630: Mercola Tapes Edition

Warning, the following podcast contains profanity like we were getting paid by the expletive.

This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Factor, BetterHelp, the American Atheists' Annual Convention, and by the new cardiac accessory for post-heart attack Baptists, The Protestant,

just like a real stent, except it's made of prayer.

The Protestant.

What's the matter, Baptists?

You don't want to, you don't.

I thought I thought through Christ all things were possible.

You want a regular one, huh?

Why?

And now, the scathing atheist: Hi, this is Quinn from Eli Bosniks, New Jersey, and I operate a wastewater treatment facility outside of Philadelphia.

You wouldn't believe the amount of corn I see all day, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, judging by my union co-workers who support your local union, a lot of whom voted against their own interests,

I can say with certainty that we did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey men.

It's going to be a long four years.

It's Thursday.

It's March 27th and it's opening day.

Yeah, not nearly as sexual as it might sound.

Well, for for you, maybe.

I'm no illusions.

I'm Ela Bosnik.

Me too.

I'm Heath Henright.

And from Silent Bobs, New Jersey, Hanover, Michigan, and Wake Rust, Georgia, this is the Scathing East.

On this week's episode, Republicans solidify their position on harm.

Pete Pegseth teaches us about the butt dialing and group chat section from the art of boy.

And Jonathan Jerry will be here to convince you that Joseph Mercola actually is nuttier than you thought.

But first, the diatribe.

There are three tiers of Bible quoting and religious arguments, all of which are stupid, but they're not all equally stupid.

The least stupid is when they're used to prove what the Bible says, right?

Now, this is usually a futile exercise since the Bible is so contradictory, but the Bible is a good authority on what the Bible says.

So that's the least stupid one.

The most stupid is when people try to quote the Bible as proof that the Bible is true.

The meme with the extension cord cord plugged into itself says everything you need to know about that.

But the level of stupid I want to talk about today is the one in between.

Those times when Christians quote the Bible as evidence of what Christians believe.

So let me just, I'm going to state this plainly up front.

It would be virtually impossible to read the Bible and to come away from it with anything like the dominant American idea of Christianity.

Almost nothing they believe could be teased out of the Bible without the help of somebody who already believed all that shit.

If you re-ran the religion from the beginning a thousand times, the new versions of Christianity, they might largely land on the same conclusions, right?

Because those conclusions were the ones that were useful to the ruling class and were being imposed on the existing faith.

But the odds that they'd come up with the same justifications are astronomical.

In fact, when you look at the views most associated with the dominant strain of Christianity in America right now, they're virtually antithetical to what you most likely would pull out of the Bible, Right?

Like, you know, look, Jesus isn't the perfect moral philosopher so many liberal Christians paint him as a lot of what Jesus says in the Bible is xenophobic, apocalyptic, antisocial, and dangerous.

But he definitely doesn't endorse the bootstrapping bullshit that the modern Republican Party is built around.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the divide between biblical values and Christian values.

As I've pointed out numerous times on this show, one of the few ethical questions that the Bible is crystal clear about is that you should welcome immigrants into your land.

Right?

Now, Republican Christians dance around that shit and try to say that the Bible meant legal immigrants, but that's a distinction that would have made absolutely not a scrap of fucking sense in biblical times.

But that's just the point, right?

There's nothing that the Bible is so clear about that Christians wouldn't just reinterpret it the second it was politically expedient to do so

I mean, consider this.

Consider the religious right lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

trying to use their Jesosity to justify their inhumane platform.

One of the things that those people have to constantly deal with is the fact that when they look across the aisle, they're mostly seeing Christians.

I mean, sure, we're more religiously diverse than them, but the overwhelming majority of Democratic lawmakers are Christian, which makes it real hard for an honest person to argue that

the clearly Christian thing is the thing that only half of Congress wants.

Right?

How could abortion be clearly forbidden by biblical teachings if 76.4% of the party supporting it is also Christian.

But don't worry, we're not dealing with honest people, so this isn't a problem.

So how is it that devoutly Baptist and Catholic Democrats can support something that you think the Bible clearly opposes?

Well, Satan, the prince of darkness, of course, Satan tricked them into following a false interpretation of the Bible that far more closely matches the actual text of the book than yours does.

And of course, this belief doesn't just save you from the cognitive dissonance that those differing interpretations of the Bible could create, right?

It also saves you from having to engage with the other side's argument at all, since doing so would be allowing the devil to tempt you, which you're forbidden from fucking doing.

And I should emphasize, by the way, I'm not just pulling this out of my fucking hat.

This is basically the official theological policy of the Trump regime right now.

Ralph Drollinger, the ex-basketball player, come D.C.

minister who runs the White House Cabinet Bible Studies.

just released a lengthy article based on a recent Bible study that said exactly that.

It said that Democrats and Republicans who disagree with Trump's most extreme impulses have been captured by the devil's schemes.

He even lists the devil's schemes in the article.

They are in order.

Same-sex marriage, homosexuality, gender neutrality, abortion, women's liberation, Islam, so the opposite of women's liberation too, I guess, liberal Christianity, he puts Christianity in quotes there, and political ideologies.

Which, of course, he insists doesn't cover Jesus thinks all my political beliefs are the best ones.

That's not a political ideology.

That's a religious belief, is he?

Ultimately, Christians believe whatever the fuck is most convenient for the Christians in charge.

The very nature of having unquestionable, unaccountable authorities on truth and the nature of reality demands that result.

So any effort to rescue Christianity by showing me some nice sounding shit in the Bible is like trying to convince me that that corporation has my best interests at heart by quoting their mission statement.

Christians are what Christians do.

And the very fact that so many Christians are trying to find a way to deny that fact is proof of how damning a fact it is.

They're talking about your Jesus.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda of this podcast, Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick.

