Cancel Me, Daddy

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...

There’s a lot of overlap between cancel culture and cultural panics in which the anti-hero of the week profits off their notoriety. This week, Kate and Christine co-host a very special crossover episode with Panic World, journalist Ryan Broderick’s podcast about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. As we like to say at Cancel Me, Daddy, “all the panic around cance...

The Cancel Culture Grift Economy™ has once again rewarded Bari Weiss. Support CMD on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cancelmedaddy CBS News anointed Weiss—the former New York Times op-ed columnist turned so-called Free Press founder—as the broadcast network’s editor-in-chief. What was once a mainstream media mainstay is poised to transform into a reactionary mouthpiece. Weiss will report directly...

Why does America's infrastructure prioritize cars over people? In this episode, we're joined by the hosts of The War on Cars podcast to expose the decades of pro-car propaganda that shaped our cities—and discuss how politicians like Zohran Mamdani are fighting back with bold transit plans. We break down: 🚗 How the auto industry manufactured car dependency 🚇 Why public transportation became a pol...

Jimmy Kimmel might be getting his show back after a pause following his comments about Charlie Kirk's death, but dozens of other people have lost their livelihood for commenting on it. Former NBC News Internet and Culture Writer Kat Tenbarge joins co-hosts Katelyn Burns and Christine Grimaldi on this week's episode to discuss the free speech crisis currently facing the US. Can free speech last thr...

According to the centrist group Third Way, Democrats should scrub their vocabulary of 45 words and phrases spanning six pejoratively titled categories: therapy-speak, seminar-room language, organizer jargon, gender/orientation correctness, the shifting language of racial constructs, and explaining away crime. “Was it something I said?” Third Way asks of Democrats’ losing streak. No—winning is some...

Age verification laws are the latest front in the religious right's movement to censor your speech and limit your Internet access, including what information you can access. Whitewashed as interventions to "protect children," these conservative laws and their so-called content moderation actually make it more dangerous for kids, especially trans and queer kids cut off from digital lifelines. No on...

Excommunicated! Executed! Deposed! What did today’s equivalent of cancellation look like in Medieval Times? For Edward II, it was losing the throne. For Anne Boleyn, it was losing her head. Get your Justice for Anne Boleyn merch: https://www.cancelmedaddy.store This week, Katelyn and Christine time travel through cancel culture history with Dr. Eleanor Janega, co-host of the hit history podcast “G...

Donald Trump is bungling the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in real time. The Trump-Epstein connection is the politics news of the month, with no end in sight to further developments about the extent of the so-called “Epstein files” that may or may not be in the administration’s possession. Trump’s MAGA base is openly angry at him for seemingly the first time over the course of two administrations. Some...

In this exclusive interview, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander reveals how he became the kingmaker behind Zohran Mamdani's shocking primary victory over Andrew Cuomo. While mainstream media missed the story, we dive deep into the political strategy that helped Mamdani defeat establishment candidates in the race for NYC mayor. Zohran Mamdani's upset victory on his way to possibly becoming the next New Yo...