The Scathing Atheist - 657: Conjured Edition

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

In this week’s episode, Atheists find ourselves the only terrorists without a magical hat, a representative who represents himself has a fool for a client, and we’ll welcome in a pair of obsessive Joe Rogan listeners throughout the show. --- 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/ Report instances of harassment or abuse connected to this show to the Creator Accountability Network here: https://creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org/ --- Guest Links: Check out more from Cecil on Cognitive Dissonance, the Know Rogan Experience, and Season Liberally Check out more from Marsh on Skeptics with a K and the Know Rogan Experience --- Headlines: Presidential memorandum defines “anti-Christian” activity as domestic terrorism: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/ Trump accuses Mormon temple shooter of being “anti-Christian”: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/28/thomas-jacob-sanford-identified-michigan-church-shooting-suspect/86409758007/ and https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/church-shooting-fire-michigan-09-29-25 and https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/29/mormon-church-shooting-trump-sign Ryan Walters is resigning, ending his disastrous reign over Oklahoma's public schools https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/ryan-walters-is-resigning-ending Yet another prominent anti-trans Republican turns out to be a pedophile: https://scdailygazette.com/2025/09/29/former-rep-rj-may-pleads-guilty-to-sending-disgusting-and-depraved-child-sex-abuse-videos/ And https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/09/gop-lawmaker-said-trans-people-harm-children-he-just-pled-guilty-to-child-charges/ Qanon shaman sues Trump for $40 trillion: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/qanon-shaman-trump-lawsuit-capitol-riots-b2835709.html Alex Jones raises eyebrows by growing ‘Hitler mustache’ - then says it makes him more attractive to women https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/alex-jones-mustache-conspiracy-infowars-b2834442.html

Warning, this episode contains words that spellcheck often corrects to duck. This week's episode of The Skathing Atheist is brought to you by My Sheets Rock and by a Herculean capacity for compartmentalization. And now, the Skating Atheist. Hi, I'm Kira, owner of Snowhair coaching. And after 18 years of running ultramarathons and coaching people couched to 5K and beyond, I can tell you with certainty, we did in fact evolve from brave, strong, tenacious. just durable and absolutely filthy monkey people. No illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick.

And I'm Cecil Something Italian. And from New Jersey, Chicago, and way cross Georgia, this is the scathing atheist. On this week's episode, aviasts find ourselves the only terrorists without a magical hat. A representative who represents himself has only a fool for a client. And we'll swap Cecil out for a different obsessive Joe Rogan listener halfway through the show. But first, the diatribe. Time is a lot of things, but it's no defense against grief. We say that it is because there's no defense, and by clinging to time,

we can suppose that there's some relief that's always just around the chronological corner. There's nothing there but more time. And in grief, time is as much your champion as your nemesis. Because when it comes to shielding you, it's a flawless window. You can see right through it. You can hear through it. You can even smell through it. You can recall the object of your grief in painstaking detail, unobstured by this

ostensible defense. But when you try to reach through it, it turns to stone. As those of you who follow me on face, Facebook. No, I lost my dad this week. He went in for what should have been a routine operation, but there's no such thing as a routine operation when you're 75 years old. Things got bad a couple weeks ago when my whole family rushed home to say goodbye. They took him off life support on Friday afternoon and he died in a morphine-induced stupor a couple of days later with my mom and his side. But in truth, we'd been losing him for years. Alzheimer's had been doing. Alzheimer's had

chipping away at him whittling him down to his core essence. And as hard as that's been, it's been downright inspiring to see what that core essence was. Even when he lost his memories, he kept his sense of humor. Even as he lost his vocabulary, he stayed gregarious. And even when he didn't really know who I was, he treated me like his son. If you've ever lost somebody to dementia, you know that it's hard to figure out when you're supposed to start grieving them. It's the cruelty of Alzheimer's that you can miss somebody that you're having a conversation

with. You can mourn somebody who's still in your arms. And in a sense, it's a relief to see him released from the worst parts of that, the inevitable parts that are always so marked by fear and confusion. And my dad, of course, was a Christian. He went to his grave believing in a heaven everlasting. and a lot of my family agrees and I don't begrudge them that everybody's entitled to grieve in their own way and to steward his memory however they see fit but in times like this

I'm kind of happy that I don't have a heaven to put him in right I mean like if I could decide to actually put the spiritual essence of my dad into an eternal paradise where I could go visit him after I died I obviously would but I don't get to make that decision all I get to decide is where I'm going to put his memory. And I don't know because I've never really believed in an afterlife, but I feel like that's dangerous believing in something like that, right? Because how much allegiance do you owe to a memory if that memory is in heaven? If at some point in the future, I realized that I hadn't thought about him for a week

or a month or even a fucking year, how guilty would I feel if I assumed that he'd spent the whole time hanging out with Jimmy Hendricks and John Lennon at the blowjob? fountain? How easy would it be to just tuck him away in an imaginary paradise and wash my hands of any obligation to remember him, to keep him alive in this world? See, from a secular perspective, me and the other people clinging to memories are all that's left of him. If we don't carry that memory forward, that light goes out altogether. And I suppose you could call that a burden if you wanted to, but that's not how I see it. We're talking about the person who gave me my love for words, my passion for justice,

and my model for productive rage. I talked in my first book. My first book opens with how I modeled my diatribes on his harmless and hilarious road rage. And the way I've always known if I did a good job when I wrote a diatribe is that when I listen back to the final edit, I'll hear an echo of my dad's voice. I'm not carrying a burden. I'm carrying a legacy. So let the religious block the people they grieve in some gilded obliat.

I don't have one of those and I don't want one. As an atheist, I don't have a heaven to offer him. All I have is my heart. So I'll have to make room for him there. They're talking about your Jesus. This broadcast and bring you a special news bulletin. Joining me for headlines tonight are the curly and waffle to my crinkle cut, Eli, Bosnick, and Cecil Cic, and Cecil Ciceroa.

