Transcript | Illuminati Influencer Queens, pt. 1

[THEME SONG]

CRISTEN: Welcome to Unladylike. I'm your host, Cristen Conger. It has been a minute, friends. The podcast has been on a bit of a hiatus since early spring, in case you didn't know, and I gotta tell you, I was a bit flummoxed at first thinking about where to even begin. How do we even catch up on everything?

You can't see me, but I am gesturing my arms at all of this. I mean, do we start with anti-abortion? Do we start with transphobia run amok? ‘Don't Say Gay’? White Christian nationalism? How about girlies on TikTok insisting that feminism simply conned women out of the plush, stay-at-home, #housewifelife?

Then I thought, why don't we start with something that all of those dumpster fires have in common? And that is conspiracy theories. Specifically, conspiracy theories centered around and spread by women.

Now, not everyone who is out to allegedly save girls sports or shut down abortion clinics or protest vaccinations would identify as conspiracy theorists. I mean, probably most of them wouldn't, but these panics and backlashes to so-called woke culture are really just a giant Venn diagram of conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories that a trans agenda is being foisted upon children. Conspiracy theories that an abortion industrial complex with piles of money is out to force people to terminate pregnancies against their will. Conspiracy theories that liberal elites are all just sex traffickers and pedophiles. Or how about that the Covid vaccine renders teen girls infertile as part of a plan to depopulate the earth. I mean, again, where where do we even start?

Now at this point, I need to give y'all a little bit of a backstory because in case you can't tell, yeah, I've been thinking about conspiracy theories a lot and for a while now. So it all started for me at the start of the pandemic when a longtime acquaintance, a casual friend, let's say, I ran into her and while socially distanced, she kind of out of the blue, informed me that Joan Rivers — yes, that Joan Rivers — was murdered by the Obama deep state with help from the Clintons.

I thought she was joking at first. Then she mentioned Ghislane Maxwell and how she was quote unquote just asking questions, and I realized she was not. I fled the scene and spent, give or take, the next two years trying to figure out how I'd come face to face with QAnon culture.

And the bigger question I'm always, always asking Unladylike and just constantly, which is what do women have to do with this? Obviously women were really being drawn into the QAnon on sphere, but something felt different. Now I'll go ahead and spoil it. The answer to what a women have to do with today's conspiracy theory, avalanche is a lot, and it started with the Illuminati.

Now hear me out. This is not a Beyonce joke, I swear. In conspiracy circles, the Illuminati was basically the original made up evil cabal of powerful elites out to destroy white Christian civilization. Think any Tucker Carlson monologue you'd hear today and who lit that fire of that cabal conspiracy theory a century ago?

Only the ground dumb of modern conspiracy theory herself. Nesta h Webster, along with her sister in antisemitism, Edith Star Miller, who also went by Lady Queensborough. And yes, I, I hear myself, I hear how absurd that sounds. ‘Grand dame of modern conspiracy theory’ — not my words. Those are conspiracy theory historians who have called Nesta H. Webster the Grand Dame, and Edith Star Miller, I mean, I don't know what the fuck was up with the Lady Queensborough, and I really don't care to find out because these women had really hateful ideas that they spread around in the post-World War I era, and those ideas are still wreaking havoc today. They were basically the ideological foremothers of far-right groups, including the infamous John Birch Society here in the US, and they are also just one stunning example of the very active roles women — particularly white women, which we will get into — the roles women have played in conspiracy culture ever since, and that we never hear about.

And like today's guest y'all heard at the top of the show, it left me wondering like, why isn't anybody else talking about what women have been talking about for so long in terms of conspiracy theories? Like me, Dr. Erin Kempker did not set out to fall down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

It was all a part of work, right? Isn't that how we justify awkward Google search histories? It's for work!

Erin is a women's historian and professor at Mississippi University for Women and author of the book, Big Sister Feminism, Conservatism and Conspiracy in the Heartland. It is essentially a nonfiction Unladylike thriller.

