The Scathing Atheist - 618: Double D Edition

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

In this week’s episode, Congress has as many atheists as it does chances not to end our civilization, we learn if it's gay for men to have hetero sex with their wives, and Michael Marshall will be here to woo you. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Crisis-Religion-Ruined-Pandemic/dp/B08L2HSVS8/ If you see a news story you think we might be interested in, you can send it here: [e-mail] To check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticrat To check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-movies To check out our half-sister show, Citation Needed, click here: http://citationpod.com/ To check out our sister show’s sister show, D and D minus, click here: https://danddminus.libsyn.com/ --- Guest Links: Check out more from Marsh on Be Reasonable and Skeptics with a K --- Headlines: New Congress sees tiny uptick in nonreligious members: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/one-new-member-of-congress-is-openly At Trump’s inauguration, reports of a pay-to-pray: https://religionnews.com/2024/12/23/amid-uncertainty-around-religion-at-trumps-inauguration-reports-of-a-pay-to-pray/ Vatican advances beatification process for Belgian king who abdicated rather than approve abortion: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-belgium-abortion-369b35f6734bdab87786ff6c4870d424 Prominent atheist transphobes leave honorary position with FFRF: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/three-prominent-atheists-resigned Kenneth Copeland says God told him he’ll live to be 120: https://www.christianpost.com/news/televangelist-kenneth-copeland-predicts-when-he-will-die.html MAGA influencer husband says giving his wife orgasms would be 'gay sex': https://www.advocate.com/donald-trump/trump-maga-gay-sex-orgasm#rebelltitem1

Warning, we haven't gotten any less vulgar since last week. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by... The fact that my neighbors never figured out that I was the one shooting fireworks back, Adam. And now, The Scathing Atheist. Hello everyone, this is Becca Buchacho-Puchatkin-McGinty-Bembo again. If you happen to like Christmas carol music but hate the words, I'll be plopping my secularized Temperate Zone Winter-themed lyrics into the Facebook and Discord,

just like I've done for a couple years, cause if the original lyrics are any indication, we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey musicians. It's Thursday! It's January 2nd! And it's National Buffet Day! All you can eat used to mean something, damn it. Right? I'm no illusions.

Ah, me li-bosnick. I'm Heath Henright. And from New York's congestion New Jersey and over Michigan and waycross Georgia, this is the Skating Atheist. On this week's episode, Congress has as many atheists as it does chances not to end our civilization. We learn if it's gay for men to have heterosex with their wives. And Michael Marshall will be here to woo ya.

But first, the diatribe. Ever since the election, there's been this steady drumbeat emanating from the left that says maybe we should be less vocal about our support for trans rights in favor of something with more populist appeal. Now, in the interest of steelmanning that argument, I should be clear that those people still support trans rights and their goals, at least if we're making the strongest possible argument for their side, still are to improve the lives and expand the rights of trans people.

Their argument is that focusing on trans issues is costing us elections, which actually is the worst outcome for trans people, right? Better that Democrats win elections while being silent about the plight of their trans constituency than to speak up about those issues and lose to Republicans, or so they would say. And there are a lot of ways to push back against that argument, the most notable of which is, in my opinion, the fact that Democrats already do run away from those issues, right? Kamala Harris didn't make trans rights a campaign issue, Trump did.

And maybe if she'd come out in the wake of those attacks with full-throated support for trans people in an effort to clarify her stance rather than ceding that issue to Trump's attack ads, she might have done better. But I think there's something more important that people making this argument are missing. What if the so-called trans issues are a whole ball of wax? So I want to apologize to our translisters for even using the words the trans issue as though I was saying fucking the Jewish question or whatever. So let me clarify that I'm not just talking about trans rights when I say that. Trans rights are human rights,

and that's not a question in my mind. I support human rights, and I try to focus on the ones most under a threat first. That's how I get here, right? But what I'm talking about here is the issue that genuinely motivates the anti-trans vote. The people who were moved to vote for Trump by those disgusting anti-trans attack ads that he ran.

And that is the challenge that trans women and non-binary people pose to their concept of traditional masculinity. That is what motivates transphobes. That's the fear at the heart of the issue, and quite possibly, it is the most pernicious of all the venoms poisoning American politics Not transphobia necessarily, but that commitment to this bullshit notion of traditional masculinity. I Mean consider this you could make the argument In fact, I am making the argument that every presidential election since 1980 was won by the candidate that exhibited the most traditional masculinity.

And when I say that, I mean it in the stupidest Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Wayne rub some dirt in it, don't have emotion, boys don't cry way. The candidate who won those now notorious low information voters was the candidate who they saw as the most action hero like Right couple exceptions, right? You could argue that George W Bush wasn't manlier than Al Gore wasn't seen as manlier than Al Gore in 2000 You could also argue that George W Bush didn't actually win that election and the other possible exception is W's reelection but given that at that point he had been elevated to the manliness of the torture president and That the chief attacks

against Kerry were against his manliest qualities, I feel like the argument still holds. In fact, if you've been following the general commentary around American elections as long as I have, you'll remember moments where the entire nature of the commentary was revolving around this manliness bullshit without anyone ever admitting it. Remember when Obama backed away from Romney a little bit on the debate stage and all the talking heads worried about the optics of that? Remember when we entirely disqualified Howard Dean because his voice cracked during a woo-hoo or whatever?

