The Scathing Atheist - 630: Mercola Tapes Edition
Episode Date: March 27, 2025In this week’s episode, Republicans solidify their position on HARM, Pete Hegseth teaches us about the butt dialing group chat section from The Art of War, and Jonathan Jarry will be here to convinc...e you that Joseph Mercola actually is nuttier than you thought. --- 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: scathingnews@gmail.com 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/ Report instances of harassment or abuse connected to this show to the Creator Accountability Network here: https://creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org/ --- Guest Links: Learn more about the Mercola Tapes here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health-and-nutrition-pseudoscience/exclusive-videos-show-dr-joe-mercolas-dangerous-ideas-whipped-alleged-medium Find more of Jonathan Jarry’s work here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/articles-by-author/Jonathan%20Jarry%20M.Sc. --- Headlines: Dems reintroduce “Do No Harm” Bill to remind us that Republicans insist on doing harm: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/democrats-re-introduce-the-do-no BC Court of Appeal says privacy law does not infringe religious freedom: https://www.bchumanist.ca/bcca_privacy_release White House is selling corporate sponsorships for the Easter Egg Roll: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/us/politics/trump-easter-egg-roll-sponsors.html?smid=nytcore-android-share Religious leaders lose shit over Satanic Black Mass: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/lawmakers-and-catholic-leaders-flip Columbus school district bans candy bribes used to lure kids to Bible classes: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/columbus-school-district-bans-candy Pete Hegseth sent secret war plans for attacking Houthis to journalist by accident: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/ https://www.newsweek.com/trump-secret-houthi-war-plans-goldberg-hegseth-2049762
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Warning, the following podcast contains profanity, like we were getting paid by the expletive.
This week's episode of The Skating Atheist is brought to you by Factor, BetterHelp, the
American Atheist's annual convention, and by the new cardiac accessory for post-heart
attack Baptists, the Protestant.
Just like a real stent, except it's made of prayer.
The Protestant.
What's the matter, Baptists?
You don't want to, you don't, I thought through Christ all things were possible.
You want a regular one? Huh? Why? And now, the skating atheist.
Hi, this is Quinn from Eli Bosnick's New Jersey, and I operate a wastewater treatment facility
outside of Philadelphia. You wouldn't believe the amount of corn I see all day, but that's
neither here nor there. Anyway, judging by my union coworkers who support your local union, a lot of whom voted
against their own interests, I can say with certainty that we did in fact evolve from
filthy monkey men.
It's Thursday.
It's March 27th.
And it's opening day!
Yeah, not nearly as sexual as it might sound.
Well, for you maybe.
I'm no illusions.
Ah, me love Osnick.
Me too.
I'm Heathen Wright.
And from Silent Bob's, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Weygrass, Georgia, this is
the Skating at East.
On this week's episode, Republicans solidify their position on harm.
Pete Hegseth teaches us about the butt-dialing and group chat section from the Art of War.
And Jonathan Jerry will be here to convince you that Joseph Mercola actually is nuttier
than you thought.
But first, the diatribe. There are three tiers of Bible quoting and religious arguments, all of which are stupid,
but they're not all equally stupid.
The least stupid is when they're used to prove what the Bible says, right?
Now, this is usually a futile exercise since the Bible is so contradictory, but the Bible
is a good authority on what the Bible says, so that's the least stupid one.
The most stupid is when people try to quote the Bible as proof that the Bible is a good authority on what the Bible says. So that's the least stupid one. The most stupid is when people try to quote the Bible
as proof that the Bible is true.
The meme with the extension cord plugged into itself
says everything you need to know about that.
But the level of stupid I wanna talk about today
is the one in between.
Those times when Christians quote the Bible
as evidence of what Christians believe.
So let me just, I'm gonna state this plainly upfront. It would be virtually
impossible to read the Bible and to come away from it with anything like the dominant American
idea of Christianity. Almost nothing they believe could be teased out of the Bible without
the help of somebody who already believed all that shit. If you reran the religion from
the beginning a thousand times, the new versions of Christianity,
they might largely land on the same conclusions, right?
Because those conclusions were the ones that were useful to the ruling class and were being
imposed on the existing faith.
But the odds that they'd come up with the same justifications are astronomical.
In fact, when you look at the views most associated with the dominant strain of Christianity in
America right now, they're virtually antithetical
to what you most likely would pull out of the Bible.
Right, like, you know, look, Jesus isn't the perfect
moral philosopher so many liberal Christians pain to mess.
A lot of what Jesus says in the Bible is xenophobic,
apocalyptic, antisocial, and dangerous,
but he definitely doesn't endorse the bootstrapping bullshit
that the modern Republican party has built around.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the divide between biblical values
and Christian values.
As I've pointed out numerous times on this show, one of the few ethical questions that
the Bible is crystal clear about is that you should welcome immigrants into your land.
Right?
Now, Republican Christians dance around that shit and try to say that the Bible meant legal
immigrants, but that's a distinction that would have made absolutely not a scrap of fucking
sense in biblical times.
But that's just the point, right?
There's nothing that the Bible is so clear about that Christians wouldn't just reinterpret
it the second it was politically expedient to do so.
I mean consider this.
Consider the religious right lawmakers in Washington DC trying to use their Jesusity
to justify their inhumane platform.
One of the things that those people have to constantly deal with is the fact that when
they look across the aisle, they're mostly seeing Christians.
I mean, sure, we're more religiously diverse than them, but the overwhelming majority of
democratic lawmakers are Christian, which means it's
real hard for an honest person to argue that the clearly Christian thing is the thing that
only half of Congress wants.
How could abortion be clearly forbidden by biblical teachings if 76.4% of the party supporting
it is also Christian?
But don't worry, we're not dealing with honest people, so this isn't a problem.
So how is it that devoutly Baptist and Catholic Democrats can support something that you think
the Bible clearly opposes? Well, Satan, the Prince of Darkness, of course. Satan tricked
them into following a false interpretation of the Bible that far more closely matches
the actual text of the book than yours does. And of course, this belief doesn't just save you from the cognitive dissonance that those
differing interpretations of the Bible could create, right?
It also saves you from having to engage with the other side's argument at all.
Just doing so would be allowing the devil to tempt you, which you're forbidden from
fucking doing.
And I should emphasize, by the way, I'm not just pulling this out of my fucking hat.
