The Scathing Atheist - 414: Exhalation Edition

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

In this week’s episode: We’ll be able to feel sorry for other countries again, James Dobson checks under our bed for antifas, and Michael Marshall will be here to help reveal the next book on our reading list. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click there: https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Crisis-Religion-Ruined-Pandemic/dp/B08L2HSVS8/ 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 more from Marsh on Be Reasonable and Skeptics with a K --- Headlines: Video of ecstatic spontaneous prayer serves as potent reminder that Capitol riot was act of radical Christian terrorism: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/17/theres-video-of-christian-terrorists-praying-to-god-inside-the-u-s-capitol/ and https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/16/michael-brown-just-because-christians-rioted-doesnt-make-it-a-christian-riot/ and https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/how-white-evangelical-christians-fused-with-trump-extremism.html The COVID Vaccine Will Make You Gay, Claims Conspiracy-Loving Orthodox Rabbi https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/17/the-covid-vaccine-will-make-you-gay-claims-conspiracy-loving-orthodox-rabbi/ Polish woman on trial for depicting Virgin Mary with rainbow halo: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/16/polish-women-begin-trial-for-depicting-the-virgin-mary-with-a-rainbow-halo/ Tony Perkins: Trump Could Prove Election Fraud in the Senate Impeachment Trial https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/14/tony-perkins-trump-could-prove-election-fraud-in-the-senate-impeachment-trial/ James Dobson Has Another Deranged Set of Predictions for a Democratic President https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/18/james-dobson-has-another-deranged-set-of-predictions-for-a-democratic-president/ My Pillow booted from Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl’s, Wayfair, others: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/19/my-pillow-ceo-lindell/ --- This Week in Misogyny: Catholics lose shit over Pope saying woman can serve in Mass: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/19/traditional-catholics-lose-it-after-pope-francis-says-women-can-serve-in-mass/ Argentina passes bill to legalize abortion: https://religionnews.com/2020/12/30/bill-legalizing-abortion-passed-in-popes-native-argentina/ Pakistani Court Bans Use of “Virginity Tests” in Cases Involving Sexual Violence https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/07/pakistani-court-bans-use-of-virginity-tests-in-cases-involving-sexual-violence/

Warning, the following podcast contains adult language, but don't worry, it's mostly happy fucks this week. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Stamps.com, ZipRecruiter, and by Exhalation. Exhalation. It's about goddamn time. And now, The Scathing Atheist. Alexa, where do we come from?

God created man in his own image on the sixth day. Stop, stop, stop. Alexa, set language to British English. Language set to British English. Alexa, where do we come from? I assure you that we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men. That's better. It's Thursday.

It's January 21st. And I am not smarter than the president. It's been too long. It's been too long. I'm no illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick. And from Bruce Willis' New Jersey and Redtown Blue State, this is The Scathing Atheist. On this week's episode, we're going to be able to feel sorry for other countries again.

James Dobson checks under our bed for antifas. And Michael Marshall will be here to help reveal the next book on our reading list. But first, the diatribe with the words, we made it. But then I'm reminded of how many of us didn't make it, and it just seems braggy. But don't get me wrong. By all means, raise your glasses, pop your corks, light your spliffs,

whatever it is you do to celebrate. You've earned it. The entire world is better off today than it was on Tuesday. It calls for the kind of celebration you'd normally reserve for an armistice. But when we sober up from all our reverie, our well-earned reverie, let's not make the mistake of confusing Trump's loss for our win. I mean, sure, it was great listening to a president speak in complete sentences again during that inaugural speech, but an awful lot of them sentences were about his magical sky buddy.

The fact that he didn't even notice the irony in saying unity, unity, unity. I want to bring us all together. Now, everyone, please join me in my religion. So it's an awful lot about where we rank on the national priorities list before i go any further let me let me be super clear on what i'm not saying here okay i am not saying that biden won't be an astronomical improvement over the dictatorial man baby we just ousted okay i mean he's obviously going to be significantly better on social justice issues environmental issues economic issues public health, and literally every other category of issues known or otherwise.