Remember when Dukakis committed political suicide by wearing an army helmet in a way that wasn't convincing enough? What could that possibly be about if not playground definition masculinity? And think about what this does to our politics, because yes, there are informed people on both sides of the political aisle that are committed to their side for ideological reasons, but there have always been enough half-informed moderates in the middle to swing the election. And if something as blatantly stupid as a dick measuring contest is tipping those scales, then our politics cannot help but be governed by dick

measuring contests, which they clearly have been since at least Ronald Reagan. And look, I get that it's no great revelation to say that Harris lost the election because of sexism, but I think people underestimate the extent to which frat bro sexism is running the entire fucking show with the average American voter. And that's the exact type of sexism that feels threatened when anyone questions their of sacred gender norms let alone when a whole generation does. And of course there are those who will tell you that these aren't atheist issues. There are people in fact who will storm off of honorary boards of atheist

organizations just to make that point, pinning that for the headlines, but I would argue that the same desperate masculinity that's driving Trumpism is also driving evangelicalism and has been for a long time. In her book Jesus and John Wayne, Kristen Cobes de Mez traces the history of the most toxic of masculinity seizing control of one evangelical institution after another over the last century. And along the way she makes a very compelling argument that every traditional teaching of Christianity, all of the principles of the faith that would have been recognizable to both a medieval peasant and a Renaissance

nobleman, have been subordinated to whatever cowboy bullshit made men feel best about the size of their dicks. She didn't say it that way, but that's what she meant. And all the scariest parts of American Christianity can trace their lineage to these cock-first theological influences, right? That includes focus on the family, the Family Research Council, the family,

and whatever weird-ass militia Dave Doebenmire has cosplayed an army man with in Ohio. And look, maybe I'm not an objective source on this shit. I grew up getting this shit beat out of me for wearing my hair long and wearing eyeliner. Maybe my personal history forces me to look at everything through this lens. But I feel like the very best thing

that we could possibly bequeath future generations of Americans might just be a challenge to this genitals as destiny bullshit That's running the show now our choice here is either to pander to this bullshit masculinity or challenge it Joining me for headlines tonight on the temple of doom and last crusade to my lost arc He then right knee live Bosnick fellas. are you ready to whip this year into shape? That's right.

Dawn is our crystal skull. How dare you? In our lead story tonight, when I was 16 years old, I got into a terrible car accident. Total of my mom's new Pontiac. I majorly injured two of my friends and minorly injured a third, but the brand-new Allison Chains cassette I had in the tape deck was miraculously unharmed. And I was reminded of the tiny and wildly inappropriate iota of relief that I felt upon realizing that when I read about the microscopic uptick in non-religious representatives that

will accompany the Republican majority when the new Congress is sworn in this year. And this year we get an actual agnostic a in the form of Arizona Democrat. Yes, I've been sorry. That's noncommittally exciting. Right. Yeah, that's a step up like a divorced dad showing us around his empty apartment. You want to play tag? Got the sweet bench in my garage. Huh? Wait, wait, wait. There's a spool. I never use it, but I could. You want to play tag? Got the sweet bench in my garage, huh?

Wait, there's a spool. I never use it, but I could. We also have a nun in the person of Washington Democrat and first openly queer Latina in Congress, Emily Randall. And as long as you keep your view zoomed in on just those two, the future looks very bright for non-religious Americans. Okay, I'm zoomed all the way in. Like you said, I can still smell lots of horse paste though as far as I'm zoomed in.

Well, and to be fair, who are they going to purge if they don't let a few of us in before they take complete power? Am I right? Yeah. I'm not quite so optimistic as no illusion. Yeah, that famous optimist. Yeah. So, okay, so let me put this in context here.

The 118th Congress, the one that was- The last one. Yeah. So, okay. So let me put this in context here. The 118th Congress, the one that was the last one. Yeah. The last democratically elected one. No. So the one that's on the way out the door that only contained one openly non-religious member. That would be the inimitable Jared Huffman. Right. Founder of the Free Thought Caucus. We also sorta had to claim independent senator and ethical fire sale personified Kirsten Sinema, who listed her religion as unaffiliated. Yeah, to be fair, we thought that meant atheist and it actually just meant I will betray you. That's our man.

That's also her party. It's fun. Yeah, uh-huh. And I say sort of because she once said that the term atheism was, quote, not befitting of her life's work or personal character, end quote. So we had those two, along with 20 members of Congress, right, who didn't answer the religion question, one of whom was George fucking Santos. That was our whole team, right? So you can see why any increase that isn't another George Santos has me at least a little

excited. Maybe Santos can change his name and run again. Fingers crossed for atheism representation. I hear the name Nicholas Rossi is still up for grabs if he wants that one. Now we know all of this stuff about the 118th Congress thanks to a survey called the CQ Roll Call, which Pew Research Center sends out every two years. Now those questionnaires for the 119th Congress have been analyzed at this point,

but Pew hasn't actually published the data yet. That's gonna come out just a little bit too late for us to get the details into this show, but we do know that A, Kirsten Sinema's on the fucking way out, which is nice, and B, she's being replaced by people who almost have to be better just by being Democrats that aren't her. So we'll go from one and a half openly non-religious members to three.

And the number, because Huffman's back, and the number of non-respondents went from 20 to 21. Right, which is a much better number for when it's eventually declared Republicans are allowed to hunt them for sport in teams of three. Yeah, right. Then you get seven. Yes. Now, of course, in light of the Christian nationalists who are taking over the two branches of the government they don't already have, it's easy to feel like this is insignificant. But the baby steps this country is taking away from a place where I'm not religious was political suicide.

Those do matter. And having secular opponents wielding at least some amount of power in Congress probably matters more. And in Preyola news. I don't know about you, but right before everything really, really terrible has ever happened to me, the world has sort of taken on a dreamlike slow motion quality. In those moments, I often feel like I have perfect clarity and time to think things like In those moments, I often feel like I have perfect clarity and time to think things like, I am actually falling off this roof or I guess I didn't swerve out of the way after all.

And I think it's fair to say that that's how sane people feel about Donald Trump's upcoming inauguration this week. But we got a reminder that sanity is the vast, vast minority. Again, as religious news reported that at least some people are paying $100,000 a person to pray with Donald Trump in a private church service the day before. Oh my God. Okay, so he's not selling indulgences.

He's selling the chance to be entered into a raffle for indulgences. Cool. Well, but he gets the indulgences, right? Like he's charging people for a raffle for the honor of giving him an indulgence. Yeah. So first off, big thanks to Stormy D for the link to this story, as well as the fantastic Praeola pun. You all knew I couldn't have come up with something that good. If you send us atheist news to scathingnews at gmail.com, whether or not you have amazing puns to accompany them, you will be invited to the scathing atheist pre-prayer prayer, where we'll be asking God to cancel out everything Donald Trump ever prays for no-baxis.