This is basically the official theological policy of the Trump regime right now.
Ralph Dralinger, the ex basketball player come DC minister who runs the White House
cabinet Bible studies, just released a lengthy article based on a recent Bible study that
said exactly that.
It said that Democrats and Republicans who disagree with Trump's most extreme impulses
have been captured by the devil's schemes.
He even lists the devil's schemes in the article.
They are in order, same sex marriage, homosexuality, gender neutrality, abortion, women's liberation,
Islam, so the opposite of women's liberation too, I guess, liberal Christianity, he puts
Christianity in quotes there, and political ideologies, which of course, he insists doesn't cover, Jesus thinks all my political beliefs are
the best ones.
That's not a political ideology, that's a religious belief, you see.
So ultimately, Christians believe whatever the fuck is most convenient for the Christians
in charge.
The very nature of having unquestionable, unaccountable authorities on truth and the
nature of reality demands that result.
So any effort to rescue Christianity by showing me some nice sounding shit in the Bible is
like trying to convince me that that corporation has my best interests at heart by quoting
their mission statement.
Christians are what Christians do, and the very fact that so many Christians are trying
to find a way to deny that fact is proof of how damning a fact it is.
They're talking about you, Jesus. We interrupt this broadcast
and bring you a special news bulletin.
Joining me for headlines tonight are the Mandalorian
and Baby Yoda, this podcast,
Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick.
Fellas, are you ready to bond?
Sorry, I was just thinking about Pedro Pascal.
Yeah.
And I was eating a frog.
So it's all coming together. You're a vegan. So yeah, we'd need a minute to think about Pedro Pascal. Yeah. And I was eating a frog. So it's all. Sit down.
It's all coming together.
You're a vegan.
So yeah, we'd need a minute to think about Pedro Pascal.
So we're going to take a pause for a word from this week's first sponsor, Factor.
Okay.
What about Wednesday?
Uh, plain chicken?
Plain chicken?
That's two days in a row.
It's a lot of chicken, man.
I don't know what to tell you.
Hey guys.
What's with all the faffernoodle?
The faffernoodle?
I, man can only say hubbub so many times, Eli. I don't know what to tell you. Hey guys, what's with all the faff or noodle the faff or noodle?
I man can only say hubbub so many times Eli. No, that's fair
So Keith and I are trying to eat better this year, but it means a lot are really not tasty meals
Yeah, well guys if you want to optimize your nutrition this year, why don't you just try factor?
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I don't know Noah, how many days in a row am I going to have to eat the same thing?
Well with 40 options across 8 dietary preferences on the menu each week, it's easy to pick new
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Awesome.
Thanks Noah.
So long, chocked chicken.
What's chocked chicken?
It's a chicken with chalk in it.
Yeah, got it.
And now back to the headlines.
In our lead story tonight,
congressional Democrats are reminding people
that the Republican party's chief goal is to do harm
by reintroducing the Do No Harm bill
and making them kill it again.
This bill would modify the existing
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,
to ensure it wasn't used to justify things
like discrimination, evading child labor
laws or denying people access to health care, to which Republicans predictably answered,
well, where's the fun in that? Yeah. Sincerely held harm says what? The bill. We did that and
Republicans all voted what? You're voting what? Sure did. Now we've talked quite a bit about
RFRA on the show, but it's still easy to forget that when it was passed in 1993, it was an objectively good thing. I mean, there
were some solid arguments against it, most notably of the Cassandra variety, but the
intention of the law was unambiguously good. Regulations were being crafted by Christian
people from Christian cultures that took Christian prohibitions and sensibilities into account,
but not those of other religions.
So RFRA was meant to protect Jewish kids who weren't allowed to wear yarmulkes in class
because of a no hat rule or bearded Muslims who are being denied jobs because the company
associates clean shaven with professional.
It basically said, hey, if your rule is pointless anyway, it can be suspended for people who
have a religious belief about
it.
Yeah, religion gets to win a stupid contest if that stupid contest is with the law.
I'm not sure it's a good thing, but all the smart people are, so trust them, not me.
Well, to be clear, you can argue that it's not a good thing, but to do so, you have to
be able to excise all the pro-Christian bias that already pervades the laws, right?
If the laws were truly secular, this would be a bad thing.
But that's what it was meant to balance out,
was that pro-Christian bias that just already seeps in.
But of course, that law has since been weaponized
by Christians who use it to refuse
to give gay people marriage licenses,
refuse to give their employees contraception coverage,
and refuse to fill prescriptions
for medicines they disagree with.
And the Supreme Court, it's so obsessed with the intent of two centuries dead people
that they name their judicial philosophy after it, can't be bothered to give a fuck with
the still living people that past RFRA said then say now and clearly intended.
So they've allowed, but I'm Christian though, to become a legally recognized get out of
jail free card.
Yeah, the original RFRA was a reaction to a ruling by
Antonine Scalia. Yes that said religious freedom doesn't mean laws don't count
It was a reaction to that like do you want me to wear?
Antonine Scalia as a skin suit and do like a musical number about it to give you the idea
I'll happily do that ready to go. Yeah, we have the skin suit already
Yeah, we've needed an excuse to use it for a while. So Anna wrote the score, it's awesome. So
the answer to this of course is to amend the original law, which is what the Do
No Harm Act would do. It would basically add a footnote to the original law. I'm
so glad that there's not a cartoon below me. It's a good thing this is an audio
medium. So basically it would add a footnote to the original law
that said no using this bill to undermine
discrimination laws, deny people healthcare,
evade child labor laws, refuse to provide government
services, or refuse to do your fucking job
as a government employee.
And despite the fucking duh of it all,
this addendum was already defeated by Republicans
in 2017 and again in 2019.
But it's become all the more important now that Donald Trump's White House Faith Office
is basically giving government employees seminars on how to refuse to do your job because of
Jesus.
Yeah, this is good work by Democrats in Congress.
We have pretty much no power right now.
One of the few things that we should be doing over and over, just like this, introducing bills like,
I don't know, don't kick puppies even if God told you the act or whatever.
Yes.
Make the evil people go on record every day, all the time.
Yeah. And since evil doesn't matter, throw in some weird shit that might be their line, right?
Vote against trans rights and say how you really feel about funnel cake bill of 2026.
You know, just like, see if we can get some hits.