Right. But but but even if you just judge him on that very narrow range of religious issues, I think it's safe to say the Biden administration, you know, isn't going to expand the Christian right to discriminate. He's probably not going to push for laws that funnel more tax dollars to churches. He's probably not going to nominate batshit Christian dominionists to the highest echelons of the federal government. In fact, the Biden administration will probably rescind some of the newfound bonus rights that evangelicals earned under Trump. But maybe not all of them. Will he, for example, change the FEMA policy that allows disaster funds to be used to rebuild

churches? I mean, the Constitution sure would have him do that, but will a centrist Democrat who's already being sold as an enemy of the church and who's part of that semi-pagan Catholic faith anyway spend political capital writing that particular wrong? And even if the answer is yes, he's going to face basically that same question in a thousand different ways.

Is he going to say yes all thousand times? I mean, consider this problem from the ground up. So bigots wanted a legal way to discriminate against LGBTQ people and they found it in religion. But to sell their fight to the masses,

they couldn't frame it as a fight against LGBTQ rights. They had to frame it as a fight for religious rights. So they passed a bunch of laws where sincerely held beliefs trigger some special exemption to the law. RFRA laws are the most prominent examples, but there are a bunch of different ways that this strategy has been employed by federal and state legislatures. Okay, so imagine that you're tasked with fixing that problem in the most politically expedient way possible. Repealing laws and policies that were marketed as bills about religious freedom with grandiose titles to

match is certainly one way to go about it. But if you're only half paying attention, which is more than you can say for most of America, it looks bad right you're repealing religious freedom laws i mean at the very least it requires that you explain that the law was never actually about religious freedom in the first place and no matter how much you whittle down that argument it still leaves you with the mercy of the american attention span but there's another way to go about it you know you could just call them on their bluff they've been saying the whole time that it wasn't really about bigotry it was about freedom so you can always just go out there and say, well, if it was never about discriminating against LGBTQ people, I'm sure you won't mind if we amend the law to add the words just so long as it doesn't interfere with the rights of LGBTQ people. Right. probably fight that but you've put them on the defensive and now they're the ones trying to explain the nuances of their position to the masses and on top of that their position is

morally reprehensible so you could see why that would be a damn tempting alternative right leave the new law in place but add protections to it problem with that is that the net that they threw was always way wider than the group they were trying to catch. It had to be for them to have any plausible deniability about the goals of the law to begin with, right? So if, for example, you pass a law that says landlords have the right to refuse rent to people whose lifestyles conflict with their sincerely held religious beliefs, adding protection for LGBTQ people only solves part of the problem. It might be the part of the law that they were going for in the first place, but it would still allow for discrimination against, say, unmarried couples or people with tattoos

or people who wear mixed fabrics. Anybody the religious people don't want to rent to, really. And look, this is just one example of how even a well-intentioned effort to rebuild what Trump tore down could fall short. The evangelicals had their little shadow government working behind the scenes through all of Trump's dumpster fire distractions with Pence and McConnell just steadily eroding any perceived threat to Christian hegemony. It'll take us years just to figure out what all we've lost. And I don't know how one measures this kind of thing, right? Like how many pounds of rights did

we lose? How many gigabytes of freedom or whatever? But the most tempting scale is time. Like the rights of secular Americans, our freedom from religion, is the worst it's been at any point in my lifetime. So it's tempting to say that we've lost at least 45 years worth of progress. You know, that it would take at least that long just to claw our way back to where we were. Now, the good news is that that's probably not the right way to measure it, right? Because 45 years ago, there wasn't us. There weren't people who so vividly remember at a time when religious freedom didn't mean granting extra rights to religious people and people who remember that religion was able to thrive even before we started pumping taxpayer money into their coffers there wasn't a robust atheist movement that could

