A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - Jeffree Star Has Always Been Like This
Episode Date: November 28, 2025On the afternoon Charlie Kirk died, Jeffree Star livestreamed a four-minute-long rant about how nonbinary people aren’t real. Star, with his pink hair, diamond nails, and prior openness to using “...any pronouns,” doesn’t necessarily fit in with Turning Point USA’s target demographic. Or does he? In this long-awaited and much-requested episode, veteran YouTuber Kat Blaque and former full-time Jeffree Star reporter Kat Tenbarge guide us through the tragic, racist, celebrity-filled history of the Internet’s most prolific makeup mogul. Despite many changes in circumstance — just like Gwen Stefani, he’ll always be an Orange County girl. Listen to bonus episodes on Patreon! Thanks to today’s sponsors! Get smarter about yours (and others!) news media consumption with Ground News at https://www.ground.news/fruity Work smarter, not harder, with Factor meals ready in two minutes at https://www.factormeals.com/fruity50off Subscribe to Kat Blaque on YouTube. Follow Kat Blaque on Instagram. Subscribe to Kat Tenbarge’s work. Follow Kat Tenbarge on Bluesky. Find me on Instagram. Find A Bit Fruity on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
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So nowadays, it's all these fucking weirdos telling their kids,
oh my god, you like a Barbie? You're a woman. And then the pandemic put a halt on all of our lives, right?
Right. Six feet apart. That was a lie, by the way. That was a full lie.
Trump is taking away visas if you're tweeting, I'm glad he died. Good. I want to teach people to eat better and how we've all been tricked and the government doesn't care about us and they want to keep us sick.
Oh, baby, they weren't ready for that. Now they are. We have grown men with beards wearing drugs,
wearing dresses going into the women's restroom.
I think it's the phones.
I think it's made people, I don't know, I'm dead inside.
No one goes and plays outside.
I will always use my platform and my voice for good.
Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruitie.
I'm Matt Bernstein.
And I've been feeling kind of under the weather.
And I got up this morning and I was like, I don't know if I can record a podcast.
And then I remember the subject of today's podcast.
and like I'm up. Let's fucking go.
On the day that Charlie Kirk died,
Jeffrey Starr did what he does best,
went live on TikTok.
And a Twitter influencer by the name of Gypsy Patriot underscore
shared Jeffrey's reactions to Charlie's death with the caption,
Jeffrey Starr speaks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk,
and you won't believe what he has to say.
Here's what he had to say.
He encouraged everyone to speak about their beliefs.
whether he believe them or not.
Am I a Republican?
No, I'm a person.
Because I'm standing up for someone that passed away, I'm now being called names in the chat.
This is what's wrong with a lot of you people.
You will never get barred in life.
You are sick in the head.
Someone just said they're unsubscribing from me.
Thank God, please.
Because if you believe in vain them's, you're part of the problem.
If you're so stupid enough to go against science, please unfollow me.
You can be whoever you want to be, but there's science and there's facts.
You can pretend in your head you're a kid.
You can't.
You can pretend in your head that you're this and you're that. Good for you. You're still only A or B.
And the truth hurts a lot of you, I see. I see a lot of you still can't get over it. So yes,
I am a grown-ass man that wears makeup. I will always be a male. My name is Jeffrey. I'm a male
that likes cosmetics. All these grown men going into women's bathrooms wearing wigs, you should all
be in prison forever. You are the problem. So a grown man that goes around the country
debating people, spitting facts
was just taken
out. And I'm not over it.
I can't stay here and play with makeup right now.
I want to throw up. So no, I'm not a
Republican. No, I'm not a Democrat. I'm Jeffrey Starr.
Stop trying to label me.
Stop trying to label me.
I am a male. I am a makeup artist. I am a
makeup mogul. I am a business owner. I am a
farmer. I am a rancher.
I am a son. I am someone's cousin. I am
someone's friend. Politics aside.
will never change.
Why is I up for debate?
Am I saying any of this?
Because Charlie Kirk fought for the rights.
He fought for the truth.
He debated everybody.
And you guys cannot argue that.
You are delusional and you were mentally ill
if you were trying to go against what I just said.
I didn't say my opinion.
I said a fact.
He really told us.
I'm not a Democrat or a Republican.
I'm a man.
I'm a makeup artist.
I'm a wife.
I'm a cousin.
I'm a brother.
I'm a single mom who works two jobs.
That video to me had the energy of the video of the male model where he's like 180 poses in two minutes.
Like he's like, I'm a farmer.
I'm not a Republican.
Charlie Kirk.
I hate non-binary people.
Biology.
Men in a wig.
Like it's literally it was just buzzwords.
It's literally.
And that's the thing.
The conservative grift is easy.
It is a script that just gets repeated over and over and over and over again.
That's kind of why it sounds like that.
Because literally all he's doing is going down the list of very popularly stated transphobic points and repeating them with the knowledge that there's a large group of people who are going to agree with him.
There's so many layers to what he says.
And I think we have to remember how old Jeffrey Starr is.
too because one thing I will say is that there are people who have some of these feelings and some
of it is based in like when he says don't label me there are a lot of especially older queer folks
who feel that way and feel that there's a lot of people who are eager to label others in ways that
like aren't how they actually feel you know so I can get how Jeffrey Starr would be like I'm not
non-binary personally don't call me non-binary because I'm a man who wears makeup that's not my
identity. That's not who I am. I am a male. Da-da-da-da-da, because that's how he feels, right?
Layers. There were so many people who were surprised by Jeffrey Starr having this very visceral
reaction to Charlie Kirk's death. For so many reasons, I was not one of those people who was
surprised. We'll get into it. What I was surprised by, though, was how he was like, this is terrible.
Charlie Kirk died. And then it's like a four-minute-long Coke rant about non-binary people.
It gives like an absurdist quality where it's like it's almost hard to believe that people do take Jeffrey Starr seriously politically.
But to your point, Kat, he's just repeating what is already said to these people in a multitude of different ways.
He's just like spitting it out at them.
And they're so used to hearing this messaging that it clearly doesn't even bother some people that he can't even focus on the topic of Charlie Kirk.
He's going, veering between these things.
Because the audience just needs to hear those phrases and that's what he knows.
And like, as a content creator watching it, I'm like, I know you don't.
Like this was almost like a prepared speech that you're giving or like something you know is going to perform a certain way.
Because I don't even believe that he believes some of what he's saying.
100%.
So as always, I like to lay some groundwork on this podcast.
Everyone is coming here with their own well of knowledge, and you may have the pleasure of not yet knowing my nemesis Jeffrey Lynn Steiner Jr., aka Jeffrey Starr.
Jeffrey Starr is first and foremost a cockroach of the internet.
He was at one point the most friended person on MySpace, then rode the wave of beauty YouTube into becoming one of its foremost celebrities, built a makeup empire alongside that success,
then transitioned into becoming a TikTok star,
where he spends all day live streaming to huge audiences,
and his most recent act, seemingly,
is doing audience capture with the American far-right.
Jeffrey's open embrace of far-right politics
while looking like a sort of femme queen, non-binary alien,
or, as one Twitter user would put it,
like Kylie Jenner was put through a dehydrator,
has led many to wonder, how?
How can you look like that and talk like that and be so, among other things, transphobic?
And like so, into Charlie Kirk, many people were confused about that.
Why is this gender-bent pink-haired person lecturing me about how I should feel about Charlie
Kirk?
It doesn't make any sense.
Or does it?
Today, we're going to do a deep dive into Jeffrey Starr's long existence as a public figure
and demonstrate not only that Jeffrey Starr's current act makes sure.
so much sense, but also that like Jeffrey Starr is just another example of what white men can
become when there are no real mechanisms of accountability in place for bad behavior.
And prove my thesis that Jeffrey Starr is Donald Trump.
Sorry, it's kind of a wild card at the end there.
But I'll make the case.
I mean, these are all just like white men who were like did alleged sexual abuse and got away
with it.
And now they feel like they can do anything.
And so they do.
They've got weird hair and they love sucking dick.
I love that.
To do this, I am so excited to be joined by, this is the Cat and Cat Special.
We are joined by Cat Black, who is a veteran YouTuber who has been online and making content for so long, and who has chronicled Jeffrey Starr's YouTube career at Great Life.
Fuck that man.
And by Cat Ten Barge, who, if you.
you listen to this podcast a lot, you're already familiar with. Cat is a journalist and has also been
chronicling, especially the misdeeds of Jeffrey Starr for a long time. She is the person who broke
the investigative reporting around Jeffrey Starr's alleged sexual harassment and assault allegations
and the hush money allegations, which we're going to be talking about all of that today. So if any
of that feels like a sore spot for you, just know that that's going to be part of this conversation.
Cat and Cat and Cat, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having us.
It's such an honor to be in this cat duo right now.
Cat times too.
How are you guys broad strokes feeling going into this conversation about this person?
I know Jeffrey Starr, but I have since written Jeffrey Starr off.
And I've seen whispers of what he's doing now.
But like last time I had a conversation with you, this is some stuff that I'm probably
going to learn a lot of as we go.
because Jeffrey Starr to me is just such an annoying person,
like figure,
just like concept,
idea,
whatever,
that when I see him,
I just ignore it.
So this will be an interesting episode
because I'll get to learn that I guess he has not really changed,
I suppose.
It's funny to me that people are still talking about it.
I think that's one of the baffling things about this is that,
like I think I made my video like 10 years ago.
Like it's,
we're still talking about Jeffrey Starr.
And that's,
that's fascinating to me.
actually. It actually proves a lot of the point that I was kind of making in those videos,
which is that like, no, he's going to continue to be successful and known and celebrated because
he has that much power in this world as a white man. Yeah. And I feel kind of similarly in that
there was a period in my life a few years ago when I was reporting on Jeffrey Star. And there would be
stretches of time when I would be thinking about Jeffrey every day, like day in, day out,
because I would be knee-deep in writing these stories and reporting these stories about him.
But around that time period, around when, as we'll talk about, he became a quote-unquote farmer.
