← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Diddy and Our Culture’s ‘Himpathy’ for Powerful Men
00:41:40
This week we're taking a break from the election and turn our attention to the allegations against Sean Combs: Where has #MeToo succeeded or fallen short? And what happens when the lines blur between rumor mill and conspiracy theory? The Opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the Opinion writer Jessica Grose join the conversation. Plus, Jessica has a recommendation for Plath-heads.
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- [00:28]
Ross Douthat
This will be an all hip hop podcast from here on out. Until the election.
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Michelle Cottle
I did not sign up for that. I just want the people to know I didn't endorse this.
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Ross Douthat
I didn't say no sign up.
- [00:39]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
It's too late.
- [00:40]
Ross Douthat
It's gonna be. It's gonna be good. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat. I'm Michelle Cottle and this is Matter of Opinion. Today, we're taking a break from presidential politics to focus on another story that's been dominating headlines. That's the apparent downfall of Sean Combs or Diddy P. Diddy or even Puff Daddy, as you may know, the wildly successful hip hop mogul who was indicted on sex trafficking and racketeering charges last week. And the Diddy story, I think.
- [01:27]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Are we going to go with Diddy?
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Ross Douthat
We're going with Diddy, Michelle.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
Good choice. Classic.
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Ross Douthat
I think it's a story that brings together a lot of really interesting threads from American culture right now. You've got issues about sex and race and celebrity and the abuse of power. You've got the contested legacy of the MeToo era, the influence of the online rumor mill and the blurred lines between conspiracy theory and reality. And all of that is why I, at least, am really excited to talk about this story.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
You are very excited.
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Ross Douthat
I'm excited. And for this conversation, I'm especially excited because we are joined by two special and repeat special guests, our colleagues, Tressie McMillan Cottam and Jessica Gross.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
Welcome, all.
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Ross Douthat
Welcome.
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Jessica Gross
Thank you.
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Michelle Cottle
Pleased to be here.
- [02:15]
Ross Douthat
So far. So far, I'm glad you're here.
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Michelle Cottle
Well, I'm hopeful.
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Ross Douthat
You're hopeful. That's right.
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Michelle Cottle
I'm always hopeful.
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Ross Douthat
That's right. I mean, I feel like hot spring's eternal. It's a dark and twisted story. So we don't want to be too hopeful, optimistic and so on. But, Michelle, do you want to give us some quick backstory on the nature of the scandal, the arrests, the charges?
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
Okay, first off, I feel like we need a little bit of legal context, which is a lot of what has come to light. Did so because of the Adult Survivors act, which is a law in New York that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations on sexual assault claims in civil suits, not criminal ones. So last. Last year, the singer Cassie came out accusing Diddy of sexual assault, rape. And no less than 24 hours after that, it was announced that they had settled the suit. But his attorney said that the decision to settle was in no way at admission of wrongdoing.
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Ross Douthat
Never is never.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
It's kind of a. Kind of a standard. But then pretty quickly, two more women came out after that. And last Monday, then, Diddy was arrested on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. So he has, of course, pleaded not guilty, and now we are awaiting trial.
- [03:37]
Ross Douthat
And the charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, that sort of umbrella seems to encompass a bunch of different things. But there's basically a core charge in the indictment, which is that Diddy and people around him presumably ran what they called freak offs, which were. I'm just going to quote the indictment. They were elaborate and produced sex performances that Combs Diddy arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded. And the alleged illegality here is that again, I'm quoting, that he used force, threats of force and coercion to cause victims to engage in extended sex acts with male commercial sex workers. And they allegedly sometimes lasted multiple days. Now, it's important to note Combs is declaring his innocence, but I'm struck by the fact that nobody I'm reading, and there's a lot of material about this on the Internet, seems super shocked by these allegations. Even though Diddy has been a fixture in pop culture for decades, presumably we could have known about some of these things sooner. So we're going to start talking about why now. And, Tressie, you profiled diddy back in 2021 for Vanity Fair. You talked about how he brought up, unbidden, the MeToo movement as evidence that celebrities can change the world, which is kind of a remarkable thing to read about. Now, just what was it like to profile him then? And how do you understand him now?
