Brittany Dawn

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that so loves the world that we've given our only begotten co-hosts.

It broke down halfway through.

It broke down halfway through.

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It started strong.

The strongest part was your confidence when you said, I've got one.

You should know well enough by now to know, ooh, it's going to be dark.

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Right.

It takes me a minute sometimes to catch John to be like, oh, his Bible talk is happening.

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I am Michael Hubbs.

I am Aubrey Gordon.

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Michael.

Aubrey.

Today.

Today.

We are talking about Brittany Dawn.

I'm so excited because all, literally all I know is that there's something, something, Christian weight loss, something, something.

I've never heard of this person.

Bless.

A couple of content notes before we get into it.

There are a lot to be had for today's episode.

We are going to talk about...

police violence.

We are going to talk about cruelty to animals.

We are going to hit on some transphobic rhetoric.

We're going to talk about miscarriage.

I feel like Stefan.

This episode has everything.

I feel like you're doing this to get me interested.

It's like a writing prompt.

It's like,

how can I tie all of these things together?

But then what about you?

Are you familiar with Brittany Dawn?

I was not before this episode.

This was one that was heavily, heavily requested of us.

So I thought I would dig in and see what was there.

And I will tell you, what was there was a kernel of a conflict that I understood.

And then a bunch of things that grew up around that sort of kernel of a conflict

that made me feel kind of complicated.

I have complex feelings on this one.

So we're going to invite folks into the complexity.

I don't like these episodes.

I don't like it when current day events are as complicated as history.

So I thought we would start out with an Instagram post, as we often do on an influencer episode.

Let's take a look at the Instagram.

I'm about to be influenced.

I am going to ask you to describe the post that I just sent.

Wow.

Good God.

Yep.

So this is from an account called Real Brittany Dawn.

It's a photo of like an extremely thin woman wearing like bikini bottoms and a crop top.

top and she's sideways to the camera like mug shot style so you can see how like impossibly flat her stomach is.

Like she looked two-dimensional.

Yeah.

The post says, facts every female should know.

One, every girl has roles when they bend over.

Two, when someone says you're beautiful, they're not lying.

Three, any girl you ask will have a stretch mark, they're beyond normal.

Four, you should have more confidence.

It's actually really attractive.

Five, you're allowed to fall in love with yourself, and you should.

Six, it's okay to not love every part of your body, but you should.

Seven, everyone's boobs are uneven.

We just did an entire bonus episode about my wax skeleton, so I feel seen by this.

Eight, you should be a priority, not a second option, last resort, or a backup plan.

Nine, you're a woman.

That alone makes you pretty damn remarkable.

10.

Most of all, even on days when you're makeupless slash lounging in sweats, you're absolutely beautiful.

And it's from 250 weeks ago, which is a weird way to do that, but I guess that's like five years.

Tell me your thoughts, Michael.

Man, I feel so mean

saying this, but it's like clearly like a thirst photo of like a very conventionally attractive woman who's like, you don't have to be conventionally attractive, Bestie.

It's very, I feel like it's very

emblematic of the time that we're in where it's all about like loving yourself and body positivity and all this.

But it's like, it's oftentimes very like conventionally attractive people telling this to you.

And so it's like a weird, like the message and the messenger are just like incongruent.

But then if you talk about it, you sound like such a dick.

Yeah.

You're the one shaming someone for being in a bikini just because she's thin.

Yeah.

It's like, that's not right.

It's just annoying.

Take it quite in that way.

I think there is a tendency to want to believe that it is dickish to talk about this kind of stuff.

You're like, let's be dickish, Mike.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, Mike.

Join me.

I'm going out on a limb, baby.

Come on out.

There's a nice breeze.

You're like, we are going to be skinny shaming today, Mike.

You know what?

It's fucking real and we're doing it.

Get in, loser.

We're skinny shaming.

No, I think, look, I think there are a few things here that feel like, as you have noted, like sort of a rich text for a cultural moment,

which is this idea that you should love your body and love its flaws and sort of perform a kind of satisfaction with your body, right?

Yeah.

All the while continuing to pursue pretty ruthless and continually narrow standards of both beauty and health, right?

And when someone my size or shape or someone who looks like me says these same things, what we are met with is like threats and harassment and like just wild, intense, awful reactions.

If these are things that resonate with you, by all means, go to town.

It feels like it is worth noting that those are things that some people are culturally permitted to say and some people are not.

Yeah.

Right.

Dude, if you're going to start with number one, everybody has roles when they bend over.

Show me the roles.

Totally.

You're showing me a distinct lack of roles.

I see like no body fat on this person.

Also, no stretch marks.

Also, no uneven boobs.

Like, none of what she is mentioning is depicted here.

Well, I can't see the boobs.

I need to see more to determine the boobs.

I'll make a determination at a later time.

We'll be our official boob judge for today.

That's what people go to this show for.

They're like, I want to hear Mike comment on women's bodies.

I want to hear a man's opinion.

Noted women body expert Michael Hoggs.

I mean, the other thing I'll say about that, number one, is every girl has roles when they bend over is a very specific, that's speaking to a specific audience.

It's not speaking to me.

Right.

I have roles when I stand up.

I have roles when I lay down.

I have roles in every, like there's not a, there's not an angle on me or a posture on me that doesn't have roles, right?

So it's normalizing this for a very specific group of people who are close to thinness.

You know, I only followed like six people on Instagram.

I had to unfollow this guy who I added and he posted like mirror selfies of like, I used to be so ashamed of my body, but like I finally sort of made peace with the way that I look.

He's like tall and thin and lean and he has like a visible six pack.

He's always been thin and lean and he's like insecure about being skinny, but it's like he has like the body that I literally would have killed for in high school, like for much of my young life.