Like, he kind of started to fall off the map for me a little bit, but he was always sort of there
in the background. And in recent months, as I've watched him start to reemerge in this form,
I'm like, yeah, this is just yet another twist on who Jeffrey has always been at his core.
Shall we get into the chronology of Jeffrey Starr?
Absolutely.
I want to just do a teeny bit of early life.
Jeffrey Lynn Steinerger was born in 1985 in L.A. and raised in Orange County.
Just like another fixture of this podcast.
No guesses?
I was not raised in, but I lived there for six years.
Oh, wait, I actually knew that about you.
Well, so the answer is Gwen Stefani.
Oh, okay, yeah.
Oh, I should have known that.
one. Kat Black, as someone who was in Orange County lived there for for some time, can you just explain
if anyone's unfamiliar with like the social and political landscape of Orange County? Okay. So I live in
Los Angeles largely because I spent a really long time living in Orange County attempting to be a
housewife. And I'm not kidding. It didn't go well. Turns out being the only black trans woman in a
community of white conservatives is kind of not healthy for me. Orange County is very conservative.
Orange County is where people live when they don't want to live in scary L.A. And when you're living
in Orange County, there is this concept of never leaving the orange curtain, which is really about
not going to the big scary city where all the black people are. That's really more of what it's
about. A lot of Orange County more recently has become more blue or gone purple.
But historically, it has been a very white supremacist place, been a stronghold for that.
And I left in 2016, 2017 actually is when I left.
I was very happy to leave because it is now very much MAGA country.
Yeah.
So that is where Jeffrey Starr grew up.
Jeffrey's dad dies by suicide when Jeffrey is five years old and he was raised by his mom.
The way that Jeffrey Starr talks about his childhood, he,
was always really into makeup from the time that he would use his mom's makeup, you know,
secretly, which like relatable.
He was from a young age really into like Gothic looks and sort of like this really high
femme sort of alternative presentation.
He also talks about his experiences with bullying or lack thereof.
Jeffrey Starr has said in more recent interviews that I've watched, he'll say in the same
breath that he wasn't bullied, but that also when like people,
People would call him a faggot out of a moving car, for example, that he would stand up for himself.
And he would fight back.
And he would, like, put bitches in their place.
I am probably one of the only people that looks like me that has never been bullied.
I was never really bullied at all.
I always stuck up for myself.
And if someone tried me, I'd get vicious back.
I used to love fighting.
And so it's like, it sounds like you were bullied.
And, like, I can't imagine being queer in, like, the late 90s, early 2000s in fucking Orange
County and not being bullied.
But this sort of like mythology that he has about himself is one where like anyone who's mean to him,
he'll be twice as mean back.
And so like that's how the world should be kind of.
Yeah.
It strikes me that like the persona Jeffrey had from his like late teenage years onward,
it's formed of this sort of violent exterior where he has this persona both in his content online
and people who knew him in real life at that time.
described like real physical acts of violence toward other people. So it's like he has this super
aggressive way of dealing with the world around him that feels very much so like it literally
emerged from his childhood. And also the values in his early content are him like sort of
punching down on other vulnerable, marginalized individuals, like unhoused people,
black people, like all kinds of other minorities, really. And do you know, I,
doing that because he's trying to gain the favor of like the white dudes who are bullying him because if they can say oh well i also hate black people
you know that's that's what it's all about and when i look at geoffrey star that is immediately what i read of him
and i get it i've lived in conservative communities for the vast majority of my life there's a lot about
his personality and even some of my less favorite conservative um figures on the internet who are in the alphabet mafia
who have this persona thing that kind of comes from being in a very conservative community,
being attacked,
but then finding inroads with some of those people who are attacking you,
where you become essentially one of the good ones.
Like, oh, yeah, we may have called you a faggot, but you're one of the good ones, right?
Like, we can joke with you.
Like, we'll still be bigoted, maybe to other people, but, you know, you're cool or you're cool
within certain context.
So he's still, even in that video we just watched, he's still,
seeking the approval from that group of people who would typically hate him, who do hate him, actually.
That's, I think, behind the vast majority of, like, the conservative LGBT, frankly.
After graduating high school in 2002, Jeffrey Starr, like, hustles for gigs.
He talks about using a fake ID to get into Hollywood clubs to meet celebrities and then sort of, like, offer himself up as a makeup artist.
and it was through this sort of hustle that he became the makeup artist for Kelly Osborne.
Did you know this?
I could see it.
I could think of her makeup of that era and think of his makeup of that era.
And it does match.
It does match.
Jeffrey talks about how he would steal Kelly Osborne's clothes to take, I mean, like steal, quote, unquote,
but he would take her clothes and then take MySpace photos, pretending that they were his clothes to project wealth that he did not really have.
which I think is also a really interesting through line because we're going to talk about
Jeffrey Starr's accumulation and transfers and drop-offs of wealth.
And it is very, very hard to understand how much money Jeffrey Starr actually has at any given point in time.
Also very bling ring, which was around this era.
Very bling ring.
I recently, like a month ago randomly, was like, I'm going to watch every documentary about the bling ring.
This whole thing of like Jeffrey Starr sort of like slipping into clubs in the early 2000s to try to like link up with celebrities that he had nothing to do it.
It is very blingering.
And Jeffrey actually knew in like the early 2000s loosely through like a social circle one of the guys whose house had been robbed by one of the bling ring members early on.
Like before they did the huge celebrity houses, they just like robbed one of their high school friends' houses.
Yes.
And like Jeffrey like vaguely knew that guy through MySpace.
circles. So it's all a very like incestuous community of like we love fame. We want to get close to
fame. Like they're almost like like like vampireic way. I feel like if history had been tweaked ever so
slightly, Jeffrey Starr would have been in the bling ring and then he would have like gone to jail for two
years and like we would never would have heard from him again. Oh, if only Jeffrey Starr was in the
blingering. So in 2003, Jeffrey joins MySpace and quickly becomes extremely MySpace famous. Now I just turned 27.
And I don't really know that much. I don't really know that much about MySpace.
It was a spectacle. I mean, all of us were friends with Jeffrey Starr on MySpace because it was the era of that. You know, you added as many people as possible. You organized your top friends. It was a very political thing. And everyone wanted to be on Jeffrey Starr's page and like a series of other people who also turned out to be shitty. But I remember coming to school and being like, oh, did you see what Jeffrey posted?
And it's always like some outlandish thing.
I remember vividly the Fruit Loops picture of him self-inducing.
Wait, what is this?
This great example of how he hasn't changed, actually.
It was a picture of him making himself throw up fruit loops.
And, you know, it was a very kind of cool looking weird, like edgy picture.
But it was such a great example of him doing edge lordship because obviously at this era,
people had sensitivity around anorexia and body and things like that that was early 2000s right and so yeah that's a good example of him being like edgy and glamorous and like not giving a thought like not give not carrying and like yeah i did it yeah yeah i did it and the thing is i think a lot of people don't understand like how common that attitude was online because there were less of us online like social media was like starting to really become a thing
And like, you know, if you were an early adopter, you were kind of often also more of like a nerdy person too.
What really struck me was how specific of an aesthetic there was to this era.
Like, I don't think it really has a lot of easy one-to-one comparisons.
Like, this was the hot topic, goth.
Like, Jeffrey fell into that category with like the hot pink hair and like the crazy looks.
But what I think really defined this era was also just like, like,
tiny scene queen girls, like literally the scene queens of MySpace. And Jeffrey wove his social
life into theirs and like understood very early on that one of the ways to stay relevant,
in addition to cultivating this really like shocking aesthetic and having this shock jock persona,
was also to put himself in this social world and sort of cause drama. And he also at this era
was appearing in like the background of Kesha music videos. And there are,
There are photos of him and Demi Lovato from this era at house parties.
He really wanted to embed himself in the scene and he succeeded.
I was watching while preparing for this episode.
There's like all sorts of old Jeffrey Star Myspace content like on the internet archive and like deep, deep, deep in Reddit.
There are just these videos of him with like his other mostly like white scene queen type friends.
and they're just being so unbelievably racist.
Yeah.
Like really, like truly shocking.
Like, just like throwing around the N-word,
a lot of like anti-Mexican racism.
It's quite shocking.
Watching me because I wish they were famous and sadly I am and they'll never be anything.
So they've done their little shack with their fucking, you know,
little lighter.
So they can't even afford an oven to bake their little food.
And they just keep on harassing it.
It's so pathetic.
I love it.
I really think you'd get away with fucking making a fake Jeffrey Star profile just to promote yourself and getting pissed off and fucking being a dumb fucking black hoe.
So pathetic.
I mean, one of the videos I did was about several of the clips that had resurfaced where he had like been saying the N-word, right?
And a lot of people at the time saw these, these videos and were like, things were so much different back then.
And keep in mind, you guys, I'm 35. I was there.
You know, like it was racist then.
It was and it's still racist now.
These people just kind of got away with it because the one thing that has changed is that
there are more people on the internet.
It's not really subculture anymore.
And I think that's the thing that a lot of people don't really have a good context for.
Like, I had to sneak on the internet to get onto to MySpace and start a Zanga and do all this
shit.
Now it's in everybody's pockets, right?
And so now what you have is a wider range of people looking.
out what you're doing. And these kids could just be racist. You know, they could post really
heinously racist stuff. You know, I've been posting videos on the internet. There was a time when I
didn't post videos with the idea that other people would see them or that the videos would get outside
of my immediate circle of people or, you know, I wouldn't think about people capturing it or downloading
it or thinking about it. So I know that a lot of these kids, they made these videos, uploaded them,
mostly probably for their friends.
There was probably a large amount of people on the internet who at the time were still
subculture who were laughing at it, but not necessarily criticizing it because everyone kind
of understood that that's kind of the weird thing that they were doing is like being racist
and like a safe way, right?
And no one really criticized it.
And then when these things resurfaced, because Jeffrey Starr's issue, in my opinion,
I mean, issue, it's a good thing.
He decided to jump on the bandwagon of extended shade ranges.
and started to become very much about, yeah, I'm all about black women and da-da-da-da.
