The Scathing Atheist - 385: Hidden Knowledge Edition

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

In this week’s episode, the Catholic Church congratulates itself for their non-zero number of child rapes, Muslim Satan gets ready for a big year with no pebbles to stand in his way, and Jeff Sharlet will be here to discuss the hidden knowledge of the Trump cult and how they hid it so damn well. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click there: http://www.amazon.com/Diatribes-Godless-Misanthrope-Scathing-Presents-ebook/dp/B00J53FZFI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396141562&sr=8-1 To check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticrat To check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-movies To check out our half-sister show, Citation Needed, click here: http://citationpod.com/ To check out our sister show’s sister show, D and D minus, click here: https://danddminus.libsyn.com/ To hear more from our intrepid audio engineer Morgan Clarke, click here: https://www.morganclarkemusic.com/ --- Guest Links: Check out Jeff Sharlet’s article here: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/inside-the-cult-of-trump-his-rallies-are-church-and-he-is-the-gospel --- Headlines: People Are Angry That the Archbishop of Canterbury Said Jesus Wasn’t White https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/27/people-are-angry-that-the-archbishop-of-canterbury-said-jesus-wasnt-white/ The U.S. Catholic Church Spent $281,611,817 on Child Sex Abuse Cases in 2019 : https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/28/the-u-s-catholic-church-spent-281611817-on-child-sex-abuse-cases-in-2019/ Conservatives Want Revenge By Tearing Down (Non-Existent) Satanic Monuments: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/27/conservatives-want-revenge-by-tearing-down-non-existent-satanic-monuments/ SCOTUS screws it all up again: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/30/the-supreme-courts-awful-ruling-allows-for-public-funding-of-religious-schools/ The Hajj Is Cancelled, and Lots of Muslims Respond With Tearful Theatrics: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/24/the-hajj-is-cancelled-and-lots-of-muslims-respond-with-tearful-theatrics/ Christian Nationalists and Pastors Appear in Insane Trailer for Pro-Trump Film: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/24/christian-nationalists-and-pastors-appear-in-insane-trailer-for-pro-trump-film/

Changing a light bulb should be simple. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Uh-oh, that's not supposed to happen. Quickly submitting and tracking a claim on the Bel Air Direct app actually is simple. Bel Air Direct. Insurance simplified. Warning, the following podcast contains offensiveness distilled down to its purest form. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by honey. And by eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Just lying there, dreaming, you lucky motherfuckers with your pillows. Eli. Eli. And now, The Scathing Atheist. Hey guys, this is Alex. I am a former graduate student and from my smart-ass expertise in paleontology, I can confirm that we did, in fact, evolve from five-million-year-old, filthy, hairy, bipedal, old-world monkeys. Oh, and Heath is a true gentleman. It's Thursday.

It's July 2nd. And it's Helen Keller Deafblind Awareness Week. Yeah, so we made a podcast. I have no illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick. I'm Heath Enright. And from Dr. House's New Jersey, Cincinnati Swing State, and Good Husband Georgia, this is The Scathing Atheist.

Oh, this week's episode, the Catholic Church congratulates itself for their non-zero number of child rapes. Muslim Satan gets ready for a big year with no pebbles to stand in his way. And Jeff Charlotte will be here to discuss the hidden knowledge of the Trump cult and how they hid it so damn well. But first,

the diatribe. oh white jesus what are we gonna do with you i just i find it so funny that the people who argue against taking down racist statues keep trying to come up with something to put at the end of their slippery slope and we keep being being like, yeah, no, I could do without that, too. Right. They keep saying shit like, well, what are we going to tear down statues of George Washington just because he wore the teeth of the human beings that he owned? And we keep being like, how are you not hearing this? Right. And of course, the latest failed float in their parade of horribles was white Jesus. A bunch of heritage not hate you N-word lover types tried to that rhetorical question on over the last week or so.

They're like, you know, well, next up, are you going to try to tear down the statues of Jesus? And we're like, I mean, I wouldn't stop you if you were tearing one down. I mean, if you guys wanted to do that because like honestly what could be a greater symbol of racism than white jesus according to their religion jesus was the only perfect human being historically of course he's brown but they turned him white because how could a perfect person be brown whiting up the guy the entire religion is supposed to emulate is the very definition of white supremacy. Hell, even referring to him by his anglicized name instead of, you know, the name he would have had is a vestige of white supremacy.

And that's to be expected. It's a religion of racism. So we shouldn't be surprised that their symbol is racist even before we start setting it on fire. Think about it. What set Christianity apart from other religions of its day was, by and large, its claim to universality. Right? Most religions were, to varying degrees, exclusionary back then.

They were a way of marking the in-group from the out-group. Our gods are different from their gods, and that's why we all stick together in our group. The idea of monotheism wasn't new. Obviously, they copied that off the Jewish kids' paper, along with most of their holy book. Plenty of religions at the time believed that theirs was the only real god but christianity was one of the few that also believed they were supposed to convert every other damn body to their religion now at first that's just a cult with an aggressive growth

strategy but once that religion seeps into a culture at large it's kind of hard to imagine how that doesn't lead to a us supremacy type attitude. You know, when Christians went out into the world, they were going out into the theological backwaters no matter which direction they went. Even when they happened upon cultures that were very clearly more advanced than their own, you know, like they did in China and the Middle East, their religion still convinced them that they were superior to these people. I mean, Jesus is the one true path to God, and these idiots had never even heard of him before. How advanced could they possibly be? And with those tenuous justifications, Christianity set out to enslave, colonize, loot, subjugate, and genocide every part of the world

they could put their fucking feet on, all the while bearing the Bible as their badge. Inside their book, they found ready justification for every heinous crime they committed. White Jesus reigned over all of it in silent approval. But what if the Jesus they were worshiping looked like the Jesus of history? Would it have been harder to justify their crusades if the people you were killing in Christ's name looked more like him than you did? Would it have been harder to maintain a skin color based system of slavery if your messiah had the same skin color as your slaves would it have been as easy for the 20th century to embrace the racist underpinnings of eugenics if they had to declare jesus inferior to get there

the answers might be no across the board right like i mean they do seem to know that jesus was middle eastern they do seem to recognize that he wasn't a white dude most of the time but when they picture him what do they picture when they imagine the face of christ do they imagine a white face or a black one and look i'm a firm believer in historical forgiveness you know the democratic party was absolutely the party of racism for a long fucking time. And these days I'm a registered member. And what something represented historically doesn't have to be what it represents today. But if you want to change your reputation, you have to earn it.

