Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Sat, 12 Apr
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All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Behind the Scenes of That Teen Vogue Article on Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk's Daughter Why Watching Actors Get Maimed By Big Cats Gives Me Hope For The Future How ICE Kidnapped A Farmworker Union Organizer Esperanto with Andrew Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #11 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources/Links: Behind the Scenes of that Teen Vogue Article on Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk's Daughter https://www.teenvogue.com/story/vivian-jenna-wilson-elon-musk-trans-youth Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #11 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/trump-administration-immigrant-detention-facilities-services.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-E4.PL6V.gJR0OQEOJP8G&smid=url-share https://ucsdguardian.org/2025/04/07/5-ucsd-students-face-sudden-f-1-visa-terminations-a-6th-deported-at-the-border-no-apparent-pattern-among-students-targeted/ https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-statement-international-students-visa-status-terminations https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lmcxoqk2ts24 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278147/gov.uscourts.dcd.278147.30.1_1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a931_2c83.pdf https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25881144-24a949/ https://bsky.app/profile/khuddleston.bsky.social/post/3lmaiaxi7f226 https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2025/03/18/516185/hpd-says-their-stance-on-immigration-enforcement-hasnt-changed-despite-recent-turnover-to-ice/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/04/cea-chairman-steve-miran-hudson-institute-event-remarks/ https://apnews.com/article/china-response-us-tariffs-104-d40d497f6e07ee4163d88443cb75ab3fSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the Teen Vogue article about Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk's daughter?
Welcome to It Could Happen Here. It is continuing to happen. Stonks. But we will discuss stonks probably later this week. This episode is going to be much more fun because I am pleased to have returning to the show, Ellie Ehrman, writer, comedian, and creator and host of Going Down with Ellie Ehrman, a trans political comedy news show.
As well as joining us here is Teen Vogue's news and politics editor, Lex McMiniman. Welcome both of you. Hi.
Hi, thanks.
So we're going to be talking about the recent Teen Vogue special issue cover story on Vivian Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon Musk. Ella, you put together a fantastic piece last month, and this is what we're going to discuss. How this article came together, that viral photo shoot in Japan, which is fantastic. All the styling in that shoot was lovely. But I think this particular piece was...
really relevant for trans people and also relevant because of the way global politics has been shaken up by a few specific people. And focusing in on Vivian, I think, was really special. So I guess I would first like to hear about the broad strokes of how this first came together.
From our perspective, you know, I don't know that like everyone is aware of this. And certainly I don't know that all of my friends in our various trans subcultures know this. But at Teen Vogue, we've been covering like trans politics and trans rights for a long time, like far before I got here.
But I've been here for almost four years and it's been a pretty big part of my beat in part because of it being like a very unavoidable thing. thing within following like U.S. state legislatures and then obviously like at the federal level, which has only intensified more and more in the last year. And so that's like one aspect of it. But at the same time, we love young people that shitpost.
And so Vivian had been on her radar for a while. Totally. I also think people are maybe more aware of this whole like comrade teen Vogue vibe of like, we're really interested in talking to people that have a clear political leaning that have like a sense of how they see themselves in the world in a political context.
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Chapter 2: How was the Teen Vogue article on Vivian Wilson created?
And Vivian sort of came right out the gate as someone who was really eager to share her thoughts on these things. So from last summer, like within like a month of when Vivian was kind of introduced to the world through her, her, father talking about her on Jordan Peterson's podcast.
We were trying to get in touch with her and it was something I was talking a lot about within the office and we didn't really know what to do because she just kind of emerged from nowhere onto the internet. And so I had been talking about it a lot including with Ella, because we talk a lot. And so Ella eventually revealed, like, oh, that's oomphie. I am mutuals with Vivian. Not oomphie.
You did kind of, I mean, substantively. Are you threads oomphies? What are you oomphies on? Instagram.
Instagram, nice. I would never use threads. My God.
So over to you. That's my Teen Vogue intro, but Ella, if you want to... Yeah.
No, because I am interested in contacting Vivian because she was certainly getting an unhinged number of media requests starting last summer.