And so when these things resurface and he centered himself as like a central figure on social media who is a trusted source,
there are a lot of people who are naturally going to ask, does a person who would make that content even back then,
keeping in mind that not every white person goes through a racist phase, right?
Would that person be the right person to trust when it comes to black women and extended shade race?
ranges. And there were still a lot of people who swore by the makeup, swore by the quality of it,
swore by his opinion of other makeup and said, you know, maybe Jeffrey Starr was racist back then.
But, you know, he's clearly changed. My main argument was, I mean, really all he's trying to do
is like most capitalists make more money by selling products that can be sold to certain types of
people, right? Like, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how extended your shade range is.
like you're still trying to make money. It's not actually charity, you know, but people treated it
like charity. And I think Jeffrey Starr largely survives on the idea that he's in some way doing
charity. And I think like going back to that early Myspace era, the racism was a prominent feature.
The like top influencers were either incredibly fair-skinned and white, like they were all white
people for the most part and or openly white supremacists. This was viewed as like a part of edgy culture
a part of cool culture.
And Jeffrey performed in Warped Tour, where popular bands and singers used this type of iconography
to be edgy.
It was a fetishization of racism, of white supremacy, also of things like self-harm, of eating disorders.
And this stuff fed itself into Jeffrey Starr's content and was a part of his, like,
aesthetic image as well.
Yes.
And Jeffrey at this point, he loved, like you said, it's like fetishizing this sort of like Nazi
iconography. He loved Confederate flags and he loved swastikas. And to that end, there's something I need
to talk about. But I do want to add that, like, to me, from a psychological place, a lot of this
reads as like, not to give him too much grace and not that it justifies anything, but like, to me,
a lot of this behavior makes sense as like a cry for attention. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, this is
someone who, right, whose dad died by suicide when he was five who like grew up as like this
openly effeminate queer kid and like a very conservative place. And it's like it, to me,
a lot of it just seems like acting out. Definitely. A hundred percent. I mean, a lot of people who
rose to prominence on the internet, not just in the Myspace era, but throughout the entire timeline
and history of the internet, a lot of these people are young influencers from incredibly troubled,
volatile home backgrounds.
A lot of times they're very lonely and isolated,
which is why they spend so much time on the internet,
putting content of themselves on the internet.
A lot of time they've been abused,
like lots of times like trauma in their backgrounds.
And unfortunately, the internet is a very like comfortable place
for people like this to thrive.
And it rewards and incentivizes the worst possible behavior
that they are willing to do partly because of their backgrounds.
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Now, let's get back to the show.
And every time something new resurfaces about Jeffrey Starr and people being like,
can you believe Jeffrey Starr is a conservative?
I'm like, you guys don't think that the guy who started lipstick Nazi would be a conservative,
but the problem is they don't know about lipstick Nazi.
Are you too familiar with Jeffrey Starr's first attempt at a beauty brand?
I am, unfortunately.
Yeah. Around 2006, Jeffrey Starr launches LipstickNazi.com. I can't believe the words that are coming out of my mouth right now.
Do either of you want to describe what lipstick Nazi is? I mean, people dig this up every few years and it is a revelation to too many. But essentially, like, you have this Myspace Era web design, classically, the hot pink lipstick, the super heavy.
black and glitter eyeliner and pink swastikas, pink razor blades, barbed wire,
lipstick Nazi.com, Hollywood.
Like, this falls into this MySpace aesthetic that is so specific, so clearly.
And at around the same time, there was a rumor.
So I don't know how much of this survived to this day,
but there was always kind of like an allegation that floats around from time to time
that fans would like self-harm and post-reve.
those pictures online in tribute to Jeffrey Starr.
Yeah.
That honestly, regardless of whether or not that is true, that does feel like a rumor that
Jeffrey Starr would indulge.
Oh, totally.
Because it would be like, look how much these people love me.
In an interview that Jeffrey Starr gave recently, he, you know, now he's really leaning into
this like anti-cancel culture conservative grievance politics, like way more openly.
And like you said, Cat Black, like using the script that he knows how to follow.
he went on a cancel culture riff
that I thought was really fascinating.
And for some reason, around 2013,
everyone became a pussy.
And people were, it was a very bizarre shift.
Like, all my crazy wild jokes were now,
and I'm like, okay, got it.
And people got really, really weird.
And I think now we're at a place
where people should be held accountable
for really awful things, right?
I think cancel culture is kind of over.
But like we talked about,
you're going to glorify
and make fun of someone
that was murdered on,
like,
now you're getting
the repercussion.
So the people that are losing
their jobs,
Trump is taking away visas
if you're tweeting,
I'm glad he died.
Good.
Now you're being held
responsible versus,
oh,
you made a joke when you were 12.
We're going to hate you forever.
I think people are allowed
to grow and change.
And what's funny
is he would love to be a kid
right now making a Charlie Kirk joke.
Like,
that I can imagine
that he would literally be doing that.
Like,
if he was a little team,
because that's what the little teenagers are doing right now.
If he was a kid now and like all of this had happened in the early 2000s,
Jeffrey would have like made a lipstick called like Charlie's Blood.
Yeah.
But it's just, it's so interesting and conservatives do this now,
which is also like Jeffrey Starr just becoming like a run of the mill conservative grifter type
is so boring to like I hold him to a higher standard.
Like do a more complex grift than that.
But he's doing what they all do, which is like creating a.
very narrow definition of accountability that includes everyone he personally disagrees with and
not himself. And and also reducing like his entire wild past of like very overt racism that went
well into his 20s as a joke that I made when I was 12. There are two things about what he said in
that clip that really irritated me. The first thing is when he talks about the cancel culture of the
2010's and how this period was so wrong, he weaponized cancel culture to his benefit.
And he has done this throughout his career.
He drives hate campaigns against his competitors in his various fields.
And at this period in time, he weaponized cancel culture to his benefit.
He weaponized cancel culture when he attacked James Charles.
He weaponized cancel culture when he attacked Laura Lee and MUNA and Gabriel Zamora and
all of those other people.
And he uses it to his benefit and then he discards it to his benefit and acts like he was never a part of it.
The other thing that really annoys me is when he's talking about the government taking away people's visas for joking or celebrating Charlie Kirk's death and how that's somehow better than cancel culture, it's not surprising.
It's just annoying because conservatives already make this argument all the time.
It's just even more infuriating to hear it out of Jeffrey Starr's like uneducated mouth.
But I'm like, you understand that that is actually a freedom of speech violation.
When the government, when the state restricts your movement because of your speech, that is tyranny.
Cancel culture is not.
But of course you make the opposite distinction.
It is just so stupid to listen to.
And it's a continuation of like most of this stupid cancel culture shit anyway.
Like, did he get canceled?
No, because cancel culture isn't fucking real.
Like, there's definitely something to be said about the way that.
people on the internet will sometimes jump on hate campaigns and da-da-da-da-da-da
and whether or not accountability actually matters isn't there's a conversation to be had about
cancel culture but like it's never meant what these motherfuckers are trying to make it sound like
and what what kills me about what he said is it actually doesn't require a lot of thick
skin for you to be a conservative and to just be racist and it really doesn't like it is actually a little
bit more bold to stand up against people like Charlie Kirk who are paid a lot of money by billionaires
to go to college campuses and say that people like me don't have the mental capacity to ever
possibly hold any position of power over a white man, right? You know, it's also frustrating because
actually the thing you should be opposed to as a person who believes in this constitution is
people being imprisoned for their speech. It would actually be far more American for you
if we're buying into the bullshit for you to stand up with your fellow Americans and support
their freedom of speech rights, right?
Like that would absolutely be the more, you know, traditional way.
And that's kind of the thing that's fascinating.
Being raised around so many conservatives, this whole Trumpy MAGA thing is kind of funny to
me because it's not consistent, but of course it never is, you know?
Yeah.
I do think you're giving Jeffrey Starr way too much credit in the idea that he's like aiming to be
coherent in his politics.
Like he's just saying whatever he needs to say.
People who you who buy makeup for you have the right to care about you saying the N word.
And that's actually not a big deal.
You could argue that that's actually the free market with people making the decision to not purchase your stuff because of what you advertised, you know, in the past.
It's just, it's funny to me.
Like, he wants to be able to be edgy.
He wants to be free to be edgy.
He wants to be able to say the racist shit.
He doesn't really like any of the consequences for it.
That's the funny thing because they'll walk away from the conversation.
saying, oh, so I have thicker skin when really you're a thin skin little bitch.
Yeah.
So as we mentioned in the latter half of the 2000s and the early 2010s, Jeffrey Starr was making music.
He established himself in this like vans warped tour scene.
He, Jeff, the amount of celebrity cameos in Jeffrey Starr's existence is so bizarre.
Jeffrey Starr made a song with Nikki Minaj.
Oh.
Who is also.
Who is now?
Also Nazi.
How great.
Which I'm like, I'm like, can you believe that?
And everyone's like, yeah.
Especially now.
Especially now.
Yeah.
Nikki Minaj is also now a trumper.
But that's a whole other thing.
But do you know who managed Jeffrey Starr as a music artist?
Acon.
Fuck.
You know everything about Jeffrey Starr.
There's no surprises.
Jeffrey Starr was managed.
by Acon who signed Jeffrey to his record label and once referred to Jeffrey Starr as
the next Lady Gaga.
Yikes.
But you know at that era, some of his music was kind of giving Lady Gaga, some of it.
Oh, yeah.
He did like a whole electro thing for a bit that was giving that.
And it was during Jeffrey Starr's brief career as a sort of up-and-coming musician,
that Jeffrey Starr has a number of sexual.
assault allegations levied against him. And this is where I defer to Kat Tenbarge who investigated
and reported those allegations. Kat, take it away. So I think it really goes hand in hand with what
we've been talking about in regards to the violence of these eras and environments that Jeffrey
Starr partook in. Because going back to the Warped Tour era, which is when these allegations
took place, the majority of the ones that I reported on, at least, like Jeffrey surrounded
himself and was in this environment that was ripe with this type of abuse.
