someone was the king of. Like if somebody's like, I'm the hot dog king of Portland. I'm like, well, who gives a fuck?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
We're back. Sophie, let's go through those chapters.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
One of them's got to be about trans people, right?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Protect, protect child's innocence. Yeah, that's probably the trans one. There's got to be one on the border. Protect us from I stop white genocide. I don't know what the fuck she'd title that.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
A lot of the right is these days. A lot of the lady right. Including Lana Del Rey. Lana Del Rey was always pretty problematic, Jamie. That was what made her music fun.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
That's not true. I got hard pants made with my suit that I wore.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
A couple of days. I wore that a couple of days at the DNC and the RNC.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Anything that needs a belt to stay up. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
It was a decision I made when some guys shot at me one time where I was like, I almost died in uncomfortable pants. I'm never doing that again.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I hate this shit. You've never changed your own oil, Marjorie. Don't even lie.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
It's such a 20 years ago populism where it's like, I'll wear my blue jeans to a fancy dinner, you know, because the fanciest dinner is the steakhouse in my town.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Man, the richest people in the world dress like shit now. It's fine. Nobody's a dick about this anymore.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Why is this lasting so long? I don't know why we're talking about this for so long. You're not selling me on jeans, to be honest. Neither of those ways sound comfortable. What's easy to put on is a fucking pair of pajama pants.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Especially because, like, I don't know. That's not the number one kind of pant that I see on, like, a job site. It's certainly not the number one kind of pant. Like, if you're, you know, working out in a farm, there's some places where blue jeans are the right thing to wear. But, like, it sucks ass if it's super wet to be wearing blue jeans while doing agricultural work. They're not great for it.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Marjorie. Darling, you know what makes you feel unstoppable? Is taking your friend's Adderall along with a cocktail of the finest pills the gas station provides truckers. And then getting in a car and driving for 37 and a half hours. That makes you feel like a god. By like the 24 hour point, if you just keep taking the pills, man, you see through time. You realize that it's just an illusion.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
He listens to the show. Our massive and unprecedented penetration of every demographic has finally come back to bite us in the ass.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
That like road trips, distance, all of this is fake. And you can literally just pick a point in space and time and pull yourself through it. That's how I do road trips.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
The people who own blue jeans factories and offshored them, who do they send their money to? Which political party?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
She's talking about jeans a lot. I think this is, I mean, the good news is nobody who likes her reads is going to read. Like this book is not, and none of these are generally made to be read. Right. They're made to be on a table. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
And you sell it and you get like part of how like you get bribed as a politician like her is you come out with your book that this vanity press then gets a bunch of different right wing organizations and think tanks to buy a shitload of copies of. And, you know, no one needs to read it for it to get on the bestseller list and you to make money. Right.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Like that's it's part of like how these people get paid.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Oh, 300. Okay. Okay. Well, I mean, here's the thing, Marjorie. The reason why 300 people don't die every day in plane crashes is because the airline industry is incredibly heavily regulated. and has been regulated for decades with this kind of obsessive focus on stopping people from dying in crashes. Not so.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
If the illegal drug supply was instead a legal and regulated drug supply with extremely high standards for what could get through and high standards for who and when it was sold and all this kind of stuff, then probably a lot less people would die.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we are recording a bonus kind of an emergency episode. Not for now, but for whenever we have an emergency and to come in as our pinch hitter and and really just get some get some shit recorded. Just some absolute garbage. Jamie Loftus, how are you doing?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
A lot of people just care about justice, Jamie. A lot of people just care about justice.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
For one thing, if you're buying your drugs from a government store that has strict rules about like what and how they can sell, you know, you're not getting fucking any fentanyl in your shit. Right.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
No, I mean, it's it's it's part of it's like the wind shit got where. Right. Like one of the reasons why we're having such an issue with fentanyl right now in Oregon is that fentanyl like got here later than it got to a lot of the rest of the country. And like the the the fucking actual drug. way in which the opiate epidemic spread had an impact on how and when fentanyl hit different places.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
This has been a good bit. I was going to open us with a bit about pedophiles, but this is a lot more fun.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
The idea that the epidemic of deaths due to the illegal use of opioids is a liberal city phenomenon is for one thing kind of cutting all of Appalachia out of it, which like, boy, that's supposed to be something J.D. Vance knows something about, but I love that he's blaming his mom's drug addiction on fucking fentanyl being trafficked in when it's like your mom was stealing pills.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Like, as a nurse, right? Like, she wasn't getting them from someone who smuggled them across the border.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
It's been kind of a pedophile dense year for Behind the Bastards, Jamie. I didn't mean to, but we've really wound up hitting them a lot. You're listening to an iHeart podcast.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah, I mean, you were handed the book, so.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah, that is unchill. You should have just started hitting.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Every night since the RNC, I've I've drank my kratom in a Heritage Foundation cup of which I have six. Six? Oh, I stole a lot. Gary has a couple too. I took a lot of those fucking things.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Obviously, I'm not going to read Liz Cheney's fuck. I didn't even know she had a goddamn book. But Marjorie, Marjorie, I got to say, It sounds kind of desperate that you're like comparing yourself to her to pump your book up like shoot. I can't believe I'm saying this to you, but like be more ambitious, you know, like shoot a little bit higher than fucking Liz Cheney.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
You could you could find a more desperate way to write a book, but you would have to work hard. And you know who also works hard? Sophie, Jamie.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
They work hard every day to fuck Tucker Carlson. That's their only goal. So help him out. How hard can it be? Yeah, really.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah. Dry scabs. We've talked about this. Dry scabs. Dry scabs.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
They make the sound, Jamie, if you've ever put like a couple of coins in a plastic cup and then shaken them around, that's the sound that his cum scabs, because they're hard and they're heavy. There's a lot of copper in them. I'm thinking, oh, I was thinking nickels.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah. Yeah, it would hurt if one of his cum scabs hit your head like it could really like, especially if he was doing it at like the top of the Empire State Building. Those could those could hit people on the ground with velocity. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I mean, this is good. The subreddit's been clamoring for cum scabs talk since we since Cody and I last talked about the cum of different elected leaders.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
That's not bad. That's not bad. That's good.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Wow. Wow. Again, that's desperate. I thought things were going better for her than that. No, no, Robert, let's co-write a book and get on Armchair Expert. No. If I write another book, Jamie, the only thing in the afterward is going to be, please do not invite me on a podcast.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I'm surprised if any of them are more than about 500 words, right?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I don't think I don't think she read her own book.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Well, I'm kind of curious. Is it real or is it? Made by China? I'm guessing it's made by China.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah, I mean, there's a reason for it, but I'm sure it's because the ghost writer is personally angry about it.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
She's just sourcing that people don't like to have things on their faces? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I'm checking to see if it can give me any advice on what kind of bleach I need to be drinking though.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I need some classic crash. Who do you call?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah. You know, I don't know. So, Jamie, I, you know, I was raised by a mix of like hippies and libertarians. So I've just been 50 50 and bleach and apple cider vinegar. Oh, OK. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah. Dot org. I tried dot org, but it's it is not working for me.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
No, no. It tries to take me to a landing page. That is nothing.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I'm stuck. I'm on a list. I'll check the Wayback Machine.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
We're pulling out all the stops. The Internet Archive's down right now because it got attacked by, I think it's Russians pretending to be pro-Palestine activists. Yeah. But it's hard to say why. Well, because the justification of the guy in the claiming to be the hacker in his like telegram was like, well, America owns this. It's like America.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
No, not not like a way that it implicates the military industrial complex in the Internet Archive. That is not an accurate statement.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I think it's just I think it's it's just a fake website. No, no, no. The Internet Archive is real. But yeah, I cannot find this thing on the Internet Archive on the Wayback Machine. So I don't know what the fuck's going on with this.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Obviously, it's bad. I don't think it's we'll be revisiting this one, but you all got 45 minutes or so of entertainment. And what more can you really hope for? Is there more to life? Not as far as we hear it, whose jobs are reliant upon being able to entertain you in a 45 minute podcast.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Liz Cheney. Really attacking the core demo of people who think Liz Cheney is a writer? I don't know. I don't know why she keeps doing this. I was unaware that Liz had written a book.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah, I I very few things have been worse for like the written word than the idea that like every single politician in public life has to have a book. And they're increasingly like coalescing with like the grind set influencer business management sort of like guru books. Like there are whole people who who read because they have to like performatively like a book every week or something.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
But every book they read is either like the 45 minute body or fucking Marjorie Taylor Greene's book or Peter Thiel's management advice or some shit.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Well, you take the four hour body, Jamie, and you just fucking compact that shit, right? You get a really good editor. You cut that word count down by 75% and you're good to go.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Mm-hmm. Yep. Speaking of worse than a YouTuber's memoir, your book is a not. It's good. You have a book.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I'm about to go out deer hunting, which should be obvious by my clothing. You're in a different kind of camo, Jamie.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Speaking of people who aren't pedophiles in a way I can prove, today we're gonna be reading Marjorie Taylor Greene's book.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I knew it would be relevant. It always somehow is. It always somehow is.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
She sure does. Why don't you tell them that story, Sophie? How did you get a signed fucking copy of Marjorie Taylor Greene's book?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
The camo of that. You are also planning to shoot something.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah. Great lighting to the lighting, Sophie.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Wow, that makes it look ethereal, like it's a pillar that landed in the middle of a bunch of apes in like 150,000 BC, and they're gonna start beating each other to death in order to get access to its wisdom.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Also, is the lady in silhouette on the front supposed to be Marjorie Taylor Greene? Because that does not look like Marjorie Taylor Greene. That's a body double. That is not quite a double, but yeah.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
OK, that's fair. That's fair. I mean, yeah, because it was an axe in Grand Rapids, right?
