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For the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

Sir, in the orange, phone away, please.

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I can, in fact, confirm that we did evolve from filthy monkey men and women.

It's Thursday.

It's May 8th.

And it's National Coconut Cream Pie Day.

Not the porn category, but that's fun too.

Yeah, yeah.

It's fun too.

I'm No Illusions.

I'm Eli Bosnik.

I'm Heathen Wright.

And from Woodrow, Wilsons, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Wake Cross, Georgia, this is the Skating Atheist.

Of this week's episode, Christian bigots put themselves on a list for a change.

Donald Donald Trump gets down with the sithness.

And Thomas Cecil will be here to explain how Eli's spreadsheet got lost in the mail.

The first the die trial.

Lucinda and I made an all-too-rare trip to the theater the other day to check out Ryan Kugler's new vampire movie, Sinners.

Partly because Ryan Kugler is is one of the best directors working in Hollywood and he seems to get better with every movie, and partly because how could I not go to theaters to see a movie called Sinners?

And I know this isn't a movie review show, so I'm going to keep my praise brief, but the movie was fantastic.

It hits on all fronts.

Great writing, great soundtrack, great cinematography, great acting.

Yo, Michael B.

Jordan played dual roles as identical twins and mastered two slightly different variations on the same Mississippi accent for it.

But what impressed me most about the movie is that it had a strong anti-Christian message.

I'm strong for a Hollywood movie anyway, not for like a fucking diatribe.

So I don't want to get into spoiler territory here, but ultimately the story is very much about how African Americans were robbed of their religion and mythology and culture and handicapped by this religion of meekness and self-denial.

So after the movie, I took to the inner webs.

I hopped on Blue Sky, which if you're not on Blue Sky, it's basically like Twitter when Twitter was just, you know, regular shitty.

Highly recommend it.

Anyway, I posted basically the truncated review I just gave you, right?

Great movie, great acting, great music, surprisingly anti-Christian message for a Hollywood movie.

And so inevitably, along come the Christians to defend it.

Now, to be clear, the movie is being derided throughout the Christian community as being demonic and anti-Christian.

Most Christian leaders,

I guess most Christian leaders don't know about it because most of them are unaware of black cast movies in general.

But the ones that do know about it are mostly pretty worried about the motherfucker.

I've seen plenty of Christian opinion pieces and hysterical social media threads warning people off of the movie or asking Jesus to forgive them for watching it.

It is decidedly and unapologetically critical of the role that Christianity played in denuding black Americans of their cultural heritage.

And most Christians realize that when they watch it, I think.

But some don't.

And some decidedly don't.

Some of them have strategies and tactics for not realizing that shit.

And I saw a few examples of that on Blue Sky.

Several apologists showed up in my mentions to say some variation of, well, I don't think Kugler was criticizing Christianity so much as

this meaningless subdivision of Christianity that I've carved out of the hole in order to divorce myself from culpability for the horrific foundation my faith is built upon.

It wasn't Christianity, it was dominionism.

It was slaveholder religion.

It was the extractive aspects of Christian supremacy.

Of course, as you may have noticed, none of those is an or.

This is a very don't blame the man, blame the fist kind of an argument, and yet plenty of defensive Christians jerk their knee right into it.

Because dominionism, slaveholder religion, and extractive elements of Christian supremacy are Christianity.

Christianity is the sum of its parts, but all too often Christians convince themselves that as long as they can attach a name to the parts that they don't like, they can sequester them in a prison of exception.

Well, you don't get to do that shit.

Much in the way that a murderer is still a murderer when he's not murdering, Christianity is still a slaveholder religion when it's not holding slaves.

It's still dominionist in a secular dominion.

It's still extractive when it's not extracting.

Not that it's not extracting.

But plenty of Christians can leap into this ridiculous fallacy without recognizing the idiocy of it at all.

My religion is only the good parts.

It doesn't matter how the church got here, why it was the dominant religion, how my ancestors were converted to it, how it spread across the globe, how it continues to disempower and subjugate, what it does with its power when it has it, or who it dehumanizes along the way.

Those don't count because I say they don't count.

I worship the tip, not the iceberg.

It's an awful lot like the tepid Trump voter who's now trying to hide behind his unbridled lunacy by saying, well, I didn't vote for that.

Motherfucker, you voted for Trump.

So you're responsible for all the crazy evil shit he does, not just the crazy, evil shit he promised to do.

Likewise, when you empower Christianity, you're responsible for what it does with that power.

And historically, what it's done is domineering, extractive, slave-holding type shit.

It's inherent in your thing.

And we can prove that with history.

All denying those aspects of the faith does is offer them cover today.

They're talking about your Jesus.

Creator of this broadcast will bring you a special news.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the C-3PO and R2-D2 to my BB-8, Heath Enright, and Eli Bosnick.

Fellas, are you ready to give the folks at home a little droid rage?

Okay, the color of my right shin has been proving the multiverse for decades, and people are curious.

And I will turn out not to have been built by Matt Powell the whole time.

What I'm saying is, I promise, okay.

And of course, we need to take a quick break to remind you that May means Matreon, the time of year when we ask you for money at the beginning and end of the show.

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Assuming that was good.

Dude, what is with you?

I'm being sensitive.

And now back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, in proud boycott news.

Nice.

Give me a minute.

I'll get there.

With an evil cult controlling all three branches of the U.S.

government, it's easy to feel powerless right now.

We can look ahead to future elections if those are a thing, but lots of people want to do something now.

Well, it turns out we have the power of the purse.

Now, allegedly, there's something called Congress that has that or something like that.

I forget what they do here.

But the other power of the purse is very real.

We can take away about half the economy from bad people.

Granted, like ethical consumption, it's tricky, but you can definitely choose what not to buy.

The question is, how do you find a curated list of shitty companies to boycott?

Well, there's a shitty company, like a meta company of companies that did the homework for us.

It's called Public Square.

And we actually talked about them back in 2023 before it was cool.

They're a big online marketplace for companies that are dedicated to Christian right values, especially anti-choice values.

And thanks to their super handy, giant list of terrible businesses owned by terrible people, decent people all over the country are doing a proud boycott.

Yay, there it is.

It's all coming back.

So wait, now I'm just supposed to to buy flavorless whole bean coffee and hope it's pro-life propaganda?

Yeah.

What's the deal?

As much as I love this story, I'm not sure anybody needed to crack a code to know that Freedom Eagles' Second Amendment brand tooth whitening strips were supporting the bad guys.

And don't buy those.

Why are you buying those?

And a big thanks to Militant Agnostic.

for sending us a link to scathingnews at gmail.com.

That's that I'm not motherfucking sure.

Yeah, exactly.

So, Millie Aggs, if you see Eli in person, you get to make him wear one MAGA-themed accessory as an obnoxious affectation for the rest of that day, like a monocle with the American flag on it, something like that.

Okay, you lost me at MAGA accessory, but you won me back again when I got to wear it wrong.

As long as I'm making them look bad, I'm in.

No, look, if somebody hands you an accessory to wear and doesn't expect you to put it up your butt, they just don't know you, right?

They don't know you.

You're Eli Bosnik.

Especially a monocle.

We know that for sure.

So I like how round they are.

Just don't take it out too quick.

quick.

So in order for a company to sell their products on public square, that company has to pledge to respect the core values of the site's parent company.

So what are those values?

Well, its investors include former GOP senator and current head of the Small Business Administration, Kelly Leffler.

She's obviously crushing it right now.

And also Donald Trump Jr.

Donny Deuce is also a board member at Public Square.

Their mission is providing an anti-woke marketplace that's all about Christian values.

According to their About page, we will always protect the family unit and celebrate the sanctity of every life.

