Behind the Bastards - How Hobby Lobby Funded Terrorism And Tried To Destroy Democracy

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Robert is joined by Cody Johnston to discuss Hobby Lobby.FOOTNOTES: Meet David Green: Hobby Lobby's Biblical Billionaire Some thoughts on the Hobby Lobby antiquities case Hobby Lobby’s Legal Expert Speaks: “I can’t rule out…they used my advice to evade the law.” The Green collection and the Museum of the Bible: 443,000 square meters of mess Dispelling the Myths Around the Hobby Lobby Antiquities Case DID HOBBY LOBBY’S C.E.O. UNKNOWINGLY SPONSOR TERRORISM? How much money has ISIS made selling antiquities? More than enough to fund its attacks. Mission From God: The Upstart Christian Sect Driving Invisible Children and Changing Africa America’s Biggest Christian Charity Funnels Tens of Millions to Hate Groups Hobby Lobby: Who is David Green? 9 facts telling you everything you need to know about the evangelical entrepreneur 5 things to know about Hobby Lobby’s owners Hobby Lobby Allegedly Fired Employee Due to Pregnancy Bad Boss: Yes, Hobby Lobby’s Steve Green Does Want You To Live By His Religion’s Rules How the Hobby Lobby ruling helped and hurt religious freedom Column: The Supreme Court’s awful Hobby Lobby decision just spawned a very ugly stepchild Aftermath of the Hobby Lobby Decision Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just said Hitler. That's the worst introduction yet.

I've invented a whole cannon for the Gerald Ford Hitler hybrid in my head. Adolf Hitler brought us World War II, Gerald Ford brought us the pardon of Richard Nixon, and Jerry Hitler brought us the dodge dart. So who's the real monster? I'm going to go with Hitler. Listeners, we're not even talking about Hitler, guys. This episode's not about it. You just got people so upset. I know, I know, I know. This is the worst introduction yet. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards.

The podcast where we talk about terrible people. My ghost today is Cody Johnston. Cody, how are you doing? You called him your ghost? It's a spooky episode. The ghost in the room is Katie Stoll, who is not completing our triumvirate as per usual. That's weird. I feel really unbalanced. It is very weird. It is odd. It's uncomfortable.

I keep looking there for Katie, and she's not. I love you, Katie. We're making a well-deserved day off while Cody and I slog through this story, which has nothing to do with Hitler. Nothing to do with Hitler. Not even a little bit. A little bit. Oh, God. Cody, what do you know about Hobby Lobby? They did ISIS.

Yes, this is the story about how Hobby Lobby literally invented ISIS. Yes, I knew it. No, no. I mean, kind of. No? All right. A little bit, but not that much. I mean, you've got a lot of work to do because I've been convinced over the years that they did ISIS. That Hobby Lobby did an ISIS. Yes, you've got to deprogram me from my way of thinking now.

Look at these cute glasses Anderson wore from Hobby Lobby for her RBG costume on Halloween. Yes, she helped ISIS. Anderson helped ISIS. We've all found ourselves needing a Hobby Lobby at one point or another. Maybe you needed some decorative glass jars or yarn and a felt needle at 7.30 at night. Oh, my God. And if you need those things, the only place to go is a Hobby Lobby. That was going to be my example too, yeah.

Yeah, it's just like the store you go for weird little crafty things that no one else is going to carry and the kind of knickknacks that you put in your home when you don't really know what else to put there. Like eyeglasses that fit a dog. Like ISIS glasses. Like eyeglasses that fit the dog. For an RBG costume for a dog. It's ironic that you keep bringing up Ruth Bader Ginsburg because this is the story about a group of people who want to make it impossible for people like her to sit on the Supreme Court.

Oh, fun. That's the tale of Hobby Lobby. I thought you were talking about ISIS. A little bit. I mean, you know, you have probably heard as Cody has been constantly referring to. I can't stop thinking about it. Yeah, that Hobby Lobby got in some trouble for maybe funding ISIS. And yeah, that's not technically true.

Hobby Lobby did not exactly fund like the Islamic State itself. But they did help to fund some other Islamic extremist organizations that were precursors to ISIS. And more to the point, you can make a strong case that they're working to set up a Christian equivalent to ISIS right here in the US of A. That's the story we're going to talk about. God damn it, Robert. Yeah, you wish they were just funding ISIS. I do now. Good old wholesome ISIS.

Starting near rock bottom. But don't worry, it gets a little lower. Yeah, it'll keep getting lower. But before we talk about how everything that I just talked about winds up happening, we have to go back in time a little bit to talk about the beginning of Hobby Lobby. Cody, could you give me some mood setting time machine noises? No. Perfect.

Anderson really did not like that. I'm just going to put it out there. It's a new model. It's a new model. All right. Some of the scientists listening can graph the differences between your time machine noises when Katie is and is not present. That one was much more like a tyrannosaurus or perhaps a pterodactyl. Some like really, really old bird.

That was messed up. So David Green was born on November 13, 1941 in Emporia, Kansas. His father was a preacher and not a particularly big deal within that world. He wasn't like a big time preacher. He moved around from like congregation to congregation in tiny little towns in Kansas and eventually escaping the hellish wastes of Kansas for the hellish wastes of Oklahoma. The family settled in a town called Altus where David's father preached to a flock of 35 people who were vastly outnumbered by the cows on their farms.

So he's got humble beginnings, you could say. Now David grew up in Altus, which is about five hours away from the tiny town in Oklahoma where I grew up. It was as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get and they were very poor. David would have worn nothing but secondhand clothing and eaten primarily food donated to his family by the congregation. The Green family could go weeks at a time without eating meat. So they are the kind of poor where like you just don't even money's not even a factor in your life. But still his mom found ways to give what little they had to other families in Altus. In interviews today, David remembers his mother and father sacrificing their tiny comforts

and even their necessities for the good of the community. Religion was the very air he breathed as a child and all five of David's brothers and sisters grew up to be either pastors or pastors' wives. But a life of preaching and poverty was not for David. He struggled at school and had to repeat the seventh grade, but he had no desire to focus on the Bible for a living. Instead, he started working in the business world as soon as he could. During his junior year of high school, David got involved in a work study program and landed a gig as a stock boy in the town general store.