It's got it all: 1970 second-wave feminism, the race to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in Indiana, which would become the final to do so before anti-feminists shut it down. And with help, it turns out, from conspiracy theories.

The question that Erin set out to answer while she was writing her dissertation was, ok, I'm in Indiana and I'm curious how the Equal Rights Amendment passed after a lengthy fight in a state like Indiana, which is predominantly white and conservative. She wanted to know how the feminists pushed it over the line, and what Erin discovered once she headed off to the library, like any good historian, and made her way back to the archives and started sifting through piles of women's newsletters, pamphlets, anti-feminist, anti-Equal Rights Amendment propaganda, she quickly ran into almost QAnon-esque kind of conspiracy vibes about this global cabal that's seeking to strip away our “feminine difference” and “privileges” and turn us all into sexless robots who all wear very drab clothes that the government issues to us. Because this is also a dystopian socialist nightmare that is definitely on its way. And the Trojan horse that it's arriving in is called the Equal Rights Amendment. And those pants-wearing feminists are all just government pawns here to turn our children gay!

Ok, now I am heavily paraphrasing, which means I need to just throw to the doctor, to the good Dr. Erin Kempker.

[MUSIC BREAK]

CRISTEN: I have to give you the quick backstory of the way that I found you.

ERIN: Ok, yeah. I'm curious.

CRISTEN: so. You wrote a book called Big Sister Feminism, Conservatism and Conspiracy in the Heartland, and it was actually a couple of years ago that I first ran across your name and your book in a piece in the Atlantic Magazine about, uh, celebrity pregnancy truthers.

ERIN: Yes. Benedict Cumberbatch.

CRISTEN: Yes. Oh my gosh. I mean, that's a whole other, I could talk to you for a whole other half hour, just about Megan Mark's maybe bump, but, um, I won't derail us. But, uh, I wanted to bring that up because, What you said in that piece has stuck with me ever since, and I'm gonna go ahead and say it.

It, it basically inspired this episode, , so I'm gonna also quote you back to you.

ERIN: Okay. That's good cuz I probably don't remember what I said.

CRISTEN: Well it was, it was a while ago. So you made the point. There hasn't been much focused study on women in conspiracy theory, belief. I think there's a perception that it's a largely male world. I didn't find that to be the case. I would say we need to rethink the stereotype, and I was so excited to read that because I was like, All right, yeah, yeah. Hey, wait. Why does there seem to be this gender gap?

So, bigger-picture question: Why have women been largely ignored in conspiracy research?

ERIN: You know, I think it's a great question too, Cristen. I'm gonna try to give you some answers, but I guess my first answer would be, I don't know either. I've got some thoughts as to what might be going on.

First, I think I would point to the idea that some of the women that I focus on — especially those 1950s, 60s and 70s women — they strongly identified with the status of a stay-at-home mom, and they were quite comfortable in that identity. And they were strongly committed to it. And for that reason, they supported men in their lives and they supported men's decisions in their lives.

I'll give you one example here. Marguerite Dice. That’s the woman who literally put the men in the room, in her room, her home there in the suburbs of Indianapolis, to create, with Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, which is a very important right-wing conspiratorial organization that's born in 1958. Marguerite Dice is almost never mentioned in any founding of the John Birch Society, despite the fact that she has a very long history of right-wing and really white nationalist politics. And she's just completely erased. If she's mentioned at all, she's mentioned as sort of like the hostess, you know, who really brings the men refreshments.

And I'm not entirely sure Margarite Dice would've been unhappy with that characterization. I think she was so deeply invested in that idea of, you know, women having a role to play in supporting men that I don't know that she really was seeking a spotlight in that. Though I do think and I do suspect that they wanted at least some appreciation from men for their activism and their participation and the power that they brought to the movement. So I do think their particular sort of interpretation and understanding of gender might play a role in that and that they saw themselves as supportive of others in their lives. But definitely behind-the-scenes operators.

