Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 875: No Kings, Santos Sentence Commuted

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Gloryhole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is cognitive dissonance. Every episode we blasts anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news,

makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political, and there is no welcome at. Today is Thursday, October the 20th, two days. Cicel. It's not Thursday. It's Monday, Tom. It's Monday. It's October the 20th.

The other day, the other day on our show, you said it was August. Cecil, does time matter? I know, bro. Time is a fucking flat circle at this point. Like, are you kidding me? Just, how about this? That's what time it is. Hey, there is no welcome at, there's also Tom, no kings.

So there are no kings. That happened this last weekend. Huge turnouts all across the United States. We're recording early because I am flying to QED. So this show will be put out for patrons before then, but after then will be like Monday, QED will be over. So next week when this releases QLD be, QED will be over. Oftentimes when we record very quickly after we've had a previous show, there's nothing to talk about, unlike in normal administrations. In the Trump administration, we have a full

plate of notes we have to talk about. We have so many stories. I want to mention before we get started that we're going to have Dr. Darrell Ray, founder of recovering from religion and the secular therapy project. He's going to be joining us later to talk about vulgarity for charity, which is coming up starting next month. But we want to start out to talk about No Kings, because I had an opportunity to go to the No Kings protest. I went to downtown Chicago's protest that was at Grand Park. It was at one of the fields nearby. It's essentially the band shell they do at the Jazz Fest ad and other places. It's a giant area where they congregated to start. And so they started there. I was terrified because we're rolling in, right? I come rolling in with a friend of

ours, a lady friend of ours, and then my wife and myself, right? So we're driving downtown. And I get off of the interstate and I'm like, holy shit, there's just people on the side of the road just walking towards Grant Park and the sidewalks are full of people. And so I was like, holy shit, am I going to get a spot down here? It starts slowing up to the point where I'm turning to where I'm going to go and I'm like, oh, I'm not going to get a spot. I'm not going to get a spot. And I was lucky enough to get a spot in a paid lot. I guess people didn't want to have to pay they're like, I'm not going to pay to go there. Like, what the hell? We get out, we start walking. And it is like normally like when you're downtown and you see big stuff like Loll.

Alapalooza or, you know, these other big things that are happening. Genuinely, it's packed. It's almost always packed. This was more packed than I've ever seen it ever. Like, and I live downtown for, you know, 20 years. So I've seen the most people I've ever seen downtown was this last weekend. We start walking toward it. We get to the ban shell.

And the entire city block is standing room only on this band shell. Like there's the hall the green is all standing room only, right? There's drone shots up. But when you see the drone shots, you're just blown away by how many people are there. They come out. They start speaking. It was Brandon Johnson. It was some of our representatives.

They did some multilingual stuff. So there was people doing bilingual speeches. So they would say a little in English. They'd say a little in Spanish. There was just this huge turnout of people. Pritzker spoke at the end. Then we all decide to, they're like, okay, now we're going to march. Now, I saw tons of people, didn't see a single protest or,

like counter protester. And I figured if there was going to be, you know, a counter protester there was going to be some real problems. There wasn't a single one. Nobody's going to come down to Chicago and try to harass people. So we were there. We walk over to the street. We're getting ready to march.

They're like, okay, everybody, we're going to start marching. We stood on the side of that road waiting for the crush to finally move forward. It took us 45 minutes to get a half a block. Holy shit. Then we finally start moving, actually moving, moving, and it was just as much of a crush walking down the street,

we turn, and the city of Chicago has a thing called the loop, and the loop is where the train runs, essentially, around the loop of the Chicago. That's where the business district is. And we essentially walked all around the downtown area. The entire line of people went, and if you're from Chicago, you know these streets. If you're not, it's irrelevant.

But it basically went from Jackson to Wacker, whacker up to, I think, Wells or Franklin, and then Franklin back to Jackson, and then the Jackson down. So it's essentially in circles the entire loop with people were marching. That's how many people were walking around. It was insanity down there. There was just tons of people, tons of people really excited to be there.

And there was, I didn't see any, like, nothing, nothing broke out. Nobody was vandalizing anything. It's not this group of Antifa, like, near-do wells or whatever. They were trying to pass it off as an American hate rally or whatever. There were several chance of USA, like, people were like, there was a ton of American flags. I think people, I think the left is genuinely trying to recapture patriotism. They're trying to do their best to recapture it. And so it was great.

There was so many people. If you get an opportunity to see the one in Chicago, the aerial footage is amazing. You can just see the pulse of the people coming out. It's just, it's a never-ending stream of humans. They're walking around. They're average, some of the people said 100, some other people said 200,000. there was so many people there more than I've ever seen

and I've seen like I said I've seen Lala Paloza I've seen when we won the World Series when we won when we won the Stanley Cup I've seen these things and it wasn't as big so huge amounts of people

and it was really great to see and it was all over the nation too I saw so because I was excited and a little nervous for you to be honest I was a little nervous too I was a worry because like you're down there and you're thinking gosh all somebody has to do

is drive a car the wrong way or whatever it is, you know, because there are near-do wells in the world that don't like people expressing their First Amendment rights. Yeah, I was, I was excited for it. I couldn't be there. I was excited for you. I was nervous for you. I was excited for the, I was watching, like, refreshing news feeds, you know, like checking like the news sources. I saw CBS. So I remember I texted you and I was like, oh, it looked like there were like 75,000 people. And you're like, bro, there's a lot more than 75. There was so many people. That was the first report I saw. I saw later in the day, a report from CBS News saying,

250,000 plus people, and that the protest in Chicago stretched for more than two miles. Yeah, that makes sense. Just two miles of people just out there. Yeah. And I, you know, like, you look at something like that, and you cannot help but realize just how foundational and important all of the pieces of the First Amendment are. Yeah. Right.

We get stuck, I think, a lot here when we talk about, I have a right. right to free speech. And a lot of people seem to think the First Amendment sort of starts and stops there, because that's the place where it intersects with your life the most frequently, right, in your day-to-day sort of existence. And there's all these like free speech absolutists, right? If you're a free speech absolutist, you are probably further along the right-wing spectrum than you are center or left. Most of those people who call themselves free speech absolutists find themselves more often on the right than in the center or on the left. I find it really interesting how many of those people who are free speech absolutists

are not also absolutist defenders of the press, which is also First Amendment, or are not also absolutist defenders of our right to peaceably assemble and redress our government for wrongs, right? Which is also in the First Amendment. I find that really telling about what their priorities are. When you pick and choose in that way,

what you're saying is, I want to make sure that my voice eclipses your voice. Exactly right. That is the point of free speech absolutism. It is not a deeply held ideological principle. It is a specifically targeted political angle to take in order to silence minority voices and amplify majority voices. That is what that's for.

Because if they had really an ideological patriotic, patriotic standpoint, they would be every bit as excited about the no king's protest, even if you didn't like what they were protesting. I look at something like this, and I see, this is a functioning democracy still. Right? Because, like, what happened? When you look at, you look at countries where there is not a functioning democracy, I'm thinking of the Arab Spring, and I'm thinking of the Syrian response to the Arab Spring. I'm thinking of things like Tiananmen Square. When democracy really falls, the one of the first things to go is exactly the event you participated in.

