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This week on “Matter of Opinion,” we take 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.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.
Ross Douthat: 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 —
Michelle Cottle: Are we going to go with “Diddy”?
Douthat: We’re going with “Diddy,” Michelle.
Cottle: Good choice. Classic.
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 today.
Cottle: You are really excited for this.
Douthat: I’m excited. And for this conversation, I’m especially excited, because we are joined by two special guests, our colleagues Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jessica Grose.
Cottle: Woo! Welcome, all.
Douthat: Welcome.
Jessica Grose: Thank you.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: Pleased to be here.
Cottle: So far.
Douthat: So far.
Cottom: Yeah. Well, I’m hopeful,
Douthat: You’re hopeful.
Cottom: I’m always hopeful.
Cottle: Hope springs eternal.
Douthat: I mean, I feel like 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 back story on the nature of the scandal, the arrests, the charges?
Cottle: OK, first off, I feel like we need a little bit of legal context, which is, a lot of what has come to light 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 year the singer Cassie came out accusing Diddy of sexual assault and 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 an admission of wrongdoing.”
Douthat: Never is.
Cottle: Never. It’s kind of a standard.
But then, pretty quickly, two more women came out after that. And last Monday, Diddy was arrested on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. He has, of course, pleaded not guilty, and now we are awaiting trial.
Douthat: And the charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, that sort of umbrella, it 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 supershocked 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.
What was it like to profile him then, and how do you understand him now?
Cottom: Well, I’ll start by saying I’m not surprised. I grew up with his music, and his cultural production is the height of my young adult years —
Douthat: And just for our younger listeners, of which we have many, when was this era?
Cottom: Seriously? Seriously, Ross, you going to make me put a number on it?
Cottle: He’s going to make you date yourself. [Grose laughs.]
Cottom: Thank you. So this would be the late ’90s, early 2000s. It’s the height of Bad Boy productions, and I was both sentient and legally able to drive. If people want to do that math —
Cottle: And that’s as far as she’s going.
Cottom: That’s exactly right, Michelle.
So when I went in to profile Diddy, I was coming to 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 profile — 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 himself at the time as Love.
Cottle: That is so sweet.
Cottom: 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.
Cottom: 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.
To move from like the Black civil rights movement to #MeToo just seemed … interesting. So I asked him several follow-up questions about why #MeToo? Why had it impacted him? Why did this movement seem so critical and important to him? I did not get a good answer beyond the fact that it was a moment for celebrities in Hollywood to rethink their values.
Douthat and Cottle: Mm-hm.
Cottom: And I said: Well, OK [Cottle laughs], 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.
Douthat: I’m looking at the profile now, and you mentioned in it that he’s a girl dad. He has a large number of children. Did he talk about being a father of daughters as sort of part of his —
Cottom: He did not.
Douthat: He didn’t.
Cottom: 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 comedic approach, which is, “Oh, my daughters won’t date until they’re 40.”
Cottle: Oh, he was dead serious about that problem.
Cottom: Yeah. I said, “Well, yeah, I get that, but they’re also young women, and they’re modeling, and they’re in the industry.” He didn’t want to have a serious conversation about that. I 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.
Douthat: Yeah, so, Jess, let’s pick up on that 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.
Grose: Right.
Douthat: That is certainly not — you know, I’m also a child of the late 1990s. My image of Combs and all of his incarnations does not really include family man. But it’s sort of an interesting response. How do you think sort of whatever narrative they’re offering fits into the ways that we’ve seen figures facing these kinds of accusations deal with sort of the #MeToo era?
Grose: So I totally agree with Tressie that this was a yearslong construction on his part. I mean, he’s deleted most of his 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. [Cottle laughs.]
He has, whether consciously or not, been building this renewed image of himself for the past couple of years, perhaps in anticipation of many of these charges.
In their defense of him, his lawyers say: He is this family man. He’s a wonderful philanthropist. As if the fact of his procreation has anything to do with these charges. 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 1 as a woman living alone.
Cottle: Oh, my God, she’s a single cat lady.
Cottom: Cat lady. Exactly.
Cottle: Oh, my God.
Grose: Right. So we’re seeing some of the same tactics to make one kind of person, with a family, a 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 — we’re not talking legally for Combs — is we have that video of him assaulting Cassie.
Cottom: Yes, agreed.
Grose: 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 or seven years after the beginning of the avalanche of accusations.