Fellas, are you ready to bond?

Sorry, I was just thinking about Pedro Pascal.

Yeah, and I was eating a frog.

So it's all sitting up.

It's all coming together.

You're a vegan.

So, yeah, we need a minute to think about Pedro Pascal.

So we're going to take a pause for a word from this week's first sponsor, Factor.

Okay, what about Wednesday?

Plain chicken?

Plain chicken?

That's two days in a row.

It's a lot of chicken, man.

I don't know what to tell you.

Hey, guys.

What's with all the Paffir noodle?

The Phaffer noodle?

Man, can only say hubbub so many times, Eli.

No, that's fair.

So Heath and I are trying to eat better this year, but it means a lot of really not tasty meals.

Yeah.

Well, guys, if you want to optimize your nutrition this year, why don't you just try Factor?

What's

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I don't know, Noah.

How many days in a row am I going to have to eat the same thing?

Well, with 40 options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week, it's easy to pick new meals tailored to your goal with Factor for every day.

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Awesome.

Thanks, Noah.

So long, chalked chicken.

Ugh.

What's chalked chicken?

It's a chicken with chalk in it.

Yeah, got it.

And now, back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, congressional Democrats are reminding people that the Republican Party's chief goal is to do harm by reintroducing the do no harm bill and making them kill it again.

This bill would modify the existing Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RIFRA, to ensure it wasn't used to justify things like discrimination, evading child labor laws, or denying people access to health care, to which Republicans predictably answered, well, where's the fun in that?

Yeah.

Sincerely held harm says, what?

The bill.

We did that.

And Republicans all voted what?

We're voting what.

They sure did.

Now, we've talked quite a bit about Riffra in the show, but it's still easy to forget that when it was passed in 1993, it was an objectively good thing.

I mean, there were some solid arguments against it, most notably of the Cassandra variety, but the intention of the law was unambiguously good.

Regulations were being crafted by Christian people from Christian cultures that took Christian prohibitions and sensibilities into account, but not those of other religions.

So RIFRA was meant to protect like Jewish kids who weren't allowed to wear yarmulkas in class because of a no-hat rule or bearded Muslims who are being denied jobs because the company associates clean-shaven with professional.

It basically said, hey, if your rule is pointless anyway, it can be suspended for people who have a religious belief about it.

Yeah, religion gets to win a stupid contest if that stupid contest is with the law.

I'm not sure it's a good thing.

All the smart people are, so trust them, not me.

Well, no, to be clear, if you like, you can argue that it's not a good thing, but to do so, you have to be able to excise all the pro-Christian bias that already pervades the laws, right?

If the laws were truly secular, this would be a bad thing.

But that's what it was meant to balance out was that pro-Christian bias that just already seeps in.

But of course, That law has since been weaponized by Christians who use it to refuse to give gay people marriage licenses, refuse to give their employees contraception coverage, and refuse to fill prescriptions for medicines they disagree with.

And the Supreme Court, that's so obsessed with the intent of two centuries dead people that they name their judicial philosophy after it, can't be bothered to give a fuck what the still living people that passed RIFRA said, then, say, now, and clearly intended.

So they've allowed, but I'm Christian, though, to become a legally recognized get out of jail free card.

Yeah, the original RIFRA was a reaction to a ruling by Antonine Scalia

that said religious freedom doesn't mean laws don't count.

It was a reaction to that.

Like, do you want me to wear Antonine Scalia as a skin suit and do like a musical number about it to give you the idea?

I'll happily do that.

Ready to go.

Yeah, we have the skin suit already.

Yeah, we've needed an excuse to use it for a while.

So Anna wrote the score.

It's awesome.

So the answer to this, of course, is to amend the original law, which is what the Do No Harm Act would do.

It would basically add a footnote to the original law.

I'm so glad that there's not a cartoon below me.

It's a good thing this is an audio medium.

But it was basically, it would add a footnote to the original law that said, no using this bill to undermine discrimination laws, deny people health care, evade child labor laws, refuse to provide government services, or refuse to do your fucking job as a government employee.

And despite the fucking duh of it all, this addendum was already defeated by Republicans in 2017 and again in 2019.

But it's become all the more important now that Donald Trump's White House faith office is basically giving government employees seminars on how to refuse to do your job because of Jesus.

Yeah, this is good work by Democrats in Congress.

We have pretty much no power right now.

One of the few things that we should be doing over and over, just like this, introducing bills like, I don't know, don't kick puppies even if God told you the act or whatever.

Yes.

Make the evil people go on record every day.

All the time.

Yeah.

And since evil doesn't matter, throw in some weird shit that might be their line, right?

Vote against trans rights and say how you really feel about Funnel Cake Bill of 2026, you know?

Just like, see if we can get some hits.

Yeah, so yeah, so this doomed effort was introduced by the ever ooh-ooh-inducing Jamie Raskin

along with Representative Steve Cohen, Bobby Scott, and Marygate Scanlon, as well as Heath's man-crush senator Corey Booker.

And yes,

it will fail.

And while it's failing, the Republicans will be holding a hearing on whether the flat earthers are maybe on to something, and the American voter will be reminded of what they could have had

eggs feel like they wanted eggs that was really important hard for them to remember

and in Easter eggs in this economy news

this year's White House Easter egg roll is sponsored by Policy Genius what's Policy Genius great question me doesn't count

fine okay you do it you do it still not a point what's policy genius?

If you're going to do something heroic at a big event, you want to make sure your family is taken care of, but you don't have time for all that paperwork.

There's policy genius.

And they're just one of the main, many amazing corporate sponsors that might be paying for the celebration and political favors from the president.

Seriously, that's happening.

After holding a Tesla sales event at the White House two weeks ago, the Trump administration is now offering ad space at the Egg Roll event with plans of turning the whole thing into a product showcase.