And I know we've been like really down on, hey, like fascism is here. It is. But I don't think we are so far down that slippery slope that we are unable to recover. And I think a day like yesterday shows us that we still have our claws in. Yeah. Right. And that's, I think that's super fucking important.

Absolutely. You know, what's really impressive is, of course, people are going to show up to big cities like I did right I went to Chicago but there was so many different places all across the country that had a little tiny and sometimes very large for the place that they're at protests right so sure there's hundreds of thousands of people that go to Chicago and Boston and New York and L.A. and these big cities all across the country but you know what some tiny little little places all around Illinois had pop-up So there's a ton of these No Kings protests all over Illinois.

And they started popping up, you know, I felt a little weird going to some of these that were out in, you know, when I was going to go to Chicago, I felt, well, I don't know, man, I'm not sure. Like I was a little nervous. I couldn't imagine how nervous people in little tiny red states, little tiny red cities with these protests. There was one, two, three people. Some of our listeners were sending images of these smaller protests in deep red areas where people are deep and red areas where people are deep and. read, and I know for sure there were counter-protesters there. Those people had some real courage to get out there and stand there because they know the hostility that they're going. There's going to be hostility against them. There are going to be people who are going to go up against

them and who are going to try to yell at them and try to flip them off and scream at them or maybe come confront them. And that takes a lot of courage to get out there. So kudos to all the people who came out, not just the people who in like big areas of the country were out, but people and small, little areas of the country showing that this sort of reach was, it was, it permeated the entirety of the American, of all of America.

There was protests everywhere. So it was amazing to see. And I saw, the response that I saw mostly was, you know, this is a hate America rally. That was their talking point. The Republicans came on all the different

networks that they could. They hate the media, but they sure as hell spread their message on the media all the time. Right. They hate the media. The media is biased. But the media sure is shit shits their opinion out constantly. And so they'll come on CNN and they'll come on all these other places. And they all had their rhetoric down.

It was a hate America rally. You're going to come out to a hate America rally. I saw none of that. What I saw was, you know, people celebrating diversity, people celebrating that this nation was built up by immigrants. And that continues to be sustained. by immigrants. I saw people who were welcoming others. Like, that's all what America's about. And and so this idea that they came out with. And then the other thing is the response afterwards is that I've seen online and from other places as well, we didn't have a king before and you went

out there in protest. We don't have a king now. I guess it worked. And that whole flippant comment So stupid. Basically, what it does is it ignores the fact that there has been progressive executive overreach in so many different places, stifling of speech, I mean, look at how they're weaponizing different departments of the government to go after free speech when it comes to, you know, the FCC going after people and saying that certain people should be taken off the air, suing different places and telling people that they can't come to the press circle, you know, excluding press from the press circle, sending your armed and federalized troops to different places in the country to stifle speech outside of immigration centers,

those are ways in which someone is overreaching in a way that a king would. So I know your tiny little brains can't put this together or you're just stubborn enough where you don't want to put it together. But that's a real overreach of power. And that is something that a dictator would do or a king would do. And that's not something we accept here in the United States. So that's all those comments and all that bullshit. Like, you are genuinely in either an unthinking person or you're stubbornly not paying attention

to what's happening. Yeah, and I think the answer is, Porque, no los dos. Why not both? Right? No, you're not wrong. Like, the, what, a couple of things strike me about that. And like the first, like you said, is the willful ignorance. I mean, any, what we have seen over time, as you point out, is as the unitary executive

theory, which first came about during the George W. Bush era. As the Unitary Executive Theory has strengthened and taken hold over the last 20 years, that has consolidated more and more power into the executive branch. And I think this is a protest not just against Trump, although largely against Trump, but also against the idea that, hey, this cannot be allowed to continue. This constant upward push of power into the hands of any one person, regardless of whether that person is elected every four or eight years or not. Like, there should be a system of checks and balances.

There should be three chambers or three, you know, branches of government that help to sort of check and balance each other. Any erosion of that is a consolidation of power into an executive that is king-like. Yes. The idea that these guys are like, well, it's not exactly a king. It's like, well, fucking some, have you ever heard of a fucking. metaphor, like you're being impossibly stupid. The other thing I want to point out is that across the nation, it was millions of people. Yeah, it was millions of people. And to the, I and I've looked

for it, essentially entirely peaceful. Yeah. No meaningful for the, no meaningful, you know, vandalism, violence, arrests, like it was just wildly peaceful. I was thinking about right-wing protests and rallies, right? The most recent one of any size I can remember was January 6th. Yeah. You'd be hard pressed to, even if you don't believe that was an insurrection, which you're crazy, it was. But even if you don't believe that was an insurrection, it would be hard pressed to say

that that was a peaceful demonstration. Sure. Right? Patriotic in nature. And then Cecil, I was also thinking, too, of when you and I very first started this show, and we were just wee baby podcasters with Naria, green. gray hair upon our heads. Nearly 20 years ago, and there were the tea party rallies that were taking place to protest a lot of

Obama's policies and Obama's, you know, a gender. And color. Well, but that's the thing I was going to point out. I remember you and I being incredibly critical of the Tea Party rallies, but what were we critical of? We were not critical of, hey, you guys shouldn't be out here gathering together to protest. We're like, yeah, you should be. But the problem is you've got a bunch of racist caricatures and signs, like objectively racist, like Obama as a monkey.

You're hanging Obama in effigy. Right. Like, when you fucking, when you hang a black dummy, there is a lot of baggage behind that, folks. It's not like that just, it's not like that just appeared out of nowhere. It's not like that doesn't have a giant long history in the United States. where people hit their face under a big pointy hat. It's not like that doesn't have a big, long history in the United States. Yeah.

It's just so absolutely incredible that like when the right has got, I mean, I think of like a Charleston. You know, the United the Right rally. Unite the Right rally. Like what was that all about? These are different. Like they're qualitatively different. They just are. Interestingly, too, they're also quantitatively different.

There are not millions of people on the right. When we feel on the left, I think, when we feel as progressives and we feel even if we're center right, that we are, you know, just getting curbstomped in this political moment because we are, you know, and in many ways, like take a look at something like the no king's rallies. I think they're inspiring. Yeah. I think they show us, hey, we do have power. We do have force. I think they also show the politicians that answer to us a lot. Yeah.

They show like, hey, we're fucking out here. And there's some shit we want. There was, at this one in Chicago, you had Pritzker, who's the current governor. You had Durbin, who's our senator. You had two or three of the representatives, House representative people who represent Chicago were there. So it's not like there wasn't anybody there who had some political pull. Like, there was a lot of people with some really powerful, you know, their powerful political

entities. And I think, you know, there's a story in the notes here. It's Democrats at no King's Rally to protest Trump. But many say they're also inhabiting. with their own party. And this whole story, this whole article essentially says, look, one, let new blood in there. Stop it with this old guard stuff. You know, like let's, let's flush out some of that stuff. Stand up to Trump. Don't let him push you around. And let's embrace a populist message and not a capitalist, corporatist message. And I think all that stuff is absolutely the lifeblood.