He only made 60 cents an hour, but he became aware of the basics of how capitalism works, watching his boss buy products for 10 cents and sell them for 20. So that's like his, yeah, he falls in love with this idea. Plant in the seed. It's like transubstantiation, but with pennies. Yeah, yeah. I look forward to finding out what he does with this information. Yeah.

This world with a new worldview. And so while David's mom gave until it hurt and while his siblings committed themselves to serving their communities, David found himself more enthralled with the idea of profiting from his fellow man. And over the course of his early and mid twenties, David served in the Air Force Reserve and married a woman named Barbara, who he'd met while working at the general store. He turned his work experience into a job as a manager at TGNY,

a five and dime shop that sold odds and ends. By the time he was 29, he decided he'd learned enough working at these businesses to do a better job starting his own. So he borrowed $600 to buy up equipment and inventory and teamed up with another manager from his store to create his first business, selling miniature picture frames to stores like TGNY where he'd worked. So like too small to really like put pictures in, just like the kind of knickknacks you stick up around the house for no reason.

Yeah, yeah. Like slightly bigger than wallet size. Yeah. All right. Okay, okay. Yeah, tiny little picture frames that are basically just knickknacks for like old women to turn into craft projects. Yeah.

Like that's the business he decides to go into for some reason. It's really, really specific. Very specific. But you know, there's a market, you got, you cornered that. He had a very weird specific dream and it turned out to work very well. Worked really well, yeah. Yeah. So his wife and sons assembled these tiny picture frames on their kitchen table

and received seven cents apiece from dad for their labor. The whole enterprise was profitable for reasons that I cannot understand. And by 1972, Green had enough money to open his first actual store, a 300 square foot hobby lobby in Oklahoma City. Okay. Okay. So it was like the inventory, it wasn't just picture frames at that point. It was like, all right, it's just like the hobby lobby that we know.

When he opens his first hobby lobby, yeah. He expands beyond shitty picture frames. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To shitty other stuff. To shitty other stuff. Yeah. There's a whole wide variety of shitty things for sale at Hobby Lobby. Yeah, do you like Knicks?

Do you like Knicks? We got them. Yeah. Great. We got Knicks. We got Knicks. We have the Knicks, which is a useless sports team. We have a tiny picture frame.

You've got the Knack. Yeah. I don't know what the Knack is. It's an album. Robert just said like a sports diss. Like, nice job. I liked it. Yes.

Yeah. We will not go into any more detail about why the Knicks are terrible. Terrible. Long time listeners will know. Wow. All right. Waiting for that episode to drop. Oh, it has.

Now, there are different opinions on why Hobby Lobby became a huge success. The CFO, John Cargill, credits David Green's brilliance at merchandising. He says that Green basically realized that cheap crap like Styrofoam roosters and fake books and plastic plants could be produced for pennies overseas and then sold for dollars to American customers. And there turned out to be an endless appetite among realtors setting up show homes, hotels looking to decorate on the cheap and little old ladies with a love of knickknacks. And so David's business exploded from selling cheap poorly made decorative crap in mass.

I mean, yeah. There you go. That explains it all. There you go. That's all. Oh, wow. What a good idea. I think at times about like how when the world is like dying and I'm like sitting upon one

of the last bits of land that like peaks above the boiling oceans choking the last remaining life on the surface, how I will explain to children why we let this happen. And I am excited to talk with them about Hobby Lobby. All right. Here's the first. Well, the oceans had to die because we needed Styrofoam roosters to put up in corners of the house that didn't have decorations. Yeah.

And I'd like to, I'd like to see that scene gathering around the fire that you actually don't need because like you said, the boiling oceans. Yeah. The oceans are boiling. Covered in soot. Yeah. Treating wounds. Argument over.

Treating wounds with Styrofoam roosters. Argument over. Who's going to eat who first? Like who's the first to go? That's going to be good. But then the tale of Hobby Lobby. So one major reason for the success of Hobby Lobby came down to luck and good timing. Right around the time his first store opened, the hippies of the United States became enthralled

with beads. The bead buying craze started right at the same time that Greene began expanding his business and it fueled Hobby Lobby's spread to a second 6,000 square foot location. Greene was able to quit his job at TGNY and he recalls that his wife was not happy with this. She was real comfortable with me working at TGNY. They were doing two billion a year in sales. We did $100,000.

Of course, they're gone now and we're making three billion. Not wrong. Yeah. He's not wrong. Wait, are they still married? Oh yeah. Okay. That's wonderful.

She said this, but actually it's billions of dollars now. No, no, no. It's more like my wife, you know, this is why the man has the business sense in the family because my wife would have had us working for a doomed enterprise instead of selling Styrofoam roosters to all in sundry. Yeah. Yeah. And now we're doing great because of the good work that we do.

Because of the good work that we do. Hobby Lobby today is one of the largest businesses of its kind in the world, operating 520 stores in 32 states. David Green and his family are the sole owners of the business and over the course of his career, Green's net worth has soared to more than four and a half billion. I think it's even more than that now. Because there are no shareholders or co-owners, David gets to run Hobby Lobby exactly the way he wants and since he is an evangelical Christian that's been woven into the character

of the business. Sometimes this manifests itself in wacky ways. For example, products in Hobby Lobby do not have barcodes. What? Yeah. There's two explanations for this. What? When interviewed.

Yeah. There's too many. There should be one. Yeah. The official explanation from David Green is that computerized point of sale systems make his employees less knowledgeable about their inventory because they rely on a computer to tell them where things go and what things cost and while it costs more money for the business to have employees updating prices by hand, it leads to better staff because

they know where everything is and what it costs and they have an understanding that's deeper of the inventory, which makes sense. That's not an illogical theory. Yeah. I'm ready for you to bum me out, but that's actually a good answer. Yeah. That's a very good answer. However, some suggest this hard line against barcodes has more to do with the fact that

large chunks of the evangelical Christian population believe that barcodes are the mark of the beast. This rumor is largely perpetuated by folks and blogs just like barcode conspiracies and I really have no idea what the truth is, but Hobby Lobby employees regularly talk about the idea that there are no barcodes in the business because it's the mark of the devil. There's a whole, you could find in the era of VHS, whole VHS tapes explaining how the barcode is the mark of the beast and all of the different dashes really stand for 666 and it's the devil's way of getting into capitalism.