Yeah.

Yeah.

JFK had asked not what your country can do for you.

FDR had nothing to fear but fear itself.

Donald Trump has, but don't answer yet.

That's finished.

Yeah, that's fair.

And a big thanks to Anne for sending the link to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Anne gets whatever she wants.

Keith, does that include your hand in marriage?

Yeah, like Ann already had whatever she wants.

I feel like we should have to give her something she doesn't want, right?

Yeah, you can marry me too.

Cool.

Let us know.

So what's the only thing worse than a bunch of kids celebrating a divine Nepo zombie by rolling extremely expensive hard-boiled eggs in this economy across the White House lawn in a big snit?

That's right, it's the auto ads.

And the White House put out a nine-page buying guide with all the details.

But they didn't go straight for the hard sell because it's a classy

buying guide for corporate sponsors of the resurrection of our Lord and Savior.

Obviously, yeah.

Government-sponsored resurrection.

The guide starts with some fun facts about the history of the event.

For example, in 1887, President Grover Cleveland started inviting kids into the East Room on Easter, which ruined several very nice rugs.

Sure.

Then it says, exact quote from this guide, Reaganomics.

Oh, it's

egg.

Egg.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan hosted a hunt for wooden eggs that bore the signatures of famous people.

Ooh, and the best part was, if you got one from Ronald Reagan, it changed every year because of his terrible, terrible Alzheimer's.

Everybody.

No.

I feel like they were just trying to find a way to get rid of the evidence after they tried out the minority report thing.

Right.

They're like, oh, fuck.

Getting rid of these skeeballs.

This is fucking George Bush, George Bush, George.

What the fuck?

Let's start a group on signal.

Moving ahead to 1969.

What?

Yeah, years are confusing.

They moved ahead to 1969 in the guide from 1981.

First lady Pat Nixon in 1969 had a staff member put on a white jumpsuit and a rabbit mask that they apparently had to shake hands with all the kids and moving ahead once again to 1889 we learn that benjamin harrison had the united states marine band play lively tunes for the kids and one other detail that was not mentioned in the guide this is from the article i read in the times the first weir that's white house easter egg roll w-h-e-e-r took place in 1878 they use that throughout the guide They're psyched about it.

Okay, I was wondering why you were trying to get a fucking anagram going.

No, no, no.

That's theirs, and they love it.

The first one took place in 1878, soon after Congress passed a law that banned kids from rolling eggs and themselves down Capitol Hill.

Yep.

Oh, even back in 1878, poor families had to make do by smudging Jimmy in a pattern and tossing him down the hill.

So this event is run by a company founded in 2013 by Republican staffers, and it's called Harbinger.

That's the name of the company.

Not a good name.

Ah, not great.

Honest, but bad name.

And here's the details from Harbinger.

If you want to buy a sponsorship, they have three tiers, silver, gold, and platinum.

And they're fucking idiots.

So they got the order backwards in their own guide.

And they went platinum, gold, silver when they explained it.

When you're doing tiers, you have have to show the basic one first and then add stuff, obviously.

So I'm going to fix it and explain in the right order.

At the basic silver tier, you get a 10-foot by 10-foot branded activation.

You get to engage with the White House press corps and you get 50 tickets to the event.

That's going to be $75,000.

Jesus Christ.

When you say engage.

And that is where Eli stopped talking, podcast listener.

It's so weird that he only had the first half of the sentence, but that's all he had to say.

That is weird.

Yeah, he just stopped.

All right.

Next up, we have the gold tier.

You get all the silver stuff, plus your branded activation is 20 by 20.

You get one additional, quote, branding and visibility, but not in a key area.

Fucking relax.

You're not at platinum yet.

You get two tickets to the official weir brunch,

and you get 100 general admission tickets.

That is $125,000 for the gold.

What?

No U.S.

citizenship?

This is bullshit.

And here's the deal for the serious players.

And you look like a serious player.

You do.

For the platinum tier, you're talking $3,530 for the branded activation.

And yes, your area will be key if you're wondering.

We're going to bump up those brunch tickets to a four-pack and you get a meet and greet or a White House tour.

Not both.

Don't be greedy.

and actually you know what you're breaking my balls i'm gonna throw in 50 more tickets 150 total and exclusive access opportunities 200k all in what do you think okay so you're saying i could bring 150 people to cause a distraction while i'm alone meeting the president no This sounds like a plan.

No, so we are

not adding that Patreon tier.

I don't care that you guys can outvote me okay just saying we have enough people at the portland show to make this plan happen

so fun trip much like the response to the tesla sales event at the white house there's been some concern that selling ads for a white house event might be using public office for private gain because Because of what those words mean.

And we have regulations that very clearly prohibit that.

But even without those rules, this is the U.S.

government running a giant Christianity ad expo on Easter.

If an Islam-themed toy company called like Shia Pet tried to

A, it wouldn't really help, even though that's a great idea for a company.

And B, there's no chance they're getting approved for like a branded activation area at the White House.

I really wish we could afford to test that theory with one of our many 30 by 30 avant-garde atheist activations that rose.

You probably have a rich listener with 200.

I know who it is.

And so either we get denied and then we have a lawsuit about religious discrimination or they have to let us do it and get fucking secular on the way out, which we will.

I promise you.

We would have made the news.

We would have made the

while I block Eli's access to the company bank accounts.

We're going to take a quick break for a word from our other sponsor this week, BetterHelp.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

And then we emerge from the fake wall.

Boom.

Mental health is ours.

Oh, my God.

It's perfect.

Right?

Hey, guys.

What are you up to?

Oh, hey, Noah.

Eli and I are just planning a heist.

I knew this was coming when you started talking about Magic the Gathering, dude.

Guys, you can play with proxies.

Okay, first of all, not at the tournament level, you can't.