And sure, few Christian authorities still promote the kind of racism they did 100 or 200 years ago. But they still promote bigotry with no less abandon. You know, it's just a different, slightly more culturally acceptable bigotry. Any claim that the Christian religion has meaningfully progressed over the last couple hundred years has to deal with this question. Why can't Christians handle a historically accurate depiction of their savior? And before you say they can, let me direct you to all the backlash the Archbishop of Canterbury got last week when he suggested it was inappropriate to depict Jesus as a white European dude.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not in the extreme sliver of a minority that is actually calling for depictions of white Jesus to be taken down. OK, like too much of art history is tied up in that religion for that to make any fucking sense. And I don't know if the world could survive the orgasm tsunami that would occur if American Christians found out they were actually going to get persecuted. But there's a lot of middle ground between calling for their removal and pretending they aren't racist. Christianity has been the cornerstone of the most racist cultures in modern history. Even in the modern day, it continues to correlate heavily with bigotry. And of all the elements of culture that Christians seem ready to fight for,

I can't identify a single one that isn't rooted in bigotry. So yeah, white Jesus is a bigoted symbol because he's a man of color forced into artistic white face, but all the more so because he symbolizes a bigoted thing. Joining me for headlines tonight are the parental and guidance to my warning. Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick. Fellas, are you ready to earn that explicit tag? Fuck yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Noah, Heath, can I speak to you guys for a second?

Over here Over here? Yeah, sure, okay, what's up? So, look, I I'm no prude, right? But do we really need to be dropping The F you broken hockey stick? You know?

The what? The old F-bomb Okay, so What do you have in mind uh okay well don't worry we're still gonna have a darn good time without the uh swearing i got a joke this week about those lockers for pickup at home depot you know those that's the code super super funny Plus, I got a visual bit where I shoot a diaper from my new diaper dispenser. Okay, you have prop comedy

for our podcast? Yeah, it's the diaper dispenser is the bit. No, I get it. What's that over there? Is that eight hours of uninterrupted sleep? Where? And while we try to surgically implant the funny back into eli we're gonna take a break for this week's first sponsor honey uh heath he's he's already

knocked out yeah no i know i know that was just for me oh okay okay how about if i'm like if you want to see him again you will do exactly as we say oh yeah yeah that's good perfect right yeah guys what why is steve from best buy tied up in our living room uh two words noah coupon codes coupon code coupon codes indeed you know when you're shopping online and you see that little box for a code at the checkout you don't have one of those codes well once best buy gets our letter we'll never run out of those codes again you mean your ransom note potato ransom note oh okay guys why don't you just try honey we tried super hard darling yeah super code one super code two everything did you just try those two codes yes those were the ones well honey is the free browser extension that finds

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That's join honey.com slash scathing. Wait, so no, we didn't have to kidnap Steve from Best Buy. You did not, but okay. Well, so no, we didn't have to kidnap Steve from Best Buy? You did not. But, okay, well, we already tied him up. Yeah. So we...

Hmm. Spin it as a sex thing? Spin it as a sex thing, yep. Cool, got it. Excellent. Okay, Steve, you lucky boy! Hey, buddy! Who's ready for round two?

And now, back to the headlines. In our lead story tonight, according to the annual audit by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Church paid out over $281 million last year on cases of child sex abuse. To be clear, that's just in the United States.

Wow. Also, to be clear, they have an entire dedicated department within their organization for auditing themselves about child sex abuse that's something they have to have and they're pretty proud of the existence of that department and what they're doing yeah and they're pretty proud of that 281 million dollars that's humanitarian aid and you're welcome victims of victims yeah right uh excuse me do you have any idea how many kids we had to fuck to give out this much charity it is an ordeal that's what happened right the story yeah and everybody keep that fucking number in mind the next time somebody says that these guys have reformed 281 million dollars in a year yep yeah so this annual report is something they've been

doing since 2002 that's when the church read a newspaper article from 1985 about news from 2 000 years of history and they were shocked to find out they had pedophiles in their company. And the latest audit showed a huge spike in allegations. The 2018 report had 1,451, and last year's report had 4,434. Wow. The big jump was mostly the result of the church finally setting up a compensation program for victims. the result of the church finally setting up a compensation program for victims and also it was about new laws in states like new york that offered a one-year window for victims to report crimes that were beyond the statute of limitations and i guess that's better than nothing but now a bunch

of those pedophiles are back on base because the clock ran out yeah we could always stop having that fucking clock but i guess we paid for it we paid for the clock so we're keeping it i don't know yeah i'm sorry but if you can't get your rape paperwork together in 365 days it obviously wasn't that important to you is the law right yeah yeah but but the key takeaway here is that this is a sort of a per annum thing. So if you let all the people they rape come forward, the number of victims triples. Right. Even if you just do that in a few states, the number triples. Yeah.

It was a very small amount of states. Exactly. So, again, a little bit of justice for victims is good news within a really dark context. But the church is taking credit for this right now. Like they accomplished something. They're looking at this graph being like, yep, graph goes up and to the right. That's the good type of graph.