And there have been so many allegations that stemmed from artists who performed at Warp Tour,
including the artists that Jeffrey collaborated with Blood on the Dance Floor.
And before I reported on the allegations against Jeffrey,
I reported on these allegations against the lead singer Dobby Vanity of Blood on the Dance
Floor, who Jeffrey worked with.
And at the time, going back in the archive of Jeffrey's tweets,
He tweeted about these allegations within this scene against Dobby Vanity.
He, like, said that he confirmed them, that he was like an eyewitness to things that had happened.
And then fast forward to 2020.
And Jeffrey kind of denounces some of this, I think, to not have any accountability or responsibility for what was allegedly happening there.
And at that same time that he's kind of denying knowing anything about Dobby Vanity whose allegations are being brought up, allegations against Jeffrey.
come up. And this is also the period of time when Jeffrey and Shane Dawson were both experiencing
this reckoning that touched on all kinds of terrible content and conduct that they were
partaking in, racist content, offensive and derogatory content, inappropriate interactions
with fans and with minors. And all of these allegations were like sort of swirling around.
And a lot of them do date back to the MySpace era. But this pattern emerged over like years,
of behavior where Jeffrey had allegedly engaged kind of embracing like his online persona
offline like people in the scene alleged that he had been violent toward them that he had like
either threatened to use or used weaponry on them that he would then show in videos on YouTube
like my pink taser or like my handbag lit all my weapons that I have so there were allegations
of that behavior happening offline.
And then there were also sexual assault allegations against Jeffrey,
groping men in venues and just sort of being like physically sexually aggressive in public.
And then also involving like other people in the MySpace scene.
And this was like pretty horrific stuff.
When I approached Jeffrey for comment at the time back in 2021,
a lot of sources and people who had made allegations reached out to start recanting those
allegations before the story was published. And we were later able to report that Jeffrey
had been offering sources for the story, like hush money payments of like thousands of dollars,
tens of thousands of dollars in some cases to recant those allegations. But the story still came
out. But interestingly enough, the story, it was definitely felt and read at the time and
like fairly widely. But the story did not take off. Like most people do not know about these
allegations against Jeffrey Starr. And I think the reason for that is people expect a level of
bad behavior from him. And it doesn't shock them in the way that it shocks someone when you hear
allegations against a beloved celebrity. So like the tolerance for the entire scale of his behavior
public or otherwise has created this environment where he doesn't even receive the same levels
of criticism or cancellation that maybe other celebrities receive. And yet here he has still
complaining about cancel culture when he avoided and was able to sort of wriggle his way out of
so much deserved scrutiny. That's why it's so annoying. He's been complaining about this forever,
but I think to your point earlier, mostly as like a sales point, because he's never really
canceled. Him being canceled ends up being like the thing that draws more attention to him.
And then you go to the comment section, oh, we love you, Jeffrey, don't let anyone, you know,
who cares? Jeffrey is huge on TikTok. Sometimes I'll be on TikTok and I'll get his lives and
I'm like, oh my God, I clicked not interested a week ago.
You know, and even if it's like a new makeup thing, I'll get, I'll get it.
Like, he's everywhere still.
That's why you can't really take any of the I was canceled shit seriously because I don't
think even he cares.
Can I just return to my thesis that Jeffrey Starr is Donald Trump?
But really what I'm describing there is like an enormous category of celebrity men who
I honestly think being able to bulldoze sexual harassment and sexual
assault allegations, which only a very certain type of person, right, wealthy white men are able to do.
I feel like getting over the other side of that relatively unscathed, like the message that
sends is that you can do anything. It's very Trumpian to me. Well, I think a lot of men,
they hold on to this idea that if they one day amass enough wealth, that's what they'll be
able to do. And it's funny because, you know, I've spent a lot of time with people of means. And
kind of get the sense of that, right? That at a certain point, like, they just want to purchase people.
Then when you look at what's happening with Epstein, you sort of see it, you know, you've got people messaging Epstein while he's in jail about how they can get around sexual assault allegations.
There's this group of men understand that at the end of the day, rich white men should be allowed to do it.
And if they did do it, then, you know, whoever was on the other end of that should be happy it happened to them.
You know, as a survivor, that's, that's something that I've come to sort of understand as well.
I've only once reported a man who's assaulted me and there have been several.
And I feel good about not reporting some of the men that have harmed me because they are rich white men.
They are men who have means and who would ruin my life.
And unfortunately, that's the world that a lot of the Trump-like people want to hold on to.
And I think it's a world that we hopefully dismantle quite soon.
I don't know if that's possible in my lifetime, but unfortunately, that is a big thing.
When I was reporting on these allegations against Jeffrey back in 2021, one of the things I remember strongly about having conversations with dozens of people who had known Jeffrey Starr at various points in his life, a lot of them for a very short amount of time, but they had crossed paths with him in some way.
And a lot of them were terrified of him.
And they were terrified for me, for reporting on him.
And they had built him up with this sort of mythology that I think was really understandable where they were coming from.
But it's like he is an individual who traffics in fear and benefits from people being this afraid of him.
So he like cultivates this mysterious persona of like, I'm unimaginably wealthy.
I can get away with anything.
And through conveying that to people, conveying that message to them and that impression
to them, he does get away with everything.
He's like faking it until he makes it.
And I think that's super Trumpian as well.
And I also think that even the aesthetic in what both of them project is kind of similar.
Because with Jeffrey, when he transitioned over to selling makeup after his music career
ended, his audience has always included a demographic of people who are like rural,
who are very low income, who are like middle America.
these are the types of people who have always been fans of Jeffrey Starr,
which doesn't necessarily strike people as like predictable or sensible
because it's like, oh, he's this Hollywood, openly gay,
super sexually explicit about being gay, like flamboyant man.
What about him appeals to this demographic?
But in a similar way, you could ask what appeals to this demographic about Trump
because Trump is also like an East Coast like super flamboyant,
loves Broadway, gold toilet seed, like the type of individual.
And yet they both have this same appeal.
And I think a lot of that appeal, a singular part of that appeal, is this like Arab,
I can get away with anything.
Yes.
So post MySpace, post-music career, Jeffrey Starr transitions this relatively niche fame into
becoming one of the biggest faces of what is beginning to boom in the early 2010s.
which is beauty YouTube.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome back to my channel.
Hi.
How are you?
You know, this is not going to be an episode
where we document every single thing
that Jeffrey Starr has ever done
because Kat and I have tried to do versions of that on Patreon
and we end up just like locking ourselves in a room for eight hours
and just like really hard and like people start screaming for help.
So we need to be selective about what exactly we pull from each of these eras.
I think the most interesting thing about,
about Jeffrey Starr's career on YouTube, is that this coincides with this like cultural shift,
this Obama era liberalism, where I think as Kat Black said earlier, you had to pretend to care
about social causes. You had to pretend. And a lot of people earnestly did care about those things.
But for Jeffrey, someone who just a couple years prior was like saying the N-word on camera,
chasing black women down the street and hurling racial slurs at them.
This is, you know, someone who needed to do a radical shift if he wanted to capitalize on the
moment the way that he was about to.
Yeah.
And my thing with it has always been, I don't believe you, you know.
And I felt that way about a lot of people back then, actually, mostly because there's a
way you carry yourself and speak about things when you actually have done the work.
And what it felt to me was happening with Jeffrey and with a lot of other people.
is they just got the script.
Like he had the script earlier in the first video we saw.
He has another script and we're all about inclusivity, intersectionality, you know,
stay woke.
I'll never forget one time a Google executive asked me if stay woke is still relevant.
There was an era of like the Obama like liberalism shit that yeah, a lot of people were
bullshitting to make sales.
And, you know, I think there are some people who feel kind of nice that we're not doing that
anymore. Jeffrey being one of them. Jeffrey for sure being one of them because he never believed it.
And I knew that. But all people could say is like, but he's selling makeup to black people,
though. Like, would he sell makeup to black people if he was racist? Like, come on, you guys.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, he would. Jeffrey was doing what a lot of other, I think,
celebrities and influencers were also doing, which was shifting like Shane Dawson comes to mind for
the YouTuber comparison.
Another episode. Let me know. I don't know if we can, maybe post holidays we could revisit Shane Dawson because I don't have it in me right now. I want to feel, I want to, I want to feel merry. God damn it. But yeah, I mean, a lot of these celebrities and YouTubers, Kardashians come to mind as well. What Jeffrey Starr was doing was he was shifting from a kind of overtly racist viral content into a type of content that was like culturally appropriative and therefore was able to be packaged.
as socially liberal, socially progressive. But the reality of it was he was still taking advantage of
and in a lot of cases, still very overtly attacking and targeting black women and black people.
And some of the aesthetic indicators of this era were like, no longer do we have the super grungy,
high contrast, MySpace era makeup. Now we've gone into this like lux aesthetic that really defines
this group of people where it's like now we just fetishize.
wealth itself. So we have an entire room full of Birkin handbags and all of our clothes are designer.
We live in these absurd Calabasas mansions and we have all these designer dogs. And it's like,
Jeffrey in this era of YouTube really showcased wealth as a big like part of his shock and awe
versus like some of the overtly offensive stuff that he was doing a few years prior.
One of the highlights of his many YouTube controversies was his like very race.
racist feud with Jackie Ina, who is a popular black creator online. She was also very popular in the
beauty space. I don't remember the exact timeline, but I remember that text messages were leaked of
Jeffrey, I think calling Jackie a gorilla, if I remember actually. I think that's what I remember
too. I forget who leaked them or who was in that. I know I made a video about it, but I, you know,
I've not cared about Jeffrey Starr in a long time.
The granular details themselves are exchangeable for so many of these Jeffries are controversies.
But it's like time and time again, even throughout this YouTube era, the peak of his career,
where he's the most beloved, even by liberal and socially progressive people, the cracks were always there.
The bad stuff was always bursting at the seams.
We could see it the whole time.
These text messages are so blatant.
And yet people still tried to like push it under the rug and pretend like that wasn't the
real Jeffrey that they saw on their YouTube screen. Yeah, which is bizarre because most people,
I'm bad at this, but most people, they put on a character that they show. And to me, Jeffrey's
projecting a character. And this character needs to sell makeup to you. And black people have money.