And second of all, no, this is to pay for our therapy.

You need to rob a bank for therapy yeah i know a traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from a hundred dollars to two hundred fifty dollars per session which adds up fast okay well why don't you just try better help

oh you mean like an elite team of criminals from across the world for the heist yeah it turns out we don't know no any no no with better help you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions saving you big on costs and on time better help believes that therapy should feel accessible not like a luxury with online therapy you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress.

All right.

That sounds great.

Where do we sign up?

Your well-being is worth it.

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

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

All right, Noah.

Thanks.

All right, Heath, you got your grappling hook?

Sure, do.

Wait, wait, I thought you guys were just going to try BetterHelp.

Oh, we are, but you reminded us, and so now it's about the Magic the Gathering thing.

Eli just learned about legendary commanders.

Yeah.

Surprisingly, not supposed to be lands.

No, that's true.

They're not.

And in the Candy Ban Can news, as a person who spent a not insignificant amount of airtime warning of the dangers of religious programs in schools, I have to admit that even when theocracy does manage to smash through the walls of church and state like a proselytizing Kool-Aid man,

It's pretty lame.

I remember in my own childhood, the sullen, mournful classmates who were hauled away from recess and gym to be bullied at a nearby Catholic church by a 70-year-old virgin.

So 70-year-old liar.

So it makes sense that modern programs do everything they can to make their pitch at all appealing.

Well, this week, one school district in Columbus, Ohio is taking away religious assholeries ace in the hole as they're banning the distribution of candy for Jesus.

Yeah, we're getting rid of the candy.

Just one other small thing.

We're going to need you to mark your vans from now on.

No, sincerely held unmarked vans with trails of candy.

Like, that's what happened.

That kind of gives away the game when that's what happens.

Right.

It's also a blatant admission of how full of shit they are that they can't sell, get superpowers, live forever in paradise, and avoid eternal punishment without adding a fun-sized Snickers to sweeten the pot, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Not even doing full-size.

Fuck you.

They're not even doing fun size.

They're doing like suckers and shit.

Fucking cheap ass.

They're not bars.

Right.

So for those of you unfamiliar, most of these programs, though not all, are run by LifeWise Academy, a program that connects public schools with local churches for Jesus preaching during the school day.

And you might be thinking to yourself, hey, how is that not a criminal enterprise?

Well,

Eli, you were saying?

Right, yeah.

So LifeWise provides the curriculum, the staff, and sometimes background checks so that Christian parents can make sure there's never, you know, an extended period where their kid doesn't hear about Jesus.

And one of the criticisms that has come Lifewise's way over the last few years is their recruitment tactics.

Because look, the pitch for this, already bad, by the way, is...

I'm a religious nutbag.

If my kid has science class without a counterpoint, I'm going to vomit.

Good.

Please make my kid skip recess so that someone with my belief system can yell it into them.

Hey, just embrace the vomit.

We love it over here.

Start in OnlyFans.

Make some money inside hospitals.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But in reality, LifeWise has spent a lot more time at water parks and putting on rock concerts and, as I said at the top, offering kids literal candy to convince them to join the program.

At which point, they then hit them with the Jesus.

And look, trick-or-treat is a weird bribe, admittedly.

But a lot more often these academies aren't offering just candy.

They're offering lunch, which means that food insecure families are especially vulnerable to their tactics.

Hey, we'll still take those lunches you're giving away.

We'll pick them up, bring them to the school cafeteria.

It seems like you could have offered that the whole time, but like we'll totally pick them up.

But okay, maybe I'm not remembering the Bible correctly.

When Jesus healed that blind guy, did he make the guy listen to like a timeshare presentation first?

I forget how the story goes.

Do you want to get spitty mud in your face?

Because this is how you get spitty mud in your face.

This is how you get spitty mud in your face.

He's got you there, Heath.

Right.

So with that in mind, this week, the Columbus School District revised its policy to read as follows: quote, any private entity providing religious instruction during the school day must agree that it will not provide participating students with any materials, snacks, clothing, candies, trinkets, or other items for their return to school.

The district will not release students for religious instruction, release time to any private provider that fails to adhere to this prohibition.

Okay, don't make a list, though.

They're going to start giving away like non-trinket objets that aren't technically items like you got to tighten up that language nothing made of matter no doing that right or just be honest and say no giving them shit that the other kids are going to be jealous of you absolute fucking ghouls yeah yeah that's true now predictably christians are using this change to cry oppression painting a picture of hungry children returning empty-handed from their salvation practice as some sort of bigotry.

But the truth is, they're just mad because they have one less bribe, one less axe to hold over the heads of the needy.

And if you ask me, that's always good news.

Oh, yeah.

And finally tonight, in New Phone Houthis.

Fantastic.

We have a story about a U.S.

military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and accidental group texting.

As part of Donald Trump's isolationist America First policy, the U.S.

military recently fired up some more attacks all the way across the globe.

The Houthis are a Shia rebel group that's been launching missile and drone attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea in opposition to Israel and in solidarity with Palestine.

In response, Secretary of Defense, former Fox News Weekend co-host and

Holy Crusades enthusiast with a tattoo on his arm to prove it, Pete Hegseth, has been overseeing the U.S.

military operation.

And in addition to being a Christian Rite lunatic, he's also a 44-year-old boomer somehow who doesn't know how phones work.

And he sent detailed war plans to a group chat that somehow included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.

And we know about the whole story thanks to an article in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled, The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.

Yeah.

And if you're wondering why we're covering this here you're on the scathing atheist instead of over on the skeptocrat, it's because

this is the best evidence of a loving God we've seen for a while.

People, okay.

We are at DEF CON too over here.

Yeah, so I want to be clear because this is getting lost in so much of the coverage that this is already egregious before they accidentally include the reporter on that group chat.