Yeah. So, so yeah.
So this doom defferent was introduced by the ever
oo-oo inducing Jamie Raskin.
Oooo!
Choo-choo!
Along with Representative Steve Cohen, Bobby Scott, Mary Gay Scanlon,
as well as Heath's man crush Senator Cory Booker.
And yes, it will fail.
And while it's failing, the Republicans
will be holding a hearing on whether the flat earthers are maybe on to something and the
American voter will be reminded of what they could have had.
Eggs? I feel like they wanted eggs.
That was really important.
Hard for them to remember.
And in Easter eggs in this economy news
This year's White House Easter egg roll is sponsored by Policy Genius
What's Policy Genius? Great question me doesn't count
Fine, okay, you do it you do it still not a point What's Policy Genius if you're gonna do something heroic at a big event?
You want to make sure your family is taken care of but you don't have time for all that paperwork.
There's policy news.
And they're just one of the main, many amazing corporate sponsors that might be paying for
the celebration and political favors from the president.
Seriously, that's happening. After holding a Tesla sales event at the White House two weeks ago, the Trump administration
is now offering ad space at the egg roll event with plans of turning the whole thing into
a product showcase.
Yeah.
Yeah.
JFK had asked not what your country can do for you.
FDR had nothing to fear but fear itself.
Donald Trump has, but don't answer yet.
That's fitting.
And a big thanks to Anne for sending the link to skatingnews.
At gmail.com and gets whatever she wants.
Keith, does that include your hand in marriage?
Yeah, like Anne already had whatever she wants.
I feel like we should have to give her something she doesn't want, right? Yeah, you could marry me too, Anne.
Cool, let us know. So what's the only thing worse than a bunch of kids celebrating a divine
nepo zombie by rolling extremely expensive hard-boiled eggs in this economy across the
White House lawn in a big snit? That's right, it's the auto ads.
And the White House put out a nine-page buying guide
with all the details.
But they didn't go straight for the hard sell
because it's a classy buying guide
for corporate sponsors of the resurrection
of our Lord and Savior.
Obviously, yeah.
The government-sponsored resurrection.
Yeah, yup. The government sponsored resurrection. Yeah, yup.
The guide starts with some fun facts
about the history of the event.
For example, in 1887, President Grover Cleveland
started inviting kids into the East Room on Easter,
which ruined several very nice rugs.
Sure.
Then it says, exact quote from this guide Ray aganomics in 1981
president Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan hosted a hunt for wooden
eggs that bore the signatures of famous people whoo and the best part was if you
got one from Ronald Reagan it changed every year
Because of his terrible terrible Alzheimer's. Yeah, buddy No, I feel like they were just trying to find a way to get rid of the evidence after they tried out the Minority Report
Thing right there like oh fuck getting really ski balls
Bush George Bush George Bush, what the fuck?
Let's start a group on signal moving ahead to
What the fuck? Let's start a group on signal.
Moving ahead to 1969.
What?
Yeah, years are confusing.
They moved ahead to 1969 in the guide from 1981.
First Lady Pat Nixon in 1969 had a staff member
put on a white jumpsuit and a rabbit mask
that they apparently had to shake hands with all the kids.
And moving ahead once again to 1889, we learn that Benjamin Harrison had the United States
Marine Band play lively tunes for the kids.
And one other detail that was not mentioned in the guide, this is from the article I read
in the Times, the first weir that's White House Easter egg roll, W-H-E-E-R, took place in
1878. They use that throughout the guide. They're psyched about Weir.
Okay, I was wondering why you were trying to get a fucking anagram going.
No, no, no. That's theirs and they love it. The first one took place in 1878, soon after
Congress passed a law that banned kids from rolling eggs and themselves down Capitol Hill.
Yep.
Oh, even back in 1878, poor families had to make do by smudging Jimmy in a pattern and tossing him down the hill.
Yeah.
So, this event is run by a company founded in 2013 by Republican staffers and it's called Harbinger.
That's the name of the company. Not a good name. Ah, not great. Honest but bad
name. And here's the details from Harbinger. If you want to buy a
sponsorship, they have three tiers. Silver, gold, and platinum. And they're fucking
idiots, so they got the order backwards in their own guide and they went platinum, gold, silver
when they explained it.
When you're doing tiers, you have to show the basic one first
and then add stuff, obviously.
So I'm gonna fix it and explain in the right order.
At the basic silver tier, you get a 10 foot by 10 foot
branded activation, you get to engage
with the White House press corps, and you get 50 tickets
to the event, that's gonna be $75,000.
Now, when you say engage.
And that is where Eli stopped talking podcast listeners.
So weird that he only had the first half of the sentence,
but that's all he had to say.
That is weird, yeah, he just stopped.
All right, next up, we have the gold tier.
You get all the silver stuff,
plus your branded activation is 20 by 20.
You get one additional quote branding and visibility,
but not in a key area, fucking relax.
You're not at platinum yet.
You get two tickets to the official queer brunch and you get 100 general admission tickets.
That is $125,000 for the gold.
What?
No US citizenship?
This is bullshit.
And here's the deal for the serious players.
And you look like a serious player.
You do.
For the platinum tier, you're talking 35-30 for the branded activation and you look like a serious player. You do for the platinum tier.
You're talking 35 30 for the branded activation.
And yes, your area will be key.
If you're wondering, we're going to bump up those brunch tickets to a four pack
and you get a meet and greet or a White House tour.
Not both. Don't don't be greedy.
And actually, you know what?
You're breaking my balls.
I'm going to throw in 50 more tickets, 150 total, and exclusive access opportunities.
200k all in. What do you think?
Okay. So you're saying I could bring 150 people to cause a distraction while I'm alone meeting
the president?
No.
This sounds like a plan.
No, sir. We are.
You guys feel it. We're not adding that patreon to your I don't
Care that you guys can outvote me
Okay, just saying we have enough people at the Portland show to make this plan happen
So fun trip much like the response to the Tesla sales event at the White House
There's been some concern that selling ads
for a White House event might be using public office
for private gain because of what those words mean.
And we have regulations that very clearly prohibit that.
But even without those rules,
this is the US government running a giant Christianity ad
expo on Easter?
If an Islam themed toy company called like Shia Pet tried to buy a spot, A, it wouldn't
really help even though that's a great idea for a company and B, there's no chance they're
getting approved for like a branded activation area at the White House. I really wish we could
afford to test that theory with one of our many 30 by 30 avant-garde atheist activations
that rose.