There's an asterisk after that specifically excluding Kilmar Obrego Garcia, but all the other ones.

Yeah, sure, yeah.

And like born kids.

And then it says, Rock some merch to get the word out.

Oh, so we're in an air.

So for anyone who loves their Amazon Prime t-shirt, because that's your favorite brand, but it's a little too woke for you.

You can get a Public Square t-shirt that says pro-life, pro-family, pro-freedom on it.

Yeah, and get it now before the tariffs hit because you know those are made in.

I love how like pro-life, pro-like, the first two things are, I'm going to take your rights for this.

I'm going to take your rights for this.

And I'm also in favor of all the rights.

We're in the libertarian asterisk.

Yeah.

So it's been a while since we talked about the amazing offerings from Public Square, and I decided to give it a quick look to see their latest stuff.

And against all odds, it gets even dumber.

In the very first row of featured products, they were already making jokes by accident about themselves.

They're selling on that very first row a portable steak in a bag.

What?

And then...

a big multi-pack of toilet paper right next to it.

There it is.

All right.

Well, it looks like RFK Jr.

is now officially part of the Christian Rite product Zeitgeist.

I learned that too.

Also on the first page of Public Square, I found a skin cream made with beef tallow.

Yep.

It's not one of those

woke moisturizers.

It's for manly men who like to rub cow fat on their face.

Along with a delightful blend of pink grapefruit, cedarwood, rosemary, and chamomile oils.

Just $20 for a two-ounce jar from Clara and Fritz.

Don't buy Clara and Fritz.

All right, hon, I'll let you get it, but I'm going to need to see Clara and Fritz having orgasm-less missionary-style sex before I buy.

You understand?

Sex you could light a fire with.

Exactly.

So

here's some other great companies to boycott.

We have a line of Christian video games for kids by TruePlay Games.

that teach about biblical truth in every adventure.

I'm sorry to say I will not be boycotting that he.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

We have Patriot Mobile.

That's the makers of the Clandroid Freedom Phone.

I'm pretty sure we talked about that once or twice.

We have a company that converts your money into gold for you

Christianly or something like that.

Okay, that's just selling you gold, though, right?

Converted that isn't it?

McDonald's converts my money into hamburgers, too.

Yeah.

And if somebody's selling you gold, they don't think it's a good idea to own gold

by definition.

And we have the terrifying section on public square called sports.

I also checked that out.

They have two bikes for kids, and those are right next to a gun rack, an absurd holster that takes up your entire leg, scopes, ammo boxes, a company that seems to be Build-A-Bear for gun components.

Also, interesting.

And if all that seems dangerous for kids, don't worry.

They also have a product called the Bulletproof T-shirt.

They really have that.

According to them, it delivers ballistic protection, stopping handgun rounds while maintaining a low-profile, everyday look.

That's only $1,099

from a company called Civilian.

Don't buy anything from them either.

Yeah.

So if I can part the curtain slightly, listener, I wrote the joke in our notes.

What is that?

A t-shirt filled with pans?

And then I was like, wait a second, Eli, it's 2025 and all the jokes you've ever made are just true now.

I should Google it first.

Spoiler, it's a t-shirt filled with pans, everybody.

Again, I didn't need a hack to know that the company civilian that makes the bulletproof t-shirt donated its profits to the Trump inaugural fund.

Okay, so the boycott idea, it's been going viral recently, especially after a boost from an article in the Huffington Post last week.

And the stock price for Public Square is down about 73%

since Trump took off.

Get it on the booths.

It was already down about 54%

before the Trump tax kicked in and created the markets on Liberation Day.

Weird that a retailer full of patriots who would never produce their stuff anywhere but these United States of America had such a big drop after the tariffs.

Weird.

Yeah, maybe those things don't work very well.

Or those those patriots are liars.

Um, spoiler, it's both.

Yeah, I thought you were being a little loose with the oars there.

Thank you very much.

Bottom line, great work on the boycott, and let's keep that going.

But let's not be abusive.

I saw someone on Reddit suggest that people, you know, like buy stuff on public square and then keep returning it to overwhelm their shipping and customer service.

There was even talk of pranks with like boxes of glitter falsely labeled fetal remains.

Please do a funeral for me.

I can't afford it.

And even if that was me on that Reddit segment,

that would be illegal and unethical.

That's our official stance.

Don't

do that.

Is what I'm saying.

And in Cypriotic news, the people of Cyprus, Turkey took to the streets this week to protest a new law granting special permissions to Islam in schools because

Believe it or not, there are, in fact, things more terrifying than what American theocrats are doing.

Well, more terrifying than what they're doing to our schools anyway.

Trump in charge of nukes is the scariest of all of the things, and they did that.

But yes, that's fair.

That's fair.

So, first off, big thanks to Freddie Boxmuncher G for sending us this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Fred told us we could only use this story if we referred to him by one of his many Cunalingus-based nicknames.

And Fred the Labial Laper G felt a little tasteless.

You two can make similar demands by sending us atheist news to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Not entirely tasteless.

I liked getting Fred or like getting Fred over squeals for the act.

Yeah, no, that's good.

I want to be clear that you can't make similar demands like that of all of us.

I will send you to HR over shit like this.

Yeah, no, we have reported Fred to Cannes.

It's interesting.

So for those of you who are out of the loop, Cyprus's very existence is a highly contested matter of national policy.

Well, they all agree it exists.

They all agree it exists, but not whose it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Turkey invaded the previously Greek-owned island in 1974.

And to this day, only Turkey acknowledges the independence of the Turkish-occupied north.

Yeah, no, what I saw you referring to it as Cyprus-Turkey in the notes, I was wondering if Senior Pets snuck into the Google Docs.

The Greek Cypriot self joined the European Union in 2004.

And just last Friday, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutiérrez appointed Maria Angela Huguenquiller as his personal envoy to Cyprus, tasked with trying to restart peace talks that have been stalled since 2017.

So needless to say, it's a little tense right now.

Yeah, with like Erdogan and Orban and Trump and Putin, it's like we're playing risk with neo-Nazi kids who definitely need a fucking timeout.

Like we need to call some moms to come get their boy.

Yeah.

A bunch of timeouts.

That's right.

Nobody likes it when the board gets flipped over, least of all the motherfuckers who live on the board.

Right.

And so I should point out that one of the biggest fears among the people of Cyprus is the creep of Islamic theocracy into their otherwise pretty secular society.

So when last month the right-wing Turkish Cypriot authorities lifted a ban on wearing headscarves in high schools, but not on symbols of other religions, it felt like pretty solid evidence of that creep.

Okay.

In fairness, Yamakas can take your eye out like a throwing.

Yeah, it's true, it's true.

They are.

If it ever comes down to like a religious religious war, like with the required outward-facing symbols of your faith, it's going to come down to the Jews versus Sikhs pretty quickly, I think.

Yeah, no, that's fair.

That's fair.

It's also worth mentioning that there is a legal challenge to the rule change in addition to the protests.

And so far, popular support for the protests seems strong.

So this might be a moment where theocracy gets held back.

But if you've been following our show long enough, you know this is definitely a situation worth watching and worrying about.

And in Moon Komp News,

the Trump administration managed to outdo themselves in terms of stupid against all odds, and they invited a new type of lunatic into the White House press room.

Instead of reporters from real sources of news like the Associated Press, Trump's been switching out seats at the briefing for outlets like One America News and important journalists like Marjorie Taylor Green's boyfriend who has that podcast from the garage.

No, what's real?

That's a real one.

And one of the newest arrivals is Cambrie Nelson from the bigotry think tank, the America First Policy Institute.

And Ms.

