Cancel Me, Daddy

The 2026 midterm elections resulted in a blue wave, blowout, or “blue-nami,” whatever you call the sweet taste of victory for Democrats!  This week, Katelyn and Christine are so excited to cancel Republicans, they forgot to announce it on the pod.  Our co-hosts provide freewheeling but thoughtful commentary on the political future that starts—now. Democrats must use their new political c...

“Where is James Talarico?” second-rate conservative activists and Nazi enthusiasts asked when the Democratic Texas Senate candidate took a short break from the campaign trail in October. Their uncoordinated right-wing rumors ultimately coalesced to a conspiracy theory claiming that James Talarico had checked into an Ohio mental health facility ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. In reality, James...

If you have been online in the past few weeks, you’ve consumed at least one “take” about the viral “lesbian bar story.” According to The Boston Globe, “all hell broke loose” when the Greenfield, Massachusetts-based Last Ditch bar posted a cheery Instagram announcement about mask optional Saturday nights. The Boston Globe played up the backlash—some from Greenfield community members, some from Inte...

The right-wing outrage machine could not stand Dr. Jason Arday, the University of Cambridge’s youngest ever Black professor. And so, the coalition of journalists, pundits, and academics could not let the 41-year-old’s academic record stand. Scorned white academics in the United Kingdom and from the United States unduly interrogated Jason Arday’s credentials and accomplishments. British tabloids am...

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham made her initial comments about “protecting young girls” in women’s sports to an ESPN.com writer in July. The rest of the summer devolved into a moral panic, the likes of which the WNBA had never seen.  The league doesn’t know what to do with its new transphobia problem—or its old anti-Blackness problem. Doing nothing continues to fuel the right-wing ecos...

Pundits, politicians, and lobbyists have given a pass to Silicon Valley’s tech bros for far too long. We don’t have to understand Peter Thiel or Sam Altman, but we have to understand the "Network State" they want to establish. Journalist Gil Durán exposes tech bros as the leaders of “The Nerd Reich,” the name of his unputdownable new book. They’re the bad guys—and they’re all guys, some we know be...

On July 4, 2025, a loosely affiliated group of demonstrators gathered outside the Prairieland immigration detention camp in solidarity of incarcerated migrants. The Department of Justice (DOJ) would soon recast the demonstrators as an “Antifa cell.” Federal prosecutors would trump up terrorism charges against them. In some cases, the DOJ indicted people who hadn’t even been present at the demonstr...

The Catholic Church has spent two thousand years fighting about who actually gets to be Pope — and this year, it's happening twice at once. The Society of St. Pius X, the traditionalist breakaway group that's been in schism with Rome since the 1980s, just got hit with a fresh round of excommunications. Meanwhile, US officials floated the idea of backing an antipope against Leo XIV after a very pub...

To podcasters, pundits, and outlets on the left, Maine Senate Democratic candidate Graham Platner could do no wrong. Platner’s rugged oyster farmer persona and populist platform appealed to the full spectrum, from center-left Pod Save America’s Jon Faverau to socialist comrade and streamer Hasan Piker. Progressive media men made excuses for Graham Platner’s misdeeds and misconduct. The Nazi tattoo...

Renowned “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley is the latest casualty at CBS News under the leadership of reactionary editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. At a staff meeting the day before his ouster, Pelley accused Weiss of having “no qualifications” for the role and “murdering ‘60 minutes’” in the process. But Scott Pelley represents much more than another journalist out of a job. His firing is the ine...

Anderson Cooper recently left CBS News' "60 Minutes" after more than 20 years on the job. Cooper received glowing media coverage for his voluntary departure in the wake of billionaire David Ellison's acquisition of CBS and installation of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. But Cooper and Weiss share more in common than they'd like to admit. As prominent queer media figures, they're both pa...

Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and Jeff Bezos have the same problem: audience retention. Shapiro's Daily Wire podcast and the conservative website he co-founded are in a prolonged free fall. "CBS Evening News" viewership continues to plummet since Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss installed conservative puppet Tony Dokoupil as the flagship show's host. The Washington Post's bro-y "Make It Make Sense" podcast —...

We’re excited to share a preview of a new podcast we think you’d enjoy: No Such Thing No Such Thing is a show where three best friends and journalists settle their dumb arguments — and yours — by actually doing the research. Hosts Manny Fidel, Noah Friedman, and Devan Joseph start each episode with an argument using just their gut feelings. Then they go out into the world, investigate, talk to exp...