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Sophie. Of course, she's a classy lady. Oh my God. Why wouldn't you think she would make it out to her? Jesus.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah. Yeah. I think we should replace some of the history books with Marjorie Taylor Greene. But I think specifically we should go for like Edward Gibbon's Rise and Fall or yeah, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Just throw Marjorie Taylor Greene's book in for like volume three of that shit. Classic scholars work it all out. See who notices.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
First, I forget what I... We're finally getting the confession, folks. This is a big day. No.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a real, it's a real, uh, that guy with the wine move. I forgot what's his name's name for a second there. It's still forgotten. What the fuck? I was just listening to a review of that movie. What is it? Yeah. It's Jamie. Give me a Coppola. God damn it. Yes, of course. I'm sorry. I did want to watch every living male actor today.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
They never do. My guess is... There's like 10 pages of that. Just based on the way things tend to work, she probably submitted an outline or she may have... My guess is she dictated an outline in a conversation with somebody the publisher sent. That person may have been a ghostwriter or may have handed that off to a ghostwriter.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
And then she got to approve probably again verbally, like she may have just had someone read it to her because she's she's famous enough that they may have just had someone read it to her. And occasionally she would suggest changes or maybe she didn't read it at all and just approved it.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I think you probably it's probably a rare one of these where the author puts in more than about eight hours of actual work.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
That sounds like it's not just a Peter Thiel cutout.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
It's owned by Donald Trump Jr. And someone named Sergio, Sergio Gore, which is what I would name.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
I would name a bad guy that in like one of the early Marvel movies.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
No, Jamie, no. Oh, that is not a Sergio. Look at that man's face. Jesus Christ. I found his Twitter, and I'm sorry. I'll pop my screen on here. Oh, my God. Look at this. Look at this, dude. You need a jawline. You gotta have a chin to be Sergio. You need to have a jawline to be Sergio Gore. Share your screen really fast.
Behind the Bastards
We Read Marjorie Taylor Green's Book
Yeah, I'm working on it. Look, we're not we're not in the body shaming here thing, but like some names are just clearly the wrong name for a person. And this is one of them. This is just not this is not a proper Sergio. I'm sorry. Look at this. Look at that.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You wake up, put on your Ray-Ban Meta glasses. You're living all in. You realize you need coffee, so you say... Hey Meta, how do I make a latte?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After Meta AI gets you caffeinated, you're ready for some beats.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And during Smith's lifetime, the practice was kept fairly quiet. He married as many as 40 women, some of whom were underage. Women were expected to remain in the home, have many children, And to this day, there is an early and intense emphasis on being a wife and mother before all else.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The end of the line came for Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844, where non-Mormon locals imprisoned and then killed he and his brother. He's been hailed as an eternal prophet in the Mormon church ever since, and is still an extremely prominent figure in the culture to this day.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And if you want this story told from the Mormon perspective, there's a lot of LDS produced movies about it on YouTube that are really well acted.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
All right, save it for the pulpit. After Smith's death, a guy named Brigham Young takes over, and the Mormons leave Nauvoo in 1846, hiking pioneer-style to what is now present-day Utah, where in the next 10-odd years, they ignored the American government and practiced polygamy openly. That is, until this was going to prevent Utah getting statehood.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Polygamy would be an LDS-sanctioned practice until 1890, but it was technically discontinued at that point to avoid clashing with existing laws around bigamy passed in the 1860s and 70s. However, a lot of Mormons continued to practice polygamy quietly. In today's Mormon marriages, more traditional fundamentalist monogamy is certainly the norm.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And there's a long, complicated history with the Mormons, Utah, and indigenous people. Because unlike most accounts of a new American colony being founded, there were Native Americans in Utah when they arrived. And under Brigham Young, LDS members are encouraged to purchase Native children as slaves and raise them in their homes with the hopes of assimilating them to the Mormon faith.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It's not too dissimilar from the residential schools that separated Native families and erased their culture, often killing children all the way into the 1990s. Today, there's still a very high number of Mormons in Utah, hovering somewhere around 40% in 2023. It's where Brigham Young University is, and where some of the religion's most prominent influencers live today.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Ever heard of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Well, there you go. On the other end of that, about a third of people raised in the LDS today end up leaving the religion, as opposed to the 95% retention rate of the late 1980s. So it's important to note the internet age has made a difference in how Mormonism is perceived by its own members. And if you're Mormon or ex-Mormon, you know that I am barely scratching the surface here.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It's an extremely complicated religion that's been around for nearly 200 years. Things I didn't mention include rituals, observances, restrictive religious underwear, and for the very devout, missions, which are 18 to 24-month assignments where LDS officials determine a location for a young person to go, and their job is to recruit people into the church.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
As it pertains to today's episode, it's important to note that Mormonism is a fundamentalist religion that has been historically hostile to women, to queer people, and to anyone who isn't white. What is also important is that the Mormon Church has a shitload of money. A shitload. I had no idea. At present, the Mormon Church's net worth is estimated to be $265 billion dollars.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
For context, Disney is valued at $161 billion. Much of this has to do with mandatory tithing, where church members are required to give 10% of their income back to the LDS. As for pop culture, Mormonism has been portrayed negatively a lot. Think HBO show Big Love and still-running Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, which, of course, the LDS condemned.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It has... Wow, I wonder why they didn't like that. But the LDS has also produced its fair share of successful entertainment acts. There's no Scientology, but Mitt Romney, David Archuleta, Donny and Marie Osmond, and Gladys Knight is still a pretty impressive roster. The Aquabats are Mormon. Really think about that. and of course, a ton of currently successful influencers. More when we come back.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The prevalence of Mormon influencers has been an increasing point of speculation in the last few months, mostly in connection to two stories that have broken through to the mainstream. The first story, as I write this, a new Hulu reality show that is about to debut about Mormon wife influencers.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The central characters of this show are existing successful Mormon mommy TikTokers. And if the comments on virtually every video of these women is to be believed, they are very controversial within the Latter-day Saint community. And most would say they do not represent Mormonism. In spite of the fact that they live in Salt Lake City where the LDS is headquartered, most of them grew up Mormon.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And part of why they became so popular on TikTok was because they were referencing the tenets and values of the church.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
This content got really popular under the hashtag MomTalk on TikTok in the early 2020s. And while this content promotes fundamentalist values around gender roles, due to their popularity, the MomTalkers were also becoming primary breadwinners for their family. The women of MomTalk look very modern. They're usually wearing Kardashian-adjacent athleisure.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
But the reason they have a TV show, in my opinion, is not because they blew up on TikTok or even really because they're Mormon. It's because they were perceived as being bad at being Mormon. In 2022, MomTalk influencer Taylor Frankie Paul announced that she and her husband would be getting a divorce because of her violation of the terms of their soft swinging within their Mormon friend group.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And soft swinging is not sanctioned by the LDS. In no small part because that might actually be fun for women.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It's a huge source of controversy among very online Mormons, if the comment section is to be believed. And it's not hard to understand why. Add this to the fact that mom talkers were regularly breaking core tenets of the faith. They did things like drink caffeine. They didn't wear their religious garments beneath their clothes all the time.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You head to meet some friends, but can't remember the place.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
This soft-swinging incident might cause a scandal in your average suburban community, but Paul's disclosure that there were multiple Mormon couples involved caused a stir within the community. So, presented with this public scandal and subsequent high-profile influencers' decision to remain within the church, is this bad for the Mormon PR team, or is all press good press?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
They haven't been excommunicated or anything like that, but the Mormon church has issued the rare condemnation of this upcoming Hulu show. And this is rare because the LDS hasn't commented on how Mormons are portrayed in pop culture in a while. But when the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives trailer dropped, the LDS released the following statement.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
There are a lot of Mormon rituals that aren't often referenced in this kind of content, but is addressed a lot in ex-Mormon content. There's rituals like the washing and anointing, there's endowment ceremonies, and aesthetics that are all but directly pulled from Joseph Smith's interactions with the American Freemasons.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
But whether the LDS likes it or not, this is the latest step that actively Mormon influencers have made into mainstream culture. Again, I haven't seen an episode of this show yet, but it looks like the wives are going to be centered in the story here, which would have been unheard of in Mormonism at one time.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
But what I've learned is that part of why Mormon influencers are more successful than other trad wives... Okay, let's define trad wife.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Part of why Mormon influencers are more successful than other trad wife influencers of other religions is because the Mormon church has been unusually good at adapting to the internet and always has been. That's not the only reason, but we'll get there.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
if you've managed to make it to fall 2024 without having the word tradwife shoved in your face congratulations and sorry because i am going to tell you what it is tradwife content is a social media trend from about the last half decade where women create lifestyle content and make lifestyle changes to more closely align with traditional gender roles with an emphasis on the beauty of a return to old time values
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So TikTok's about making meals from scratch for five hours, defining oneself primarily as a wife and a mother, rejecting or abandoning a career outside the home, and being generally deferential to the patriarch, whether that's a husband or father or priest. Not all trad wives are Mormons. Hashtag not all trad wives. Not even close.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And I'm not going to tackle the topic of trad wife content wholesale in this episode.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
What you need to know is the term trad wife shouldn't be conflated with stay-at-home moms because while trad wife creators are moms and at home with the children, making trad wife content is, for my money, a separate job from the actual parenting because being a stay-at-home parent is a job, although most cultures are not conditioned to view that labor as valid.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Radwife content looks beautiful, high on aesthetic and low on practicality, showing only the aesthetically pleasing parts of the nuclear family and rarely any of the struggle or mess. There's a sense of self-surveillance to this content, an appearance of perfection in the home and family that's projected to the public, and often visual signifiers that harken back to mid-20th century America.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So if this makes sense, tradwives don't look like stay-at-home moms. They look like the advertisements of stay-at-home moms. And so much of what makes their content appealing is that an incredibly difficult lifestyle to achieve is made to seem easy, attractive, and morally correct.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Because if you're making lifestyle content of any kind, whether you personally or morally endorse the lifestyle, you're working in sales. I hate to break it to you. How many hot dogs have I sold by accident? Incalculable.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The trad life space is predominantly white, but possibly more diverse than you might expect.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
There is an active Black trad life community who, according to a Refinery29 piece by Nyla Burton in late 2022, believe that, quote, "...traditional marriage is the key to Black women's liberation from being overworked, economic insecurity, and the stress of trying to survive in a world hostile to our survival and existence."