Fellas, are you ready to desperately shift to funny after a fucking eulogy diatribe? I told you to let me do a clown horn in the background for the transition is easier. You only have yourself to blame, no illusions. This show is essentially America's eulogy, so it's not much of a tone show. I guess they're all eulogies at this point, but in an effort to make it a little less awkward Regardless, we're going to buffer the headlines with a word from this week's sponsor, My Sheets Rock. I don't want pumpkin in a ravioli.

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Hey, would you try pumpkin ravioli? Like the pie? Thank you. You guys don't know what you're missing as brown butter sauce, sage? The pie. No, it sounds like the pie. And now, back to the headlines. In our lead story tonight, it turns out that we're terrorists,

which honestly explains a lot about my experience with airport security, but according to a presidential memorandum from September 25th, titled, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, pointing out that Trump is a fascist is terrorism. Huh. And in its effort to broadly redefine terrorists to mean of people who are politically inconvenient for Donald Trump, the memo explicitly lists being anti-Christian as a warning sign of terrorism. I mean, we have been warning people about terrorism for years.

And that is on us. That's on us. No, we have. Well, who's going to tell us to stand back and stand by us? Great question. Probably Soros, but yeah. Seth Andrews. So, well, he does say that to me all the time.

Yeah. He does. Yeah, it's true. Now, the crux of the memo is that saying anti-Trump stuff leads people like Charlie Kirk's killer to political violence, ergo saying anti-Trump stuff is a form of political violence, right? It's basically a 2,000-word attempt to paint all liberal and democratic groups as responsible for the acts of left-wing political violence while not tying conservative. groups to the far more prevalent

incidents of right-wing political violence. Yeah. Do you think if we tell them that the only reason we condemn them is because they're doing bad stuff, they'll come like back around to knowing they're the bad guys again? How deep can this go? I don't think that. No. And now there isn't a word in this memo that shouldn't

scare the fuck out of you, including the signature, but the part that's garnering the most attention in the atheist community is a sentence where the memo delineates a few red flags you can use to determine if a group is a terrorist organization. Quote, common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality, end quote. Or anything that wasn't outlined in Project 2025.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. Probably worth emphasizing here that according to the Fox News crowd, being anti-American means taking down. confederate statues. Being anti-capitalist means getting all been out of shape when somebody suggests genociding the homeless and being anti-Christian means having insufficiently reverent coffee cups in December. Also, extremism on migration, race, and gender means displaying a pride flag and opposing concentration camps and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family religion and morality counts as every goddamn word ever spoken on this fucking

podcast. Exactly. And if the FBI is listening, just a quick report. reminder, he's the scathing atheist. I'm just a lovable sidekick. I'm not even in the title. I'm not even in the title. I'm going to wish everyone

happy holidays so fucking hard this year. It's going to be ridiculous. Probably at a concentration camp, but still. Yeah, I mean, I still do it. We'll have a good laugh. Yeah, no, it'll be fun. It'll be fun. And you know what? We won't have any Christmas shit on our cups.

That's true, yeah. Or cups. That's true, yeah. Right. Well, we have a fire barrel to warm our hand. at least, I hope. Those will be the Cubs, yeah. So, okay, so they're redirecting the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force now to focus on organizations that oppose Trump's policies, as well as, and Trump's comments on the memo dripped with references to this, those who fund said organizations.

So he's going after Democratic mega donors. And based on his fucking rambling nonsense speech to a gathering of very confused and bored U.S. generals, he's ready to employ the military in that effort as well. So fucking, I donate on Patreon with caution, I guess. Or, or while you still can everybody, exactly. And George Soros, if you're looking for a shell podcast to hide some money, hit us up. I'm just saying, true. We'll work with you.

And in Find the Smoking Gun news, over the weekend, there was another mass shooting in the United States. I know, typical Sunday afternoon, but this one happened at a church. specifically a Mormon church in Michigan. A 40-year-old man from Burton, Michigan, who gives a fuck what his name was, rammed his vehicle into the LDS church in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan during a Sunday service.

He opened fire with an assault rifle. He set the building on fire, perhaps with some improvised explosive devices because some of those were found at the scene. The shooter killed four people and he injured eight in the attack. And he will remain a leftist until proven non-existent by the right-wing media.

Damn it. You have to imagine the right-wing's going, okay, guys, guys, we're really selling this. The left is the violent side really hard right now. So if our side could just not do a political violence for like, at least the next three days, no, God damn it. Fuck.

Bubba. They get the big broom and they sweep him under the rug as quick as they can. Right. This rug is full. Full rug. Lumpy-ass rug we got here. A lot. The response from the president came pretty quickly before we knew a lot about the shooter.

It read, quote, this appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America. The Trump administration will keep the public posted, as we always do. Except on Epstein-related stuff. Yeah, except on that. Continuing the quote, in the meantime, pray for the victims and their families. this epidemic of violence in our country must end immediately, end quote. He sent this out as a brief reprieve from the AI-generated videos of racist depictions of senators and medbed conspiracies. If only there were some way to control the guns. You know what?

Leave it with me. I'm going to cook off this, I feel like. Good luck. Well, then, to paraphrase Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA crowd spent all weekend trying to convince everyone the shooter wasn't. one of them. Great. Now we'll never be on Disney Plus season.

Nope. We're so close. You see, two weeks before, the administration had tried their damnedest to make the Charlie Kirk shooter into some kind of leftist trans activist. They did their best to release very specific pieces of this online history

and private messages to show that this was the thing that motivated. Often these acts are chalked up to unstable people. But in the Kirk case, they did their best to show that this was leftist ideology that actually pulled the trigger and they were going to use this killing to wage war on dangerous leftists

and trans activists. Yeah, it's nice that they didn't have to change their plans because of it. Yeah. Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody showed me a passage from Project 2025 that said and then use Charlie Kirk's murder to justify cracking down on left wing groups. It's like

they had a Google Alert set. It's like crazy. But what happens when the shooter might be one of their own supporters. No major news outlets thus far have speculated much on the political motives here, something that perhaps

the Wall Street Journal could take note next time they are in a group text with the administration about inscriptions on bullet casings. Some news organizations like the Guardian in the USA Today have mentioned that his social media has images of the shooter

in a Trump 2020 shirt. And also that his Google Street view of his home has a Trump-Pent sign on it. And that image was from this June. Well, Cash hasn't had time to write up some new text messages yet. No, that's true. It's been a busy week. Honestly, you have to wonder how many supporters Trump lost for suggesting that Mormons counted as Christians in his first tweet.