Yeah. Okay. The conspiracy stuff, like the blogs that are talking about this, aren't people making up a wild accusation. It's based off of people who have also been saying- Huge numbers of people, yeah, who believe that barcodes are evil. It is a belief. Yes.

It's just the conspiracy is that that's why they don't do it at Hobby Lobby specifically, but it is a thing. Yeah, exactly. That is wild. Yeah. That belief is a thing that at least a couple of million Americans believe. Oh, that's too many. Yeah.

David has a reasonable explanation for why Hobby Lobby doesn't use barcodes, but there's a lot of people that are like, come on. Oh, no. His first answer was so good. Yeah. It's a really good answer. Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like, oh, that makes complete sense.

Yeah, of course you would. Yeah, they'd know. They'd point over there and like, oh, yeah, it's this amount. It used to be this amount because I did it by hand. Yeah. Oh, no. All right. Exactly.

Okay. Yeah, now David Green's choice to not use barcodes is fine regardless of why he does it. He has that right. Yeah. He's the sole proprietor of the business. What he's got to do. What's less fine in my opinion are the ways in which he's chosen to spend his fortune.

In interviews, David will frequently claim that God is the real manager of his $3 billion per year empire. He told Forbes this, if you have anything or I have anything, it's because it's been given to us by our creator. So I've learned to say, look, this is yours, God. It's all yours. I'm going to give it to you. And when he talks about how he uses his wealth in interviews, David tends to say things

like this. I want to know that I have affected people for eternity. I believe I am. I believe once someone knows Christ as their personal savior, I've affected eternity. I matter 10 billion years from now. Yeah. Yeah. This is, see, we're going in.

Okay. I just, yeah. I'm selling too much. I don't care for that. They don't affect people for eternity by selling them colored mirrors and bookends. Also, the phrasing like affect people. Yeah. It's like, unsettling.

Yeah. It's unsettling. It's like weirdly clinical and like, it doesn't specify what you mean. It's not great. It's not great. It's not great. Billions of years though, that's billion, 10 billion years, power, that's some Scientology level delusions right there.

So David Green is currently the largest individual donor to evangelical causes in the United States. In 1999, he bought an old VA hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas and turned it into a church. This proved to be the start of more than $300 million in donations to established churches on 50 different properties. Other Christian leaders have come to see Green as something of a venture capital fund for their religion. He receives proposals on a daily basis for churches and religious schools that need his support.

In 2004, he gave a $10 million building to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. A few years later, he paid off the numerous debts for Oral Roberts University. He has founded numerous Christian foundations through which he has distributed 1.4 billion copies of Christian literature in more than 100 countries. The One Hope Foundation focuses on providing scripture to children aged 4 to 14. The Every Home for Christ Foundation sends missionaries with Bible booklets door-to-door in the global south. When people suggest that maybe delivering food or medicine might be more useful than

Bibles in many of these countries, Green has a prepared response. It's not like you give them that, but don't give them food. You give both. But Green insists, if I die without food or without eternal salvation, I want to die without food. I can't argue with that, if those are the two options, if those are the two real options that are definitely on the table, you have to choose. That's a good point.

Good stuff, huh? I wish I could buy one. Good stuff. Wish I could work at Hobby Lobby now. Oh, you can, Cody. You can. I shouldn't have said that out loud. I changed my mind.

I have good news for all of us, because this podcast is now sponsored and owned entirely by the Hobby Lobby Corporation. Oh, thank goodness. Yeah. And speaking of Hobby Lobby, Cody, have you considered all the different things that Styrofoam roosters could do to improve your life? Most of them, but probably not all of them. I think there are some I probably haven't thought of that I would buy if I were told

about them. Yes. With Styrofoam roosters, you don't need, for example, single-payer healthcare. Just jam a rooster in it. Uh-huh. That's the Hobby Lobby message, shove a fake cock in whatever ails you, and your problems will be solved. Hobby Lobby Loves Selling Fake Cockies.

Yeah. On December 28th, 2012, Hobby Lobby made an irrevocable donation of an entire campus in Northfield, Massachusetts, to the National Christian Foundation, or NCF. Both Hobby Lobby, the business, and David Green, the billionaire, have made and continued to make numerous donations to the NCF, totally millions upon millions of dollars. The NCF is, on its face, a non-profit that supports a variety of Christian causes. But of course, because this is my podcast, the NCF primarily exists as a vehicle to viciously attack people Christian extremists hate all around the world.

And I'm going to quote now from Sludge, a website that analyzes the way evil pieces of shit pump their money out across the world. Yes. Quote, According to the three most recent available tax filings, which cover 2015-2017, it has donated $56.1 million on behalf of its clients to 23 non-profits identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups. I certainly don't know of any public disclosures or funds to hate groups at levels anywhere near this.

Heidi Beric, director of the Intelligence Project at the SPLC, told Sludge, It's pretty astounding and certainly concerning. According to a 2017 Inside Philanthropy article, NCF is probably the single largest source of money fueling the pro-life and anti-LGBT movements over the past 15 years. In 2017, NCF's donation to anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate groups rose to over $19 million. That's a lot of money. It's good.

Good stuff. Good stuff. 10 billion years, Cody. It's called salvation, yeah. The NCF pours money into the Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of Christian lawyers who want transgender people to be mandatorily sterilized and want homosexuality to be made a literal crime. The Alliance Defend, that's how you defend freedom by putting people in prison.

Nothing says freedom like enforced sterilization, the Alliance Defending Freedom is currently opposing the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. David Green doesn't ever really say hateful things, but this is where he puts his money. In fact, since NCF donations make up more than one third of the ADF's budget, it's likely Green has put quite a lot of money into this group. If we want an idea of how the United States would look if Green and his friends got their way, we can hop over to Uganda. And Cody, that's what we're going to do right after these ads for products and services.