Now that said, that's just, you know, purely speculative on my part because the reality is that I really don't know why nobody else was talking much about this or why people aren't talking about this. So it was really confusing. And I'll be honest, I wrestled with that for about 10 years.

CRISTEN: Oh, wow!

ERIN: Yeah. Yeah. I finished my PhD in 2008, but the book wasn't published until 2018, and I just didn't see that much conversation going on about all of this conspiracy. There were certainly some scholars talking about it.

It seemed really central to me. It wasn't just like, you know, a couple of women doing this. It seemed like the point, you know?

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm.

ERIN: This is what they were talking about, is these interlocking conspiracies. And so I went ahead with my book without really knowing about what others were going to be saying about it, and then, I'll be honest, I think it was the 2016 election when Trump and then conspiracy just, you know, came straight out, it was in the mainstream. And since then, it's now been the reverse of that. But you know, much of the time I was preparing the book, it was sort of trying to figure out, am I the only one seeing this, or one of the few people that are seeing this?

I don't have an answer for that one. It was certainly everywhere, uh, in the archives that I was looking at. And it took some time, you know, to try to figure out what was going on? Because of course, you know, anytime you start reading conspiracy, it's so bizarre. Like you were talking about, it just comes at you like a floodgate and it never lets up, you know? It's constantly morphing, and then there are these, you know, sub conspiracies, and it's just to the uninitiated, I mean, it's just — I don't know how to explain it, except it's just bizarre and baffling.

CRISTEN: Ok, when Erin was just describing how reading up on a bunch of conspiracy theory stuff can make you start to feel like the conspiracy theorist, whew. I felt that. I've been there. This episode is doing it to me, so I feel seen and I'm gonna bask in that validation for a hot second while we take a quick break.

[AD BREAK]

CRISTEN: I'm back with women's historian Erin Kempker, who is about to get into the wild weeds of 1970s anti-feminist conspiracy theories. If that's not a Jeopardy category, it should be. Blossom, are you listening?

CRISTEN: Could you explain a little bit of what, what you mean by conspiracy — like, the general brand of conspiracy that you were seeing in all of this archival material?

ERIN: There are a lot of different organizations that you can look at. I read their newsletters. They're prolific writers, um, and they're reading a lot. They're sharing reviews of books, they're sharing information with each other in their newsletters. I read those, and the kinds of conspiracy things that I was seeing, they were very concerned about any initiative, um, started by the United Nations. So, any kind of UNESCO or United Nations campaign, especially that involved children, was constantly being watched. They were also very concerned about the National Educators Association and teachers slipping subliminal messages into into curriculum, or even less conspiratorial and just more concerned about a sort of a secular drift or a progressive agenda being pushed by teachers particularly.

A lot of these folks were already starting to advocate for things like homeschool.

CRISTEN: So it sounds, uh, sounds very familiar…

ERIN: Yes. A lot of this, you know, it has a deep history. It goes back some time and, you know, they could argue against the United Nations being too cozy with Communists and then in the next sentence say the United Nations, um, had already been taken over by Communists and then later on in the same newsletter, the United Nations was part of a trend or part of the conspiracy of, uh, globalists, you know, to turn us all into one-world zombies. None of those to them were competing ideas.

Mm-hmm.

Even though those aren't the same ideas at all, you know, those ideas didn't compete.

It was just this sense that the United Nations was bad that's like a spectrum of belief on the United Nations. You know, maybe you just don't like that the United Nations is cozy with Communists. They're ok with that. Or, if you are on the further end that believe they are one-worldists, you know, pushing world government and they've already taken over the US federal government, that's all right, too, because, you're still represented. So there was that kind of belief.

There were things, like they would report that the United Nations had taken over American cities. Um,

CRISTEN: Goodness.