And what could rejuvenate a left on this side of the country is to get rid of those corporate interest because you pointed out really I think astutely and this was a while ago you don't have them anymore man they're not with you anymore they've all fucking tossed their fucking chips in with Trump so they're they weren't with you ever they were only with you in the sense that if you won you might give them something well guess what they're with the other guy now and they will not jump ship midterm they will they dare not jump ship midterm so you cannot appeal to the corporate interests in this in this country during the midterms.

It will not work because guess what? They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you. They don't care about anything except for profits. So do not go after that. Instead, go after the populist message as deep as you can. Throw that shit out. Now, I understand that fucking corporations help win elections in this country

because of fucking citizens united, right? We fucked ourselves with a terrible fucking Supreme Court decision and we can't do anything about it. But, man, I'll tell you what, if we can get rid of them in the midterms, you can get rid of them in the fucking general election in four years. You could just keep doing it over and over. Just fucking get rid of them because they're just doing everything they can

to tear this country apart. And for once, I wish a guy would take a dump on my chest. That is appalling. That really upsets me. I can't believe nobody's ever taking a dump on your chest. Will you be that guy? It would be an honor and a privilege.

Did you see Trump's video, Tim, the little video that him and J.D. Van, J.D. Vance put out a separate one. J.D. Vance and Trump both put out AI Slop videos. I'm not going to show the videos because I don't, I fucking, we don't want to share AI slop. But essentially the J.D. Vance one shows Trump putting a crown on and then pulling out a sword as a king. And then a bunch of Democrats, they, they, they, they weaved in a bunch of Democrats when they were doing something with, with things around their neck. But essentially, it showed a bunch of Democrats essentially bowing down to Trump. Then Trump releases one the day after the new. King's rally. And it's, there's a jet that says King Trump. I think it's got the fucking top gun music on it. He gets in it. He's got a tiny little mask on. It doesn't fit anywhere. It doesn't fit over his nose. It looks hilarious. And then he flies his, his King Trump jet over the No King's protests and drop shit on them from above. So Trump shits on his constituency, right? Like everybody is his constituency, essentially. Like we all are the people who he answers to. but he doesn't, he only answers to people.

He doesn't even answer those people, but he pretends the answers to people who like him and he hates all the people who don't. So he shit on Americans in this video. And it was released on his true social feed. And here's what I want people to remember. It made him so mad. And it made J.D. Vance so mad

that Trump and J.D. Vance had to go rage type into Sora or whatever, their anger. So they could produce a video to try, to trigger other people. And here's the thing, man, it's not working. Dude, I know you're mad. You're mad, bro, and it's hilarious. Yeah, man. And, like, I look at something like this and I'm like, okay, man, this is what I expect from the troll in chief. Yep. This is it. I would expect the same thing from, honestly, from a, like, petulant 13 year old. That's what this feels like. Yeah, this doesn't

feel when I look at something like this, this is not here to say like, oh, what a, what a clever retort. what are you kidding me? This is somebody who obviously has never cared about being a president for all of America, right? This is a guy who's in it for himself, is willing to literally shit on his opponents, right? Has no interest in sort of uniting people, has no interest in drawing America together. His, because his vision of America doesn't include you. That's the thing. Like, that's the difference. When you listen to the speeches and look at the actions for, and shit on them all you. want. But from the center left Democrats, their vision of America likely includes you, right? Maybe it's not as inclusive as it should be. It is probably not. It is probably not as progressive as it needs to be to answer the most pressing questions of the day. But does their vision of who is American, does it include you? Trump's very much does not, right? Intentionally, specifically, structurally, economically, it does not include you. It never was meant to include you. So he's just the troll in chief.

That's what this is. This is also, this is the inevitable consequence of moving away from like an insistence on seriousness when it comes to our political leaders and a diving into an embracing of entertainment and politics and the conflation of entertainment and politics. It's a team. And it's not, it's not a great one, you know? Yeah. Like Donald Trump answers to only one.

thing, and that's the fucking bond market. Like, that's all he answers to. You see him, like, the bond market does something he fucking scales back his tariffs. You know, that's who he answers to. Yeah. That's it. He's not answering to the people. He's not answering to the other people on the right. He doesn't care what Marjorie Taylor Green has to say. He's not answering to the people in the center or on the left. He doesn't care. He's never trying to govern those people. What he's trying to do is enrich himself and his friends. That's all he's trying to do. That's all he's ever been trying to do. I also want to address real quick, we got an email from somebody saying, hey, you guys are really denigrating AI slop, and it makes you kind of come across as old. And like, you recognize that

AI and the use of AI video and stuff is a means for people to express themselves. And maybe you should embrace this as just an other artistic medium that people can use to express themselves. And while I think that that is probably an impulse that is understandable, I think the difference here is that the ability to mess with the tools of narrative reality creation, is just an inherently bad thing. Like, I don't want to come across as a Luddite here. I know that I can often come across that way. But when I look at stuff like this,

like this AI slop, and nobody believes that this is true, but this didn't exist six months or a year or two or three or five ago. And in a year and two and three and five forward, this is likely to get better and better and better in ways that we won't be able to see the weirdness of and, like, pick out the uncanny valley of. It's already starting to get really difficult.

And that is not good for us as a society. I was thinking about this a lot when I saw that email because I really questioned myself. I thought, am I just being too reactionary? And I don't want to be. I want to give myself moments of pause because I do have ideas about this stuff. But I really truly don't think that that's the case here. I think that if I were trying to create a tool that allowed certain people, people in power to control the narrative around what's true and not true, one of the things I

would do is make sure that you enjoyed it. Because if you enjoy it at the ground level, you're going to fight for me to keep it, right? I think it was a very savvy, I think it was a very savvy move to take something like AI and make it available to the general public and not keep it as a tool for corporations and governments? Because if I give it to you and you like it and it's fun, then you are not going to say, hey, that is not good for the world because you like it. So I actually think that there is an intentionality to building really dangerous and powerful technologies in ways that appeal to you personally so that you will excuse how they are used politically and how they are used technologically and by oligarchical power brokers.

I think that we should take a step back and say, hey, the fact that I like something actually is not relevant here. Vegetarians do a great job of this, right? So as a corollary, vegetarians oftentimes will say, hey, I really still, I love meat. Like you talk to Eli Bosnick, he loves bacon. But he has a, he has an issue as a moral stance on this that says, hey, but I think it's actually bad for the world. And so I don't engage in this. And I think that, like, we have with these technologies, with AI technologies, we have been sold, man.

We bought it. They did a good job. They gave it to us cheap and for free and then for cheap. And they made us have a lot of fun with it. And everybody's having a good time. And so nobody is saying, hey, maybe we should stop the party. It's exactly what I would do if I was trying to take over. Honestly, it's the thing that you would do because now you on the ground will defend it.