Oh, I can't wait. Yeah, yeah. You know what won't turn our nation into hate-filled religious theocracy, Cody? Deliverables. Pudding? Deliverables. Pudding? Pudding will not also turn our nation into a fundamentalist hellhole.

Energy drinks. It is well known that fundamentalists cannot drink pudding or eat energy drinks. Off we go. Goodbye. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

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Yeah. Cody. Yes. You enjoying this fun tale of the man who sold Styrofoam roosters over the world and used it to fund bigots? Yeah. He's, I like his answers for stuff. Yeah, they're good.

I'm glad that. Yeah, his answers are up, he's up front, and he's forthright, and there's nothing behind it. Nothing. He's speaking from his heart about his, what he wants to do, and why he's doing it. I like it. In 2008, the NCF gave $817,000 to Ed Silvoso, an evangelical minister from California, who works directly with Julius Oyette, the Ugandan bishop who led the charge against

that nation's 2014 anti-homosexuality bill. Here's how Human Rights Watch describes it. The law permits sentences of life in prison for some sexual acts between consenting adults. It criminalizes the undefined promotion of homosexuality, a provision that threatens human rights advocacy work, and prompted a police raid on a joint U.S. government, McCarrary, University HIV research, and intervention program. The law also criminalizes a person who keeps a house, rooms, set of rooms, or place of any kind for purposes of homosexuality, a provision that has been used to justify evicting

LGBTI tenants. This gay people have been rendered homeless by the law since its inception. Human Rights Watch talked to one of them, a lesbian woman named Hanifa, who showed them her eviction papers, quote, you have been nice to me and paying me very well, but due to the existing situation in the country, pleasure behavior with your friends, forgive me to suspect you of being indecent. I cannot allow you to rent my house. I cannot fight the government.

Yeah, and it's hard to know exactly how much of Hobby Lobby money went up in these efforts, but the NCF sent millions of dollars to different groups in Uganda pushing these laws. And like, you know, obviously part of the goal of having organizations like this is so a guy named David Green can claim none of his money directly went to it, but also millions of his dollars go to this group, which spends millions of dollars doing this shit. Yeah. Smart.

Smart. I mean, smart, defined smart. I mean, Smart Cody is providing me with a place to buy both paint brushes and those fake books that I can put up on my counter to make it look like I read. You're a reader. Yeah. Yeah. And clay for which people can make, I don't know, crucifixes out of.

You can make anything. Crucifix. Anything at a clay. Yeah. Larger crucifix. A larger crucifix. Smaller ones. A smaller one.

Yeah. A frame to put it in. Any size at crucifix. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. We won't get into it. There are laws like that that are being introduced in various states this year.

There sure are, Cody. Yeah. There sure are. Probably do an episode about that on our other show. Yeah. Yeah. And if you trace back the money behind those laws, I bet they go to the same place as these do.

I would believe that. Yeah. Yeah, the NCF is also one of the groups that Chick-fil-A, for example, gets like lambasted for supporting. Mm-hmm. But like, for whatever reason, Hobby Lobby has not acquired the same amount of ire. Mm-hmm. Interesting.

Until now. In the first few months after the bill's passage, at least 17 LGBT people were arrested under suspicion of homosexuality in Uganda. Three transgender individuals were sexually assaulted in police custody. Charity organizations that provided contraceptives and AIDS medication were forcibly shut down. Under the new law, even doctors were allowed to deny basic treatment to gay people. Human Rights Watch talked to one transgender man who went to his doctor with a fever. He said the doctor asked him, but are you a man or a woman?

I said, that doesn't matter. But what I can tell you is I'm a trans man. He said, what's a trans man? You don't, we don't offer services to gay people here. You people are not even supposed to be in our community. I can call the police and report you. You're not even supposed to be in the country. This is kind of the world that David Green wants for the United States.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Through his donations to the NCF, David Green has supported all this. He has also supported a number of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate groups. The NCF gives money to Act for America, the American Freedom Law Center, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. I love freedom. You love freedom, right? Yeah.

I love freedom and things. I like organizations with freedom and liberty in their name, because that means it's good. That means it's good. It never means the freedom to oppress broad swaths of the population. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, how dare you? How dare you? How dare you? How dare you?

No, freedom is good. Whatever you said is bad, but not my freedom or liberty. Cool. Yeah, so David Horowitz of the David Horowitz Freedom Center believes that, quote, the whole Muslim world is pursuing a final solution to Jews and that American Muslims represent the real neo-Nazi movement in America. What the fuck? It's not those Nazis.

What the fuck? They literally say that they're neo-Nazis. Yeah, it's amazing. Come on. Oh, no. I think Horowitz is an all of them kind of guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I mean like the Nazis say like they're Nazis. Yeah. Yeah. They use the word. Yeah. The Alliance Defending Freedom is an anti-LGBT group currently lobbying to make US law as much like Uganda's as possible.

They provided Hobby Lobby and David Green with free lawyers in 2014 when the billionaire Hobby Lobby owner decided to strike a blow against birth control and the Affordable Care Act. This whole thing stemmed from the fact that the ACA required company health insurance plans to provide access to contraceptives. Crucially, the Green family insisted they did not object to paying for all kinds of contraceptives. Just the morning after pill, which they believe violated heavenly law for reasons I think are dumb.

Pregnancy actually begins when a fertilized egg attaches itself to the wall of the uterus and the morning after pills are meant to prevent this. But the Greens argued that any action taken to prevent implantation once the egg is fertilized is the same thing as an abortion. The Greens also argued that paying for IUDs would violate their deeply held religious beliefs. In 2012, when the series of lawsuits began, Green insisted, we simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate.