Cottom: Yeah, there’s quite a bit of fatigue, I think, around “trust women, believe women,” even within the #MeToo movement. Not only did it need to be a woman that you cared about. 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 criticisms of wealthy and powerful men into this bucket of “Well, we can’t ever really know,” and “I think #MeToo 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 the woman had to be, if not famous, had to be perceived as valuable, and fame certainly helps.
Grose: And I do think we’re in a period of prolonged backlash, I would say, to that initial spasm of #MeToo. 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’s just a big piece in Slate about Brad Pitt —
Cottom: Oh, yeah.
Grose: 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.
Cottle: I’m just fascinated by the possibility that there are fields that are built around principals. You know, whether you’re talking about music, entertainment, to some degree, politics — you know, the whole joke that senators are all their little kingdoms and nobody ever says no to them, either.
And if you’ve got one of these principals, it’s not just them that you’re fighting against. It’s an entire machine —
Cottom: Yes, yes.
Cottle: — that is devoted to keeping them where they are. And I would think, if you are Brad Pitt, still one of the biggest male stars in Hollywood, you have a great machine devoted to exactly this. Tom Cruise, whoever is facing even minor scandals. Not even these big scandals.
Cottom: Mm-hmm.
Grose: 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. You saw it with Justin Timberlake. There were a bunch of articles published at the same time he pleaded whatever he pleaded to his D.U.I.: He’s out with his family at a play. A source said he’s a family man. [Cottle laughs.]
And I’m not suggesting that a D.U.I. is anywhere near any of the allegations against Diddy. But it’s the same playbook.
Douthat: I think as a family man, I have a question. [Grose laughs.]
Cottle: I bet you do.
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 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, to use your phrase, Michelle, break a machine” — there was a Weinstein machine, there are machines around celebrities that can enable fantastic amounts of abuse — going from there to litigating bad hookups, litigating D.U.I.s, 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 #MeToo? 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?
Grose: 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 the interpersonal level and the cultural level. And I would say on that, I think we have made less progress.
Cottom: Yeah.
Grose: And I think the expectations of girls and women are largely unchanged.
Cottom: Yeah.
Douthat: In the sense of negotiating interactions with bosses?
Cottom: I think with men.
Grose: I was thinking mostly about sexual assault.
Cottom: Exactly.
Grose: In terms of the way women are 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 it’s 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.
Cottle: Do both of you think that there’s the problem that young men, in particular, may feel vilified by what’s happened with #MeToo and so then you wind up with this backlash where the Andrew Tates of the world can swoop in and say, “Hey, they’ve 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”?
Cottom: 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 pushback from young men. If we want to talk about 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 “himpathy” — this default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that it is so deeply embedded in our culture.
So I would argue that one of the places where #MeToo has not been nearly as successful is dismantling the machine around himpathy, our cultural inclination to default to centering men in 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 think it would still be challenging.
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 agree that this is a real phenomenon, I just —
Cottom: 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, 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?
Douthat: So I want to pick up on something, Tressie, that you were talking about: 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.
To me, a big part of what is striking about this story, even more than any of the stories from five or 10 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’s show and talking about how he likes to make love till 6 a.m.
Cottom: Ugh. Yeah.
Douthat: 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. 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.
We’re at a moment when all of this gossip, speculation, rumor, [expletive] 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.
Grose: 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 —
Cottom: You and my grandma, Jessica. [Cottom and Grose laugh.]
Cottle: That’s a totally legit news source.
Grose: Totally legit news source when I was a teenager. I don’t know, we just loved 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 hyperpowered 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 trafficked.
Douthat: OK, but wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. [Grose laughs.]
Tressie, you were just saying that this under-news landscape was where what turned out to be serious allegations against Combs first percolated, right?
Cottom: Yeah, and I think both can be true. There would be some hidden or not so hidden truth in The Enquirer among all of the alien stories, right?
Grose: Yep.
Cottom: And we now know that, especially, celebrities would have people planting stories about them in them. I think 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.
Douthat: This podcast does nothing but cover the hip-hop —
Cottle: Ross does. [Laughing.]
Douthat: I don’t know what you’re trying to —
Cottom: Ross is on the beat. Yeah. OK. [Laughing.]
Douthat: This is what we do here, Tressie, but go on.
Cottom: There’s this big vacuum there. And when there’s 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.