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Tradwife content is popular across a lot of religions, but what's consistent across these communities is a feeling of performance and this aesthetic of either mid-century housewives or cottagecore.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
In my opinion, there's very little intimacy to these posts in spite of the fact that we're seeing inside of a family's home and usually seeing their children who are, make no mistake, a part of the business model. While I totally get why the content is so appealing, it does feel like a performance. and a very effective one.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
I mean, I'm like a militant feminist, and I would be lying if I said I hadn't seen a few tradwife posts that made me feel like I was living my life the wrong way. But neutral statement, these posts are a performance. Think of it like this.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The Donna Reed Show very effectively sold the idea of Donna Reed as a nuclear housewife and mother that lived in this effortless way and in reality was a television show that was produced by its star and that the real Donna Reed was a multi-hyphenate creative and a TV pioneer who was selling the idea of this housewife rather than actually living that life herself.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You wake up, put on your Ray-Ban Meta glasses, classic style, innovative tech. You're living all in. You realize you need coffee, desperately.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
From a social media perspective, the tradwife phenomenon has a lot in common with a pattern that we talk about on this show all the time. A lot of the reason we're still talking about this content is because there's been so much backlash and outrage toward it.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Since it became popular in the early 2020s, left-leaning feminists who believe that the tradwife trend harkens a dangerous period of regression as the American people's right to bodily autonomy slowly and surely slips into the very mid-century timeframe that tradwives so often portray. In this outrage, does help to fuel the success of the influencers.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Because yes, they have millions of followers, but the snark Reddit boards and hate comments saying that tradwives are self-hating and glamorizing oppression have engagement in the hundreds of thousands as well. And as far as the algorithm is concerned, Engagement is engagement, whether it's positive or negative.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It reminds me a lot of Friend of the Pod, Max Fisher's book, The Chaos Machine, in which he fully illustrates the ways in which modern algorithms are designed to enrage. That's why we have so many social media stories that are rooted in backlash and then backlash to the backlash.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Tradwife narratives fall neatly into this pattern because for every bit of praise, there's an essay that's written in stark disagreement. So why is this content so popular in the last few years?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
While these accounts have millions upon millions of followers who view the content as soothing or aspirational, there are plenty of modern moms who are completely fucking baffled by it. Because I've engaged with so much of this content that my algorithm will never bounce back, I feel comfortable saying that tradwife content is often a lot about subtext, right?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Projecting a message without explicitly stating it. Maybe the 50s were a great time for women. Maybe we need to bring it back. But there's a sense of encouraging to submit to the status quo. A status quo that existed before a lot of necessary civil rights were fought for. But online now. Whew, trad wives, man. But let's bring it back to the Mormon side of this content specifically.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After Meta AI gets you caffeinated, you start walking to work and you need a soundtrack.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, the next generation of AI glasses. Just say, hey, Meta, to harness the power of Meta AI. Shop now at meta.com slash smart glasses.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Because, as we're trying to get to the bottom of, Mormons have found a lot of success in this space. Momtalkers are far from the only prominent Mormon content creators dominating social media today. The most popular, and so by extension the most embroiled in controversy, is the second major Mormon influencer story of the summer, Ballerina Farm. More when we come back. Welcome back to 16th Minute.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The more I learned about tradwives, the more it became obvious that they developed in response to the capitalism is for girls to actually slay rhetoric of the mid 2010s. But like, is it that different when you're a tradwife entrepreneur? It kind of seems like you're doing the same thing. But the thing that you're selling is that you're not actually doing the thing that I'm watching you doing.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
With the built-in camera, you snap a pic of a dope mural on the side of a building that you think is worth sharing.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And when we left off, we were talking about the most famous Mormon influencer on the scene today. Ballerina Farm, where do we begin? All my male listeners are getting like a nosebleed. Ballerina Farm is the username for a Mormon woman named Hannah Nealman, whose follower count on Instagram currently sits at 10 million.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
She was raised in the LDS and was a tremendously talented ballerina who got into and graduated from Juilliard. And she's cited over and over that she was the first undergrad in modern history to be pregnant while still at Juilliard. Because while there, she got married to fellow Mormon Daniel Nealman in 2011, the year before she graduated.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So both the Nealmans grew up in big, devout Utah Mormon families. Hannah was one of nine, Daniel was one of 10. They got engaged after only three weeks. And while Hannah was still in college, she also started competing in beauty pageants. She started with Miss New York and then re-entered the space after getting married and having kids. Because Hannah does not stay a ballerina.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After graduation, Hannah and Daniel moved to England for a semester at Cambridge, then Utah, so Daniel could finish his degree at Brigham Young University, and then to Brazil, where Daniel worked as the director of his father's security company for a few years. Because it must be said, financially, these are incredibly privileged people. Daniel's father founded JetBlue, dude. They've got money.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And he's so Mormon that he worked on Mitt Romney's failed presidential campaign in 2012. But Daniel's dream is to move back to Utah and live on a farm. And they finally do so in 2017, buying the eponymous Ballerina Farm in 2018. By the time they moved on to the 328-acre farm, they had four kids.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After work, you head to meet some friends.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And when they moved onto the farm, Hannah Nealman's online brand as a Mormon wife was well-established, but significantly less successful. Hannah started her social media journey as a mom influencer on a blog called We Took the Train in early 2013, shortly after the birth of her first child, Henry, and her college graduation.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And it's interesting that she intersects with a completely different era of successful Mormon online influencers. Because in the 2000s into the early 2010s, Mormon mommy blogs were a thing. The Mormon mommy blogger pipeline was popular for as long as blogs were popular. And mommy bloggers in general have always enjoyed massive success and usually adapt to new social media platforms pretty easily.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, the next generation of AI glasses. Just say, hey, Meta, to harness the power of Meta AI. Listen to music, make hands-free calls with open-ear audio and built-in microphones, and so much more, all while staying present to the world around you. Shop Ray-Ban Meta Glasses at meta.com slash smartglasses.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
I'd recommend Sarah Peterson's book, Momfluenced, for more on this topic. Because mommy blogging was popular from the very dawn of social media, but it was very different than the trad wife content that we see today. There was a lot more emphasis on writing over visuals, and the writing tended to be more confessional. Writer Catherine Gieser Morton has been covering this space for a long time.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
I'm quoting here from a New York Times column called Did Moms Exist Before Social Media? from 2020, where she mentions how Mormon women entering the mommy blog space changed it.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Early successful Mormon or ex-Mormon mommy bloggers included Heather Armstrong of Doocy, Amber Fillerup Davis, and Love Taza, a.k.a. Naomi Davis. Around this same time, successful family bloggers like Shay Carl and his family become really popular on YouTube in the late aughts into the early 2010s.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
In fact, Carl's child Brock was considered to be the first Truman baby, as in the Truman Show, as in a child whose life was documented from moment one to a massive social media audience. Scary! This hyper-vulnerable mommy blog stuff is considered pretty old school now.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
At the time, Mormon mommy bloggers were a part of the coined blogger knackle community, with personalities like Stephanie Nielsen of the NeNe Dialogues and C. Jane Kendrick of C. Jane Enjoy It serving as early examples for their crossover appeal outside of the religion. There was even an award system developed for successful blogger knuckle publications called the Niblets.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
This went from 2005 to 2017. And bloggers who were particularly good at spreading Mormon values online got a trophy. And I I don't know if you feel the same way, but I was really surprised because I thought of Mormon culture as so conservative in its gender roles that actively encouraging women to speak at all would be a non-starter. But that's not true at all.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
If talks given by Mormon leaders during the early blogging era are to be believed, These blogs, blogs, etc., were viewed to be an extension of the Mormon mission and a way to get the word out. I'm pulling this from an LDS news post from 2007.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
This feels like a skeleton key to a lot of Mormon content, to why Mormons are so online. Whether they are overtly discussing their religion or not, modern Mormon missionaries will very often vlog their experiences. This is from a missionary named Grayson Hardman from last year.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Posting is all but baked into the religion in the modern day, probably in a sourdough that took five hours to make. By the time Mormon tradwives and mommy bloggers become mainstream famous, they're not wearing their religion on their sleeve as much. It's It's more of a soft pitch.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You usually find out they're Mormon, whereas if you scroll all the way down to the beginning of their profile, they often used to be more overt about the values they held. But again, to connect it back to that piece, this heeding to espouse a vision of an ideal Mormon family without defensiveness or belligerence, it kind of makes sense. Okay, back to Ballerina Farm.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Because Hannah Nealman starts in the waning days of mommy blogging, she kind of straddles different eras of social media and Mormons online. She starts mommy blogging on We Took the Train in the 2010s at the end of the mommy blogging trend and then is at the forefront of the Instagram and TikTok Mormon mommy blogs, which are wildly different in tone.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
They're not at all confessional and are far more defined by their aesthetic and this sense of sterile, So to give you an idea of how her narrative voice shifts, here's an example of how Hannah would speak in her early blogging days in 2013.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It's still praising the lifestyle, but even acknowledging her own insecurity or the doubt that people in her life had about her religion is not something you would see today. In these early posts, you can really feel Hannah grappling with, "'I love dance, but I love my husband and motherhood. Am I doing the right thing?' She also talks about going to McDonald's and loving it."