It was like I wanted to look like Guy Pierce in Memento and he looked like fucking Guy Pierce in Memento and like I don't have any like animus toward this person.

It's it's totally legible as human behavior to me.

I just don't want to encounter that on social media.

I don't really, that's sort of why I only use Instagram to like keep in touch with like high school friends and people that I know personally.

Yeah, that's my personal Instagram account as well.

It's just like straight up like people I know and then comedians.

That's it.

And a couple of like tattoo artists.

And your

personal insta is mostly your dog.

Not mostly.

Yeah.

I 100% took a video of him this morning scratching at his food bowl and then I had to talk myself out of posting it.

Why?

You should have posted it, Aubrey.

Well, just like

who needs to see a dog scratching at a dog bowl?

You should have been like, one,

every dog scratches its bowl.

Two,

believe in yourself and your dog.

You got to make it into inspo, Aubrey, and then it's okay to post.

So, Michael, shall we start at the start with Brittany Dawn?

Should I not have clicked on her Instagram profile?

I'm on her Instagram profile.

Oh, no, Mike.

Oh, there's a category in her stories for cyberbullying.

Yeah.

That's probably where we're, that's where we're headed, I guess.

We'll get there.

Okay.

Brittany Dawn was born in 1991 in Texas.

There is not a lot out there about her childhood or even about her early rise because she is a person who had a lot of pretty organic growth or at least organic seeming growth on social media.

That is borne out today.

She has 442,000 subscribers on YouTube, 483,000 followers on Instagram, and she has 1.3 million followers on TikTok.

That's a lot for just like a normal ass person.

Most of what we know about Brittany Dawn's early life are things that she herself has said in videos and Instagram posts and all of that kind of stuff.

She reports that she worked as a vet tech in early adulthood for several years.

From there, she gets into a bodybuilding world.

Okay.

She loses a small amount of weight.

I think the number that I saw in one of her early posts was like 30 pounds.

Oh, you love this.

This is, this is Aubrey Catnip.

Like the thin person who lost a tiny amount of weight and then becomes like a weight loss influencer.

Absolutely.

So she like her early Instagram posts are an overwhelming number of before and after photos of herself split screened.

Okay.

She starts looking more muscular because she's bodybuilding.

She starts looking more toned.

And these before and after photos of essentially like a thin person who's not particularly toned and then a thin person who's thinner really, really, really take off on social media.

People

eat it up.

Okay, I couldn't help myself when I Google image searched for Brittany Dawn 2014.

Damn it, Michael.

And yeah, she's like super buff.

She does look like a bodybuilder.

And like her before pictures are all just like a normal looking person.

As Brittany Dawn is posting her sort of fitness content, she also starts talking about

her own personal history of what she considers problem problem drinking and also disordered eating.

She tags her posts with ED recovery hashtags.

She includes like a bunch of like ED warrior kind of stuff.

And some of those posts are before and after photos, which is an extremely wild choice to make to say, I'm talking about my ED recovery.

Here are my before and after photos.

Which means other people who are looking for eating disorder recovery content are going to to click through and get these kinds of before and after photos, which they are a very clear statement of the before photo is what a body should not look like and an after photo is what a body should look like, right?

And to your point earlier, I would say her before photos are something that I absolutely would have loved to have had in like high school and college.

Yeah.

So I'm sending you a quote from a piece from the Dallas Morning News.

Okay.

It says, over five or so years, Brittany Dawn grew her following by posting pictures and videos about her own transformation and a seemingly idyllic lifestyle.

Her feed is filled with inspirational messages.

It takes $0 to be a decent person with a good heart, images of her modeling fitness wear, healthy snacks, and two-foot pizzas, trips to Hawaii, a pit bull with 10,000 followers of its own, and a Range Rover.

Many of her followers say her life looked like something they wanted for themselves, someone who practiced what she preached.

Okay, I have no idea where this episode is going, so I'm like,

what are we foreshadowing here?

We're not foreshadowing much here.

This is genuinely like a fast-forward.

This is a wealthy, thin white woman who sort of has the world by the string, and she's doing very standard-issue influencer stuff.

Aubrey, there is nothing standard-issue about two-foot pizzas.

Okay, okay.

I don't even know what that is.

As her following grows during this time, she starts offering services to her her followers for a fee.

Oh.

She starts offering personalized meal plans.

Okay.

She offers macronutrient checks.

She offers personal training and one-on-one fitness coaching.

Okay.

All of the services have different prices, but the personalized meal plans go for up to $300.

Oh, okay.

Which is a fair amount of money for a plan and not any food.

I was just going to say it sounds low, but I'm also low.

My brain is so fucking warped by doing so many of these episodes on these grifters.

That's so much less than a Pete Evans retreat.

Yeah, exactly.

We've looked into so many other fucking weird hists.

Yeah, yeah.

Brittany Dawn has claimed that she helped 5,000 clients during this time, but when she was later asked to confirm that, she didn't know how many clients she had and neither did her manager.

So I'm guessing that's an aspirational scale.

I'm guessing that skews a little larger than what she actually did.

It's wild that you can just do do this by like being like a hot lady who posts on Instagram.

So all of this is happening.

Folks are paying her for meal plans, all of that kind of stuff.

And in 2018 and into 2019, her customers start to connect through a Facebook group.

And as they start posting about their experiences, they figure a few things out.

The first thing that they figure out is that their personalized nutrition plans were not personalized at all.

Of course.

That's like that dude who was making personalized playlists for ladies that he met on the internet, and then it turned out they were all just the same playlist.

It's all just an endless loop of, hey, there, Delilah, or something.