Black women invests very heavily in the beauty space. And I personally think that Jeffrey Starr,
because of the way that both of their opinions were trusted, was a little threatened by Jackie,
you know, who's doing a lot of stuff at the time.
And I think like the thing for me with Jeffrey is so much of it leads back to him hating
black women.
And people like to think that black women are sensitive.
We're easily offended.
You know, we got thin skin, which is such a hilarious accusation, especially listening to
him complain about being canceled still in 2025.
But, you know, the reality is we just see it.
You know, we see it because we're used to having to see.
it. So a lot of black women did address Jeffrey Starr for being a little weird about black women.
And literally, all people could come back with was, oh, but he sells makeup to black women.
And I think that there's obvious reasons why a non-racist white people shouldn't even
privately refer to a black person as a gorilla. But people love to like suspend their disbelief.
And, you know, oh, this person who's trying to sell things to me, they couldn't, they couldn't be a
different person behind the scenes.
Not at all.
Wait, I actually want to touch on that, though.
We've been circling around this a little bit,
but one comment that comes up over and over and over and over and over again for the like
20 plus long years career of Jeffrey Starr is like,
Jeffrey Starr is real as fuck when he's reviewing makeup.
So like, I trust him because like he will always be honest when talking about that
Anastasia Beverly Hills.
shadow palette. And I'm like, the bar has to be higher than this. But you know, here,
here's the problem. Here, here's what I'll say. This is going to sound like a little bit of
apology. But I'll tell you. Oh, okay. No, I'm here. So Jeffrey Starr, especially at that
era, because he was projecting wealth, there were a lot of people who were like, okay, he really
doesn't have a reason to bullshit us. That he's got all of the incentives to just be honest, right?
And at the time, there were a lot of influencers being paid to say nice things about products.
And I think, actually, this is maybe why Jeffrey Starr did appeal to some of the more rural folks, too,
because he would actually give, in my opinion, pretty good reviews of makeup.
And for a lot of people, especially people who are trying to save money, you want to invest.
You don't want to just go and buy this trendy bullshit because so-and-so said so,
and they're reading a thing that says that you have, you know.
So I think for some people, it was like, I'm going to watch a Jeffrey Star video because
I know Jeffrey Star has no incentive to lie to me.
Of course, that's, you know, to be questioned.
But I think that was the idea.
I think that's such a sharp analysis.
And I also think like two things come to mind.
One, it again relates back to Trump for me because that also is so much of Trump's appeal is like
Because Trump was also really honest about eye shadow review.
Well, it's like.
The pathos is like Trump is not a government guy. Trump is an outsider.
So therefore, Trump will tell us the truth about what's really going on in this institution that we distrust, even though Trump himself isn't extremely corrupt, untrustworthy person.
And I think the same can ultimately be said for Jeffrey Starr.
But Jeffrey Starr was so smart about how he started and grew his makeup career at the same time as he was doing YouTube makeup commentary.
Because the first Jeffrey Star Cosmetics products were like the intense, long-lasting liquid
lipsticks that were pretty revolutionary at the time.
People were using them.
Drag queens were using them.
Celebrities were using them.
People, professional makeup artists put them in their makeup kits.
This was a good product for him to launch with because it actually set him up with,
like, authenticity and credibility that other people did not have.
He also was genuinely talented at doing makeup.
He could impart actual makeup wisdom on to.
his viewers. And I think the way that he ultimately steered his brand was so unique, but worked
really well for a time, which was that he was so, um, like, aggressive toward other brands,
which is not how people usually market their products. You're not usually like, um, I'm going to
buy your product because you're feuding with the owner of the competing product and I side with
you. But that is literally how Jeffrey Starr conducted himself. He feuded with the Kardashians.
He was like their products are trash.
And the reality is they were overpriced.
And like he feuded with all of these different people.
And a lot of times I think his insights about what the competitors were doing wrong were true.
But his ultimate kind of downfall in this territory is that as Jeffrey grew his brand, his own products could not live up to like what he was saying about competitors.
Because today he sells a massive range of products.
He sells skincare.
He launched, I believe like concealer.
and foundation and was doing all these different things.
And as he put out more products,
it became more and more clear that like,
MUAs are not reaching for the Jeffrey Star setting spray.
Like people like the Jeffrey Star skincare, nobody's asking for that.
Like yeah, never heard of it.
Over time, he almost like lost that edge,
but it worked really well for a while.
I will say I know we're kind of getting away from politics here,
but when he launched his skincare line,
I was like, who looks at Jeffrey Star
and think skincare.
People call him the cryptkeeper.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The opposite is true, actually.
His makeup is so impressive because of what he looks like.
I will say, though, there is a demographic of people who purchase everything he puts out.
Like, if you go deep into the weeds of like Jeffrey Star fan subculture internet,
you will see people who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on all of his products,
on all of his like hand mirrors and we'll post like photo halls of all of them.
And when I discovered that part of like Reddit or whatever, I was like, that's crazy.
Well, I have some experience with them because back when I was on Twitter and posting
about Jeffrey Star all the time, these people would obviously be like coming for me constantly.
And I would go look at like their pictures and like read their profiles and see how they had
an entire wall of Jeffrey Star hand mirrors and like every single palette.
eye shadow palette, but they didn't really wear it. It was interesting. It felt like I was doing
like a sociological study in a lot of ways because I could tell that these were not like wealthy
people whatsoever. In fact, I don't think they could afford their level of devotion to Jeffrey
Star or at the very least they were dedicating a substantial amount of like what they had,
the resources they had toward these collections. They really sought his acknowledgement.
and approval. So, like, Jeffrey would occasionally, as many celebrities and influencers do,
he rewards people with engagement. He has done, like, giveaways. He puts on, as I believe
Kat, you were talking about at the beginning, like this charitable persona. That also really speaks
to these people. And so they're vying for his attention. They want to show him that they are a
devoted fan. And they also want to defend him. I'll never forget. I think the last time I went
down this rabbit hole, it was he had released some, some highlighter.
and someone at DragCon got this highlighter and it had broken apart and they were finding out in like real time, I think, that Jeffrey Starr doesn't care about you.
And it was really sad because he was so dedicated because he had purchased all of these things, you know.
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And now let's get back to the episode.
I know a lot of people are listening to this and they might be waiting for me to talk about by sister.
And this is not a by sister episode.
Kat Tenbarge and I did a very, dare I say, excruciatingly long series.
about by sister.
That is over on Patreon.
What I will say about by sister, which,
let me see if I can synthesize the entire events of by sister in like two sentences.
Basically, James Charles, who is a younger, much more quickly up-and-coming competitor to Jeffrey Starr, Tati Westbrook,
who was another veteran of YouTube, made a video about James Charles, who she was a friend and mentor to,
accusing him not only of betraying her as a friend, but being a sexual predator.
And this was before all that stuff came out about James Charles.
So at the time, there was no actual evidence to believe that it was true.
But Tati Westbrook nonetheless spun the narrative that it was true.
And then James Charles disproved everything and Tati Westbrook looked really bad.
And then Tati Westbrook, one year later, came back and said that Jeffrey Starr had manipulated her into making her original
video. That is like
the broadest of broad strokes, but did I do okay?
I think you did a good job.
Some people know a lot about like law or science.
I know a lot about my sister.
My only comment with regard to this episode,
Jeffrey Starr's political arc, his general worldview,
is that I completely believe that he orchestrated by sister.
because I think one thing we know about Jeffrey Starr is he has always been intimidated by business rivals.
He has never been shy about being unbelievably cruel to other people.
And so, like, I completely believe that he planted seeds in, in Tati's head about, like, oh, maybe James Charles is a bit of a sexual predator.
And that's how we can take them down and then, you know, reign supreme in this YouTube beauty space.
Well, I think that for me, the kind of through line here is that Jeffrey,
through the confrontational marketing style, Jeffrey saw James Charles as like someone he
desperately needed to take out. They were so similar to each other. And James poised
such a threat to Jeffrey's bottom line. And when Jeffrey does this like aggressive confrontational
style of counter marketing with other people in the industry, there's no low he won't sink to.
he will 100% accuse someone of very dubious, serious allegations, even as a total hypocrite.
He will also rely on racism easily.
And people let him get away with that.
And I think for a long time, this continued until this and other factors, I think ultimately
became too much for him, which is when we go into the next phase of his career.
But like, for a little bit, this strategy worked very, very well.
and it relied on people's underlying bigotry.
They're underlying racism, they're underlying homophobia,
and we now see him doing that again.
Should we talk about the insane apology videos
before we go into that era?
Yes.
I totally forgot about those apology videos.
Jeffrey Starr, before realizing that he had to move on from YouTube,
because this era really came crashing down for him,
he made a number of apology videos for like past racism,
past transgressions.
And I just want to sit for a minute with the thumbnails of those videos, particularly
one where...
I totally forgot.
It's all coming back.
I'm dead.
I love the little boy.
He looks like a femme Voldemort in this thumbnail.
And he's like holding his face ever so gingerly in his like Gucci sweater.
And the text...
on top of his, on top of his body just says racism.
Racism.
Also, I'm pretty sure in that video, he never actually utters the words, I'm sorry.
I don't think he ever apologizes.
Like, I feel like that's kind of a hallmark of Jeffrey is like, the video is not titled,
I'm sorry that I was racist.
The video is simply titled, racism.
It exists.
Like, let's talk about it.
And then he's like, he's like, the internet was a different place back then.
or actually another classic rhetorical style that he falls back on is like, I'm not that person anymore.
I'm really not.
I can't even recognize that version of Jeffrey.
Yeah, I don't.
I think that's what he says, right?
I don't even recognize that person.
And it just makes me sick to my stomach because I don't know who that person was.
I know who I am today.
I know exactly the person I am today, but I do not know who that person was.
And, you know, I do believe people change, but have you changed, sir?
I don't know.
I feel like he's one of the most consistent and predictable people I've ever seen on the internet.
