Why should you care about private equity? It is affecting all of us in the U.S., even if we don’t realize it. Private equity money promises to invest in a growing list of our workplaces, often to sell them off for parts. Journalist Megan Greenwell knows this experience all too well as the former editor-in-chief of Deadspin, the acclaimed sports website that experienced private equity’s familiar slash-and-burn cycle. And the cycle doesn’t stop with our livelihoods, Greenwell writes in her forthcoming book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. Our lives—our hospitals, our housing, our food, and our water—are increasingly under the control of private equity. 

This week, Greenwell joins Katelyn and Christine to define the problem that spans presidencies and propose solutions that will outlast the ever-tightening broligarchy. 

Citations:

• Follow Megan on Bluesky @greenwell.bsky.social
• Preorder Megan’s book, Bad Company, via The Flytrap’s Bookshop.org affiliate link or your local independent bookstore
• Megan Greenwell for Deadspin (RIP), “The Adults in the Room”
• Anna Merlan for Mother Jones, “How Elon Musk and His DOGE Goons Are Following the Private Equity Playbook,” Q&A with Megan

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From Mark Zuckerberg at the inauguration to Elon Musk in the oval office, the tech broligarchy is upon us, shaping policy to erase trans people, Black people, and “childless cat ladies” from the Internet and ultimately from public life. “Cis” has been a slur on Twitter since 2023. More recently, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, put an end to third party fact-checking, reduced automated content moderation, and loosened hateful conduct standards. 

Guest Tat Bellamy-Walker joins Katelyn and Christine on this week’s episode to identify and clarify Meta’s three-pronged attack. Bellamy-Walker, a longtime journalist turned program manager of digital safety training and resources (media) at PEN America, provides us—and listeners—with tangible steps to protect ourselves and each other online. Listen and learn about digital hygiene, counter speech, resources, and more. 2FA all the way!

Citations: 

• Follow Tat Bellamy-Walker on Twitter: @bell_tati
• PEN America’s Online Harassment Field Manual
• Extensive safety resources geared toward women and nonbinary journalists at the International Women’s Media Foundation
• Donate to the Black Journalists Therapy Relief Fund
• Delete Me and other subscription services to scrub your personal data from the Internet
• Donate to the Trans Journalists Association

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Comedian Gianmarco Soresi is a rising comedy star with nearly 950,000 subscribers on YouTube alone. You have likely come across one of Soresi’s sets if you’ve been scrolling through social media as a brief escape from our current reality. *stares directly into camera* But this self-described “matza pizza” skewers rather than ignores our current reality, bringing his full self—Jewish, Italian, leftist—into his routines and crowd work that address the war in Gaza, transgender rights, and other quote-unquote issues that leave other comedians crying “cancel culture.”

This week, Katelyn and Christine conduct a wide-ranging interview with Soresi about politics, comedy, art, media, and, of course, cancel culture. When comedians like Dave Chappelle say they can’t try out new material or blame marginalized groups for hemming them in, the joke’s on them. Trust us—listening to this episode is a must. And Soresi’s a comedian to watch.

Citations: 

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January 6, 2025 marked two grim occasions: the four year anniversary of Donald Trump inciting his followers to take over the U.S. Capitol and the present-day Congress certifying Trump’s 2.0’s presidential election victory.

This week, Katelyn, Christine, and special guest Meredith Shiner compare and contrast their experiences as congressional reporters on Capitol Hill. Meredith, a communications consultant and journalist, is the preeminent critic of the insurrection that aired live and what she calls the “polite coup”—the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. Biden and the Democrats abdication of their responsibility to any timely or enduring accountability and the mainstream media’s passivity, exacerbated by consolidation under their billionaire owners, are recurring topics. But the discussion does not get mired in cynicism. This episode’s energy is what we all must hold on to heading into next week’s second Trump inauguration, and whatever comes after.

Links:

Greg Owen for LGBTQ Nation: Trans & wildly popular “Oprah of China” suddenly blackballed by Chinese government

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“Imagine if a document saying all the things that he wants ends up in the wrong hands,” Melissa Nathan—the crisis public relations expert who preserved alleged domestic abuser Johnny Depp’s public image—texted behind the scenes of her latest smear-campaign-for-hire. The New York Times called Nathan’s bluff. publishing the extent of her actor-director client Justin Baldoni’s alleged retaliatory social media operation to turn public sentiment against actress Blake Lively, the target of his alleged workplace sexual harassment on their film “It Ends with Us.”

