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The Opinions
Republican Women vs. the G.O.P.
00:41:03
Trump didn’t invent misogyny, but he’s leaning into it.
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A
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B
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
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C
I'm David French, a columnist for New York Times Opinion. And today I'm joined by my colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Coddle. Jamel and Michelle, hello.
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D
Hello.
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E
Hello, David. Hello.
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C
It's fun to sit in this host chair. Michelle, you might have trouble prying me out of it after this.
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E
Don't get used to it. No, I'm coming for it.
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C
Well, we'll see. We'll see. So today we're going to talk about women, specifically women in the Republican Party. So after the 2024 election and you know, for months after the 2024 election, we there's been just a lot of talk about Democrats problems with men. But now it's clear that Republicans have a lot of problems with women. And these problems may be really accelerating. We've seen women challenging some of the highest profile leaders of the Republican Party, from breaking with Donald Trump, for example, in the Epstein files, breaking with Mike Johnson. Also we've seen a lot of just wildly reactionary sexism kind of in different corners of the right, from people being hired at leading national conservative groups to weird goings on and student groups on campus. So there's a lot going on here. And Michelle and Jamel have been taking a look at this. And we're going to start with you, Michelle. So I want to start with a kind of mini rebellion that we've seen from some of the women in the House, for example, and you report on Congress, you've written about this issue. What's the lay of the land here?
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E
Okay, so you pointed to the highest profile one of these, which is when three Republican women and we're talking Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace. So we're not talking Squishy, Rhino whatevers. They broke with Donald Trump and with leadership to push and force a House vote to release the Epstein files. And it got ugly. Trump was bullying them. He wound up in such a nasty feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene that she has wound up saying she's resigning from Congress early. But there have been other episodes as well. Elise Stefanik, who is a member of leadership and a loyal Trump soldier, over the years has been going hard at Mike Johnson over some policy disagreements, has accused him of lying. Nancy Mace has broken with leadership and tried to censure one of their colleagues who has come under allegations that, among other things, he has mistreated women. And Maya and others have said they're not happy with how leadership has handled this problem. And then you just have more kind of nebulous, generic, broad based complaints. There's been reports by multiple news organizations that Republican Housewomen are unhappy with this speaker and leadership plat in particular in terms of how their issues are treated. They feel like they've been passed over for opportunities. It's just getting a little bit tense over there, which this is a long running problem for the party. But it's getting even hotter these days.
- [04:07]
C
You know, it seems as if the right, especially the new right, really lionizes women who absolutely fall in line and, and who are absolutely obeying the party line. So, you know, they'll lionize them as mama bears, for example, when they're taking on left leaning school board. But so long, so long as they are loyal foot soldiers implementing the party's will, they're celebrated. Look, see, we, we're not sexist at all. Look at how much we have put forward these really strong women as part of the right. But then there's as soon as there's any mold breaking here, as soon as there's start to not fit exactly with what sort of the dominant party line is. The turn is incredibly rapid and incredibly vicious and there seems to be really no tolerance for disagreement and dissent and perhaps even extra special venom directed at them. Are you seeing this, Jamel? Are you finding any of this surprising at all?
