Show Notes
A “point, counterpoint”-style deep dive into the double-sided coin of “ethical consumption” and “ethical salesmanship” (or its alternative, “selling out”) under that little thing we call “capitalism,” sponsored by our treasured economic partners in the Saudi Royal Family. “Is There REALLY No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism?” from Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty (2024) “This feminist t-shirt isn’t actually made in a sweatshop” by Zing Tsjeng from Dazed (2014) Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hartman (2025) “Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction,” a lecture series from 1952 by all-time neoliberal juggernaut Ludwig von Mises “The Litter Myth” from “Throughline” by NPR (2019) “A Beautiful If Evil Strategy” by Chris Rose from Plastic Pollution Coalition (2017) “Leaked Audio Reveals How Coca-Cola Undermines Plastic Recycling Efforts” by Sharon Lerner from The Intercept (2019) “What is Amazon Web Services?” by Melissa Eddy from The New York Times (2025) “People Think Amazon Is an E-Commerce Company, but 74% of Its Profit Comes from This Instead” by Anthony Di Pizio for The Motley Fool (2024) This video from Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism, about whether one’s identity as a consumer can ever be weaponized as an anti-capitalist tool “Ethical Consumerism Isn’t Dead, It Just Needs Better Marketing” by Julie Irwin for Harvard Business Review (2015) “The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility” by Aneel Karmani for Wall Street Journal (2010) “Nirvana: Inside the Heart and Mind of Kurt Cobain” by Michael Azerrad for Rolling Stone (1992) “Lived Through This,” an interview with Chuck Klosterman, by David Wallace-Wells for Vulture “The Rise and Decline of the ‘Sellout’” by Franz Nicolay for Slate (2017) Shakespeare’s Sonnet 110, in which he bemoans the need to do spon con so he can make a living as a writer “In the 90s, We Worried About Nirvana ‘Selling Out.’ I Wish That Concept Still Made Sense,” by Dan Brooks for The Guardian (2023) “How We Stopped Caring About Selling Out” and “Comedy’s Favorite Truth-Tellers are Playing Jester for the Saudi Prince” by Emily Topping for Current Affairs (2025) “The Age of the Double Sell-Out” by W. David Marx (2025) “I didn’t listen to a single Taylor Swift song on Spotify last year. She still made money off me.” by Chris A. Williams for The Philadelphia Inquirer (2024) “It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup” by Freddie deBoer (2025) “Ha ha! Ha ha!” an infamous review of Trick Mirror by Lauren Oyler for London Review of Books (2020) “The Journalist as Influencer: How We Sell Ourselves on Social Media” by Allegra Hobbs for The Guardian (2019)
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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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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.