It's Connor Oberst, and they all, they all should have seen right through it.

They also figure out that their one-on-one support, which some of the plans build, like you get, you know, personal support from Brittany, were a lot of generic texts that were like, you got got this, girl.

Oh, hell yeah.

So she's automated all this shit.

It sure seems like it.

There are also funny little details about this.

One customer ordered something that came with a packet of, that said it came with 21 amazing recipes, and the packet arrived and it only had 11 recipes in it.

Nice.

I wanted there to be like, there was, not only was it not 21 amazing recipes, it was just 11 recipes and they were just okay.

The next thing that they figure out is that many customers had previously dealt with eating disorders and signed on because they felt like this was a safe way to do what nearly everyone feels pressure to do, right?

Which is sort of quote unquote get healthy, which just means get thin.

Man, you know, you have a bad business model when like it works until your customers start speaking with one another.

It's a bad sign.

So folks start going back through her old posts and screen-grabbing Instagram posts that show her using hashtags like ED Warrior, Eating Disorder Warrior, and also hashtags in the same post like be healthy and skip dinner.

Yeah, that's not what I would classify as ED recovery necessarily.

Right.

I would describe that with the term ED somewhere in there.

They also figure out

that some of them have requested refunds when they sort of figured this out and they were like, oh, well, if it's not personalized, give me my money back.

What?

Those requests for refunds rarely even got a response email.

Those who sort of escalated to complaining on social media got an even clearer message.

Their comments were deleted and their accounts were blocked by Brittany Dawn.

Another good sign.

The handful of customers who were offered refunds were offered either partial refunds or were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement before getting their up to $300.

The funny thing is she could actually hide behind like technicalities and be like, well, it was personalized.

You just happened to have the same characteristics as every single other person, unfortunately.

There's a path to this that I can

sort of understand, which is like up to 5,000 clients is a lot of people to manage, especially if you're not trained, especially if you don't have staff.

Yeah.

Like, I think there's a good faith way of getting here.

I don't know that Brittany Dawn took that good faith way to get here.

But usually, if you sort of take that route, you would go, I'm so sorry.

Let me level with you.

Here's what happened.

Yeah.

Of course, you'll get a refund.

This is what we're going to do when we're on cameo.

Finally, we're like, you're all getting the same fucking thing.

One of my favorite late-night rabbit holes to fall down on the internet is

cameo pricing.

Oh, yeah.

Same.

I know.

It's so fascinating.

I know.

To be like, how much do you think Chris Harrison, the disgraced former host of The Bachelor, charges?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then my guess is always wrong because it's like $500.

And there's weird like Trump world people on there whose like prices are shockingly high.

And you're like, does someone want a happy birthday message from Michael Flynn?

Hey, it's the mooch.

Hey, congratulations on your retirement.

Okay, so folks start talking about their experiences in this Facebook group and start figuring out that no one's getting what they paid for and also very few people are getting refunds.

So it starts to leak out more broadly, right?

Folks start commenting on her public posts being like, hey, can you give me a refund?

People start talking about it more online.

And it gains so much steam that a

YouTube prankster, Cassidy Campbell,

creates a video

drink Brittany Dawn.

These were the people that would just like walk up to people in grocery stores and be like, MAT!

Yeah, and then like scare them.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh, gotcha.

It's like, yeah, it's just a human reaction to you being a prick and like ruining someone's day.

Congratulations.

You are absolutely not going to watch this video because I understand what your discomfort threshold is.

And this is like 60 points above that.

Oh, really?

It is so uncomfortable.

Now I kind of want to watch it, Aubrey.

Michael.

What's it it like?

Describe it to me first.

Let me know.

Let me know what I'm to expect.

Okay, so the video is absolutely bizarre.

Okay.

Cassidy Campbell is sort of dressed up.

He's got a costume.

It's a very weird, sort of broad caricature of this cartoonish idea of small-town conservative bigots.

The look is very tiger king.

I'm already uncomfortable.

Mullet, baseball hat,

camo.

Extremely uncomfortable.

Handlebar mustache.

Okay, he keeps saying, Murica, good God, which like hasn't been funny or insightful in a solid decade.

Yeah, if we two 41-year-olds are telling you that

shit is not funny anymore,

if we, if we're over it, wow.

Cassidy Campbell is at a fitness expo where Brittany Dawn has a booth.

Okay.

In this video, he does include a pretty lengthy segment where he's giving context.

He's playing like videos, front-facing videos from people on TikTok and Instagram talking about their personal experiences and how rough it was.

So like it is

sort of signal boosting that stuff, but mostly it's just this like wild, shitty, flat caricature

of a guy going, one, two, three, Trump.

Like, okay.

He sort of makes his way into this fitness expo.

He goes up to Brittany Dawn's booth.

He sort of gets her attention, and then he absolutely just starts shouting and unloading on her.

What?

About how she stole money from his daughter, and she just wants her money back, but she won't give the money back.

It is very uncomfortable, and it has the energy of...

a random dude walking up to a lady in a public space

shouting at her also what's the point of the costume if you're just gonna walk up to somebody and yell at them yeah yeah you could have just straight up asked some direct questions.

Say, hi.

Without doing this weird deep character work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is, this is like a tension that I feel like we both think about a lot in like doing episodes like this, that like whenever there's a female influencer who's kind of problematic, criticisms tip into like rank misogyny extremely quickly.

Yeah, I mean, we'll get into it.

There is

not quite cottage industry, but there is definitely like a community of people who are just like, fuck this lady.

Yeah, it becomes anti-fandom really quickly where literally anything the person does becomes grounds to criticize them and like the justified critiques or like the scale of the justified critiques get buried under all this other stuff.