- [05:12]
D
No. I was gonna say this feels very much like a dog bites man situation. Right? Like you have a political movement whose genesis, you know, talk about the beginnings of Trumpism in terms of its nativism and xenophobia and racism and et cetera, et cetera. But its genesis includes like, anger at disdain for opposition to high profile female leadership. Right. Like Trump likely isn't as successful in 2016, if not for Hillary Clinton being his foil. And the extent to which Trump in that election and in this past election defines himself against female leadership. Right. Defines himself against women leadership, defines himself as defending not just conservatism but sort of a masculinist vision of conservatism, one that is predicated on male dominance, cannot be obscured, cannot be hand waved away. And so when that's part of the ideological basis for the political movement, there's been much conversation about how Trump has attracted young men to his campaign last year, of the ideological formation, part of the social formation of the movement, then it should come as no big surprise that when that's placed on top of a political tradition that has had female leadership or women leadership, but has always also been uneasy with that, given the traditionalist impulses of a large part of the coalition, none of this comes as that big of a surprise. I'll say, to the observation you made, David, that I think one of the things that's happening here is that as long as women in the movement are within their proper sphere, which is some variation on the home, it was useful that you said it's school boards, right? That's school boards, children, the home, right? So women can exercise leadership when it comes to that, because it relates to the home, the domestic sphere. I was just thinking, right? Like, is it. I'm gonna make this point somewhat by way of comparison. So Ben Carson was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the first Trump administration. I forget the name of the current HUD secretary, but he's also an African American man. There's been a joke, perhaps a note that, Does Trump think that HUD is the black cabinet department because of the word urban? Does Trump think that Homeland Security is the woman cabinet department because it has home in the name? And certainly both of Trump's education secretaries have been women. Again, education, the home. So within the designated spheres, there is no problem with women leadership. But once it goes beyond that, once it's trying to exercise like a. Like a larger, more comprehensive leadership position to Marjorie Taylor Greene, not simply acting as a representative for her district, but really trying to speak on behalf of MAGA itself? Then there's an issue, right? It's not just the dissent. It's the fact that you're kind of, you know, this is, for lack of a better term, you're kind of getting uppity, and we have to cut that out. We have to knock you back down to where you belong, which is you can have leadership, but only within spheres reserved for women.
- [08:44]
C
You know, it's very interesting to me because I've been, you know, living in the middle of MAGA country for almost all of the last 10 years, and I think that a lot of people don't get how wildly diverse parts of the MAGA coalition have become. So you have, on the one hand you might have what you would call your not particularly religious, anti woke heterodox. You know, some of them more, you know, running from center left to far right folks who kind of joined the coalition. And a lot of these folks, it would be weird, it would be strange to think of women as being their sphere is the home. For example, then you have a hyper traditionalist fundamentalist Christian movement that is even more loyal to Trump than his anti woke heterodox folks that has an extraordinarily and increasingly hierarchical and patriarchal view of women. So for example, you guys might be familiar with the podcaster Ali Beth Stuckey, who's somebody who's very, very conservative and very much loved and adored by large parts of the traditionalist right. And yet she endured an online storm because she spoke at a gathering where she said men shouldn't be watching porn and that that was seen as a woman scolding a man. And that's inherently improper. And these are not these two, these two different worldviews don't really meet very well, but they're under the same big Republican tent. And so Michelle, I want to go to you and get a little historical context. Can you walk us through some of the GOP's recent history with women, with powerful female leaders, with female pundits, influencers, what's been the lay of the land pre MAGA up until this moment.
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E
So it is important to remember that this is not something that Trump has wrought. It is just something that he has exploited and as we always say, dialed up to 11. I mean if you just want to go back to 2012 with the post Romney kind of meltdown of the party, worrying about the famous autopsy. There was this movement among Republican women operatives, big fundraisers, the electeds, they were trying to make the party more palatable to women, to lose the whole kind of anti woman reputation that it had gotten when, you know, there were those episodes with Todd Aiken talking about real rape, those sorts of things. So we're talking about Elise Stefanik was trying to lead her party in a direction that would get more women into the game. Whether you fundraisers. Mitt Romney's old campaign manager started a consultancy that was aimed at this. I talked to tons of fundraisers and operators and then Trump hit and the party went from being okay with these women doing this even when it made them a little uncomfortable, because it cuts against the whole idea that you shouldn't worry about gender. That whole Kind of. We can't even get near identity politics, so how can we possibly be promoting a particular gender, a program? It went from being mostly okay with that to just being like, we don't care anymore. We're just gonna go all in on this. Look at this guy. He's basically the crudest, most vulgar sexist creature on the planet, and people love him. So at that point, you saw those gains in terms of women leaders having a little more backing for their plans before square one. And now with this most recent election, with Trump just going all in on the misogyny and hyper masculinity, it's like they've lost even more ground. But this has always been an issue for the party. They've had a women problem for decades and they've tried to address it different ways. And with Trump, the way they've tried to address it is just smack women down as hard as they can on some level.
