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- [00:01]
A
Today's episode of Diabolical Lies is brought to you by the Nantucket High Speed Ferry. The general category of cultural discourse we could label correctly as rich people. Shit. The cute little hand woven baskets that you first saw dangling off the wrist of the worst girl in high school. Speaking of the worst girl in high school, Charlie Kirk, the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, the blogosphere ads of the early 2000s, pre glow up Hannah Nealman post glow up Paige Lorenz. And the general vibe online right now of low and high key right wing influencers channeling left wing feminist with all of the confidence and bravado of those who take a Marianne Williamson quote and assign it to Nelson Mandela. Before we get started, Katie, do you want to do a little bit of housekeeping?
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B
Kara's gonna have a baby, folks. We know this.
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A
Allegedly.
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B
We've been working up to this moment for nine months. Kara delivering our child.
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A
I'm impressed that you know the gestation length of 40 weeks.
- [00:58]
B
40 weeks. 40 weeks from the missed period, in fact. Yeah, I listen, I paid attention. That's not one, but two parts of a birth episode coming home to roost right there. And as such, because Carol will be birthing new life into the world, we are going to tweak our regularly scheduled programming and we were just going to drop off of the face of the earth, but then both of our internalized capitalism got the better of us and we decided we can't fucking do that. So instead, we are going to release one episode per month during Caro's quasi maternity leave, and it's just going to be the paid episode. So big apologies to our free subscribers, those freeloading on the backs of the paid subscribers. So Caro has time to. I don't know. We haven't gotten that far in the birth. In the birth series, so I don't actually know what happens after the baby comes out, but she'll be doing something with her boobs and probably a lot of sleeping.
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A
There you go. Wow. Incredible.
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B
How was that? Should we pivot to lemon varietals?
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A
I was just. I'm gonna make you do some lemonade stand metaphors today. Yeah, no. Anyways, long story short, I think this has been an interesting conversation for you and I over, like, basically almost the last year because there are not many comps for what we do in the real world. And so it's been pretty interesting to talk about what a maternity leave would look like. There are some people who run podcasts who have gone on le and who just keep up with their cadence, but they either recycle content they've already done, or they basically have the type of podcast that doesn't require research. So it's like you're just shooting the shit and you're hopping on. And I think you and I both feel very strongly that what we do requires a lot of time, and it also. We don't want to be replaced by other people. Like, it wouldn't really be the same meaningful show if I had, like, an assistant doing the research. And then I was just, like, hopping
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B
on, auditioning new co hosts, new caros, three episodes, and we just see if anyone notices. Don't acknowledge it at all. Just, like, carry on as though it is normal.
- [03:00]
A
So I'm giving birth sometime in September, and we'll be coming back in the new year, and if you want to keep supporting us throughout that process, that's fine. If you want to pause your paid subscription until we come back with two episodes a month, that's fine too. We will, of course, continue with our redistributions throughout this process as well. And I just want to God bless Katie, who had no control in me getting knocked up and whose livelihood is now kind of fucked by it. So welcome to America, baby.
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B
My eye twitching. When Kara said she wants to do less work, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's fine. That's reasonable. What if I just did the other one by myself? I'll just do it alone.
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A
Dude, I would honestly kill for that. I think that's a great idea. If you have a little nervy bee halfway through and you want to start doing that and talking to yourself, and you have, like, a little sock puppet named Caro, I fully support. All right, Katie, what do you know about what I would describe as the Nantucket influencer drama that has unfolded over the last week?
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B
Well, I guess some store in Nantucket put up a sign that says, no influencers. And an influencer named Paige Lorenz, who. I'm gonna be honest, every single photo I see of her, she looks like a different person. So I. To this day, I don't think I would recognize this woman on the street if she was walking toward me. She posted some. Something where she basically just implied that influencers or a group that is discriminated against and that it is misogynist to call out influencers specifically as being a group that you maybe don't want in your store.
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A
I was very interested by this conversation almost immediately. I think it's because I'm watching a conversation take place here that is basically identical to the conversation that I feel like I have been circling around for the last two years in terms of what I think about with the influencer space. Obviously, most of my focus has been in the tradwife influencer realm, But I saw a lot of really interesting parallels in the conversation that has unfolded this week to the conversations that I was directly a part of two years ago and that I have seen while on book tour and while talking about yesteryear. So when this discourse came up in the last few weeks, it just seemed like a good opportunity for us to deconstruct an argument that I think we have danced around in a number of episodes but haven't liked, focused on explicitly, and a generalized attitude that I often see in the world of influence and in the conversations we have around the influencer industry. So the argument that I want us to think about today is this. It is that the influencer industry is at least partially feminist by nature because of the fact that it is driven by women and because of what it has offered to women. Okay, okay.