Yeah, that's true. Right, so she did that one NBC interview after... after Elon went on Peterson. And I do not work at Teen Vogue, but Lex and I know each other because you're contractually obligated to know everyone else who's part of the, you know, deep state Illuminati doing trans politics online club.
Yeah, I was just going to say trans people club, but also deep state, yeah.
The pronoun council, yeah. We're all established members. We swear allegiance once a year. There's a whole ritual. Don't worry about it. So when I got in touch with Vivian last... fall, which I got in touch with her initially to see if she would come on Going Down. And I reached out to her and I said, do you want to come on my live comedy show?
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Chapter 3: What challenges do trans youth face today according to the article?
And it's also like Conde Nast as an institution, which is like Teen Vogue's parent company, is only one of multiple media conglomerates that will very proudly use trans people in a representative way and sell magazine covers with trans people on it. You can think of Hunter Schaefer, for example. She's been on the cover of several Vogues, but at the same time,
Hunter Schaefer also received a misgendering passport after the Trump admin.
So, like, I think that if legacy media is unwilling to connect the dots between, like, profiting off of, like, the aesthetics of trans people, but not actually, like, talking about the political underpinnings of, like, why trans people are even able to be visible at this time and, like, what the, you know, trapdoor, as Termaline calls it, of trans visibility means, then it's, like, why even do this work in the first place?
so Vivian was like a really great opportunity for us to like build on like we've done several photo shoots particularly with trans women because I and trans girls at Teen Vogue because we like feel very strongly and Ella makes this point in the piece that like the way that trans femme people are like objectified and commodified and also like the target of such extreme vitriol is something it feels really important to take a stand against it just felt like
doing this with Vivian who's so high profile but also hadn't had the opportunity yet to take control of her own narrative in the public eye and with this being her second ever interview first ever photo shoot like it just felt like a really big opportunity that was worth using as a big swing, you know?
No, like, she is at, like, the center of this, like, matrix of trans commodification in so many ways. Like, this special issue was the first time Vivian was really, like, framed as the subject matter of, like, any piece. And, like, framed as her own person.
For the entirety of her adult life, she's been used as this rhetorical object, like both by her dad, but as well as like by people on the left who's like objectified Vivian to use her as a bludgeon against her father. And yeah, like people are very willing to like commodify or use trans people in certain ways.
But to have like trans people writing about other trans people in a way that frames them as a subject matter is so important.
Yeah, I mean, I think Vivian, one of the things that drew me to the story in the first place is that Vivian's sort of case is such an interesting microcosm of the transphobia experience as a whole. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does Vivian Wilson express her personality and humor?
I guess I'd like to talk a little bit more about the structure of the piece and how it succeeded so much in putting Vivian as a subject, right? Because the first half is written in more of a traditional article format to give context and frame Vivian as a person. But then halfway through, it switches to a back-and-forth interview, which allows Vivian to just speak for herself.
And I think having both of those, and not just one or the other, strengthens the piece entirely and strengthens being able to see Vivian as a complete person. Because as I'm getting the context for her life and the political situation in the first half, then I get to see how much she reminds me of... regular 20-something trans girls.
And, you know, like, half of the friends I have, though I do disagree on Team PETA. PETA's a bitch boy. It's Team Gayle all the way. Thank you.
Controversial.
All right. All right. All right. I'm excited that we agree on this. But those sorts of, like, offhand comments, like, there's other things that, like, give you, like, a... a view into this person, it's so useful to have at least 50% of the piece be this just straight interview.
We unsurprisingly talked a lot about how we were going to structure this piece and Partially landed on Q&A format for like, we knew this was going to be a behemoth, like no matter how we tackled it, given the subject matter, and then ultimately how long the transcript was. There were many aspects of this that we were like, okay, how do we do this in a way that's going to read well to people?
Because something we also think about a lot is like accessibility, like young people famously hate reading now. But we wanted this to actually be something that like a young person could sit down, dash through, still get some like, you know, historical political context out of and still come away being like, haha, team PETA, team Gale or whatever the hell, right?
And so, and maybe have like subway surfers on like another phone at the same time.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Um, and then I would say the, the, I want Ella to talk about the transcript and like interview stuff, but like the intro, I think is probably where I spent the most of my time editing this piece and like adding stuff and, um,
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