Right? Yeah. Right. See, when it suits them, this disingenuous administration will use any political lever they can to try to look like the underdog and that their ideas are under attack. The Kirk death was a perfect chance for them to say, to everyone. Hey, your conservative religious ideas are under attack in the United States. And here's the culprit. It's trans people. And you can tell this because of the things that this person posted and what they cared about. But when the killer has a pro-Trump stance, suddenly this isn't

what we're talking about. And they're going to try to find any way they can to distance themselves from this because they opened up this type of guilt by association. And they claim that shooters were motivated by ideology, except when that ideology is their own. If they can't turn the shooter into someone who can magically marginalize white supremacists, then they want to turn the page on this

as quickly as they can. Amen. And in Rye, Rye, this American Pie News. Podcast listener, in unprecedented and horrifying times like these, it's important to find the silver linings. Things like

family, friends, And the nonstop failure and embarrassment of Oklahoma's superintendent, Ryan Walters. Or should I say, former superintendent because after once again losing ever so loseally once again last week, he has announced he is resigning from his position to join an anti-union teaching association. So you know we're going to talk about it. He's so bad at education, he's somehow graduating to something worse. That's insane, man. Right. I want to be clear that he wasn't pushed out for constantly breaking the law and deliberately miseducating Oklahoma students, although that is what he was doing.

He left voluntarily because he wasn't succeeding at doing that. Not getting enough wins. It's just tough. So I'd like to begin by thanking the truly one million of you who sent us this story to Skathing News at Gmail.com. Look, we appreciate all the folks who send us atheist news to Skathing News. at gmail.com. But when our listenership rises up in our inbox in joyous jubilation as they did at this news, that is reward unto itself.

Skaithy News at gmail. Yeah. Okay. So sometimes you got to read through every email looking for the right story. But then sometimes like 600 emails have the same subject line and you're like, okay, well, this one, whatever it is. Right. So just in case you're new around here, Noah's the smart one, I'm the funny one.

Cecil's my very best friend in the world. and Ryan Walters's short, sad time as superintendent of Oklahoma was a positive festival of failure. First, he tried to buy Trump Bibles for every school classroom in the state and failed. Then he tried to give all the teachers my little fascism loyalty test

that never happened. Then, most importantly, he accidentally showed 70s Bush to an office full of people who were there to yell at him for being an idiot. And then finally, he got told by the Supreme Court of the state that he wasn't allowed to change

the social studies curriculum when school boards weren't looking. And he personally drew fig leaves on all the sexual organs in every state anatomy. I mean, look, couldn't uphold the standards of education that we expect here in Oklahoma

is about as damning a critique as you can get. Yeah, really is. And so, thanks to that wildly inexhaustive list of his failures, this week. He announced that he's taking the balls he got out in his office and going home. Telling Fox

News where he made the announcement, quote, I'm excited to announce. I'll be stepping down as Oklahoma State Superintendent and taking the role of CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance. We are going to destroy the teachers unions. Yikes. Sounds like a lot of freedom. Yeah. Jesus.

We have seen the teachers unions use money and power to corrupt our schools to undermine our schools. We are one of the biggest grassroots organizations. in the country, we will build an army of teachers to defeat the teachers' union was for all. So this fight's going national and we'll get our schools back on track. We will not allow any further union control, end quote.

And then he twisted his mustache and he tied the teacher's pensions to the railroad track. Right? Yeah, exactly. Jesus. So you might be wondering to yourself, podcast, listener, what's the teacher's freedom alliance? Not a sponsor, no point. Sometimes it's just for the love of the game, though. Anyways, Walters actually did a pretty good job of describing it.

Well, except the part where he pretended it was grassroot. Yeah, man. Money doesn't grow on trees. It apparently grows on grassroots. Yes. So the TFA is an offshoot of the right-wing Freedom Foundation, an anti-union advocacy group probably best known for suing public sector unions for not properly informing employees that they have the right to be paid less money.

In other words, they could not more obviously be the bad guys if one of their offshoots specialized in puppy kicking. So it actually makes sense that Walters is joining them as a CEO. Yeah, right. Honestly. He then funded giving waitresses fake $100 tips and that are actually prayer cards.org. Right after this. I think that was literally Ray Comfort, but yes.

Who would be the person who funds an anti-union advocacy group? Brass. I wonder who would be the. that person. The roots. I wonder what kind of income level that person would have.

So grassy. Golf courses have a lot of grass. Especially the nice ones. Here we do. Either way, I for one will miss Ryan Walter's ill-fated attempts at Theocracy

and the rays of sunshine in our gloom that they represented. But if I know Ryan, just because he's out of a job, doesn't mean he'll stop embarrassing himself in the most public ways humanly possible. So looking forward to the first press conference of the TFA

where he sits on his own balls and shift himself and something. Yep. That's clearly coming. Amazing. Next up in headlines in No Fucking Kidding News. Hey, everyone. Trigger warning on this next one.

There's some in-depth talk about child sexual assault. I bet it's a Republican. Sorry, go ahead. So this weekend, anti-LGB. politician from South Carolina, State Representative R.J. May pled guilty to some crimes. He had spent his career calling LGBT people groomers and accusing drag queens and trans people of harming kids.