ERIN: There was the idea that there was some legislation — they were constantly watching state legislation — there was legislation in Alaska to support mental health programs that was the ‘Siberia USA’ sort of conspiracy that the fact that it looks innocuous — Alaska is supporting mental health in 1955 — but according to Minute Women, this started in California that was the creation of a gulag that was going to be used to imprison, you know, right-wing political thinkers. There was already this trend of associating mental health experts with potentially globalists and progressives. So, you know, that bill became connected to this idea of persecution of the right. ‘Siberia USA’ was a whole campaign in the mid 1950s.

So, you know, you open up a newsletter in the archives, and this is the kind of messages that you read and the kind of ideas that you're reading.

CRISTEN: This is what the ladies were chatting about?

ERIN: Yeah, exactly. Like, this is just a normal, you know? It was really hard to understand did they believe what they were saying? Was this just kind of thrilling? You know, how to understand that.

CRISTEN: So according to this brand of right-wing conspiracy, what was the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism actually?

ERIN: You know, I think, depending on who you asked, of course, Cristen.

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm.

ERIN: And I think they were certainly the more politically savvy women were trying to target their audience to message so they wouldn't come at you maybe with the full blown, this is a one-world government conspiracy. But on that spectrum, again, of total conspiracy belief down to just maybe a criticism of federal overreach.

The Equal Rights Amendment was considered by some to be part of a global conspiracy of the United Nations to sort of insert itself into the inner workings of local communities, and really on that issue of gender, transform sort of personal relationships between men and women and within families. It was considered to be if not the first step in this global conspiracy, it was part of that global conspiracy, which may have been going back all the way to the 1950s, and some people even pushed it back to the 1920s, depending on the conspiracy that you're talking about. But it was this idea that because it was supported by the United Nations, it was part of the United Nations’ Decade of Women celebration. That's why the United States created the International Women's Year, and the Equal Rights Amendment was considered part of that idea. That feminists want to eliminate the difference between men and women. They want to make us all same sex, so-called gender sameness.

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm.

ERIN: So too, does the world government conspiracy want to strip us of nationalism and strip us of any sort of, uh, religious tradition. It's this secularized, universalist understanding that they're trying to, you know, make patriotic, Christian, stay-at-home mothers into, you know, unisex cogs in a world government system.

It sounds crazy to most. But if you came of age through that anti-communist sort of armageddon, sort of apocalyptic rhetoric of the Cold War, getting ready to fight the atheistic Communists and getting ready for the end of the world, this doesn't seem that different, you know? It's like a shift. The atheistic Communists, it turns out, weren't the end goal. They were just one part of this globalist conspiracy. So for those folks, it doesn't seem as wild as it does to the uninitiated, but that's how they saw feminism as part of this battle between good and evil.

Whether feminists understood it doesn't matter to them. They were at best duped. But at worstm they were in league with either this cabal of globalists or other times, the satanists, because the antichrist also looms over all of that as well.

So you could be just a globalist. You could be, you know, in league with Satan. Again, we're not even gonna, really disagree about that. We can agree that we don't agree and then we're gonna move right on. But you're our enemy either way.

So it doesn't really allow for much compromise, Cristen! There's not a whole lot of working across that line, as you might imagine.

I do think, and I write about this in the book, I think it was empowering. There is definitely something empowering to thinking that you are in the know and feeling quite knowledgeable about something — just that feeling that comes with, you know, the so-called research that they were doing on this, and they were. They were getting the congressional record. They were scouring it for any word like collective, and then they would reprint that these people said collective, which was important to them. Or, you know, they said the word collectivism or unification or consolidation — any of these words that might signal this sort of condensing of power into a smaller unit. They really feared any of that centralization, and it was powerful for them.

So I think, you know, not having power in one aspect of their lives might have affected their desire to gain power through conspiracy belief. And as women who probably had young children and were stay-at-home, their access to information was limited, but they were using everything they had. Seeing their ideas in print would be a powerful thing, too. So that their ideas could be printed and circulated, and other people would talk about them. I think that's a powerful motivator as well.