Well, and this is the thing.
It's like we're watching as this person tries to just stay with the times, ultimately to sell makeup.
And so what that means in this moment is like issuing a few really ridiculous apology videos.
There was another one.
And I think this was the last great YouTube controversy of Jeffrey Starr before he flees to Wyoming.
after the whole by sister scandal really collapses in 2020.
Jeffrey Starr makes an apology video where he is perched on his golden sofa in Louis Vuitton slippers in front of a dual spiral staircase.
And he's saying, you know, I never meant to get caught up in any of this.
I don't know if you guys remember this video, but I literally have its transcript burned into the back of my brain.
He shifts so quickly from,
This is not who I am.
This is not Jeffrey Starr.
I know I'm dramatic.
I'm crazy at times.
I'm outspoken.
But at the end of the day, that is not who I am.
Two, we need to be talking about
there hasn't been justice for Brianna Taylor.
And did I get swept up into the bullshit again?
Of course I did.
And for that, I'm forever embarrassed of.
Now, Brianna Taylor still has no justice.
Black trans women are being murdered.
every day and the news is silent.
Elijah McLean has no justice.
And the countless other people who are murdered every single day
while everyone just goes about their business, like nothing's happening.
Yeah, I do remember that.
I was like, oh my God, shut up.
And that's another example of him reading the script.
It was like, I mean, all of these influencers back then were like,
Black Lives Matter, but then they were like being racist on the weekend and like,
you know, bullying their Black friend.
Like, yes.
And then they were like, but what really matters isn't what I did.
It's Brianna Taylor.
But also, he doesn't care about Brianna Taylor, which is not, it was always very evident,
but particularly after watching him praise Charlie Kirk.
Yeah.
It's so obvious that he did not give a fuck about Brianna Taylor.
He just used her name as a buzzword.
Charlie Kirk, he's extolling the virtues of this man.
Yeah, literally.
Literally.
Like, what Charlie Kirk was advocating for is why she was murdered.
So for you to say, but I believed in him and I did it.
It's like, come on, man, you never felt that way.
And I do appreciate that people are being more honest now about how they feel.
Like the Jeffrey stars of the world did drive me a little insane during the Obama era.
Like, just be honest, you're racist.
Just make, you can make makeup for just white people.
I'm sure you'll be fine.
Honestly, the multiple acts of that golden couch apology video are so insane to me because
it goes from, if it's not me, I never did anything wrong, to like, let's talk about
what really matters, Brianna Taylor.
Two, I'm so excited for all the new things we're working on at Jeffrey StarC cosmetic.
All right.
Now, no matter what narrative anyone tries to spin of me, I am so fucking proud to own an
inclusive makeup company.
Since I opened my doors in 2014, I have created products for everyone.
Any product, shade, or formula I've created has worked for any race, gender.
And most importantly, I want you guys to remember that all beauty matters.
Yeah.
His ability to go from like just effortlessly from one thing to the next was really on display there.
But I do think this was the last time that Jeffrey Starr was like really making a splash on YouTube because he failed so completely in this moment.
And so what he did was in 2021, he flees from Los Angeles to Wyoming.
Getting away from the wokeness.
Oh my God.
I'm so scared.
Oh, my God.
Get away.
This is funny to me.
To Wyoming, where he purses.
purchases a yak farm, which of course he seamlessly integrates into his business model and starts selling yak meat.
What I will say about the move from L.A. to Wyoming is it's really interesting. He lived in this mansion in Hidden Hills, which is a gated community in Los Angeles.
He ultimately sold it for about $16 million. He tried to sell it to Britney Spears. She and her ex-husband toward it at the time. That was really interesting.
But Jeffrey Starr sells his mansion for, I think, $16 or $17 million. And then,
moves into this ranch in Wyoming, in Casper, Wyoming, which costs, I believe, $1.2 million.
Jeffrey Starr now says, oh, it was COVID and I was shacked up in this big mansion that I didn't know
what to do with. I never even used the movie theater, which I'm like, I'm with you. Like,
I would go crazy in a house that big. But there seems to me, like, something missing in this narrative
of like, so I downsized by like over a thousand percent. I think that like the clearest,
of what happened here, which is corroborated by several things, is like in 2020,
makeup trends changed dramatically. And like the things that Jeffrey Starr's brand had been known
for, bright, bold, full coverage makeup, that was no longer in whatsoever. And that is around
the time that he introduced like Jeffrey Starr skincare. He started doing more like makeup brushes,
like other products besides what he was known for. None of that stuff ever took off. And
the way that his like previous products had become cult classics. Jeffrey's Dark Cosmetics,
it suffered as a brand. It was suffering as an industry. His scandals did not help. A lot of people
in the public who would have otherwise been comfortable buying his makeup, I think were turned off
by some of what had happened in the preceding years. And so you have all of these economic factors.
And then socially, you also have this sort of like quasi falling out with his like then best friend,
Shane Dawson, where they really stopped, like, seeing each other after being previously
super close for content and money, of course. But nonetheless, like, they had a little bit
of, like, a falling out that they kind of denied. He also broke up with his long-term boyfriend,
Nathan Schwant. Oh, Nate. I was engaged right now, I believe. To a woman.
To a woman, yes. Yeah. Oh, my God. Wait. Good, good for him. Yeah, he looks so happy.
Actually, he looks really happy. Mazel to have Nathan Schwant.
For those who don't know, Jeffrey was like, Nathan is straight, except for me.
Yeah.
Which honestly, like, sexuality is very complicated.
Straight identifying men are very complicated.
I believe that that's how both of them understood that relationship.
Not to get too off face.
I agree.
I think that, like, there was a dynamic in the relationship that had more to do with, like,
Jeffrey's wealth.
Absolutely.
And the way that, like, that played into it.
But regardless, they broke up.
So Jeffrey moved to Wyoming.
And obviously Casper, Wyoming, where he lives is a majority white population, like eight to nine out of ten people there are white.
And he just immediately embraced that rural conservative downhome aesthetic to a degree where I at this time around like 2022, the inkling had been planted in my head as a full time Jeffrey Star reporter.
I was like, I think at some point he's going to get political.
I didn't know if he would do like full on run for office.
It all makes sense to me.
And you started to see him really lay the groundwork for where he is now at that stage.
Again, he hasn't changed.
When Jeffrey Starr moves to Wyoming, he starts dipping his toes in.
I remember he did this podcast at the time that went very viral where he was like,
non-binary, they, them, all this fucking bullshit that we started to make up during COVID.
What is that?
I'm out into all the other bullshit.
I think, what other bullshit?
The they and them.
And all that extra shit that we added during the pandemic because everyone is so bored on their fucking houses.
They just started to make up more shit and more stuff, more stuff.
Yeah.
That's where the conservative is like me because I'm just real.
Yeah, you do have a conservative vibe to you.
You're not they and them.
You're trans, your male or you're female.
And you're standing on that.
And people get so mad when I say that.
How are you with they?
What the fuck does that mean?
As stupid is what it is.
But you need someone like me that looks like me to say it.
Because if you say it, it turns into you're homophobic.
You hate trans people.
you hate gays and it's just how you feel you don't hate anyone you just think it's stupid he also
really notably like embeds himself within the community of caspar wyoming and this is an extremely
niche interest that i have never been able to look away from but are you guys familiar with the
makeup and meat store no i've never heard of the makeup and meat store but i think that where
where geoffrey star sells his yak meat and also his makeup yeah yeah jeffs star
Shortly after becoming like a yak farmer, he opens up a store called Jeffrey Starr, makeup and meat, where he sells Jeffrey Starr, makeup, and Jeff. And like beef jerky, like beef jerky, but it's yaks. There was this like, I can never get out of my head. He, he did like an opening day celebration with like the ribbon cutting and the whole thing. And like this is a really specific reference point, but I don't know if you guys.
ever watched like the fairly odd parents.
Jeffrey Star reminds me of like the mayor of Dimmesdale in Casper Wyoming.
Dougsdale Dimadone.
I imagine Jeffrey Starr just like walking around.
Like I imagine him as the mayor of Casper Wyoming.
Yeah.
He does kind of give those vibes.
And if you didn't know anything about Casper Wyoming, which most people don't,
then you would kind of assume from this social media that he had taken over as like the king.
Because he has the money in the community, I assume.
He quite literally does have the money in the community, or at least claims to.
He does interviews now, and he'll talk about how, like, he bought up yaks from neighboring farms.
People will be like, oh, when you move to Wyoming, were people homophobic towards you?
And he'll basically be like, well, you know, I got some weird stairs, but they didn't really know what I was about.
And once they learned, essentially through this sort of coded language, he's like, once they learned that I was a conservative racist and that I had the money to buy up all of their yaks,
they weren't so mean to me anymore.
Which is, again, it's the same thing from Orange County early 2000s MySpace bullshit where he's like,
yeah, everyone's being really mean to me.
It's quite literally if you can't beat them, join them.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now he has enough money to basically own those white people who used to beat him up.
So I think it's probably a little bit of a power thing for him as well.
You know, he comes from California where the cost of living is a lot higher.
He goes to Wyoming where it's a lot lower.
and he gets to be king, you know, and I kind of think that's always what this is kind of about, you know.
He strikes me as a person who just desires endless, endless praise constantly.
A hundred percent.
And one thing that I find really kind of ironic and funny about this era, when he first moved to Wyoming and bought the yaks, people were like, Jeffrey, you're not going to eat them, are you?
And he was like, eat the yaks.
The yaks are like my pets.
I love them.
And then like three weeks later, he was like hot, fresh yak meat.
Like, come and get your yak meat.
So like, he's just such a ruthless capitalist.
Also, when he first moved there, he was buying like engraved benches from local woodworkers
and like going to local businesses and stuff, which in theory is also a good thing to do.
But of course, he was doing it to like win people's favor.
also at a local town square orchestra type thing, there were like banners of local businesses
sponsoring it. And one of them was like Jeffrey Star Cosmetics, which was such a weird image to see
because it was literally like he had embedded himself as this Willy Wonka type figure in a random
Wyoming town. And I'm pretty sure he has a factory there now and he employs a lot of people.