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Michelle Cottle
Well, I'll start by saying I'm not surprised. I grow up with his music, and, you know, his cultural production is the height of, like, my young adult years, so.
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Ross Douthat
And talk just for our younger listeners, of which we have many. When was this era?
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Michelle Cottle
Seriously? Seriously, Ross, you gotta be honest.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
There's people make you date yourself.
- [05:41]
Michelle Cottle
Thank you. You know what I'm saying? Okay, so this would be the late 90s, early 2000s is the height of Bad Boy productions. Okay. And I was both sentient and legally able to drive, if people wanted to know.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
And that's as far as she's going.
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Michelle Cottle
That's exactly right, Michelle. So when I go into profile Diddy, I was coming from that with a couple of different lenses. One was as the person who had grown up knowing him, knowing his music. But that also meant I had heard stories about Puffy Diddy for years. To be clear. Nothing quite as egregious as what ends up coming out, but certainly nothing that runs counter to the idea of him being manipulative, potentially violent. Right. So when I go in to do the profile of Diddy for Vanity Fair, the reason for that, which I found very fascinating, was that out of nowhere he was doing another rebrand. As you mentioned at the top of the show, he's had several of these. You know, there's the Puff Daddy era, the Puffy, the Diddy, the P. Diddy era. And he was rebranding at the time as love.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
That is so sweet.
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Michelle Cottle
Isn't it something? In retrospect, I think the rebrand was a part of him getting out ahead of what at that time was a snowballing narrative, especially on the Internet, that he was a sexual predator. Yeah. Because there was no new music. It was just him renaming himself yet again. But you mentioned, Ross, that he initiated the conversation about MeToo, which was surprising to me because he had just spent a lot of time telling me that he thought of himself in the tradition of black civil rights leaders like Harry Belafonte. Right. And so to move from, like, the black civil rights movement to me too just seemed interesting. And so I asked him several follow up questions about why me too. Why had it impacted him? Why did this movement seem so critical and important to him? Did not get a good answer beyond the fact that it was a moment for, like, celebrities in Hollywood to rethink their values. And I said, okay, but why you in particular? Right. No good answers. I think it sounded good at the time. And in retrospect, it sounds quite deliberate. I'll say.
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Ross Douthat
I'm looking at the profile now, and you mentioned in it that, you know, he's a girl dad, he has a large number of children. But did he talk about, like, being a father of daughters as sort of part of the his.
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Michelle Cottle
He did not. I did, however, I brought it up about him being a father if he thought about the world his daughters were entering as young women. What was interesting is that he moved that conversation very quickly to what I would call the sort of like, you know, the comedic approach, which is the. Oh, My daughters won't date until they're 40, you know.
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Ross Douthat
Right.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
Oh, he was dead serious about that.
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Michelle Cottle
Yeah. You know, and I said, well, yeah, I get that. But they're also young women modeling and they're in the, you know, in the industry. He didn't wanna have a serious conversation about that, was not able to talk to the daughters on the record, which we tried to do. And so the only version of that story we have is his.
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Ross Douthat
Yeah. So, Jess, let's pick up on that, the sort of girl dad stuff, because you wrote a piece about, you know, in the defense that he or his team are issuing right now, there's sort of this presentation of him as Sean Combs, family man that is certainly not, you know, I'm also a child of the late 1990s. Like, my image of Combs in all of his incarnations does not really include family man. But it's sort of an interesting response. I mean, how do you think whatever narrative they're offering fits into the ways that we've seen figures facing these kind of accusations deal with the MeToo era?