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
something that wildly differs from her current stance as a trad wife slash farm-to-table influencer. In these early days, she's working part-time teaching dance while raising her eldest son, trying to sort of find a balance between traditional values and what her passions are. This is not at all what ballerina farm content sounds like. Here's a post from this year.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So Hannah Starts is a completely different kind of Mormon influencer. When I started looking for an answer to this question, why there are so many Mormon women that are successful online, I was seeing the same answer over and over. Well, it's because Mormon women are taught to journal a lot. The Instagram and TikTok content on the farm is wildly successful.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And Hannah and Daniel continue to grow their family that now consists of eight children. And they quickly expand this success to start a series of businesses. They start a beef farm. They start a lifestyle brand.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And Hannah goes from a middling blogger to a leading TikTok and Instagram creator, racking up millions of views on her videos of making meals from scratch, talking about the advantages of her farm-to-table and family-first lifestyle, and doing it all in full makeup in these cottagecore flowy dresses. There's also quiet advertisements and Ballerina Farm content.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
For most of her videos, you can find affiliate codes on her website for basically anything you saw her use in the course of the video. In 2021, Hannah had 200,000 Instagram followers. Now, she has 10 million. So the days where Hannah was teaching dance part-time are long gone. Now she's a farmer who isn't just running a business and making meals.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And as these responsibilities pile up, viewers began to question how she was doing all of this. Like sure, Surely someone is helping with the kids and the business, right? Because the kids are homeschooled and the meals took hours and Hannah appeared to be making content and co-running multiple businesses while also upholding conservative values. That's a lot of jobs.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
But we're not really allowed behind the curtain. Part of the content's appeal is that Hannah made this all look so easy. And as she was doing all of this, she continued to compete in the occasional pageant, winning the title of Mrs. America in 2021 and 2023.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
She's projecting the super mom image, right? It's unclear to viewers how it's attained. And you get the feeling that it either requires a lot of personal sacrifice, a lot of other people working just outside the frame or both. Because the alternative is, well, what the fuck is wrong with me? But this virtuousness.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
This emphasis on disciplining the body, the emphasis that, ball gowns aside, my marriage and family are the most important thing, that's a solid add for Mormonism. And even so, the Ballerina Farm family doesn't often reference the Mormon church online. It's implied they get ready for church on camera.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
There's extreme emphasis placed on the gender roles in nuclear families, but for someone who comes across their content by chance, there's nothing that screams, these are Mormons. unless you know what to look for in terms of home decor. And this feels by design.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You don't build an empire with the ninth most popular religion in the U.S., according to Pew Research, behind dominant Protestant and Catholic practices, behind Judaism, and behind other subcategories like atheist, agnostic, and quote, nothing in particular, unquote.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
If you're six places behind, nothing in particular, and want to keep growing your business, it makes sense that they avoid endorsing their often controversial religion. So in most places, I've seen Ballerina Farm classified as a soft advertisement for the church. And for feminists with careers who openly advocate on issues like queer and trans rights and open abortion access,
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
I understand why Ballerina Farm's success is triggering. And for people who work on farms that are not bankrolled by JetBlue, the account scans as even more of a performance. And then this past summer, Ballerina Farm has been a popular point of discussion for years with evangelizing followers and snark blogs with readership in the six figures.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
But she comes to widespread mainstream attention this past summer when a Times profile written by Megan Agnew suggested that beneath this content was a very disturbing dynamic. Main takeaways from the article include... Hannah and Daniel said they met on a plane.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It turns out this was a plane that Daniel's father owned, and he specifically requested to be sat on said plane beside Hannah, making it the most expensive predatory meet-cute I've ever heard of. Hannah wanted to date for a year in order to maintain her education at Juilliard, but was overruled by Daniel.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
She was engaged a month later and was married and pregnant soon after that, all before graduation. There are, of course, people working on Ballerina Farm and for their company. They were just never acknowledged as existing in the content. However, Hannah is not allowed to have nannies to help her at home. And the article implies that this is Daniel's choice.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And he describes Hannah as becoming so exhausted by caring for the eight children that she will sometimes collapse for a week at a time, which plays into the Mormon and just generally fundamentalist belief that women's suffering is virtuous. But to a modern audience, hearing this dynamic within such a wealthy family felt fucked up.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Hannah and Daniel did not believe in voluntary abortion, something their content suggested but never stated, and that Hannah's identity prior to their marriage, and especially her relationship with dance, had been slowly choked out by ballerina farm and the Mormon lifestyle.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And this story had reach, not only because it was upsetting, but because it seemed to vindicate and sadden a lot of the people who had been asking how Ballerina Farm, quote unquote, did it all. The article suggests that the answer is by sacrificing parts of herself and being exhausted to the point of not being able to function.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Something I thought was interesting while examining the reaction to this story was that non-Mormons tended to find Daniel Nealman as the villain of this story, because it's him who is constantly correcting, negging, and suppressing Hannah throughout the profile as written. But ex-Mormon influencers are careful to add a little bit of nuance to this.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Their suggestion is more, does Daniel come off as an entitled asshole? Yes. But both Daniel and Hannah are playing their role here. It doesn't excuse the behavior, but ex-Mormon YouTubers like Jordan and McKay note that Daniel was playing the part of the devout Mormon husband to the hilt here.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And what I'll say in Ballerina Farm's defense, while I find the details of this story really dark, I do believe Hannah Nealman when she says that she believes this is the correct way to live. And the rest of us can make of it what we will. Hannah has, of course, condemned this piece in a recent post,
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
and her audience has only continued to grow. Honestly, I think this article might've helped her in the long run. But all this, while fascinating, does not answer my question. Why is this a 10 million follower account? Hannah Nealman has not been acknowledged by the LDS as a remarkable asset, and she doesn't emphasize her religion as she once did. So is she an asset to the Mormon church?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The answer becomes clearer if you start to follow the money. It's impossible to get meaningful insight into this issue without talking to people who have been Mormons themselves, who intimately understand the culture. There is a thriving corner of the internet that is built around ex-Mormon content, primarily on YouTube and TikTok as I'm writing this.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
There are plenty of creators who have left the church explaining their personal experience with the various indoctrinations, cultural stigmas, and oppression experience within the LDS, often accounts of their childhood and their mission and why they ultimately left.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Like pro-Mormon content, ex-Mormon creators appear to be very successful, and I've watched quite a bit of it in preparation for this episode. Some resources I've used are the long-running Mormon Stories podcast, which has been going since 2005, and a number of YouTubers, especially Alyssa Grenfell, who I'll be talking to in the next part of this episode. Here's what I'll leave you with.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
If Mormonism is nowhere near the country's most popular religion, but is disproportionately represented on our social media, then what is there left to look to than money and the algorithm? Alyssa Grenfell explains in part two. See you then. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer, Anderson, my cats, Flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird, who will outlive us all. Bye!
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You wake up, put on your Ray-Ban Meta glasses, classic style, innovative tech. You're living all in. You realize you need coffee, desperately.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After Meta AI gets you caffeinated, you start walking to work and you need a soundtrack.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
With the built-in camera, you snap a pic of a dope mural on the side of a building that you think is worth sharing.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After work, you head to meet some friends.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, the next generation of AI glasses. Just say, hey, Meta, to harness the power of Meta AI. Listen to music, make hands-free calls with open-ear audio and built-in microphones, and so much more, all while staying present to the world around you. Shop Ray-Ban Meta Glasses at meta.com slash smartglasses.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the internet's characters of the day to see how their moment affected them and what it says about the internet and us. My name's Jamie Loftus, and this is part two of a series trying to answer a question that I honestly thought would be easier to answer. Why is the internet so dominated by Mormon mommy influencers?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So if you haven't listened to part one yet, I recommend you do, because this is a frustratingly complicated question. Last time, we talked about the origins of the Mormon church, its stance on race, gender, and sexuality. Cliff notes, not great. And its history of intersecting with conservative-leaning social media trends among women. So think mommy blogs of the 2000s.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Mormon women were at the top of that boom and were more open about their religion than many influencers are today. Think about another ongoing trend that's a whole subject unto itself, one I'd like to dedicate more time to in the future. Mormon women's intersection with major multi-level marketing schemes.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Schemes that rely on salespeople spending a lot of their own money with usually diminishing returns if you don't get in on the ground floor. Utah has the highest concentration of MLMs in the country, and the door-to-door element isn't that unlike the missionary spirit that the devout embark on on behalf of the Church of Latter-day Saints, or the LDS, when they're young adults. Sales as a mission.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Actually, if you're into obscure documentaries as much as I am, one of the most famous contemporary failed MLM schemes was actually founded by a Mormon couple, that being LuLaRoe, the ugly leggings company that was busted in a massive legal scandal in the 2010s. You tell the people you love they're in a pyramid scheme and they go, no, I'm not.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And when it comes to recruiting for MLMs, Mormon women tend to be excellent marks. Because of the rigid gender roles of the religion that encourage many women to stay at home, things like LuLaRoe might be the only opportunity for them to make a living on their own, not to mention the close-knit Mormon communities offering a ton of customers.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It's not quite that simple, but you see where I'm going with this. And of course, there is significant crossover with Mormon women in the current, if somewhat dwindling, tradwife content that's become extremely popular on Instagram and TikTok. We talk about this quite a bit in the first part of the series, specifically about users from MomTalk.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
the stars of the new show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and Ballerina Farm, a 10 million follower influencer who presents stay-at-homestead lifestyle while, say it with me, selling that idea to her followers as a part of what is very much a job unto itself.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The more I think about it, tradwives are actually not straying from the similarly flawed girl boss archetypes the way that they think they are. But that's for another day, because now we're going to forge into part two, shall we? Even with the context I've given you, I was still confused. Because yes, white hetero-conservatism sells online, we know that. But why this religion specifically?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
What about Mormon content is bringing them to the top of your feed? Ex-Mormon influencer Alyssa Grenfell has been asking this question too. She was raised an extremely devout Utah Mormon, went on a mission, got married at an LDS temple, the whole nine yards.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Eventually, like one in three young Mormons today, she left the church in her 20s with her husband after they both found themselves questioning the values they'd grown up with. For Alyssa's husband, the radicalizing issue was the church's stance on gay marriage. And for Alyssa, it was a series of crises of faith.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Over and over, what Alyssa felt God wanted for her was directly contradicted by priests and her father. She was called to do a mission 2,000 miles away from where she expected. She was told by her father that God needed her to be a teacher when she had no interest in teaching and didn't feel she had the natural skill set to do it.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So eventually, the two leave the Mormon church, they start drinking coffee and cocktails, and Alyssa was motivated to join YouTube after self-publishing her first book. And while she's been on YouTube for less than a year, she already has nearly a quarter million subscribers. And my favorite video of hers presents a pretty compelling theory.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Alyssa suggests that, sure, Mormon tradwife content does play into the algorithm as far as aesthetics, but it's very possible that the Church of Latter-day Saints itself is bankrolling these Mormon mommy influencers without the influencers being able to say for sure that it's them. Here's a clip from that video.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Alyssa only started investigating this search term question when she was getting repeated feedback that her viewers were getting ads for the Mormon church on her videos, which is weird because Alyssa's content is doing the opposite of encouraging people to join the church.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And what's more, when she looked into the amount that she was making on YouTube and the amount of algorithmic preference she was getting less than a year into her time versus other creators, she was getting a lot more engagement and making a lot more money. Why? She explains more in the video.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So this theory isn't and can't be proven without the LDS being straightforward about their finances, which will never happen. So I'll let Alyssa take it from here. Without any further ado, here is my interview with the fantastic Alyssa Grenfell.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up like I didn't know anything about Mormon culture outside of what was in pop culture when I was growing up. Growing up in the Mormon church, I know that you've made a significant amount of content about this. How are women specifically treated and sort of how are you conditioned to view yourself?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
