Episode 15: Grifty Tribune: Puppy killers, brain worms, and faux dictators, oh my!

Grifty Side Hustle How America Lost Its Mind, and Do We Even Want It Back? We Lost Our Mind 160 Years Ago When We Failed the Test of Reconstruction Show Notes Welcome to Grifty Side Hustle. Between regular Grifty episodes, one or two of us take a closer look at something we're really into. Each episode stands on its own, whether we're following someone's career, revisiting a period in history, or examining an idea or institution that gets us asking bigger questions. Sometimes it's an obvious grift. Sometimes it's a political promise or a national myth that refuses to stay in the past. The cast may be smaller, but the suspicion is fully staffed. We're looking at who gets power, who lives with the consequences, and how old ideas keep being repackaged as common sense. Did America lose its mind? And if it did, what if it actually happened 160 years ago? Grifty Pod co-host Aaron McCall launches the series' first-ever Grifty Side Hustle to dig deeper into that question by looking to the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. Senator Hiram R. Revels was the first African American senator elected during the Reconstruction era. But was the Civil War exclusively about slavery, or was it also about the tensions behind the promise of a nation where "we are all created equal with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? The more we dig into Senator Hiram Revels's career and the society around him, the more we see that the Reconstruction period and the present day share many of the same conflicts, struggles, and political tensions. Aaron ends the episode by asking what we can learn from the past in order to understand our present-day struggles. Subscribe to Grifty Pod and follow the show @GriftyPod on Instagram, and find each of the hosts individually. Azi is @The.Wellness.Therapist, Aaron is @mrneuropolitan, Inna is @_dr_inna, and Julian is @realityandmeaning. THE THREE GRIFTY QUESTIONS Who's making money? Who's gaining power? Who benefits if I stay angry? They do not explain everything. They explain an alarming amount. FURTHER READING Want more Grifty between episodes? Subscribe to our Substack for show notes, sources, writing, and bonus material. Subscribe free, or go paid if you'd like to support the research and production behind the show. We spend a lot of time asking who's making money, so eventually we had to admit we'd like some too. Subscribe to Grifty on Substack POLARIZATION, DEMOCRACY & THE OTHER TEAM The Cherry Tree Myth

HOW AMERICA LOST ITS MIND, AND DO WE EVEN WANT IT BACK? Episode 2: The Long Con In 2009, Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to a million Twitter followers. CNN had reporters around the world. Ashton had Punk'd. Somehow, we'd found a way to compare them. Azi follows The Gong Show, The Real World, and American Idol into a culture that sells humiliation and mistakes watchability for authority. The Apprentice gave Trump a carefully edited business reputation, and being good at television could get you taken seriously in a completely different job. Political loyalty can start to look a lot like attachment to a TV character. Paris Hilton didn't cause fascism. We're not putting that on the woman who gave us "that's hot." We wanted celebrity access, then found ourselves expected to post our breakfast, our divorce, and our opinion on a controversy eleven minutes old. Even silence needed an explanation. Aaron traces slavery and Reconstruction through Obama's presidency and the racial backlash that came with it. Obama organized online; Trump promoted birtherism. Aaron also looks at the political decisions behind neglected schools and out-of-reach healthcare. Anger about those failures doesn't become imaginary because a grifter exploits it. We follow how it gets turned into money and political authority. Inna asks how well anyone can know a person through curated posts, even honest ones. Platforms respond to what users choose, and companies learn what keeps us clicking. Filter bubbles aren't inevitable; they depend on how that loop is built. Julian explains Michael Barkun's stigmatized knowledge: when institutions reject a claim, believers can find it more persuasive. We get into QAnon, wellness conspiracies, and the habit of borrowing Tuskegee's documented abuses to make unrelated vaccine allegations sound credible. We connect just-world beliefs to manifestation's convenient defense: when correct thinking doesn't deliver, blame the customer. The seller stays an expert. IN THIS EPISODE Reality TV, The Apprentice, and Trump's business image Kutcher's million-follower race against CNN Bush, 9/11, Iraq, and damaged public trust Obama's digital campaign and Trump's birtherism Reconstruction, citizenship, and voting rights QAnon and conspiracy psychology next to New Age conspirituality Stigmatized knowledge and real institutional misconduct at Tuskegee Just-world beliefs and victim-blaming, plus manifestation Online identity and mental-health communities, and algorithms, user choices, and filter bubbles Hospitality in The Odyssey and community beyond online connections THE THREE GRIFTY QUESTIONS Who's making money? Who's gaining power? Who benefits if I stay angry? They do not explain everything. They explain an alarming amount. FURTHER READING Want more Grifty between episodes? Subscribe to our Substack for show notes, sources, writing, and bonus material. Subscribe free, or go paid if you'd like to support the research and production behind the show. We spend a lot of time asking who's making money, so eventually we had to admit we'd like some too. Subscribe to Grifty on Substack HORSESHOES, DIAGONALS & STRANGE POLITICAL BEDFELLOWS The Emergence of Conspirituality. Charlotte Ward and David Voas linked New Age spirituality and conspiracism in 2011, years before QAnon. It doesn't describe everyone into alternative spirituality. OUTRAGE, ALGORITHMS & INTERNET BRAIN Curation Algorithms and Filter Bubbles in Social Networks. Ron Berman and Zsolt Katona model algorithms alongside users' own connections and choices. Design changes the outcome, and personalization doesn't automatically build an echo chamber. "I See Me Here": Mental Health Content, Community, and Algorithmic Curation on TikTok. Sixteen interviewees describe support, doubts about credibility, and harmful content they struggled to escape. Relatable isn't the same as accurate. These are qualitative findings, not population estimates. The Internet's Role in Campai