And now their leaders are seriously doing a victory lap, proudly boasting that the Catholic church is reducing their child sex abuse numbers more than any other group. Well, like there's a competition and they're winning. Just for the record, they had 37 allegations last year by victims who are currently minors. So certainly hasn't gone away. And Catholic League President Bill Donahue is super proud about getting all the way down to 37. Here's the very excited announcement from Donahue. Quote, of the 49,972 members of the clergy, 0.07%, 37, had an accusation made against

them for abusing a minor however since only 0.016 eight could be substantiated by the church itself yeah that means that 99.98 percent of priests do not have a substantiated accusation made against them in other words clergy sexual abuse is near zero percent end proud quote you can almost not even tell the difference between us and zero percent like really it's so yeah and hey bill when you count everyone who has ever or will ever live there's almost no covet too yeah crushing it well like to be fair most organizations can't have hundreds fewer sex abuse allegations in a year right impossible puzzle in a thunderstorm's numbers have never gone down at all that does not make us the bad guys here catholicism yeah i work to keep those

numbers up and wait what what did you say not that nobody said anything clean edit yep and we also got some bragging about this great news from francesco cesario the chairman of the review board who oversees the self-audit according to uh frankie cheese quote indeed, the church has been the one institution that has really taken an institutional approach to this problem and put in place policies and protocols that have resulted in a much safer environment within the church. End quote. He also heads up the Ministry of Tautology over there. He's a very busy guy. What's a brain palindrome? Is there a term for that?

I think what he was trying to say is that all the other Nazi gold-funded sovereign rape cabals are real willy-nilly with their enforcement. In comparison. Well, to be fair, things like state and federal governments already have those protocols in place. You guys just weren't following them. That's the whole fucking probably actually since their protocols are called laws. Right. Yeah. Like if you follow the laws, you don't need additional rules against shit that's already illegal.

Yeah. Yeah, and while we're on the topic of the institutional institution instituting its institutional response to their institution, just a quick note on that $281 million. That is not the amount they paid out to victims in settlements last year. That also includes lawyer fees and also something they call support for offenders that they spent money on. What? something they call support for offenders that they spent money on. What? Also, they don't mention this part, but the church spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists

hoping to prevent legislation that made it easier for victims to seek damages. So $281 million is the amount they got away with paying last year, plus the amount it cost them to get away with it. And they're adding those two things together and bragging about it as a final number that's positive. Jesus Christ. And in monumental news, as many of our listeners are probably aware, over the past few weeks, America as a nation has looked at its multitudinous statues of treacherous racists and thought,

hey, why do we have a bunchous statues of treacherous racists and thought, hey, why do we have a bunch of statues of treacherous racists? It feels like we should save those for good people, which in turn has turned racists and treason enthusiasts, I guess, to lose their goddamn mind. Yeah. I mean, these are

people that couldn't learn addition without putting rocks on the piece of paper with the ones place and the tens place and the hundreds place marked off in little squares. So I'm not surprised they need large stone visual aids for history class. We are erasing history for them the way they learn things. Yeah. So this week, Cheryl K. Chumley, who is somehow uglier than her name implies, took to the right wing news outlet with a plan for revenge. If liberals are going to take down statues of their heroes, then they're going to take down statues of our hero. Say.

Science. What? I got to admit, that's going to fuck things up. I'm going to look really silly sacrificing virgins in front of a banner or or whatever i don't know i don't even know that's true you got to get one of those pop-up things they have for conventions and stuff oh there you go yeah well i will yeah so here's the quote if the standard in this country for deciding on the fate of statues memorials and monuments has become one of offense meaning if the structure offends it must go no then christians certainly have cause to go after all things satanic temple it's only fair no oh okay

so that's a deal no more confederate generals no more satan and no more jesus got it what do i get to remove if i'm offended by her stupidity? Right. Yeah. So as is tradition, the usual round of Christian idiots jumped in to agree with her, even when the statues they were talking about didn't exist. Right. So first up, punchable face made man boy. Charlie Kirk tweeted, quote, Democrats would rather tear down a statue of Christopher Columbus than the statue of a Satanist god at the Arkansas State Capitol. And that tells you everything you need to know about today's left and tweet that were anti-slavery across the board. And you're arguing against. Yeah, right.

Yeah. And even if you were right, it would still just mean we sided with the less genocide-y biblical deity that never raped any teenagers in the book, right? Yep. But to be fair, Charlie's got a point. I mean, see, the statue of Baphomet that was at the Arkansas State Capitol was only there temporarily for a protest. yes we would literally rather take down statues of real genocidal assholes than a fake goat demon that isn't there anymore but ironically or at least how people use that word the fact that charlie kirk is mad at that and thinks you will be too is actually everything you need to know about charlie k So he's a nice Ouroboros. I don't even know that you need to know anything about Charlie Kirk, but if you needed to know a thing, that would be the thing.

And in plain in the ass news tonight. Fantastic. Thank you. Hope you enjoyed not funding religious schools with your tax dollars. Well, that lasted. We had a good run, pretty good run, but the Supreme Court put an end to that on Tuesday with a decision so

fucking muddled it elicited three separate dissents and three separate concurrences. This was the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in which the high court was asked to decide if giving taxpayer money to religious schools counted as giving taxpayer money

to religious schools and in a taxpayer money to religious schools. And in a surprising twist, it turns out it doesn't. Okay. So now we have to fund their playgrounds. Check. Give them loans. Check. Which are secret.

Check. And now we fund their schools. Check. Okay. So at this point, is it just about not directly putting the check into the collection plate right it's the plate based location that depends if a state has a collection plate subsidy program at that point they can't exclude any collection plates just for being religious yeah collection plates yeah so here's the case in a nutshell. The Montana legislature passed a bill back in 2015 that would give a modest tax credit to residents who funded private school scholarships.