Yes, it is full bitch eating crackers territory.

Yeah, that's what I was about to say, but I didn't know if you knew that term because that term's problematic.

Oh Michael, if you think I'm not listening to your bonus episodes,

you're crazy.

Do you want to say what bitch eating crackers is, just in case people don't know?

So, for those of you who are not subscribers to the bonus content of If Books Could Kill, Bitch Eating Crackers is sort of this shorthand for like when you hate someone so much that them just eating crackers elicits a negative response from you, that you start going like, look at this bitch eating crackers.

Like,

okay.

And it's almost always women who this happens to.

Like, you see the derangement.

You see the beginning of, like, okay, there's like real reasons to criticize this person.

And then very quickly, you're like, wait a minute, the things that people are criticizing her for are like eating crackers type stuff.

So this video ends up getting 1.8 million views, which is absolutely bonkers to me.

After this happens, Brittany Dawn posts an apology video, a classic of the YouTube genre, and it is very weird.

Okay.

And it is very wooden.

Okay.

It has since been taken down, but I found an alternate upload.

And I

think maybe you and I should watch the first little bit of that too.

Okay.

Even if we end up cutting it out, it's just a lot.

I like our little watch parties.

I like our little watch parties too.

Also, I just feel like I'm like, let's stretch out today.

Yeah, let's just go for it.

Let's relax.

Let's

hang.

Hang out in the living room of our show.

Okay.

Here is the

internet archive.

Archive.org YouTube link.

I didn't know that was possible.

Oh,

it plays everything?

Welcome.

Fuck yes.

This video goes out in February of 2019.

Hey guys,

I'm not really sure where to start this video.

I am

scared to film this video.

There's some things on the surface that have come to surface that have come to fruition that need to be addressed and so I'm here to do that and I'm here to put everything to rest once and for all.

I apologize to anyone who feels like they got scammed from me and I genuinely promised that my intentions from the start were pure.

I wanted to help and impact as many women as I could because I felt like this is why I was given this incredible platform.

When you're given an opportunity like this, you would be stupid not to take it and run with it.

And unfortunately, I ran too fast for one person.

These claims are coming from years ago after I got launched into a business that took off so fast that I didn't know how to mentally handle it.

I did what I knew to do to the best of my ability.

I didn't know what I was signing up for simply because being an influencer and running a fitness influencer business was not really a thing back then.

Therefore, I didn't have much guidance.

Tell me about your reactions to this so far.

Yeah, so I guess it's a little wooden.

She's reading off of her phone and kind of pausing to look at the camera every now and again.

Maybe this is like bad of me, but like I am in my head comparing her to like all of the other influencers and like all of the other scammy bullshit.

Yeah.

This is obviously indefensible behavior, but it's it's like on a grading on a curve.

This is not like that bad.

Yeah.

I find it difficult to get worked up about this.

Yeah, I can understand that.

And I felt that way at this point in the research as well.

Okay.

And then my feelings changed.

Okay.

She talks about

getting

death threats after the Cassidy Campbell video.

She talks about getting harassment.

She talks about all kinds of stuff.

She's

pretty widely known at this point to be a fairly unreliable narrator, or at least an untrusted narrator.

So she's talking about this stuff, and people are already like

not thrilled with her.

So to have this kind of statement where she's reading off of her phone, where this is a side note and a real pet peeve, her dryer is on in the background.

Dude, I was wondering what that sounds like.

That was her pit bull.

Yeah, like a pair of overalls or a button or something.

It's like clickety, clickety, click.

The other thing to know about this video is that she monetized it.

Okay.

It had ads.

She included affiliate links.

And people were like, why are you making money off of your apology for scamming people out of money?

Yeah.

So it's like not, again, like, I'm not going to make a federal case out of it, but I get why it left a bad taste in folks' mouths, right?

Like, I, that, fair.

Understanding.

It's not good.

It's not, it's not that bad, but it's definitely not good.

Within just a few days of that, on February 13th,

the Brittany Dawn backlash becomes a story in national news media, and Brittany Dawn goes on Good Morning America.

Yeah, I have this link in my right-hand bar.

Yeah, you sure do.

Yeah, it's like suggesting this to me now.

Brittany is sort of briefly quoted on camera in the piece, and she says, quote, I jumped into an industry that had had no instruction manual.

I'm basically going through uncharted territory and I'm doing the best that I can to the best of my ability.

I'm using this as a tool to learn and to grow as a professional and to move forward.

All of this only sort of serves to amplify customers' really troubling stories, right?

Someone comes forward in all of this media and says

that she was very thin at the time that she started with Brittany Dawn.

When she decided to stop doing the Britney Dawn routine, she was at 80 pounds.

Oh, wow.

Another customer disclosed that she had anorexia and was still put on a quote-unquote personalized plan of 1,245 calories

paired with high-intensity interval training.

Another person said that they weighed around 200 pounds when they were

doing sort of Britney Dawn's program and that they passed out from inadequate nutrition.

In November of that year, November of 2019, so we're fast-forwarding like nine months, she announces that the focus of her social media presence is changing.

She says that health and fitness are important to her, but that her identity is shifting, and now her identity is in Christ.

Okay.

Her content shifts very quickly from primarily fitness and weight loss content to

evangelical content that I would say is even niche within evangelical spaces.

Oh, really?

There's a real Pentecostal sort of tenor to what she's doing.

So she's like, she's in a tent.

She's doing revival stuff.

She's in her Range Rover filming

videos.

on her iPhone camera.

So we're going from, here's how to order a low calorie drink at Starbucks and like, here's the lunges that I'm doing

to the video that I just sent you.

Okay.

And she is posting this around Joe Biden's inauguration.