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Jessica Gross
So I totally agree with Tressie that this was a years long construction on his part. I mean, he's deleted most of Instagram, but you could see over the years that he was putting more pictures of himself with family. There's a picture of him in matching pajamas with all of his kids. He has, whether consciously or not, been building this renewed image of himself for the past couple years, perhaps in anticipation of many of these charges. And in their defense, his lawyers say he is this famous family man, he's a wonderful philanthropist. As if the fact of his procreation has anything to do with these charges and what they are also doing. In the letter to the judge, Combs was not allowed to have bail, and his lawyers appealed this decision. And in a letter to try to appeal this decision, they painted Victim one as a woman living.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
Oh, my God, she's a single Catholic lady.
- [10:48]
Michelle Cottle
Exactly right.
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Jessica Gross
Right. So we're seeing some of the same tactics to make one kind of person a family, normal, upstanding citizen, whereas someone who is unmarried and does not have children is somehow morally suspect. So they're doing this overtly. And then the other thing I would want to bring up is in sort of the context of the larger Me Too movement, a lot of these charges against Combs have been legal moves forward. But I'm really interested in hearing what everyone else thinks about where we are with the movement culturally, because I think part of the reason the accusations have stuck in the cultural sphere and not. We're not talking legally for Combs is because we have that video right. Of him assaulting Cassie.
- [11:37]
Michelle Cottle
Agreed.
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Jessica Gross
And so there is this way in which powerful men will still be defended by the public unless we have a piece of evidence like that. And I am really curious to hear what everybody else thinks about where we are in this movement. You know, what is it, six, seven years after the beginning of the sort of avalanche of accusations.
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Michelle Cottle
Yeah, there's quite a bit of fatigue, I think, around trust, women believe women, even within the MeToo movement. So not only did it need to be a woman that you cared about, not not only did it need to be a woman who you thought deserved better, we needed the visual evidence. Because I think at this point people do sort of like lump all sort of criticisms of wealthy and powerful men into this bucket of, well, we can't ever really know, you know, and, you know, I think me too, went too far sort of thing. And so I think the threshold for evidence had to be higher. But I think the threshold of evidence for women is always pretty high. And so, yeah, I think that woman had to be, if not famous, had to be perceived as valuable. And fame certainly helps.
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Jessica Gross
Right. And I do think. I do think we're in a period of prolonged backlash, I would say, to that initial spasm of Mewtwo. And there's still a lot of room for disbelieving and the power of male celebrity to get a lot of support depending on what their reputation was to begin with. I'm thinking right now about Brad Pitt, and there was just a big piece in Slate about Brad Pitt and the allegations of abuse against him from his ex wife, Angelina Jolie. And listen, I don't know what happened on that private plane. None of us know what happened on that private plane. But he's really been able to skate above all of it and have his career not miss a step.
- [13:35]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
I'm just fascinated by the possibility that, like, there are fields that run on principles, you know, whether you're talking about music, entertainment to some degree, politics, you know, the whole joke that senators are all, you know, like they're little kingdoms and nobody ever says no to them either. And if you've got one of these principles, it's not just them that you're fighting against, it's an entire machine that is devoted to keeping them where they are. And I would think if you are like Brad Pitt, you know, still one of the biggest name, you know, male stars in Hollywood, you have a great machine devoted to exactly this. Tom Cruise, whoever is, like, facing even minor scandals, not even these big scandals.
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Jessica Gross
So it's. So as I was researching that piece about the family man defense, the amount of times I saw it used now that I can't unsee it. So you saw it with Justin Timberlake. There were a bunch of articles published the same time he was pleading. Whatever he pled to his dui. He's out with his family at a play. Even a source said he's a family man. And I'm not suggesting that a DUI is anywhere near any of the allegations against Diddy, but it's the same playbook.
- [14:52]
Ross Douthat
I think, as a family man. I have a question.
- [14:55]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
I bet you do.
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Ross Douthat
I think this story raises a useful question about what is the MeToo movement trying to cover? Because I think, again, one of the reasons why you have either sort of weariness or backlash, whatever term you want to use, is this sense that the movement had moved from big cases where you are basically trying to use your phrase, Michelle, break a machine. There was a Weinstein machine. There are machines around celebrities that enable. Can enable fantastic amounts of abuse, going from there to, again, litigating bad hookups, litigating DUIs, whatever. Right. And what's interesting about the Diddy case is it brings us back to the place where MeToo started. We're back to the machine. But is that good for me, too? I mean, Jess, do you think MeToo stands or falls on whether it can litigate the small stuff? Is it about the big predation? What do you think?