The mainstream media failed to hold Alex Jones accountable for more than 30 years. A satire company is poised to do what journalism wouldn't. Ben Collins knows why. As a former far-right extremism reporter inside mainstream media, he watched newsrooms normalize and platform Alex Jones' conspiracy theories in the name of "both sides" journalism. Now he's chief executive officer of The Onion's paren...

Tech billionaire Sam Altman positions his company’s artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, as humanity’s savior. But the human race can’t trust the OpenAI CEO, according to a recent New Yorker Sam Altman profile. From his earliest days in the tech industry, Altman has toggled between exaggerations (at best) and lies (at worst) about AI’s world-changing potential. When his optimism turned apoc...

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling’s trans persecution feeds off her vast fortune. Rowling uses her estimated $1.2 billion net worth to directly fund anti-trans causes. As executive producer of the upcoming Harry Potter HBO show, Rowling will make even more money that she can funnel into what she calls “women's and girls' sex-based rights.”  Early media criticism of the Harry Potter reboot is...

U.S. presidential administrations typically "hard launch" a war with congressional testimony, press conferences, and high-profile speeches designed to sell it to the American people. The Iran war is different. Nearly a month after the initial joint U.S.-Israel strikes, Trump's foreign policy amounts to leaving the public "on read." His motivations are nebulous, contradictory, and propped up by a m...

Pete Hegseth’s résumé maps the trajectory of a man who failed upward from Fox News host to Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense. As Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings proved, sexual assault allegations are rarely a roadblock to a powerful job in the Trump administration. In fact, Donald Trump has consistently rewarded Hegseth for years of documented bad behavior—from financial mismanagement o...

How deep does the media’s complicity go? In this episode of Cancel Me, Daddy, Katelyn Burns and Christine Grimaldi unpack the disturbing connection between the "Shitty Media Men" list, the MeToo movement, and the recently released Epstein files. While the world focuses on the spectacle, we dig into the systems that allowed abuse to thrive. We explore how names on the infamous 2017 "Shitty Media Me...

It is Cancel Me, Daddy’s fifth anniversary! This week, former co-host Oliver joins Katelyn and Christine to discuss all the panic around cancel culture. Oliver and Katelyn pinpoint how they defined cancellation when the podcast started in 2021 and what has and hasn’t changed about it over the past five years. Some of the very same “cancellation grifters”—Bari Weiss, Dave Chappelle, and J.K. Rowlin...

You can’t log onto social media or otherwise tune into the news without witnessing extremely disturbing images of masked federal agents assaulting and arresting people in Minneapolis. We’re talking bystanders, legal observers, passerbys, immigrants, citizens—everyone in ICE’s wake. This week, Katelyn and Christine welcome New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie to the pod. Jamelle’s work ce...

Was the Harper’s “free speech” letter really about defending open debate—or about protecting powerful media elites from criticism and consequences? In this episode, we expose how the Harper’s letter, its transphobic signers, and the larger “cancel culture” panic helped shield figures like J.K. Rowling and Bari Weiss while the real threats to free speech exploded under Trump. More than 150 journali...

Think cancel culture is new? The Catholic Church invented it in the Middle Ages. Being burned at the stake was the ultimate deplatforming. In the 15th and 16th centuries, figures like Joan of Arc, Giordano Bruno, and Jan Hus faced the stake for the crime of heresy. But was heresy actually just a way to crush dissent? This week, medievalist and historian Eleanor Janega (@GoingMedieval) joins Kately...

Olivia Nuzzi is in the headlines again for an alleged inappropriate relationship with a source. Nuzzi’s former partner, Ryan Lizza, is using his newsletter to make the claims about Nuzzi and…former Republican presidential candidate Mark Sanford in 2020. Lizza’s ongoing, multi-part series about Nuzzi amid her book launch is an uncomfortable read for its florid prose and revenge porn vibes. Never fo...

Democrats’ recent, high-profile gubernatorial and mayoral victories across the country proved the value in candidates sticking to their pro-equality values. Whereas former presidential candidate Kamala Harris dodged Republicans’ notorious, bigoted anti-transgender playbook from the 2024 presidential election cycle, Virginia’s governor-elect, Abigail Spanberger, and New Jersey’s governor-elect, Mik...