And that seems like an okay idea until you consider that the overwhelming majority of private schools anywhere in the country, but especially in fucking Montana, are Christian schools. 70% in this case. And since forcing taxpayers to fund religious schools violates the federal and state constitutions, montana supreme court struck down the law in a 5-2 decision in 2018 and that should have been the end of the story right montana scrapped the program life moved on but because this iteration of the scotas cannot pass up a chance to force you to fund religious bullshit they decided to hear the case even though the program had ended what is happening gorsuch walks into the break room it's been a really rough week guys first i had to admit trans people were humans then mexicans were humans can we do some theocracy that i can

enshrine in law presumably forever right yeah no it's like they threw him a fucking bone now we should point out here that not only should the supreme court have agreed with the montana courts on this but they never should have taken the fucking case the program in question ended years ago so it's hard to imagine what resolution there could be right but in its ceaseless quest to broaden the definition of religious persecution as much as possible the ro the Roberts court elected to both take the case and ignore precedent. And in one of the least challenging calls in the history of Supreme Court predictions, the case was decided 5-4 on purely partisan lines.

And I say partisan because Roberts doesn't deserve the courtesy of pretending his majority isn't composed of political operatives. composed of political operatives. Yeah. So basically, Christianity is a little kid that went to a birthday party and couldn't handle watching somebody else get a gift. And they started weeping. Hey, the trans people got it right. I don't like it. Yeah.

So Roberts was like, oh, don't worry, buddy. Don't worry. You get to be retroactively right wrong about a thing in Montana that doesn't exist anymore huh yeah yeah we stopped by the toy store on the way home you're right yeah now you might wonder what the fuck this decision could even look like right because again the tax credit at the heart of the case no longer exists so as Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in a desperate bid to keep us from remembering how bad she fucked up Trinity Lutheran it's anybody's guess what the majority is even saying should happen she called the decision perverse and added quote it is hard to tell what the court wishes the state court to do there is

no program from which petitioners are currently excluded so must the Montana Supreme Court order the state to recreate one has the court just announced its authority to require a state court to order a state legislature to fund religious exercise? Amazing dissent. End quote. Not adding, also, does everyone remember when the guy

who gets the same number of votes as me cried about his not-rape calendar? Yeah, right. He's over there. He's in, right. He's over there. He's in the room. He's right there. He makes this a fucking majority. Of course, this was never about resolving any problem with

Montana tax subsidies. It was about expanding the scope of religious power in the government. First Amendment be damned. 30 states offer tax credits or vouchers for private schools according to this ruling every damn one of them has to start offering that shit to religious schools odds are that if you live in america you are now funding religious education your tax dollars will be spent to

indoctrinate children into verifiably false religious beliefs. And just in case we've neglected to point this out before, that is entirely because 53,651 too few people voted for Hillary Clinton. I mean, 264 million too few people voted for Hillary Clinton. Well, did you just Google the U.S. population and subtract 65 million, Eli? Yes, I did. You know that number has babies, right? And kids. I believe babies should vote.

Okay. But congrats to the Jill Stein court for this one. Great job. And in not a moment too soon-y news. Fantastic. and in not a moment too soony news fantastic there are lots of great reasons to cancel a giant stampede themed party of 2.5 million people all showing up in a city of 1.5 million people to cram into a sweaty arena throw rocks and all kiss the same surface for example that sentence yeah great reason right which was a fairly accurate description

of the event called the hajj that's the annual pilgrimage to mecca that every devout muslim is required to make at least once in their life i'm still amazed that they got away with making exit through the gift shop one of their four basic tenets that's amazing yep they've uh they've never missed one of these Hodges before, but in response to the global pandemic, Saudi Arabia had to cancel it for the first time in history,

according to many scholars. Nobody from outside the country is allowed to visit this year because, you know, the technocratic royal family of Saudi Arabia realized they can't trust pilgrims from shithole countries like the united states where they don't respect science right it's dangerous yep okay upside you could make a pretty strong argument that donald trump canceled the hajj

which is a huge bigot win for him right like that's historic for a guy who ran on the Muslim ban. Yeah. First of all, I mean, seriously, congrats to Saudi Arabia for doing the right thing. That's good. What was that noise? Oh, I forgot about that. I set it up when we started the podcast eight years ago in case Saudi Arabia ever did the right

thing. Were these doves? It the podcast eight years ago in case Saudi Arabia ever did the right thing. Oh, were these doves? It's been eight years, man. That was kind of sad. So they're taking a big risk by giving the prevention of a plague a higher priority this year than the need to throw pebbles at Satan. And a huge group of Muslims does not agree with taking that risk. People are freaking out like their bowling league just got. And that's because I'm not exaggerating about the devil stoning concept.

A big part of the Hajj is taking part in the OCD themed magic ritual in which every pilgrim has to show up at that giant stone cube called the Kaaba. I think that means cube in Arabic. Walk around it exactly seven times while kissing and touching it and then hit one of the three sacred walls on that cube with exactly seven pebbles. Then they have to come back the next two days and hit all of those three walls with seven pebbles. Then they have to come back the next two days and hit all of those three walls with seven pebbles each. And before you ask, no, you may not go from west to east on that. It's fucking east to west. And if you're bad at throwing and you miss,

your whole system of 49 extremely well-chosen pebbles gets completely ruined and people freak out. And that's how you make sure Muslim Satan doesn't do whatever it is that he does at full power. Nobody really knows because this is the first cancellation. Yeah, exactly. He's never been there before. He's going to be at full fucking power this year. We're going to find out what happens. Well, luckily, we read the Quran and we know that it's uh not bow to adam about 14 times the surah yeah that's his big plan yeah yep fucking muslim satan rise up he's like ah last i can

unleash my vengeance upon adam's people release the murder hornets you already what all right fuck it then i'll burn down a continent then. What the fuck do you mean that's so January? That doesn't even make sense as a sentence. This is a weird year to hop in on safety stuff. Right. Yeah. Oh.