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Jessica Gross
I think it operates on several different levels. There's the legal level, where I think arguably we have made some progress. And then there's sort of the interpersonal level and the cultural level. And I would say on that, I think we have made less progress. And I think the sort of expectations of girls and women are largely unchanged.
- [16:16]
Michelle Cottle
Yeah.
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Ross Douthat
In the sense of negotiating interactions with bosses would be.
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Jessica Gross
I think with men, I was thinking mostly about sexual assault in terms of the way that they're treated by the system, the way that they don't want to report allegations against somebody because their reputation can and might be destroyed. So I think just sort of narrowly talking about it in terms of sexual assault. I think, again, legally, we have made a little bit of progress, incremental. Culturally, I don't see a whole lot of change.
- [16:45]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Do both of you think that there's the problem that young men in particular may feel vilified by what's happened with me too? And so then you wind up with this backlash where, you know, The Andrew Tates of the world can swoop in and say, hey, they feminized the culture and you're not the bad guy, and they just disrespect you and you should come be a real man with me.
- [17:08]
Michelle Cottle
Yeah. So one of the things I think is interesting about this is we can talk about young men being villainized. And I think there's absolutely a pushback from masculine cultures. But it's important to note that there are also a lot of women who are defending men, in particular, defending their sons and their husbands. They're defending a culture that they think benefits them. I hear from mothers, particularly middle class, upper class mothers of predominantly white men. But it's not unique to mothers of white men who feel like they are defending their sons against a culture that is hostile to them. And so it is not just, I think, pushback from young men. If we wanna talk about, like, a machine, there is a machine for young men. And I would argue that that has been the cultural bridge that has been too far for many of us. The feminist philosopher Kate Mann calls it empathy. This, you know, default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that that is so deeply embedded in our culture. And so I would argue that one of the places where MeToo has not been nearly as successful is dismantling the MA around empathy, our cultural inclination to default, to centering men and the male experience. And not just because that would make men more vulnerable. It makes some of the women in their lives also feel more vulnerable. And I think that has been one of the tension points. If we were just talking about sort of a battle of the sexes, I mean, I think it would still be challenging.
- [18:40]
Ross Douthat
Do you think it's at all reasonable for the mother of a teenage boy to worry about a false accusation of sexual assault? Or is that just like a normal maternal anxiety? I mean, I agree that this is a real phenomenon. I just.
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Michelle Cottle
I think it is about as normal as worrying that you're going to be sex trafficked at the shopping center. If you are a middle America mom, that is to say that is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No. And is there a much bigger threat out there that might be a better use of your maternal anxiety?
- [19:14]
Ross Douthat
All right, let's take a quick break there, and when we come back, we'll talk briefly about some of the issues around how we process news like this on the Internet and how we think about conspiracies. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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- [20:23]
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- [20:53]
Ross Douthat
So I want to pick up on something, Tressie, that you were talking about at the outset, how a lot of these rumors and allegations around Diddy sort of surfaced before the indictment, before the lawsuits, before the things that have sort of turned this into a national scandal. You talked about people processing these things through Internet rumor and so on. And to me, a big part of what is striking about this story, even more than any of the stories from five or ten years ago, sex scandal stories, is how much of it I see people just processing through a constant flood of second order rumor speculation and so on. People digging up old interviews that seem kind of weird in hindsight. Combs going on Ellen DeGeneres show and talking about how he likes to make love till 6am videos of combs together with Justin Bieber where Bieber seems extremely uncomfortable while Combs talks about how we never hang out anymore. One of the best selling books on Amazon recently has been a book that purports to be the memories of Diddy's partner or lover, Kim Porter, who died in 2018. And it's apparently filled with wild stories about Diddy and other celebrities. Porter's family, I think, has denied the veracity. The guy who published it claims it was given to him on a flash drive. And we're at a moment where all of this gossip, speculation, rumor, bullshit is indistinguishable for many people from the official news stories. And I'm just curious how you guys process a scandal like this in this era.
