Hi everyone, this is Josh Levine, one of the editors behind Slow Burn.

We here at Slate are hard at work on another season of the show, but in the meantime, I'm

here with something I think you'll like.

It's my new narrative podcast mini-series, The Queen.

The Queen tells the story of Linda Taylor, a woman who was a con artist, a kidnapper,

maybe even a murderer.

She was also America's original welfare queen, the villain Ronald Reagan needed to create

a vision of a country being taken advantage of by its poorest citizens.

If you like this episode, encourage you to subscribe to the show and its own feed.

All four episodes in this mini-series are out right now so you can go ahead and binge.

Just search for the queen in your favorite podcast app.

Thanks and enjoy it the show.

Here's episode one of The Queen.

Six years ago, a friend sent me an article from the 1970s about a woman named Linda Taylor.

It said that Taylor had committed welfare fraud to the tune of $154,000 in a single year,

using 80 different aliases.

It also said that she owned a bunch of luxury cars, had filed a fraudulent police report

about stolen first, and had been preparing to open a medical office, posing as a doctor.

Another article I found said that Linda Taylor, the so-called welfare queen, could change

from black to white to Latin, with a mere change of a wig.

Before I read those stories, I didn't know that the welfare queen stereotype had originated

with a real person.

...