Nelson is pretty sure the moon disappeared for a whole week last year.

Wait, what?

That's how she got in, actually.

She said she was there with the moon.

So, first of all, let's not slide past how subtle and awesome it is that Heath described her as a new type of lunatic, right?

Thank you.

But secondly, no, thank me.

Yeah, I want to appreciate the fact that we have the only job where our job is to make fun of people for having our job.

And that's awesome.

It's cool.

It is cool.

All right.

So just to give you an idea of the journalistic rigor of Cambry Nelson, Cambry, here's what happened at a recent briefing.

With all the important news right now, Nelson got her turn to ask a question and decided to get some career advice from press secretary Caroline Levitt.

Nelson said, quote, I'm kind of the nerd when it comes to reporting.

I'm not the headline news girl.

I'm the nuts and bolts.

I'm the policy type nerd.

So what direction do you advise me to go into?

Like the White House files y'all send out every single day?

Because that's what people are used to.

When they want to ask me questions, they want to know the nuts and bolts of everything.

End quote.

My question is more of a compliment for myself.

Yeah, I think there was a question in there, but I don't think that's it.

I don't, I don't, okay, so

if it got lost in the verbosity there, Eli, her question was, so what's like the news?

Do I have to read this?

Is this going to be on the quiz?

Yeah.

And Caroline Levitt responded by saying, I wish there were people in the legacy media that were like you.

So

idiots?

I guess

the answer was nuts and bolts, hard journalism.

I don't know.

Well, we'll see how it goes.

Because here's the tweet from Cambrie Nelson on on October 5th of last year, which, by the way, was three days after a new moon.

Quote, Has anyone seen the moon lately?

I've been looking for seven days.

And exact quote.

Well, there's your mistake, right?

You should have tried seven nights.

You'd have had a lot more.

Yeah, no, that's important.

You need that one.

Fucking idiot.

So in response to that very important question about nuts and bolts science journalism on Twitter from somebody who works at a so-called think tank.

One follower said, I have not seen the moon at all.

It's like it disappeared.

And then Nelson wrote back, It has.

Why is everybody silent about this?

They are quiet about the white sun, too.

What?

And yeah, if you're wondering, what?

That's a great question.

Great question, y'all.

Apparently, there's another conspiracy theory beyond the disappearing moon plot.

People are convinced the sun used to be yellow-orange, and now it's suspiciously white.

Qui bono, no idea.

I don't know.

Right?

How bono?

Okay.

But hey, at least that's one mystery that we know Donald Trump is looking into.

Remember when he stared directly into the sun during our eclipse, everybody?

Yes, you guys remember?

Yeah, so here we are.

The biggest news wire service in in the English-speaking world is no longer allowed in the White House, but we might finally learn about the Sun Changers and the Moon's Invisibility Realm.

Yeah.

Journalism.

Nuts and Bolts.

And on that note, we're going to pause for a break from our second sponsor this week, My Sheets Rock.

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Eli, we have told you this so many years in a row.

Now, you cannot offer our patrons a sweaty roll in the sheets with the male cast member of your choice.

Okay, why male?

The wives felt less funny.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Well, either way, we can't do it.

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Right, but Heath, have you actually tried them?

I sure have.

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That's what I was saying.

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And we're back.

Next up in headlines in Jew Learning Nothing News.

I wear a lot of hats here at at Puzzle in a Thunderstorm LLC, adorable heart and soul of the podcast, chief provider of pure sexual magnetism, but also, as the member of our cast born and raised Jewish, it's my job to report on the stories that sound like the kind of thing Marjorie Taylor Green wakes up screaming, but are actually true.

Which is why this week I am obligated to inform you that the newly released New York State budget plans to heavily weaken the oversight of religious schools in hopes of currying favor with a secret cabal of literally underground Jews.

Okay.

To be clear, Eli is not talking about the rickety-ass secret tunnel in Brooklyn that never got a building permit.

That was a different thing.

Just happened to be underground, which made it sound worse to MagCadge for sure.

Yes.

Right.

So at this point, that's the public cabal of underground Jews.

This is totally different.

This is a secret.

Totally different.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, first off, big thanks to Will D.

Beast for being the first to send us this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

And a big thanks to Stormy, the Prospector D, for delivering the excellent punch.

It's fine.

Ooh, tough but fair.

All right.

Stormy, step up the fucking game.

What's going on?

No, look, Stormy would not want us.

Like, Stormy knows, Stormy knows that this is not their best work.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

It's good.

It's fine.

It's fine.

And they value this feedback.

This is what they need.

When you send us new to scathingnewsgmail.com, we'll give you the feedback you need.

Sit in your shame, Stormy.

Yeah.

Now, again, we don't want another Carl, guys.

I think we should be aware.

We're all walking real close.

Did you hear his daughter got out of the hospital?

Okay.

We'll talk about it when we're recording.

We're recording.

We're recording.

She's fine-ish.

So, if you're not familiar, it wasn't that high.

If you're not familiar, this is a story we've been covering for years.

Long story short, in areas of Brooklyn, there are large Jewish schools catering to the Hasidic community called yeshivas.

These are private Jewish schools conducted in Yiddish Yiddish that only admit boys and very often don't teach,

well, most of the things that schools are supposed to teach, like math and science and in some cases, English.

Yeah, coming soon to a publicly funded school near you.

And look, you're allowed to have religious schools.

You're allowed to have religious schools that don't teach real things.

For some reason.

That's...

what religious schools are for.

But what you're not supposed to be able to do is run a religious school that's publicly publicly funded.

But according to a New York Times investigation in 2022, more than 20 of these all-boy yeshivas had collected over $1

billion

with a B in government funding over a four-year period without providing students anything remotely resembling a public education.

Yeah, also worth noting, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week regarding public funding of religious charter schools in Oklahoma.

And according to to the logic of the Christian right majority, taxpayers have to let religious schools get like a billion dollars or whatever to provide nothing resembling a public education because it's religious persecution to

have a curriculum, apparently.

That's how the argument is looking right now, even with Amy Coney Barrett recused.

Yeah, no, I've been talking to Jeff Blackwell about coming on when they hand that decision down.

And the biggest sticking point now is that he's not allowed to represent American atheists when he's actively chugging wine wine out of a paper bag.

That's true.

That's true.

Now, if you're a regular listener to our program, one, you already know that I was the sexual heart and soul of the podcast.

You remember it from the last time Eli made that joke.

Yeah.

And from all the times before that.

Well, right.

And two, two.

Remember when Eli was funny before he became a dad?

That was the best.

Oh.

Yeah, I do.

Hey, guys, my headphones are broken and my depression voice actually came through by accident

instead of Heath's joke.

No.

I'm like, let's punch up at your humor is all I want.

Oh, are you punching up?

Are you punching up, Heath there?

If I'm talking about humor, I'm punching up.

I'm going to take a selfie of us standing next to each other and we'll see if the populace thinks you're punching up.

Literally punching down all.

Spiritually, sexually, it's up.

Sexually, you are punching up.

That's true.

Two, you'll remember that.

You remember that back in episode 621, we covered a story where four of these yeshivas sued the New York Department of Education for demanding that they actually educate kids.

Well, as I said at the top, it looks like New York has responded to those lawsuits by quietly slipping reduced oversight and lower standards for religious schools into the new state budget.

Which, again, the SCOTUS was about to make them do anyway, but they still suck for doing it.

Yeah.

And look, there's a lot of pushback against this move.

So it might not go through, but...

It's an election year.

And the reason they're doing this is because the Hasidic community votes as a block.

If New York Democrats think it'll help them in key areas, and let's be honest, it very well might, they might be willing to pay this price.