I think more to work needs to be done, but it's pretty clear that they felt empowered by this belief and that they were getting something from it more than just their fear of changes in the economy, you know what I mean?

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm.

ERIN: There was something happening there that made this feel good and right.

CRISTEN: Oh, it's just like that Eurythmics song “Sister's Doin It for Themselves,” right?

Let's take a quick break.

[AD BREAK]

CRISTEN: I'm back with women's historian Dr. Erin Kempker.

Next up, you might wanna take some notes because while these antifeminists in the seventies were peddling a lot of harmful shit that still resonates today, they really knew how to make a misinformation machine.

CRISTEN: So there's been, especially in 2020 and since there's been more attention paid to the role of social media and women spreading, like QAnon conspiracies in particular.

ERIN: Right, Yes.

CRISTEN: And reading those stories, like a lot of times, at least the headline framing is like, Oh wow. Like women are doing this wild thing and like using technology to spread information, but they make it look aesthetically pleasing to some people on Instagram. Yeah. You know? and which is, which is not, which is not wrong.

Like that was happening. Right. But in the, But then when I, I read these kind, this historical context. and you know, it, you, you mentioned a few times like how good they were working the phones Yes. And like phone trees and-

ERIN: Oh yes.

CRISTEN: Even just now doing, you know, today, like instead of a control find, they were the control find having to go through all of the documents.

ERIN: Exactly, yes. That's so, so true. They were the control find and they were so good. Like you said, the telephone, they, they made sophisticated telephone. Um, yeah, they didn't even need necessarily to leave their houses to meet. They had like, the minute women had telephone trees, they would call one another and, and sort of like the game telephone tell one another what they had been told.

So in case they couldn't meet, they could still communicate with one another. Um, and there would not be a breakdown in the system. Somebody would not be left out because that was all part of how they organized with the telephone. They used the John Birch Society, and this wasn't just women, but women absolutely were active in the John Birch Society and instrumental in the John Birch Society.

They had the Let Freedom Ring campaign where they just left telephone numbers. They posted 'em all over town and they would just like drop 'em on the street, you know, like literally a telephone number or they'd put it up as graffiti and people would call the number and there would be a prerecorded message and the message would change weekly.

And, you know, one week it would be an anti-civil rights message, and then the next week it would be, you know, about the war in Vietnam. And then the next week, it would be about the Equal Rights Amendment. But so, once you had that number, you could call and get this information and it would change on a weekly basis.

They operated bookstores — women-owned and operated bookstores — with the John Birch Society. And like I said, they hosted people into their homes. They found and were using the technology of their time as well as anyone. There's no doubt. And to think that women are not part of this conspiracy, it's just a blind spot when it comes to women's history.

And I suspect because of the hyper masculinity of people like Alex Jones and that sort of performative masculinity, and the idea that, you know, they're talking about all of them and trying to market this kind of survivalist merchandise and different things like that. I do think that there continues to be this association with men and conspiracy. But women's historians like myself, I'm not the only one by any means, but have had for some time now been looking at this, and we can definitely say women are definitely in this world — active participants in this, coming up with their own conspiracy beliefs. And that's certainly true of the 20th century.

CRISTEN: Yeah, it's not exactly the kind of gender equality we might, you know, envision, but it's there.

ERIN: Well, that's just the thing, you know. We tend to think of women, and I think there's this stereotype still, that women act as angels in the machinery.

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm.

ERIN: And that women's politics is somehow inherently more progressive than men's, and it's just not true. Women have been part of, you know, fascist movements around the world and in the United States. Kathleen Blee and her work have shown us all of the ways in which women were instrumental in the Klan, and there was the women's Klan. So women are not synonymous with progressive women's politics, and I think we have to really complicate and muddy the water when it comes to what we mean by “women's politics,” cuz they don't.

CRISTEN: Right. And that leads perfectly to the question of in this case, like, what women are we talking about?