Turns out, RJ was distributing child sex abuse material. These images included some where adults were sexually abusing seven-year-olds. This is going to be awkward for moms for liberty who honored this disgusting trash bag in 2023 as their legislator of the year. I don't want to know what the trophy looked like. Oh, God. Yeah.

I mean, at the time, he thought it was weird that it was a signed EP of Isn't an ironic, but Netflix really loving the song. Man, it's a good thing that literally anybody involved with Moms for Liberty has even the smallest measurable amount of shame or else they just carry on like nothing happened, right? R.J.

tried to acquire T. 265 different files of toddlers and young men involved in sex acts on KIC, a social media network. He tried this in 2024 using a clever screen name, Joe Biden 69. Joe Biden is spelled with four ends in that, by the way. Yeah, right? Because three other people already were Joe Biden. He already had that one. Yeah.

After he was caught, he decided to represent himself in court. He petitioned the judge to dismiss evidence that was obtained with a warrant. but he doesn't have a law degree and had no idea what he was talking about. The police had collected evidence that he had been exchanging child porn images and he has sexual interest in children of the same age as his own children

and that he has sexual interest in incest between young children and their parents and he had also, quote, flown to Columbia to film himself having sex with three underage girls, end quote. Okay, but at least a drag queen didn't read them a story for frankly. It turns out a lot of his accusations were evidenced by, like, having seen that guy at the Wednesday mixers.

I guess we should have caught this sooner. RJ was a founding member of the South Carolina Republican Freedom Caucus. The hell you say. Who else is in the Freedom Caucus? Oh, Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, and Lauren Bobert. Oh, spot the pattern, everybody. Can you spot the pattern? He was re-elected in South Carolina.

three months after there was an FBI raid on his home to recover electronic devices, he was elected with 68% of the vote. Last year, during a debate on trans care for minors in the South Carolina House, May said, quote, we as legislators have an obligation to ensure that our children have no harm done to them, end quote. Dibs. Oh, Jesus Christ.

Maybe his next job will be as prison projectionist. There you go. On Twitter, a still active tweet by May responds to Elon Musk. Musk says removing child exploitation is priority number one. Please reply in comments if you see anything that Twitter needs to address to which May responds, quote, wonder if this includes exposing children to drag shows or pushing sex changes on toddlers, end quote. Also, please list anything else we might be going after and how people get away with it.

Yeah. It's just like what's the best. Right, right. But holy shit, isn't counting on these pedophiles to self-report a perfect encapsulation of Musk's management of Twitter? That's amazing. Okay, guys, I am going to turn around and I want you to put your pedophilia. Dad, stop walking towards me until I turn around. My dad.

Amazing. With this guilty plea, he faces five counts of sending child sexual abuse videos, which means that he can't. which means that he can get five to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for each count. If he ever gets out of prison, he'll have to spend from five years to the rest of his life in supervised release. It also have to be registered as a sex offender

and in South Carolina as a felon, he would not be able to vote or hold office. But he still might be able to run for president. Yes, he will, yeah. I may even win. And in the fuck it docket news. Among the many unevidence assertions that Trump has made in his efforts to rewrite the history of the January 6th Keystone Insurrection is a recent unevidenced claim that FBI agents were placed within the crowd to act as agitators. The idea being, I guess, that without those undercover agents spurring them on, the otherwise reasonable Trump supporters that were attracted to his nakedly spurious claims of a stolen election never would have attacked police officers broken into the Capitol or smeared their feces.

around. So with the inherent reasonableness of that crowd in mind, I'd like to tell you about the QAnon Shaman's $40 trillion lawsuit against Trump, wherein he claims that he's the real president and that Christopher Nolan stole the idea for the dark night from his imagination. Guys, pay close attention to this one before the Supreme Court makes it a law. I hope they make it a rule that everyone in the Supreme Court has to wear his hat while they're on the bench like that. Yeah, like that water buffalo thing he wears, it'd be amazing. Yeah, otherwise, how could they be a jury of his peers?

Exactly. So you'll all remember Jacob Hainsley from cosplaying as a Bills fan from Bedrock during the world's least successful B&E. Well, that guy, who, by the way, has since rescinded his support for Trump over his refusal to release the Epstein files, has filed a rambling 26-page single-paragraph lawsuit in which he claims that he's the rightful president that no laws but the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have any legal standing

and that James Cameron stole the idea for Avatar from him independently from Nolan's theft apparently in addition to Trump the lawsuit names the Federal Reserve the NSA the International Monetary Fund the World Bank, the State of Israel Elon Musk, T-Mobile

and Warner Brothers Studios is he suing T-Mobile to bring back Carly folks and get rid of Billy Bob Thornton because I will file an animorphs brief. I will do that. And look, I'm not here to pick on this guy's mental illness. If you want stuff like that, you're going to have to listen to a different show or the archives.

Or just for my turn to talk. Right, one of those things. But I do think it's worth talking about because as you'll recall, this dude was arrested, tried, and convicted for his role in the fucking Looney Binsurrection. There were countless stories about the wacky shenan. Anagans that attended his trial and his incarceration. And then in his great wisdom, Trump decided to pardon the motherfucker along with everybody else involved in that idiotic attempt to remain president by holding one's breath in the toy aisle.

So it's kind of worth keeping track of what he's doing with his post-pardon life. So many people go to jail and come out lawyers. I mean, not this guy, but some people do that. Yeah. Now, of course, the lawsuit will go no further than the burst of media derision that we are, we are currently indulging in. But in the story I read about this in The Independent, they said that they had contacted the various parties

to the lawsuit for comment. And the fact that somebody at Warner Brothers had to read through this drivelous manifesto instead of another desperate entreaty from Eli to get them to release Batgirl for GAM purposes is enough for me to say, I'm personally aggrieved by it, and I am considering legal action.