And all of this stuff combined made me wonder for a little while if he was going to like run for mayor or like run for local office or like start small.
Like I was like, is he trying to move somewhere where he can like get a smaller position in office like maybe be a representative or something and then work his way up.
Like I wondered if politics would be in his sites.
But I think based on what he's doing now, the answer is it's so much more work to be a politician than it is to be on TikTok live for like.
17 hours a day and just say a bunch of offensive stuff and get people to buy your like backlogged
makeup stock. Yeah, you have more freedom too. So as we've said, Jeffrey Starr's sort of latest act,
he's become a total TikTok celebrity. He goes live relentlessly and does like TikTok live battles
with people, which I got to say, doesn't seem like a super dignifying activity for someone
with as much wealth as he claims to have. I was shocked when I saw him doing it. I really was actually.
I was like, oh, is he broke? Is he broke? Like, and it's actually, I felt that way about a couple of different people. Like, there's a couple of people like Michelle Fan, for example. I'm like, why are you on TikTok live? Because in my mind, I thought, isn't that kind of like not what you would do at your level? But, you know, I don't sell on TikTok. So who knows? You saw with Jason Nash too. And that was such a big joke online, like influencers and YouTubers who have resorted to panhandling on TikTok live. And
I feel like Jeffrey really thrives in this environment as well.
Like going back to that clip of him, we watched at the beginning.
Like he can just be there and be like, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he can do that for like eight hours.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll share.
I used to do, I used to be a cam girl.
One of the things I didn't understand is that there are people who are literally,
like, they'll go on camera and they'll just say fucked up shit and people will pay them.
And it's kind of, that's why I don't do the live thing because I kind of,
I have like low-key trauma from being a camera.
girl. I know that that's what people want. People want conflict. Well, I mean, it is it is a type of like
psychological pornography. And he has really sort of leaned into this conservative political identity,
again, because what are we tracing? Jeffrey Starr's political arc throughout his career,
which can be traced right alongside the sort of cultural and political arc of America throughout
his career. In his YouTube career, he had to do this Obama era liberalism, hashtag Black Lives
matter stic where he pretended to care and he pretended to apologize and he pretended to grow and change
and learn to be intersectional. But now we're in Trump 2.0 when the whole thing is just like,
what is the attitude of this country right now? Be as mean as you possibly can. Go fuck yourself.
And he's really born for that, honestly. Like this is the most natural point in Jeffrey Starr's
professional career where he can just be himself. It's almost easier for him because
it's less of a performative aspect.
Like he's straining for credulity and believability when he's talking about racism from the
perspective of racism is bad.
It is so easy for him to talk about how people who identify with they, them, pronouns are
freaks, unlike me because I'm a man.
Like, it just rolls off the tongue.
It's low-hanging fruit.
There's more people that are willing to pay you to say there's no such thing as non-binary
people than there are people who are willing to fund a non-binary person's
describing their own life and experience.
Like that, and that's been my experience.
I've been an openly trans blogger for two decades.
Um, I've been in rooms where I'm asking for money.
I've, I've asked people for resources and things.
They don't want to fund a lot of the stuff that would, you know, in so many ways,
let's just be blunt about it, sabotage many of the ideas that are central to capitalism.
Like they'll fund Jeffrey Starr, especially as a visibly
queer person to say that stuff because there's a larger group of people that want to hear that
than there are people who want to actually humanize trans people, you know, there's way more money,
way more support over there. And it's, I think, why he's doing it. Any vaguely queer person can
make a video saying there are only two genders and I'm a man and da da da da da da and da and they will
literally get way, way, way more people who are willing to like support them, follow them,
money at them because that's just people like that more. So yeah, it's so predictable. He's following the
money as he always has, I think. Yes. And particularly he has leaned into this like model minority
persona where it's like, yes, I may look like, you know, a super femme, gay guy, queer person,
gender, fuck, sort of individual. But like, I am the version of that that's going to validate all of your
most homophobic and transphobic beliefs. And,
And I think this is the part, especially now that a lot of people are like,
how can someone who looks like him be saying that?
And I just watched like this full two-hour interview that he just did where he says a lot of
transphobic things that went super viral on like, you know, Instagram Reels and Facebook with
all of these conservative white people being like, I just love him.
And I took a few clips from it because there is something extremely uncanny about watching
someone and hearing someone who looks and sounds like Jeffrey Starr, trying to like enforce this
very arbitrary idea of gender.
So let's take a look.
It started when the first person and we as a society, let them, I'm they.
Okay.
And what the fuck does that mean?
You don't, you don't, five years ago, we would not be able to have this discussion.
Everyone would have a meltdown.
But why?
You're a they and of them.
Got it.
So what you're saying is there needs to be more context around it?
The absurdity is that...
Are you saying...
You can only be a man, a woman, or trans.
Okay.
There's a third thing here.
I love that you can be a man, a woman, or trans.
To me, this is, like, more fun than, like, trans people aren't real.
There's only, like, men, like, cis men and cis women, because it's like, oh, now...
You know what I mean?
It's not a binary.
It's a tricary.
I don't know how it goes.
He's like there's not quite a binary,
but there's a little bit of a binary as I see fit.
I have so much to say so I'll try not to say too much.
Please say too much.
To me, all of these things, like I didn't want to go on the like the part about him
having a straight boyfriend thing because this is all kind of part of the same sort of
thing.
I've known so many Jeffrey stars through my life.
and it usually follows a very particular pattern of he's a person who is feminine, loves being
feminine, likes makeup, likes being all up in, you know, drags and stuff.
But he's not going to transition because he doesn't identify that way.
And by nature of him being feminine, he does indeed attract straight men occasionally,
who he does indeed have some sort of relationship with.
But of course, for most of these straight men, because they are straight men, it will never
lead anywhere. It will always be this either being sexualized thing or I think as we saw in Nathan's
case, it's financial. You've got the money. I've got the thing you want. Give me a bit of money.
I'm, you know, that's a very common thing. And then what I think sometimes they resent is when they
see these men do go off and form these relationships with women. Yes, some of them being transgender.
Like to me, we can have a whole debate about whether or not these men are straight, but like,
I'm polyamorous. I have four partners, two of them.
identify a straight. And if you said they were gay, they wouldn't care. You know, it's, it's what,
like, it's not a big deal. But like, there are some people who get so wrapped up in what they see
trans women being able to do, what they see non-binary people being able to do. And they're over
there thinking, well, what the fuck? Like, I have this thing. And yeah, I occasionally, you know,
cross into these areas that they do. And it, it's like, it comes from a place of bitterness and
rejection. And I think rejection is a very common, very potent thing in here. And, you know,
his life, which is why he is so desperate to chase this. Yes, he's chasing money. It also happens to
also help him chase a lot of that approval. When I look at Jeffrey Starr, I see someone who is
incredibly ostracized. He resents the fact that there are people who would say, oh, you're they,
them? Cool. And didn't bully them in the way that he was bullied. I mean, that's, that's a sad part.
The worst thing in the world to people like this is that someone accepted their gender. And it's weird
because, you know, I mean, I'm not saying that Jeffrey Starr's an egg.
I don't think Jeffrey Starr is very much a man who is feminine and enjoys all these things.
But I think that he has so much dissonance around his rejection that it's causing him to not understand that some people experience being accepted and it's genuine.
And like, what's the big deal if, you know, someone uses they, them?
It's a non, it's a real non-issue, actually.
It's a non-binary non-issue.
It strikes me that he, in this environment that he's currently in, and with this demographic he's playing to, he knows what to say to get accepted by them in this context.
I think he also understands that the only reason he's on this podcast is because in the same way that, like, beautiful women are objectified by conservatives.
Like, his flamboyant and unusual appearance is being objectified by these people.
and he is striving so hard to be in on the joke that he's willing to say whatever it takes for the people to see him as in on the joke, but he's never going to actually get there.
And the flip side of that is that not too long ago when he was filming his documentary series with Shane Dawson, he said, and I've seen people pull this clip up and juxtapose them.
He was like, he's like, people call me a man, they call me a woman, whatever pronouns, all pronouns, alien, whatever.
Oh, wait, that's another question.
I keep calling you she.
On accident?
Like Andrew was like, wait, is Jeffrey or what's happening?
I'm just Jeffrey.
So if you look at me and you're like, damn, honey, yes.
Like, she, everyone calls me he, she, whatever they want to call.
Yeah, I'm an alien.
Every pronoun is okay.
Every pronoun.
He was doing the same thing to a different audience.
He wanted to be at that point accepted by a more liberal audience.
But now that he strives for this acceptance from the conservative audience, it's no problem
to him to go back on what he said because he's like, it's performative and he knows what
they want. Yeah. And he's trying to make money. He's trying to find space for himself, too. I think that
for some content creators right now, some of us are a little nervous about whether or not we're going to
be able to continue to have careers. And I do think that for a lot of people, grifting and kind of like
cozying up to the right, that feels like a safer bet, especially during a time when people are
being in prison for their speech or kicked out of the country for their speech. I think some people
feel safer there. And I think that that's also sort of the sad part about it is sometimes that
rejection makes you desire or believe in this idea that those people who rejected you are actually
safe. And if you could only be accepted by them, you would be safe. But the reality is he's never going
to fully be accepted by these people. He's only as useful to them as long as he keeps reading the
script. And eventually, they're going to say to him, well, okay, you feel that way, then why the
fuck are you wearing that wig then? Why do you have that makeup on? Like, yeah, it was fun entertaining
for a while. But if you actually feel that there's only men and women and things like that,
then you also should feel that men perform this way, women perform that way, and what you're
doing is attempting to be more like a woman than a man. So maybe you should stop being as non-binary
in the way that you live and fall in line. And you know, the reason I'm able to say all this,
and I think the reason why I think he's able to say this is because we were raised in conservative
communities. These are narratives that we internalize. You know what to say because you know,
what people are reacting to. And for some people, you recognize that if you stay in line,
if you entertain the narrative, if you stay on the script, you'll feel safer. It's not real,
but it's an illusion that's very strong. And to me, so much of this goes back to that, like, teeny
tiny detail of like, well, when I was bullied as a kid, I fought back and I loved that. Not to get
too, like, woo, but like, what if you didn't have to fight back? What if you at any point during your 40
years on earth, maybe got some therapy, did some internal work, I don't know, but like worked on
quite literally, oh, I sounds so annoying. This is like not the podcast for talking about healing your
inner child. What if you at any point, like kind of tried to heal your inner child and realize
you shouldn't have to actually fight back. Like those forces of bigotry shouldn't exist. And like,
you should have been able to be like punk and have pink hair and be a fag. And it should have been
fine. But it wasn't for you. And so now you need to make sure that it's,
it isn't for anyone. Yeah. And I think growth and part of healing your inner child for a lot of people is
becoming that older person who does accept that younger person and make space for the fact that they can
be a queer kid with pink hair and it's not a value judgment. You're not better or worse for it.