- [13:02]
C
Well, you know, it seems like to me you've got this very strange dynamic where it's sort of a one way ratchet on identity politics. So if you discover, for example, you're Republican, you discover that young men really turned out for you in 2024. Well, doubling down on men isn't identity politics. It's just smart politics. But if you realize you have a problem with women trying to do things different to appeal to women, that becomes identity politics. So when a Democrat is a white.
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E
Man, David, like for the party, the norm is a white man, and that should be what's in leadership among others.
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C
Well, and also, there's just this sort of natural tendency to like the groups that seem to like you and dislike the groups that seem to dislike you. And so you're going to rationalize why everyone who likes you is right, and you're going to rationalize why everyone who dislikes you is wrong. And when it gets into gender dynamics, that dynamic can get really ugly. You know, we have seen circumstances where people on the left have really denigrated young men. And then you see people on the right really trying to jam women into this trad wife box. And here's the way I thought about it. And Jamel, I'd love your thoughts about this. So as long as you are the loyal character in the play that has been designed for you, like the mama bear role in the school boards, for example, you're going to be loved, you're going to be welcomed, you're going to be revered. But if you demonstrate any independence at all, especially if that independence is related to your sex or your race, then the specific experiences you've had, for example, because of your sex or your race, then you're going to be drummed out, then you become the problem, then you're woke, you're horrible, you're terrible, whatever, and you're out.
- [14:52]
D
Yeah, I mean, that seems like a pretty fair description of what the dynamic is. What's striking to me is how so last year, Republicans won the presidency, the captured of trifecta just a couple years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Dobbs. And Trump was able to successfully distance himself from that decision, despite the fact that it was wouldn't have been possible without a Supreme Court confirmations, he was able to distance himself from that. And although there was a gender gap last year, quite a large one, there typically is quite a large gender gap. He overall was able to do pretty well with women, kind of across demographics, despite kind of the background conditions. And it's striking to see how much he has squandered that in the almost year or the year since the election. And it's striking to see, you know, Republicans not just not respond to their declining position with women voters, especially younger women voters, but just continue to double down on this. I think it's right to describe as like male identity politics. And that particular kind of male identity politics or maleness is defined against almost traditional masculine values. Trump himself. Right. Is this petulant, whiny figure, doesn't take responsibility for his actions, doesn't really exhibit any of the traditional masculine virtues, the kinds that might be represented by a Gary Cooper type. Right. None of that you're getting from Trump and the figures who have kind of emerged from the manosphere who have this cultural cachet on the worst possible extreme. The Tate brother is Andrew Tate. You know, that whole sphere of people, they also represent like maleness or masculinity as being about a lack of responsibility, a lack of any honoring any obligations, kind of masculinity as unfettered license to do what you like and to dominate other people. And, you know, I'm of the view that this is prime to inspire a backlash, and not simply a backlash from women, but a backlash from people who just find that whole mode of being to be just not appropriate for public life.
- [17:33]
C
You know, there's a story recently from the Harvard Crimson about a conservative debating society called the John Adams Society. Essentially seems to have put into place a very quiet plan and program to just remove women from it entirely, that there just aren't women in the group anymore. And I have now heard from a number of people at a number of colleges where if you are a conservative woman in college or in law school, that you're finding it tough in some of these student organizations to have any presence, to have any voice at all. And it's even become pretty well known in certain schools that one conservative group is very friendly to women and another conservative group is absolutely not friendly to women. What I'm seeing is a very meaningful, real world change where it is actually at the grassroots level. You're seeing more and more exclusion and marginalization of women. And this, I think, is going to have a radiating effect. This is daughters calling their moms and dads and saying, I'm shut out. This is, you know, young women finding that they are viewed suspiciously for having career ambition at all. My thesis is that this is actually going to end up being far more impactful than any kind of online sexism, which we all know gets kind of confined into the online echo chamber. So, Michelle, my question for you is, am I saying too much? Are you sensing. Are you seeing that this is actually. This approach towards women is really leaking out into this wider world, that people are experiencing it in their lives rather than sort of watching it on their computers or phones?