As I was sort of learning more about you as you were coming of age, all of these gut feelings, thinking that I'm being guided by God towards this person, towards this mission location, towards this job, receiving different answers that weren't in your gut. What is it like to process that doubt?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
How do you move forward with so much of what your life has been structured around being removed?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You're coming of age alongside the internet and you're growing up with these very rigid beliefs. What was your relationship with the internet as you were coming of age into your early adulthood?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So you grow up alongside the internet and then you start to see this influx of influencers who I first just saw labeled as trad wives, the like Mormon aspect and not, you know, whatever, hashtag, not all trad wives are Mormon, but many of them are many of the most successful influencers are either Utah Mormon based or create content that really a appeals.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So when did you start noticing this content? And yeah, what did you make of it?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we talk to the internet's characters of the day and see how their 15 minutes of fame affected them and what it says about the internet and us. But this week, we're taking a bit of a side quest to answer a question I've been asked quite a bit lately and I didn't know how to answer.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It seems also because of how the algorithm works at any given point in time. There have been times where I have gotten content pipes to me from a Mormon influencer, but the content that I get, it's not immediately clear. Where a lot of TradWave accounts that have ended up in my feed, it takes me a little while to catch on that there is a specific religious reason element.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Is that something you've also noticed? Do you feel that there's sort of any reasoning behind that? Because you're saying, you know, the church wants you to talk about your religion as much as possible, but it feels like with some influencers to what end was not always clear to me right away.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Why are there so many Mormon women at the top of the social media influencing pile? After a recent episode, I saw this question in the comments everywhere. I saw it on the 16th Minute Reddit board, which, by the way, someone made if you're interested or have thoughts after episodes.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome back to 16th Minute. I sort of had to wear something like temple garments in my youth, but it was these shoulder-to-knee stinky cotton shirts I wore underneath my back brace. And unfortunately, there's no question about my personality that can't be answered with the sentence, I wore a back brace for my entire adolescence.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And now we continue our conversation with ex-Mormon influencer and great theory haver, Alyssa Grenfell. As I was sort of learning more about a recent subject I was covering, I found out that the family was Mormon, but didn't really talk about it. And a lot of people were saying like, oh, you should do an episode about like, why are there so many successful Mormon women in the influencing space?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And I was like, oh, I have no idea. And you mentioned sort of the most popular answer given, which is what I was encountering a lot, which was that young Mormon women are taught to journal a lot. So that's probably why they're successful at influencing. It doesn't not make sense, but felt just like a very incomplete answer. Could you take me through what made you start journaling?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
asking this question, because people were telling you that they were getting ads for the Mormon church on your content. That was how that started, right?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And while it did resonate with me that the subject of the episode had been raised Mormon, I didn't want to touch that within the episode for a couple reasons. First, because they never talk about Mormonism in their content and have generally avoided questions about it. And second, I didn't have a fucking clue what the answer to this question was, even though I understand why it was being asked.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
As someone raised Catholic, I was like, wow, Catholics found dead in a ditch, like not a profitable YouTube career. I was truly blown away with how many times higher those keywords were scanning.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So this week, we're going to attempt to answer that question in a two-part deep dive series, the second of which will release on Thursday. Because to understand the root of why Mormonism and present-day Mormon mommy influencers are so successful, you've got to understand where the overlaps in their interests are and how the values of both of these communities line up.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
I had no idea how much money the Mormon church has. As you explained in the video, the church is welcome to pour as much money into these keywords as they like, but they can't control whether the keywords are being talked about favorably. So it seems like there's a world where the Mormon church is accidentally cutting you checks for... for talking about why you left the church in detail.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
trad wife influencers that started by talking about mormonism quite a bit and probably don't talk about it as much now they are also sort of getting uh cuts of this even if they're not explicitly talking about the mormon church anymore do you think even if an influencer who started talking about mormonism isn't anymore does this still help the church
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Final thing, I mean, I just wanted to mention and talk a little bit as far as your theory goes, is that this is a way to sort of have these poster board influencers kind of representing, if not the church explicitly, the gender roles and the ideals of the church in the day-to-day context.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Without having it be traced back to supposing Ballerina Farm, you know, wakes up tomorrow and is like, I'm done with the Mormon church. It's not like she can say, and the church has been paying me this much for this long to create this content. It creates this middleman.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So this week, we're going to get all up to speed on that. And on Thursday, Alyssa Grenfell will unpack how Mormon moms have stayed on top of internet influencing for the last 20 years. All right, let's jump in and take a brief, God, I really hope actually brief, look into the history of the Mormon church in America. And I'll link to some additional resources in the description of the episode.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. Welcome back to 16th Minute. And now we continue our conversation with Alyssa Grenfell.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
There's no one answer that's going to completely unlock why are there so many successful trad wife accounts at this specific moment. That answer ranges far beyond Mormonism, but I think your content has just helped me have a better sense of not just you and the culture that you had to leave behind, but also who is shaping Mormonism. the internet.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And it seems like the Mormon church has no small part in doing that.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Okay, let's learn about Mormons. Mormonism is a 19th century religion formally founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. He was born squarely in the middle of the Second Great Religious Awakening in the U.S., a religious revival that would strengthen movements like Methodism, Presbyterianism, and the Baptist Church, and would birth a lot more. And Joseph Smith was a kid of this era.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
People should be allowed to live their lives comfortably however they choose to. And so it's just like, let's not go after a specific woman. Let's go after maybe the system that you can trace it back up to, which seems like a lot of what your work is trying to do is interrogate the system that creates and not, you know, bully the byproducts of the system.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
He grew up without a firm religion, but was curious to try things. The Mormon faith, often called the LDS or Latter-day Saints, came up shortly after the Shakers movement. The LDS came to prominence around the same time as a number of black church movements like the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The LDS shares a little bit of DNA with spiritualism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
begin with thanks so much again to alissa for her time and patience i really recommend her youtube channel if you have any further questions about what it's like to grow up in the mormon faith what it's like to decondition oneself from a cult-like upbringing as well as some interesting interviews with fellow ex-mormons you can also check out her book at the link in the description so listeners to conclude why are there so many successful mormon wives in the influencing space today the answer is
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
money. Okay, see you next week. In all seriousness, thank you so much again for listening. Please remember to subscribe to the show if you like it, leave a friendly review, tell your friends, it all helps. I had a lot of fun making this episode. I learned a lot and it was really hard. So please let me know your thoughts.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And for your moment of fun, or I guess more of a moment of reflection this week, here is former American Idol contestant David Archuleta talking about why he left the Mormon church. See you next week.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And pet shout-outs to our dog producer, Anderson, my cats Flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird, who will outlive us all. Bye!
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You wake up, put on your Ray-Ban Meta glasses. You're living all in. You realize you need coffee, so you say... Hey Meta, how do I make a latte?
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After Meta AI gets you caffeinated, you're ready for some beats.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
You head to meet some friends, but can't remember the place.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, the next generation of AI glasses. Just say, hey, Meta, to harness the power of Meta AI. Shop now at meta.com slash smart glasses.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And you can listen to my limited series, Ghost Church, for more about the history of that. The mid-19th century was a big time of religious change and upheaval in the U.S. And after Mormonism took off, new religions continued to pop up. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian scientists weren't far behind Mormonism.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
But very few specific movements from this time still have the cultural hold on America that Mormonism does. Though Joseph Smith releases the Book of Mormon and the religion is formalized in 1830, but the religion's origin story connects to two incidents from the previous 10 years.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
One was from 1820 when Joseph was 14 and asked both Jesus and God which religion to follow and was told by them, follow none of them. It is your job to prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
The other incident was in 1823, when a 17-year-old Smith is said to have been visited by the angel Moroni to repeat this calling, and was also told that there was an ancient record regarding God's dealings with the quote-unquote American continent that he needed to translate with a series of tools when he was a little older.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
After the angel Moroni's visit, Joseph Smith says that he retrieved and divinely translated the text of the Book of Mormon, which was inscribed on thin gold plates. There is a bit of a Wizard of Oz-y quality to the way that this translation is dictated. There's magic stones, he's going behind curtains, and sometimes he wouldn't even use the gold plates.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
He would instead put a special stone in a hat, then bury his face in said hat. But if you're a prophet, he explained, the stone lights up within the hat, and then you just dictate from there. This whole mystical plates thing also comes up in modern Scientology, where members in Florida are engraving the words of L. Ron Hubbard onto titanium plates as we speak.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
It also harkens back to Helena Blavatsky's notion of the Akashic Records of the late 19th century, which were said to be indestructible tablets of the astral light. So there's that. A lot of this reminds me of spiritualism, which in its early days was composed of a lot of practical magic. Great movie.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And if you're not familiar with the origins of the Book of Mormon, to be fair, most religious origin stories are not significantly wilder than this. Spiritualism has a similarly mystical origin story. As for its contents, the Book of Mormon details the plight of a group of Jewish people in Jerusalem who escaped the city before it's destroyed in 600 BC.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
They built a boat, sail it to the Americas, and soon become embroiled in a conflict within the group between two groups called the Neophytes and the Lamanites. One of the big changes made to the Book of Mormon later on is that the Lamanites were ancestors of all indigenous Americans. This language would later be softened to say that they were among the ancestors of some indigenous people.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
So a group of Jewish people migrate to the Americas and become Lamanites. indigenous Americans. Okay, Jesus is a huge part of Mormonism and the Book of Mormon details that after Jesus is resurrected in 33 AD, he goes to visit the Americas where he is hailed as the pale prophet because yes, Mormon Jesus is white.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Some of their other beliefs as expressed through Joseph Smith are that God is a flesh and blood being who has a flesh and blood wife, his wife. who lives far away near a distant star. And God tells Joseph Smith that we earthlings were brought into being to create these nuclear families, to be closer to God so that one day we can live with God out of town on the star where he lives.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And to create these families, you hear a lot of the classic signifiers of fundamentalist religions. There is an emphasis on sacrifice, discipline, and suffering. There are rigid gender roles. There's canonical homophobia. There's absurd racism that was later scaled back in order to accommodate growth and membership.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Until a few decades ago, the Book of Mormon described members as, quote, a white and delightsome people, unquote. To this day, there is still a tacit don't ask, don't tell policy within the church about queerness. And that's an improvement from the mid 2010s when the children of queer parents were still not allowed to be baptized in the LDS.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Anyways, in his time, Joseph Smith was, per his account, declared a prophet by Jesus and genuinely did face a great deal of persecution.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
In the early days where he was gathering followers in New York, he was arrested and ejected from the state and took his believers to Ohio to prepare for the second coming of Jesus in Zion, a location TBD paradise where Smith envisioned communities that would be governed by celestial laws as determined by him. As it progresses, Mormonism grows further away from traditional Christianity.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And before you know it, the Mormons are ousted from Ohio. Smith is tar and feathered before this. The group then moves to Missouri, which is great because the Lord just so happens to have told Joseph Smith that that's actually where Zion is, but also where the Garden of Eden was. So the Mormons start buying up land in Missouri.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And to remind you of the era of history we're in, this happened in 1831, just a year after the Indian Removal Act was passed and brought about 20 years of brutal genocide of the indigenous people. But once in Missouri, the Mormons are driven out again, this time with increasing violence.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And over the next few years, they head with Smith all over the Midwest, where they're treated with similar hostility most places they go. At one point, the governor of Missouri passed an extermination act. Eventually, they moved to Illinois, where they're permitted to set up a city of their own called Nauvoo, basically Zion 2.0.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
And it's here where Smith lightly militarizes the group and increasingly sends out missionaries to continue to grow the faith. And at the same time, Smith is told by an angel to introduce one of the LDS's most controversial policies, polygamy. And polygamy wasn't something that was allowed to everyone in the faith at first, just the powerful in the church.