Yeah. I think, too, that there's just no oversight at all on any of this stuff, right? So very little oversight on the internet itself. Very little oversight on social media and how we connect to people. Very little oversight on AI and how that is going to be implemented in these different arenas. All that stuff, what it really needs is it needs to have somebody who, is overlooking and overseeing it and saying, this is good, this is bad, this is bad, and be able to objectively and without a party affiliation, without any kind of political

leanings, without all that stuff, to have a nonpartisan type of group that can look at this sort of thing and say, this is objectively bad for us. That's something that's super useful and should be useful. And I know that there's going to be free speech people out there will be like, well, that's a ministry of truth or whatever else you want to say. But look, having the fucking fire hose of this stuff we're already seeing getting drinking from the fire hose of this isn't great for us right we're already seeing there's a whole subreddit of people where they post AI videos asking is this AI I can't even tell anymore right so there's a whole subreddit of that and some of those I'll go on that subreddit and I'll be like man I don't know I actually don't know

I don't know I can't be sure some of them I can tell some of them you're like oh that's clearly AI but then there's other ones you're not so sure and so you're you're not so sure and so Like Tom suggests, that that creation of reality is a very difficult and dangerous thing that we just put in everyone's hands. That's like, I mean, I understand we put dangerous things in people's hands. We're the gun culture. So we already know that that's all we're, we already bad at it. So we're just going to be bad at this too. Someone also suggested, too, they said, hey, you know, like you guys were talking about using AI.

And now you're talking about like how difficult and bad AI is because we talked about how you were trying to make an image. You're talking about making an image. And the thing is, is like, you've got to understand how it works in order to know whether or not it's good or not, right? Like you've got to work with it within parameters, see how far it goes with you because you're worried about how far other people are pushing it. If we don't know anything about it, then we're just yelling at a cloud. You've got to know about it too.

So you've got to read about it. You've got to try to use it on occasion just so you can at least see how it works. Because if you don't know, then you're just talking out your ass. You don't know anything about it. Yeah, that's exactly. Like one of the criticisms that I've had, you know, people, when I've talked with other people about this, have you even used it? And I was like, well, yes, I have. I have even used it. Right? So I, you have to be able to say, yeah, I have an intimacy and a familiarity with this in order to say, you know, before I became a vocal critic of social media back in like 2015, 2016, I had been on Facebook for 10 years, right? So it's not like I was like coming at this from another with where I didn't have any, you know, day-to-day familiarity with it. I think you have to have familiarity in order to say like, hey, this is the thing I'm actually criticizing. That's exactly right. Okay, I'm going to divide it. There's one for you. One for me. Two for you. One, two, for me.

Three for me. Three for me. Four for me. Four for me. Four for me. You don't count that way. The story's from The Guardian. This is just an acceleration of other forces in Texas and elsewhere, North Carolina Republicans will redraw maps to gain extra seat in Congress. The state is the latest in the U.S. conducting mid-decade gerrymandering to favor one party before the midterms. Nice. Well, this is going to be the escalation. This is what we're going to see.

They're going to do it in another place, and then they might do it in another blue state now. So another blue state with a blue governor and a blue electorate that is supporting that governor is probably going to look out and say, okay, well, we got enough seats. We can redraw now because other places are doing it. it, the Supreme Court has to put a stop to this. The Supreme Court literally has to walk in and say, this can't be done. We're not doing this every two years that somebody gets elected or things change or the regime changes. Because guess what? What happens if there's a blue wave? These idiots don't realize. What happens if, like, genuinely, Trump fucks up the country

even worse than he has already? Let's presume that happens. Let's say he fucks the country up. Let's say the government doesn't open for a long time. Tons of people out of work. everybody's at a food bank. Interest rates shoot through the roof. Inflation goes crazy. Let's just say all that stuff happens. And it's now the midterms, right? And there's a blue wave. And it's a blue wave in a lot of different places, even places that were purple places. Now what? Now what are you going to do? Now suddenly those places are going to be able to redistrict in the midterms. Oh, shit, you redistrict. And now you're fucking locked out. It's a terrible idea. There should be, we should definitely follow more stringent rules when it comes to this,

because the whim of the governments around there, we're clearly seeing the partisan workings, and it's awful for us. Yeah, I mean, we should, like, it's so crazy to me, Cecil, how self-evident most of the solutions are to fixing government, right? Like, you want to, you want to just, like, tomorrow, you want to say, okay, well, I mean, gerrymandering is just patently an unfair process. We should have a law that says you can't do gerrymandering, right? That there should always be a nonpartisan committee who draws congressional maps. Yeah. Like gerrymandering should just be illegal, right? There should be, there obviously should be term limits in Congress, right? It is obvious that we should take certain types of money out of politics. These are not complicated

solutions because they're not complicated questions. Yeah. Right? But we're not going to do them because the people who are in charge and people who are in power don't actually want these things. The gerrymandering is just one more example. I think the worry that I have is that if they do this well, the ability for us to have a blue wave

is nullified. Oh, it's severely curtailed. And I think, like, they're going to win this because the House of Representatives represents more land than it does people. And it always has. It's always the land around and those few farmers and rural people,

those are the ones who get their choice on who they want to be essentially running their state. And the blue people are in such a high concentration that you can't just be like, well, here's 100,000, and here's another 100,000, and here's another 100,000, here's another 100,000, and those four or 500,000 people, they all get their own vote,

and they all live downtown, and that's four votes. They don't do that. They're like, no, we're going to take a tiny sliver of the pie, and then you get most of the state. And then we're going to take a tiny sliver of that pine, you're going to get most of the state. And then they outpower the blue areas of that place. And the problem is, is that happens all over the country.

So they're just going to, like, it's not like they're going to threaten us with Oklahoma or something, or I'm trying to think of a full red state. Like, what's the, like Alabama or something, right? Like, what's the worst that's going to happen? They might have one blue, one blue there and all the rest of them, like, what are you going to do? And so, I think the problem is, is in the deep red and deep blue states, we're going to have a real issue. But if they start to gerrymander and deeply gerrymander in these places, these purple states might flip. We got to, you got to nip that shit.

You got to stop it. And the Supreme Court is too feckless to do that sort of thing. Oh, yeah, because they want this. They're like, this is, this plays into their worldview. This is their world view. She's a grunt car. They're bred in hatcheries. Cloned muscles, low intelligence, brute force.

This is the kind of shit that needs to happen. News, judge to question feds on use of force, body camera mandate, and immigration enforcement in Chicago. Federal judge has said basically, hey, you're here. Your body cameras are on. And they were like, yeah, we didn't turn them on. The federal judge is like, in case you didn't fucking hear me. Yeah.

What I said was body cameras on. And I want to know why you're shooting that guy in the face with fucking pepperballs. And they're saying, you can't arrest people at immigration court. Like, you can't just go there and do that here. You're not allowed to do that. We're not letting you do that. And like, they did it. They just did it.

And then they did the pepperball stuff, even after they were told not to. And they released tear gas into groups when they were told not to. And then they didn't turn their fucking body cameras on. And we fucking knew that they weren't going to do that. And then they get called. Now they got to go in and they got to answer.