We probably have a rich listener with 200k.
I know who it is.
And so either we get denied and then we have a lawsuit about religious discrimination or they have to let us do it and get fucking
Secular on the way. Yeah, which we will promise you we would have made the news. We would have made oh, yeah
Oh, yeah, and well, I block Eli's access to the company bank accounts
We're gonna take a quick break for a word from our other sponsor this week better help
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
And then we emerge from the fake wall.
Boom!
Mental health is ours.
Oh my god, it's perfect.
Right?
Hey guys, what are you up to?
Oh, hey Noah.
Eli and I are just planning a heist.
I knew this was coming when you started talking about Magic the Gathering, dude.
Guys, you can play with proxies.
Okay, first of all, not at the tournament level you can't. And second of all, no, this
is to pay for our therapy.
You need to rob a bank for therapy?
Yeah, no. A traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session,
which adds up fast.
Okay, well, why don't you just try BetterHelp?
Oh, you mean like an elite team of criminals from across the world for the heist?
Yeah, it turns out we don't know any.
No, no, no.
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That's betterhelp.
H-E-L-P dot com slash scathing.
All right, Noah.
Thanks.
All right, Heath, you got your grappling hook?
Sure do.
Wait, wait, I thought you guys were just going to try better help.
Oh, we are, but you reminded us.
And so now it's about the magic gathering thing.
Eli just learned about legendary commanders.
Yeah, surprisingly not supposed to be lands.
No, that's that's true.
They're not.
And in the candy ban can news, as a person who spent a not insignificant amount of airtime
warning of the dangers of religious programs in schools,
I have to admit that even when theocracy does manage to smash through the walls of church
and state like a prophylotizing Kool-Aid man, it's pretty lame.
I remember in my own childhood, the sullen, mournful classmates who were hauled away from
recess and jimmed to be bullied at a nearby Catholic church by a 70 year old virgin.
So...
70 year old liar.
So it makes sense that modern programs do everything they can to make their pitch at all appealing.
Well this week one school district in Columbus, Ohio is taking away religious assholeries ace in the hole as they're banning the
distribution of candy
for Jesus.
Yeah, we're getting rid of the candy.
Just one other small thing.
We're going to need you to mark your vans from now on.
No, sincerely held unmarked vans with trails of candy.
Like that's what happened.
That kind of gives away the game when that's what happens.
Right.
It's also, it's a blatant admission full of shit they are that they can't sell,
get superpowers, live forever in paradise, and avoid eternal punishment without adding
a fun-sized Snickers to sweeten the pot.
Exactly, yeah.
Not even doing full-size, fuck you.
They're not even doing fun-size.
They're doing suckers and shit.
Fucking granola bars.
Right.
So, for those of you unfamiliar, most of these programs, though not all, are
run by LifeWise Academy, a program that connects public schools with local churches for Jesus
preaching during the school day.
And you might be thinking to yourself, hey, how is that not a criminal enterprise? Well,
Eli, you were saying?
Right. Yeah. So LifeWise provides the curriculum, the staff, and sometimes background
checks so that Christian parents can make sure there's never, you know, an extended
period where their kid doesn't hear about Jesus. And one of the criticisms that has
come LifeWise's way over the last few years is their recruitment tactics. Because look,
the pitch for this already bad, by the way, is I'm a religious nutbag.
If my kid has science class without a counterpoint, I'm going to vomit.
Please make my kids skip recess so that someone with my belief system can yell it into them.
Hey, just embrace the vomit.
We love it over here.
Starting OnlyFans.
Make some money.
Side hustle.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But in reality, Lifewise has spent a lot more time at water parks and putting on
rock concerts and, as I said at the top, offering kids literal candy to convince them to join
the program.
At which point, they then hit them with the Jesus.
And look, trick or treat is a weird bribe, admittedly, but a lot more often these academies
aren't offering just candy.
They're offering lunch, which means that food insecure families are especially
vulnerable to their tactics.
Hey, we'll still take those lunches you're giving away.
We'll pick them up, bring them to the school cafeteria.
It seems like, it seems like you could offer that the whole time, but like,
we'll totally pick them up.
But okay.
Maybe I'm not remembering the Bible correctly.
When Jesus healed that blind guy,
did he make the guy listen to like
a timeshare presentation first?
I forget how the story goes.
Do you want to get spitty mud in your face?
Cause this is how you get spitty mud in your face.
This is how you get spitty mud in your face.
He's got you there Heath.
Right, so with that in mind,
this week the Columbus School District
revised its policy to read as follows, quote,
any private entity providing religious instruction during the school day must agree that it will not provide participating students
with any materials, snacks, clothing, candies, trinkets, or other items for their return
to school.
The district will not release students for religious instruction, release time to any
private provider that fails to adhere to this prohibition.
And don't make a list though.
They're going to start giving away like non-trinket objets that aren't technically items.
You got to tighten up that language.
Nothing made of matter.
No doing that.
Right.
Or just be honest and say, no giving them shit that the other kids are going to be jealous
of you absolute fucking ghouls.
Yeah.
That's true.
Now, predictably, Christians are using this change to cry oppression, painting a picture
of hungry children returning empty-handed from their salvation practice as some sort
of bigotry.
But the truth is, they're just mad because they have one less bribe, one less axe to
hold over the heads of the needy.
And if you ask me, that's always good news.
Oh yeah.
And finally tonight in New Phone, Houthis,
New Phantasy,
we have a story about a U.S.
military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and
accidental group texting as part of Donald Trump's
isolationist America First
policy, the US military recently fired up some more attacks
all the way across the globe.
The Houthis are a Shia rebel group
that's been launching missile and drone attacks
on commercial ships in the Red Sea in opposition to Israel
and in solidarity with Palestine.
In response, Secretary of Defense, former Fox News weekend co-host, and holy crusades
enthusiast with a tattoo on his arm to prove it, Pete Hegseth, has been overseeing the
US military operation.
And in addition to being a Christian right lunatic, he's also a 44 year old boomer somehow who doesn't know how phones work.
And he sent detailed war plans to a group chat that somehow included the editor in
chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.
And we know about the whole story.