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B
A feminist because girl.
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A
Exactly. You're a feminist because girl.
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B
Feminist because girl did it.
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A
Exactly. And the part two of this argument that people will make is that if you dismiss this theory of empowerment in any way, you are in some way behaving misogynistically. It's this idea that there is a coin, and on one side of it is misogyny. On the other side of it is feminism, and they are always inextricably connected. Okay, so I want to give definitions for both of these words before we get farther. Katie, I'm going to have you read the definition of feminism from Merriam Webster. I'm not going to make you define it on your own terms like you would do to me. I'm like, so you own a lemonade stand.
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B
So you own, and you only sell lemonade to women. Okay, so are you following? All right. Feminism is the belief in and advocacy of the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes, supporting equal rights and opportunities for women. It is also an organized movement that works to fix unfair rules and treatment based on gender.
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A
Okay, okay. And then this is misogyny.
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B
All right? Misogyny is the hatred of aversion to or prejudice against women. It often shows up as an active dislike of women, a belief that men are better, or actions meant to keep women down when they want power or freedom.
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A
Okay, great. So people often interconnect misogyny and sexism, and I think they're very similar. But TLDR sexism is more of a the establishment of, like, legal discrimination or. Or some sort of reinforced discrimination against women. And misogyny is more of behavior. It's more of a. Characteristics that we can all have that's harder to identify. And it's also pretty hard to punish. Like, it's not necessarily something that you can ban in the same way that you can, like, legislatively try to ban racism or sexism.
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B
Well, I think the other thing about misogyny, and actually this is analogous to, I think things like racism as well, is it is so ingrained in the social fabric and in the culture that I think everyone to some degree is going to experience feelings like that just based on their presence in the culture that we live in. And I think that there is a kernel of truth in this discourse around, like, it is massage. Like, some of these claims about influencers are rooted in misogyny, where I will often have to catch myself when I'm feeling exceptionally annoyed at the behavior of a particular woman to kind of check, like, okay, am I experiencing internalized misogyny right now? So I think it's, like, not even as simple as whether something is or is not misogynist. I think most things do have misogynistic elements, literally because it is the water we are swimming in that is kind of inextricable from the broader culture and one another and ourselves.
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A
Yeah. I mean, for example, I am feeling internalized misogyny right now because you decided to show up in a cute outfit for a recording without telling me that you were planning on doing that. And I look fucking horrific. So I'm gonna have you read a section from the Cut, which is where this local kerfuffle on a very, very isolated enclave became a national conversation. It was an article in the cut by Steph McNeil, another.
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Another episode of White on White Crime on the Diabolical Lies podcast.
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Hey, hey. I will say from the jump, we were interested of rich white women. You can go back to our first episode. The receipts are there.
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That it was not the original sin of diabolical life.
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A
The real problem is when we did our episode on terrorism, because we were
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like, let's expand the premise, and got everybody's hopes up that there was more happening here.
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A
That was nothing else happening here.
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B
That was because Luigi Mangione was hot.
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A
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. Really quickly. I was talking to Riley today and just fucking yelling at him because I'm pregnant. And I was like, I want you to go on the podcast and speak on my behalf. And he said he's going to wear a shirt Moving forward. That says clocking in as Caroline. Clocking in as Osama bin Laden, Which is such an amazing Russian nesting doll. Okay, now go. This is from the cut. This is from the cut.
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B
Okay. When John Sylvia decided to hang a sign in his family's antiques and handmade craft shop that read no Influencers, he wasn't doing it to go viral. Quote the sign was made for people walking in the store or walking by and looking in the window, he tells me. That distinction perhaps illustrates his entire reason for posting it. Sylvia, whose grandfather started Sylvia's Antiques in 1927 and who later merged it with Four Winds Craft Guild, was born and raised on Nantucket, so he's used to seeing the tension that sometimes bubbles up between locals and well heeled summer vacationers who pour into the 14 mile Long island off the coast of Massachusetts every summer. But as if all of a sudden, tourism has exploded on the tiny island and he has a bone to pick with some of these selfie stick wielding customers, this latest tourism wave has washed in. Sure, some of the young vacationers who visit his shop are great. They talk with Sylvia and his staff, asking questions about the famous lightship baskets he carries and learning the history behind them. But then there are the ones who enter and immediately start filming without engaging at all. A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else's video, he says. Like fucking talk to me. Talk to anyone in my store. Open up TikTok or Instagram this summer and you can't escape Nantucket, a smaller sister island to Martha's Vineyard. The Massachusetts enclave's pristine beaches, bursting colorful hydrangea bushes and sumptuous lobster rolls are New England perfection and look positively idyllic through a phone screen. Though Elan Hildebrand's Nantucket novels and now their screen adaptations have long drawn fans to the island, residents largely credit social media for this latest tourism boom. Quote for better or for worse, Nantucket is having a moment. Carly Reardon, a longtime blogger and content creator who has been singing the island's praises to her followers for more than a decade, tells me. Quote it's been the preferred location for influencer marketing campaigns. Nantucket as a concept has gone viral. Okay. As someone who is a Colorado transplant, this strikes me as like the mirror image or the summer version of what towns in the American west experience in the winter, where you have like Aspen and Jackson Hole and these destinations that have now kind of become like billionaire playgrounds where people will go there and like cosplay, we call it like the Aspen costume that you see in the Denver airport, where it's like, leather pants and fur and, like, cowboy hats and all this stuff where you're like, no one who actually lives in these places actually dresses this way or, like, ports themselves this way.