Alright. I'll take a gap year or something. I brought cups. And circling back to all the other great reasons to cancel the Hajj on top of the pandemic, there's pretty good evidence that plenty of pilgrims aren't, you know, the greatest athletes and also lie about their throwing accuracy. Over the years, Muslim Satan made Allah look like an idiot. For example, over 1,200 pilgrims on the way to Mecca have been killed in plane crashes. Also, over 100,000 have been killed by cholera outbreaks during the event. And thousands more have been trampled to death in very literal stampedes of human beings.

Yeah. The stampede of 2015 killed about 2,400 people. Wow. All of whom showed up to an event that had deadly stampedes of human beings that killed thousands in 1990, 1994, 1998, 2001, 2004, and 2006, to name a few of the recent ones. 98, 2001, 2004, and 2006, to name a few of the recent ones. Not to mention the stampede-lets that didn't get recorded on all those other years, but those

definitely happened somewhere. Right, well, and yeah, to be clear, no global pandemic is needed to make millions of people crowd into small area and slop around the same item, bad public health policy. I feel like that's just, like, a priori knowledge, like fucking math. Just for porn head

tabs. Come on, people. And finally tonight in Dickstarter News, are you afraid of what our nation will look like without Donald Trump's tiny guiding hands? Do the words socialism, globalism, and fact checker send a chill down your

spine? Then you might want to jump on the Kickstarterstarter for the upcoming christian film trump 2024 the world after trump i'm so fucking excited for this stupid fucking title because clearly they think that they're assuming that he wins the second term but that would be trump 2025 right So I guess they're accidentally postulating that he wins re-election but then dies of a big Mac attack a few years later.

I don't know. And let me just say at the outset, this god-awful movie trailer plays like the season finale of The Scathing Apes. It's got Robert Jeffries. It's got Tony Perkins.

It's got Mike Huckabee. It's got the MyPillow guy. It's even got show favorite Paula White saying, you can just kill a child for any reason. Apropos of nothing. That's it. She just says that sentence. Why am I killing this child?

For spite mostly. That's cool, right? Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, the trailer is just a montage of these bigots using different euphemisms for anti-Semitic slurs. The whole time

it's like, globalism, blah, blah, blah. But then, out of nowhere, an army guy fires a giant artillery cannon for absolutely no reason in the middle of this montage, and I could not stop laughing when I watched it. And then, you know, back to the globalists and their red hanukkah cups at christmas fuck them one last thing the

trailer is a bunch of like scary words like abortion socialism curls with undercuts and then like people talking about how great trump is but the final part of the trailer is the word flawed and then a bunch of those same people being like yeah he is an asshole hung out with kim jong-un but you know what are you gonna do that's the conclusion of the trailer for their movie amazing all right well on that extended pitch for our sister show got off on movies we're gonna close the headlines for the night heath eli thanks as always. John Roberts sipping shampoo out of a Dixie cup. When we come back, we'll take a look at the cult of Trump and politely decline all the Kool-Aid offers.

Why is John Roberts sipping shampoo out of a Dixie cup? I don't know. Why is he not sipping shampoo out of a Dixie cup? Just as great question. out of a Dixie cup? Just as great question. I know that the news coming out of Trump's Tulsa rally was about how few people showed up

compared to the campaign's lofty expectations. And while that is newsworthy, if you think about it from a distance, the fact that 6,000 plus people were willing to brave a pandemic to sit in a stadium full of maskless disease vectors just to hear a man who can't assemble a coherent sentence deliver an hour

plus of stream of conscience blatherskite is at least as in need of explanation. Every time I see videos of his rallies, the question at the forefront of my mind is, who the hell are these people? Well, my guest today decided to find out for himself. Jeff Charlotte is an author and a journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Harper's, The Washington Post, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, ad infinitum. But our audience is probably most familiar with him through his books, The Family, The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and C Street, The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, which were the basis for the Netflix documentary series, The Family.

He's also the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's Outspoken Award, and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award. But I've asked him on today to talk about a new piece he has out in Vanity Fair that takes a deep dive into the culture behind the Trump rally. So first of all, Jeff, welcome to The Scathing Atheist. Hi Noah, great to be with you. All right, so before we talk specifically about the article,

I'm curious because a lot of your work revolves around religion and faith, and I'm curious what it is about that subject that draws you in. Well, that's a long story. subject that draws you in? Oh, that's a long story. Maybe suffice it to say, I think it's a vastly misunderstood arena of American life. And I think journalism in America actually sort of grew out of these high Protestant roots, which reserved religion for Sundays and has evolved over time such that we have a political journalism which thinks that the proper way to practice political journalism is to ignore religion and to do so is to profoundly misunderstand American culture and politics.

So this is a show obviously dedicated to atheism, but whether you're an atheist or a devout believer, there is no understanding the flow and current of American life without looking deeply at religion. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's a great point, actually. All right. So let's shift gears then to this recent article of yours. I want to talk a little bit about the research. You went to multiple Trump rallies for this, correct? I did. The story, you know, I had done the same, something similar in 2016 to New York Times magazine when an editor got in touch with me and said, you know, who I'd worked with

many times before. And he said, why don't you go around to Trump rallies? This was early in 2016 and look at them in terms of religious ritual. And so what I wanted to do this time was to see what had changed in the four years between 2016 and now. Back then, I had discovered or encountered what I took to be a variation of what's known as the prosperity gospel, this idea that God wants you to be rich and name it and claim it. And, you know, the wealth of the preacher or in this case, the politician Trump is a sign of God's favor. And I wanted to see if that was still functioning or if there was something different, if the theology of Trumpism had changed. And so that's that's what put me back on the road going to Trump rallies.