Scathing news at gmail.com. Yeah, because let's face it, their whole judicial philosophy is built on the sanctity of no-baxis, so even though it won't work, it might still scare them. Right. Convince them that we undo their cootie shots or something. So this story comes to us from Axios News, which reported on a seven-page prospectus of donor-only events, which would make a back page listing blush. This listing included a cabinet reception with Trump's nominees, a candlelight dinner with Trump and

Melania and of course access to the aforementioned one America one light Sunday service for those who donate $100,000 directly or raise $200,000 indirectly. So I guess you can also sell wrapping paper candy bars like a marching band, I guess. Yeah. Well, if you do it right, your downline can really pay off. That's cool. But you do have to keep several pallets of the fight, fight, fight cologne in your garage. Well, it's okay. If we just committed to starting one Trump based pyramid scheme a month for the next four years, we could retire at the end of his term to like a place that still has democracy by then. Yeah, no, for sure.

Now I should point out that the Trump administration has not confirmed that the service exists or that any of the events will actually happen. And given the Trump administration's habit of promising donors and fundraisers perks and then not delivering on them, this could have just been, you know, an aspirational vision board of theocracy. So as I'm sure I'll be saying a lot over the next four years, let's hope that was a shitty thing he was just hoping to do. Yeah. And in Belgian King Waffles news.

Brilliant. Fantastic. We have some enormous, enormous news. There might be a new saint. Nobody cares. That's nothing. But it's a big deal for the Catholic Church when they come up with a new potential saint. Vatican's Office of Saintitude announced last week that Belgium's former monarch, the

late King Baudouin, has been officially nominated for beatification because of that one time he took a day off from kinging in order to avoid approving legislation that legalized abortion in Belgium. Oh God, canonizing a motherfucker for a thing he didn't do, that's how desperate they are. Yeah. At this point, mother fuckers,

you just have to restore sight to the blind. Now calling in sick on abortion day is enough to get you in wolf No, I get it because like the Catholic Church went from conquering God Kings to the only building that will let your racist grandma in So this is kind of fitting right? And a big thanks to stormy D. Once again for the link and for Belgian king waffles. Excellent. OK, we're just going to start bringing Stormy on if one of us has to call

in sick at this point. Yeah, love this. How tall are they? So here's the backstory on King Baudouin. In 1990, the Belgian parliament approved a bill that officially granted autonomy over one's

internal organs, and that would include The uterus because it's an organ inside of you and you have that's your body Yep And most importantly that means you are allowed to murder a baby there, which is great. Fuck. Yeah, it's great I can't murder a baby in any of my organs But king bo did not like that. I've tried. And Belgium is one of those countries that still has royalty, but that's dumb and Belgium is fully aware of that.

So they let the sitting monarch continue cosplaying by signing new laws or not. It doesn't matter if the king signs it. So King Bo decided to take a big stand of anti-choice protest that's entirely meaningless and abdicated his throne for one day rather than sign the bill. AKA, he's a magical immortal hero of Catholicism and Pope Francis wants him sainted. Yeah, well, symbolic gestures that accomplish nothing other than empowering bigots, that's kind of Pope Ford Coppola's whole wheelhouse, so I get it. I get it.

Okay, how tempting must it have been to finally do away with the monarchy that day though, right? And they're just, hey, you're back! Okay, you're gonna laugh when you hear this. So as part of the run-up to the sainthood process, Pope Frankie visited Belgium, prayed at King Bo's tomb, and proclaimed that Belgium's laws are homicidal and described abortion as hiring a hitman to solve a problem. Much like the hitman that Frankie hired right before becoming Pope to kill all the other

bishops being considered for that position. Really? Did that really happen? Who knows? We have no evidence that it did not happen. That's the important thing. That's how evidence works. Interesting. Either way, he definitely killed so many people, for sure. Either way, Belgium's Prime Minister, Alexander de Kru, responded to Frankie's murder charge by saying, almost exact words,

who the fuck was that guy? Fortunately, the time when the church dictated the law in our country is long behind us. The last part was exact words. Take it from America, dude. That's a more aspirational statement than you want it to be. Okay? Oh, no, Noah, don't worry about it because the only social network they have in Belgium is Tumblerone. Okay. Oh no, no, don't worry about it because the only social network they have in Belgium is

Tumblerone Just give you a clean cut So hey podcast listener, I don't speak for the rest of the episode because it's I'm screaming and weeping They caught it and then I I'm actually recording this after I'm back from the hospital just in case you're wondering why I'm not in the rest of the show. Got it. So following the announcement of the beatification process, the Vatican's team of magical detectives is going to conduct a thorough investigation into King Bo's background and determine if he can be declared venerable.

From there, they just need to find a miracle and then find a second miracle and King Bo can become a saint. It's kind of like becoming a cabinet member in the US but way more serious and legitimate. Yeah. So that's fun. Yeah. And in the garbage taking itself out news tonight, three prominent atheist transphobes took their ball and went home over the weekend after realizing that nobody was playing ball, nobody wanted them there, and this was, in fact, a Wendy's. The transphobes in question are Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Jerry Coyne, and the Wendy's in question is the honorary board of the Freedom for Religion Foundation.

And the three left in a huff after the FFFF made the egregious decision to take down a transphobic article just because it was incorrect, misleading, bigoted, and dangerous. Okay. It sounds like some freedom of speech happened and then some more freedom of speech happened in response. Old white guys love that stuff. Were they like super cool about it? Yeah.

People, in order to win points in a culture war they're losing, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Jerry Coyne have to pretend to know less about biology than me. Yep. That's like me trying to win points for the left by insisting I'm not as funny as Jeff Dunham. I think you need a prop for senior pets, if I'm being honest. Oh my gosh. I would love a prop for senior pets. I just got one for you, it's on the way.

God damn it. So not to get too in the weeds on this stuff, but the basic story here is that a trans activist and former FFRF intern named Kat Grant posted an article on the FFRF's website about how trans rights are an integral part of the secular movement. And then Jerry Coyne, a guy who wrote an evolution book once that was nowhere near good enough to justify the amount of transphobic shit the community has overlooked from him since then, asked to publish a rebuttal to the idea that trans people deserve rights. So the FFRF did, and predictably and commendably, a shit storm ensued.