The thing is, is if this has teeth and if this can push them to do the right thing, it's better for America. It's just better for America if we're watching them and curtailing their actions. It's just better for us. And it's better for America. When I see, you know, one of the things that occurred to me, Tom, when I was thinking about

this is like, Trump has like no finesse on anything. Every single thing Trump does is brute force. Everything he does is try to, is try to, like every problem is a fucking nail to that guy. Every single one. And so when I think about, when I think about how he handles immigration, how does he handle immigration. There's no subtleness to it. there's no like working with other countries to see if there's some way to slow the immigration down.

Can we help give them aid to help them, you know, keep people at home? Can we help, you know, make sure that those people feel safe where they're at? You know, they can thrive where they are. No, none of that. It's just whoever comes in, we're just going to, we're going to brutally grab them, maybe send them to the wrong country, you know, really fuck them up as much as possible. Be dangerous when we go after them, et cetera. It's just a brute force answer, right? There's no, there's no finesse, there's no real thinking through it. It's just like, you know, I see a nail and I hit it.

Same thing when it comes to his economic policy. What's his economic policy? Well, everything is a fucking tariff. I'm going to, I'm going to bully you. I'm going to push you. I'm going to fight with it. Look at how he had to deal with the thing in Gaza. When he dealt with the, it's like a threat.

It's always brute force. And while brute force can solve a problem, right? Like, let's say you have a hole in your wall and you want to cover with plaster. You can just fucking smash a fucking piece of plywood in there. I feel seen right now. You can fucking do that, but it's not going to last or it's going to look like shit or it's not going to work. These are bad solutions.

And he's not a bright person. And the only thing he does is brute force. And you can see it in the way in which he governs all the people that are underneath them, right? All the people that are in the executive branch also do brute force shit. That's all they do. They don't have any subtlety. They don't. And look at how he's, look at how he's even trying to do the shutdown.

It's all brute force. Come to me. I will do what I want. You don't get in a say. You don't get to, there's no compromise. There's no subtleness. There's no politics. It's literally, do what I want are the government stays closed.

It's all the same thing with him. It's so easy to predict what he's going to do because all you have to do is look for the brute force solution. And that's going to be his, that's going to be how he does it. And it's so funny because this is a guy who wrote a book proclaiming that dealmaking was a kind of art. Right? Right? That there was a sort of like, you know, this like fucking flow state. Like, you know, it's an art when you make a deal.

And instead it's just like, uh, you got to do what I say or I'll make terrible things happen. That's pretty much it. Like, what the fuck? That's your whole strategy is just the willingness to destroy, the willingness to burn, the willingness to, you know, go fucking full like ham on every single thing that you do. And like, if you do that enough, you will rack up some wins. Sure. Right? So like if I go into the gym and I'm just like, yeah, what's my strategy? Well, I have actually a pretty, you know, well thought out progressive overload plan with primary and accessory lifts. I could do that or could just fucking work as hard as possible all the time. And sure, the risk for injury is really high, but I'm probably going to make some gains, right? It's not the most efficient way to get things done. It does have damage that is going to happen if you do that. But you're going to win here and there too. I look at something like this and I think this is what we need our

federal judges to do. This is the check and balance system. This is it. This is what is required of our judiciary. I'm not convinced that the Supreme Court will, you know, support this kind of stuff, unfortunately, but we should make them continue to contend with it. We should make them continue to get on the books and stand in front of people and say, you know what, I am stripping yet one more power away from the people. I am taking one more power away from states. I am taking one more power away from accountability. There is no world. I don't care where you are on the political spectrum.

I really mean this. I don't not care where you're at on the political spectrum at all. There is no world where you should not want body cams on all law enforcement all the time. I'm talking from fucking TSA all the way to the fucking anybody short of like undercover agents, right? If you are not undercover, you should be wearing a fucking body camera. That's it. Law enforcement should be cammed up all the time. No exceptions.

For sure. No exceptions at all. I understand that some of that footage may end up becoming sensitive and you might have to FOIA it or otherwise get classified. Cool, fine, awesome. But the camera footage should still exist. Yeah. These guys have so much physical power, power of violence over our citizenry.

And if we don't say you are accountable to someone, they are accountable to nobody. They're already walking around with qualified immunity. It's pretty much unqualified if we don't check. We don't check their power. Exactly. So, like, fucking body cams on everybody. I don't understand how the right, who for the longest time, have been the guys who looked at something like Ruby Ridge, right?

Ruby Ridge, if you were on the right, Ruby Ridge was a rallying cry that said, hey, we should be afraid of federal law enforcement overreach into the actions of private citizens, right? Well, you can argue the merits of that one way or the other. But that was a rallying cry for the right. It motivated things like Waco. motivated, you know, right-wing militia groups. The right-winger's for the longest time have been the ones who've been telling us,

be more afraid of the police at the federal level. Yeah. People of color on the ground have been telling everybody for fucking centuries, be afraid of the police. And we didn't fucking listen, right? We didn't fucking listen. Yeah. So we actually all agree on this.

Yeah. That's what's so crazy. And all of a sudden, it's like, yeah, but they're enforcing my mandate. Yeah. They're enforcing the bigotry I want to, to ensconce into the American ideal. So, like, I actually don't want their cameras. I don't want them to be able to fucking beat the shit out of somebody.

Yeah, I mean, like, we shouldn't think that someone should be able to shoot pepperball sprays at just regular people just standing there, right? Not breaking the law, standing there, or peaceful protesting. You know, there's this idea that somehow these people look at this conflict. And they somehow identify with the oppressor here who is literally shooting fucking pepperball spray into a priest's eyes because they feel they feel somehow slighted from the roof, right? You're your siding with that guy who's an oppressor, someone who is attacking an American citizen under the, under the authority of the federal government. Like this is a this is a huge overreach, something that we should all be up in arms about. Because here's the thing, I don't want them to shoot a fucking right-wing protester in the face.

If he's out there with his maga hat and he's saying like praise Charlie Kirk or whatever sign he has, I don't want some left-wing guy on top of a roof shooting him in the face with a pepperball gun. Absolutely not. That's a fucking horrendous overreach. And I would want that person fired. Don't you want the same thing? Like here's the thing, man. We can all peacefully protest if the government reaches out and start smacking one of us.

We all need to stand up and say that's a bad thing. Johnny. Four weeks. 20 papers, that's $2 plus tip. Gee, Johnny, I don't have a dime. Sorry. Didn't ask for a dime. $2.

Well, it's funny. See, my mom had to leave early to take my brother to school and my dad to work because... $2. New York Times. Cecil, you had some things to say about this when I sent this story from the New York Times. George Soros is released after Trump commutes his... San Jose, George Santos. Sorry, George Soros.

This was arrested. No, George Soros is who funded that great big rally in Chicago. George Soros was busy all weekend. He didn't write a bunch of checks, Tom. Come on. Yeah, did you get your Soros check, Cecil? I paid for myself. Who's going to pay for my gas and parking?

Come on. I thought it was the Jewish mafia. I had to buy my own fucking poster board and write my Star Wars sign on it. All right. Let's try that again. George Santos is released after Trump commutes his sentence. Obviously, if George Soros were arrested, Trump would not let him out. George Santos's lawyer said the disgraced former congressman was freed from a New Jersey prison around 10 p.m. on Friday.