Thanks to an article in the Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled the Trump
administration accidentally texted me it's war plans. Yeah. Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled, The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me
Its War Plans.
Yeah.
And if you're wondering why we're covering this, you're on the scathing atheist instead
of over on the skeptic.
It's because this is the best evidence of a loving God we've seen for a while.
We are at DEFCON 2 over here.
Yeah.
So I want to be clear because this is getting lost in so much of the coverage that this is already egregious before they accidentally include the reporter on that group chat.
Sure is.
You're not supposed to have war group chats?
Nope.
No?
Yeah.
Fuck.
All right.
Well, a big thanks to Viced Rhino for being the first of many to send us a link to scathingnews.gmail.com.
And also a big thanks to Stormy D for being
just a few minutes behind,
but crucially providing New Phone Who Thieves,
one of my favorites of all time.
When I build my field of dreams,
Vice Rhino and Stormy definitely get season tickets.
And Stormy also gets a statue in the Monument Park
in Left Field for that pun. Loved it.
But we are gonna dress you up like a Civil War general story. Sorry, we don't make the rules.
We do make those rules actually, but yeah, still.
We'll dress them like a...
Okay, so here's what we learned from Jeffrey Goldberg.
It all started when he somehow got added to a group chat on Signal by somebody named Mike
Walz.
That's the name of Trump's national security advisor, and Goldberg figured this must be
a prank because otherwise it's the dumbest fuckup of all time.
Right, and keep in mind that all time includes Rudy Giuliani.
It does.
Well, it was option B, the dumbest fuck up of all time. The group
chat continued with texts from Mike Walz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, of course,
Vice President Jan Stans Vance and high level staff members representing Marco Rubio, Tulsi
Gabbard, the Treasury Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
None of those people noticed that a journalist
was listed in the group.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Ah, shit, is this one of those Bitcoin scams again?
I hate, oh, oh no, it's the top most officials
of my government.
Yeah, right, so dumber than the Bitcoin scams,
but more important.
I should read, I should read.
Falling for the Bitcoin scams.
Yeah, right. So from there, the chat started discussing than the Bitcoin scams, but more important, I should read. Falling for the Bitcoin scams.
So from there, the chat started discussing
extremely sensitive military details,
especially from Pete Hegseth.
And of course, Hegseth was using terms like operational security
or OPSEC, because he's not just a DEI hire from Frogs
and Friends weekend.
He definitely knows what OPSEC means.
He's a military guy.
Well, except of course the OPSEC measure called
don't start group chats without the help of someone under 40.
That's a tricky one.
Who did not have several drinks that morning.
And also the part that says don't discuss top secret info on group chats.
Yeah, pretty basic stuff.
Jesus.
We also saw the use of and this is insane.
Way too many emojis.
They're discussing a campaign of dropping bombs on people.
And Mike Waltz celebrated afterwards with a text that ended with
fist emoji, American flag emoji, fire emoji.
Guys, guys, you can generate your own emojis now.
Just ask for the war crimes thumbs up combo.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
Would hell would probably not even be the scariest thing AI did that day.
So yeah, exactly.
I know there's a lot of things going on here, but the emoji thing somehow
bothered me the most.
It's the most insane.
Interesting.
That's the part that bothered you the most.
You can't do emojis in these sort of thing
Whatever I'm focusing on a weird thing. So just in case it wasn't clear
It's insane that any of these people were using signal for that discussion. Yes
Signal is known to be relatively secure by using end-to-end encryption. So sure something I guess
but you don't have to hack anything if you're invited to the chat and relatively secure by using end-to-end encryption. Well, sure. Something, I guess.
But you don't have to hack anything if you're invited to the chat.
And if you're a high-level military official,
you're not supposed to use publicly available apps for classified information either way.
Even the good ones with incognito mode or whatever they thought they were doing.
Yeah. And again, all of this is for technology that you are not using to
Accidentally add journalists to your top-secret thread
Again, this is the kind of shit that's usually discussed in a room
That's been checked for bugs that has a fucking force field around it like actually that yes you up doing a war
Like, actually that, yes. You up doing a war.
And with the silver lining that when these idiots blow up the world, at least we'll
know early enough to have a party first.
We're going to close the headlines for the night.
Heath, Eli, thanks as always.
Jumanji.
And when we come back, science communicator Jonathan Cherry will be here to communicate
some science.
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A-A-Con because you could spend your Easter hunting for community.
Oh, very nice. Right?
It's very rare these days that I see something about a woo merchant and I say to myself,
wow, that guy's way nuttier than I thought.
But a recent video from my friend Jonathan Jerry titled the Mercola Tapes sure as hell
managed that feat.
So I invited him on to talk to you about it.
If you don't know him, Jonathan Jerry is a scientist and science communicator with McGill
University's Office for Science and Society. And he's also one of the many Canadians that I'm trying to get in
good with in case I need to escape to the North. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Hey, it's a large
country. There's plenty of room if you need to come by. You guys aren't even used in the top half.
As long as you don't mind the cold, we have a lot of untapped territory up North.
Yeah, yeah. No, I can do that. I can handle the cold, we have a lot of untapped territory up north. Yeah, yeah.
No, I can do that.
I can handle the cold.
I grew up in Michigan.
It used to be cold there before global warming.
All right.
So I want to dive right into this because this is some amazing stuff that you've uncovered
here.
But before we do, we got to talk a little bit about Joseph Mercola.
We've talked about him on the show before.
Marsh devoted one of his earliest Who's Who segments to Joseph Mercola.
You can go back to episode 500 if you haven't heard that.
But for those in the audience who might need a refresher,
could you remind us who is Joseph Mercola?
Dr. Joseph Mercola is one of the most influential
sort of alternative health influencers
slash supplement salesmen in the world.
He is an osteopathic physician by training,
which in the US is essentially equivalent
to a medical doctor, so I'm not holding that against him.
But very early on, he got into alternative medicine,
natural medicine, quote unquote, natural medicine.
And he was a very early adopter of the internet,
and he saw the potential for the internet
to spread the word about his alternative health beliefs. And so he created a website,
Mercola.com in 1997, I believe, so very early days. And you
know, every, every kind of alternative medical sort of
quackery and grand conspiracy theory you can think of, it's
there. He is an anti vaxxer. He co wrote a book about the truth
about COVID-19, where every conspiracy theory about the pandemic
is in there.
