Grifty Podcast Por Azadeh Ghafari arte de portada

Grifty

Grifty

De: Azadeh Ghafari
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Intro take off eipsode of Grifty, a late-stage capitalism audio newsletter by and about false idols. With Azadeh Ghafari, Baktaash Sorkhabi, Amanda Motell, and Dr. Thomas Oden.2023 Ciencia Política Higiene y Vida Saludable Política y Gobierno Psicología Psicología y Salud Mental
Episodios
  • Episode 46: Truth or D.A.R.E, the T-Shirts and Transvestigations Leading Us Nowhere

    Episode 46: Truth or D.A.R.E, the T-Shirts and Transvestigations Leading Us Nowhere
    Nov 19 2025
    Episode Summary Welcome back to Grifty Pod. If you are listening to this episode without a helmet or a seatbelt, you are far braver than we are. This week felt like the entire nation had a stroke while standing upright. The Epstein documents dropped and inside that cursed file dump we discovered the soul bending phrase Trump and Bubba which was not on any of our bingo cards. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to pick a political fistfight with Trump and it looked like two malfunctioning Roombas colliding in a hallway. Every headline seemed to be written by a bored demon trapped in a newsroom. So today we are taking you on a tour of American unreality. First we slide back into the nineties to revisit the DARE program which gave entire generations a deeply misplaced sense of safety. Then we blast forward to the current moment where right wing influencers are turning on their own in something called transvestigation which is exactly as deranged as it sounds. The circus is in town. Let us begin. What You'll Learn in This Episode The DARE Program and the Comforting Lie That Posters Fix Everything Charlie and Erika Kirk and the Digital Fever Dream of Transvestigations Is it A Grift? Real News or Fake Grift Fever Dream? The DARE Program and the Comforting Lie That Posters Fix Everything What DARE Was Selling The DARE program arrived in Los Angeles in 1983 and quickly metastasized into a national tradition. A smiling uniformed officer would walk into an elementary school classroom and deliver a series of highly scripted moral lectures about resisting drugs, alcohol and peer pressure. Children signed pledges. Children received neon yellow T shirts that glowed like irradiated dandelions. Children were assured that they were now fortified against the evils of the world. By the mid nineties DARE had infected more than seventy percent of school districts across the United States. It was not a curriculum so much as a branding operation. Parents adored it. Politicians bragged about it. The police treated it like a goodwill tour. The problem is that the entire thing did not work. Multiple meta analyses found that DARE had either no measurable effect on future drug use or effects so small they barely registered. A few studies found that students who completed DARE even experimented more possibly because children are curious, confused and easily entertained by forbidden concepts. The program was built on slogans rather than science. It substituted good intentions for meaningful intervention. It made addiction look like a moral failure instead of the complex social crisis it is. DARE was America in miniature. A shiny T-shirt pretending to be a solution. Why This Matters Today DARE is a perfect case study in institutional showmanship. It demonstrates our national desire for easy answers. It teaches us that if something feels helpful enough people will stop asking whether it is actually helpful. This is how grifts survive. This is how nostalgic myth becomes public memory. ⸻ Charlie and Erika Kirk and the Digital Fever Dream of Transvestigations What Transvestigation Actually Is Transvestigation is a conspiracy subculture devoted to claiming that public figures are secretly transgender. The reasoning is not medical, psychological or scientific. It is forensic fan fiction. These groups analyze photos of celebrities and politicians and apply invented rules about jaw shape collarbone angle shoulder width rib cage length wrist thickness and something they ominously call skull markers. There is no science behind it. There is no method behind it. There is only paranoia amplified by people who believe they are citizen detectives protecting the world from a conspiracy that does not exist. For years this fringe movement targeted women on the left. Michelle Obama was their white whale. They also went after celebrities like Taylor Swift, Meghan Markle, Serena Williams and Adele. Any woman with a strong jawline or athletic build was declared part of a secret gender agenda. The harassment has been relentless. But now the movement has turned inward. They have run out of enemies and begun pointing their microscopes at their own heroes. What They Are Saying About Erika Kirk According to the THEM article and recent digital surveillance here are the claims: They say her jawline fits what they insist is a male coded shape. They circulate side by side photos comparing her face to older images of male celebrities and trans women in transition even though none of the comparisons are coherent. They insist her collarbones sit too high and too straight. They point to photos where her shoulders look square in certain angles and treat this as biological evidence. They claim her wrists appear too thick in one photo where she is holding a water bottle. They argue that the way her thumb rests on a plastic bottle is masculine. This is considered a smoking gun in transvestigation circles. They point to her rib cage and claim it is too long for a woman...
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    56 m
  • Episode 45: You Can't Sing

    Episode 45: You Can't Sing
    Nov 12 2025
    41 m
  • Episode 44: Water, Winter and Washington: Alaska's Fight for Survival and Sovereignty ft. Dr. Brian Heaslet

    Episode 44: Water, Winter and Washington: Alaska's Fight for Survival and Sovereignty ft. Dr. Brian Heaslet
    Oct 29 2025

    This week on Grifty, we are heading north… way north. where climate change, government chaos, and corporate greed have collided at once.

    Alaska is in free fall. A typhoon has slammed the western coast, wiping out villages and food stores that took generations to build. The federal government is shut down, freezing aid and cutting off SNAP benefits for tens of thousands. While people are trying to keep their families fed, the Trump administration is approving new oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

    This is not about the weather. It is about what happens when a government built on extraction leaves its people to fend for themselves. It is about sovereignty, survival, and the politics of pretending the climate crisis is still up for debate.

    We are joined by Dr. Brian Heaslet, a lifelong Alaskan who knows what it takes to keep food and supplies moving across the most isolated parts of the state. Also joining is our own Sierra Montoya, bringing her sharp Alaskan insight and humor to unpack what life in the Last Frontier really looks like when disaster meets politics.
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    56 m
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