In 2014, the case made its way to the Supreme Court, which was probably David Green's goal from the beginning. Hobby Lobby won its suit, which established that corporations with religious objections could opt out of providing mandatory coverage to their employees. This marked the first time in American history that the Supreme Court declared businesses were capable of holding religious views. Most of the coverage of this event portrayed a simple moral consistency on behalf of David. As he told the Independent, you can't have a belief system on Sunday and not live at

the other six days. However, when you actually dig into how David runs his company, he seems notably less consistent about, for example, the sanctity of young life when that young life might actually cost him some money. And I'm going to quote now from an article in Rewire News. Quote, When a very pregnant Felicia Allen applied for medical leave from her job at Hobby Lobby three years ago, one might think that the company best known for denying its employee's insurance coverage of certain contraceptives on the false grounds that they

cause abortions would show equal concern for helping one of its employees when she learned that she was pregnant. Instead, Allen says the self-professed evangelical Christian arts and crafts chain fired her and then tried to prevent her from accessing unemployment benefits. They didn't even want me to come back after having my baby to provide for it, she said. Allen had been hired as a part-time cashier in July 2010. Not long after she started the job, she found out she was four months pregnant. She had not been working long enough to qualify for parental leave under the Family Medical

Leave Act. Allen went to her supervisor. I asked her, would I lose my job due to me being four months and only having five months before having my child? She told me, no, I felt like everything was okay. I had talked to my boss, she let me know that everything would be okay, I would still have my job. But when she actually had to give birth and take her leave of absence, her supervisor

told her that she would be fired for doing so. She tried to reapply to her job after coming back but was not rehired. When she applied for unemployment benefits, she claimed Hobby Lobby lawyers lied to the unemployment agency and said that she had chosen not to take parental leave and quit. The court eventually agreed with Allen's version of events and she won her claim for benefits. She sued Hobby Lobby in February 2012, the same year that the company started its battle with the ACA.

But that case was dropped immediately because, it turned out, she'd signed away her right to sue the company without knowing. All Hobby Lobby employees are required to resolve legal disputes through arbitration, which heavily favors the corporation. Yeah, there we go baby, yeah we got there, awesome. And Cody, how would you feel if I told you that Hobby Lobby's arbitration wasn't a normal arbitration agreement, wasn't the, yeah. I would feel wholly unsurprised by that statement.

I don't like to get political. You don't, you're famous for that. Yes, but what if we didn't tie healthcare to our employers? I mean, Cody, that's a nice dream, but can you point out, I don't know, for example, a couple of dozen nations on the planet with higher standards of living in longer lifespans in the United States that do something like that? I've actually never heard of a second country. Oh, okay.

So... Then our education system's working. Yeah, yeah. So I think whatever comparison you were going to make or point you were going to make would have been lost on me. I would have been like, what's Canada, I don't know, even if that's a reference to a nation. No, no, it's actually a gas station somewhere up past Tacoma, okay. So yeah, I'm going to quote Rewire News again discussing the peculiarities of Hobby Lobby's

arbitration policy. Yeah, God, because even before you get here, it's like, yeah, companies prefer arbitration because... God, all right, go ahead. It benefits them massively. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, okay, here we go. One thing that sets Hobby Lobby's arbitration policy from most corporations is its allowance for Christian-influenced arbitration.

What? The mutual arbitration agreement Allen signed gives employees the option of choosing to find an arbitrator either through the Non-profit American Arbitration Association, the largest dispute resolution service provider in the United States, or the Institute for Christian Consiliation. The company Hobby Lobby uses for their Christian arbitration is called Peacemaker Ministries, whose principles include the idea that Christians are not allowed to sue other Christians. This is incredibly convenient for the Christian owner of a Christian company who fucks over

his Christian employees. Now, Hobby Lobby insists that its owner's beliefs are not forced on employees. Outside from the fact that they won't pay for your birth control because of their beliefs, which is kind of forcing their beliefs on you. But Hobby Lobby won't force you to be Christian, although they do actively evangelize their employees. David Green has hired three chaplains to minister to his employees. He claims that hundreds of employees have been converted to Christianity this way, including

15 managers in a single year. As David told the Independent, we prayed a prayer with them and we did have 15 managers come to know Christ in the business place. That seems good. Above board. That's above board. Yeah. Because once they know Christ, they can't sue you.

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how many have been like, yeah, sure, I'm Christian now, knowing that like they'll be in the good graces a little more. I mean, I had to join Jack's weird Buddhist set, which I still have trouble believing that MMA is a critical aspect of Buddhism, but Jack says so, yeah. Or that rewire article quotes Alex Colvin, a professor at Cornell and an employment arbitration expert.

He said this of Hobby Lobby's arbitration policies. I think it's an interesting confluence here with Hobby Lobby being in the news with that big case. But if that were an employment case where an employee wanted to make a claim, we would never see that case at the Supreme Court because it would be stayed in arbitration. So ironically, Hobby Lobby gets to go to the Supreme Court because they want to challenge this, but their own employees don't get to go to court. That is ironic, isn't it?

I was going to use the word fair, but I guess very fair and cool, morally consistent too. And speaking of moral consistency, while the craft store chain apparently considers the morning after pill a clear and present danger to their faith, they did not have the same issue with supporting the Chinese government. The vast majority of Hobby Lobby's products are made in China. They spend billions of dollars a year importing from that country. And up until 2016, the Chinese government enforced their one-child policy by, in part, mandatory abortions for pregnant women.

David Green decided this mattered less than maximizing the profit margins on his knickknacks by having them made in China. So it just, like, these beliefs are only ironclad up until they're not as profitable. Yeah. Then they don't matter. Yeah. I mean, that's, again, it's wholly unsurprising. Yeah.

But at least they can deny their employees care. That seems good. Yes. Their employees that they make memorize all the prices because the barcodes are the devil. Of course, Cody. Yes. Of course. We can understand in our society how you might have to deny employees access to certain

medicines because the way that they deal with eggs and stuff is against your poorly understood religious beliefs. We're also being like, but we're still going to buy a bunch of stuff from China because that's just the only way to get enough Styrofoam roosters. Yeah. Yeah. But we can guarantee Hobby Lobby wouldn't do something like invest millions of dollars in the same drug firms that produce the pills that they say are against their religious

beliefs. That would, of course, be a massive violation of what they believe, right? Yeah. I agree and I choose to leave this podcast before you make your next point. Hobby Lobby's 401k plan for employees includes some seventy three million dollars in mutual funds that are heavily invested in the very same drug firms that produce emergency contraceptive pills. What?