Sure is.

You're not supposed to have war group chats?

No.

No?

Fuck.

All right.

Well, a big thanks to Weist Rhino for being the first of many to send us a link to scathingnews at gmail.com.

And also a big thanks to Stormy D for being just a few minutes behind, but crucially providing new phone Houthis, one of my favorites of all time.

When I build my field of dreams, Veist Rhino and Stormy definitely get season tickets.

And Stormy also gets a statue in the monument park in Left Field for that pun.

Loved it.

But we are going to dress you up like a Civil War general story.

Sorry, we we don't make the rules we do make those rules actually but yeah still don't dress them like a you know

okay so here's what we learned from jeffrey goldberg it all started when he somehow got added to a group chat on signal by somebody named mike waltz That's the name of Trump's national security advisor.

And Goldberg figured this must be a prank because otherwise it's the dumbest fuck up of all time.

Right.

And keep in mind that all time includes Rudy Giuliani.

It does.

Well, it was option B, the dumbest fuck up of all time.

The group chat continued with texts from Mike Waltz, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, of course, Vice President Jan Stance Vance, and high-level staff members representing Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, the Treasury Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

None of those people noticed that a journalist was was listed in the group.

Fucking Christ.

Ah, shit.

Is this one of those Bitcoin scams?

Again, I hate.

Oh, oh, no, it's the topmost officials of my government.

Right.

So, so dumber than the Bitcoin scams, but more important, I should say.

Falling for the Bitcoin scam.

Yeah, right.

So from there, the chat started discussing extremely sensitive military details, especially from Pete Hegseth.

And of course, Hegseth was using terms like operational security or OPSEC, because he's not just a DEI hire from Frox and Friends weekend.

He definitely knows what OPSEC means.

He's a military guy.

Well, except, of course, the OPSEC measure called don't start group chats without the help of someone under 40.

That's a tricky one.

You did not have several drinks that morning.

And also the part that says, don't discuss top secret info on group chats.

Yeah.

Pretty basic stuff.

Jesus.

We also saw the use of, and this is insane,

way too many emojis.

They're discussing a campaign of dropping bombs on people.

And Mike Waltz celebrated afterwards with a text that ended with fist emoji, American flag emoji, fire emoji.

Guys, guys, you can generate your own emojis now.

Just ask for the war crimes thumbs up combo.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah.

Hell would probably not even be the scariest thing AI did that day.

So yeah, exactly.

I know there's a lot of things going on here, but the emoji thing somehow bothered me the most.

It's the most insane.

That's interesting.

That's the part that bothered you the most.

You can't do emojis in this sort of thing.

Whatever.

I'm focusing on a weird thing.

So just in case it wasn't clear, it's insane that any of these people were using Signal for that discussion.

Yes, Signal is known to be.

relatively secure by using end-to-end encryption.

So

sure.

Something, I guess.

But you don't have to hack anything if you're invited to the chat.

And if you're a high-level military official, you're not supposed to use publicly available apps for classified information either way.

Even the good ones with incognito mode or whatever they thought they were doing.

Yeah.

And again, all of this is for technology that you are not using to accidentally add journalists to your top secret thread.

Right.

But like that, but again, this is the kind of shit that's usually discussed in a room that's been checked for bugs that has a fucking force field around it.

Like actually that.

Yes.

You up doing a war.

And with the silver lining that when these idiots blow up the world, at least we'll know early enough to have a party first.

We're going to close the headlines for the night.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Jumaji.

And when we come back, science communicator Jonathan Cherry will be here to communicate some science.

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Aw, very nice.

Right?

It's very rare these days that I see something about a Woo merchant and I say to myself, wow, that guy's way nuttier than I thought.

But a recent video from my friend Jonathan Jerry titled The Mercola Tapes sure as hell managed that feat.

So I invited him on to talk to you about it.

If you don't know him, Jonathan Jerry is a scientist and science communicator with McGill University's Office for Science and Society.

And he's also one of the many Canadians that I'm trying to get in good with in case I need to escape to the north.

Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Hey, it's a large country.

There's plenty of room if you need to come by.

You guys aren't even used in the top half.

As long as you don't mind the cold, we have a lot of untapped territory up north.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I can do that.

I can handle the cold.

I grew up in Michigan.

It used to be cold there before before global warming.

All right.

So I want to dive right into this because this is some amazing stuff that you've uncovered here.

But before we do, we got to talk a little bit about Joseph Mercola.

We've talked about him on the show before.

Marsh devoted one of his earliest who's woo segments to Joseph Mercola.

You can go back to episode 500 if you haven't heard that.

But for those in the audience who might need a refresher, could you remind us who is Joseph Mercola?

Dr.

Joseph Mercola is one of the most influential sort of alternative health influencers slash supplement salesman in the world.

He is an osteopathic physician by training, which in the US is essentially equivalent to a medical doctor, so I'm not holding that against him.

But very early on, he got into alternative medicine, natural medicine, quote-unquote natural medicine.

And he was a very early adopter of the internet.

And he saw the potential for the internet to spread the word about his alternative health beliefs.

And so he created a website, mercola.com, in 1997, I believe.

So very early days.

And, you know, every

kind of alternative medical sort of quackery and grand conspiracy theory you can think of, it's there.

He is an anti-vaxxer.

He co-wrote a book about the truth about COVID-19, where every conspiracy theory about the pandemic is in there.

He's been selling every dietary supplement you can think of.

And that has made him extremely rich and very, very influential.

And of course, he is friends with other people in that kind of of community, including Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., who is now the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, in case you forgot.

Yeah, I've been trying to.

Yeah, he was influential with the RFK presidential campaign and whatnot.

So yeah, he's heavily tied to RFK.

So, okay.

And what are the Mercola tapes?