He's been selling every dietary supplement you can think of.
And that has made him extremely rich and very, very influential.
And of course, he is friends with other people in that kind of community, including Robert
F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the secretary for the Department of Health
and Human Services, in case you forgot.
Yeah, I've been trying to, yeah, he was influential
with the RFK presidential campaign and whatnot.
So yeah, he's heavily tied to RFK.
So, okay, and what are the Mercola tapes?
So last fall, our office released a video that I made,
an hour long video called Mercola Know the Risks, which was a sort of comprehensive look at Mercola, his empire and his misinformation.
Because I hadn't seen anything really well done on Mercola on YouTube.
And when I made that video, I just learned through journalist Rick Polito, who writes
for this trade publication for people who are in the supplements industry.
I just learned that something very wild had apparently happened, which is that Mercola
was now consulting with a medium who claimed to be channeling an entity.
And he was doing business meetings with this channeler and he had fired his entire C-suite
and replaced it with other people.
There were allegations of money being moved around, maybe being stolen by the channeler
of people being fired because they were Catholic.
And there were these meetings between him and the Chandler, who goes by the fake name
of Kai Clay.
Those sessions were being recorded.
These were video sessions and Polito mentioned having seen some of these videos, but I hadn't
myself.
And so after the video came out, a whistleblower from Inside Mercola's
company reached out to me and said, hey, here's a bunch of these videos.
This needs to come out.
And so that's what I'm referring to as, as the Mercola tastes is these daily
sessions of over two hours each where Mercola speaks to Kai Clay, Kai goes into
an alleged trance, starts channeling this
hyperdimensional high-frequency entity from the causal plane called Balon, and then Merkola
asks Balon a bunch of questions, and then the trance ends, and Merkola sort of updates
Kai on what happened because Kai claims that he doesn't know what he says when Balon is
possessing his body.
Yeah, and the videos are just amazing.
So apparently Balan knows all things from all dimensions
except for articles.
He can't quite get articles correct.
So he like uses the instead of a here and there and stuff.
It's lazy.
I mean, that's what's striking here is that is that Mercola seems to be all in
on this Chandler and this Chandler is not even good at cold reading.
I mean, what we're seeing here is somebody who starts laughing maniacally, but while
closing his eyes says, how are you?
And then keeps his eyes closed, speaks in a monotonous voice, basically just agrees with
what Mercola is, is saying and asking,
and will say, you know, the Amy, the Noah, and will say, human, as if he hasn't fully
grasped the English language.
And that works.
That is good enough for Mercola.
Well, so, but as you point out in the video, what works for him is that he always tells
Mercola exactly what Mercola
wants to hear too, right?
So I think some amount of the laziness of the psychic act is forgiven since the psychic
always tells him that he's a super genius or whatever he wants to hear.
So what can you tell us about this guy, this Kai Clay?
So Kai Clay, his real name is Christopher Johnson.
And Rick Pulido did mention which Christopher Johnson he is, because, of course,
it's such a common name that it would be very hard to track down.
I forgot that Rick Pulido had identified which Christopher Johnson he was.
And so I figured it out on my own and I present the evidence in the video.
And it's very, very strange because he is Christopher W.
Johnson, the former CEO of the White Horn Group,
which was a branding agency in New York City.
And on Christopher Johnson's LinkedIn profile,
he claims to have worked with major brands.
I mean, we're talking CNN, MasterCard, Pepsi, Sesame
Street.
He says that he's the guy behind the branding of the Infinity
automobile brand. He says that he's the guy behind the branding of the Infinity automobile brand.
He says that he's been,
apparently still is part of the US Afghan Women's Council
led by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.
So you have this guy who apparently,
based on what he's saying,
I mean, I don't know to what degree we can trust this,
but apparently had a very successful branding,
marketing career in New York City, working with major clients.
And he was this single gay dad who got a daughter through in vitro fertilization and surrogacy.
And he stepped away from the Whitehorn Group.
There are these years that I call the missing years, where I was not able to find any trace of him or of Balon or any of that. And then in 2019, he appears in Florida
and he creates this company
that's called White Horn World LLC.
So very similar to the White Horn Group.
And if you go through it on LexisNexis,
you find that the variant name for this is Balon.
That's the first trace that I see of Balon.
And all of a sudden during the pandemic, he is channeling.
He has a website balon.com, B-A-H-L-O-N,
and he offers the services to CEOs, you know,
the usual schtick.
And then in late 2023, he holds an event
with Mercola in Florida.
And that is when I'm told those meetings begin
and Mercola brings him in and starts asking him
for advice on a daily basis.
Okay, so Mercola just like, like it seems like he just got taken in by his own bullshit
in a lot of ways.
Well, that's what's interesting because, you know, it's been alleged in civil actions
against Mercola and Johnson by former high ranking executives within Mercola's company,
that what Johnson is doing is that he is bringing in people that he knows to replace them.
And some of the money that Merkola has might be moved around to other accounts that Merkola
does not have control over.
And so yeah, what seems to be happening that here you have somebody Joseph Merkola, who
was always the guy outside the mainstream, right?
I call him the upside down doctor.
Basically everything that medicine says is true.
He says the exact opposite.
He's been a contrarian his entire career.
And so he hasn't anything that just smells of consensus.
He's like, no, it's corrupt.
And he says the exact opposite.
And that leaves you very vulnerable
to any kind of fringe group, fringe beliefs,
and people who are con artists, who will play that card of
like, yeah, I'm also outside of the mainstream, and who will then feed these people's egos.
I mean, you saw the video, there's a whole montage in there of Balon feeding Mercola's
ego and telling him you're going to win more Nobel prizes than anybody in the world.
You're a genius, you're a genius, you're a genius.
And Mercola starts to say, yeah, well, I'm a, apparently I'm a genius.
It's so good to be a genius.
All of these things.
And so that makes you so receptive, right?
To that kind of con artistry.
And in my, in my opinion, in my interpretation, that is what's happening here.
Okay.
So let me put on the hat of a Mercola defender or the tin foil cap of a Mercola defender
for a minute and ask you this.
Why are you doing this?
What business is it of yours?
What Joseph Mercola and his psychic are talking about?
So in 2019, the Washington Post reported on an affidavit in which Mercola had admitted
that he was worth over $100 million.