The FFRF hastily took down the screed and they posted an apology. And that's when Coyne, along with a pair of transphobic testicles that were with him, decided to resign from the organization's honorary board. Oh. Well, you know, careful of the door in your ass, guys. Yeah. It'll be tough to run the crucial day-to-day stuff of the honorary board for a bit.

The best part is that they resigned from an honorary board. No, you are not proud of me and I haven't contributed to the movement. Yeah, right. I got you. It's what I'm doing now is me getting you. Right now. And to be clear, I do not think the FFRF apology was sufficient. The article from coin didn't just express a reprehensible viewpoint. It did so dishonestly, right?

So he relied on debunked statistics to prop up a dangerous lie that he used to claim that trans people are more likely to be sexual predators, right? So we're not talking about just wrong. We're talking about malicious. And while we're on the subject, this isn't a case of stifling a dissenting voice as I've seen a few apologists try to frame it. This is a case of retracting a lie. The FFRF still has my support as an organization. They have done and continue to do a ton of great work, but they fucked this up and they need to own that and demonstrate an effort to correct it. Yeah.

Also, you're allowed to stifle a dissenting voice sometimes. Yep. Every organization gets to make the call that certain topics are not up for debate on their platform like, for example, I don't know, ranking the gender identities in terms of sexual predation, which apparently- There's one. Yeah, there's one right there Yeah, the old white guys can check out. I don't know Almost anywhere else on the entire internet if they want to get into that. Yeah. Yeah. Well guys look you gotta give it to them

Okay, the FFRF had no experience with people who did harmful things with what they said and did sometimes without meaning to I mean They've never encountered that situation before. So they had to spend eight paragraphs on how gay some of their friends are and then agree to disagree that trans people exist. They had to. Yeah. They have no choice. Well, and look, to be honest, I was hesitant about even covering this story because I recognize that the majority of our listeners don't really care about the internal politics

of the atheist movement and who's leaving who's honorary board. But I think it's important to highlight this one because I know a lot of people have rethought their involvement with movement atheism because of these lingering transphobic dinosaurs. But those of us who stuck around did what we could to make it an uncomfortable place for transphobes to be

And and I think this story represents a victory on that front, right? The FFRF didn't kick them out, but the larger community made their voices Unwelcome enough that that didn't matter And it's the kind of thing that I want to make people aware of who maybe moved to the fringes of that movement because they didn't Feel safe in it. Yeah, and not to be a sunny optimist, but when I saw this article posted on the skepticism Reddit, I sort of braced myself for the worst in the comments, and I was really pleased to see just how many of them were Jerry Who? Yeah, right.

Right. And in coping mechanism news, scathing atheist regular and man whose flesh mask animal lector would call a bit hastily done, Kenneth Copeland, had some news to break to his congregation this week about when he will die. Yes, the 88 year old who has made several hospital visits this year, let us know that God has told him he will die at 120 years old. And he was like, oh, not even the world record. Cool. Thanks, Scott. I'll still take the under. I sure will. You sure will. No elution. So regular listeners to our show might remember

Kenny Copes for asking his parishioners to buy him a private jet because public airlines were quote tubes full of demons or the time a reporter asked him about that statement and he hissed at her like she was trying to Separate him from the one ring Might also know him for trying to cure kovat in all of America with his oily hand pointed at a TV camera Mm-hmm. I guess what I'm saying is whenever this guy's name pops up in our inbox. It's gonna be a good day Well an easy day, right? Like, is it like an easy work day for us, but a horrible day for the state of the universe as a whole, generally speaking.

I guess eventually there'll be an obituary, I guess, but yeah. It's true, it's true. Sad day for us, good day for the world. Exactly. Anyway, Kenny Copes has had a rough one over the last year. As I mentioned, he was in the hospital for what he says was a ruptured appendix, probably because he can't tell his church, I'm a cocaine addict and that's pretty bad for you even when you're not 88. Lies or no, it brought up thoughts

of his mortality. So here's what he had to say, quote, I've made an entered into a covenant with God and on December 6, 2056. I'll see y'all later. I'm out of here. 120 years old. You take an old worn out car and you put it in the shop and you restore it good as new or better. Well, this old 88 year old worn out body has been made better.

The different parts have been overhauled and now it's finished. I am here to give thanks like never before. He also added, I'm not just the president of embalming fluid Club for men. I'm also From the corpse of the thesis look I don't know it's hard to look bad for 88 But this guy finds a way he sure does he put a picture of him in our notes I assume is a punishment to me and the creeper would be like it's just a little skincare routine in the morning and night, man. It's not a big deal. You're just, you know, sunscreen every day. But that's not all. God also gave him a heads up about the next few presidential

elections with Copeland saying, quote, I've been praying about the years. 2024 was a victory. Sure. 2025, the nation comes alive 2026 the big fix 2028 we go through the gate 2029 all things will be divine. I Don't have 2030 yet God's not made silver. Nobody's perfect. Yes Look nothing rhymes with 30 but dirty and flirty and both them fuck up my thing Come back to me after I've had a year give me another year on this exactly

So yeah with all that knowledge firmly in hand, Kenny, if you're listening, and we know you are, he's a big fan. If you would like to bet some of your 750 million dollars net worth on whether or not you will live to be 120 years old, we here at The Skating Atheist are definitely interested in taking that bet. We will give you great odds, game dog. Hit us up. And finally tonight, in cell phone of the year news, we have a story about a Christian

right MAGA influencer bragging in epic Ben Shapiro fashion about his pristine record of participating in exactly zero orgasms for his wife and therefore edging out the Pixel 9 and the iPhone 16 and pulling off the self own of the year. So, okay, yeah, people keep acting like this shit makes our job easy, right? But when last year's exaggerations are this year's headlines for long enough, this shit starts getting tricky. Okay? Thank you. And a big thanks to Jacqueline for sending the link to skatingnews at gmail.com. Jacqueline

has the option to demand Eli's next iPhone in exchange for an Android device and Eli has to make the brand switch for at least two years. Okay, okay. Jokes on you, Jaclyn, because I got a dumb phone for Christmas because I'm a baby who physically couldn't stop himself from watching YouTube shorts. So the very tragic MAGA influencer guy is Josiah, who the fuck cares? And he looks like he was created by AI as a joke about MAGA influencers, like a propaganda poster that we made. During the appearance in question, he's wearing a comically oversized MAGA hat with the American flag on the side, and his facial hair is a wispy sex criminal mustache and a literal neck only beard. Nothing else.