So last fall, our office released a video that I made, an hour-long video called Mercola Know the Risks, which was a sort of comprehensive look at Mercola, his empire, and his misinformation, because I hadn't seen anything really well done on Mercola on YouTube.

And when I made that video, I just learned through journalist Rick Polito, who writes for this trade publication for people who are in the supplements industry.

I had just learned that something very wild had apparently happened, which is that Mercola was now consulting with a medium.

who claimed to be channeling an entity.

And he was doing business meetings with this channeler.

And he had fired his entire C-suite and replaced it with other people.

There were allegations of money being moved around, maybe being stolen by the Chandler, of people being fired because they were Catholic.

And there were these meetings between him and the Chandler, who goes by the fake name of Kai Klay.

Those sessions were being recorded.

These were video sessions.

And Polito mentioned having seen some of these videos, but I hadn't myself.

And so after the video came out, a whistleblower from inside Mercola's company reached out to me and said, hey, here's a bunch of these videos.

This needs to come out.

And so that's what I'm referring to as the Mercola tastes, is these daily sessions of over two hours each where Mercola speaks to Kai Kle.

Kai goes into an alleged trance, starts channeling this hyper-dimensional, high-frequency entity from the causal plane called Balan.

And then Mercola asks Balan a bunch of questions.

And then the trance ends.

And Mercola sort of updates Kai on on what happened because Kai claims that he doesn't know what he says when Balan is possessing his body.

Yeah, and the videos are just amazing.

So apparently Balan knows all things from all dimensions except for articles.

He can't quite get articles correct.

So he like uses the instead of a here and there and stuff.

It's lazy.

I mean, that's what's striking here is that, is that Mercola seems to be all in on this channel, and this channeler is not even good at cold reading.

I mean, what we're seeing here is somebody who starts laughing maniacally while closing his eyes, says, how are you?

And then keeps his eyes closed, speaks in a monotonous voice, basically just agrees with what Mercola is saying and asking, and will say, you know, the Amy, the Noah, and will say human, as if he hasn't fully grasped art, art in the English language.

And that works.

That's good enough for Mercola.

Well, so, but as you point point out in the video, what works for him is that he always tells Mercola exactly what Mercola wants to hear, too, right?

So I think some amount of the laziness of the psychic act is forgiven since the psychic always tells him, you know, that he's a super genius or whatever he wants to hear.

So what can you tell us about this guy, this Kai Clay?

So Kai Clay, his real name is Christopher Johnson.

And Rick Pulito did mention which Christopher Johnson he is, because of course it's such a common name that it would be very hard to track down.

I forgot that Rick Pulito had identified which Christopher Johnson he was.

And so I figured it out on my own.

And I presented the evidence in the video.

And it's very, very strange because he is Christopher W.

Johnson, the former CEO of the Whitehorn Group, which was a branding agency in New York City.

And on Christopher Johnson's LinkedIn profile, he claims to have worked with major brands.

I mean, we're talking CNN, MasterCard, Pepsi, Sesame Street.

He says that he's the guy behind the branding of the Infiniti automobile brand.

He says that he's been part, that he apparently still is part of the U.S.

Afghan Women's Council led by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.

So you have this guy who apparently, based on what he's saying, I mean, I don't know to what degree we can trust this, but apparently had a very successful branding, marketing career in New York City working with major clients.

And he was this single gay dad who got a daughter through in vitro fertilization and surrogacy.

And he stepped away from the Whitehorn group.

There are these years that I call the missing years where I was not able to find any trace of him or of Balan or any of that.

And then in 2019, he appears in Florida and he creates this company that's called Whitehorn World LLC.

So very similar to the Whitehorn Group.

And if you go through it on LexisNexis, you find that the variant name for this is Balan.

That's the first trace that I see of Balan.

And all of a sudden during the pandemic, he is channeling.

He has a website, balanced, B-A-H-L-O-N,

and he offers his services to CEOs, you know, the usual shtick.

And then in late 2023, he holds an event with Mercola in Florida.

And that is when I'm told those meetings begin.

And Mercola brings him in and starts asking him for advice on a daily basis.

Okay, so Mercola just like, like, it seems like he just got taken in by his own bullshit in a lot of ways.

Well, that's what's interesting because, you know, it's been alleged in civil actions against Mercola and Johnson by former high-ranking executives within Mercola's company that what Johnson is doing is that he is bringing in people that he knows to replace them.

And some of the money that Mercola has might be moved around to other accounts that Mercola does not have control over.

And so, yeah, what seems to be happening is that here you have somebody, Joseph Mercola, who was always the guy outside the mainstream.

I call him the upside-down doctor.

Basically, everything that medicine says is true.

He says the exact opposite.

He's been a contrarian his entire career.

And so he has anything that just smells of consensus.

He's like, no, it's corrupt.

And he says the exact opposite.

And that leaves you very vulnerable to any kind of fringe group, fringe beliefs, and people who are con artists who will play that card of like, yeah, I'm also outside of the mainstream and who will then feed these people's egos.

I mean, you saw the video.

There's a whole montage in there of Balan feeding Mercola's ego and telling him you're going to win more Nobel Prizes than anybody in the world.

You're a genius.

You're a genius.

You're a genius.

And Mercola starts to say, yeah, well,

apparently I'm a genius.

It's so good to be a genius.

All of these things.

And so that makes you so receptive, right, to that kind of con artistry.

And in my opinion, in my interpretation, that is what's happening here.

Okay, so let me put on the hat of a Mercola defender or the tinfoil cap of a Mercola defender for a minute and ask you this.

Why are you doing this?

What business is it of yours what Joseph Mercola and his psychic are talking about?

So in 2019, the Washington Post reported on an affidavit in which Mercola had admitted that he was worth over $100 million.