He served less than three months of his fraud conviction. He was convicted of fraud and he was sentenced to more than 80 months in prison. he served less than three and Trump was basically like hey it wasn't that bad he was kind of a rogue he was a wacky calling the rogue he didn't pardon him he commuted his sentence

there's a difference yeah and I think like the other thing that we have to understand is that this guy literally had people donate to his party and then he just took those fucking credit cards and those like hey guess what I can do and then he went all hog and fucking used people's credit cards and he stole money Like, he's a literal thief.

Like, it was proven in court. He's a literal thief. He is a thief stealing political people who contributed to his political campaign. He stole their money. Not a thief of hearts, by the way. No, definitively not a thief of hearts. But he is just a liar and a thief. And here's the thing we have to remember, too.

Let's go in the way back machine to remember that it was the Republicans and the Democrats that kicked him out of Congress, right? It was not a single group that said, hey, this guy should go. It was everybody was like, get this fucking guy out of here. So it's not like he had some sort of group of people or this was a really partisan thing. Somebody went after him and they weaponized something. No, man, this guy was an awful person. A bunch of people on both sides of the aisle said this guy was an awful person.

And so they threw him in jail. They tried him. They threw him in jail. He lost his fucking court case. And then he was in jail. And Trump, this weekend, and here's what I think happened. This is, you know, clearly I've no way to prove this, but often when really bad stories hit the news, what you'll see Trump do is do something that is clearly a way to inflame the other side so he could take any kind of spotlight away and do what Bannon said, which is flood the zone, right? So what Trump will do is try to flood the zone when something big hits.

this Nazi young Republican thing was not going to go away quietly. This was a terrible, awful thing that happened. Tons of people, tons of young leaders in their party were shown as hateful, awful, authoritarian Nazis, right? These are people who are sending awful shit, praising Hitler, talking about rape. These are just terrible, terrible people.

And so that shit wasn't going to go away. It wasn't going to leave the headlines. People were going to continue to talk about it. What do you do? You flood the zone. You give people something else to talk about and says something else to talk about literally just shows you flexing nuts.

That's all it is. I'm flexing. I'm showing people how powerful I am. And I'm silencing them because what I'm doing is I'm taking their, their attention away from these Nazis and these shitty people that infest my fucking party.

And instead, I'm sending their eyeballs over to something like this, which should enrage them. but it's nothing they can do because it's within my power to do it and go fuck yourself. How's that? I think that's,

you know, it's so funny because I will admit I did not immediately catch that that is almost certainly the strategy. I saw it and I was like, God damn it this fucking guy, you know, because like... Yeah, sure, because it makes me match.

Because I get caught up in the bullshit and like, shame on me for getting caught up in the bullshit. Genuinely, shame on me for getting caught up in the bullshit because you're exactly right. If you're Trump, What a great thing to do, right? There's no stakes for him in doing it.

What does he have to lose? People who are going to support Trump, they literally support him no matter what he does. He's shooting fucking missiles at boats full of fucking people in the Caribbean Sea without any legal, you know, auspices to do so whatsoever. And he gets away with that. So what's releasing a Santo? You know, who cares? Like, let the guy. So there's no harm in it for him, but it gets people distracted.

you're exactly right man it gets people talking about that and now they're not talking about this now they're and so we've moved on it's such an interesting tactic to say the way to distract from big scandals is to give them a new scandal yeah brand new one because the human mind it just wants novelty right we get bored the human mind gets bored of the same thing we'll chew on it like a dog with a bone if there's not something new but if you hand me a new bone i'm going to go to that one every time it is such a distressingly effective strategy to move people away from Signalgate, right?

Signalgate should be a big fucking deal. To move people away from like the Epstein stuff. To move people away from the the murder of the Congress people in Minnesota. Yes, the murder of the Congress people in Minnesota. Or, you know, the extrajudicial killings of, you know, people in the Caribbean Sea, or, you know, any number of other.

scandals. Let's just move him away from here. I'll give you a George, I'll throw this fucking Santos onto the fire. Here we go. Yeah. And so some fucking clown shoe ass motherfucker has been let out. There's really no harm in it for him. And everybody stopped paying attention. Yep. That's so smart. It's so fucking smart, man. And I think, and I think, too, one of the things, too, is I wonder, and this is just a Cecil that has no idea if this is true. But I genuinely wonder if Trump was upset that other people were getting the limelight over

him. I wonder if he was like, well, what is with these young Republicans? Fuck these guys. I'm the president. They shouldn't be in the news. I wonder if that had something. That could be something that has something to do with it too. It could be. And also, I also think that

from what Trump has said, he thought that the seven-year sentence was egregious because Santos's crimes were financial crimes. Well, never mind that what was Trump convicted of? Financial crimes. So downplaying the seriousness of financial crimes is perfectly sort of like creating a sort of public narrative that downplays the seriousness of financial crimes. It's so funny because if I walk into a, oh, I don't know, the Louvre, for example, this last weekend. And I break into the Louvre and I steal a bunch of jewels. I steal a million dollars

worth of jewels, right? I'm a big deal criminal. I'm dangerous. I'm going to be put away for a long time if I get caught. If I embezzle a million dollars, I still stole money. I stole the same amount of money. But if I did it using a fucking keyboard instead of a glass cutter and a brick or whatever, I am somehow a different kind of criminal. I am a criminal that the world should be worried about less. And the impact is the same. It's theft as fucking theft, man. Sure. You weren't a different collar. That's the only difference. I heard a story and I can't confirm it. And I'm curious

if you saw this too. That the leak came from, that Nazi leak, from the texts, came from someone who was snubbed because they didn't get to take a picture with the president. That's what I heard. Oh my God. And I thought I saw a story

and I cannot find it now. Yeah, it's a Daily Beast article. It says Trump selfie snub triggered maga civil war that leaked racist Republican chat A Donald Trump appointed official accused of leaking hundreds of racist private text messages sent by the youngest members, leaders of the party

Gavin Waxe, the chief of staff of the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is facing backlash from his own allies after a bombshell political report revealed messages from the telegram chat about this thing Wax was the former president of the New York Young Republicans Club

is under fire despite not being in the chat at all. Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told the Daily Beast that the 31 year old obtained and leaked the messages to settle a longstanding feud with Peter Guinta, the former chair of the New York Republican State Republican Club

once friends, the two allegedly found themselves at odds over a photo opportunity with then presidential candidate Donald Trump at his campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey. I fucking love how like... That's so amazing

if that's true If that's true That's so amazing Look it's a Daily Beast Who knows Right Like Daily Beast is just like Some guy said a thing

That da da da News So I have no idea If that's true At all But I will say this Like if it is true Like if that thing is true

How fucking great and delicious Is it These people fucking hate each other Like how amazing is it That not only do they get The hate from all the people in the United States

They hate each other too man It's so good, man. This shit is so fucking good. It wouldn't surprise me at all because, like, you see so many times the littlest, most petty fucking shit blows up this big deal stuff. Because at the end of the day, people are just people, man. Yeah. They're just like emotional, irrational, just people.