ERIN: Mm-hmm.

CRISTEN: Because, you know, you also mentioned groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Are we talking specifically about white women?

ERIN: Largely, yes. I think I was looking at white women largely.

CRISTEN: Mm-hmm.

ERIN: But not exclusively on either side. Certainly there were women of color in the feminist camp, although women of color were also reporting problems that they were, and difficulties they were having, um, with getting, um, Initiatives that they felt strongly about on, uh, the agenda in feminist organizations.

And the Women's Political Caucus is one of those where you see that conversation playing out, um, on the right wing side. Uh, yes. Largely white women, but not exclusively white women. And there's been a little bit of work done on her, but you know, that's, you know, her life and experience. I mean, and then you have modern day examples, you know, of, uh, women.

Um, Right wing women who sort of take up the cause as well. Um, and so I think, um, is it Kathy Barnett would be, uh, the woman who recently ran for the Senate in Pennsylvania, um, and others that I think like the experiences of right wing women, black women, um, is critically under-researched. And I would like to know more about.

CRISTEN: Do you have any sense of whether left wing conspiracy theories were influencing women on like feminists on the pro era? A side? Mm-hmm. , because the one thing that I have been wrestling with a lot of how to responsibly talk about and frame conspiracy belief is the fact that you. We're all susceptible, we're all highly susceptible to them.

It's not like they're, you know, it's, it's just indicative of someone being right wing. Um, and I was just curious if that on the other side, I mean, I, I doubt there was like global cabals of Satan worshipers, you know?

ERIN: No.

CRISTEN: Hanging out. Yeah. But, uh, if there was any of that happening within the feminist movement that you're aware?

ERIN: Yeah, it's a hard thing because mostly what I'm looking at is right wing conspiracy belief, and I don't see, um, women in, like, for example, the Hoosiers for the Equal Rights Amendment, . Mm-hmm. , when you open up their records, you don't see conspiracy belief. They're not talking about, um, you know, um, Well, they're not talking about, they're not talking about any kind of conspiracies that I have seen.

That said, you have to be very careful because, um, you're right in that conspiracy belief is very prevalent in the United States and on the right and on the left. But the difference is the, is the exact nature of the conspiracy beliefs, um, differ. So they don't believe in the same conspiracies. Mm-hmm. , but they believe in conspiracy.

Um, and so this particular issue, I, I cannot say generally, you know, that this would be the case, but on this particular issue, it, it zeroed in on a right wing fear. World government, um, collectivism, and this idea that Gender particularly is ordained by God. So any kind of initiative to challenge gender difference, um, really brought down, um, fire in brimstone for them.

That that was something that was very, uh, part of their, their religious understanding and that. Also connected to, because of the way that the Cold War had played out, um, you know, really since World War ii that really connected to this idea of, uh, family life and structure as well. And this idea of, um, you know, I, I, I don't wanna oversimplify things, but that, Communists believed in abortion and they believed in men and women, women's equality.

And that in the United States, um, we believed in gender difference and, uh, families and male breadwinners and women a stay at home wives. Um, and that was the 1950s American dream by golly. And, you know, everyone has a right to live it. And so, um, there was that sense that. Whether intentionally or not, feminists were challenging that and were in league with this, um, dangerous cabal of, uh, not only the globalist, but like I said, the satanist.

So it really did provoke that issue really provoked a Firestone storm on the right. Um, on other ideas, I think they would. Be a little bit more, um, crossover between the right and the left. So, um, health food was a big concern for a lot of the women that I was looking at. Um, and the John Birch Society especially, they were really interested in additives.

I mean, obviously everybody knows about the fluoridation, but, um, Yeah, they were really interested in like additives and food and, um, the John Birch Society at one point was really pushing the idea that, um, Leia Tri would cure cancer. So some of that stuff was, you know, really alternative medicines and things like that.