And we'll obviously keep you in the loop, but failures of education like this make it even harder to escape theocracy.

And in my opinion, it's not worth a voting block, even during a primary.

And finally, tonight, in Count Dooku News.

I had to use that once in citation.

I wanted to bring it everywhere.

All right.

We have a story about Donald Trump, Sith, Jedi, the Pope, and AI.

It's

interesting times, 2025.

And it all started when somebody in the White House finally explained to Donald Trump that Kilmar Abrego-Garcia does not have MS-13 literally tattooed on his fingers in comic sands above the secret pictogram code for MS-13.

And Trump decided the solution, rather than admitting he got fooled by his own administration's Photoshop, was better deep fakes using that AI thing from the World Wide Web that I heard about.

So now some guy at the White House and the President of the United States are huddled over a laptop, fucking around with Dolly and giggling, and then posting their amazing AI-generated dank memes on Truth Social and fucking Twitter.

And the first two images we got were Donald Trump as the Pope.

And then on May the 4th, Donald Trump as a Jedi knight who got apparently banned from the Jedi Olympics for steroids.

Right.

It appears.

Okay, this is obviously incredibly stupid and awful, but it is also

the least worst thing his administration has done.

So I'm just saying maybe we count our lucky stars a bit.

Yeah.

Okay.

Tell him about Sora.

I'm taking away the I if they keep doing shit like this with AI, though.

It's just A.

And a big thanks to Dan for sending us a link to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Oh, Danny T.

Yeah, we thought about some sort of exciting adventure as a gift, but Dan craves not these things.

Instead, Dan gets a copy of the security camera video of Eli doing his sweet lightsaber moves at a university building where Eli somehow still has a teaching gig, I'm pretty sure.

Two-year contract, bibby!

Wow.

Dear God, I hope they never listen.

It's so over if they listen.

They won't.

I just, I went once a week.

I go, oh, God, someone's going to Google me.

Don't Google.

Okay, so the image of Pope Donald did not go over well.

Lots of Catholic people, especially Catholic leaders, found it very offensive.

If an evil person like Donald Trump was, you know, in charge of their entire organization, the church might end up doing some terrible things.

So it was a really bad image.

It's not funny to them.

So Trump got scolded by several cardinals and bishops, including the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, who said,

Well, it wasn't good.

But Trump also got some defenders like J.D.

Vance, who said something along the lines of, everybody relax.

It's a joke.

And okay, right there, that's how bad religion is and how bad the Catholic Church is.

They made me be on the same side of anything with J.D.

Vance.

The idea of a supreme God-connected leader with a very silly hat is not serious.

And that idea should be mocked all the time.

And so should Donald Trump, who very clearly demanded the AI juice up the size of his hands.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To be fair, I think J.D.

Vance was just excited to get a chance to kill a second Pope.

He was like, oh, this one's really helping.

No, he fucking wore the mark and he let J.D.

Vance see it.

This is probably great for us.

All right.

That brings us.

to the Jedi image asterisk.

Pin in that for a second.

So the image has Trump in a Jedi costume with two enormous eagles and three American flags behind him.

And I describe Trump himself as a vascular fuck Jedi.

Pretty sure that was the prompt they landed on.

Okay.

I read an opinion piece last month by a woman who is, at least according to her, in actual love with ChatGPT.

And this picture is so much more embarrassing than that of the people.

It's like one of Putin's demands was that Trump make his shirtless picture of him on the horse look humble in comparison to something.

All right.

Taking out the pin.

The vascular fuck knight is holding a red lightsaber.

So Sith.

The Jedi use blue, green, yellow, orange, or white.

Or Samuel Jackson wants purple and he gets whatever the fuck he wants.

And there's also that one blacksaber.

But the Sith famously use red lightsabers.

Point being, Trump couldn't even make himself a good guy using AI.

No, he could not.

Which means one of two things happened.

Either A, they generated the image and then Trump demanded a red lightsaber to be more Republican, or B,

artificial intelligence has a way better sense of humor than we realize.

And Dolly was like, yeah, so I'm trained on the entire internet of information.

And you are definitely a Sith, man.

I'm making you a Sith.

Even I can't hallucinate that you are the good guy, Donald.

Right.

So, bottom line, making fun of the Catholic Church is great, but you do not fuck with the religion of Star Wars.

Not cool.

Trump is canceled.

We're furious about the color of the lightsaber.

And with that renewed hope that Ewan McGregor will someday cut Trump in half and dump him into a planet's core, we're going to wrap the headlines for the night.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Tumaji.

And when we come back, Tom and Cecil will be here to explain why the headlines were so fucking short.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Which, of course, brings me to chapter seven.

Now, this is when my theory really starts to come together and why Potter fan8898 is just so obviously being intellectually dishonest in their analysis.

Eli, what are you doing in the sound booth?

Yeah, are you recording Erotica for Dolphins again?

Because we told you they don't have money.

Don't have money yet.

No illusions.

Don't have money yet.

No, I was thinking about Matreon, and I realized what's the best way to make our patrons grateful and want to give us money?

Our heartfelt thanks.

Delivering a good product regularly.

Oh, that's a good one.

No, no, it is neither of those things.

It's showing them the alternative.

Because without your guys's help, my podcast would probably have been a long-standing and drama-filled analysis of the Harry Potter fanfiction I feel is non-canonical.

Right.

Hey, speaking of that, have you ever considered therapy for

that?

Any of this, really.

Therapy?

I thought that was for people who think they're Napoleon and only for people who think they're Napoleon.

No, Eli therapy is great for a lot of stuff, from everyday stress to relationships.

And if you're thinking of trying therapy, give BetterHelp a try.

BetterHelp has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapist from their diverse network of more than 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties.

Plus, BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide.

All right, guys, I'm sold.

Where do I sign up?

We're all better with help.

Visit betterhelp.com slash scathing to get 10% off your first month.

That's betterhelp, h-e-l-p.com/slash scathing.

Thanks, guys.

Glad we're not a Harry Potter fan fiction cast after all.

Most of the time.

Yeah, most of the time.

Bonus episode.

It's a story you've heard many times before.

The guys entrust Eli with keeping track of the Bulgarian for Cherry Roasts.

Oh, man.

Eli creates a spreadsheet with instructions that look like Qbert swearing.

Roasts inevitably get lost.

We act like we're still surprised by this somehow.

We put Eli back in charge of keeping track of the roasts again.

So it should come as no surprise that we were recently alerted to a whole segment that we meant to record but didn't.

Like wrote it out and everything and then just didn't record it.

And you're thinking, guys, you didn't even do a vulgarity for charity last year.

Yes.

That is correct.

You are correct.

But don't worry, the one we missed was just all the biggest donors to the share.

I was saving.

I was saving.

Yes, that we were saving for the very end.

And in turn, they ended up at the very end.

A lot of suspense.

Now, of course,

in an effort to spread the blame for this as thin as possible, I'd also like to welcome in Tom and Cecil from the Cognitive Dissonance Podcast, the Citation Needed podcast, and Dear Old Dads and No Rogan, respectively.

Damn it, it's gotten harder to introduce you guys since we started this thing.

Tom, Cecil, welcome back.

Hey, at least I wasn't in charge of keeping track.

We'd have missed a lot more donors.

Can't even keep track of your neck muscles.

Tom's in horrible pain, everybody.

Horrible, horrible.

A little context for you here.

All right.

Before we get into the roasting, big thanks to some people who donated and asked for nothing in return.

That includes Ann W., Loke, Peter K, Penelope, Brooke, Christine M.

Kim and Kirsten, Robin, Chris M, Jen and Chris, Becky H., Amanda and Jeff, Alexander, Eric, Citizen Gold, Steve P., Brady from Colorado, SoggyPants, Christy K, and Jennifer O.