And in the tapes, he says, yeah, while anybody who's worth anything is not going to confess to where their actual net worth is, I'm actually worth over $300 million.

Wow.

And he hasn't seen patients in a very, very long time, as far as I know.

This is money that he has mostly made by selling supplements to people, by getting people hooked on his website, his daily newsletter, all the articles that are written by him and many that are ghostwritten by people who have no qualifications writing about health.

He has, you know, he speaks at conferences and he's being paid for that.

So the massive massive fortune that I can barely wrap my head around that he has made comes from the people, from the public.

And these people need to know that he is not a reliable source of information.

He is getting now his medical information from Balan.

I have him on tape asking about an article on vaginal candidiasis and running through the treatments, the supplements that they want to promote for that, asking Balan, is that true?

Is that not true?

And when he doesn't get it from Balan, he gets it from ChatGPT because he is super in love with artificial intelligence.

And he says, you know, ChatGPT says so.

And there's no reason why he would lie.

So he's unaware, it seems, of the fact that large language models can hallucinate answers out of thin air.

So people need to know these things.

And then, of course, there's the danger part of this, which we were discussing before we were recording where There are two things here.

Let's start with the slightly more mainstream one, which is the fact that he is very cozy with RFK Jr.

He hosted a town hall in Florida for Kennedy while Kennedy was running for the presidential nomination.

They're both major leaders of the anti-vax movement.

And I've heard rumors that he's been offered a job within HHS and he's sort of considering it.

And so you can imagine the damage that could be done by Mercola gaining access to some center or institute within HHS.

And this is a guy who has to go to Balan with every decision that he has to make.

So now you've got Christopher Johnson, a branding executive, closing his eyes and telling Mercola how to run one of the health agencies within the U.S.

government.

So that's one possible scenario.

The other scenario is that there's a clip where Mercola shows his handgun to Chris Johnson and says, hey, I haven't used this in two years, but this brain, it doesn't miss.

There's no fear in my brain.

And there's all this paranoia that is revealed in those tapes.

And there's a land in Costa Rica where he had contracted somebody to build what has been described by the contractor as an end-of-days compound to survive the apocalypse or world events, is how the legal document puts it.

Then that whole plan got abandoned by Mercola, and then he moved to having a similar plan in Mexico.

And that, I am told, has been recently abandoned as well.

So there's this idea of creating a compound in Latin America, and we're going to have packs of dogs to protect us.

And he's got his handgun, and they want to build schools there.

And, you know, we've heard about doomsday cults and the story never ends well.

We have somebody who is being swayed by a psychic, a medium who claims to know everything.

And that also deeply worries me.

Yeah, no, there's plenty of things to get terrified of in here.

So, okay, so let's turn to the tapes themselves.

So how much of this stuff did you ultimately watch?

I was sent an initial batch of 26 videos.

I since accessed way, way more than that.

But I decided to watch all 26 of them.

And they're about two hours and 10 minutes long.

Woo!

Yeah, so I watched it all, and I took very copious notes because, you know, so much of it is quite boring, to be honest.

It's very mundane, but then once in a while, you hear Mercola says that he wants to recruit millions of people to march with weapons on veterinarians and basically kill them.

And so you have to do a double take and rewind and make sure that you heard this correctly.

So you have all of these

nuggets, if you will, that are all the way through these tapes.

So I took a bullet and

I spent weeks watching over 50 hours of this stuff.

Wow.

Okay.

And speaking of nuggets, how much of the stuff that you watched was about Joseph Mercola's butt?

Very little, thankfully.

Okay.

But

as you point out, so Mercola, of course, has these alternative health theories.

He thinks he's going to win a bunch of Nobel Prizes in part because he thinks he's figured out that carbon dioxide is very good for your gut bacteria and it will protect all of the molecules in your body.

It will create like a force field to protect it from really, really evil 5G radiation.

Yes.

And so it's very funny because in one of the tapes he says, oh, you know, I must have been an idiot for putting ozone up my butt.

I mean, who would do this?

And then cut to, yes, I'm putting carbon dioxide up my butt now.

And that's a thing that's going to revolutionize medicine and in the entire world.

And there's a bit where he is bent over his standing desk, shirtless.

And given the context, I'm assuming that he just got done blowing the gas up his bum and he's keeping it on the inside while he's talking to Chris Johnson about how it's such a wonderful shield around your biomolecules.

It's amazing.

So the man literally thought his problem was that he was blowing the wrong type of smoke up his own ass.

It's

just gorgeous.

Okay, so, but other than the setting the butt stuff aside, what else, what other kind of stuff did you learn?

You've already mentioned the recruiting an army against veterinarians as a profession.

Yeah, this, I mean, this is the most disturbing thing.

I mean, this is a massive call to violence, and he hates the veterinary industry.

They used to have a veterinarian, an alternative veterinarian, who is working in collaboration with Mercola.

Her name is Karen Becker, and they just fired her in 2024, and they locked her out of all the accounts.

So she lost all of her content.

She posted about this on Instagram.

She was not happy.

And so it's a recurring motif that he just hates the veterinary industry.

It's never made completely clear in the videos that I watch why that is.

It seems to have something to do with a diet that veterinarians will recommend to dogs.

And in the tapes, Mercola adopts a puppy that he calls Joy.

And so he's very close to his dog and he wants what's best for his dog.

And he thinks that knucklebone is the best kind of thing to feed to your dog.

At some point, he feeds some of his own blood to his puppy.

And then

he asks Balon if

that's okay.

And so

he's very much against the veterinary industry to the point where he says at some point, oh, because of course I failed to mention it, but Mercola is not only getting advice from Balan, he also claims to have spiritual guides who put ideas into his head.

And he has over 1,500 spiritual guides, some of whom are his own parents.

And so he says, well, my guides told me how we're going to do this.