Intrauterine devices and drugs commonly used in abortions. It's also worth noting that prior to the ACA, Hobby Lobby's health insurance plan covered all these devices. It's almost as if what really matters to David was establishing the legal precedent that corporations could discriminate against employees based on religious beliefs. It is almost exactly like that. It is almost exactly like that. That's wild.

It's cool stuff. It's not wild again. Again, wholly unsurprising. Holy cool and unsurprising. And boy howdy, have the implications of the Hobby Lobby decision been vast and terrifying? In her dissent to the 2014 ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared, the court I fear has ventured into a minefield. Two years later, in 2016, the Los Angeles Times evaluated the impact of the ruling

so far like this, quote, the minefield Ginsburg warned about has now detonated. On Thursday, U.S. District Attorney Sean F. Cox of Detroit ruled that a local funeral home was well within its rights to fire a transgender employee because its owner had a religious belief that gender transition violated biblical teachings. Cox's ruling puts the lie to Justice Samuel Alito's denial in his majority opinion in Hobby Lobby that the ruling would provide a shield for a wide range of discriminatory practices by allowing them to masquerade as religious scruples. Our decision today provides no such shield, Alito wrote.

Ginsburg, who was on the short end of the 5-4 decision, knew better. She said there could be little doubt that religious claims would proliferate because the court's expansion of religious freedom to corporations invites for-profit entities to seek religious-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith. She asked, where is the stopping point? Suppose an employer's sincerely held religious belief is offended by high health coverage of vaccines or paying the minimum wage, or according women, equal pay for substantially similar work.

Within days of the ruling, there were already 49 cases from for-profit organizations claiming religious objections to the ACA, and the ruling is increasingly used to cloak illegal discrimination in the robes of religion. Wheaton College even argued that the ruling meant they could refuse to fill out medical paperwork stating that they would not pay for contraceptive coverage because doing so was one step in a process that would lead to other entities paying for that coverage. So they were well within their rights to fuck with employees' private lives even if their money wasn't on the line.

That's awesome, huh? Cool stuff! Oh my God, it's so sneaky and gross. Oh my God. Oh. It's still too early to say precisely what the long-term impact of the Hobby Lobby ruling will be. But it is clear that it has fundamentally changed the game as regards religious freedom of speech.

There is now established legal precedent to protect wealthy individual religious extremists from abusing people they disagree with in almost any conceivable manner. You might note that this is basically a slower, less bloody, but ultimately just as violent a way of achieving the same basic goal that ISIS set, a state completely dominated by extreme religious law with no freedom or ability to dissent. Good. I just wanted to talk about ISIS, Robert. Well, Cody.

This sucks. This sucks. I have some good news for you. Because now we're going to get to the part of the story where Hobby Lobby helps to fund the precursors to ISIS. I guess that's lighter. Is that lighter? Cody looks really sad, you guys.

It's bumming me out. It's a good story. Everybody loves a happy story. Yeah. Everybody does love a happy story, a happy, happy. Cody. Yes. You know what won't lead to the establishment of a theocracy in the United States that strips

people of very basic fundamental human rights in order to maximize corporate profits. Is it products and services? That's exactly right. Yes. I knew it. Yeah. I knew how to save the Republic. It's products and services.

That's the problem. There just weren't enough products and services in 2014. Well, Hobby Lobby only has products. They don't have services. Exactly. And this is why podcasts will save the Republic is the sheer deluge of products and services that we can bring in to rescue our fellow Americans from this encroaching nightmare.

Exactly. This is a revolution. Rear the heroes. This is the beaches at Normandy. And we are fighting bigotry with products. Promo code save the world. Adbreak. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So Cody, we just talked about how David Green's goal is basically the establishment of a religious state, along the same lines as ISIS, but slower and more profitable. Speaking of Islamic terrorists, David Green helped to put piles of money in the pockets of Islamic terrorists so he could have a fancy museum.

Right around the same time Hobby Lobby won its case in the Supreme Court, stories on the company started spreading the word that David Green was creating a Bible Museum in Washington, D.C. Politico reported that the museum would likely cost the family more than $800 million and involve a repository of tens of thousands of biblical antiquities the family had recently acquired. The mission of the Bible Museum was, at first, to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible. Green later modified this slightly to, invite people to engage with the Bible.

Yeah, he knows what he's doing. Yeah, he really does. Smart cookie. In 2010, Hobby Lobby President and David's son, Steve Green, visited the United Arab Emirates with an antiquities consultant. There they inspected 5,548 artifacts. These objects, according to a later legal complaint, were displayed informally, spread on the floor, arranged in layers on a coffee table, and packed loosely in cardboard boxes,

in many instances with little or no protective material between them. That's how you're supposed to do it. It's like taking you to the garage and like show you like that. Here's the antiquities. Here's the antiquities over there. There's the corner over there. There's the antiquities over there. We sell heroin too.

Yeah, you want some of them. Yeah, some of them is inside. Get that part. Now these antiquities mostly consisted of cuneiform tablets and balls of clay imprinted with ancient seals. The whole situation seemed very shady, and it was, but the dealers provided what's called a statement of provenance. See antiquities stuffed as a major problem, particularly in the Middle East, since the

early 1990s between 200 and 500,000 objects have been looted from archaeological sites in Iraq alone. Cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets, the same kind of objects that were displayed by Steve Green in the UAE, are the most frequently looted items. Since 1990, cultural objects from Iraq carry special import restrictions that include criminal penalties. That's not just because the US government wants to stop these items from being looted. In fact, it has much more to do with the worry that the items are being looted by terrorist

organizations and used to fund violent attacks across the world. During the height of the Islamic State, illegal antiquities looted within its lands were estimated to have been valued at between $4 billion and $7 billion, which is obviously an incredibly wide possible range. ISIS's Department of Natural Resources, Antiquities Division, charged a 20% tax on saleable antiquities. And most experts seem to think the group probably didn't make more than a few million dollars from its looting program, but that is plenty of money to carry out horrific attacks.