Yep. Listeners, Heath included a picture in our notes and the fact that this ridiculous helmet isn't poorly photoshopped onto his head is hard for me to accept in the way that the solution to the Monty Hall problem is. Yeah. He looks like a little boy dressed as a problematic country singer you've never heard of for Halloween. The neckbeard is moldy, I would say. It's got hair coming off.

It's like he knows his orgasmless wife is going to slit his throat in his sleep one day and he wants to make it a little tougher. Okay, so Josiah appeared on a YouTube show called The Grudge hosted by his wife Isabella, also a Christian right MAGA influencer, along with a relatively sane person named Luke Beasley, the other host. Most of the episode consisted of Beasley playing clips of Isabella's rabidly homophobic content and then roasting it. It went badly for Isabella, but she did so much better than her idiot

husband, who jumped into the conversation during a discussion about sex. According to Josiah, quote, the best part about having sex is reproduction. I don't value sex because of an orgasm. I value sex because I know that I'm gonna reproduce and have another baby. Yes, or if we was on a deserted island, you could probably start a fire with our intercourse. There's no such thing as that. Okay, so at this point you're probably thinking, how does a proper Christian heterosexual man avoid having gay sex with his wife? Great question. Josiah continued, he explains, quote, as soon as we're together it's like no birth control, no nothing, because

I'm not gonna have gay sex. What? Gay sex is more than just another man and a man. Oh, so much more. It's just the idea of looking at sex as such a materialistic thing and just like, oh well, we just have an orgasm and that's fun or whatever. That's okay. When you say it like that, my wedding vows seem underwhelming. I will admit, right? Hey Josiah, Champ, just bring it in. If the first thing that comes to your mind

When you think about gay sex is how fun it would be Your game I do yep as your game with that word means when you are Okay from there. We got one more exchange to close it out. Just like a finely crafted button on a sketch There's no more more satire. Luke Beasley, the host, responded to that sexuality advice from Josiah by saying, okay, no gay sex with women, guys. And Josiah responded genuinely by saying, very true, I agree. Like, he might as well get side tackled by Cecil's Boston lady at that point,

like I'm fucking pregnant! Then trampled by clip-clop Tom. It was like, just perfect. Perfect, but you can't write it better. Senior Pets comes in for Turkey! They all die. All right, well, I think we need to start some kind of sex work Kickstarter to get that poor woman an orgasm.

So we're going to wrap up the headlines and concentrate on that. Heath, Eli, thanks as always. Turkey. And when we come back, Marshall be here to remind us what HHS is going to look like in a couple of months. Hey, podcast listener. I'm Eli Bosnick here to tell you about this week's sponsor, Honey. Honey is an amazing free. No, no, we aren't working with honey anymore.

Oh, we're not. Why? What happened? Yeah. So it just came out that they were like stealing affiliate links and actually hiding coupons from people so that they would use theirs instead of the best one. Yeah. So we're not working with them as a sponsor anymore. Oh, come on guys. Everyone makes mistakes. Is this how we're going to know they're probably probably gonna go to jail for like fraud or something. Fraud? I mean who doesn't do a little fraud here and there? Right?

Okay, come on. Save money today at honey.com forward to last- No, such weird hills to die on. He really does. I'll save up for your legal fund, honey. Call me. What? Within movements like our own, it's common to hear some

variation of attack the idea not the people but fuck all that the people are the ones having all the shitty ideas to begin with y'all motherfuckers can hack at the branch is all you want we'll be over here at the roots with my good friend Michael Marshall on this installment of who's woo so Marsh welcome back it's great to be here great to see you guys again excited to tell you all So Marsh, welcome back. It's great to be here. Great to see you guys again. Excited to tell you all about another Woo.

Right. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you too. Yeah. Yeah. So far so good. Alright. So who do you have for us this time around?

So in each installment of Who's Woo, it's always fun to be able to like flesh out the backstory of somebody who absolutely sucks. Backstory. Sorry. We'll get into that. We'll get into that. And it's also like, it's even more fun to introduce you to some awful people that you'd never previously heard of.

But maybe the most fun of all is where I can take someone you already know was terrible, but then show you just how much of an asshole they really were. Which is why today we're going to talk about Daniel David Palmer. Ooh, ooh, okay. So for those who don't know, who is Daniel David Palmer? Yeah, Daniel David Palmer was born in what is now Ajax, Ontario on March 7th, 1845. His father Thomas Palmer was a member of the Seventh Day Adventists. And so he emphasized a biblically literal view of the world and a supposed personal

relationship with God. But that didn't really last with Daniel David Palmer because by his late 20s he was already describing himself freely as an atheist. Okay. I feel like he's going to do atheism wrong, which is hard to do. It's pretty easy to be an atheist. Lots of Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne vibes. Good stuff for DDJ. It's weird how all the people who spent the week telling me that we need to unite with

Transpobes have never told me that we need to embrace Daniel David Palmer. I think they might be lying about what they think, everybody. I think. Maybe. So when Daniel or DD Palmer was 20, his father moved him and the rest of the family to Ohio, looking for better job opportunities in the reconstruction period that followed the American Civil War. And there, Dee Dee tried his hand at a range of jobs, including beekeeping for a while, fruit farming, and he also ran a grocery store. Gotta get rid of the honey and the fruit, I guess.

Exactly. And at the same time, he also tried his hand at a range of wives. He married Abba Lord in 1871, Louvenia Landers in 1874, and then his housekeeper, Lavinia McGee in 1876. Although, as best I can tell, his marriage to Abba Lord, his first wife, was only annulled in 1877, two wives later. Oh Jesus Christ. Okay, so wait, I'm sorry. Abba, Louvenia, and Lavinia? Okay, three tries, he couldn't find a lady with a real name in there anywhere?