All right. So now I'm fascinated to know the answer. Did the theology change? Yeah, horrifyingly so. And I came away in 2016, I remember at the time. This was early in 2016. I came back. I remember saying to friends, look, you all are deluding yourselves if you think Trump is a joke. This is a really, really powerful movement. I get the claim to be one of those journalists who early on said, I think Trump can win. And I came away from this set of rallies to really frighten both by the scale, the organization, which was greater than 2016, the discipline, the money, the devotion, but also by the changes that I witnessed in the theology. If in 2016, it was all about get rich quick, prosperity gospel. In 2020, it's what I described as a kind of Gnostic gospel of Trumpism and Gnosticism. This is early second century Christian heresy. And it's not perfect. This is the Trumpist

version of Gnosticism, but it's all about secret knowledge. And it's all about the idea that the official story, the news and so on, is all a lie designed to obscure the reality. And that only those who are special can see the truth. And they will see the truth of the true wisdom. And they will also see the truth of the secret enemies. It tracks almost perfectly onto the QAnon network of conspiracy theories that I think are not the fringe of Trumpism, but in some ways the intellectual heart of Trumpism. because I think you're perfectly accurate with it. So let's talk a little bit about that. I found the Gnostic parallels fascinating. And among them was sort of this,

a lot of stuff that you highlight of the ways that people are applying numerology and whatnot to Trump's tweets to try to decode them. Can you tell us about some of the ways that you saw people doing this or some of the advice that you got on how to understand Trump? Well, I think this began for me was in Bossier City, Louisiana, which is right outside of Shreveport. There's a rally of about 14,000

people, many more thousands outside. And I came upon a couple wearing T-shirts that I'd seen around the rally before. The T-shirt said, in big block white letters on black trump's tweets matter and and i took it to be just sort of a racist play on black lives matter which it certainly is but upon talking to that man who was a traveling missionary who goes from rally to rally handing out a a small new testament with a constitution in it, kind of Pastor Sean. And he said, no, no, it's Trump's tweets really matter. And he pointed me to the man who had been handing out the shirts, Pastor Dave.

So I went over to Pastor Dave and their idea was when they say Trump's tweets matters, it's their kind of scripture. And every typo, every strange capitalization is actually a kind of code that you need to learn to read. They're fond of saying, just like QAnon, that Trump is like a genius chess player. He's playing on so many levels we can't even imagine. So you read a tweet and it just seems filled with errors and typos and miscapitalizations. That's because it's so sophisticated.

I said, like scripture. Pastor Dave said, yes, like scripture. And I said, but sometimes I can't make any sense of it. And he says, you never will. He says, some of it will be beyond our understanding. That's how high level Trump is. But it is ours to study and study and study. And at Trump rallies, in fact, you can purchase, if you'd like, a beautiful leather-bound edition of all of Trump's tweets, which you can read like the book of Proverbs from the Bible.

And as I traveled from rally to rally, I kept encountering this belief as this core belief that the way to understand Trump is not just to take it, words at face value but to understand that there's a depth to everything he says wow okay so I'm going to jump ahead a little bit because I had this question for a little later in the interview but but it belongs here I feel like when you hear that kind of stuff it is so easy for the vast majority of Americans to dismiss it as utter insanity right you talk in the article about a woman who was explaining her theory on how the 2017 mass shooting in Vegas was a secret Saudi plot to assassinate Trump that went wrong. And like much of what we encounter as secular activists, you tell this to people and they can't take it seriously. They think there can't be more than a tiny little sliver of people in this country that would embrace such insanity. And yet those people managed to elect a president and basically lead him around by the nose.

So how do we get people to take this seriously? It is a frustration of mine, right? Is that there's I mean, even that term, it's not insanity. It's a belief system. They're different. They're different. They're different. And, you know, when we're talking to skeptics and atheists, they can say, yes, but it is wrong. That's fine. I'm not talking about what's right or wrong. I'm talking about what you believe. Insanity, and let's not abuse that term. That's a term related from mental

illness, right? That refers to specific disorders. This is a belief system. I happen to think it does not correspond to reality, but I remember this is a lesson I learned early on in my reporting. Let me tell an old tale. I was reporting. This was a church in North Carolina, and an individual had gone in and opened fire on this church. And thank God there was only blanks in the gun. No one was hurt. And I went to see the local sheriff to talk about this person who the church and the sheriff believed was demonically possessed. And I sort of questioned that reality. And the sheriff sort of split the difference he's like maybe so and then he opens his drawer and he pulls out a gun and he points it at me and i just about you know i jump out of

my chair and he said that's a cap gun he says and i i do it he says so he says he says things that ain't real can still hurt you southern sheriff says things ain't real can still hurt you that's what we need to remember it doesn't matter, can still hurt you. That's what we need to remember. It doesn't matter. We can say they're insane, but so what? They're in power. Right. And they had the power to make that real. And I think that's important. The story you mentioned, there's a woman named Diane, who I met at a rally in Sunrise, Florida, Broward County, deepest blue Democratic Broward County, where 22,000 people filled the stadium and there were more outside. Diane, who had been an Obama voter, who had become a Trump voter and who believed every QAnon conspiracy theory.