- [19:19]
E
What I'm worried about is taking that and blowing it up to what we're seeing large, which is the huge sorting among younger people, like whatever is driving it disrespect for conservative women in conservative spheres. Or kind of the backlash against men just being generally piggish. Or there was a me too backlash among some young men who felt like society had just decided to blame them for everything. You've got all these pieces floating around, which is taking the younger generation and splitting it. I mean, the gap between young men and young women on political issues is much bigger than what you see in the older generations. And that's a terrible. I don't know how you have a society where you're increasingly driving the genders apart for various reasons and having them just occupy, certainly occupy different online spaces, but increasingly just making it awkward for them in real life as well. I'm actually really worried about that.
- [20:31]
D
I just wanted to make two points. One is just a quick interjection about the Harvard story, which is kind of ironic that it's the John Adams society, of all places, that's trying to make it woman only. Abigail Adams, quite famously, not just John Adams wife, but a confidant of John Adams, someone who had a very important influence on his thinking, for whom he was in constant correspondence with, and saw her as Very much an intellectual equal. So it's sort of like, find a different irony's dead, Jamal, find a different guy. The second thing is that if I had to diagnose some of this, I think it runs somewhat downstream of what you might call the zero signification of American society, where everything is just sort of considered in zero sum terms. If this person gets something, then I lose something. And that goes down to, I think, how a lot of young men think about their own prospects. If women are doing well, then I necessarily must be doing poorly. If I'm not 25 and making $100,000, it's because women are taking the opportunities from me. Which is obviously nonsense, right? Like, first of all, many young women are feeling lonely and left out and for lack actualization, right? Like it's the, that we associate with sort of like young men extend to young women as well. But there isn't the same kind of societal panic about it. But the other thing is that it is no harm. It doesn't harm you as a young man or as a man, period, for women to find fulfillment and actualization and get ahead. Right. That isn't actually a zero sum equation whatsoever. But I think so many of the cultural and political messages in this society are zero sum. I just watched the president, you know, yesterday talk about this in terms of immigration, right? Like we're getting Somalians and not Norwegians. Like very zero sum, which, you know.
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E
I just really love those Norwegians.
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D
Not the topic of this discussion. But like that's just, that's just straightforwardly like racist.
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E
But, but that is important that Trump, that is Trump's entire worldview, Right, right. Is that it is a zero sum game. You cannot have a win, win as far as he is concerned. So that is across the board how he views all of this.
- [22:52]
C
I feel like we're at the precipice of a really dark future which says one party is the party where women. This is the party where women are welcome, please come, come one all. And then here's this other party. This is where the men are welcome and come one, come all, if you're male. So this is this very broad, wide gender gap that we're starting to see, especially, you know, amongst Gen Z. So the question that I have really, for both of you who follow the Democrat, the ins and outs of the Democratic Party much closer than I, is what really truly is the Democratic Party like for women? Is it actually a healthier environment for women? Is everything fine in the Democratic Party in its approach to women? What are the Prospects for the Democrats preserving an appeal to women while also extending a hand to men, especially those men who are not down with this super hyper traditionalist trad wife view of patriarchal view of women.
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D
I mean, it seems just from my vantage point that, like, you know, women are an important part of Democratic leadership. The party obviously is nominated two women for the presidency. I was gonna say that. I think part of the Democrats. I call this a cultural issue in terms of how it's perceived is that, like, you know, the unifying thing for the Democratic coalition is a belief in the use of government and particularly the federal to solve problems. And those problems often relate to the domestic sphere. Right. Their health care, they are education, they are childcare. Right. But these are all issues that are associated with the home, that are associated with women. And so I think part of the Democratic Party's issue here, you know, when people talk about, you know, it's culturally hostile to men, I don't think that's true in the sense that, that like, if you are a Democratic man, people are going to like, be mean to you or gonna be ostracizing you. That's. That's nonsense. I think what people are trying to gesture at is that the Democratic Party, and this is not a new thing, is like, coded as like the domestic party. And so it's the mommy Party. The Mommy Party.