draw on so many people across the country to join in their fight 45 years ago now look i've watched the atheist movement get beat the fuck up over the last few years often deservedly i talked to listeners pretty regularly who say they still listen to our show and maybe a few other podcasts, but they don't really consider themselves part of the atheist movement anymore. And I honestly, I get that. A lot of us turned out to be really shitty people, and there's only so many times you can see that happen before you want to write the group off as a whole. But the stakes have been raised too much for that. The right thing to do was never to walk away. It was to push the assholes out, and we've the right thing to do was never to walk away it was to push the assholes out and we've never needed you to do that more we were left out of biden's national

call for unity and it's only by uniting ourselves first that we're going to fight our way back in they're talking about you jesus interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news bulletin. Joining me for headlines tonight is the buzz to my Woody, Eli Bosnick. Eli, are you ready to take off? To indignity and beyond. I'm pretty sure that's not how it goes. It is if you've only seen the porn. Oh, okay. All right. All right. I still have to Google that.

Before we get rolling tonight, I should probably acknowledge that Heath is not here again this week. I feel he reached out to see if he'd quit the show or ripped his dick off by accident. Or otherwise abdicated his position. So for the record, he has not. Unfortunately, his dad's health has taken a turn for the worse, and he's been with his family lending whatever support he can, which may mean he's in and out for the next little bit but he appreciates your support as his family goes through all of this he may also have ripped his

dick off again though we have no way of knowing well i thank you for the classy follow-up there eli and on that note we're going to pause for a word from our first sponsor this week stamps.com I'll mail you his dick Yeah, warm No, no, not too warm Yeah, you don't say Eli, what are you doing? Oh, hey, no, I was just practicing my small talk in the mirror Your small talk? Yeah, you know, now that it's 2021 Pretty soon I'm going to have to interact with people again

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Never go to the post office again. All right, Noah. I will check that out thanks yeah no problem so you want to you want to show me your small talk skills i sure do all right um nice weather we're having sell me pictures of your feet okay sell me pictures of your feet please no and now back to the headlines in In our lead story tonight, the only word in radical Christian terrorism that you can take issue with regards to the Capitol riot is radical. Because one could convincingly argue that the level of lawless reality starved arrogance is mainstream, if not mandatory in the ranks of American Christianity today. in the ranks of American Christianity today. Yet even as many Christian pundits back away from their initial stance that the riots weren't terrorism,

they've only shifted over to claiming now that they weren't Christian. And that became a much harder bridge to sell this week when the New Yorker released a video showing, among other things, a group of the terrorists breaking into a spontaneous, ecstatic, and explicitly Christian prayer.

Come on, Christians. Even Axe Body Spray's Twitter was like, yeah, those are our customers. They suck. Sorry. No, of course, neither the prayer video nor the prevalence of banners that all but had we're storming the Capitol building because Jesus scrawled all over them, would be enough to stop Christians from denying any kind of culpability. Indicative of their stance was a recent piece in Charisma News, where radio host and apologist Michael Brown argued that the Capitol rioters weren't Christian at all, quote, not at least in any true sense of the word, end quote. He then argues that the notion that they're Christian will be disproven

once it comes out that all or most of them are members of either white supremacist groups or white nationalist groups, because near universal membership in the same group simultaneously proves and disproves the culpability of that group. Apparently, yeah, you can't be an elk and a fucking Shriner at the same time or whatever. He's just like, we may never know why the KKK burns a lowercase T as a threat. Yeah. To be clear, there were Christian flags of multiple

varieties. And if you weren't aware, that was a thing. I can't blame you. But as a regular attendee at atheist conferences, I can tell you there are plenty of them. There were Christian banners. There were prayers along the way to the Capitol building, prayers during the insurrection, prayers afterwards. The New York Times noted a mock campaign banner that said Jesus 2020 armor of God patches on several of the terrorists in a white cross with the words Trump won in all caps. And that's far from an exhaustive fucking list. And again, that's all what we're talking about before we saw them calling on

the name of jesus from the senate chambers yep and can i just say how baffling and frustrating this is as someone who's been talking about the dangers of religion since before trump was president yeah look you're listening to this podcast so you get it but we've been saying hey the christians are gearing up to be terrorists. And the Christians have been saying, hey, we're gearing up to be terrorists. And the New York Times is like, no fucking idea how this happened. Yeah. Let's interview a few more idiots.