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I think there's a couple models, and it depends upon how far down the revelation you go. So the example you gave of Spain, we have contemporary with that and slightly more recent versions of that in the U.S. So the workman's circle, now the worker's circle, they funded really wonderful cultural programs, including libraries.
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Unions often had libraries, especially back when they used to have more buildings. I'm part of my union, and aside from just being where I work, we don't necessarily have a building per se. So those things have always existed, especially in like the workmen circle in ethnic communities who were trying to preserve a culture. And that's something that fit into 20th century capitalism.
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And so if we go farther than the revolution, I read a really great pamphlet recently from the 70s, actually, that was from the UK. And it kind of discussed libraries, you know, if we make it through the revolution a little bit as being operated under a syndicalist model. Yeah. Where...
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Workers and patrons, which is what we call them now, there wouldn't be quite that split then, would be able to govern and run these libraries. There was a really great diagram. So there's definitely been ideas for a long time about what this could look like.
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I honestly can't tell. You know, I think that people... It's hard to say now, right? Because we do have the funding there. It's just, will it actually happen? Will the thing happen that... has already been allocated.
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I think we have a little bit of time, but I would expect if that congressional oomph isn't expressed, that especially when summer reading rolls around, we'll really start to see it because that's something that a lot of people depend on to keep their kids occupied during the summer.
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And especially out, you know, in red states and rural areas, it's going to be very much like the, I never thought the leopards were going to eat my face kind of situation. Yeah.
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Right, right. That sucks, you know, because it's going to be a lot of kids, especially without those resources.
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Yeah. And this is at the university level, to be sure, where books are very expensive.
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But at the public and school library level, you know, this is exactly why this is happening is because there is this ongoing narrative from the last few decades where, where people, especially like queer kids say that the library saved their lives.
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Young people of color saying like, this is the only place I could see myself in culture by reading these books. So of course, of course this is happening because that, you know, they want to take that away. Yeah.
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I unfortunately don't have great news. I don't think, you know, because of the way this is working and it is so much about just like raw brute power that no one at the federal government or even state governments for the most part seems to be able to counter. It's just like not something they can conceive of.
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yeah because they already are doing things that supposedly shouldn't be allowed right we've already had the congressional funding this should have a congressional you know this is passed by congress and yet an executive order and elon musk can undo it right if things were working this wouldn't be happening right so so we are really kind of down down the line a little bit in what we can do and how effective it's going to be that said there are things we can do a lot of them are the uh
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The things that liberals usually do, which is like calling your senator over and over and over again every day and your representatives and your state government, too, to make sure that your state government is paying attention to what they're going to lose. There is certainly, you know... things one can sign on to for major library organizations.
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The ALA has been writing a lot and less formal organizations than that. I think one thing that we can always be doing, not just in this situation, but if you want to be supporting libraries, one of the best things and easiest things you can do is go get a library card if you don't already have one and use your damn library. There's probably something there that you want.
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And that actually really does help because libraries... whether it's with something like IMLS or whether it's grants from foundations or local funders, their local government, are better able to make their argument for why they should be given money if they have good statistics to say, we had 10% more readers this year. The number of books we loaned this year is higher than it's ever been.
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People are coming to our events in droves. That kind of success breeds success. If they can show that to potential funders, they're more likely to get money. So, Don't go bother to read the book. Just check the book out, keep it for a week and give it back if you don't have time to read it. Make those numbers go up.
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You can borrow e-books and audio books from Libby. Some libraries have streaming movies. A lot of libraries have... still either all online or hybrid events that you can watch rather than having to go to the event at the library. You know, the one thing about some of those streaming services and Libby that I will caution about is that your data is less secure.
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If that's something you're concerned about, then it would be borrowing paper books. Okay, that's good to know. Because most libraries, even in the kind of tech dystopian future we live in, do a decent job or at least try to be...
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good about your borrowing data when you borrow hard copies but because um things like libby and the streaming services are third-party integrations those collect some some amount of use data so it's absolutely great to use those but i would caution that if if you are a person who has a very high threat model and you want to be careful about your data go for the paper
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Yeah, so there are a few more radical organizations that I think are worth paying attention to. My favorite is Library of Freedom Project. They're really wonderful and more willing to say the thing without bullshit. The thing that I would obviously urge every worker to do this, but if your workplace is not unionized, start working on that. That will always give you more power.
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So you should start trying to organize your workplace.
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Who knows where that's going to go? But you can at least try. It's still legal now.
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And similarly, there are, depending upon what state you live in, there might be a state library organization that is active. And that would be just a good way to make connections with other libraries.
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That's not really what we... Yeah, I think that there are other kind of data rescue projects with the federal government that have better data than that. IMLS doesn't have that much data, so I wouldn't be too concerned with that.
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Yeah, it's definitely like trying to figure out to make... how to make your and the libraries around you keep going and offering the things to your communities that they've been offering.
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I think in libraries and elsewhere, it's just... being able to offer a counter narrative, like not buying into the idea that the library is a money hole, you know, that they can only be valued monetarily. So when you hear that, maybe start going to your library's board meetings. And when you hear those kinds of things said, get online for the comments and offer a different narrative.
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And you can do that all over your life in different ways. When you hear that narrative that is monetary and neoliberal and harmful, offer a different one.
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If you have a public library near you, they should have a website, and the website should have an events page that includes board meetings, hopefully other information about your library's board as well. And if you can't find it, maybe call up the library and ask. They'll probably just tell you. They're really good at information there.
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So it depends upon how much Joj and Trump and company are going to listen to Congress because Congress has already funded IMLS, which is the Institute of Museum and Library Services, for this year. So that money already exists. It's already been allocated. And so in theory, they should be good for at least a year. And then next year when the budget comes up,
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Again, it should be up to Congress because Congress created this institution and Congress funds it. But the executive order and the commentary on it does say that they would like to dissolve it Kind of as soon as possible, definitely next year.
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So it's really up in the air about how fast things would move, what exactly would happen, if it would be this year, if it would be next year, whether anyone's going to listen to Congress.
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Yeah. So it's, as I said, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And so basically they're allocated money by Congress every year. And then they hand it out to states, especially then who kind of break it down into other grants. They give grants to states and libraries and institutions. for things that museums and libraries do.
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So that includes things like on the museum side, maybe putting together programming or doing big digitization projects. I used to work at an institution where we had a grant that did a lot of digitization of historic documents. And on the library side, they do all sorts of stuff, especially for public libraries. They
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end up funding things like summer reading programs, equipment, especially for internet access, you know, all this stuff related to job training and those services that libraries offer. And interlibrary loan is a big one so that people can access materials that their library doesn't hold, but it's held by other libraries.
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And rural libraries and tribal libraries, especially really, really benefit from this. Every single state and territory in the country gets these funds.
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Yeah. Well, you know, depending on your library, some libraries will fund it from their operations budget, but if, you know, especially for small rural public libraries where that might be very expensive, that is one thing that these grants go to is interlibrary loan. Okay.
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So I first want to mention that the entire budget of IMLS for 2024 was something like $266 million. We're not talking about huge sums of money in terms of the federal government. It comes out to about 75% per person in the country. So we're not going to be saving on our taxes if this goes away. But that money makes a really big difference.
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So even smaller states that maybe have a million people in it might see a couple million dollars of these grants per year. And so what that would mean is that the things that, maybe not all of them, but most of the thing that these grants cover would not be there. So that means that there wouldn't be summer reading in some places.
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That means that they wouldn't be able to buy the hotspots that they lend out to people who don't have internet at home. That means that maybe there wouldn't be the class that teaches your grandma how to not get caught in a phishing scam.
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So all sorts of things, those things just wouldn't be there because there's probably not, especially in red states, other funds that are going to come to cover that.
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You could like take the, I don't know, the gold toilets away from the Navy and cover it in a day, right? Like it's so small. Yeah, yeah. And yet it has this enormous... outsized impact, you know, the statistics say that every dollar spent on IMLS returns $2 to the economy. So it's actually, if you're going to measure it that way, highly beneficial, especially to these more marginalized areas.
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Yeah. So for better or for worse, public libraries in the United States have become the social safety net of last resort because they already exist almost everywhere. And it's so hard to get you know, not right now, but even in the past couple decades, other social programs started in many parts of the U.S. that things kind of just get lumped into the library.
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So now you get your tax forms there, maybe they have a social worker on staff, it's the place that homeless folks can sit when it's snowing. Yeah. So that kind of is like a little bit of side from what we're talking about right here, but I really do want to point out that public libraries have become the social safety net in many, many places.
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So that aside, offerings of, aside from books and other media, including e-books, audio books, movies in lots of formats, magazines, newspapers, there are tons of classes about all sorts of things, especially technology classes. It's a place that a lot of people, it's their only reliable internet access. So in 2025, you can't do mostly anything without the internet.
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You can't get a job without the internet. You can't maybe pay your bills without the internet. So that's a reliable place that people who don't have internet for various reasons, maybe they live so far out in the country that just doesn't go there unless you have satellite, right? Even now. Or maybe you can't afford it or whatever.
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Or there's one computer in your house and there's six kids and someone has to do their homework, so what's everyone else going to do? So then the computers themselves... And then also, the other thing that IMLS also does is those grants will sometimes purchase research databases.
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So if kids especially are trying to do their homework, again, like children's and teens programming is another thing between homework help, social things, clubs. So in a lot of places where there's not much going on, it's one of the places where young people can go in the afternoon or on the weekend and study.
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not be getting in trouble either because they're making trouble or the adults think they are because there's somewhere productive to be there's somewhere that's inside supervised there's something to do and so That's the kind of stuff we talk about in normal times when we're trying to fight for weekend service or later hours.
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But if we're looking at it in the lens of IMLS, the building might be open, maybe, because maybe they have the foundational operationals, but then there won't be these programs, there won't be these resources, there'll just be a bunch of books on the shelves.