I mean he will take a few more swings at it before his time. They get worse. But quite how his first marriage managed to linger on through marriages two and three. It's not something I can answer. I couldn't find that detail out. But it is in some ways fitting because I would argue that it's fair to say ABBA was an enduringly influential figure in the subsequent path of Dee Dee Palmer's life. Yeah, same.

Dancing Queen. Oh yeah, Mamma Mia 2. Waterloo. So huge. Come on. So the thing is, Abba Lorde was a spiritualist medium when she met and married Dee Dee Palmer in 1871. She was also 13 years old at the time.

She'd been working the lucrative commercial mediumship market for at least a year by that point, so since she was like 12 or younger, and she was offering soul readings, psychometry, handwriting analysis, clairvoyance, and even, genuinely, spiritual advice on how to bring up children. Advice that I can only imagine consisted of, don't allow them to become professional liars and then marry fanatics while they're still tweens. Or maybe just do the first part about the lying. It's pretty good money.

It's pretty good money. Hey guys, sorry I'm late to poker night. My wife took forever. She wanted another story. Oh Jesus Christ. I don't think our marriage is going to last. I got to tell you. Well the thing is, at the time of their marriage, D.D. had already claimed to be very skeptical

of mediumship. Sure, kids lie all the time. Which makes it an even weirder choice that he chose to marry the 13-year-old psychic. Because it implies it wasn't the psychic bit that he was into. Not a good look. And so, in fact, he wrote in 1872, quote, I was a disbeliever in psychometry, clairvoyance, and all mediumistic phenomena, and I had satisfied myself that it was a delusive humbug and fancied that I should have no trouble to convince

my equal partner that such was the case, for she was so purely honest that I knew she would not practice her knowing deception. Okay, look, I have had to have the, I don't think you're lying, I think you're stupid conversation before. I've never had to have it with my don't think you're lying, I think you're stupid conversation before. I've never had to have it with my wife, so I get it, right? Like I'm sympathetic here. Never with your wife or a child or both.

Yeah, absolutely. Or your child wife. Yeah, exactly. So that skepticism led Palmer to put his magical child bride to the test. And it's a test she apparently passed convincingly in his eyes, because from that same 1872 letter he wrote, quote, I patiently waited to inform her of the failures to guess correctly. During the first week, she diagnosed 10 cases of disease without a single failure, all of which were unknown to her previously.

This was too good for guessing, and I compelled to acknowledge one Humbug as truth. Although there's no way for her to know that I wrote Egypt on that slip of paper. She did not peek. She's too honest to peek. Right, no. I found the person that I just said I didn't think was capable of lying to not be lying. Oh did you now? And so like I dwell on this aspect not just because it's weird to think of this guy

being taken in by an obvious trickster of a child, but also because I think it gives some invaluable context to the next chapters of Palmer's life. Because when a harsh midwestern winter killed off all of his bees, Palmer then sold up his farmland and set himself up as a magnetic healer before subsequently founding the Chiropractic movement. Get it? Backstory. So good. All she does is nag nag nag. Why don't you do fake stuff instead of bee stuff? We need more juice boxes. It never ends! Now, a lot of people will know some of the story of the origin of Chiropractic. Heath,

you even covered it on this show way back in episode 111's How Bullshit Is It? But for those who weren't around at the time or could do with having their memories refreshed, Palmer was practicing magnetic healing in his office in Davenport when he noticed that the building's janitor, a guy called Harvey Lillard, had a severe hearing impairment. And Palmer decided that the deafness had to be related to the presence of a lump that he noticed on Lillard's back. Because, you know, one of the chances that a guy in 1895 were deaf and lumpy. Too much of a coincidence. Couldn't be the case. And according to the story, when Palmer treated the lump, the deafness was miraculously cured

and therefore Palmer was right in his hunch. Sorry, poor choice of words. Every day is hump day for this guy, am I right? We have fun. Now, unsurprisingly, Lillard's family- He's deaf, it's okay, it's alright. Yeah, exactly. He's not a listener, it's fine. But yeah, Lillard's family tell this story slightly differently. They tell it as Palmer overheard Lillard telling a joke outside of his office, and then Palmer walked up to join the group just in time to catch the end of the joke, and at the punchline he just slapped Lillard on the back in a kind of hearty 19th century expression of amused camaraderie. And then several days later,

Lillard happened to remark that his hearing had improved a bit. And neither his deafness nor his subsequent recovery were documented in any measurable way. So we only have the word of this 19th century janitor and the guy selling the miracle cure. But you know, on such scant foundations, an entire empire of bullshit was built. Yeah, so I started a business of elbowing deaf people in jukeboxes and being like, ayyyy! And it worked really good. But he did though, he did. And to be clear, chiropractic would only get more dangerous and less scientific from there. Like that's the most...

Yeah, absolutely. So as a result of this one encounter, Palmer decided that spinal lesions, which he began to call subluxations, were responsible, in his words, for 95% of disease and anything that could go wrong with the human body. And he wrote that the other 5% was down to displaced joints in parts of the body other than the spine. So it was all joint stuff, but the 5% was non-spinal joint stuff. Which is how you know he must have been aware that this was all bullshit. Because he's still saying his miracle cure fixes everything. It's just that one time in 20 you have to apply it elsewhere than the spine.

Right. Alright, listen. I'm sorry. Bad choice of words. Hey, I made you hear 19 out of every 20 words, man. That's pretty good. Come on. Yeah. So, I like the Fonzie Palmer. I like the Fonzie Palmer. So his reasoning was that the spine was this like super highway for what he called innate energy, which told the body how to be healthy. But when the energy hit a subluxation, it was like trying to get on the freeway during

rush hour. And so the message of, you know, just work like normal, apparently that message wouldn't be able to get through to your organs and they just got haywire. That, that's why your legs never hurt one at a time. It all makes sense. Right. Well, and you see cracking your knuckles is like an air toe booth for the energy. Shit, the metaphor got away from me. My wife isn't a liar. Okay. She can't lie. And look, like all of this was nonsense. He's had a big lollipop. Of course all of this was nonsense. But the thing is, this wasn't even new nonsense.