That's when this video comes out.

That direction.

Okay.

So the thumbnail is like her looking concerned in that like a YouTube thumbnail, like, I'm reacting to this way.

And then the big caption in the thumbnail is, this is unsettling.

I don't care if you're red, blue, Republican, Democrat.

I don't care what state you live in.

I don't care what color state the state that you live in is.

I don't care about any of that.

This isn't a video about my political stance.

This is not a video about who I voted for or anything in regards to that.

This is a video about what the Holy Spirit is revealing to me and so many others in this day and age.

And things are shifting and they're shifting fast.

The first thing that I found incredibly disturbing yesterday was during the inauguration when Lady Gaga was up there.

If you don't already know, Lady Gaga is tied into witchcraft.

I am going to try to put some information here on the screen as I talk, sharing this and stating this and just showing you guys the facts.

If you dig even this an inch deep, you will find this.

It's out there.

Like it's not trying to be hidden.

She has made this known.

The performance that she put on yesterday was more than disturbing.

It reminded me of Hunger Games from the get-go.

And then on top of that, on top of of her whole outfit, her whole get-up, she was also wearing the Dove of Peace symbol, also in Hunger Games.

A little disturbing.

Lots of red flags going on there.

Lady Gaga is also tied to Marina Amabrovic.

Now, if you don't know who she is, Google her name.

She is a witch.

They're both into spirit cooking and soul cooking.

And yesterday, the slogan for them was, fight for the soul of our nation.

Biden said that he is going to reverse any and all laws that were made or put into place against abortion when he gets in the White House.

That he wants to do away with gender terms like niece,

nephew, brother,

sister, mother, father.

I'm sorry.

What?

How are people not seeing these red flags?

The opening prayer in the Senate two weeks ago, I believe it was two or three weeks ago, in itself was disturbing.

Not only were they praying to all these other gods, but they closed that prayer out with a men and a woman.

I'm sorry.

Do you even know what amen means?

Do you even know what amen amen means?

But we live in this culture that is so sensitive and so easily offended by anything and everything, including a prayer now, that our government, who doesn't want to offend anyone, is now mixing and molding God's word for what they want it to be instead of submitting to his authority of who he is and who he has always been.

And I just want to say this, if you are offended by anything that I say in this video, I really, as a sister in Christ, want you to take that offense to the feet of Jesus and ask him, ask the Holy Spirit to reveal these things to you because if you're following the same Jesus that I am, he will.

I love that the clip that we just watched started with her being like, Marina Abramovich is a witch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Lady Gaga was dressed like the Hunger Games.

And then it ends with her going, people are so offended by everything these days.

I'm like, an outfit that reminded you of a movie.

What's happening?

The thing is, is Hunger Games, that's not even like a sacrilegious text.

That's not, like, that's not like witchcraft or anything.

That's just like a sci-fi movie.

Yeah, there's no occult element to it.

So I don't know what.

I don't know what her.

I don't know what heroes are.

I mean, to be fair, Lady Yaga's outfit did look a little Hunger Games, but like that doesn't like mean anything.

Also, the symbol in the Hunger Games was the mocking J, not a dove.

A dove just only always means peace.

Yeah, that's like a Christian thing.

There is so much in this video that I can do.

We can go line by line, Aubrey.

We can just

do this all day.

Particularly, I wanted to dig in with you on

Biden wants to do away with gendered terms like niece.

That's actually true, but all of the vowels will be replaced by X's.

Nix fuse.

I love it.

I love it when these deranged religious people say stuff about like language and like pronouns and stuff that just like literally doesn't make sense.

They're like, they want to do away with pronouns.

Like that in English, that would actually make it very difficult to communicate.

I don't think anyone's actually proposing that.

Well, and also just like, as a, you know, former public policy person, when she's like, he wants to do away with all these names for nieces and wife and husband and nephew, my brain is trying so hard to figure out what policy that would be.

Yeah, tell me the mechanics of that, Brittany.

What are the mechanics by which someone could ban

stop people from saying words?

I mean, we're so awash in this stuff that it is almost campy at this point.

But like, this is someone who's like become unglued from reality on some level.

And she's, she's clearly reading like far-right

Facebook group ass news sources that just say shit that is just doesn't make any fucking sense.

It's like, yeah, the Democrats want to ban all religions.

Yeah.

And then the weird stuff with the symbolism is just like pure QAnon.

It's pure QAnon.

It's also pure national treasure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, they put the symbol on the dollar bill.

This is a fucking, this is a generation that read too much fucking encyclopedia Brown growing up, and we all think this is the way to like solve crimes.

And too much Dan Brown.

The funny thing is, I love the Da Vinci code so much because it's just openly such fucking garbage.

And like in a really fun way, like I feel like the writer kind of knows that it's garbage and it's just like very well executed garbage.

Listen, I'm over here dunking on National Treasure, and I 100% watched National Treasure Book of Secrets last week.

So, around this time that Brittany Dawn is shifting her content, she's also shifting what she is selling to her followers.

Okay.

And she starts selling tickets to religious retreats.

Okay, that makes sense.

Where she baptizes attendees.

That's actually, that's a way better business model.

The reaction from at least the most vocal vocal sort of Christian folks responding to this is very negative.

Charging someone to be baptized, like, what are we doing?

Especially when that someone isn't clergy, feels really wild.

I mean, sure.

But also, like, it's a weird case to like all of a sudden be offended at the intersection between commerce and Christianity, guys.

Someone hasn't heard of Joel Osteen.

Yeah, Brittany Dawn is not like even in the top 1,000 of like

fucking mega church ass grifters doing this shit.