Cottle: Yeah.
Cottom: Where we had been having those rumors about R. Kelly, since I was 12 years old.
Cottle: Wow.
Douthat: Mm-hm.
Cottom: I remember the first time someone told me a story about R. Kelly, and this is way before the internet. This was traveling down interstates to get to me. [Cottle laughs.]
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. So if you live in a culture where the police do surveil you and 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.
Grose: And I want to be clear: 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.
Sex-trafficking victims often are trafficked by people that they know or have met before.
Cottom: Yeah.
Grose: I just want to make it clear that it is not some complete stranger, and I just wanted to make a clear delineation.
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, the Combs stuff is — this is “Eyes Wide Shut.”
It’s not people playing classical music and wearing Venetian masks, but it’s one of the world’s most famous celebrities 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?
Cottle: 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.
Cottom: Yeah.
Cottle: 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 let this crazy go.
Grose: 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. Some of them 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, you know, 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 or swept away because they’re lumped in with misinformation and conspiracy theories.
So I hear you on that, for sure.
Cottle: We too often do it based on whatever our previous biases are.
Grose: Yes.
Cottle: So, like, we are completely willing to believe that Hillary Clinton is trafficking children in a 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 a 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.
Grose: 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.
Cottle: They also throw bigger sex parties, right?
Grose: It’s true. [Laughs.]
Cottle: You’re not going to go “Eyes Wide Shut” my neighbor down the street.
Cottom: 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 same sort of standard with 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 a 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 it 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 cleareyed assessment to what is happening. It’s the same reason — 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 a very serious obvious pattern of criminality, we don’t have the lens, we don’t have the contacts, 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 it’s a workplace. Right? We forget that these are employers and employees, that what we are calling a sex party is — for someone — is 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.
Douthat: Yeah, I guess it seems to me that there is a tendency to say that, in the way you described, 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 impresario’s party, whatever.
Cottom: Mm-hm.
Douthat: 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.
Cottom: Mmm.
Douthat: 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 have changed my view, is what I’m saying, of reality.
I guess, and I guess —
Cottle: Well, hey, if we learned one thing from the Catholic Church scandals, it’s that institutions can hide stuff for a very long time.
Cottom: Yeah, we should have.
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: Have your perspectives on any of these kinds of issues changed over the last five or 10 years? Like, America’s become more paranoid. Are you guys more paranoid than you were?
Grose: I’m not more paranoid. I think I am less credulous.
Cottom: That’s a great way to put it.
Grose: 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? —
Douthat: Yes, more sex parties!
Grose: — was violating Covid rules to go to sex parties.
As someone whose kids were in New York City public school at the time, the idea that he was flouting Covid rules when 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 when we just have so many things happening like this all the time and it’s 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.
Cottom: Yeah.
Cottle: Tressie?
Tressie: So I have the great privilege and benefit of being an African American. So I never really trusted social institutions wholesale.
Douthat: Fair.
Cottom: Right? So I said earlier that part of the problem is sometimes somebody really is out to get you. That little seed there of critique is always in me.
And I think it’s one of the reasons I’m not resistant 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. So because 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 lessons —
Cottle: [Gasps.] You’re singing Ross’s tune.
Douthat: Thank you! You’ve brought it around to aliens, Tressie, thank you.
Cottle: Oh, my God. Oh, Tressie, he will love you forever.
Douthat: Thank you, Tressie.
Cottom: You’re welcome, Ross, happy early Christmas. [Laughs.]
Cottle: Tressie, did he pay you to do that?
Tressie: Absolutely not!
Michelle: Oh, my God.
Douthat: I’m going to take moderator’s privilege and end on the mysterious light in the sky. That’s our show. See you next week.
Grose: Bye.
Cottom: Bye.
Recommended in this episode:
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“With Love, Sean Combs” by Tressie McMillian Cottom in Vanity Fair
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“Sean Combs and the Limits of the ‘Family Man’ Defense” by Jess Grose
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“Entitled | How Male Privilege Hurts Women” by Kate Manne, who coined the term “himpathy”
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“#MeToo Comes for the Archbishop” by Ross Douthat
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“Why We Can’t Quit Brad Pitt” by Scaachi Koul in Slate
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“Red Comet” by Heather Clark
The post Diddy and Our Culture’s ‘Himpathy’ for Powerful Men appeared first on New York Times.