This week, Katelyn and Christine discuss the coordinated campaign against Lively, perpetrated by our old enemies behind the Amber Heard defamation allegation. We highly recommend you check out the links in the show notes for the context that Cancel Me, Daddy has been providing since its beginnings with Oliver and Katelyn! Revisit the 2022 “Depp-ception” episode with guest and “Cancel Gunkle” Michael Hobbes, who returned in 2023 to cancel The New York Times over spurious and harmful reporting about trans kids. We’re still side-eyeing the paper and the byline.

Links:

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The health insurer horror stories haven’t stopped coming in the two weeks since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed by alleged murderer-turned-folk hero Luigi Mangione. And the ruling class is not having it! Elected officials, corporate CEOs, and the mainstream media with the power to change or buck the system are hell bent on protecting it, at the expense of many more lives.

This week, Katelyn and Christine discuss the sudden, ongoing suppression of free speech, sharing each of their experiences with health insurance, censorship be damned. Their conversation spans UHC’s denials and demands for Christine’s mental health records in 2024 to Kate’s gender-affirming surgeries, which she crammed into one year to meet her deductible under one of the various insurance plans that Americans will have in their lifetime. Thirsty Internet assassin boyfriend memes, of course, rise to the top. And Kate asks Christine to name the greater Italian American—Christopher Columbus, or Luigi Mangione? Tune in for her answer!

Links:

Your Ombudsmon's Corner: Marisa Kabas skeet critiquing Semafor Editor in Chief Ben Smith defending Bluesky’s apparent welcome to transphobes and trolls

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Last month’s Loser Election prompted an X-odus from Elon Musk’s crumbling app to Bluesky, which grew by 1 million users per day toward the end of November. Despite the grim news cycles, Bluesky is far from all doom and gloom. It is, in fact, putting the social back in social networking.

This week, Katelyn and Christine chat with Faine Greenwood, who created the “Alf hog” meme that caught the attention of everyone from AOC to Jeri Ryan to Jake Tapper in the early days of Bluesky. Katelyn, Christine, and Faine have fun with verbal shitposting and Internet shitposting and give credit to the nascent trans accounts that helped shape Bluesky, which they hope will remain a safe and fun space amid an influx of anti-trans and anti-abortion trolls.

In Flytrap news: Subscribe to read Christine’s first essay about her colonoscopy for Christ, “The Red Mass Went Up My Ass,” edited by the inimitable Katelyn herself!

Links:

Support Cancel Me, Daddy by supporting our Patreon and subscribing to our worker-owned feminist media collective, The Flytrap!

Cancel Me, Daddy is a Flytrap Media production. Edited by Maria Paleologos. Graphics by Eden M-W, music by D Peterschmidt.

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The “Daddy Election” did not go as Cancel Me, Daddy planned. Everyone seems to have an opinion about what woulda, coulda, shoulda changed the outcome of the “Loser Election,” in which we’re all losers reading and skeeting our way through the Orange Fallout.

This week, Katelyn and Christine make sense of the “multiverse” of election takes with “Cancel Gunkle” Michael Hobbes, journalist and co-host of Maintenance Phase and If Books Could Kill. Kate, Christine, and Mike discuss checking our priors and checking each other, turning what could have been a hot mess into a thoughtful discussion and mutual thirst for Paul Newman (RIP), both of which we encourage you to contribute to via Bluesky. Everyone has an opinion, and we want to hear yours. Keep up the infighting! And take care of each other. That act is more important than any opinion poised to change over the days and weeks to come.

Links:

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Our regularly scheduled episode happens to fall on Halloween! And spooky season is feeling extra—as extra as Tucker Carlson rallying “Daddy Trump” to give America a “vigorous spanking” for being a “bad little girl.” It’d be funny if it wasn’t sickening, and terrifying. We’re just five days from the 2024 presidential election, featuring the return of the Orange Fascist—and white evangelical power could strong-arm the strongman back into the White House.

This week, author and friend of the pod Talia Lavin unravels the intricacies of the movement, the subject of her new book, “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America,” with Katelyn and Christine. To well-funded white evangelical nationalists, only Trump can deliver us from the literal demons behind every abortion and pronoun. We need to take this group seriously, or the joke is on us come Election Day.

Content Warning: This episode includes extensive discussion of child abuse and corporal punishment, which Wild Faith explores as central to the Christian right’s political project: creating the conditions for future generations of obedient soldiers for God and country. Please listen with care, and take good care. 

Links:

Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin

Talia Lavin for MSNBC: Tucker Carlson’s “daddy” comments speak volumes about the far right

Martha Ross for The Mercury News: Tucker Carlson: How early rejection by hippie San Francisco mom made him shameless

William Grimes for The New York Times: Alice Miller, Psychoanalyst, Dies at 87; Laid Human Problems to Parental Acts

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Special episode swap with BEED, a podcast by former Cancel Me, Daddy guest Bridget Todd:

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