So this may seem like a hard turn from sort of fitness content into

Pentecostal leaning evangelical content,

but Christian fitness has a surprisingly long history.

Ooh, you are doing context.

Here we go.

So the modern roots of that connection stretch back to the Victorian era.

There's a book called British Manly Exercises

that is published in 1837 and becomes a hit.

One Scottish medical practitioner founded the British Institute of Physical Training in 1889.

His exercise program consisted of what he called physical jerks.

Oh, what?

Which feels to me like how you would describe dancing in the Footloose Town.

So all of this evolves into a movement called muscular Christianity.

I am taking it that you have not heard of muscular Christianity.

No, because if I heard it, I would assume that that was like supposed to be a metaphor.

Like it's muscular, like the spirit of Christ is like making our beliefs more powerful.

But they mean like literally physical muscles, like you're covered in like veins and protein.

Absolutely.

The idea behind muscular Christianity primarily focuses on men and masculinity.

And the idea is that your body is a gift and that it needs to be trained to do the work of Christ.

Things like protecting those who are perceived as not being able to protect themselves, things like missionary work, and so forth.

Professor Richard Andrew Meyer outlined six criteria for muscular Christianity: Abs, lats, quads, traps.

Traps.

Number one, a man's body is given to him by God.

Two, to be trained.

Three, to be brought into subjection.

Four, to be used for protection of the weak.

Five, to be used for the quote, advancement of all righteous causes.

And six, to be used for subduing the earth, which God has given to the children of men.

Subduing the earth?

The anxiety at this point is like we're working in these factories and it's making us soft.

We used to work the fields.

So this idea of like subduing the earth is like, we have to get back to our sort of masculine roots of working the land.

God, it's always the same shit.

It's the same shit we see now, right?

It's like, oh, we left the land.

We used to be pure.

It's like all this sort of like Michael Pollan stuff, authenticity, and get your yogurt from a dairy farm direct from the farmer.

It's all the same shit forever.

The other thing that's all the same shit is that muscular Christianity also sort of gave way to a set of beliefs that are with us still today, which is the idea that physical strength led to strong character and strong morals, right?

That if you are training in the gym, that doesn't just mean you're training in the gym.

It means you have tenacity and a work ethic.

And, right?

Like, there are all sorts of sort of like character complements that we add on to the simple act of going to the gym or not going to the gym.

Right.

It's turning this into a metaphor, basically.

So muscular Christianity spread through the U.S.

as well, in part as a sort of reactionary politics, right?

Women were gaining more social and political rights.

A wave of immigrants were sort of shifting culture and the job market.

And all of that also led to a different sense but like linked to the sort of english version of white masculinity in crisis right always pussification of men this is like the thing that men have been fucking whining about for like 200 years straight up tucker carlson yeah exactly muscular christianity is actually how we got the ymca

what the song no god damn michael i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding

i mean it kind of is like this is this is why we have gay men fetishizing this stuff but

the YMCA built its first gym facility in 1869 in New York.

And before that, it really was just a Christian association that didn't have nearly as much to do with athleticism, right?

Okay.

Muscular Christianity continues to sort of influence Christian fitness programs today.

We still have programs like Losing to Live, The Daniel Plan, Firm Believer, Bod for God,

Holy Fit, Body Temple Wellness, and Body Gospel, right?

Like there are tons of these.

You have a bunch of these in your diet book collection, I know.

Do I ever?

I don't have firm believer.

That's by far the best one.

All of this also ties into Christian weight loss programs.

I read a great piece in Christianity Today

about this sort of concept of like a fitness-driven church.

They referenced a 1957 bestseller called Pray Your Weight Away,

which argued that, quote, if our bodies really are to be temples of the Holy Spirit, we had best get them down to the size God intended.

Yeah, God does not care what size you are.

This is like the dumbest shit.

This timeless being

is like looking down and it's like, oh, you're Donnie Fan's like 8%.

It should be 5%.

Cheryl's put on a few.

God.

So in the tradition of muscular Christianity, Brittany Dawn starts her own ministry called She Lives Freed.

Okay.

According to The Guardian, her ministry is a 501c3 registered nonprofit.

As part of that, she launches a podcast actually earlier this year in 2023 called Chiseled and Called.

That's not even good, Brittany.

She starts holding religious retreats and her retreats go for up to $650 for a weekend retreat which is considerably higher than other sort of like Christian spiritual retreats right

she also has a bunch of merch she sells a set of Bible highlighters what why would you need special highlighters

that's genius I like her now I'm sorry it's such a blatant grift you have to almost respect it

fucking Bible highlighters

she's just taking like a razor blade and scratching off the part where it says sharpie.

Yeah, yeah.

And writing like Bible.

Can I tell you about

no, now I'm so giggly.

This is good.

She also sells protein cookies.

Okay.

She sells false eyelashes and she sells self-tanner.

Is the bronzer called Lookin' Dark on the Ark?

I think that would be pretty good.

There are also some internet allegations that the false eyelashes that she sells are just like drop shipped from Alibaba.

I'm sure.

Yes.

Well, what did you expect?

It's not like she's like a

textile manufacturer.

Like, of course.

So, like, part of her appeal at these Christian retreats that she holds is her backlash.

They canceled me just like they canceled Jesus.

So, I'm going to send you a quote: a A number of media outlets attended this one retreat.

Okay.

She got asked about, like, talk to me about the fitness scam stuff.

And this was her response to that.

I just sent it to you.

Oh, God, I was right.

Jesus.

Okay.

She says, you can't cancel what God has called.

You can try all you want, but the power of the blood has already overcome it.

That is the truth that I walk in every day, and a heavenly confidence comes with that.

You can't cancel me.

