What The Hell America!

If you’ve noticed that the Right’s female beauty standards switched overnight from realtor mom to blackshirt Barbie and are wondering what this augurs for American politics, we have just the podcast for you.

Diabolical Lies is a one-stop shop for Blake Lively content and J. D. Vance skewerings. It’s the only podcast where you can hear passionate discourse on both Taylor Swift’s rumored fillers and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis’s writings on technofeudalism. One typical episode on “the yassification of Christian Nationalism” dives deep into the connections between venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s ominous financial moves and Mormon tradwife influencers like Ballerina Farm. You will hear breakdowns of Chappell Roan fan drama, and you will hear comparative analyses of the American and Nordic welfare states, and they will be miraculously connected.

In summary, Diabolical Lies is a show for smart women who enjoy pop culture and have also noticed that everyone seems to be eating out of the trash can of ideology. If that sounds like you, head over to their Substack and enjoy this paid subscription discount specifically for Jacobin readers.

The hosts of Diabolical Lies, Katie Gatti Tassin and Caro Claire Burke, were both raised conservative, both rushed sororities (Katie at the University of Alabama, the mother of all unhinged sorority-rush cultures), and both had only brief layovers as liberals before striding into socialism (Caro cutting out the middleman thanks to a chance encounter with Noam Chomsky). The hosts are openly midconversion, and one of the pleasures of listening is hearing one transfer a heady realization to the other. Their audiences’ synapses are firing too. In the Substack chat a few weeks ago, scores of listeners collectively announced their intentions to join the Democratic Socialists of America — this inspired by a podcast whose most recent episode centers on an OnlyFans influencer.

Katie Gatti Tassin is the founder of Money with Katie, a personal finance media brand that discusses money, class, culture, and the economy. Her book, Rich Girl Nation with Penguin Random House, comes out June 10. Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear, about a modern tradwife forced to time-travel to the 1850s, is forthcoming with Penguin Random House in 2026. Anne Hathaway is signed on to star in and produce an Amazon film version.

They spoke to Jacobin’s Meagan Day about their own political trajectories, the shortcomings of personal enrichment as a path to freedom, the Right’s crusade to blame everything wrong with capitalism on feminism, the “wellness-girly-to-MAGA pipeline,” and finding a Third Way beyond girlboss and tradwife.