That's right, everybody. And I want Bat Girl for work purposes. what I want it for. I'm going to use it. And finally tonight in hell comes to Jonestown News. If you ever find yourself a wash and despair at the state of the

world, I want to encourage you to look to Alex Jones, a multi-millionaire at the top of his power with hundreds of thousands of fans and a broadcast empire who is now broke to the tune of the GDP of several sovereign nations. And

as of this week, Sporting a Hitler mustache. So we're going to talk about it. Yeah. His upper lips really wide, though, so it kind of looks like a carpet sample under there. It does. Very strange looking. Thank you, Cecil.

Look, a Hitler mustache doesn't work for anybody. But, like, even if, like, Hitler hadn't already ruined it, it wouldn't work for him. Wouldn't at all, absolutely. Exception, of course, is Michael Jordan who could do anything. Well, yeah, that's true. Now, before you get mad at Alex Jones, he's wearing the look as a test. That's right, podcast, listener. You judged Alex Jones too quickly.

No, you didn't. Jones said his new look is a, quote, social experiment. Yeah. To show how people look on the surface of things instead of what the actual policies are. God, what a total coward. Do the Hitler mustache and blackface while pulling the skin of your eyes back. Oh, my God. That's what you need to do.

Right. If you're going to go, fucking go. Amen. No flinching. No flinching. He continues, quote, being a white guy that has German features, classical German features with a Hitler mustache

and it was interesting I could tell you that it had a wild effect on women I thought they were about to start throwing their panties at me but they weren't and they didn't know why they were looking at me and because most modern women even young ones don't really even know what Hitler is

in the back of their head they know what it is so they got a guy with you know kind of Lex Luther meets Adolf Hitler looks blue eyes what and they just didn't know what to do. They're like melting. End exact quotes.

No. Okay. German features. Classical. In that he looks like an unidentified dumpling as that what we're saying? Perogi-esque. Yeah. Or maybe they're referring to his schnitzel-like complexion as possible. Look, when a woman is staring at you terrified talking into her phone at 911, she's not melting.

Okay. She's not melting. She's shrinking away. I think I see how you. There's a difference. Very big difference. If she's crying, that counts just getting wet. You're the one who made an assumption.

But what does Alex Jones think of Adolf Hitler? I'm so glad you asked, because he would like to share his opinion. And yes, it is bad. Quote, I've never supported Hitler. And I oppose all forms of totalitarian systems. I don't think Hitler is the worst totalitarian in history, but he's right up there. In the top three or four, end quote.

Or four. What's your top five? It's amazing. I like that they've switched from fascist to totalitarian because fascist hits too close to home for them. Yeah. No, it's like with Joe Rogan had to stop calling the other guy's mainstream media. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. So it turns out that owing grieving parents a couple billion dollars is not amazing for your brain. That or maybe the ladies are cream in their jeans for Al. Alex's new look. We'll see how the experiment works out and report back. All right. So with all due apologies for closing on the thought of women creaming their jeans for Alex Jones, we're going to wrap the headlines up. Eli, Cecil, thanks, as always, and sometimes respectively. Dimagchi. And when we come back, we're going to swap Cecil out for a younger model. A younger, smarter, and better-looking model. Amazing. I don't know about better-looking.

No, better-look. Take that. As you may have noticed, Heath was unable to join us this week. He's taking my dad's death really hard. But fortunately, we were able to scare the help of not one but two guests this week. So without further ado, we'd like to welcome the other co-host of the No Rogan Experience, Michael Marshall, for a segment called Who's Wo? Marsh, welcome back. Oh, thank you so much. I always like to be back here

to tell you about some of the worst people in pseudor science history. So, yeah, always an absolute pleasure. Yeah, we couldn't have Marsh and Cecil on the same episode. Otherwise, this would officially count as a crossover episode. So we had to separate them out via segments of the show. Oh, yeah, we'd have released it as a bonus episode. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

So what do you get for us today? So here on this regular rundown of some of the biggest and worst woo proponents around, we tend to focus on the loner loons or the solo scammers, the people whose personal story takes us on a singular journey through the very history of pseudoscientists. And while sometimes their lives will intersect with other folk, these poor unfortunates are usually little more than bit players

in our main character's movie. However, this time I'm going to break that mold a little bit because this week our who's woo features a pair whose lives and lies are inextricably linked. And so we couldn't cover one without covering the other. Now, admittedly, grammatically, that makes it less of a who's woo and more of a who are woo. But I'm not going to call it that because it's a little clunky to say. And also, if I write the word whore in a script, I'll be kicked off the British internet. So I can't call it who are woo.

That's true, yeah. But all of which is to say, today we're going to talk about Ed and Lorraine Warren. Oh, there are so many words I could say about them that would get me kicked off the British internets. Plus, everyone knows Hoor Woo is just astrology, so it would have been confusing in the first place, Mark. So Edward Warren Maney was born in September 1926 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, just four months before Lorraine Rita Moran. Apropos. And in 1945, when Ed was on leave from his World War II assignment in the U.S. Navy, the two got married. And then in what's becoming a recurrent theme in certain Who's Woo segments,

details of their early lives are slightly fuzzy in that we really only have their word to go on it. Case in point, Ed, for example, explained that his lifelong fascination with the supernatural was a result of having been born and raised in a haunted house, according to Ed. Meanwhile, Lorraine insisted that for her, it's because from the age of seven, she was capable of seeing people's auras and speaking to the dead,

according to Lorraine. So, suffice to say, there is... No contemporary corroboration of either of those claims. There isn't even any like theoretical corroboration that could be. No, guys, you can't use each other as a reference. What do you mean that's your whole thing? It can't be your whole thing. Well, nevertheless, that shared love of the supernatural led them to founding the New England Society

for Psychic Research in 1952, the oldest ghost hunting group in America. They were barely 26 years old at the time, which is actually the same age I was when I found of the Meresite Skeptic Society, but there the similarity ends. By this time, Ed was describing himself as a self-taught demonologist, presumably because that's the only possible type of demonologists.