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Jessica Gross
Well, you know, I just want to make the point. There's always been fringe tabloid I remember buying the Weekly World News and the National Enquirer when I was you and my grandma Jessica.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
That's totally legit news source. Take that.
- [22:50]
Jessica Gross
Totally legit news source when I was a teenager. I don't know, we just love those crazy tabloids that were just nonsense, true nonsense, lots of alien invasion. So I think this has always been out there, this desire, parasocial need to spin fantasy about celebrities. Certainly it is hyper powered and superpowered by the Internet and it has left a lot of fertile ground for people who might not have good news sources in their lives to believe a lot of things that they shouldn't. And I think mostly it's harmless. But where it becomes harmful is we have this group of moms who believe we need to save the children because they are going to be kidnapped from the Walmart parking lot and sex trafficking.
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Ross Douthat
Okay, but wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. Tressie, you were just saying that this under news landscape was where what turned out to be serious allegations against Combs first percolated, right?
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Michelle Cottle
Yeah. And I think both can be true. You know, there would be some hidden or not so hidden truth in the Inquirer amongst all of the alien stories. Right. And we now know that especially like celebrities would have people planting stories about them in them. I think this is the same thing is true in this instance, which is there's a lot of innuendo which lends itself very nicely to the sort of irresponsible wild wild west of Internet blogging and entertainment reporting, which I will put in very aggressive air quotes. Entertainment reporting. Because who covers the hip hop industry? Seriously? I'm not sure that we can say that we do.
- [24:37]
Ross Douthat
This podcast does not cover the hip hop. I don't know what you're trying to say. This is what we do here, Tressie, go on.
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Michelle Cottle
There's this big vacuum there when there is then a serious news story. Right. If you don't cover the culture regularly, you need to know the players. It's just like covering any other beat. You need to know the players, you need to know the relationships, you need to know the history. And when you don't have that, it is much easier when a very serious case like the instance of Combs. I would liken this to the case against R. Kelly, where we had been having those rumors about R. Kelly since I was 12 years old. I remember the first time someone told me a story about R. Kelly and this was way before the Internet. This was traveling down interstates to get to me, but that it would take so long to find the sort of grains of truth in the conspiracy theory. I think to Jessica's point, owes to a few things. I think it is poor news sourcing for communities who are likely to be hip hop fans. I think also it's fair to say that for some people, sometimes somebody really is out to get you. And so if you live in a culture where the police do surveil you, you do feel like you are being followed, and there is evidence that that is true. I think it is easier to believe, for example, that somebody is setting up the successful, rich black man who is defying the odds. And then I also think there's something to the people who are telling the stories. When we don't tend to listen to those people or believe them, the stories become bigger and more fantastical. I think when people don't feel heard.
- [26:12]
Jessica Gross
And I just. I wanna be clear. Like, the conspiracy theories about Combs that ended up being somewhat true. And the conspiracy theories that we see on the Internet about children being kidnapped by total strangers are totally different. And that sex trafficking victims often are trafficked by people that they know or have met before. It is not some complete stranger. And that. I just wanted to make a clear delineation.
- [26:39]
Ross Douthat
Right, That's a good delineation. I just want to push a little bit, though, on this because I feel like we at places like the New York Times, on the one hand, want to have the idea that there's this very serious and respectable way to do journalism that involves assuming going in that conspiracy theories are bad. There's nothing worse than conspiracy theories. We are fighting against misinformation and so on. But at the same time, again and again, you will get these stories. R. Kelly is a good example. Combs is now allegedly a good example. The entire Jeffrey Epstein story is a good example. Where, yes, it's not that children are randomly being picked up at the shopping mall and being flown to Jeffrey Epstein's island. But it is the case that rumors and innuendo that circulate for a long time turn out to have a lot of truth to them. And that multiple overlapping groups of powerful people are involved or implicated in stories of. I mean, I'm sorry. Like, the Combs stuff is Eyes Wide Shut. You know, it's not people playing classical music and wearing Venetian masks, but it's one of the world's most famous celebrities running, you know, running orgies. And right now, as a consumer of the Internet, I'm, like, circulating around and it's like, well, what other celebrities are involved in this? Who is implicated in this?