The November 2015 Paris attacks, for example, killed 130 people and cost roughly $10,000. It is worth noting, of course, that in 2010 and 11, ISIS was not really a thing, but its precursors did exist, and so did other extremist groups, like al-Qaeda, who profited from the sale of antiquities in Iraq. The simple reality of the situation is that people who buy antiquities in Iraq have, and at that point had, no way of knowing who they would support with their purchases. Most experts simply advise people not to make these kinds of purchases, since it's impossible to do so and not fund terrorists and the illegal theft and destruction of cultural artifacts.

But the Green family didn't care about any of that. They wanted fancy old Bible shit for their Bible museum. As I mentioned earlier, Steve Green traveled to that UAE meeting with an antiquities expert. She advised him not to purchase any of the clearly shady artifacts on offer. Her exact quote was, I would regard the acquisitions of any artifact likely from Iraq as carrying considerable risk. And I found an interview with this expert, conducted later on a blog dedicated to antiquities research and study.

Here's how she described the reaction to her warning. I can't say they reacted one way or the other, they didn't seem surprised or upset, which in hindsight is kind of surprising. The impression I had at the time is that they were only considering buying antiquities. I had no idea until I read the complaint released last week that this was already in process. They had already, earlier in July, before I talked to them, looked at cuneiform tablets. You would think if I'm talking about, you have to do this and that, and they're already in negotiations.

They would have had some reaction to what I said. I'm pretty mystified as to why they bothered to have me do this for them. What do you think they had her do this for them? I don't know, just like they're interested, they like history. They like history. The why became clear later. Hobby Lobby wired $1.6 million to seven different bank accounts associated with five separate people to buy the items.

They had the artifact shipped to the United States in numerous packages with fake labels, identifying them as tile samples. The packages were also shipped to multiple locations. In doing so, Hobby Lobby and the Green family followed well-established procedures for smuggling illegally obtained cultural antiquities. In that interview with the Antiquities expert I quoted from earlier, the interviewer asks her if she thinks the Greens might have just consulted her to learn how the legal process for importing artifacts works so they could more easily devise a scheme to break the law.

Here's her response. I suppose one can't rule that out, which would be very upsetting to me. I can't rule that out. My goal was to discourage them from doing the wrong thing by telling them all the wrong things they could do. I thought they would not want to do those things. I can't rule out it was all the opposite, that they used my advice to evade the law as opposed to follow the law.

Can't rule it out. Christians! Yeah. This is great. We're religious. We believe in morality. Yeah. They have very consistent morality.

Yeah. Which is that all that matters is what they think of the Bible and not preserving historical antiquities or avoiding funding terrorism in foreign countries because that has nothing to do with Christianity in America, which is all that matters to them. Which is, it's discussed, there were a lot of groups like the Free Burma Rangers, which are a heavily Christian organization dedicated to providing emergency medical care and war zones and stuff. These are very religious people who would go get shot at in order to provide emergency

first aid to people fighting and dying in Mosul. At the same time as these billionaires who call themselves Christians are funding violence around the world in order to have a fancy museum. It's sickening. I like that first part you talked about. It seems like a real Christian thing to do. Yeah. Yeah.

It's providing emergency medical care to vulnerable people. That does seem more Christian than funding al-Qaeda by stealing artifacts. It seems like it, but maybe it's not. It seems like it. I'm not, you know, I'm not. But, you know, we're forgetting Mark 2330 when Jesus stole the Statue of Liberty in order to hide it in his underground lair. I thought that you actually had a Bible verse in your head that you were quoting.

That's the one. That's right next to his giant coin. His giant coin and his Mona Lisa. He has the original. Of course. Of course. Yeah. He's got that one painting that got cleaned wrong and now it looks all smeared.

That's his piece, like the center of his collection. Yeah. His whole life has been leading up to getting that. Yeah, the Gnostic verses are just about Jesus stealing art. Yep. That's why the church had to suppress them. Yeah. I'm well, well versed in history and religion.

So I know exactly what you're talking about. Now fortunately, the Greens were worse at smuggling artifacts than they are at imposing religious law in the United States. Customs caught them. And in January of 2011, Border Patrol began seizing objects, roughly 3,450 in total that Hobby Lobby had illegally imported. The resulting civil asset forfeiture case bore a hilarious name. The United States of America versus approximately 450 ancient cuneiform tablets and approximately

3,000 ancient clay bulla. That's amazing. That was written down. Yeah. That's the name of the case. Oh, yeah. Oh, that is. Oh, right.

It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Now Hobby Lobby was caught red handed and they didn't even really try all that hard to defend themselves. The case was that obvious. I mean, yeah. The company claims to have accepted responsibility for its past conduct and promised to revise its internal procedures, which is meaningless because their employees were warned by an

expert not to do what they did before the acquisition process began. But David Green lied and claimed that this was all the result of Hobby Lobby being new to the antiquities business and making rookie mistakes. On the Hobby Lobby website, he wrote this, we should have exercised more oversight and carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled. Hobby Lobby has cooperated with the government throughout its investigation and with the announcement of today's settlement program, it is pleased that the matter has been resolved. The settlement involving Hobby Lobby returning all the ill-gotten artifacts and paying a

fine. But they are left in possession of more than 40,000 ancient relics, some of which will be displayed in their Bible Museum and only a small fraction of which will ever be made available for serious scholars to study. I spent a lot of time reading the blogs of different archaeologists and antiquities researchers and they all seemed pretty uniformly to agree that the Green Collection basically kept important historical objects hidden from everyone but a small coterie of experts that the Green Family personally likes.

There were also in agreement about the fact that the Bible Museum and the Green Collection is almost certainly filled with other stolen and looted items. And I'm going to quote now from one of the more prominent blogs in that ecosystem, Anonymous Swiss Collector. You can't collect antiquities without risking buying looted ones. Every purchase is a risk, best just not to do it. You can't collect antiquities on the scale of the Greens, massive scale, without certainly buying a lot of loot.