It's so funny how oftentimes, like, low-stakes stuff turns into big emotional reactions for everybody. Because, again, we're all just fucking people. Yeah. That's all we are. That's it, man. We wake up and we're like. I'm like, yeah, put my fucking pants on.

Like, yeah, well, I'm just, I'm full of fucking irrational biases. Oh, God, you would love to see, though, somebody who's in power like that to be able to rain themselves in once in a while. It's fucking amazing. So good. So Vulgarity for Charity is going to kick off this upcoming November, and we are joined by Dr. Daryl Ray, founder of Recovering from Religion and the Secular Therapy Project. He's also the author of The God Virus and Sex and God.

Dr. Daryl Ray, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me, Cecil. Oh, thank you so much for joining me today. We're going to be jumping into this Vulgarity for Charity. We're going to be trying to raise money. for the Recovering for Religion Foundation. Can you tell me a little bit about sort of what that organization does from a sort of high level?

Yeah. Well, we started in 2009. We've been growing ever since. We've got over 500 trained volunteers, 200 active in any given time, especially right now. And we answer calls. We answer chats from literally anywhere on the planet. So you could chat in with us right now. if you are watching us, and you could ask an agent what we do and why we do it.

What we do is we help people deal with the consequences of leaving any religion. It could be a Hindu from India. It could be a Scientologist from California. We don't care. What we've learned in the 16 years of our existence is that the issues are common no matter what, because we're humans. We're dealing with the same kind of emotional responses to the loss of family a loss of a group, loss of culture,

loss of community, and loss of faith, if you will. So that's our focus. We get a lot of people in distress because I'm losing my wife, I'm losing my husband, because I've become an atheist or whatever, or I've changed religions.

It can be that simple. And that is a big test. There are literally million, billions, let me put a B on it, billions of people on this planet who were given a religion, without their permission. And when they find that out,

when it's finally wake up at 19 years old or 90 years old, we really do have people in their 80s that have discovered it was all a charade. And it doesn't matter who you are, we're here to listen. And our volunteers are trained very, very carefully to just be non-judgmental. We're not here to convert or deconvert anybody.

We're here to support them in their journey. wherever they want to go, wherever their life goes, because it's not our life, it's their life. And it is a big transition, Cecil, they go from high control religions or religion that says your, you know, your sexuality is your enemy to being free of that ideology, but then trying to figure out what they do. We even had one recent chatter say, I left religion and I feel like I've been born again. But born again in a kind of a bad, way because I'm innocent. I'm naive. I don't even have to balance my own checkbook. Yeah, I need to find out how to have relationships with the opposite sex because I was taught purity culture.

So, you know, it's really interesting what people don't know about the real world because they were told the secular world is your enemy. So they come to us saying, what do I do? They call us say, what do I do? And we can give them resources. We have an enormous resource library. that's vetted to be secular, to be scientifically valid. And we put a lot of pride in the support that we've generated, especially through our training for our volunteers and our resources page. And the resources page is open to anybody. Everything we do, by the way, is free.

We don't charge a dime for any of our services. We give, our volunteers give hundreds, some even thousands of hours helping people, and we don't charge anything for it. So that's why we're entirely dependent upon donors to make these services work. Our sector of therapy project is also free, but the therapists within the project charge, of course, they're professionals. But the service of helping you find a therapist that's truly secular and won't bring their religion into their practice is a free service from us. And we're now in 11 countries,

sector therapy project, 11 countries. We have 1,00047 therapists that have been vetted by us to be fully secular and evidence-based and licensed. They have to meet those three criteria or they can't get into our process. Is religious therapy so common that people need, need to go out of their way to find a secular therapist? I challenge you to go online just randomly and look at psychologists and try to tell me, are they religious or not? You cannot tell by their profile, unless sometimes you can if you dig really deep. Sure, sure. But so many therapists will bring their religion, sooner or later their religion will influence their therapy, which is absolutely unethical.

And it's against ethical rules of any professional organization, whether it's American psychologists or the American Counseling, Association, Merritt and Family Counselors. It doesn't matter. You should not be bringing your religion in. And yet they still do. If I have time, I had a PhD

psychologist. PhD, been in practice for 15 years, graduated from Notre Dame University. You don't get much better than that. And he applied. But he said he was Catholic in his application. And I said, well, okay, I'll consider that.

I've got a scenario for you. You've got a 22-year-old woman who's kind of dealing with her therapy. And in the fourth session of therapy, she tells you she's going to the abortion clinic tomorrow to get an abortion. And she wants some help relaxing as she tries to go through all these people that are yelling at her and calling her a murderer and everything. How would you help her? And I sent him a net question. A week went by and he didn't respond. I sent it to him again.

A week went bond. He didn't respond. Oh, no. I sent it to him a third time. He finally responded with only this, I couldn't help her. Wow. In other words, a Ph.D. from Notre Dame could not keep his religion out of his therapy. So that's why we're very, we're a damn strict, partially because we met too many of those people early in our experience with the secular therapy project.

People who said they can keep their religion out, but then they, when you ask them the hard questions, if they're honest, they say, no, I can't. so it's really important because you don't want somebody coming to you as a therapist you don't want a client coming in as a client with religious trauma and then the damn therapist retramatizes you by saying well do you think your depression is because you're an atheist and they actually have done that we've got that cut yep yep or do you think you'd be have better mental health and you went back to church even though you don't believe oh my gosh that's unbelievable it very believable because it happens way, way too often with people, people who are licensed, people who, you know, have training and real universities and stuff.

I want to roll back to talk about the chat service that you provide and the helpline you provide. You were mentioning that people who leave, they sometimes have a real difficult time acclimating to regular life outside of their religion. It's difficult for them. So they're experiencing all different types of things. So you help them with the anxiety of being able to just sort of reintegrate into the world from sort of a sheltered, more protected life? Well, they come to us with lots of questions. And that's the big question.

How do I deal and live in this secular world that I'm now a member of because I've left my religion? And it's a hard transition in our chat line agents. They are not, they're not therapists. Let me be clear about that. And they're not there to give therapy. but they are there to ask good questions. For example, one of the three main things that people come to us asking is I still have a fear of hell.

I'm an atheist. I don't even believe in God anymore. I've been out of the church for five years, and I still wake up with night terrors about hell. So we ask questions. We don't tell them, well, that's a stupid thing. You know, we don't say that. That helps no one. What we do say is a real interesting question, which helps?

are you afraid of? Oh, nice. Are you afraid of the Muslim hell or the Hindu hell or the Joe's Witness hell? Of course, they don't have hell and Joe witnesses. But, and they haven't even thought about that. They didn't realize there's more than one hell. And as a result of that chat or that conversation, which may go on for an hour, going back and forth between the chat agent and us and the client, we will then give them resources. We'll say, well, you might want to look at this video on the history of hell and learn about where the whole concept came from. Oh, and did you know, there is no hell in Judaism. There's never been a hell in Judaism. And yet, wouldn't you think that there should be a hell? Because that's where Christianity came

from. Right, right. So we just ask questions. There's three things. People come to us with a fear of hell or afterlife, because different religions have different afterlife stuff. They come to us around sexuality issues. I'm gay, I'm bisexual, I'm pansexual, and yet my parents are throwing me out of the house when they found out. Or my wife's divorcing or a husband's, you know, treating me badly now. And the third thing is community. We are super social creatures as humans, as primates, and we really, really need our tribe. But when the tribe rejects us, where do we go? Where do we find community. So a lot of times our chat line agents are here to help you find community. You could be from, you know, Salt Lake City and you're a Mormon that's left Mormon religion.