I think you would see a lot more convergence maybe on the left with some of that. Um,

CRISTEN: I mean, also what you're. My jaw's dropping because as I, what I'm hearing you also describe sounds so much like the- The current day Venn diagram of conspiracy in the like, wellness, health and then like fringing off into both left and right wing.

Yes. Uh, and into like deep Christian nationalism and white supremacy where it's like, oh my God. They were, they were worried about health food too. What is happening?

ERIN: Yeah. It's, it's not, I don't know if this is helpful to anyone, but it's not really. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's, it's been there for, you know, at least since the 1970s.

I, I don't, I don't know if that helps or hurts, do you know what I mean? It's, but it's not really new. Now, I do think the internet has changed a lot about how they're connecting, but like we talked about, they found ways to connect before, and they were incredibly innovative when it comes to that.

CRISTEN: And here's a final twist. Asked Erin a little bit earlier about whether she ran into any conspiracy theories within the second wave feminist groups that her dissertation and that her book focused on. And she did not in her research, but I did get this for an ironic conspiracy twist. When the effort to ratify the ERA failed, it was extremely disruptive and demoralizing for the feminist movement at the time. This would've been in the late 70s. Some folks within the movement blamed the ERA’s failures on a government conspiracy in the form of infiltration by the CIA and FBI into the feminist movement to destroy it from within.

The fact of the matter is the FBI did spy on second-wave feminist groups and did send out women to infiltrate and take notes and keep abreast of what was happening. But it wasn't part of any diabolical plot to detonate the ERA. I mean, really, it's kind of a sexist accusation because the people who fucked the ERA were women.

They were women.

And what gets even gnarlier is that the environment of paranoia and infighting happening within the second-wave movement and this idea that they were being infiltrated by imposters sent from, what, the most patriarchal agency of all, the FBI? This dovetailed with what we now call ters, trans exclusionary radical feminists.

It only fed into the transphobia that was already becoming problematic within lesbian separatist factions and also the more mainstream factions. And if you wanna know more, there's a whole episode all about it over on the Unladylike Patreon: patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

And if you want even more conspiracy theory, good news, because there's gonna be a part two.

Yeah, we can't only stay in the past. We gotta bring it up to the present. We've got to face those dumpster fires of today, and I'm gonna do that. Next week with help from misinformation TikToker and researcher whose conspiracy chart you've probably seen, Abbie Richard, and also returning icon and friend of the pod, Bridget Todd. I did not mean to make that rhyme but I'm just gonna leave it as is.

And finally, thank you to Dr. Erin Kempker. Her book — Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism and Conspiracy In the Heartland — is, again, the nonfiction Unladylike thriller of the year.

And y'all, I would love to hear from you. Unladylike is back and what, what do y'all wanna hear about? What should we talk about? Get in touch. And also, of course, I mean, if you have conspiracy theory, send them my way. Hello at unladylike dot co is the email address. You can also follow Unladylike and get in touch on social @unladylikemedia. I'm on Twitter, Instagram, and yes, even the TikTok.

Unladylike is a Starburns audio production. Rebecca Steinberg is our senior producer. Katherine Calligori is our associate producer, Engineering and post production is by Ali Nikou. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzen. I am your host and executive producer, Cristen Conger of Unladylike Media.

CRISTEN: Erin, I have one last question for you that I ask all Unladylike guests. What is the most unladylike thing about you?

ERIN: Oh gosh. . Um, yeah, no, it's gotta be the cussing, but the first title of this book was To Hell with the ERA. And when I went to interview the conservative women, they let me know that like, under no circumstances was that acceptable. That that was off limits…So yeah, no, the cussing all around, the cussing all around is in the Midwest.

Cussing is not considered that bad, you know? I don't find that people really looked twice at you for cussing too much, but in other circles, in the rarefied circles, yeah, no. You can't get away with that.

So yeah, cussing is my most unladylike behavior.

I'm hanging onto that one.

CRISTEN: Perfect.