Because people noticed that what he was suggesting was pretty much exactly the same as what Andrew Still had outlined in his Principles of Osteopathy ten years previously. So osteopaths across America were up in arms at this new guy coming along and stealing their completely made up but very lucrative nonsense. Okay, you gotta love it when two liars have that awkward meetup and they lock eyes with each other and they know they're both lying. You know, just like Peter Popoff yelling at the psychic in the next door theatre. Being like, dude, just pick another radio channel. I get it. We're both doing

the same bullshit. So initially, Palmer denied having any knowledge of this osteopathy of which you speak. But then in 1899, he finally admitted, yeah, okay, okay. He had taken some osteopathy classes in the past, but that is definitely not where he got the idea for chiropractic actually, even though it was identical to osteopathy. Because as he explained in 1910, he didn't actually invent chiropractic, nor did he plagiarise it from still when his beekeeping business failed and his magnetic healing business stalled. No, actually, he learned all about the fundamentals of chiropractic from a Dr. Jim Atkinson, who

was a ghost that he talked to via a medium. There it is. A ghost? Okay. No, I didn't plagiarize from that guy. I plagiarized from a ghost. Is my ethical defense on that? Yeah, yeah. If you want to be mad at anyone, you should be mad at the ghost. He didn't tell me who he got it from. So as Dee Dee wrote in his book, The Chiropractor, quote, the knowledge and philosophy given

me by Dr. Jim Atkinson, an intelligent spiritual being, appealed to my reason. The method by which I obtained an explanation of certain physical phenomena from an intelligence in the spiritual world is known in biblical language as inspiration. Lying. In a great measure, the Chiropractorors adjusta was written under such spiritual promptings." So we also know that by this point, this guy was no longer saying he was an atheist and we get to throw this bullshit back into the religious pile. Oh, nice, nice.

I do. I love the biblical inspiration thing. It's like the preemptive, I'm tied in full of sh**ness with the Bible defense, right? Hey, maybe Jerry Coyne should try that instead of tweeting to J.K. Rowling. So in fact, Dee Dee Palm was so explicitly religious by this point that he would talk of chiropractic as a religion, which just so happened required him to be the leader.

You've got to have a leader, yeah. So he wrote in 1911, comparing himself to Mary Baker Eddy, who 20 years previously had founded the Christian Science Movement, and he wrote, quote, Mrs. Eddy claimed to receive her ideas from the other world and so do I. She founded thereon a religion, so may I. I am, and this bit's in block capitals, the only one in Chiropractic who can do so. Very important in block capitals. He carries on, we must have a religious head, one who is the founder, as did Christ, Mohammed, Joe Smith, very chatty terms there, Mrs. Eddy, Martin Luther, and others who founded religions. I am the fountainhead.

I am the founder of chiropractic in its science, in its art, in its philosophy, and in its religious phase. Phase? Okay. Good rule of thumb. If your so-called doctor is saying the same stuff as the guy getting removed by a bouncer from the bar, stop using that doctor. He's just being like, I am the fountain man.

I still have a tab. I still have a tab. That's stealing. You're stealing my credit card right now is what you're doing. I left my jacket. So if we don't want to take Dee Dee's word for it, and we definitely shouldn't take his word for it, at least we do have some corroboration from his son and heir to the Chiropractic throne, Bartlett Joshua Palmer. So B.J. Palmer confirmed in his writings, quote, Father often attended the annual Mississippi Valley Spiritualist

Camp meeting where he first claimed to receive messages from Dr. Jim Atkinson on the principles of Chiropractic. That's such a weird afterthought, right, that he didn't lead with, by the way, a ghost taught me this, right? Right. I came up years later. I just love the image of everyone else having, you know, a tender goodbye with their grandmother and DDP is just sitting there with a bunch of diagrams of your back. I'm doing important stuff too guys. Yeah. None of my family's come through, but we're really getting into lower back pain. Mostly goes away on its own. Speaking of BJ Palmer, he was as committed to chiropractic as his father was, having

been one of the first students to attend the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, which Dee Dee founded in 1897, making BJ Palmer a Nepal Woo. Possibly one of the earliest Nepal Woo's, I don't know. He's really good at water polo too though, so. Heard his way in. But that said, he and his father did not see eye to eye on much, and a disagreement that apparently had a lot to do with how bad a father Dee Dee had been, like once BJ's mother, the former housekeeper Lavinia, died in 1885. BJ wrote that

his father would beat him and his sisters with straps so severely that Didi Palmer would sometimes be arrested. This is in like the 1880s and 1890s, they'd be arrested for beating his kids so badly. And he even spent several nights in jail for beating his kids. Here's a quote from BJ Palmer about it. He says, Our older sister was badly injured and has been sickly all her life. Our younger sister had a severe abscess caused by beatings. We have a fractured vertebra and a bad curvature from the same source. Which I can only assume caused all manner of subluxations in the process and really made things much worse.

And that's why the kids didn't listen. It was the deafness from the subluxations from the abuse. So yeah, more abuse. Real catch 22 there. That's tough. Okay. But Marsh mentioned this, but do you know how badly you had to beat your kids to get arrested for it in 1885? That means a guy who probably owned a slave was like, you're a bad guy, you're going to

go to jail. Yeah. And when Dee Dee wasn't beating his kids, he was essentially too caught up in growing the chiropractic movement that his children barely got a look in, apparently. Although it is worth pointing out, around that time, Dee Dee did find time to take three more wives. Martha Henning in 1885, Villa Amanda Thomas in 1888, and finally Molly Hoodler in 1906.

Yeah, something tells me the kids were happy to be neglected when they could get it though, you know. Look, I'm not going to pretend to understand the experience of being a woman in 1885 again, but I think if some guy asks to make you his fourth wife, you kind of got to expect that he's not going to be an amazing partner. No? Yeah. And especially over like a 15 year or a 10 year period.

It was a really short space of time between the first wife. It's like 10 or 12 years, something like that. There was a Lavinia and a Louvinia in the same house. There was a giant pain in the ass. I bet when he met the second one, he was like, this is great for a bunch of cards and monogram powers. Just add a letter. It's like barely even changed the Christmas cards.