I see a gap in the university system. And meanwhile, Lorraine claimed to be a light trans medium, claiming that she could go into a semi-trans-like state to communicate with the dead. while retaining all memory of what she'd said and done. And all I'll point out here is, that's a far easier gig to keep up if you're really bad at pretending to be in a trance.

Well, when Ed and Lorraine were first married, she'd pretend to be in a full trance, but now she just pretends enough for it to finish. And by the way, that can't be bothered to even do the whole scam thing. Going to be a bit of a theme going forward with these movies. Yeah, it sure is. So from these simple origins, many highly questionable legends would be born, the first of which came in 1970, when the N-E-SPR, their group, was contacted by a 28-year-old student nurse named Donna from Hartford, Connecticut, who felt absolutely sure that her Raggedy Ann doll named Annabelle was haunted.

Okay, not the biggest bullshit claim that needs to be dealt with, but her Raggedy Ann doll was named Raggedy fucking Ann. That's the whole point. It's not Annabelle. So according to Donna, or at least according to what the Warrens say that Donna said, Annabelle could move by herself and had violent intent in doing so. So, for example, Donna had a roommate called Angie, who had a fiancé called Lou. What was Lou surname? Go fuck yourself. But Annabelle, we're told, disliked Lou, the fiancé of Angie, who was the roommate of Donna, who was the one who gave Annabelle to Ed and Lorraine, who were the ones telling this story.

You don't know. They're from Canada. Well, one night, Lou walked to see the doll at the end of his bed and climbing slowly up his body until it made its way to his neck, at which point it strangled him until he blacked out, according to the Warrens. But the next morning, he checked his neck for any marks,

and there were none, which shows that this was definitely supernatural. I want to point out that even their lie is most easily explained as a bad dream. That's amazing. Yeah. By the way, podcast listener, if you're surprised, to find out that Annabelle is a raggedy and doll and not the scary one you've seen in the movies.

It's because the real Annabelle is objectively hilarious looking and all her movies become comedies if you picture her in them. Okay, podcast lister, Eli, put a picture of the real Annabelle in our notes and she appears to be in a timeout box made of tarot cards, a crucifix, and a sign that says, warning positively do not. Yes, the end. End of sign. Yes.

Still, ever willing to lend a helping hand when it comes to indulging someone's paranoia in a way that might lead to publicity, Ed and Lorraine took Annabelle off Donna's hands and surmised that, yeah, actually, the doll was indeed possessed by an actual demon. That self-taught demonology training clearly coming in very handy for that assessment.

And in the Warren's possession for decades, Annabelle would continue to show her malicious streak. So years later, there's one young man visiting their occult museum made fun of Annabelle pulling silly faces at this demonic doll. But then on the way home, he lost control of his motorbike, hitting a tree and dying on impact. And the name of that young man, don't worry about it. Albert Einstein. Also, Annabelle once stabbed a homicide detective. And his name and any identifying information isn't important.

when you think about it. Never would have happened if she was an Addy Walker doll, okay? There's no way. Just Teddy Rookspin, yeah. Also, not at all important is the fact that there was an episode of the Twilight Zone that aired in 1963 called Living Doll, in which a doll got haunted by a malicious evil spirit that takes revenge on a little girl called Christy and her mom Annabel. Jesus Christ. Seven years before the Warren's had Annabelle in their possession.

details of all of that were not included in the 1980 book The Demonologist, which was written as an exclusive telling of the Warren's stories here. Right. So you know what that means? Rod Serling was in on it. That's right. Fun fact, Rod Serling is from Binghamton, New York. The episode Walking Distance is inspired by the park near my childhood home.

Okay. Well, in 1971. Carousel Capital of the World. I am so sorry, I am done. Okay. Okay, okay. Well, in 1971, in Harrisville, Rhode Island, Roger and Carolyn Perron and their young family moved into a new 200-acre home, but the children soon claimed that they've been seeing spirits in the house and that items went missing. And as anyone who's ever shared a home with young children would know, things are never where they're not meant to be, and children never make up stories for attention. So there was only one possible explanation, which ghosts? Oh, really? I feel like it could have been any number of kinds of ghosts, but whatever you say, I'm not the expert. No, it's the witch ones. Specifically, the witch ones. Very specifically, the ghost of Bathsheba Sherman, who'd lived in the house in the early 19th century with her four children, three of whom died mysteriously before the age of seven.

Okay, dying before the age of seven in the early 1800s isn't mysterious unless you had a fucking riddle in your hand when you die. So Bathsheba's tragedy seemed suspicious to her superstitious community, and they labeled her a Satanist who sacrificed her own children with a knitting needle, although there was no evidence to convict her when this went to court. Yeah, and it's obviously fake. I've never known anyone who does anything with a knitting needle that doesn't tell everyone they know about it right away. So, yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

So a friend of Carolins in the house contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren. and they turned up to the house to investigate, with Lorraine confidently asserting that the haunting was indeed a dark presence named Bathsheba, who had indeed sacrificed her children to Lucifer before hanging herself and cursing anyone who'd move into that property. And we know that has to be true, that has to be the case, because how else would Lorraine Warren have been able to know about the lady who lived in the house, whose story was at least enough of a local scandal to end up in an unsuccessful criminal case against him? and therefore presumably a matter of public records.

She walks in. The spirits are also telling me that you have a lien against the property for unpaid work by the JLS construction company in 2021 and the estimated value is $340,000. Okay, I'm confused about what Bathsheba's goal was here. So she gives loser for four kids, but then the benefits were so meage that she committed suicide. It feels like she didn't review the contract.

Right? Well, but she only killed three of her kids. So maybe that was the issue. Maybe that fourth kid was like, oh, for fuck, Zach, I've sacrificed the wrong one. This one's a nightmare. I've done this the wrong run. You never know. You never know.

Well, speaking to the Providence Journal in 2013, to coincide with the release of The Conjuring, the Hollywood movie based on the Warren's account of what took place in this house, on which Lorraine served as a consultant on the movie, Lorraine explained that her biggest concern, actually, about the Harrisville haunting, wasn't so much the dead witch and the spooky events, but the family's lack of religious faith. Oh, really?