Now, the weird thing, you talk to someone like that and she says, you know, I used to love Disney, but Disney, it turns out to be doing kind of mind control. It turns out to be doing kind of mind control. And did you know that Disney was in it with the Nazis? And did you know that the government, you know, just going on and you've got to sort of sift through the seeds of this. Walt Disney did have some fascist affinities. That's true. No, Disney movies are not trying to do mind control. The U.S. government did have a program, Operation Paperclip, by which we recruited former Nazi scientists to help our rocket program. That's true. No, it's not this, you know, what she

draws from it. And then you go a step further and you realize what you want to dismiss as crazy, she's finding these little elements that are real and are hard to absorb. She then goes on to say that the Las Vegas shooting of a few years ago, that terrible shooting where over 50 people killed at a country music concert was all part of a conspiracy to kill Trump. And it was a Saudi led conspiracy. Right. And you just I remember at that point saying, oh, this is just, you know, I can't even use this interview. She's too crazy.

I did that same thing. It's too crazy. But then I go back and I start looking this up and I discover that why on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News, a U.S. congressman had come on to discuss this very same theory that the Las Vegas shooting was actually about a nexus of terror aimed at U.S. leadership, right? So this is false, but here's the deal. I wrote this story for Vanity Fair, which is a big, glossy, big circulation magazine. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, has four times the viewership of Vanity Fair's circulation. And then you add to that all the right-wing news sources, and you realize Diane, with her crazy views about what happened in Las Vegas, she's not the fringe. Those of us who don't believe these conspiracy theories, we're the fringe. We're at the margins. They're at the center and i think that's the fundamental shift that a lot of secular people have to make is to recognize that numerically we are not the majority wow boy that is just

bone chilling to think of but yes that is actually the mainstream and you're right you know even as i'm asking you the question i'm subtly engaging in the exact same behavior by labeling this insanity that's um yeah yeah that's i did it in the story i mean i wrote i'm not calling you out there because i didn't do anything i i listened to her say this stuff i'm like oh this is crazy i can't even use this in my story for instance diane believed incredibly widespread belief, mainstay of Trumpism is the idea that the Democratic Party elite is engaging in child trafficking, right? This was that whole Pizzagate conspiracy theory and it endures and Trump kind of dog whistles it all the time. He dog whistled it in Tulsa when he said, if Joe Biden is elected, not only will there be support for late-stage abortions, there will be support for

what he called after-birth execution, killing babies. After birth, you know, babies alive in the world. Democrats want to execute them. And QAnon heard that, like, see, the president himself is saying that that's what the Democrats are up to. So that, you know, that's a, that's a kind of a mainstream belief at this point in the Republican party. A more specialized belief is the idea that Democrats don't only traffic children, they eat them. They commit cannibalism. And the first time I heard this at a Trump rally, I thought, oh, well, this is too, this is just a crazy fringe belief. The second time I heard it, I dismissed it too too. The third, I might think I might have heard it. I dismissed it. It's really common. And when I would hear it, I would start to I would talk to it because I didn't go to the Trump rallies and stay in the press cage like so many reporters do. I just go part of the crowd. So I'm there standing in the mix of people.

Someone starts telling me this cannibal idea, and I say to those around me, I'm like, do you think this as well? And the answers would range from some would say yes, they believed it. Many more would say, no, they weren't sure about that. They didn't say, that's crazy. They said, no, I think they do human trafficking. I don't think Hillary Clinton eats babies. I mean, we can't be sure. And you see how far the realm of possibility has stretched for them, where that is a plausible thing to consider. And reasonable people can disagree on whether or not the Democratic Party is dedicated to cannibalism.

The Democratic Party is dedicated to cannibalism. Unbelievable. Okay, so now, obviously, you say you walk amongst these people. You're not cordoned off with the rest of the press, but you're the enemy, right? You're the fake news media. Did you ever, like, were you ever afraid in one of these rallies? Were you ever threatened at one of these rallies? No, partly because I did not fully identify myself. I was the worst case scenario. I happened to be Jewish, too. So I was a Jew who was walking around amongst them,

not clearly identifying himself. I didn't get a press pass. I don't believe in press passes. And this was a deal I'd made in 2016 with the New York Times magazine and a deal I made with Vanity Fair. And in both cases, we sort of said, look, if the Trump team is radically trying to suppress freedom of the press, then we don't need to abide by their rules. Now, I still had a set of ethical rules that I had to go through. I had to tell people that I'm writing, you know, I could talk to people if I wanted to use it. I had to say, okay, I'm writing about this and so on. But I wasn't going around.

A lot of times I would just be there on the arena floor and I would just be sort of standing there. You end up standing there seven, eight hours packed in with a crowd. And I wasn't saying, by the way, guys, I'm a journalist here. If you're looking for someone to hit, I'm your man. Right.

You know, that was not going to be wise because, I mean, the very first rally I ever attended, the very first Trump rally I ever attended back in 2016, I found myself in Youngstown, Ohio, pressed in with a nice group of older people. And they were just sweet old grandmas and grandpas. And we're talking about the grandkids. And they were just the sweetest people. They really were. and they were just the sweetest people and they really were until we started talking about cnn and one of these old grandpas started talking about fantasizing about the violence he would like to do if he could ever get a hold of a cnn reporter and his wife was egging him on i mean it was an snm scene it was a deeply for them weirdly erotic and you sort of want to say

you know this is private between you two. I'm going to leave you two alone now. I can't get away from them because I'm packed in them. She is just so turned on and admiring her man as he's talking about the beatdown he's going to put on a CNN reporter. That was not a point where I said, hey, by the way,

I'm myself. Let's make this a three way. Sorry to be grotesque, but that's the grotesquery of that that moment, you know. And so, I mean, that's that's one of the things I think is not that weirdly the press actually doesn't do a good job on reporting on, which is the center. I mean, we know that Trump hates me, right? Or he hates the media, even if he loves to play to it. Right, yes. I don't think

they really give us a full picture of how central that is. At every arena, it's literally a cage. It's a press cage in the middle. And the press sit in that cage, which I find fairly complacent. You know, if you've got cameras, you've got to.