- [28:14]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
There's a couple of things here Though, Ross, I mean, yes, conspiracy theories on a very gut level have an appeal because everybody wants to bring order to a dark and chaotic world. You don't want to think that just bad, random things happen. You need the idea that there is a cabal of powerful people organizing things. And what that then calls for is you need people, I don't know, maybe an entire industry of people trained to pressure test this sort of thing. So you hear these rumors and you go out there and you dig into them so that you find out the difference between Jeffrey Epstein running some kind of sex island and the idea that Hillary Clinton is trafficking children in the basement of a pizza parlor. Right. You can't just give everything credence on the web, and you can't dismiss everything. People need to find a way to kind of use discernment. And you need people out there investigating these things, taking them seriously, looking into them. And then if there is no credence to them, you move on. But what you don't do is just like, let this crazy go.
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Jessica Gross
But I do think Ross has something there in terms of the idea of misinformation being weaponized. In some ways, I see this a lot when I report about vaccines in the sort of most fevered Covid moments. A lot of parents were really worried about their kids getting the COVID vaccine, and some of them, you know, had really bad information, and some of them were just nervous and had questions. And I think that there was a movement of people online, not reporters, but just the online swamp, who would just call them idiots, say this is disinformation, when it was a question like, well, why is the United States recommending vaccines for children under 12 when Sweden is not? That's a legitimate question that medical professionals and journalists and people who care about this issue should try to answer. And that's obviously very different from sex trafficking. But it is an example where I hear what you're saying. Often there are real questions that are dismissed, swept away, because they're lumped in with misinformation and conspiracy theories. So I hear you on that.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
We too often do it based on whatever our previous biases are. So, like, we are completely willing to believe that Hillary Clinton is trafficking children in the basement versus Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who's been under investigation for maybe attending drug parties with an underage girl for potentially sexual purposes. One of those has actually reached the level of like, legal investigation and a House ethics investigation and things like that, but is much less likely to be recognized by his tribe than that tribe is to have bought into the completely unfounded rumors about Hillary Clinton because we don't make these distinctions based on reason or data. We make them based on what tribe we belong to.
- [31:25]
Jessica Gross
Also, I think that there's no proof that powerful people behave this way. More than unpowerful people, we just don't hear about it. And there's this sort of moral gloss that is given to people who have money and power that they are somehow better than people who don't have money and power.
- [31:39]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
They also throw bigger sex parties. Right? You're not going to go Eyes wide shut, my neighbor down the street.
- [31:44]
Michelle Cottle
I think it's important to point out too that there is a belief that in the case of entertainment, I think very specifically that people should know what they are getting themselves into in a way that we don't have that sort of standard with, like going to a party with a politician where there is this, you know, veneer of legitimacy deeply embedded in some of the conspiracy theories around like the Sean Combs or around other popular entertainers. I would argue the same was true about Epstein and Weinstein, which is these young women by and large put themselves in that position because they want to be stars. That is their own unnatural aspiration that makes them vulnerable to powerful people. They know how the game is played. And because of that it makes it very difficult for people to put that very clear eyed assessment to what is happening. It's the same reason why, Michelle, you talk about our biases, but I think we have our professional biases in the same way. We don't cover young starlets or young performers with the same seriousness that we cover other public figures. In part because we think that it is an unserious topic. And what happens then is that when there is then a very serious, obvious pattern of criminality, we don't have, have the lens, we don't have the context. We don't have the context to think about these stories happening in that way. I think this is a problem for Hollywood and entertainment writ large. We forget that's a workplace. Right. We forget that these are employers and employees, that what we are calling a sex party is for someone, it was an office party. And I think if we thought about it, maybe in that way there'd be a little less jocularity about what happens in them and maybe there wouldn't be quite as much room for the misinformation and the disinformation to flourish.