- [25:03]
E
The Mommy party versus the Daddy Party has been around for decades.
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D
The responsible Mommy party versus the sort of like, like exciting divorced dad Party. Right. Like, that's sort of the.
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E
Okay, I wasn't going in that direction.
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C
But I mean, that was a joke.
- [25:21]
D
But like, look at the men who are of prominence in the Republican Party right now, like Elon Musk, you know, Donald Trump, who is not a faithful husband, will just say that. Right? Like, the Republican Party is sort of the orbit around which a lot of the tech billionaires revolve. And a bunch of them also, you wouldn't necessarily see their faithful husbands.
- [25:40]
E
Very bro Ish.
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D
It's very bro ish. Right. So I think that's. There's a cultural dynamic happening. And to an extent, I think that just might be, like, baked into the cake. I'm not sure what you can do to change that, because it is the case that what unites Democrats is this belief in the use of the government to solve problems, and specifically problems relating to how people live their lives. Are there ways I think you could sell that to younger men that might appeal to them? Like, hey, you want to open your own business? Universal healthcare will make that Easier for you, right? Like, that's. There are ways you can massage that. But in terms of just like the basic construct, I'm actually not sure how much you can actually do to separate the Democratic Party from that domestic image in the absence of, you know, events that maybe necessitate military leadership. Right. So FDR leads the United States to the Second World War. And so people associate also FDR with the kind of masculine leadership. The other thing I'll say here, the other thought I had was that this is a place where I do not think you can discount Trump's own image as kind of a patriarch. Right. Like, he has this big family and he has all this money and he does whatever he wants. He's like, there's this thing going around.
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E
A big family with multiple wives.
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D
With multiple wives. There's this thing going on on the Internet right now. It's a theory of behavior, political behavior, and it's everyone's 12, right? So it's sort of like. Yeah, of course, if you're speaking about Elon Musk, of course you're obsessed with, like, robots and cars and going to space. You're 12 years old. Right? Like, so. So Trump is like a 12 year old's idea of masculine authority.
- [27:36]
E
So if you're looking as a comparison, David, I mean, you've got the numbers in the Democratic Party for one thing. You know, like, just look at the House. I think there are like 96 women on the Democratic side and 33 Republican women. There's never been a Republican woman elevated above what is conference chair, which is, you know, like third or fourth, depending on if you're in the majority or the minority. You have exactly one woman leading a committee, which is shameful. And it's not even an elected committee. She got appointed. It's Virginia Fox leading the Rules Committee. So it's not just what policies are or whatever. It's just kind of like the signals that get sent within the upper echelons of the party as to who matters and who's important and who's qualified to lead. And the word from women in the House that has been trickling around is that this leadership is worse than previous ones. Now, I don't know how you want to grade that, but you definitely see it in even the structures of the party at certain levels.
- [28:43]
C
I think the thing that is most troubling to me, that I have seen arising on the right is the idea that if a certain number of women become a part of your coalition, then there are inherent problems once women reach a certain Critical mass in a profession. And this was the Helen Andrews argument, for example, that kind of took off on the right and that argument.
- [29:10]
E
Go on, David. We're just, we're being childish here.
- [29:14]
D
Yeah, I'm just, I was just being derisive. Please continue.
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C
Okay, I'm sorry. And so this sort of idea that if there's a, a X percentage number of women in any profession, institution, organization, then it's going to become woke, it's going to become inherently toxic. And this is something that I had not ever heard really in my life, except in some of the most patriarchal, fundamentalist sectors of American life now bursting out fully into the open. And so my question to you is this. My thought, my sort of inherent bias going forward is the more stuff like that spills out into the open, the more it's going to harm the Republican Party because it is just not where people are in living in their daily lives. We have so many millions of people, millions of families where women are indispensable breadwinners, if not primary breadwinners, that this kind of argument is just going to fall. The more that it's known, the more that the sort of base Republican treatment of women is perceived.