She is also selling

you can't cancel me stickers

at this specific retreat.

I don't know.

People, it's like the kind of people that she's praying on.

It's like these far-right evangelical Christians that are falling for this shit.

And part of me just feels like that is like a weird little jungle in there where they're all just fucking getting grifted.

Most like right-wing politics is so fucking grift-adjacent at this point, but it's honestly so hard for me to feel sympathy for people who are like falling for these like buy fucking gold doubloons that you see advertised on Fox News.

Yeah.

Of course she's fucking grifting you.

This is the whole fucking ideology is a grift.

Well, we're going to go a little further in that direction and then come on back.

As with

many of these stories, this is all shaped significantly by a dedicated group of internet people.

This mostly happens on Reddit, although you can find Brittany Dawn stuff on pretty much much every platform.

As of like this week, the main anti-Britney Dawn subreddit has over 40,000 followers

and is flooded with people who reject every single thing she does.

It is like deep bitch eaten crackers territory, right?

Yeah, I get really uncomfortable with that.

Even when somebody deserves it, I get uncomfortable with that.

At one point, Brittany makes a video where she talks about a very harrowing experience.

She's weeping while she makes the video.

She and her husband have come home from running errands to find that her dog has been hit by a car in a hit and run.

She is a wreck, as I would be.

I would be destroyed.

She says that she used to be a vet tech, so she knows that her dog wouldn't have survived.

So her husband takes her dog into the house, away from Brittany and shoots the dog

to put it out of its misery.

Yeah.

People have very strong reactions to this.

I absolutely understand why the idea of someone like shooting my dog absolutely got me like choked up immediately.

Yeah.

Also, I will say there is some real urban-rural divide stuff in the reactions to this, right?

Like I talked to my dad about this and he was like, well, yeah, man, like if a dog's hurt and you can't get it to the vet, like you got to shoot that dog.

Yeah.

So, like, there's some of that.

To be clear, that's not true for Brittany Dawn.

She lives in Dallas, Fort Worth, like a big ass metro area.

Right.

Like, listen, anytime.

you're putting a dog down, it's a really, really, really hard thing.

And people engage with that in lots of different ways.

They have lots of different responses to it.

I don't need everyone's like grieving to look the same or whatever, but it is kind of wild to be in such a big city with so many resources and go, no, you just got to shoot the dog.

I resent the position that these influencers put us all in because a lot of these people have made their personal life like the center of their career, right?

It's like, oh, me and my dog are going to go for a walk, or like, me and my husband have like such a healthy marriage.

Here's us in the morning drinking coffee.

And then when something happens in their personal life, right?

Like they get a divorce or their dog dies, it's it's part of their public persona, right?

Because they've made it part of their public persona.

But then if you're criticizing somebody for those kinds of personal decisions, in other contexts, you wouldn't do this.

You'd just be like, oh, this really isn't any of my business.

Well, and also like, this is someone whose fucking dog just died.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't know.

I feel gross about being like, you did it wrong.

To be honest, I find the behavior like something terrible happened to me.

I'm an emotional wreck.

I'm immediately going to turn on my phone and talk about it for the public and broadcast it on the internet.

I honestly find that behavior totally baffling and like really off-putting morally.

Like, I don't get it at all.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, her dog died.

And it seems like whatever else you want to say about Brittany Dawn, she loved her dog.

Yeah.

It just feels uncomfortable to be criticizing somebody for like...

Her dog got hit by a car and she made a decision in the moment that maybe I wouldn't have made.

Maybe it was the wrong decision.

I don't have enough information to really know.

The whole thing is just messy.

This is weird, you know, not the best decision by my own sort of assessment, but also like, I don't know that like a bunch of shitty internet comments is helping anybody do better with that.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I feel really complicated about it.

I'm glad you brought me into these complicated feelings.

I knew what you meant now.

Complicated feelings.

Here we are.

Since this whole story sort of broke, folks have surfaced other sort of issues with Brittany Dawn and her work and her sort of presence in the world and on the internet.

One of those things is that Brittany and her husband, Jordan, have volunteered in the past for the Freedom Shield Foundation, which is sort of a right-wing anti-trafficking organization that's like, we're saving Christians from bad life circumstances, right?

Another is that she posted a whole sort of series of Instagram stories and TikToks about

meeting an unhoused person named James and trying

to find him, to give him money and take him in.

And the critiques of that one were mostly about, like, wow, you couldn't even just do this thing without uploading a video about it.

As more of these little stories come to the surface, they actually draw more folks in.

Brittany announced last year that she had two miscarriages.

Okay.

Brittany Brittany Dawn has since made a number of videos about her experience with her miscarriage.

So people initially start with, she's just monetizing this again, and that feels gross.

And then

people start just straight up alleging that she is faking her miscarriages.

Part of what happens around the miscarriage stuff is like utterly grotesque behavior to me.

People pull screen grabs from her videos where she shows an ultrasound and goes like she's saying she had a miscarriage at this time period, but this is clearly an ultrasound from like this trimester and she's saying it was like whatever.

People are deconstructing all of her videos like the goddamn Zapruder film.

Yeah, right.

They are looking at her expressions on her face and they're like,

no one who is really grieving would make that face.

I, a couple years ago, watched one of the terrible like Sandy Hook conspiracy theory videos.

And, like, this is the shit that they said about the parents, like, grieving parents.

Yeah.

It's, like, their faces wouldn't look like that if their kid had really died.

Like, whenever you see somebody doing this, huge red flag.

Yes.

So following her miscarriages, Brittany Dawn announces that she and her husband have become foster parents to an infant.

Okay.

The infant that they foster is black, which will become relevant in a bit.

bit.

This riles folks for a few reasons.