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Yeah. Yeah. Or just, like, sit and read the paper and know what's going on in the world.
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So, you know, you're talking about the last decade to half decade. I think we can really trace it back much farther, at least 30 years to the Clinton administration, actually. I want to talk about the Democrats. But even, you know, the roots farther back than that, because we have a neoliberal problem, right?
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So it's basically the idea that all activity should generate obvious immediate monetary profit, that everything should be run by a business, that everything should be subject to the market, quote unquote. And so that's where we are with libraries, is that Even though I can sit here and say every dollar that the IMLS spends generates $2 of economic activity, that somehow isn't even good enough.
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Because when the powers that be look at libraries, they just see money being flushed down the toilet, and that's the only way they can measure anything. So if you look at it and you're just saying, well, this is a place we spend money. This doesn't create money. This doesn't make more money happen.
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The idea that everything should be run by a business and everything should be subject to market logics, that would say, well, if we're going to subject everything to market logics, libraries have no value because we're only measuring it. And can this make number go up? Yeah. And even though libraries do make number go up, it's not obvious. You can't make it obvious.
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There's no direct line between what libraries do and number go up, even though there actually is, for example, with IMLS. So, you know, starting during the Clinton administration, when the federal government changed and how the federal government worked changed very much under the guise of increasing service quality, what they actually did was lay off a quarter million workers and
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you know, turn everything into contract work instead of regular labor. And that, I think, filtered down from the federal level into states and municipalities so that those levels of government too also started to look at how they ran
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they're government things and in many places public libraries are arms of local government, that those two should also be run like a business and be subject to market logics and therefore number does not go up, we don't value this.
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And that's basically it, is that it's hard now that we've had 30 years of overt neoliberalism in our government system and a couple of decades more of less obvious versions of it to make government, which is now being run like a business, even in the best of times, value things that aren't valued strictly monetarily. So there's no cultural value.
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And even if the monetary value isn't extremely obvious, it somehow doesn't count.
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Right. And then, you know, even though cops also don't make money in a direct sense, somehow we can still fund that. So it really shows that, like, in the case of where you are, the carceral solution is now the only solution we have. Yeah. And when we sit here as abolitionists and we say, well, let's get rid of all that stuff, and people say, well, what are you going to do instead?
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Our answer is often no. It would be so different that it wouldn't be necessary. So we'd have prevention of the entire situation. That's one of the things that libraries offer, is prevention of the entire situation, making vast swaths of the carceral state unnecessary.
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So there's a conscious choice there, especially when money is being taken out of the balance sheets of a city government from the libraries and put into the cops, of this carceral choice of saying, we'd rather everyone's life is shit so we can throw them in jail than everyone have a nice life and no one would have to go to jail.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I feel like what you just said all could have come out of Dr. Phil's mouth at one point, the second the cameras turned off for his show.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yes, it is Behind the Bastards. And I'm I'm here. I'm mainly here to bring the Dr. Phil ASMR videos this week.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
You're going to either really love them or really hate them, and I can't figure out which it's going to be.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
We were we were talking about this off mic there. There was some Dr. Drew drama in Los Angeles this week that actually like for once ended well and online bullying like persevered. And Dr. Drew was like nominated to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority like board.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He may be technically a doctor. I'm not totally sure. I think he's a radio doctor.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He technically does have... He is a doctor. I don't know if he's currently licensed, but I know him from VH1 in middle school where he had celebrity rehab with Dr. Drew, sex rehab with Dr. Drew, celebrity rehab presents Sober House, and on and on.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I could have I could have shortened my description and said he's Adam Carolla's best friend, which is also true, which is like, wait, really?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, he hosted a famous radio show called Loveline Forever. And Adam Carolla was also on the show. And they're close. And so, yeah, he was nominated to serve on the Homeless Authority Board. And it only took about a day where activists just bullied people into withdrawing the nomination pretty quickly. And he had a few spicy little comments about it.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He was like, I can't like he basically was like, these online bullies are trying to cancel me for not being a good doctor and irrelevant for this job. So, you know, sometimes bad doctors fall. I like I love to see it.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And then driving a plane unlicensed. Unlicensed pilot at age 12? Honestly, I looked up Dr. Phil Young because sometimes it's shocking and you're like, whoa, Dr. Phil used to be hot. Not the case here. But there's a picture of him as a kid. And now I'm like, that does look like a kid that would steal a plane.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Whoa, I see it. I see it. Okay, it's honestly shocking that he was not a bald baby.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Wait, hold on. We truly don't have more info than that.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I don't like this. The closeness of father and son here. It sounds like, why is it? Oh, I hate it. Because every time we go over stories like this, you're like, it can't be daddy issues. Everything can't be just daddy. But then, but then it always is.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Right, right, right. Like, Dr. Phil's dad is like, you're my wife now.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The pitch is getting better and better and better. It's going to be sold by the end of the episode.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I would honestly rather do that more than anything else.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
okay so we're abandoning podcasts to do that to do dr phil child wife pilot yes i think that would put a lot of positivity back into the world so so they just they just bail and it's not for financial reasons i mean it is they're they're poor as shit his dad wants to go to school and is like i can't take care of this family anymore but
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Extremely, very, very, sounds like a really healthy family dynamic so far.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I love that book so much. And it turns out that's the thesis statement of the whole thing. How did you just pronounce that, Robert?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I was going to let it fly. Yeah, I wasn't. Honestly, I think that had Anna Karenina been a child pilot, maybe she wouldn't have gotten crushed by that train.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I actually don't know what happens in that book. I pretended to read it when I was like 11. I just stared at every page really hard over a course of months.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
my mom loves Dr. Phil. No, I, yeah, I don't think that that's a negative state. So if anyone's hearing that, and that's not like what they're intending to say, it's just who the audience is.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
As someone who was raised by Dr. Phil moms, I am fully and it's like not. I mean, it is the primary demographic. Yeah, at least at the peak. I don't know who's watching Dr. Phil now.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I think the grifter that really got me was Lou Pearlman, who made all the boy bands that made me...
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I mean, one of my not my favorite, but one of the most legendary. Incredible.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Right. It doesn't mean that we were like not smart, but we were clearly targeted by. Yes. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. Our school is like the kid with the Ford Taurus was like, oh, my God. He has a car. What a cool boy.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I think of other there's that is like such a like celebrity that grows to be evil. I feel like that is a pattern of like I could have been a big sport.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Right. Right. Right. Like and you just know that parties he doesn't let people forget it. Like, yeah, I'm looking up celebrities who played high school sports. Matthew McConaughey. It just seems like not making it big in college sports is potentially a villainous origin story.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I ran track in junior high, but then I threw up one time and I quit permanently. And to this day, I do not run.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It does like several rounds of like going back to being sad and then going back to being funny and then going back to being sad and then going and finally landing on being the funniest shit I've ever heard.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
There's so many levels there because if he did play in it, you're like, oh, what?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
That's like a game of 4D chess I can barely conceive of.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Anything for clout, baby. Anything for fucking clout.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Does it happen to be a product or maybe even a service?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, yeah. If he's willing to go into this game that young, that's so... He's wired for it, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
His reality is stressing me out. Okay. He's triggering my fight or flight response. This is good. Feeling good.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I respect people who use it for good, but holy shit, what an exhausting sounding.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
That's a real thing. You know, the Tashi Dilbert guy, um... Made Dilbert NFTs. And the only difference from a regular Dilbert is that he says, fuck in this one. Oh, shit. Too much money.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I can guarantee that Kathy Geisweig, creator of Kathy Comics, does not know nor care what an NFT is. And that's why she is she is really she is she is my strength in this world.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Robert, I would love you should start making Werner Herzog band camps.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I'm going to make one of you and you're going to be horrified. I wonder if Robert fan cams exist.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
How do I describe a fan cam? It's usually like it's a short video made on an app. I don't know what the app is, but it's just a series of clips of you and they put a glittery filter over it and there's like a cute song on in the background.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Robert, you would you would absolutely hate it, my friend.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
There's enough video footage of you for a fan cam. You need like three clips.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I haven't gotten past the fact that Frank Lawless sounds like a made-up person. That sounds like a cartoon character.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Right, like past trauma doesn't excuse current bad behavior.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Anyway, maybe he should have been a little more patient. Maybe he should have taken some of his own medicine.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Well, yeah, especially if you're willing to lie about your area of expertise. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The podcast is just going to disappear one day and it's the instant I'm fucking done, you know, like, fuck, fuck this podcast.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Some people are just like, they're like, yeah, I know Tony. Well, Tony Robbins is maybe not the best example. But again, this person's like basically full of shit. But, you know, I had a couple hundred dollars to burn and a weekend to burn.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And it's like, it depends on how you sell it too. Like if you're like promising, Oh, if you come this weekend, you're going to leave and make a million dollars in the next, you know, there's varying degrees.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So you're thrifting the grifter and the grifter never likes that.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So I want to take that negotiation tactic and apply it to the standup comedy world. And I'm like, all right, I know that you're supposed to be featuring for me, but actually my dad is going to be opening now. So it's going to be my dad. Then you, you'll be doing a shorter set. I will then be doing five hours like that. Oh, that would be so fun.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. With no connection to the outside world and gaslight them into believing something that they don't.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's like a juicing. Yeah, it's a juicing of the spirit. You're just left like you feel like you're better off. You're probably not. It doesn't matter because you can sleep for three days.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
That's the most dangerous trade in the world is understanding people but just not caring what happens to them.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Wow. Okay. He really does sound like, uh, like chaos Frazier. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Dr. Phil was on Frazier for all you Frazier heads. Oh God, you're right. He was the show that episode, the devil and Dr. Phil.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It absolutely is. Yeah. It's like, it's hard to care about anyone involved in this, this whole situation, but he does sound like the party who brought her.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And they definitely didn't mention whoever Thelma Box stole it from.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I will not. My spirit is worn down. I'll hand it to him.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
On so many levels, too. Like, on multiple levels. God, that's fucking terrible. It's really bad.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I mean, like, you know it's coming, but I just wish it took longer. Why, Oprah and airlines?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I want to know every single time Oprah comes into the discussion. I, I am like, where was Stedman on all of this?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Stedman writes books that are alleging to be about something, but are actually about nothing, but he's, but he's nice. So I don't care.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I hope that Stedman was like, something's not right, Oprah. And she was like, I'm, I'm not listening to you, Stedman. I'm assuming that's how their relationship works.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Maybe that's what sold him. I used to do little fan drawings of Stedman, Graham, and the barefoot Contessa's husband hanging out.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
They would just be like sharing an umbrella. Anyways.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The thing is like that every single time you're like, well, God damn, I bet that if this whole football thing had gone different, uh, the world would be a lot less Dr. Phil.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Okay, okay. You know what? I see your point of view.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, just the usuals. You can listen to Bechdel Castle, Beta Podcast, and My Urine Mensa on iHeartRadio. And then I have a new podcast coming up about Kathy Comics in June that Sophie's producing. I'm excited.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
No. I mean, it's very, you know what? I wish that Kathy was having a lot of sex, but you can't do that in the newspapers. Not then.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
There's still time. There's still time. I'll let her know.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I think it's nice. I think it's fun brand consistency. That's our Robert, people are thinking.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I think that's you're being reductive. But also when people hear you say things like that about yourself, they go, that's our Robert. I go, oh, my son. So, so pure. So humble.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Oh, OK. I thought that was you introducing me. I was like, this is really me.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I don't have a driver's license, but it hasn't stopped me from driving. Hell yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Well, good for you, Jamie. I could probably get a driver's license if I really wanted to. I just don't want to. That's not true. I've failed the test several times.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
i mean that's you know that that's not untrue that's not untrue okay okay accurate dr phil accurate jesus okay yeah so um so he's really like heading into the the villain years yeah yeah he's he's all i mean he's been in villain territory this whole time
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Right. Like the classic air out the worst thing that's ever happened.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Life strategies, self matters, the ultimate weight solution.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
We had the relationship rescue. We had that. It wasn't on the main shelf, but it was in the house.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Absolutely not. I think what we got, we got more out of John Edwards. Do you remember him or John Edwards?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, the one who would record people in the audience talking about the dead people they wanted to hear from and then walking out and being like, aha, I know exactly. That was a fun grift. But also a traumatizing one. They're all traumatizing.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, that's one of the most abusive tactics in the book. Like, well, actually, it was your fault. And if you weren't so weak, this wouldn't have happened to you. And he's like, oh, go fuck off and die.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I will say that every time I try to teach my dog something, that is a very low stakes version of that. They're like, well, didn't you teach him he'd get cuckoo on your floor when you don't feel like standing up? And I was like, yes, I guess I did.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
What kind of he went from zero to being like my laws, much like the law of gravity. That is like that is galaxy brain that are as unavoidable and as unchanging as the tides. Yes. Oh, God. You got you have to appreciate the flagrancy on on display there. Jesus.