That's a lot of Chris's, Heath, right?

Generous namesake.

Clearly.

All right.

Well, let's begin with a round of dealer's choice.

We had more donations to whatever the fuck we felt like being mean to this year than we've ever had before.

Some of those folks we've already thanked, but there's quite a few that we didn't.

So big thanks to Scott, L, Brad, J, Steve, A, Kevin, V, Rupeet, and Reynolds.

And a very special thank you you to JC, who donated $1,000 with a dealer's choice.

Amber, who donated $1,057.

Dev T, who donated $1,500 with a dealer's choice.

And Amanda C, who donated $2,000 freaking dollars with a dealer's choice to you.

We say,

are you sure, though?

Because you could dealer choice our holes, Amanda.

Several at once, Amanda.

Several at once.

All right.

Well, the way you said it, you've you've made it creepy.

All right.

For all the people we just mentioned,

there's a way to

offer your asshole to somebody and not make it creepy, Tom.

You didn't.

Why would I want to do that?

I liked this better.

I feel like he's in it to win it at this point.

Here we go.

I'm fucking committed.

All right.

So let's get a dealer's choice from everybody.

I'm going to be committed.

All right.

You know what really grinds my gears?

The zipper on the jeans I got.

They sewed it a little bit wrong so the moving part can go down past the end of the track and it disconnects every time.

Oh, no.

I could fix it very easily by sewing in a little stopper, but I'm clearly not doing that.

Instead, I awkwardly reconnect it every time when I'm done peeing.

And that means the guy waiting behind me in the public bathroom at the airport sees me angrily fiddling with that area and he says, Hey, man, everything okay down there.

That was not great.

And And no, I am not fixing it.

Do you remember at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers when Donald Sutherland is standing there and he just starts fucking shrieking and pointing his finger?

And he doesn't take a breath for like 45 straight seconds.

Just one long nails on the chalkboard shriek.

And then he just breathes in really hard and he does it again.

The whole time, he's just wailing his fingers.

Just keeps pointing it and it's shaking.

He's pointing his finger so so fucking hard.

That's the Tucker Carlson show.

I had to watch a whole episode.

All right.

So I'm going to keep it thematic because we created this script in January of 2024.

I'm going to go for a callback roast of fireworks.

That's right.

When this script was composed, I was just emerging from whatever bomb shelter all the decent human beings are on December 31st and then July 1st through fucking 97th at this point.

Look,

I like that you like big explosions and I like that it kills and maims the dumbest, least thought people in our society once a year.

That's awesome.

But guys,

can't you just quietly drown in a polar bear?

There has to be a better way to get rid of our nation stupid that doesn't scare veterans and dogs.

All right, for my dealer's choice, RFK Jr.

needs to fuck himself up the butt with ever larger bricks until one of them is big enough to kill him.

Sorry, I know that

that doesn't really count as a ropes,

but that's just kind of where I am right now.

Blue it up with beef tallow.

I don't know, man.

Whatever's good for you.

God, I wrote this so long ago.

I wonder if I'm still mad about this.

Let's find out.

You are.

You are.

Yeah, no, you are.

You are.

You are.

Okay.

Hey, the more things the more luck for once.

I like the idea of a giant Tom Rant where he's just weirdly happy throughout it, though.

I kind of like it.

Oh, got nothing.

All right, a study was recently reported on.

Well, not that recently anymore.

You heard about this?

Have you seen this?

A year and a half ago, a study was recently reported.

I'm going to rephrase that.

An old study came out.

Joe Biden doesn't seem like he's fit for office anymore.

I got to be honest.

There was a study which demonstrated that physicians perform worse, much worse, than ChatGPT in making accurate medical diagnoses, and that overall physicians' accuracy was only around 74%, leaving one in four patients settled with the wrong or no answers, delayed or prevented care and treatment, and a bill for it to boot.

And even when allowed to use ChatGPT as a tool to aid them, doctors fared no better in making accurate diagnoses.

And the reason isn't the profit motive or insurance or the takeover of private practices by managed care systems.

The reason is hubris.

And that hubris creates a disconnect between the generally excellent science of medicine and the unforgivably poor clinical practice of it.

That hubris is what prevents us from seeing women's bodies as worthy of research and study.

That hubris is why we have the worst healthcare outcomes of any developed nation.

That hubris is why your doctor sees every problem through the siloed lens of their own narrow expertise.

That hubris is why we are suffering and dying, why hospitals are full of signs imploring patients to advocate for themselves in order to stay safe.

That hubris is why women die from heart disease at a rate almost double that of men, why people of color are three times more likely to perish in childbirth.

That hubris hubris plants the seeds of the understandable distrust of doctors and sows those seeds with the blood and the tears of experience, allowing crops of denialists and charlatans to swoop in for the kill.

That hubris, that unforgivable cruelty of unquestioned self-assurance, is the very opposite of skepticism and science and even decency and humanism.

And it is instead the very lifeblood of ignorance, indifference, and cruelty.

And it is always,

every time,

personal.

He wouldn't have written that if the the morphine worked.

I just wanted to work on it.

It doesn't work at all.

The rest of us are doing comedy over here.

Tom.

It's both doing comedy.

It's dark comedy.

All right.

So this one is for you.

A bag full of bags donated $666 for you to roast homoerotic bigots.

Okay, great pick.

So if I have to deal with another guy slipping into my DMs to send a slur word and a dick pic, I'm going to fucking lose it.

Yes.

I read the email correctly.

The request wasn't a roast of homophobic bigots, although there's plenty of crossover.

It was homoerotic bigots.

Bagful of Bags is a military veteran who dealt with a whole bunch of so-called, you know, manly men who were both homophobic and homoerotic, somehow trying to like showboat their intolerance by doing the thing they claim to hate.

It doesn't make any sense.

It's like being lactose intolerant and and walking around calling people milkies and shaking gallons of milk and shitting yourself being like got them in your face

all right so cecil and eli this next one's for both of you our friends ian and jamie would like you to roast the dinner that almost killed me

people forget that puff pastry is just a tiny lattice of gluten to hold in layer after layer of butter.

It's like someone a long time ago was just sitting there eating a stick of butter like a candy bar and thought, hey,

can I make this butter crunchy?

And then, and then they did.

True men of genius.

And then you ate crunchy butter with mushrooms and shallots in butter and a side steak.

And then you ate toffee pudding, which is sweet butter for dessert.

That meal should be served on a heart starter electric pattern.

But it's still served, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It was good, man.

You know that meme about how if you gave a pilgrim a warhead, they'd die.

That's what you did, Ian.

You brought Noah to a fancy restaurant where nobody had their name on their shirt, and his heart tried to kill him.

I'm sure his veins constricted the second they walked in the door and saw cloth napkins.

You were supposed to ease the man in, Ian.

Danny's Ruby Tuesday

and Olive Garden.

And then maybe,

maybe an Outbacksteach comes on a Tuesday night.

Think with your head, Ian.

Got to eat heart healthy like the blooming onion, right?

I have an 11-year gap on my resume.

All right.

One for you here, Noah.

Joe W would like you to roast my diatribe on episode 559.

Okay, well, fuck Joe W for making me re-listen to an Eliya tribe to do this.

I don't call them Noah tribes.

Why do they have to have your name in it?

It's so weird.

But also, of all the Eliyah tribes he wants me to roast, it's the fucking heartfelt living eulogy that he gave me when I had what Heath and Eli are referring to now as my first heart attack.

Which is tricky because, A,

it was genuinely the sweetest thing anybody has ever said about me.

And B,

it would be such a dick move to go after him for structure or whatever.