- [30:22]
E
I'm about to rain on your parade, David.
- [30:24]
C
Okay, okay. That's what I was worried about. Go ahead, Michelle.
- [30:27]
E
So I would like that, if that is the case, that would be fantastic. You see, like, when people get to know someone in a group that they previously feared, then they're okay with that group. But what we are talking about here is, like, if the woman's the primary, a breadwinner, somewhere out there is a man who's ticked about it. In a lot of cases, women's success. It's back to that zero sum game. They're taking my jobs, they're taking my position atop the traditional hierarchy. I mean, part of the problem and part of what Trump has been so successful at exploiting is this is a period of tremendous social change. Like, you can no longer, you know, when I grew up, if you were like, like the dumbest, poorest, most ass backward man, it still didn't matter. You were still a white man in a culture where white men ruled. And it was right out there. Like, that was not even something you hid, that that was your attitude. That does not work anymore. And while it's great in terms of progress, it engenders deep resentment in certain corners. And it just eventually, I think maybe it works itself out the way that you would hope. But for now, the transitional periods are always really hard. Nothing is ever as terrifying as that moment when a group is clinging to its previous prerogatives and seeing them slip away. And that's basically what Trump has been beating the drum on. And you see it not just with older folks, but you see it with young men who are angry that, you know, they thought that their life was gonna be X, Y, Z, and it's not. And they don't know what it means to be a productive man anymore. And they're just like, well, that just means I need to, you know, double down on Ultimate Fighting. And listening to Andrew Tate in the.
- [32:23]
D
Morning, I strongly believe that sort of people's explanations for their lives don't just emerge out of a vacuum. It's not like a coincidence that a bunch of young men began thinking that women were responsible for their problems. That's been like a deliberate message of a set of basically ideological entrepreneurs who are on podcasts, on Internet, on social media, who are acting as influencers, who are selling something to people. And when I say selling, I mean quite literally. Buy my supplements, buy my classes, buy my books, and there you.
- [33:03]
E
It's like Tom Cruise and Magnolia who.
- [33:05]
D
Teach you how to be a man, quite literally. Right? And taking advantage of maybe real anxieties, people feel. Anxieties, I'll say. I really want to emphasize this, are just a natural part of growing up. You enter into the world, and, yeah, you have to figure out your way. It's like, it's hard. And it's always been hard. Even in the mythical golden age of being a man in the United States, which didn't exist, it was hard. It's hard for young women, too. But you have these opportunists who see this, who see the fact that it's hard to figure yourself out and what they're. Because they're selling something, because they have this agenda. What they're offering is, oh, your issue is that those people, whether they be women, whether they be immigrants, whomever it is, they are responsible for your anxiety. They are responsible for the fact that you feel inadequate. They are responsible for the difficulties you're having. And there's not so much someone out there saying what the truth is, which is that this is hard. This is a hard part of life. It is difficult. We don't live in a society that makes it particularly easy.
- [34:21]
E
Right.
- [34:21]
D
We don't make it. We don't live in a society that offers a ton of support. And the solution is to be present with other people, to, like, find community with other people.
- [34:31]
E
That's one of the reasons I think the pandemic was so disastrous and we'll have a long tally. It basically kind of warped people's ability to live in a community and they became even more isolated and freaked out and paranoid and online.
- [34:45]
D
So I was about to say, like, people should just go to church, but that's a different conversation now.
- [34:50]
C
Jamel, Go to church is a recommendation I can absolutely get behind, but that's not gonna be my official recommendation for the podcast. But it's that time now. So what are your recommendations? Jamel, let's start with you.
- [35:06]
D
I'm gonna recommend a book again. This time I feel like I should. Full disclosure, I was on a book prize committee and we awarded the book this, like our prize.