Behind the Bastards
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It's like you're you being abused, being your fault to me. That's gravity. It's like, oh, I want to put you through a shredder.
Behind the Bastards
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That's kind of like that's where his story is building.
Behind the Bastards
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There you go. There you go. And I'm sure he'd be happy to do it.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, it's so frustrating, too, because it's like the way they're worded is so deliberate that it's like, oh, I understand why people fell for this.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. It's words in a certain sequence and charging you, you know, 1895 for a hardcover.
Behind the Bastards
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That's, first of all, not true. And that's just like... I mean, yeah, he's just clearly not even good at the job he's getting famous for saying he's good at. That's so backwards.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He sounds like a fucking Catholic priest. He's like, oh, push your emotions down, okay?
Behind the Bastards
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This is like, ugh, God, you're just like, oh God, okay, so what did you do that you need to believe this in order to live with yourself?
Behind the Bastards
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We had this at my house. Wow, it was next to, I like clearly remember it being next to my mom's bed.
Behind the Bastards
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We didn't own the Bible. We owned Life Strategies, the John Edward book, and that other one by that guy who said he could talk to dead people. I forget who it was.
Behind the Bastards
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Jesus! Oh my God! That is a very well-crafted insult. That's beautiful.
Behind the Bastards
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He doesn't. He's still doing it on national television.
Behind the Bastards
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This is like just next level. It's it all rings like semi familiar. It is kind of like interesting to think about how how used to as a culture, how used to we are of like Dr. Phil saying the most fucked up thing he can possibly think of at a child because he's been doing it for 25 years. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. I was like, oh, that wasn't an escalation. It was just always that.
Behind the Bastards
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And it's never made him less money, it doesn't seem like. This is so fucking bleak.
Behind the Bastards
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He's presenting himself as someone who has a license.
Behind the Bastards
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So that sounds helpful. Yeah, thank you for that clarifying statement.
Behind the Bastards
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The worst kind of person, the worst kind of person, because now he's just outright targeting the most vulnerable people he can. It's like it was I didn't care when he was targeting other grifters.
Behind the Bastards
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No. Oh, he's a business boy. He's a business boy. He's a business boy. He's a really good business boy.
Behind the Bastards
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Oh, my fucking God. Okay, so we've arrived at cartoon villainy.
Behind the Bastards
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We sure as shit have. Okay. Does Oprah ever... Because I forget, because over the years, Oprah has endorsed a number of questionable people.
Behind the Bastards
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and sometimes shout out john of god there and and shout out um what's his name who wrote a million little pieces oh yeah jonathan fray right yeah yeah she she's had to like apologize for having endorsed a lot of fucked up people over the years did has that i bet that moment has never happened for dr phil right she's never backed off did she ever back off from him at any point no no no no no they're still deeply tied together why would she ever back off on him
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Dead man. How are you? Okay. Well, that was, that was the question I wanted a better answer to.
Behind the Bastards
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I don't know. I don't know. It's like you can't expect anyone with that much money to be a good person. You're just setting yourself up.
Behind the Bastards
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What's his middle name? What's his middle name? Oh, that's disappointing. Philip Calvin McGraw.
Behind the Bastards
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God, that's I that that that it wouldn't stop getting worse. That is so fucking off. It's like, I mean, it's pretty bad.
Behind the Bastards
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It speaks to like, yeah, just the level of clout he but he's he still upholds, too, because it's like, yeah, I guess that if you think about it for a while, you're like, oh, well, he's not a licensed doctor and look at what he's actually saying. But it's like the world was reinforcing his bullshit for
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Wow. Wow. We got to end with Dr. Phil ruining the lives of children. I mean, I guess that that is where the story is going to end no matter what. It's where it began and it's where it'll end.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Dr. Phil. just kill me now. I got, okay. I am going to, I am going to continue to advocate for put Dr. Phil through a gigantic human size shredder on live TV. I think that that is the kind of dystopian television. Like we're already at Masked Singer. That's the next logical step for me is put a hated, a hated evil person through a shredder. It's the modern guillotine, big old shredder.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Right. Right. Which is a proven model, given the star of the show. That is like bachelor levels of like.
Behind the Bastards
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I can't describe the anxiety of seeing Robert Evans has started screen sharing.
Behind the Bastards
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Even if they had been inebriated of their own volition and not being fed drugs, that is... Even if they had consented earlier, I don't think you can consent to that. No, absolutely not. That is the worst situation imaginable. That is fucking evil. Yeah, it's not...
Behind the Bastards
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That is absolutely, Cruel. God. It's cruel and good, Jamie.
Behind the Bastards
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And they just had that on in waiting rooms. That was just what you watched while you were waiting to see the dentist.
Behind the Bastards
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I can't, I mean, you can't really hand it to him for that, but that's, I mean, that's fucking something. That's so bleak, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Every time I convince myself that this is going to be a fun one, and every time, except the one time, I'm dead wrong.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, you're a successful person. You're not a hero.
Behind the Bastards
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That is extremely like you have to be thinking so hard to come up with something like that. It's so innocuous. Wow.
Behind the Bastards
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This is genuinely really upsetting. I mean, yeah, I mean, on top of the fact that that's an extreme disservice to her, that's also like yet another example of like bullshit, high rated TV heading into unhoused encampments to just frame people in a completely contextless, fucked up way. I hate that shit so much. That is awful.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, time to bust out the Franzia and really dial this up.
Behind the Bastards
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I'm still chilling. Chilling with filling? Chilling with my filling.
Behind the Bastards
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The word twerking, there was a cultural heft to it.
Behind the Bastards
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Well, and I also think that those reactions may not even be I mean, those reactions in themselves are extremely coached where I like I used to do like audience work when I first had moved here and had like no money to my name. And you're so extremely coached. And like before the show even starts, you're told to do a series of facial expressions for the editors to work with.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And so it's, it's like manipulation top to bottom with how it's handled. Cause it's like, not only is he obviously not, has no vested interest in the wellbeing of this kid. Like he also, like I, I would argue probably that editing is completely fucking doctored as well.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's complete. Yeah, it's like violent every level. And it's like, whatever. I mean, clearly, Dr. Phil does not give a fuck.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
But it is. And it also, I think, like speaks to how, especially for a kid, which is like that doing what he does to children should be illegal. It should be a crime. Yes. You should not be allowed to do shit like that. And on top of that, it speaks to like how I don't know. It's like I remember that clip when it first came out and there was no popular conversation about like that.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
the wellbeing of the child who's clearly being exploited by a multimillionaire. Yeah. And, and it's, and I, I see that. I mean, it's when you're introducing the public that way and you are coming from a place of poverty and you are not being empowered at all or protected, like what are you supposed to do? Like that miserable, cruel situation to be put in.
Behind the Bastards
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I'm sure that that's, yeah, I'm sure that that's like integral to it being able to survive at all. Like it needs to be constantly changing hands. That's, ugh.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
There was a... The good ones. That reached the point where Paris Hilton made a documentary about it last year.
Behind the Bastards
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That's fair. I was like, oh, wow, D plus, that's not the worst thing.
Behind the Bastards
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OK, fair enough. I was like, there's no way they're somewhat correct.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I mean, that doesn't sound like consent was gained at all. I mean, there were so many red flags.
Behind the Bastards
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I don't even know what to think. I mean, that entire... Because I don't trust any of the information that anyone is presenting in this way, but that's just... I mean, very clear there's not an issue that should be handled on television with an unlicensed doctor. To say the very fucking least. Yeah, that is just fucking despicable.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I am so upset about it. This was one of my toughest listens of all time. Maybe because he's just still such a real present public disgrace and danger. But like, holy shit. I can't even enjoy Dr. Phil memes. I was going to show you Dr. Phil memes. I'm not gonna. Not worth it.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
A cool, life-affirming kind of shredder. In a way, isn't that just capitalism? Put yourself through a shredder?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
You know, I'm dying to live my life. So you can just, you can listen to the podcast. You can listen to VectoCast. You can listen to Lolita Podcast. You can listen to My Year in Mensa. And you can listen to my new show about Kathy Comics that comes out in June. God damn it.