She said, at that particular time, the people did not have religion. It was very dangerous. You know how hard it is to sell people my bullshit without an underlying set of shared delusions? I was in the motherfucking woods with these assholes, okay? Well, I will admit that most atheists are scarier than fucking raggedy ann dolls and childhood imaginations.

So there's that. So Lorraine also explained that while in one of her, light trances in the house. She saw, quote, the most grotesque thing she'd ever seen in her life, unquote, which he managed to dispel by shouting at it to go away in the name of God, which is further evidence of her psychic gifts because nobody else could see anything there at the time. It was the lineup for the Riyadh Comedy Festival. You're right. So from then on, if something spooky happened in the broadly New England-ish region, the Warrens were going to be there to validate it. In 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into a new

house on the south shore of Long Island, New York, in a suburban neighborhood called Amityville. Less than a year earlier, that house had been the scene of a multiple murder with Ronnie DeFail killing a young family in their sleep. And that was something the Lutzers were aware of when they bought the house. Yeah, something they were both aware of and willing to profit from. Yes, yeah, Absolutely. And within days of moving in, the Lutz family claimed that they started to notice odd phenomena. So there were odours that came and went, and the house would make sounds in the middle of the night, and doors were ripped from their hinges. Also, sometimes it was chilly. Plus, there were a few occasions when Lutz claimed he saw his wife physically transformed into an

old woman with the face, hair and wrinkles of a 90-year-old, which to me feels like something you mention ahead of the temperature if you're going to make a list of weird occurrences. Bary in the lead. Okay, so, but that list feels like the first time he ever said it, the person he was talking to just kept saying, okay, but Old House in New England, and he got desperate at the end,

and my wife turned 90. My wife looks terrible. Because of the haunting. Yeah. Absolutely. 100% that. So one night, according to Lutz, he heard his children's beds, slamming up and down on the floor above him.

But he couldn't get up to help because he felt pinned down by an unseen force that definitely wasn't just sleep paralysis that happened sometimes when you're sleeping. Also, his wife was levitating and moving across the bed. So with all of that, the family left the house the next morning, just 28 days after they first moved in. And then the very next day, a removal man arrived

to move their furniture out of the house. And he saw nothing at all, parallel, actually. Sorry, ghost, my missus already looks like a 90-year-old woman she does. But seriously, the bed is going to be extra because I've got to pivot it. So a month later than that, Ed and Lorraine turned up to investigate the amateur house, along with a film crew from the television station, Channel 5, New York. And unsurprisingly, their conclusion was that this really was the work of malevolent spirits, despite the fact that other investigators, including apparently one prominent vampiroly,

concluded that this whole story was just a hawks, and there was a litany of evidence that disproved the account given by the Lutzers. And that was an account, it's worth pointing out, to which they'd sold the book and movie rights already. And they were soon touring TV talk shows in order to promote that account. And for their part, the Warrens didn't fail to get a taste because their fleeting involvement with the Amityville story got adapted into The Conjuring 2 in 2016 by Hollywood. For those keeping track, we're now two movies in and nobody conjured a fucking thing. Pick a different title. Right. Yeah. So their supernatural tourism and exploitation, it wasn't actually limited to New England. They even made it over to the OG England from

time to time, including popping up in Enfield, North London, in 1977, when an unassuming semi-detached council house became the scene of a poltergeist activity, courtesy of the report from sisters Janet and Margaret Hodgson. Although, skeptically, investigators actually surmised that all of the reports of disembodied voices and loud noises and thrown toys and overturned chairs were actually the result of attention-starved children, which might also have explained why the foretoe of Janet levitating looked suspiciously like a child bouncing on her bed. Still, the Warrens were persuaded that actually this definitely was a case of demonic possession. When you think about it, it really was. Meanwhile, others

pointed out that the warrants came to that conclusion in a very hasty fashion after first deciding there was money to be made from telling the story. And then they left abruptly after the other investigators there were reluctant to play ball with this profitable version of events. Coincidentally, an exaggerated version of their involvement in the Enfield Poltergeyes case was also adapted into the conjuring two. More like the conjuring two and a half, am I right, everybody? And by the way, for those of you who want to defend the warrants by saying,

well, maybe they're just that gullible, their most gullible existing humans. I want to point out that their gullibility always coincides with profitability. Right? Like, if they were really as gullible as you'd have to be, to believe all of this shit, they'd have lost all their money a long time ago

to a fucking Nigerian prince. Yeah, absolutely. I do love the image of them trying to get the whatever version of marshing on it and then person's saying, no, right? So we're thinking maybe we do, oh, you're a real fuck. I mean, Gotta go, NARC.

Yeah, I believe it was either Harry Price or Guy Lime Playfair they would have been talking to. Yeah, NARC, yeah, exactly. So in 1981, when Arna Chai and Johnson was accused of killing his landlord, Ed and Lorraine popped into the case to claim that actually the killing was a result of Johnson having been possessed by a demon. The judge, unsurprisingly, throughout his attempt to plead not guilty by reason of demonic possession, but that didn't actually stop the Warren's version of events becoming the plot of the 1983 book

The Devil in Connecticut and then the 2021 film The Conjuring The Devil Made Me Do It Well, for fuck's sake. As featured on God-Offle Movies Episode 304.

Oh, that's right, based on a true fabrication. I remember. Indeed, it was, yeah. 1983 was also the era, according to an Ed Warren trivia website, that the couple

investigated a werewolf demon that was possessing a man called Bill Ramsey, who, unlike traditional werewolves, didn't transform into a giant man wolf, but apparently just became a bit more aggressive and sometimes bit

people. And that was until they successfully exercised him and then he stopped doing that. But even the pro-Warren trivia website notes that a lack of photo of video evidence has called that claim to question. Dude, you want to be in the Conjuring Three or not? Bite my wife for the camera. Bite my wife for the camera. Jesus. It's great. They didn't even have to fake a werewolf. He could have just growled and be like, no. Hire the Chicago Puncher. Jesus. So in more than four decades of work, Ed and Lorraine claimed to have investigated more than 10,000 cases. Though, there is a lack of corroborating evidence for that claim of 10,000. Just as there is a lack of corroborating evidence for most of their conclusions in the alleged paranormal cases that they did actually insert themselves into.

