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Transcript:
It’s been three glorious years since I have thought about or spoken about Gwyneth Paltrow, a woman who really speedran the game of “iconic” to “lunatic” when she took just a few short years to go from Margot Tenenbaum to a grifter who hawks eggs you stick in your vagina to realign your chakras, or some such bullshit.
When last we discussed Gwyneth, she was promoting her disordered diet on her anti-vaccine chiropractor con artist’s podcast, including talking about how she had taken to blasting o-zone up her asshole. No, seriously, that’s what she was promoting.
For the next few years, I happily did not think of this horrible woman at all. And then suddenly, for seemingly no reason at all, I have had her shoved in my face constantly, and I’m really pissed about it.
First, I learned that she has pivoted her grift from email newsletter to podcast to GHOST KITCHEN. If you aren’t aware, ghost kitchens are the usually shitty pop-ups you see on restaurant delivery apps where they don’t have an actual restaurant–just a kitchen where they make food for delivery and sometimes for pick-up, with the same kitchen often being used to make shitty Americanized Chinese food, shitty hamburgers, and shitty chicken wings, all under different “restaurant” names with usually AI-generated photos of the food.
A set-up like that COULD be a great way for a talented chef to start cooking commercially without needing to invest a ton of money in a sit-down restaurant, but in reality it’s more often the case that rich people use it to flaunt health and safety codes while raking in billions of dollars. For instance, “Reef Technology” is a Miami-based corporation that started as a parking lot management service before pivoting to ghost kitchens and hitting a literal billion-dollar valuation, before state regulators began looking into them and realized they were violating health and safety codes left and right and red-taped them into pivoting again, to tech. Once COVID restrictions eased up and more people realized how shitty these places were, ghost kitchens have become far less of a safe investment, but that hasn’t stopped Gwyneth from opening up “GOOP Kitchen.”
When I first started researching this, I was concerned that maybe I was being unfair and this didn’t actually count as a “ghost kitchen,” but then I searched “ghost kitchen” and the top result was the address where Goop Kitchen just opened: 5333 Adeline Street in Oakland. That’s right, my own city of Oakland, and not, as they themselves advertised, Berkeley, which is a city more stereotypically likely to house the type of people who would be such huge fans of vagina eggs and asshole ozone that they would also want to give Gwyneth Paltrow $20 for a salad made in a warehouse with questionable standards of quality.
If that had been my only reminder this month that Gwyneth Paltrow exists, it would have been no big deal. But she actually made things even worse. Worse than a ghost kitchen, obviously, but also worse than promoting an eating disorder as a healthy diet, worse than blasting her asshole with ozone, and even worse than bee venom acupuncture, which she repeatedly promoted and which has actually killed people. Yeah, she actually managed to get even worse than that, with this.
That is an ad not JUST for a luxury apartment building that 99% of her audience could never afford: it’s an ad for a luxury apartment building in Israel, a country that is currently genociding the Palestinian people whose land they stole. This is some real Zone of Interest shit. It’s like shilling for a country club overlooking Buchenwald in 1940.
So yeah, that’s it, right? That’s gotta be the worst thing Gwyneth Paltrow has done to date. Right?
WRONG because she has somehow managed to be EVEN WORSE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE. A few days BEFORE that ad dropped, Paltrow was on her podcast, cleverly named The Goop Podcast, saying that she just doesn’t really think about politics, that she’s a centrist, and that her progressive husband originally and incorrectly assumed she must be Republican.
But wait, that’s not actually the bad part. That’s the part I saw referenced a lot when the Israeli luxury condo ad came out. The bad part is who she was talking to, which for some reason wasn’t often mentioned: she was interviewing Trae Stephens. Who is Trae Stephens? Another anti-vaccine doctor? A wellness grifter? A chef who only knows how to heat up bone broth? No. Trae Stephens is the co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril, a $6 billion company that sells surveillance and drone technology to the American military, along with building 10-meter tall autonomous guard towers for the US border patrol.
One of Anduril’s other co-founders is Palmer Luckey, a MAGA-brained loser who describes himself as a radical Zionist and said on stage at a Wall Street Journal event that “Israel has my (and our) unqualified support,” a statement that was then reposted by Anduril’s official account on Xitter. Funny sidenote: Luckey went on to quote himself later criticizing corporate leaders who can’t say “genocide is bad; concentration camps shouldn’t exist,” which led Xitter’s Zionists to get confused, only to be reassured that he had moved on and was talking about China, not Israel. Whew! Yeah, THAT genocide is bad. Ours is great.
Anyway, Gwyneth decided that her health and wellness podcast should spotlight the other cofounder of the company helping Israel commit a genocide, Trae Stephens, in a blatant attempt at whitewashing his and his company’s deservedly shit reputation. In their hourlong conversation, they discussed their childhoods, their kids, and the “complicated” legacy they may leave one day. Stephens comes dangerously close to self-awareness when he admits that he knew the Pope was specifically talking about him when he said “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those that wage war,” but Paltrow saves him by suggesting he think of that metaphorically and not literally. Like, he is waging actual wars, including being “heavily involved” in the current situation in Iran, but the Pope was probably talking about metaphorical wars, like the war on Christmas. Jesus hates metaphorical wars! Real wars are fine.
It all makes me think of this running argument I had back in the 2000s, when conservatives would try to convince me that lefties were the ones responsible for most of the silly and dangerous conspiracy theories: the World Trade Center was actually blown up with bombs, vaccines are dangerous, everything that comes out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s mouth. But even grifters who start from a seemingly “liberal” stance will inevitably gravitate rightward. The 9/11 conspiracy theorists are now all MAGA (much to the chagrin of Dylan Avery, the guy who made the “Loose Change” documentary). The anti-vaxxers are now all MAHA. And Gwyneth Paltrow is now selling drone strikes on Palestinian children alongside $15 falafel wrapped in gluten-free tortillas. That looks like shit, by the way. If you’re in Oakland (or Berkeley) and need a falafel, Shwarmaji has you covered: eight bucks, comes in a real fucking Labanese-style pita, and for an extra dollar they’ll fill it with french fries and eggplant. Get it with the toum, it slaps. And if you do that, you’ll be supporting an actual talented local chef instead of…you know…a wealthy genocidal freak.