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A
One thing I want to point out immediately is the distinction in language here between people who view this island as, quote, a concept and people who live there. So again, you have this guy Sylvia, saying the sign was made for people walking, looking in the window. He's talking kind of texturally about the experience of being on the island. And then you have this influencer, Carly Reardon, who is saying Nantucket is having a moment. It, as a concept has gone viral. That really jumped out to me as a novelist who has had her book be described as viral this spring again and again and again, because I understand the implication and I understand what they're trying to say here, which is that this is something that has gained currency online. But when I see that, I often think, no, it's not viral. It's a bestseller. It's actually selling copies in the real world. And it's something that feels quite diminishing to me, frankly, to describe my novel as viral, even if conversations about it are going viral. I have this moment where it's like. It's almost like the digitization of a physical product. And when I saw that Nantucket as a concept has gone viral, it felt incredibly ironic for me when you think about the staging of the war again between influencers and people who don't want their lives to exist online. So I'm going to have you keep reading a little bit more.
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B
In 2022, a local survey found the island's summer population had increased by 70% since 2014, estimating it could reach 80,000 or more by 2026. The town government recently approved funding for a study to quantify exactly how many visitors they are getting now. With the Nantucket current noting actual figures have been elusive. For Sylvia, everything about his business is antithetical to social media. The baskets he sells have a unique history that can only be appreciated by fully understanding their origins on whaling ships. And each piece takes months to make by hand. This isn't an item you can click to buy on TikTok shop, something he feels may be lost on those who have just seen images of the baskets online. Quote, they don't care about the history, Sylvia says of some of his younger customers. Quote, I don't want to sound negative, but they come in, there's like a group of them sometimes, and it can clog up the store. It's not a huge space, so Sylvia decided to have some fun with it. He asked a local artist to create a traditional wood sign reading no influencers and hung it right above the baskets. With the help of his partner who operates the store social media accounts, he posted a photo of the sign on Instagram with the caption came for the friendship baskets stayed for the shade quote. It was kind of tongue in cheek. He says it can be annoying, but I mean, I'm not anti influencers. Huh. Okay. That I think is kind of ironic because it's like you are sort of participating in the same attention capture game.
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A
So the sign goes viral, it gets picked up on Reddit. Other stores start to parody it across the country. Some use it to also say no influencers. Other uses it to say influencers welcome. And that's when Paige Lorenz gets involved, and that's when this conversation becomes a question of feminism and of misogyny. Katie, you've already kind of hinted at what you know about Paige Lorenz, so I'll just add the little bio for her. So Paige Lorenz is actually now Paige Paul. She was recently married. But one of my little acts of feminism is that I refuse to name women by their marital names. And I'm just gonna go by her former birth name. I'm gonna dad name her. So Paige Lorenz is a Nantucket local who grew up on the island. Her mother comes from a long heritage of basket weavers, and her father is actually a fisherman. I'm totally kidding. That's not where she's from. She is an influencer who often speaks up on issues related to feminist politics and women's rights. I'm just kidding again. She. She is an influencer with several million followers who grew up in Connecticut with enough money to go horseback riding and attend boarding school to ski. She became instag famous when she dated such esteemed gentlemen as the actor Armie Hammer and the country singer Morgan Wallen. She is now married.
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B
You are. Hold on, hold on, hold on. You should have led with that. Wait, let me finish, let me finish.
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A
It gets better.
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It gets better.
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A
She is now married to a tennis pro named Tommy Paul. She runs a pop up shop on Nantucket. And this is why she got involved for her clothing brand called Dairy Boy.
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Oh, Milky boy.
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That sells 90 sweatshirts with such inspired captions like Nantucket Dairy Boy. Up until this month, her track record of speaking out about politics was limited to one moment in the fall of 2025. Do you want to guess what she
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spoke about Katie fall 2025.
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I'll give you a hint.