And throughout that entire time, it was kind of hard to find someone with a spooky story that the warrant wouldn't validate as genuinely demonic, especially if they could use it for publicity, which more often than not, they could. Ed died in 2006 and Lorraine died in 2019, but their place in paranormal history and myth-making has been well and truly cemented. Not least, thanks to the work of a string of Hollywood spook stories, which claimed to be based on the real-life cases that Ed and Lorraine investigated, but crucially, based primarily on their own self-serving accounts of those cases. Yeah, chief among them that Patrick Wilson was. a great choice to play Ed Warren.

Oh, no, yeah, we look a lot alike. I think Patrick Wilson's a great choice. And, by the way, quick while they discussed to the fact that they tried to use their lives to exonerate a murderer is at the front of your mind, I want to remind you that Warner Brothers

made a lot more money on this shit than the Warren's ever did, probably worth keeping in mind. Oh, God, absolutely, yeah, yeah. So when the first of those films, The Cundering, when it was released in 2013, USA Today spoke to Steve Nevella, who was president of New England's Skeptical Society

and who actually met and investigated the warrants. Novella said at the time, the Warrens are good at telling gore stories. You could do a lot of movies based on the stories they've spun, but there's absolutely no reason to believe there's any legitimacy to them. And it seems like Hollywood was listening to the first half of that quarter was. Because they released nine films in an entire cinematic universe following the conjuring. But for all of the remarkable deeds attributed to Ed and Lorraine,

the only thing they ever managed to actually conjure was a last. legacy as paranormal pioneers pieced together from exaggerations, falsehoods, awkward cameos in other people's tragedies. And that legacy alone makes them very worthy entries into whose wound. Before we wrap things up tonight, I want to sincerely thank all the people who have reached out to offer their condolences. So many people have reached out to me with some version of you help me when I was grieving, so now I want to repay the favor. I've never felt better about what I do for a living, even as I've never felt worse. But most specifically, I want to thank Heath and

Eli. I know I do that every week, but when things went south from my dad, there was never any question that they were going to take care of everything and that I could go there and be there as long as I needed to be. So thank you guys for that. I also want to thank Cecil and Marsh for helping out this week. I also want to thank all the colleagues that reached out and offered to step in, most especially Thomas Smith, who was literally on call last weekend to make an emergency last second trip to New Orleans if I couldn't do the live show, which is incredible. It's so, so nice of them to do it. And most of all, of course, I need to thank Lucinda, who has been everything for me.

Anyway, after all that, it would seem kind of crass to plug the other shows and the Patreon and stuff, but rest assured, dear patrons, that I'm well aware of how big the backlog of people who need thanked by name is at this point. And I promise to compliment you enthusiastically when I'm in a more complimentary mood. wouldn't want me to do it now anyway. So with a quick thanks to Tim Robertson, who handles our social media, and Morgan Clark, who takes care of all the audio stuff

and wrote the music, we're going to call this an episode. If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at scathingatheas.com. Alright. All right. I'm good to roll right into headlines if you guys are. I am too. It's actually kind of nice here, so I don't have to stop and desperately run my air conditioner. You got to get your fancy. Yeah, I do. I do. But now that it's October, like, I'm not going to desperately need it again for like 11 months or, well, not five, fuck six months, I guess, or whatever it will be. But yeah. So I probably won't get it until then. But yeah.

I'll warn you about the bad thing about it is you're constantly going to turn around and go, oh, it's not on. Fuck, it's on. What is it? I got the Medea air conditioner, the one that the window slides halfway into. Oh, yeah. Okay. So quiet. And I asked Morgan, I was like, hey, man, like, I'm going to be, like, recording right next to this thing.

And he was like, look at this. And it's quieter than the fan I was running in my old office. Oh, wow. All right. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Right on. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I'm going to get me one. But of course, Eli tells me about that in like mid-September right after the four months. I like to let you make it through August. No, no, I like, I appreciate that. Do an especially long, you know, narration on D&T minus. Don't want you spoiled. Listeners, you don't know this, but when Heath's doing the outro on skeptocrat, like I've got my mic muted and I'm running my AC.

You're so gone. No Illusions is so, to say no illusions does not participate in that part of the program, it's not an overstate. Well, this time of year, I will. But yeah. All right, here we go. When I tell you, Morgan, that he was making 9-11 jokes before we're the record, I mean 9-11 jokes that we can't have on our show.

They can't even put on. Yeah, exactly. All right. Headlines beat. Which I just want to point out, because I know Eli didn't think about what he wrote the ad and everything, but the fact that you have the, you have to stop reacting to this way when people die thing, right after we're talking about my dad. That's fucking funny, right?

Like, that's pretty funny. It's really funny. When we were delivering it, I was considering ad-libbing. Like, no, this isn't about Noah's dad. And then I was like, let's let, let Noah take the lead on this one. Yeah, right, right. I'm no Michael Marshall just throwing out dead dad jokes left and right.

Jesus. He totally did. That's amazing. Like Noah got on the line. He was like, who's got a dad? Raise your hand. Man, can't wait until I get cancer. That's going to be awesome.

All right. Sound like my prayers. Noah Cecil's still stealing my prayers. All right. Well, now I want to run my air conditioner, damn it. No, okay, we'll go. We'll go. This content is canned credentialed,

which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm at their hotline at 617-249-4-255 or on their website at creator-accountabilitynetwork.org. The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle and a Thunderstorm LLC. Copyright 2025. All rights reserved.