- [33:33]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I guess it seems to me that there is a tendency to say that in the way you describe Tressie that we Aren't willing enough to believe stories from individuals who have made choices to be in the entertainment industry, to be at a rap impresarios party, whatever. But there's also this structural element where I feel like good, respectable, anti misinformation liberals. Not just liberals, myself as well. I feel like I have underestimated over the last 10 years just how much organized structural sexual predation exists in elite circles. And I agree with everything you said, Michelle, about the need to investigate it seriously and journalistically and not just spread rumors on the Internet. I just think something has to be conceded to rumors on the Internet. When you are confronted with cases where it's not just a celebrity behaving inappropriately or even assaulting an individual, where it is a structural. We are running our island paradise, our freak show parties. I don't know. I have changed my view is what I'm saying, of reality. I guess if you learned one thing.
- [34:45]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
From the Catholic church scandals, it's that institutions can hide stuff for a very long time.
- [34:50]
Ross Douthat
No. And this is actually where it started for me. One of my formative influences on this was many years ago. I was giving a talk, I've written about this, but I was giving a talk on Catholic subjects in D.C. and a guy came up to me who was a conspiracy theorist, who was a crank, and started talking to me about the then Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick and his sex parties and his, you know, his secret things. And I was just like, this is crank stuff. It was sort of in my mind as this is what the cranks believe and you don't want to fall into what the cranks believe. And of course he was a crank and he was also right. And I guess that's where I'd end here. Maybe just by asking you guys, like, have your perspectives on any of these kind of issues changed over the last five or ten years? Like America's become more paranoid. Are you guys more paranoid than you were?
- [35:41]
Jessica Gross
I'm not more paranoid. I think I am less credulous.
- [35:46]
Michelle Cottle
Uh huh. That's a great way to put it.
- [35:48]
Jessica Gross
I'm thinking right now about something I'm really angry about that happened this past week where it was found that the public health commissioner. What's his exact role in New York City?
- [36:00]
Ross Douthat
Oh, the more sex parties was violating.
- [36:04]
Jessica Gross
Covid rules to go to sex parties. And as someone whose kids were in New York City public school at the time, the idea that he was flouting Covid rules where my kids were not in a classroom makes me so angry and makes me think, oh, he thought the rules didn't apply to him. And so when we just have so many things happening like this all the time and being revealed that people who are supposed to be toeing the line think that there's different rules for them than the rest of us. I definitely have less trust in institutions than I used to, and I don't blame anyone else for having less trust in institutions. I'll put it that way. Yeah.
- [36:47]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Dressing.
- [36:48]
Michelle Cottle
So I have the great privilege and benefit of being an African American. So I never really trusted social institutions wholesale. Right. So I said earlier that, you know, part of the problem is sometimes somebody really is out to get you. You know, that little seed there of critique is always in me. And I think it's one of the reasons why I'm not resistant, actually, to the cranks. Ross. I listen to the cranks. I'm trying to knock off the cranky part and to see if there's anything beneath it. Because in my experience, sometimes there is. Sometimes what we are hearing from people is their limited ability to interpret what they have seen or heard or witnessed. And so because of that, instead of, you know, they saw a natural disaster, they think they saw an alien. But it doesn't change the fact that there was a weird light in the sky. And so I think one of my.
- [37:42]
Ross Douthat
Lessons, you brought it around to aliens. Tressie.
- [37:47]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Thank you, Tressie. He will love you forever.
- [37:50]
Michelle Cottle
You're welcome, Ross. Happy early Christmas.
- [37:52]
Ross Douthat
Damn, man. All right, Tressie.
- [37:54]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Did he pay you to do that?
- [37:55]
Michelle Cottle
Absolutely not.