Oh, come on.

I'm just pacing on this as shit.

So I do like how he managed to slip in missing the deadline for the pandemic book into it, though.

That was his

true.

It's important.

I like the contrast between Noah's and Eli's.

Like, Noah makes very intelligent points, and Eli kind of just does like a voice, it's like an accent called profound.

You know what I mean?

He just does like these

turn of phrase tricks.

Like, it's not about what we want, it's about wants.

If Eli heard himself doing that voice, he'd bully himself to death.

Hey, trying every day, baby.

Load me down with more pills than Tom.

Yeah, I was going to say he's taking meds for that, man.

Gimme.

Tom's necklace muscles have nothing on my brain.

And speaking of heartbreaking betrayals, Art would like the Wool Dasher Mizzel to roast Heath for his D ⁇ D antics.

The Wool What now?

The Wool Dasher Mizzle, Cecil.

You do ads now.

You fucking know who I am.

Okay, don't.

All right.

So Art specifically asked me to roast Heath for trying to sneak three magical fucking weapons onto his character this season.

Like a goddamn toddler with his arm caught in a cookie jar.

Oh, don't worry.

You already bring a deadly weapon into every D ⁇ D game, Heath.

It's the blade of assholdering.

You had one job.

One job this season.

Play the straight man.

And at the hint of a demand for a subtle performance, you started talking like Sylvester Stallone and grabbed the sword of a fallen angel.

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

It's all going to have an amazing payoff at the end, which, like your amazing plasma rifle, you won't fucking acknowledge.

So Eli will have to congratulate himself on it.

No, Eli, point taken, I should do more subtle stuff.

You're Eli.

How dare you?

More of a character's guy.

Cecil, this next one's for you.

Becca needs a roast of her subpar music director page.

So she wrote 20 paragraphs on social media about a director who fired her?

The world needs people that can stretch out trivial and useless bullshit like that.

She should be on the citation needed podcast.

She posts on social media this gem.

There are people out there who do not think I am worthy of feeling good.

If you'd rather unfriend me than do the internal work of figuring out why you hate that I'm thriving, says more about you than it does me.

Relax, lady.

You just dyed your hair and nobody noticed.

You sound like, sound like a Tamagotchi that got hold of a keyboard to let everybody know they forgot to feed it.

I got so hungry.

I could die.

I'll just wait for the batteries to go out so we can finally silence that interminable fucking beeping.

All right, Tom, you're up next.

We need $1,000 worth of roast of employment engagement surveys from Jennifer N.

Oh, Jesus.

All right.

Hey, corporate America.

Here's how employees feel.

I'll take the survey right now for everyone in America.

We hate it.

There you go.

All of it.

Work, that is.

We fucking hate work.

If tomorrow any one of us won the lottery, we would all fucking quit and you would never hear from us again.

If next payday, the checks stopped coming, we would all fucking quit.

You want to know what engages us?

How to build a good company culture?

Pay us money and get the fuck out of the way.

There you go.

That's the secret sauce.

That's the whole sauce.

That's it.

If we have to work, and we all do, then all we want is the goddamn paycheck and some fucking autonomy.

None of us want a virtual happy hour or pizza and Hawaiian shirt Thursdays or whatever fucking nonsense.

None of us want that.

We want to earn enough money to realize the American dream of not working.

And we want to be left the fuck alone as much as possible.

That's what we want.

That's all we want.

We want it always and forever, non-stop.

That's what we want.

So you can tell fucking Susan and HR, it's okay to not send a fucking survey and let her get back to shopping on Amazon and daydreaming of the day that she too gets to quit and turn her home office into the geriatric sex dungeon she always wanted.

Well done, sir.

Next up, we've got a round of special requests.

Cecil, you're up first.

Nick wanted you to roast the march of bureaucracy in higher education.

Higher ed is the only job where you sit down for a full four-hour interview with the entire department to hire you for $800 by monthly.

Every six months, you need to learn an entirely new software product for some new aspect of your work.

It could be D2L, Brightspace, Blackboard, Campus Connect, PeopleSoft, Qualtrics.

Oh, God, I would kill myself.

Teaching Commons.

At a certain point, you're just sure that the IT guy is just fucking with you and sending boxes of software here.

Why is there a DOS prompt?

Who uses a DOS prompt?

Seriously?

What do you mean I got to log in with my university ID number and the middle three of my social security?

Middle three?

Why is it the middle three?

It took three hours and 36 new menus later, and I can finally order coffee for a meeting that could have been a fucking email.

No, an email is generous.

It could have been the subject of an email.

My whole job is having meetings.

I could fucking tweet to people.

All right.

And Eli, Arin would like you to roast transgender teen suicide rates.

Ooh, a fun one.

Okay.

Wow.

Okay.

I think I probably subconsciously buried this particular script at the memory that eventually I'd have to do this roast.

So trans teens, if you're listening, no matter what you're feeling, no matter how bad it gets, do not.

kill yourselves without taking a Republican with you.

Jesus fucking Christ.

You get enough enough birds with this stone, and the silver lining's a lot because you're kidding.

They got to take two, Eli.

The math doesn't work.

They take two.

Put them.

No.

Whoa.

All right, Noah.

One for you here.

Vince would like you to roast your beloved Jacksonville Jaguars.

That's going to be tricky, Vince.

Okay, I just did trans teens.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

I'm a fan of the most roastable team in the history of fucking sport.

I'd say we were mostly known as a punchline from the dumb guy guy on the good place, but that implies that we're mostly known.

Most teams, you tell them, you tell them you have season tickets, they don't offer condolences, but my fucking Jaguars.

No, it's okay, guys.

We traded away the best parts of this year's draft and next year's for a guy who's going to do a football thing that literally nobody's been able to do in modern football history for a team that can't even make a consistent Pro Bowler out of Trevor fucking Lawrence.

Yeah, no, it'll work out great.

But it's okay.

Who needs to win games if you can sell fucking jerseys, right?

Sean, I mean, don't get me wrong, our head coach and general manager were well-behaved when I babysat for them in high school.

But are they?

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

They're way too fucking young for that.

But are they really qualified, man?

I don't know.

But hey, the guy who thought Doug Marone was the answer says yes.

Sorry.

Nobody knows anything I'm talking about right now except for fucking Heath and Cecil.

Heath, this next special request is for you.

All right.

And it was one of our top donations of the entire fucking fundraiser.

So roast like a mean it.

Ryan A.

donated $5,000 for you to roast people who used a pejorative sports ball.

Okay.

Amazing, though.

This is why we lost the election, people.

This is why

right here.

Hey, people who say sports ball like that, I'm glad you got bullied.

Like,

I'm glad.

I didn't do it, though.

I just like sports.

You could just be bad at something and also shut the fuck up.

I'm bad at dancing.

Very, very bad at dancing.

when people talk about dancing i'm not like body feet move duh look at that

body moving with music sound duh tappy tap music bike fuck you no that would be

insane

wouldn't it

amazing and tom cat gave us $500 for you to roast Lewis to Joy.

So try to be one-tenth as funny as Heath just was.

That's what I usually am.

Remember when neither rain nor snow nor dark of night could keep these carriers from their appointed rounds?

When the USPS was the lifeline for troops serving abroad in a reliable and inexpensive way to ship orphans on trains to work as cheap farm labor?

A United States Postal Service used to be an institution of innovation, even pioneering the workplace shooting in modern America.

But gone are those days.

Gone are the days when mailing a package or a letter was routine and dependable.

And that is because to joy, Trump-appointed Gollum, formerly in charge of the USPS, decided to dismantle and destroy one of the last functional self-sustaining the services the American people could actually count on.