And in the tapes, he says, yeah, well, anybody who's worth anything is not going to confess
to where their actual net worth is.
I'm actually worth over $300 million.
And he hasn't seen patients in a very, very long time, as far as I know.
This is money that he has mostly made by selling supplements to people, by getting people hooked
on his website, his daily newsletter, all the articles that are written by him and many
that are ghostwritten by people who have no qualifications writing about health.
He has, you know, he speaks at conferences and he's being paid for that.
So the massive fortune that I can barely wrap my head around that he has made comes from the
people from the public and these people need to know that he is not a reliable
source of information he is getting now his medical information from Belon I
have him on tape asking about an article on on vaginal candidiasis and running
through the the treatments through the supplements that they want to promote
for that asking Belon is that true is that not true And when he doesn't get it from Balaan,
he gets it from Chad GPT,
because he is super in love with artificial intelligence.
And he says, Chad GPT says so,
and there's no reason why he would lie.
So he's unaware, it seems, of the fact
that large language models can hallucinate answers
out of thin air.
So people need to know these things.
And then, of course, there's the danger part of this,
which we were discussing before we were recording,
where there are two things here.
Let's start with the slightly more mainstream one,
which is the fact that he is very cozy with RFK Jr.
He hosted a town hall in Florida for Kennedy
while Kennedy was running for the presidential nomination.
They're both major leaders of the anti
vax movement. And I've heard rumors that he's been offered a job within HHS, and he's sort of
considering it. And so you can imagine the damage that could be done by Mercola gaining access to
some center or institute within HHS. And this is a guy who has to go to belong with every decision
that he has to make.
So now you've got Christopher Johnson,
a branding executive closing his eyes
and telling Mercola how to run one of the health agencies
within the US government.
So that's one possible scenario.
The other scenario is that there's a clip
where Mercola shows his handgun to Chris Johnson
and says, hey, I haven't used this in two years, but you know, this brain, it doesn't,
it doesn't miss. There's no fear in my brain. And there's all this,
this paranoia that is revealed in those tapes.
And there's land in Costa Rica where he had contracted somebody to build what
has been described by the contractor as an end of days compound to survive the
apocalypse or world events is how the legal
document puts it. Then that whole plan got abandoned by Mercola and then he moved to
having a similar plan in Mexico and that I am told has been recently abandoned as well.
So there's this idea of creating a compound in Latin America and we're going to have packs
of dogs to protect us and he's got his handgun and
they want to build schools there.
And you know, we've heard about doomsday cults and the story never ends well.
We have somebody who is being swayed by a psychic, a medium who claims to know everything
and that also deeply worries me.
Yeah, no, there's plenty of things to get terrified of in here.
So OK, so let's turn to the tapes
themselves. So how much of this stuff did you
ultimately watch?
I was sent an initial batch of
26 videos.
I since access way, way more than that.
But I decided to watch all 26 of them
and they're about two hours and 10 minutes
long.
Whoo.
Yeah, so I watched it all
and I took very copious notes
because, you know, so much of it is quite boring, to be honest.
It's very mundane, but then once in a while,
you hear Mercola says that he wants to recruit millions of people
to march with weapons on veterinarians and basically kill them.
Yes!
And so you have to do a double take and rewind
and make sure that you heard this correctly.
So you have all of these nuggets, if you will, that are all the way through these tapes.
So I took a bullet and I spent weeks watching over 50 hours of this stuff.
Wow. Okay. And speaking of nuggets, how much of the stuff that you watched was about Joseph Mercola's butt?
Very little, thankfully. Okay.
But as you point out, so Mercola, of course, has these alternative health theories.
He thinks he's going to win a bunch of Nobel prizes in part because he thinks he's figured out
that carbon dioxide is very good for your gut bacteria and it will protect all of the
molecules in your body. It will create like a force field to protect it from
really, really evil 5G radiation. Yes.
And so it's very funny because in one of the tapes,
he says, oh, you know, I must have been an idiot
for putting ozone up my butt.
I mean, who would do this?
And then cut to, yeah, so I'm putting carbon dioxide
up my butt now.
And that's a thing that's going to revolutionize medicine
and in the entire world. And there's a thing that's going to revolutionize medicine and
in the entire world. And there's a bit where he is bent over his standing desk shirtless.
And given the context, I'm assuming that he just got done blowing the gas up his bum and
he's keeping it on the inside while he's talking to Chris Johnson about how it's such a wonderful
shield around your biomolecules.
It's amazing. So the man literally thought his problem was that he was blowing the wrong type of smoke
up his own ass.
It's just gorgeous.
Okay, so but other than the setting the butt stuff aside, what else, what other kind of
stuff did you learn?
You've already mentioned that recruiting an army against veterinarians as a profession.
Yeah, this, I mean, this is the most disturbing thing.
I mean, this is a massive call to violence
and he hates the veterinary industry.
They used to have a veterinarian
and an alternative veterinarian
who was working in collaboration with Mercola.
Her name is Karen Becker,
and they just fired her in 2024
and they locked her out of all the accounts.
So she lost all of her content.
She posted about this on Instagram.
She was unhappy.
And so it's a recurring motif
that he just hates the veterinary industry.
It's never made completely clear in the videos
when I watch why that is.
It seems to have something to do with a diet
that veterinarians will recommend to dogs.
And in the tapes, Mercola adopts a puppy that he calls Joy.
And so he's very close to his dog
and he wants what's best for his dog.
And he thinks that knuckle bone is the best kind of thing
to feed to your dog.
At some point, he feeds some of his own blood to his puppy.
And then he asks Balon if that's okay.
And so he's very much against the veterinary industry
to the point where he says at some point,
oh, because of course I failed to mention it,
but Merkola is not only getting advice from Balan, he
also claims to have spiritual guides who put ideas into his head. And he has over 1500
spiritual guides, some of whom are his own parents. And so he says, well, my guides told
me how we're going to do this. I'm going to create a campaign and we're going to recruit
millions of people, maybe 70, maybe 80 million people.
And they will be all in on protecting our pets and they will march with weapons on these
creatures, he says.
And the really, really bad part in all of this is that Balan, aka Chris Johnson, who
has his eyes closed and pretends to be channeling an entity, basically agrees with that sentiment
and says,
oh, but also don't forget the industrial side of this, probably meaning the livestock industry.