- [37:56]
Ross Douthat
I'm going to take moderator's privilege and end on the mysterious light in the sky. And when we come back, we will finish up with a hot and cold. So stay with us.
- [38:37]
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- [39:12]
Ross Douthat
You could hear love, what would it sound? Son, can we talk about your drinking? Yeah, Dad, I think we should. Helping those closest to you think about their excessive drinking.
- [39:34]
Jessica Gross
Maybe that's what love sounds like.
- [39:36]
Ross Douthat
More@rethinkthedrink.com an OHA initiative and we're Back. And it's time once again for Hot and Cold, where every week one of us shares something that we're into or totally over or just lukewarm about. And Jess, I think you have volunteered to give us a hot cold.
- [40:02]
Jessica Gross
I have. So I am reading for the second time in a couple months a thousand page biography of Sylvia Plath called Red Comet. This is a deep cut for Plath heads. If you were an angsty white literary teenage girl. Like, this is for you. Even I, who have read every biography of Sylvia Plath was like a thousand pages. Do I really want to get into this? But it is sort of propulsive. Even though you know what is gonna happen at the end. It is sort of written like a thriller. Halfway through, I was like, really angry at my husband for no reason. He's not Ted Hughes. He didn't do any of this. It's not his fault. But it really does a great job of situating her life and her work in the time she was raised and with her particular biography. And it has a lot about the history of psychiatry in the mid century and how women were treated by the psychiatric establishment. There's entire chapters about the last weeks of her life. And I just. Just love it. Again.
- [41:11]
Ross Douthat
Wait, did. Yeah. Did you say you're reading it for the second time?
- [41:15]
Jessica Gross
Oh, I'm reading it for the second time.
- [41:17]
Michelle Cottle
Oh, wow.
- [41:17]
Ross Douthat
Jess, we're gonna have your husband on next week.
- [41:21]
Jessica Gross
You know what? There's a lot wrong with me, but, you know, we're working through it.
- [41:27]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
What's the last book any of you guys read that close together for a second time for a repeat?
- [41:33]
Michelle Cottle
Yeah, I can't think of one but Ted Hughes.
- [41:37]
Ross Douthat
Still a bad guy, right? That's the.
- [41:39]
Jessica Gross
Listen, that's the takeaway. Listen, it's complicated. What happened?
- [41:42]
Ross Douthat
Is it complicated? Oh, my God.
- [41:44]
Jessica Gross
Listen, he was not a great guy, but he did half of the childcare in 1960. I defy you to find another man who did half of the childcare. So you know what?
- [41:56]
Michelle Cottle
Well, now, that is an interesting development.
- [41:58]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Okay, props for that.
- [42:00]
Ross Douthat
All right, I did not have Ted Hughes co parenting childcare juggler on my. On my.
- [42:08]
Jessica Gross
Me either. He was a very bad husband. Let's put it that way. Okay, listen, it's. Read the whole thousand pages. It is very nuanced. Like you gotta sort of.
- [42:18]
Michelle Cottle
Michelle is like. Michelle won't even pretend she's not.
- [42:24]
Jessica Gross
Get Carlos back in here. He'll read it.
- [42:25]
Ross Douthat
Yes. So we will reconvene after Carlos has read it. But for now, Jess, Tressie thank you so much for being with us, guys.
- [42:35]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Thank you so for playing with us.
- [42:38]
Ross Douthat
All right, that's our show. See you next week.
- [42:42]
Jessica Gross
Bye bye.
- [42:48]
Ross Douthat
Thanks as always, for being part of our conversation. Give Matter of Opinion a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review while you're there to let other people know why they should listen too. Do you have a question for us based on something we talked about today? We want to hear it. Share it with us in a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440 and we might just respond to it in an upcoming episode. You can also always email us at matterofopinionytime. Matter of Opinion is produced by the long suffering Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Andrea Betanzos. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary, Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carol Sabaro, Sonia herrero and Pat McCusker, mixing by Carol Sabaro, audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski and our executive producer is Annie Rose Strasser.
- [44:12]
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