Which is why when you track a package now and see that it's coming USPS, rather than literally any other character, you proactively begin disputing the charge with your credit card company as being lost in transit.

And DeJoy deserves credit for this, for the single and simple-minded destruction of an American institution.

It's all we could have expected from him.

From a sycophantic sycophantic bootlicker praising Trump through the hoarse whisper of a bruised uvula.

A guy whose only value in life, whose reason for waking in the morning is only to show the world that it is indeed possible to crawl from the cesspool of lackeys and yes, man, and climb the ladder of institutional annihilation without a spine.

And all any of us can hope is that when he realizes what he has done and he kicks over the folding chair in his own basement and he kicks and flails and lives out the last moments of his pointless life in immediate and irrevocable regret that the one note of support and love and connection that might have saved him was also delayed in the fucking man.

Who knows, sir.

Wow.

Way too funny for $500.

All right.

So it's time for some full court roasting, starting with our largest donor of the entire fundraiser, Jennifer G.

We missed this one, huh?

Yeah.

Can you believe that?

Jennifer.

Wow.

That was saving it.

Or we saved it.

Or we saved it.

Yeah, it's one of the other celebration for you, Jennifer.

Jennifer

donated $15,000 or one entire Cecil childhood

today for a roast.

It wasn't worth that much.

Are we adjusting for inflation?

Like one, I'm saying one used cavalier.

Yeah, that's what it was.

Yeah, with a door that fell off.

Sure.

If you'd kept your G.I.

Joe's bent, right?

That's fair.

G.I.

Joe's.

I like the plural.

That's the optimist.

If you kept your G.I.

Joe mint.

A single one.

All right.

So, Jennifer would like us to roast her Aunt Cookie.

All right.

Well, based on Jennifer's email, I can see why she's called Cookie.

She's the worst possible version of herself, and it's because she's got nuts.

Aunt Cookie is one of those great reminders that the disappointing thing about people isn't how ugly they are inside.

It's just, it's how little it takes, how little has to be at stake for that ugly self to emerge, right?

Aunt fucking cookie is a hydrox, right?

You go into her.

That's the best thing.

I'm canceling my roast.

That's it.

I'm done.

You think she's a goddamn Oreo, and why wouldn't you, right?

She looks sweet, but she's not.

She's a mouthful of dry cocoa powder and disappointment that you leave in the cabinet until it's old enough to reasonably throw away.

Cookie is the kind of vampire that is not sparkly nor sexy nor particularly interesting.

She's the kind that lives her life by sucking the lifeblood from the room, from the situation, from the funeral.

The kind of person who wonders upon the death of her own sister, what's in it for her?

Cookie is driven by the kind of hunger to see in every situation a way to feed herself, despite the sure knowledge that she can never feel full.

She is a woman trying to fill a hole to feel whole.

A woman whose every act of selfishness is rooted in the insatiable need for everything to benefit her, to be about her.

She is always trying to work an angle because she understands that head on, face to face, she is the embodiment of justifiable rejection.

Cookie may try to beg, borrow, and steal to cheat or lie or connive, but she is also a woman in her 70s.

A woman whose understanding of her own mortality must every day be creeping closer.

A woman who is beginning to hear the snicker of the eternal footman, and she knows knows that her life of stolen moments is and has been and will always be not a glass half full or a glass half empty, but a glass utterly and completely forgotten.

Really getting deep into like the being of Cookie.

I'd like to do physical appearance, please.

Sure.

And Cookie looks like a composite sketch of everyone whose entire family hates them.

We got a photo, and she looks like Kim Davis wore her good flannel flannel to a wedding.

If someone witnessed Cookie doing a murder, but didn't see her face and told the sketch artist, person at the reject table in the corner of the wedding, the artist would draw Aunt Cookie right away.

Aunt Cookie looks like she probably had children, but they died in an attic somewhere.

Like, don't ask her why they call her Cookie.

That's all I'm saying.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

She looks like she gives out pennies on Halloween.

She looks like she says, like, good morning to a large group of people, and they half-heartedly reply.

And she says, Let's try this again.

I said,

Yes, 100%.

And then, and then after that, she's like, That's better.

That's better.

Oh, God, she's the living embodiment of that.

Yeah, I like to use Bing.

Fuck you.

Accept cookies?

No, reject all.

Next up, Beth donated $3,000 for us to roast Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and his New Orleans Committee.

All right, the New Orleans Committee is the colonoscopy prep of city revitalizations.

It is a constant barrage of so much exhausting shit.

The whole point of the thing is to render you helpless and compliant.

So when you later take it up the ass, you'll be willing to pay for the privilege.

So the New Orleans Committee, it was a bunch of Landry's advisors making a plan to fix the city, which they found was woefully low on fascism, turns out it didn't work very well, their plan to fix it.

When New Orleans hosted the Super Bowl in February of that year, Landry ordered state police to round up people in homeless encampments and bust them to an unheated warehouse on the outskirts of town.

And he did not hear it.

Everything that involves the warehouse on the outskirts of town is evil.

It's going to be eaten.

Yes.

The only consolation is that Landry is very likely to get head-butted by Jack Reacher.

Like, yeah,

by the end of the season.

Yeah.

Okay.

Look, if there was an agent that managed GoFundMes for people who yell racial slurs at toddlers, he would look exactly like Jeff Landry.

Yes, he would.

Right.

And share all his basic beliefs and values.

And his fucking New Orleans committee was basically a racist version of I'll make my own city council with hookers and blow, but without the hookers and blow, because everything about him sucks.

That's true.

What fucking boring milquetoast loser is like, you know what I want?

I want to take the great city of New Orleans, the filthy, fucking vomit and bead-filled brothel floor that is New Orleans, and turn it into Charleston.

What fucking state is Charleston even in?

Is it a Carolina?

See, I don't even know.

That's how fucking poor it is.

Hey, Jeff, I just wanted to double-check.

You have like traffic barricades and security as part of your plan, right?

Because it looks like 90% of the budget right now.

Thank you, Heath.

Thank you.

It looks like 90% of the budget right now are these giant phone hands you have for patting yourself on the back.

Yeah, never forget.

But hey, guys, it was January of 2024 when we got this request, so I'm sure I all worked out fine.

All right.

So next up, Anonymous gave us $2,020 for a roast of 21-year-old dudes dudes having sex with 16-year-old girls.

Fund.

Yeah, I appreciate the comedy setup there, Anonymous.

And the email added, on a very much related note, here's a picture of my brother.

Interesting.

I just want to say your brother looks like he wears a t-shirt with a silkscreen picture of himself on it, taken from the sex offender registration website.

Oh, my God.

That's what he looks like.

He's printing it out.

He's like more like Megan's kissed.

Oh, God.

So the picture that we have is of him eye-fucking his own bicep, right?

And he looks like the kind of guy that would eye fuck his own bicep, which is about all the insult that there is, right?

That's the top level.

And as to the

child rape,

which is another term for 21-year-olds having sex with 16-year-old girls, I would, like, I hope you found a convenient opportunity to peel off his skin without leaving a bunch of fingerprints laying around, I guess.

Yeah.

So hopefully this guy's in jail now, both for the obvious reason and for taking a photo in which he appears to be applying a monster energy drink to his underarms as if deodorant.

Like whatever works, whatever gets him in jail.

Yeah.

Use either one.

Yeah.

This guy's brother obviously spends most of his time commenting on Instagram pictures of underage girls with one arm and doing bicep curls with the other.

But guys, here's the good news.

All we have to do is wait for the day he inevitably reaches for his phone while bench pressing, and this problem's going to work itself out in payroll.

You know what I'm saying?