This is common knowledge held by everyone in the trade. The antiquity business runs on layers of plausible deniability, not asking too many questions, leaving things implied but not said, opaque business practices, lack of regulation. Claims of not understanding the law are not an excuse for breaking it, don't be fooled by this. In this case the Greens had advisors and independent experts who told them flat out that these purchases were wrong. They did it anyway.

Why do it then? Well we have a lot of research on the topic. Basically the Greens were probably able to neutralize their actions by convincing themselves that they were above the law because they were buying the antiquities for magical evangelical purposes, saving them from the darkness obscurity in a non-Christian country. I mean, that is speculation. Their neutralization technique might be a bit different, but it'll be something along those lines.

It always is. Yes, I do think there are looted antiquities in the Museum of the Bible. I think there are lots and lots of looted antiquities in there. I can't prove it to an extent that would let some country make a return claim, but please understand, there is no legitimate source of these kind of artifacts, not on that scale. Looting is the source and lack of provenance is the proof. But counterpoint, the magic stuff. The magic stuff.

That is a good counterpoint. And he does not disprove magic in this blog post. Ergo, Hobby Lobby's good. So he should have talked to me because clearly he hasn't considered all sides to this. Yeah, he did not. He did not. You consider all things much like a radio show that I've forgotten the name of. All of the, every little bit of the information is being thought of.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that show. This is important to see both sides of an issue. Both the side that says literally the only way to have gotten these objects is massive theft in the funding of international terrorist organizations. And the side that says, but Jesus, but the magic and you sort of trail off. So close.

And that's really how you know you've won the argument when you sort of trail off. I love trailing off. It's like hiking, you know, trails are good. Exactly. You pick one doesn't matter and you just keep going and going and then you slow down and then you sort of trail off. And then you win. Yes.

And then you win. How do you feel about Hobby Lobby after all this? They're not my favorite place. Aroused? If I were to get, I mean, I'm always aroused. So thank you. It's not really, you know, that's why we have you on the show. Exactly.

That's why that's why that's why I come on the show. Bam. Damn. Did it, if I were to get a knickknack, if I were to like be in the business of knickknacks, I probably would go to a different place. I think if I were in the business of knickknacks, I would just patty whack and then give a dog a bone. But I mean, you know, different strokes, you know, different strokes for different old

men who come rolling home who are constantly aroused on podcasts. Yes. And interestingly, some fan out there needs to graph the amount of times we make come jokes when it's just you and I and when we have our third person here, because I think we make less. Call her by her name. I might make more, actually, because I know that she hates the word come. So I say a lot.

Katie does hate the word come, yeah. And now we are upping our come quotient at the end of the episode. Exactly and earlier when we were talking about, Karen, I almost referenced the come and go video. Mm hmm. That chain of guest. Oh, yes. Yes.

But I held back. But here we are saying it now. I love it when regions have a thing that is clearly like everyone outside of that region knows that the name is hilarious, like come and go or like the game cornholing, which is played in certain parts of this country that just are like, no, it's just this game that we all play. Right. What is what is funny and everyone else is like but sex.

So what if you got something else? I miss Katie. Oh, yeah, we all miss Katie. This would not be happening with Katie. We're here. We would have started with Hitler, probably wouldn't have ended on come. No. And we would have just, we would have figured out a solution to the hobby lobby problem.

Katie would have like written into their offices on a sea of blood with a sword made out of cultural antiquities and beheaded David Green in order to bring peace and tranquility to the kingdom. Yeah. She would have put. But she's not here. And so we just have come jokes. Yeah.

Just voices in the air instead of feet on the ground. That's the difference. That's the case. It's true. I know. We all miss Katie. When does the museum open? That's a good question.

Cody. Let us ask the almighty Elgug. You didn't like that? Not like that. All right. Not an Elgug fan. It opens 10 a.m. Saturday. It's open now.

Yeah. It opens. The grand opening is tomorrow. It's still around. Okay. It's open. It's open right now. Ew.

So you can go 430,000 square feet. That's. Really big. That's really big. It's got a great view. It's got a beautiful view of Capitol Hill, which they seek to dominate. That's a big step up from that 300 by 300. I'm sad.

Tiny picture frame store. Do you think they sell tiny picture frames in the museum of the Bible? They'd better. They'd better have tiny picture frames in that gift shop and a bunch of Styrofoam cocks and stuff. I mean, one of the things that is at least amusing to me is that on the museum of the Bible's page, their logo is clearly supposed to be like it's a B on its back. So it also kind of looks like the 10 Commandments or an open book, but more than anything, it

looks like a but. Hell yeah. Yeah. They did. So that's good. That's good. I think we're going to win. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. We have all the power now. Yeah. I'm sad. I thought we were really doomed before I realized their logo kind of resembles a but. And now I realize that victory is inevitable. Yeah.

Days from now. Hey Robert, this is going on too long, sir. You know what's not going on too long? Cody's Plugables. Oh yeah. That's true. They go very short. Okay, check out Worst Year Pod, which is a show that we all do.

Also some more news. It's on Twitter and it's on Patreon, it's on YouTube. My Twitter is Dr. Mr. Cody, DRMISDRC, and check out Katie Stoll on Twitter as well who's not here. We're missing Katie. But it's in spirit here. It's in spirit. We're missing so much.

Much like the Holy Spirit and just like the Holy Spirit, she's telling us to steal antiquities from Iraq. Exactly. Exactly. And we will. Even more news is the name of our podcast. Plugable over. Robert.

I'm Robert Evans. That's true. The episode's done. Don't follow him on Twitter. Just kidding. Don't do it. No, Robert. I feel like you're great on Twitter just to give you a compliment.

It's true. Thank you. Thank you, Sophie. I am great on Twitter. And you can find me on, you can find the website of this podcast, BehindTheBastards.com. And we also have another podcast, Worst Here Ever, about the election. And you can find your neighborhood Hobby Lobby if you need to buy a styrofoam rooster and further choke the oceans with the detrius of civilization.

Tight. Tight. All right. We're done. We're done. Alpha Bet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alpha Bet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.