Well, where's a secular community in Salt Lake City? It's called Oasis. Yes, there's a secular culture. Oh, nice. There's a secular community. So you're connecting people to these secular communities all over the world then? Literally all over the world. If somebody called us from London and said, And we do get lots of calls from England and said, I'm looking for community. We'll say, well, Sunday assembly meets in London once a month or the skeptics in the pub in Newcastle. And I'm naming those because I was just there a week ago. I spent a month touring the United Kingdom and speaking to these groups. And when somebody from Newcastle says, I can't find any groups, we can say, well, Dr. A was just at Newcastle two weeks ago.

go speaking you could join that group it's called skeptics in the pub and they're a great group and they've got all sorts of interesting programs going on but most important when they call us we don't send them we don't just send them to local groups we try to send them to our support groups because we have over 65 support groups literally around the planet some meet face-to-face some meet like you and i are meeting right now on zoom so they can they can go to those groups and they can tell their story and then get it off their chest. And that's exactly how I started recovering from religion. Back in 2009, I just announced it on meetup.com and said,

hey, if you're interested in talking about how religion hurt you or how it's helped when you left come to this meeting. And 11 people showed up to that meeting in the back of an IHop restaurant. And we met for almost three hours, and then the manager was kicking us out. closing it down. But I only knew one of those 11 people. The other 10 people were total strangers.

And at the end of that three hours, people were hugging each other and crying and telling their stories. People said in that meeting, I've never said this to anybody in my life. I've never revealed how I truly feel. And at that moment, Cecil, this is April 20th, 2009.

It hit me. This is a powerful need out in the real world. listening to these people. They have nowhere to go. And so that's the start of recovery religion, was a single support group. And now we have over 65, some face to face, like I said, but the vast majority are Zoom, so we've got an all women's group for Europe. We've got an all women's group for the United States. We got all women's group for Australia. We got an all men's group for North America. We have ex-J, ex-Hob's witnesses. We got ex-Catholics. We got ex-Catholics. We got all sorts of groups that can meet and support people and their journey. And every one of

them is moderated by a very well-trained volunteer that knows the limits of what we can do. They're not there to be therapists. But I'll tell you, just attending a group and hearing that I'm not alone, which is our motto, you're not alone. That enough can be cathartic. That can be therapeutic. And after coming to two or three of these meetings that we hold, they say, say, well, where's another place I can go? And that's when we say, you know, go to the Sunday Assembly in London or Newcastle or, you know, or go to the Ethical Society in Baltimore. I mean, there's, there are secular organizations all around the world that they never heard of. They've always been told that seculars are living horrible lives and they don't have any

community and nobody loves them anymore. You know, that's a great resource, though, really genuinely that, well, you know, as someone who runs a podcast, I've been running a podcast like this for, you know, 15 years. It's a, it's an atheist, skeptical podcast. And people will, will, we'll reach out and say, you know, like, one of the things that I miss about religion is that community, that, that, that, that, that, being able to connect with like minds constantly. And there's places, even in Chicago, there's a place, you know, the ethical humanist society Chicago meets every Sunday. And those, and they meet every Friday for board games. And there's all these ways in which they can they can find a new tribe they can find a new group of people and that's

great that you offer this resource to help them do that well and we're the only ones in the whole planet that i know of i mean you guys obviously do it too but we do it systematically we know where the support group we know where the community is yeah it almost anywhere on the planet and that's we really put a lot of energy and time into finding those groups putting them into our database and having them ready at the fingertips of our agents. We have a robust database. We've got a robust system infrastructure, if you will. And what we've learned in the last few years is that we can support a wide range of activities outside.

We're not a U.S. nonprofit. I mean, we are legally a U.S. nonprofit, but we're actually incorporated in Australia now as well. and we're expanding into Europe. So that's a big part of what we're doing over the next year or so is really finding ways to penetrate where they don't even know about us. When I went through, I was on speaking to her, I gave eight talks in eight cities in the last three weeks. And I'd ask the group,

how many of you have ever heard of it come from religion before tonight? And frequently I'd get no more than one person or two people. Nobody else in the room heard of us. So we have the resources, but we have to connect to the people who need those resources. So that's why we're talking to you partly because you're helping us raise funds to be able to expand those resources. Anyway, yeah, I can talk all day about all sorts of stuff, but I'll stop right there. Here's what we hope, here's what we hope, Darrell. We hope that people will donate, we'll be able to help get your message all over the globe

because it's so important for people who are walking away from religion to have some kind of support structure, whether that's resources or being able to be turned to the correct therapist that's near them, or be able to find a group, a community, a tribe, be able to be able to walk away from religion without all that anxiety that comes with it, and be able to reintegrate into a regular secular society and walk away from that sort of baggage that they've had for so long. And so we hope that this vulgarity for charity will raise that money so that you guys can continue doing the things you do. So I want to thank you so much for joining us today. And we hope that we can really hit a nice high mark with this vulgarity for charity so you guys can continue your work all over the, all over the world. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. We really are honored and appreciate that

you want to support us in this way. All right. That's going to wrap it up for today. We're going to thank, of course, Dr. Daryl Ray, founder of recovering from religion and the secular therapy project. He's also the author of The God Virus and Sex and God. He joined us today talking about the upcoming Vulgarity for charity and our work with recovering from religion. We're going to have all the details on how you can donate when we fully launch. We wanted people know about the charity that we're going to be supporting. So we want to thank Darrell for coming on. We're going to have all those links and everything in the show notes to reach recovering from religion. But Vulgarity for Charity stuff,

we will cover on the next show. So our next show will talk about exactly how to donate to Royal Guarity for charity, how all that stuff works. So stay tuned for that. And please, we want to encourage everybody when it starts. Please, let's hit the ground running. There's only going to be 100 roasts this year. It's going to be the 50 people who donate the most money and 50 randomly chosen roasts

from the ones we get. So we're asking people, you know, dig in those pockets. The 50 biggest ones are going to go. they're going to be the ones we definitely pick. So please help out recovering from religion, help people who are leaving religion, find a community, find therapy, find people who are like-minded.

It's so much, it's so difficult to leave religion, man. And when you finally do, sometimes you feel lost, and these people are a guiding light for that. So please, we're going to try to help them as much as we can. All right.

Thank you so much for joining us this week. We're going to be back on Monday. and we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician,

double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch,

late-night info docutainment. Leo Pisces, Cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. thrust your hands, bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in.

If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonancepod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and threads, all under the handle at DissinencePod. This show is Can Credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255, or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org. I don't know.