Show Notes
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In this conversation… What does it mean to “run the government like a business” in America today? In today’s episode, we scrutinize the fetishization of “efficiency” and the American businessman, the role this valorization played in the ascendancy of our current “leaders,” and what everyone’s getting wrong about how business is done in America today—through the lens of a recent bombshell report that “breastaurant” Hooters is filing for bankruptcy. Got questions? [email protected]. References in the Episode “Is Hooters Really Rebranding Because Millennials ‘Aren’t That Into Boobs’ Anymore? Here’s What We Know So Far,” the important, hard-hitting journalism you’ve come to expect from Peter Thiel’s favorite beach read, Evie Magazine “The decline and fall of Hooters,” by Kara Kennedy in The New Statesman “Hooters in Talks for Potential Bankruptcy in Coming Months,” by Eliza Ronalds-Hannon and Reshmi Basu for Bloomberg UK “Chanticleer Holdings and Hooters Ring NASDAQ Closing Bell,” a 2012 Hooters press release “Prison food is the latest target in a campaign to divest holdings,” by Fola Akinnibi for The Los Angeles Times, because nothing says American dream quite like the ROI on mass incarceration “PE Firms Rebrand Prison Healthcare Companies, But Care Issues Continue,” by Syed Hamza Sohail for HIT Consultant The Private Equity Stakeholder Project’s report on HIG Capital and Wellpath, and the 1,395 times the “Correct Care Solutions” subsidiary was sued in federal court “PE-Backed Prison Health-Care Firm Wellpath Declares Bankruptcy” by Dorothy Ma for Bloomberg “H.I.G. Capital’s Companies Mired in Regulatory and Headline Risk,” by Eileen O’Grady for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project “H.I.G. Capital puts Hooters up for sale,” by Luisa Beltran for PE Hub in 2015 “H.I.G. calls off ‘Hooters of America’ auction,” by Luisa Beltran for PE Hub approximately 10 minutes later lol “H.I.G.-backed Hooters of America seeks a buyer: sources,” by Luisa Beltran for PE Hub in 2018 “New Owners of Hooters Plan to Expand Less Offensive Spinoff, Hoots” by Greg Morabito for Eater “Hooters of America sold to 2 private equity firms,” by Julie Littman for Restaurant Dive “Hooters of America Announces Closing of $70 Million Term Loan Facility,” from Stephen Brown on Business Wire “How the Financialization of America Hurt Workers and the Economy,” by Michael Collins for IndustryWeek “The Apprentice, Intro Season 1, Donald Trump,” which is nothing short of an absolute fucking trip to the reality television universe where this man truly shined and should’ve stayed Marjorie Taylor Greene being generally confused about how the government is supposed to work pt. 359235 “Trump seeks to run government like a business, for better or worse,” by Brett Samuels for The Hill, which contains some of the bleakest quotes known to science “DOGE is causing the very problem it claims to be solving,” by Shannon Arvizu for The Hill “Trump Quietly Plans to Liquidate Public Lands to Finance His Sovereign Wealth Fund,” by Mark Haggerty and Jenny Rowland-Shea for the Center for American Progress Ronald Reagan contradicting himself for 41 seconds “How Ronald Reagan Tried to Shrink Government Spending” by Christopher Klein for History usaspending.gov, a literal line by line accounting of where we spend money “Americans voted for Trump, but don’t support his agenda,” by G. Elliott Morris for ABC News “What DOGE is Doing Across the Federal Government,” by Nik Popli for Time fiscaldata.treasury.gov, where you can learn about the national debt “How Much Is the National Debt? What Are the Different Measures Used?” from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation
More from Diabolical Lies
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com
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)
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.