Diabolical Lies

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

Caro & Katie discuss your questions about:
* Whether the “financial independence, retire early” movement is an effective way to Cordyceps-bug (visual below) capitalism for your own freedom or a gateway drug to the life-diminishing tendency to obsess about money
* Why Katie would accept Fox News’s radical Marxist label
* Caro’s Yesteryear experience and why success sometimes feels like failure
* The creative process and whether creating from a place of defensiveness makes for shittier art
* The future of Diabolical Lies if you people continue to tolerate us
* Politically agnostic friends and the expectation that every element of your personal life conforms to your political ideals
* Whether Christianity and feminism are compatible, and if feminism can really be “compatible” with any belief system that evolved under thousands of years of patriarchy
* Conspiracy theories we believe in
* How to feel generally better about your career under capitalism
* The difficulty of “killing the (misogynist, capitalist, etc.) cop in your head” and choosing more fulfilling work that may earn less or no money
* Whether we use PowerPoints to present our outlines to one another and how our research process has evolved from our glorified voice notes
* Neutralizing the male gaze and self-objectification theory
We’ll see paid subscribers again in October for a topical episode that will (probably) be about the never-ending breastfeeding vs. formula culture war.

A quick heads-up: Around 1:34:00, we discuss postpartum psychosis, depression, filicide, and the Lindsay Clancy trial (no graphic descriptions). If that’s not something you’re up for today, take care and skip ahead to 1:40:00.
It only felt fitting to wrap up our pre-maternity leave regularly scheduled programming with a conversation that brings our very first episode full circle.
Skeptics of the tradwife shtick have long observed that tradwife influencers aren’t actually exposed to the risks of the conservative, traditional lifestyle they’re aestheticizing, because they—presumably—have access to their own money and, with it, some degree of autonomy and optionality.
This summer, the years-long discourse has finally landed where it started, with the accusation—you actually have a job—being wielded effectively as a defense—yeah, this is a job, why is everyone calling me a tradwife? The result is a discursive ouroboros.
Many fellow Discourse Vultures have perceived Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman’s disavowal of the tradwife label in recent interviews whilst wearing top-to-bottom denim as proof that this brand of motherhood is no longer in vogue, and that the reality of Smith and Neeleman’s family dynamics (50/50 partnerships, being a CEO) serve as evidence of that shift. The personal is political, as they say, but how effectively does personal experience really serve as a political defense? Can it nullify the ideological associations of powerful aesthetics, when those aesthetics are already central to American culture?
This episode is a close read of three eerily similar themes that appeared across both recent interviews with some ~lite feminist theory~ layered atop them.
THEORY
Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich (1977), the original source from which the “mothering as experience” and “motherhood as institution” framework was pulled
“A review of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution” by Alice Braun (2019)
“Institution of Motherhood” from Encyclopedia of Motherhood, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Andrea (2010)
“Mothering and Motherhood: Experience, Ideology, and Agency” by Min Jao from Comparative Literature Studies (2019)
“Racism and Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood” by Dorothy E. Roberts from Journal of Gender & Law (1992)
“Filicide in the United States” by Phillip J. Resnick from the National Library of Medicine (2016)
Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America by Rachel Louise Moran (2024)
“Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” by Audre Lorde (1984)
CLOSE-READ INTERVIEWS
“Nara Smith: Stop Calling Me a Tradwife” from Call Her Daddy (2026)
“Ballerina Farm is Happy with Her Choices” by Stephanie McNeal from Vulture (2026)
OTHER REFERENCED PRESS HITS
“Tycoon or Tradwife? The Woman Behind Ballerina Farm Makes Her Own Path.” by Julia Moskin for the New York Times (2024)
Alyssa Grenfell, the ex-Mormon YouTuber referenced
“The Un-Trad Rise of Nara Aziza Smith” by Bianca Betancourt for Harper’s Bazaar (2024)
“How Lucky Blue and Nara Aziza Smith Made Viral Internet Fame From Scratch” by Carrie Battan for GQ (2024)
“Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)” by Megan Agnew for The Times (2024)
“Ballerina Farm opens its door to visitors” from ABC News (2026)
“The ‘trad wives’ leaving high-control Christian nationalist communities” from CNN (2026)


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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

The Democratic Party was facing an identity crisis when Donald Trump began his second term in January 2025. Just two months later, Democratic media Thinkboiz Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published Abundance.
Their theory of the case: We could “solve our problems with supply,” and that to do so, we needed to pursue “a liberalism that builds,” an idea that meant aspiring to “more than redistribution […], more than parceling out the present.” The text of Abundance focuses almost exclusively on examples of government proceduralism and self-defeating obstruction, while at times quoting books like Fully Automated Luxury Communism and even Karl Marx.
There’s just one difference between the productive capacity imagined in Fully Automated Luxury Communism and Abundance: only one of these books sees this vision as compatible with capitalism.
Over the months that followed its publication, an “intra-left” fight emerged between the “populist left” (represented by figures like Bernie Sanders and the DSA) and the “abundance left.” For a while, it looked like Abundance would set the vision for the future of the party. What happened?
Diabolical Lies investigates.
All citations and references can be found at diabolicalliespod.com.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com