So here is a guy who is basically not only agreeing with this mass call to violence,
but also saying, hey, don't forget about those people over there. Those are targets as well.
Right.
Yeah. That's really, I mean, I have no words.
And so anything else that makes the top five of weirdest shit you found out while you were watching these?
I mean, there's a lot of weirdness.
There's a lot of dangling keys in front of Mercola in an attempt to distract them with really, really big projects.
So, Balon tells them, oh, you're going to create a chain of wellness clinics the world over.
And they built a prototype at their headquarters, which I'm told has been abandoned.
Nothing has moved there. He's writing a book a week, Mercola is, because he is basically picking a topic.
Maybe his spiritual guides told him about the topic and then he chooses a ghostwriter and gives an outline to the ghostwriter.
Ghostwriter books a zoom session with Balon, asks Balon a bunch of questions, that gets transcribed by artificial intelligence,
Mercola does a bit of editing, boom, there's your book. So that's where the information is
coming from these days. So there's a lot of really outlandish stuff in this. I mean, I can't even,
I, we'd be here for hours just, just list, going through the list of all the weird stuff that's in
there. Okay. So look, I don't want to needlessly amplify any
criticisms here, but Journalistic Integrity demands that I at least ask
you, were you paid by Bill Gates to release this information on the same day
as the JFK files came out in an effort to distract the masses? As soon as he
mentioned Journalistic Integrity, I knew exactly where you were going with this.
So for people who are playing the home game, who may not be in the know.
So Joe Mercola has an ex-girlfriend called Erin Elizabeth, who is also an alternative
health influencer.
And the night that my video came out, she posted on X. So his ex posted on X. She wrote
about the video.
And to me, this this was I mean again
It's I I you know you were you were saying you're you watch 50 hours of this stuff. I feel a bit like an anthropologist
I love learning how people think about these things with their frame of mind is what their logic is and so here you have
Erin Elizabeth who is using some incredible conspiracy logic
To there's there's so much red yarn here. It's fascinating.
So when I started doing, when I started sort of getting recognition
for the work that I was doing through McGill,
the people who don't like me had to figure out a quick way
to just cast me aside and sort of disbelieve me.
Sure.
And so somebody figured out that some professor on the McGill campus,
which by the way, McGill, huge university,
we don't all know each other. So there's a professor somewhere on campus who got a grant
from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which happens as foundation, you can apply
for grants. So somebody there got a grant. And so that now is the way that I get dismissed
by conspiracy theories that I'm being paid by Bill Gates, who of course is pro-vaccine.
He's part of the deep state.
Because like literally anyone else at your entire university got money from him once.
Yeah. So they have no idea how grants work in a university. And I think that what they
believe happens is that one person gets a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
the Black Hawk helicopters arrive over campus, men in black rappel down from the helicopters,
knock on doors and say, these
are your talking points.
Shut up and just say these things.
It says, oh, vaccines are safe and effective.
And that's how the entire university is now corrupt.
And so Erin Elizabeth's point is that the Bill Gates funded McGill University releases
this video about Joe Mercola, my ex, on the same day that the JFK files are being released. Coincidence? And
so by her logic, I guess Bill Gates, who is part of the deep state, probably knows who
assassinated, who truly assassinated John F. Kennedy. And once this covered up, was like,
oh my God, what are we going to do? Oh, I know. I'm going to ask this Jonathan guy,
I'm going to feed him all these videos from Arcola and he's going to make a video that
will release on the same day and then this way CNN won't cover the release of the JFK
documents.
So yeah, that's the kind of logic that we're dealing with.
Wow.
No offense to your notoriety, but I feel like Bill Gates could have done better.
Oh yeah.
Plenty.
Go look at the number of views of my video has on YouTube.
I don't think I was a distraction at all.
Unbelievable.
All right.
Well, I'll tell you what, man.
There's obviously, as you said, there's way more to this than we can cover in the span
of an interview.
So I encourage our listeners to check the show notes for a link to Jonathan's video.
And something tells me there might be a follow up video to it in the future.
Jonathan, thanks so much for your time today and for all the work you did putting all this
together and seeing what, you know, what gold there was to sift for in
there.
Thank you for having me. And just as a reassurance, I am still sane, although I would say that
if I had gone insane.
Yeah, well, that's true.
That's true. Before we line up for our place in your memories, I want to remind you that tickets are still
available for our upcoming live God of a Movies in Portland, Oregon on May 24th.
We've moved to a larger venue to accommodate demand.
It's already going to be the biggest show that we've ever done and we'd love to add you
to that record.
Check the show notes for more information.
Anyway, that's all the blast movie we've got for you tonight, but we'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more. If you can't wait that long, be able
to look out for a brand new episode of our Sister Show's Hot Friend God of a Movies, doing a 7
on Eastern on Tuesday and an even newer episode of our Half Sister Show Citation Needed debuting at
noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, this show wouldn't show if I neglected to thank Keith Enright
for putting the Blast in Blast Fem. It's kind of there. I want to thank Lucinda Lujans for putting
the Pi in impiety most weeks. She was off this week. I want to thank Eli Bosnik for putting the sack and sacrilege. I want to thank
Jonathan Jerry one more time and encourage you to check out not just the video that we talked about
today but all of his work. He does some great stuff. Check the show notes for more links.
I also want to thank Quinn for putting this week's Farnsworth quote, nothing prepares you for this
administration quite like a career in waste management, I suppose. But most of all, of course,
I want to thank this week's best people, Sable, Chad, Nicholas, and Katie,
who are so badass, bird flu knows better than to fuck with them.
Together, these four formidable fornicators forfeited some fortune for our foreboding forewarnings this week by giving us money.
Not everybody has enough money to do that shit well with eggs,
but if you do, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash scathingatheist,
whereby you'll have access to an extended ad-free version of every episode. Or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage at scat episode donation at patreon.com slash scaling a theist whereby you'll have access to an extended ad free version of every episode
or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the
right side of the home page at scaling a theist calm and if you'd like to help but
eggs you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review telling a friend
about the show and following us on social media and speaking of social media
Tim Robertson handles that for us and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark who also
wrote all the music that was used in this episode which was used with permission
also Morgan's just a pretty cool guy he's listening to this now. I just wanted to include that because it embarrasses him.
If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you can find all the contact info on
the contact page at skatingadvice.com. Why doesn't your throat close up more?
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