All right, nothing says peaked in high school harder than trolling the sophomore student body for pussy three years after your first attempt at flunking the GED exam, despite Ma waking you up by pounding on the basement door for you to study.

All right, next up, let's all have a go at Sarah J's cats, Vulcan and Zeus.

Okay, these are great.

We got photos of Vulcan and Zeus, and both of them somehow look like they just got pulled over drunk and they're putting on a really bad game face, right?

Yeah, okay.

So in this second picture of Vulcan, Vulcan is very clearly demanding that someone bring them the head,

like the boiled skulls of the mice and squirrels that have offended him, right?

Try to distract me from that with the belly scratches pictures, but I know when I'm being summoned to ritual violence by a cat.

And as for Mr.

I Wanted You to Chase Me Medium over here, Zeus,

I don't buy that.

He's hiding under the bed because he's shy bullshit.

He's down there free basing cocaine.

Look at his fucking face.

I can see it.

Look, I can't tell which cat is which by the name here.

They're both orange, so they're both operating like a 1% capacity.

The one on the counter looks fucking majestic.

I'll tell you that.

He's just sitting there wrapped in shadow.

Looks like he can pounce and he totally jumps at you like the Monty Python rabbit and then gum the fuck out of your neck.

The other one has somehow wedged their thick body down between the shades and the window and in the sun.

And their body is, I'm not kidding, it's spilling upwards.

So it is, yeah, no idea.

It's like defying gravity.

I'd make fun of them, but like, like the rest of us, they're just trying to avoid the evening news, you know?

We've all been there.

It's all they're trying to do.

Vulcan and Zeus are indeed beautiful, but let's not forget that they are cats.

Nice one.

So all the while that they are walking around on your bathroom counter over there by your toothbrush, remember they probably just stepped out of a sandbox full of their own shit, and you're basically brushing your teeth with Tidy Cat.

No, it's okay.

They're covered in saliva, so they're clean.

Oh, yeah.

Don't worry about this shit.

I spit on it.

It's

right, right.

Got a fine sheen of toxoplasmosis to guard you from any germs.

Zeus looks like if he bled into an open wound of Craven the Hunter, the only power he would gain would be taking beefy shits just outside of the litter box.

A real beefer of a shit.

And to round round out the full team roasts, Leslie, Kate, Diana, and Melanie pooled their funds for a $2,000 roast of friend of the show, Dan Beecher from the Thank God I'm Atheist and Data Over Dogma podcasts.

Yeah, Data Over Dogma is a great show, and it's an important one because it is an hour-long program that helps remind us what data isn't.

Okay, well, to honor Dan, I'd like to take a joke in the style of Dan.

Okay.

All right.

Because here's the thing, right?

I'm here.

I'm sitting and I'm thinking, and I'm thinking, this guy, you know, I'm watching this guy right here.

And I'm thinking, this guy right here is great.

Hey, you're punched Dan.

You're an equity actor.

You can't bump yourself into co-star with fucking one like that.

Yeah,

Dan is pretty sure that he is cool and stylish enough to pull off a mullet.

And apparently there is nobody in his life that is honest enough to tell him otherwise.

I don't, you know, I'm not sure if I'm jealous of that or if that's just the reason I keep people like these guys around in my life, right?

Exactly.

Dan looks like someone put an 1840s gold rush miner on queer eyes.

Okay, and to be clear about the mullet, Dan decided that age 49 was a good time to go with a mullet.

Yes.

Better late than never.

It's an interesting pick.

It looks like he got cursed by a witch to age both forwards and backwards at the same time in crazy ways.

Right.

Contradict each other.

He's the picture of DeLorean Gray.

Oh, my God.

Amazing, sir.

Amazing.

And finally, to wrap things up, it's time to roast by far the biggest recipient of Ire for the year.

Not this year.

Or last year, actually.

Heart attacks.

That's the one I'm talking about.

In some cases, mine, but mostly just a concept.

So big thanks to Eric C., Julie L., Cameron D, Jamie and Mark, Lane and Rachel, Anita S, and Will P.

And an even bigger thanks to Colin R.

and Stuart B, who both broke into our top 100 donors with $1,000 each with the same goal.

And when that many people offer that much money, pointing all in the same direction, that means that only the vocal stylings of our very own Anna Bosnik can fill the bill.

So, without further ado,

hit it, Anna.

Do you like crispy bacon?

Do you like melted cheese?

Do fluffy rolls and garlic butter

make you eager than ease?

A fresh hot pile of french fries and a perfectly cooked steak?

Those creamy dips and crispy chips, do they make your belly ache?

Well, forget about that, cause you gotta eat grapes and greens

and fresh fruits and veggies and beans.

You can fantasize all you want until you realize that literally every good food might kill you.

Food might kill you.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

Forget about all the good things now, cause you had a heart attack.

Yeah, baby, yeah, yeah, baby.

Do you like waking up early

to go out for a run?

I daren't think so, cause that shit sucks, and nobody thinks it's fun.

Are you easily frustrated?

Does it feel so good to rage?

Has your doctor ordered you to just calm down,

but you're still just at the cage.

When all is said

and done,

you're living like a nun.

Cause any little pleasure might mean your life, yeah.

Don't even think about having sex with your wife, sex with your wife.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

Put down the Doritos, baby.

You had a heart attack.

I told you to take it slow.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack, yeah.

You had a heart attack.

Oh, oh, oh.

You had a heart attack.

Ooh, oh, ooh, oh, ooh, ooh, ooh.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

Slow death now.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

You had a heart attack.

Thank you, Anna.

And yes, fuck hearts.

Before we flutter away, though, I want to remind you that it's Matreon, and donating to your favorite anti-Trump podcast has never been more important.

Also, if we get a thousand new and upgrading patrons, which is a number that we've hit in the past, Lucinda will quit smoking again.

But this time she's going to take pills and shit.

Anyway, that's all the blessing 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 on the lookout for a brand new episode of our Sister Soul's hot friend got off a movie's debuting at 7 a.m.

Eastern on Tuesday and an even newer episode of Our Have Sister Soul's Citation Needed debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I can't sleep comfortably at night if I neglect to thank Keith Enright for always taking on a little more.

Eli Bosick for always putting in the work.

Lucy Delusions for always waking up a little better.

Tom and Cecil for always fuck youing a little stronger.

And Anna Bosick for somehow always rocking a little harder.

I also want to thank Hannah for providing this week's Farnsworth quote.

I can't say much more than that because she's a financial anything and any endorsement I make in that regard has to run through lawyers and shit.

But thank you, Hannah.

But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's most marvelous Matreon members, Monica Sterling, Rargona, Chris, the paper librarian, Bobby Julie, Richard Feather Snow, Ridley, Yoda, Walks Up Hills, El Senor Tenabroso, Other Chris, Wolfgard94, Alex Croncosaurus, Office of Arbitrary and Capricious PC, There is no legal, there is only Zul, Sarah, Philip, and Aranis, who collectively put the it

in genitals.

Together, these 20 plenty funny honeys gave us money, and by doing so, they got us all a little closer to Heath having to do a magic trick and Eli having to sing a song.

And if you want in on the Matreon action, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathing atheist, whereby you'll learn early 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 scathingadheist.com.

And if you'd like to help, but the economy is on fire, you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts and by telling a friend about the show and following us on social media.

And speaking to social media, Tim Robinson 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.

Except for the stuff that Anna wrote, she wrote that other stuff.

If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at scathingatheist.com.

Yeah, laughing's fun.

We'll try not to be funny.

This content is can-credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm at their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountability network.org.

The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle in the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025, all rights reserved.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at OV.coop.

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Get peace of mind today at greenlight.com/slash protect.

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