Just crossed it out a little sharp. So he married his last wife there, Molly Hoodler in 1906. 1906, it turns out, was a big year for Dee Dee Palmer because it was the year that the law came knocking. Because Iowa had recently passed a new medical arts law against practicing medicine without a license, essentially to clamp down on charlatans like the Palmer's. And Dee Dee Palmer was the first chiropractor they prosecuted under this new law. And despite him having enough money to pay the fine, and you know, more to the point,

having enough acolytes who'd be willing to pay the fine on his behalf, he instead elected to play the martyr and go to jail. He spent 17 days in jail and he was not out hoping that the resulting publicity from his imprisonment would help spread the message of Chiropractic and of its founder who was so committed to his ideals who was willing to be imprisoned for them. Just to be clear, imprisoned by the ivory tower big science government of 1906 Iowa. Yeah. Rough.

The thing is, things did not work out quite as he hoped for, because upon his emergence from prison, he had a massive falling out with his son, which resulted in him selling that chiropractic college to BJ Palmer and heading out west, where he founded new schools in Oklahoma, California and Oregon, all of which failed, while BJ's practices flourished. And this soured the relationship between father and son even further, and the pair soon became like bitter rivals. Didi would write in criticism of the direction that BJ Palmer was taking the chiropractic

movement, and he even gave lectures to opposing chiropractic colleges that had started up in order to try and stem the flow of people towards BJ Palmer's practices. And then in August 1913, Dee Dee Palmer was marching on foot in a parade in Davenport when he was struck from behind by a car which injured him so sufficiently that he never really fully recovered. And the driver of that car? Albert Einstein.

Yeah, it was his son, BJ Palmer. There's a lot of Earnhardt family vibes in this for sure. Right? Think of it as a really hard spanking, Dad. Remember how you were mad at us? So, Dee Dee Palmer died just two months after that. And he died in LA, and while typhoid was officially listed as the cause of death, some have suggested it was actually the foul play here. The book Trick or Treatment claims, quote, it seems more likely that his death was a direct result of the injuries caused by his son. Indeed, there is speculation that this was not an accident, but rather a case of patricide,

unquote. And while I won't comment on what I make of those claims directly, I will point out that the two authors of that book, Dricker Treatment, one of them writes for me at the Skeptic Magazine and the other employs me at the Good Thinking Society. So yeah, so a couple of shady motherfuckers is what you're saying. Question, how many of them oppose civil rights for gay people? Because I've heard that number can be flexible. Is it not zero? You keep it in the single digits you're fine.

Yeah, exactly. As long as it's above 97%, you're fine. You're golden at that point. It's like how any room of 20 people, like people share a birthday. Yeah, exactly. It's like that. That's not right. So with Dee Dee Palmer now completely out of the picture, the chiropractic movement grew

and grew under BJ Palmer, becoming the pseudoscience that we know today. And along the way, BJ himself had a son of his own named, called him David Daniel Palmer. And David Daniel Palmer actually went on to become a leading chiropractor and give himself the nickname The Educator. So really flowed in the family here. Was he a WWE? That's fucking rules I was going to say. Can I take dibs on that now? Is that free?

It's free. It's free. You can't take it. No, you can't. Anyone else but not you. Enilingus. The fountainhead. Yeah, in 1922, the Palmers bought a radio station to market the chiropractic industry,

as well as broadcasting weather reports and sports updates. And hiring for those sports updates in 1932, a 21 year old, Ronald Reagan, who got his big break in the media through BJ Palmer's radio station. Yeah, absolutely true. Amazing detail. And also in 1926, BJ Palmer published a travelogue autobiography titled, Round the World with BJ, a book that despite its title was nothing to do with Nancy Reagan. Chiropractic is definitely the supply side economics of medicine. This all

tracks. Yeah, it's all coming together. And so that is the story of Daniel David Palmer, a man born into a deeply religious movement who recognized it was all bullshit, and then met a barely teenage con artist who conned him back into belief, or, let's face it, far, far more likely, showed him the tricks of the trade and how to con people successfully and all the money and influence that could be gained from grifting. And then 130 years later, his bullshit ideas have become a worldwide industry that's globally and erroneously synonymous with spinal health. And it all cemented a legacy that enriched, empowered, and ultimately divided three generations

of his family. All in all, Daniel David Palmer is a more than worthwhile entry in Who's Who. Alright well Marsh, thanks for helping us break in the new year and we look forward to more who to come. Before we try to find a newer Lang sign for next year, I want to thank everybody who came out and saw us live or otherwise supported us over the past year. It was a tough year. Thank you for helping us help you get through it. Anyway, that's all the blessing we've got for you tonight. But we're back in 10,022 minutes with more. If you can't wait to long beyond look out

for a brand new episode of our sister shows, Hot Friend, God of Movies Day being at seven Eastern on Tuesday and an even new episode of our half sister so citation needed debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, I can't wrap up the episode until I thank Heath Enright for another year of hilarity. Eli Bozic for another year of elation, and Elucid Illusions for another year of love. I also need to thank Michael Marshall once again for helping out tonight. And a reminder that Marsha is the editor and a frequent contributor to The Skeptic, which you'll find at skeptic.org.uk. He's also got podcasts, which you'll find on the show notes for this episode. Oh, I also want to thank Becca for providing this

week's Farnsworth quote, which I got exactly when it was no longer topical. Sorry about that. I'll try to do better next time. Speaking of which, I'm running low on Farnsworth quotes. If you'd like to hear your voice on the show, or maybe if you've got a podcast, website, blog or small business that you would like to promote to our audience, send me a Farnsworth quote, preferably as an MP3, send it to noillusions at yahoo.com, put Farnsworth in the subject line and please keep it under 20 seconds. And if I haven't used yours, if you've sent one and I haven't used it, feel free to resubmit

it. They get lost more often than I'd like to admit. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best bipeds, Kristen, John, Lauren, Sam, Jay, Evan, the Trees Knees, C7's Jim, and Dragonfly. Kristen, John, Lauren, and Sam are so bright, those flat earthers in Antarctica are blaming the midnight sun on them. Jay Evan in the trees knees who are so hot global warming denies them and C7's Jim and Dragonfly whose IQs are what these year numbers have been trying to catch up to the whole

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