Maybe one of them will say their name backwards and zoop back into their own dimension. Right. Yeah, exactly. Now, I should say the New Yorker video isn't all bad news a considerable chunk of the runtime is spent on a concerted effort to set a big pile of metal on fire with a zippo so if worse comes to worse it is comforting to know that we'll you know we've at least got a shot of fooling them with the what's that over there trick but as i diatribed about last week at its worst stupidity is way more dangerous than intelligence and we should be

nothing but terrified by the idea that people in our country who started at space carpenters saved my brain ghost from the goat monster are growing less connected to reality. Yeah. And in hey news. Thank you. Tired of Christian idiots getting all the credit for spreading COVID and vaccine denial, Orthodox Rabbi Daniel Assor threw his sweaty weird Jew hat in the ring this week when he told his followers on social media

not to take the COVID vaccine because it will turn them gay. Well, if you motherfuckers would just drink more high C, it never would have come to this, Daniel. Exactly. So according to the news outlet, Israel Hayom, a sore who looks like Dan from the How To Heretic. And thank God I'm atheist committed to his pandemic beard, told his followers, quote, any vaccine made using an embryonic substrate, and we have evidence of this, causes opposite tendencies. What? That's Jew code for gayness, I guess.

Okay. Vaccines are taken from an embryonic substrate, and they did that here too. So it can cause opposite tendencies, end quote. Okay, I mean, not that it's unique to him or anything, but I just want to point out that Rabbi Daniel Asor comes from an embryonic substrate. I'm not sure what he's trying to tell us, guys. Wink.

But the follow-up to this story is amazing. So apparently even the Orthodox Jewish community hates Asor as much as his button-down shirt seems to. Oh, it's like trying not to dance with him at a nightclub. It is. Right. So everyone hates this guy. And according to the Jerusalem Post, quote, Havruta, an organization that acts to promote tolerance and acceptance of lgbtq people in her ready society

so atheists yeah atheists said it was quote currently gearing up to welcome our impending new members so yeah congrats to bill gates for enacting his plan to turn all the orthodox jews gay and make next year's pride a lot less colorful all coming together there you go they'll get the rainbow back damn it speaking of which in poll watching news fantastic for the americans who think ours is the only country that spent the last few years being taken over by unhinged christian extremists i'd like to remind everybody that poland and their accelerating dissent into full-blown theocracy was on full display last week when the trial began for three women accused of blasphemy.

Specifically, they're on trial for hanging up posters that depicted the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus with rainbow halos, thereby endorsing their heretical impiety of implying Christians shouldn't hate gay people. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Mike Pence is

just sitting cross-legged in front of the tv man i could have done that too i gotta talk to these guys earlier next time right yeah so uh three women elspieta podlezna anna prus and joanna zyra skandar podlezna apologies for the rampant mispronunciations there started their trial last Wednesday. Leader of the so-called Law and Justice Party Jaroslaw Kaczynski, whose name I do not apologize for mispronouncing, justified the charge by calling the felonious in haloing, quote, a direct attack on the family and children, the sexualization of children, that entire LGBT movement. Gender is a direct attack on gender, too. Adding that the posters, quote, actually threaten our identity, our nation, its continuation, and therefore the Polish state.

End quote. All right. Yeah, and somehow the fact that his country is so fragile that it could be taken out by a nominally gay poster seems to be of less concern to him than the poster itself. Yeah. As the old saying goes, if the existence of your family is threatened by gay people,

either you're gay or you have sponge-painted walls. Either way, you deserve it. You deserve it. And in unforeseen perks news tonight, as Christian leaders across our nation scramble to distance themselves from themselves, hate group leader and worst thing that can be described as a perk tody perkins is finding the brighter side of the second impeachment of donald trump because

that according to tony at least is when donald can prove his case for election fraud oh he'll finally have a platform of some sort so far he's been stymied by just not saying it out loud. But he's got it. It's right there under his tax return and his health care plans. It's going to blow this election wide open right after it's too late. Yes.