- [35:15]
E
So you really like it?
- [35:16]
D
So I really like this book. I think it's one of the best books of the year. It's by a UVA historian, Justine Hill Edwards. It's called Savings and Trust the Rise and Betrayal of the Freedmen's Bank. This is a somewhat obscure story in American history, but in short, at the tail end of the Civil War, the United States established a savings and loan bank for the formerly enslaved. So people could invest their savings, they could build a nest egg. And it tens of thousands of black Americans invested in it, and the trustees of the bank stole all the money and gave it out in speculative loans. And at the end of the day, the bank closed and a lot of people lost all the money they had saved. There are just clear echoes to the present when you think about the 2008 financial crisis and the way that commercial banks and lenders targeted vulnerable low income communities with predatory loans. And you see in this story some of the origins of that, that, like, people invested their trust in something and that trust was betrayed. So it's a sad story. It's a phenomenal book and it's a wonderful book of history. So that's what I recommend.
- [36:34]
C
Michelle.
- [36:35]
E
All right, so I am going to suggest, as we're in the high holiday stress period, rolling through a very particular kind of brain decluttering, which is whatever social media app is making you the most mental, strip it off your phone. I did this. I did this. Actually, with me it was X, because in the wake, and this is a little dark, but in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, my feed got so crazy with conspiracy theories and just super ugliness, I couldn't pick it up like at night and just glance at it without being caught in some horrible, you know, going down some dark rabbit hole. So I just stripped it off and I haven't had it on there since I still have an account. I use it when I go on my computer or whatever. But that's a very different thing than just being able to scroll through it when I'm line waiting for the train or at a restaurant or whatever. And I am a happier person.
- [37:40]
C
That's an excellent recommendation, Michelle. Very challenging. Very challenging, but a great recommendation.
- [37:46]
E
But, you know, do something.
- [37:49]
C
So I'm gonna recommend a podcast this time. This is called Unicorn Girl, and it's a podcast by the same people who did a very, very, very popular podcast about a scam called Scamanda. But anyway, this is a follow up by the same people. And. And the story itself is just wild. It's just wild. At some point you think, no, that can't possibly have happened. And it happened. And then that's just the intro to.
- [38:15]
E
Do we get any hints, David, like, or is that the whole thing?
- [38:18]
C
So this is about a woman who came to prominence by creating an anti trafficking sex trafficking organization and becoming an influencer in the anti sex trafficking space. She is, I think, the most dangerous form of con artist, which is a mixture of the genuine and the fake. Okay, so there's some stuff that's real there. Like there's some stuff that she actually did, and then there's a lot of stuff that's just dramatically fake. And so you realize how people are brought in by genuine things, and then it makes them more receptive. You know, it puts them in the category of this is a wonderful person, this is heroic person, and then once someone occupies that category in your mind, there's almost nothing they can't get away with. And then the second thing is, I've been so interested in scams and cons during this Trump era, and the combination of how difficult it is to pull someone out of a scam, how hostilely you're treated when you provide factual information that someone is a con artist, and then how people get conned, like, what are the points of vulnerability? And I think this podcast hits all of that. And one of the key insights is the best con artists come at you through your point of vulnerability.
- [39:37]
D
Yeah, I'll have to check that out. I've long had this idea that you could tell the story of the United States in scams and cons from beginning to end.
- [39:47]
E
The United Griffs.
- [39:49]
C
Well, that, that, that's it for this week. So we're going to be having one more of these roundtable conversations in the year 2025.
- [39:58]
E
Oh, my God, we're already there.
- [40:00]
C
We're already, we're already there. So I don't want to give the the premature Happy New Year, but we're one podcast away from the official Happy New Year, starting the Happy New Year. Greetings. Okay, Michelle Jamel, thanks so much.
- [40:12]
E
Always a pleasure.
- [40:12]
D
Thank you, David, for hosting.
- [40:39]
B
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishaka Darba, Christina Samulewski, and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Allison Bruzek. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saborough, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.