And we're going to create a campaign.

And we're going to recruit millions of people, maybe 70, maybe 80 million people.

And they will be all in on protecting our pets.

And they will march with weapons on these creatures, he says.

And the really, really bad part in all of this is that Balan, a.k.a.

Chris Johnson, who has his eyes closed and pretends to be channeling an entity, basically agrees with that sentiment and says, oh, but also don't forget the industrial side of this, probably meaning the livestock industry.

So here is a guy who is basically not only agreeing with this mass cult violence, but also saying, hey, don't forget about those people over there.

Those are targets as well.

Right.

right yeah that's really i mean i have i have i have no words and so any anything else that makes the top five of weirdest you found out while you were watching these i mean there's a lot of weirdness there's a lot of of dangling keys in front of mercola in an attempt to distract him with really really big projects so balan tells him oh you're going to create a chain of wellness clinics the world over and they built a prototype at their headquarters which i'm told has been abandoned nothing has moved there he's writing a book a week mercola is because he is basically picking a topic maybe his spiritual guides told him about the topic and then he chooses a ghostwriter and gives an outline to the ghostwriter ghostwriter books a zoom session with balan asks balan a bunch of questions that gets transcribed by artificial intelligence mercola does a bit of editing boom there's your book so that's where the information is coming from these days so there's a lot of really outlandish stuff in this.

I mean, I can't even,

we'd be here for hours, just list going through the list of all the weird weird stuff that's in there

okay so look i don't want to needlessly amplify any criticisms here but journalistic integrity demands that i at least ask you

were you paid by bill gates to release this information on the same day as the jfk files came out in an effort to distract the masses as soon as you mentioned journalistic integrity i knew exactly where you were going

So for people who are playing the home game, who may not be in the know, so Joe Marcola has an ex-girlfriend called Erin Elizabeth, who is also an alternative health influencer.

And the night that my video came out, she posted on X.

So his ex posted on X.

She wrote about the video.

And to me, this was, I mean, again, it's, I, I, you know,

you were saying you watched 50 hours of this stuff.

I feel a bit like an anthropologist.

I love learning how people think about these things, what their frame of mind is, what their logic is.

And so here you have Erin Elizabeth, who is using some incredible conspiracy logic to there's just so much red yarn here it's it's fascinating so when i started doing when i started sort of getting recognition for the work that i was doing through mcgill the people who don't like me had to figure out a quick way to just cast me aside and sort of disbelieve me sure and so somebody figured out that some professor on the mcgill campus which by the way mcgill huge university we don't all know each other so there's a professor somewhere on campus who got a grant from the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which happens.

It's a foundation.

You can apply for grants.

So somebody there got a grant.

And so that now is the way that I get dismissed by conspiracy theories: that I'm being paid by Bill Gates, who, of course, is pro-vaccine.

He's part of the deep state.

Because like literally anyone else at your entire university got money from him once.

Yeah, so they have no idea how grants work in a university.

And I think that what they believe happens is that one person gets a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Black Hawk helicopters arrive over campus, men in black rappel down from the helicopters,

knock on doors and say, these are your talking points.

Shut up and just say these things.

It says, oh, vaccines are safe and effective.

And that's how the entire university is now corrupt, right?

And so Aaron Elizabeth's point is that the Bill Gates-funded McGill University releases this video about Joe Mercola, my ex, on the same day that the JFK files are being released.

Coincidence?

And so by her logic, I guess Bill Gates, who is part of the deep state, probably knows who assassinated, who truly assassinated John F.

Kennedy and wants this covered up, was like, oh my God, what are we going to do?

Oh, I know, I'm going to ask this Jonathan guy, I'm going to feed him all these videos from Mercola, and he's going to make a video that will release on the same day.

And then this way, CNN won't cover the release of the JFK documents.

So yeah, that's the kind of logic that we're dealing with.

Wow.

No offense to your notoriety, but I feel like Bill Gates could have done better.

Oh, right.

Like, I just plenty.

Go look at the number of views that my video has on YouTube.

I don't think I was a distraction at all.

Unbelievable.

All right.

Well, I'll tell you what, man.

There's obviously, as you said, there's way more to this that we can cover in the span of an interview.

So I encourage our listeners to check the show notes for a link to Jonathan's video.

And something tells me there might be a follow-up video to it in the future.

Jonathan, thanks so much for your time today and for all the work you did putting all this together and seeing what, you know, what gold there was to sift for in there.

Thank you for having me.

And just as a reassurance, I am still sane, although I would say that if I had gone insane.

Yeah, well, that's true.

That's true.

Before we line up for Our Place in Your Memories, I want to remind you that tickets are still available for our upcoming live God-awful movies in Portland, Oregon on May 24th.

We've moved to a larger venue to accommodate demand.

It's already going to be the biggest show that we've ever done, and we'd love to add you to that record.

Check the show notes for more information.

Anyway, that's all the blast movie we've got for you tonight, but we'll be in 10,022 minutes with more.

If you can't wait that long, be able to look out for a brand new episode of our Sister Show's Hot Friend Got Off on Movies Do being a 7 a.m.

Eastern on Tuesday and an even newer episode of our Half Sister So Citation Needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, this show wouldn't show if I neglected to thank Keith Enray for putting the blast and blaspheme.

It's kind of there.

I want to thank Lucinda Lusions for putting the pie and impiety.

Most weeks, she was off this week.

I want to thank Eli Bosnick for putting the sack and sacrilege.

I want to thank Jonathan Jerry one more time time and encourage you to check out not just the video that we talked about today, but all of his work.

He does some great stuff.

Check the show notes for more links.

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

Nothing prepares you for this administration quite like a career in waste management, I suppose.

But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best people, Sable, Chad, Nicholas, and Katie, who are so badass, bird flu knows better than the fuck with them.

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