One, she makes a lot of videos of her with this foster baby.

She has affiliate links to some of the like baby stuff that she has bought, all of that kind of stuff.

She does blur the child's face because the U.S.

Children's Bureau requires that foster parents not post pictures of their foster kids.

Thank fucking God, Jesus Christ.

She also reveals a bunch of personal details about this baby in her videos.

She talks about the baby going through substance withdrawals, which is like an extremely sensitive disclosure and reads to many folks like she's trying to get brownie points based on the struggles that this infant is going through.

So she has a baby for some short period of time and then is just immediately like mining the baby for content.

That's how folks respond to it.

Man.

Foster parents and social workers in particular are livid that she is sort of bucking this fairly widely accepted role for foster parents, that they are temporary loving homes, but temporary homes for kids who are expected to reunite with their families.

The biggest reason that this one blows up doesn't have anything really to do with Brittany.

It has everything to do with her husband.

You start to see comments on the posts about her foster child with people asking how they passed a background check to foster kids.

Okay.

And Brittany responds in the comments: quote, My background check came back perfect.

Thank you.

I'd be cautious about believing everything you see about someone on the internet, a gossip forum, and especially manipulative news stories.

Okay.

She is talking about her husband, Jordan Nelson, who is originally from Kansas City, Missouri,

and is a former police officer.

Okay.

He and Brittany got married in September of 2021.

He is a former police officer in part because the ACLU filed suit against him for excessive force against a black man.

Oh my fucking God.

So the lawsuit was settled out of court, but the dash cam footage was released.

It very clearly shows a black man standing still, his hands in the air and fully visible.

A group of officers sort of tear up in police cars and approach him.

So Brittany Dawn's husband, Jordan Nelson, is the first officer to reach him.

And what he does is kick his legs out from under him, shove him into the sidewalk, and four other officers descend on him and hold him down.

Jesus Christ.

A few minutes later on that same video,

he reenacts the whole thing to show off to his fellow officers.

Fuck off, good God.

While this man is still lying on the sidewalk and had yet to receive any medical attention.

Jesus Christ.

It's like the opposite of bitching crackers.

This is like the most odious fucking shit.

It is absolutely atrocious.

Yeah.

After all of this happens,

Jordan Nelson filed for a protective order against the dude he beat.

Oh, God.

Absolutely deranged behavior is what's happening here.

I guess the reason he passed the background check is because they settled out of court.

So there's no, like, he wasn't.

All a background check would find is if he was convicted of something, but he wasn't convicted of anything, partly because he was like an agent of the state.

Yeah.

It's like a huge loophole in the system, right?

That if somebody uses power to subjugate somebody else, that wouldn't show up as a red flag.

And now this fucking couple is fostering a black child.

Right.

Like, just boy, oh boy, oh boy.

I can't say enough about how extremely reasonable a concern this is.

Yeah.

And it leads to quite a bit of talk about

how much this reflects the brokenness of the foster care system.

And hard agree, right?

God, this episode was so fun and breezy.

It was just like a run-of-the-mill Christian megachurch grifter.

Remember when you were like, I like her.

And now it's just like, oh, it's like all of like the worst shit in American society.

Yeah, has she, has she said anything about the, the video of her husband?

Not that I found.

Just the like, don't believe everything you read, which is like, okay.

God, it's such a fucking obvious thing to say, but it's like, the idea of a Christianity that wants you to be thin, but doesn't mind you using your power as an agent of the state to beat somebody up

is just like not a, that's not a serious morality.

Quite a bit of this comes to a head in a way that really surprised me.

Okay.

The state of Texas announced in February of last year that it was suing Brittany Dawn for $250,000 to a million dollars in damages for, quote, deceptive trade practices.

Okay.

The grounds for the suit are specifically

that Brittany Dawn particularly focused on targeting people with eating disorders.

Oh, wow.

People who were clearly intentionally misled

and taken in by the frequent frequent implication that Brittany Dawn was trained to work with people with EDs or that she had a level of expertise that they could trust, right?

They also allege some other little things that didn't come up in the online tossing out the net to gather things up that I did.

The actual lawsuit includes in the damages that they say that she charged shipping for PDFs.

Nice.

That's actually pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Let's write write that down, Aubrey.

Let's keep that in our back pocket for when we cash in.

The trial gets scheduled.

There's over a year of buildup.

It's delayed a couple of times.

It ends up coming to a close without a single day of the trial because she settles out of court.

And two weeks later, Brittany Dawn makes a video saying she's off social media, that the Lord is calling her to a period of spiritual rest.

Even though she's off social media, she has more followers than ever on TikTok.

Wow.

Despite everything, she still seems to be accruing followers and she still seems to be profiting.

It's also such a weird, like, internet story, because if it wasn't for the final twist, like the final thing that happens, the video of her husband,

this would

mostly be a story of like something on the internet that makes me kind of uncomfortable.

Yeah.

Like someone who is annoying or tacky or grifty or even like genuinely bad, but then a community forms just talking constantly about how bad this person is, right?

And it seems like they finally,

you know, years into this, found a good reason to dislike her.

Yeah.

Like both of them are such archetypes.

In addition to being who they are, right?

They are also sort of

these kind of effigies of like this kind of dude and this kind of lady.

And they sort of come to represent, again, like not just what they personally are doing, but these whole systems

that they are happily and proudly contributing to that are terrible to folks who are on the downside of power, right?

Yeah.

And also her boobs are asymmetrical.

Okay.

I feel like it's okay.

It's okay.

It's okay to make fun of her for that now.

I can be problematic because she sucks.

She sucks so all dents are off.

That's how principles work.

That's how it works.

I can say that about people now.