But if you don't have cameras, then go out and talk to people. And it's a moment. Trump uses it like in a wrestling match. He turns, he says, look at those scum back there, the scum of the earth. And you get 20,000 people turning around, flying the birds, screaming, F you, you know. I mean, this orgiastic, ecstatic rage. And if you were to take a volume leader to the Trump rally, I think you would find that the third loudest thing he can, you know,

there's things he can talk about that gets volume, right? You know, he says something, it's call and response. He says this, you cheer that, right? You talk about God and about freedom of religion that's pretty loud you talk about guns and the second amendment that is louder you talk about hating the press and it is off the charts really off the charts that's the moment of love and fulfillment between the great man and his followers. And, you know, what's interesting, that makes perfect sense to me as a person who follows evangelical Christianity quite a bit,

because, yeah, the media, the people who are telling you the earth is millions and millions of years old and that evolution is true and that these are fossils, etc. Yeah, I see that 100%. Those are the people that are stealing not only the the things that are that are required for their religion to work, but also all of the various things that they want to believe in in terms of the conspiracy theories. That makes perfect sense to me, but it's not something I've thought about before. Yeah, I think and it's not something I had. I mean, I knew that he hated the press. And I think one of the things I want to get across with this Vanity Fair story, the biggest thing I wanted to sort of say, let's explore this kind of American narcissism, this theology of secrets and secret enemies, which animates Trump. But then related to that was the idea that Trump, like all authoritarians, relies on an enemy within.

That's how you regulate a society far more useful than an enemy without outside is the enemy within. That's how you regulate a society. Far more useful than an enemy without outside is the enemy within. It's like Trump doesn't care about China or Russia. He cares about the enemies within. And on the one hand, Muslims and immigrants function for him like that, right? But they're not a perfect fit, actually, even as much as he directs so much hate toward them, because in his followers' imagination, and this is all about white supremacy, the enemy within, the immigrant enemy within, it's easy to identify, because to them, immigrants don't look like Americans, which is to say, white. Right.

And they think all immigrants are not white, and they can tell who's who, right? So, for an enemy within, classically, in authoritarian authoritarianism you need someone who can pass amongst you unseen russia and nazi germany it was jews in much of the cold war it was communists for george w bush don't forget who ran on re-election against same-sex marriage it was this archetype of the gay man. And now I believe it is the journalist. The journalist is the enemy within. They could look like anybody. Your own child could become one, just like they could be a communist or gay and so on. They walk among you, don't even know where they are, and they're just spreading lies and misery. So journalists, that's why that level of hatred against the press, I think, is there, is that they are, as Trump likes to say again and again, the enemy of the people.

Not an enemy of the people. They are the enemy of the people. Immigrants are bad. The immigrants are less than human, so they don't get full enemy status. If you want full betrayal, you got to go to journalists. Wow. Well, that's a terrifying note to close on.

But I think given the subject matter, it's probably best that we close on something terrifying. I have to say it is a phenomenal article. There was way more in there than we had time to talk about in detail here. So I'll have the article linked in the show notes for the audience.

Jeff, thanks again so much for your time. Thank you, Noah. Good talking with you. Before we put the masks back on, I want to be clear that Jim Jones's followers killed themselves with Flavor-Aid, not Kool-Aid. I use Kool-Aid in the joke because that's more familiar,

but the pedant in me found it hard to do. I'd ask you not to send me email corrections about that error, but that would just make it more frustrating when I get the email, so just go ahead. Anyway, that's all the Blast Movie we've got for you tonight. 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 show, The Skeptocrat, debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern time on Monday,

an even newer episode of our sister show, Hot Friend Got Off When We Wee, debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our half-sister show, Citation Needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Monday. An even newer episode of our sister show's Hot Friend Got Off When We Wee's debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday. And an even newer episode of our half-sister show Citation Needed debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, I'd be an ungrateful piece of shit if I neglected to thank Heath Enright for always having the Enright stuff. I need to thank Eli Bosnick for being here in the Bosnick-a-time. I also want to pass along Lucinda's apologies for her absence this week. Long, stupid story as to why she's not here, but she'll be back next week. I also want to thank Jeff Charlotte one more time for braving Trump rallies so the rest of us didn't have to.

I want to thank Alex for providing this week's Farnsworth quote slash assessment of Heath. He's correct, by the way. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best people, Corey, Michael, Mousy Tongue, Chris, Mary, Jeffrey, Nicole, Carson, and Angel. Corey, Michael, and Mousy, who are so sexy, the MPAA sent somebody to run out ahead of them handing out cards. Chris, Mary, and Jeffrey, whose IQs have more zeros than my hometown. And Nicole, Carson, and Angel, whose ninjitsu is the reason you haven't been hearing any more about those murder hornets. Together, these nine naughty non-believers nudged our net worth northward this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the money it takes to give us money, but if you do, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathingadeus,

whereby you'll earn 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 scathingadeus.com. And if you'd like to help, but spending money is so pre-Armageddon, you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review, telling a friend about the show, and following at P-I-A-T-Pod on Twitter. Legal services for this podcast are provided by the Law Offices of P. Andrew Torres, Tim Robinson handles our social media, and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode which was used with permission.

If you have questions, comments, or death threats you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at skatingideas.com. How dare you rewrite this joke Keith Enright.

How dare you. By the way. Do you want to deliver it? I'll say it's Helen Keller deaf blindness week no I do the day and then you do the joke that I write sometimes

seriously do you want it like it's pretty great I'll do the blue part I care about formatting I care about content that's cool introduction No, I care about formatting. It's important to me. I care about content. That's cool. Introduction.

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