HOW AMERICA LOST ITS MIND, AND DO WE EVEN WANT IT BACK? Episode 1: It's Not a Horseshoe. It's a Business Model. The wellness people think your toothpaste is poisoning you. Finance bros think empathy is bad economics. Somebody on the far right thinks Taylor Swift is a Democrat psy-op, while someone on the far left thinks your aunt buying hummus is personally funding colonialism. On parts of both fringes, everything is somehow Israel's fault. The old antisemitic conspiracies apparently have remarkable staying power among people who think they're having brand-new thoughts. Then, while the MAGA right was helpfully laying out its intentions in Project 2025, a corner of the online left looked at Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that jails journalists, murders protesters, brutalizes women, and executes gay people, and thought, "Maybe these guys have a point." It's impressive how much authoritarianism you can overlook once you've decided the authoritarians hate the right people. Different politics, same inability to enjoy Thanksgiving. And somehow, all of these people have podcasts. Actually, so do we. Welcome to Grifty Pod. We're opening a season about how America lost its mind, which every podcast host seems to have already solved. In our defense, we're planning to disagree with each other, which is a terrible way to run a cult. We start with Horseshoe Theory: the idea that the far left and far right eventually bend toward each other. Shared conspiracies and purity tests don't mean these movements want the same world or have equal power. The American far right has substantial electoral, judicial, governmental, and media power. Your neighborhood tankie with 600 followers does not. Aaron asks why standing in the middle automatically makes you right, bringing in slavery, Reconstruction, and racial hierarchy. Moderation can be a tactic; it isn't automatically a worldview. Julian brings in diagonalism to explain how people with very different politics unite against shared enemies. He connects that to conspirituality and the pandemic-era collision of wellness, libertarianism, QAnon, anti-vaccine politics, and MAGA. Some spiritual influencers decided Trump was a lightworker. After all that talk about letting go of the ego, that's quite a man to end up defending. Inna talks about Soviet Ukraine, the propaganda she believed while her parents kept dangerous truths from her, the USSR's collapse, and antisemitism she later heard echoed in America. She's now a psychology professor, but once believed she was psychic, making her the only Grifty host theoretically capable of predicting your five-star review. Julian traces his politics from growing up white under apartheid in South Africa and conscientious objection through Pat Buchanan, the Tea Party, and QAnon. Seeing Americans put Hitler mustaches on Obama posters over health care was quite something. Apparently the tyranny was going to begin when somebody could afford a doctor. He and Inna also disagree about emotional labor: people can only explain their marginalization so many times. We get into why arguments can harden beliefs, too. Being wrong can threaten your identity and your place in a group. Changing your mind is hard enough without admitting that the person who's been annoying you has a point. Azi's leftist parents joined Iran's 1979 revolution hoping for something better. Her mother marched while pregnant; another authoritarian order followed. So when somebody says "burn it all down," Azi would like to know who takes over afterward. Her family has already tried the version where you find that out later. Children, disabled people, and the elderly don't get to skip the collapse. That's where we come back to vulnerability. Economic insecurity, loneliness, and institutional failure give people real reasons to be angry. We're asking who turns that anger into audiences, markets, and power. A grifter doesn't have to invent your pain. They can just tell you who c

Grifty Pod Bonus Episode "Beating a Dead Horse" We're back because the group chat got out of control. This week we break down the Eric Swalwell allegations, Azi's firsthand experience as a whistleblower in the Eric Bauman scandal, and the bigger issue of power, patriarchy, and why "believe women" suddenly comes with exceptions. We also get into cult of personality politics and what happens when the left gets its own Joe Rogan with Hassan Piker. Messy, honest, and very online but with a real point. Stop worshipping individuals and start holding systems accountable. Listen, then log off and go do something useful.

Episode Summary Welcome back to Grifty Pod. If you are listening to this episode without a helmet or a seatbelt, you are far braver than we are. This week felt like the entire nation had a stroke while standing upright. The Epstein documents dropped and inside that cursed file dump we discovered the soul bending phrase Trump and Bubba which was not on any of our bingo cards. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to pick a political fistfight with Trump and it looked like two malfunctioning Roombas colliding in a hallway. Every headline seemed to be written by a bored demon trapped in a newsroom. So today we are taking you on a tour of American unreality. First we slide back into the nineties to revisit the DARE program which gave entire generations a deeply misplaced sense of safety. Then we blast forward to the current moment where right wing influencers are turning on their own in something called transvestigation which is exactly as deranged as it sounds. The circus is in town. Let us begin. What You'll Learn in This Episode The DARE Program and the Comforting Lie That Posters Fix Everything