And it's sad to me that he has not gone that down that direction. I think about the stuff that I
post all the time that I want to be able to leave this earth in a way where something I posted and said
helped move us in a direction where some of the kids wouldn't have to go through the shit that I went through when I was younger and being ostracized and being rejected and, you know, identifying with how strong I had to be.
Like, it's great that I have thick skin or whatever.
Like, that's awesome, whatever.
But what if I didn't have to do that?
What if, what if I could just be embraced and accepted?
And what I hear in some of what he says here is that he does resent that that's happening and it didn't happen for him.
100%.
This is a beautiful place to land, but I do have a couple other clips from this interview that were just so deranged, but also so to the point of like, he's memorized this script and he knows how to regurgitate it on a podcast that were like almost funny.
I'm going to play them.
I'm sorry in advance.
But let's just really take it there.
Let's take it there.
Why are we encouraging our kids to be a different gender and feed them false information when they're so young?
So this is what I said recently that people really understood.
When I grew up and I started looking different, right?
My mother encouraged me to just be myself.
When I started wearing makeup and being more feminine and wanting to do certain things,
it wasn't, oh my God, Jeffrey needs, what do they call it now?
Gender affirming care.
I'm going to, I'm done.
I'm done.
I just, she let me be myself.
She didn't push me to be anything.
Just like when you're a tomboy, did your mom try to, you know, get you a surgery to be a,
you know what I mean?
Exactly.
Did she cut your tits off?
At 13, that's not, no.
So nowadays, it's all these fucking weirdos telling their kids,
oh my God, you like a Barbie?
You're a woman.
No, that's just a little boy experimenting, not knowing what the fuck he's doing.
It's just so funny to me because this is quite literally an essay that Andrew Sullivan wrote
in the New York Times like a couple months ago.
Like, this is just all.
This is the thing that I find disappointing about Jeffrey Starr is it's like, your whole
thing is that you're outrageous and like unafraid to go against the grain. Like if you're going to do
this right wing pivot, like at least be interesting. You're just doing like, you're just doing like so
run of the mill boring conservative grifter shit. And it's not convincing coming from such a flamboyantly
queer person because it's like he can sit here and be like, what is it? Gender firming care.
They just invented it three weeks ago. And he can be like non-binary people have only existed for five
years, but it's like, that's so not true. And it's just so obvious that like you, Jeffrey
Star, know that none of that is true. But you know, what's funny is I think that the conservatives
don't care as much about that. I get the vibe from a lot of them that it begins and ends with
them finding a video of a person who looks a certain way saying a certain thing just so they can say
see, see, look, people are always sending me like some black conservative woman's
shit. And I'm like, great, I don't care. But there are some people where they think that that's so
important that that's the main appeal of the Jeffrey Stars of the world. And it's not convincing.
I'm not convinced. You know better. Didn't you date a straight man and you're a man? How did that work?
That sounds like a little non-binary to me. I don't know. And these clips went so viral. Like,
I've had a million people send them to me. And they're all posted by like conservative pages with
thousands of replies being like, we love Jeffrey Starr. And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure you do.
because, you know, he does serve a real role in this ecosystem where someone who is homophobic,
who is transphobic, can hear all of their beliefs regurgitated back to them by someone who looks like
Jeffrey Starr and then feel like I don't have to challenge myself on anything because Jeffrey agrees
with me and Jeffrey looks like that.
Yes.
I think that Jeffrey is comfortable with this very impressionable audience that he does not have to work hard to impress.
Like, he just has to say the magic words.
He at this point has learned, much like Donald Trump, that he can stand in the middle of the street and shoot someone in the head and no one would care.
I mean, how much has he gotten away with?
Let's not forget earlier we were talking about sexual assault charges.
You've got this motherfucker on here talking about our kids, our kids, our kids.
Let's keep you from the kids, actually.
And off of those buses, huh?
The whole conservative side, I was look, I saw a Megan Kelly thing earlier today that was so perfect on this.
you know, oh, I need to keep the boys out of the girls' locker room, but like Donald Trump didn't do anything to those girls.
And if he did, it wasn't that bad because yaddy, it's like, come on.
It's all a fake bullshit script.
But they've learned that they can get away with it.
And I honestly think that the sad part is, is our literacy in this country is very low and there's enough people who just won't care enough to look into it.
Like the fact that it is so tangibly hard for transatlose.
kids to gain access to gender affirming care, but people have been able to buy into this narrative
that you can send your kid to school and they'll come back with a sex change the next day.
It's insane. And they believe this. You know, like you have to get months upon months of
electrolysis before you have a sex change operation because if you don't, hair is going to grow
where it shouldn't. But somehow these children are getting full sex change operations and that's just
believable. And for me, that speaks to just how dehumanized trans people are, the fact that no one
wants to look into it enough to hear how actually hard it is to gain access to this care.
He was mentioning, oh, cutting off your tits, right? In very, very, very few circumstances can a person
who's under the age of 18 actually get that surgery? It's not a common thing at all. And if these
people knew any trans kids, they would know that. They would know that the first couple of years of
this conversation is not, well, you need to have surgery. It's more like, well, we're going to
support you in your way of expressing yourself. You know, the same way that your fucking mom said to
you apparently. It would be, we're not going to judge you. We're not actually going to tell you
who you are. We're going to give you the opportunity to decide for yourself. In fact, that's actually
the function of puberty blockers is allowing a child to have.
time to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted those things. And you need to have
typically a bit of time on actual hormones before you have any of these goddamn surgeries. And so
it is so frustrating to me the way that people talk about this because they actually don't
understand that more likely for a rejected trans kid to just, you know, go back into the closet
and, you know, decide not to be themselves, is that they're going to run away, get onto the
streets, be assaulted by grown men, some of whom are conservative, and that's their only way
up and out of their circumstances, being exploited by the same men that voted against their rights.
That's the reality for a lot of trans people, is they have to do sex work to survive.
It was my past, right? It aggravates me that people don't understand that the other end of rejecting
trans youth is exploitation or suicide, typically. The worst thing you could do,
to a trans kid is not just kind of accept who they are.
And I'm very passionate about that because I'm very much who I am because of some of the
shit I had to go through when I was a teenager because my parents didn't accept me.
It pisses me off because I know that he doesn't care.
He doesn't care.
He gets to get away with it.
But this actually does have an impact on people.
You normalize the idea that this is such a thing.
People do and have voted against people having access to their care just for this bullshit.
Yeah.
I think that Jeffrey has.
has done the calculus that the things that he's saying now aren't going to directly affect him
in a way that matters to him. And he also knows, I think at least he's made this sort of bet
that as a gay man who does not have a super strong line of protection between him and any
fascist agenda. But I think Jeffrey, even if he's not smart enough to recognize this, like even
if he couldn't repeat this back, I think he probably understands that deep down, there are
are other queer people and allies who will be fighting for his rights and protecting his rights.
So he's not really in danger because he can ride on the back of other people's work to protect
him while he endangers more vulnerable queer and trans people in a way that won't come back to
bite him necessarily.
I mean, that's what we do on this podcast.
Like, I fucking, I fucking advocate for Jeffrey Starr's right to be Jeffrey Starr every day,
whether I like it or not.
Mm-hmm.
whether I like it or not.
Okay, this is my last six second clip,
but I just,
I had to include it because I love masculinity.
Here's a problem with society.
We've set up society to shame and ridicule straight men.
Have we?
Have we?
Have we?
And if he looks at the camera softly enough,
a straight man will finally pick him.
This is the problem with society.
We set it up to shame and ridicule straight men.
Jeffrey Starr, if only you were right.
I want to live in that society.
I think that would be a much more productive one.
Cat and Cat, thank you so much for joining me today.
Going through this journey, I don't know.
I would say like, I hope this is the last time I talk about Jeffrey Starr.
It won't be.
It won't be.
Thank you so much for having us.
You just reminded me that I think I ended one of my videos literally saying,
and I hope this is the last time I ever talk about Jeffrey Starr.
That obviously did not happen.
Jeffrey Starr is going to live till 200 years old,
and he's going to be on whatever, like,
AI future app is dominating then,
and like he will be one of the top 10 most followed people on that app.
And I, thankfully, will be dead.
Edgy teens will keep his likeness alive forever.
They'll build pyramids in his name, I'm sure.
But thank you so much for having me.
I did appreciate my time discussing this.
This was a blast from the past.
Where can people find each of you, support your work, et cetera, et cetera?
Well, you can find me on black in the city.com.
That is my website where I write, you know, every once in a while.
And also YouTube.
That's really the main place.
So that's where most people follow me on YouTube.
Cat Black, K-A-T-B-L-A-Q-U-E, like the 90s girl group.
And then I am at SpitfireNews.com is my newsletter.
And you can also find me on Blue Sky and Instagram at Kattenbarge.
And if you have made it this far in the episode, as usual, I have no idea how long this will be once it's cut down.
But you have very likely made it through quite a lot of time.
I appreciate you so much.
Thank you for allowing me to indulge in my little online.
online fixations of the most annoying gay people in the world.
I love you so much.
And until next time, stay fruity.
Yay.
Yay.