So appearing in front of a branded hate group banner, like a very serious person who should be taken very seriously. Perkins said, quote, Here's the double edged sword for Democrats is that if the president has a trial, he can present evidence. And part of that evidence may be what has not been seen yet about this past election. So they need to be careful the platform they give the president. End quote. Well, but like he's allowed to present evidence

now he can do that but and what's amazing about this is that in that instance he wouldn't be i mean it's not like you just be able to go up there and talk about whatever he wants you know he has to like answer questions and shit and if he starts going on about his bullshit election conspiracies, they're allowed to just tell him to shut up and move on. Mr. President, 20 minutes of whatever the fuck you want to say. Oh, and that's going to happen, by the way. So really looking forward to that testimony if we get it either way. Perkins has obviously made a great point here and one that I certainly hope he does not keep making, given the chances that Donald Trump can only do extremely good things for himself and his administration by testifying in front of the Senate. So, yeah, let's hope the Democrats don't let him do that. Also, apropos of nothing, I don't even know I'm bringing this up.

Tony, please don't throw me into a briar patch. If you happen to be around me and a briar patch. Yeah, so while we find out if Tony Perkins is too chicken to talk Trump into speaking under penalty of perjury, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our second sponsor this week, Zip Recruiter. Hi, I'm Noah Lusions. And I'm Eli Bosnick. And we've both been in charge of hiring people at various points in our lives. I was not great at it. No, you were not. And that's because

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the site within the first day. Wow, that's way less time than the entire week I would spend interviewing out-of-work actors at the diner across the street. Yes, it is. And right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash scathing. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash S-C-A-T-H-I-N-G. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash scathing. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. So you spent a week at a diner? I mean, they had a good veggie burger.

Did they? No. A man wrote the Bible. A whore is what you want one if it's a legitimate rate cooking can be fun hey i'm proud of a man this week in massage well damn it i just can't bring myself to give you guys bad news today by the time this comes out we'll only be 19 hours into the Biden presidency, and I feel like y'all have earned some good news.

And as much as that would normally mean my next line was about handing you back to the guys, I actually managed to find a few genuinely good news stories for you. So let's start with the obvious one. The vice president is a woman. And like, that's second in command of the whole fucking country. Hell, given Biden's age, it's more like first and a half in command. And the awesome thing

about breaking the glass ceilings that are that high is that the shards can actually fall on the ones below it. But hey, it's not just about our joy, it's also about their misery. Am I right? Which is why my next story is about conservative Catholics losing their shit over women serving in mass.

Pope Francis sent out a memo last week, except they have some fancy Latin word that means super duper important memo, in which he slightly modified the canon law to say that women could serve as acolytes and lectors, which are fancy terms for minor parts in Catholic mass. Now, this isn't particularly new. Women have been serving in these roles all over the world since 1994. All Francis did was formalize that change by changing lay men to lay persons in a couple of the official paragraphs. And even that was enough to prompt plenty of voices within the church to freak the fuck out. Of course, the ability to take part in magic Jesus

spells is hardly the most significant new r right women have earned since last we spoke. I've missed the last couple of weeks, so I haven't been able to congratulate all the women's rights activists in Argentina who managed to end 2020 with a spectacular victory. After a 12-hour legislative session to close out the year, Argentina's Senate passed a law legalizing elective abortion up to the 14th week of pregnancy and after that in cases of rape or danger to the mother's life. And sure that's still shitty and overly restrictive but it's a big improvement over where they were the day before. And on this segment we've long since learned that if we didn't measure our victories on a relative scale we'd have no victories to celebrate at all. Whykel finally electing our first female vice president 100 years after earning the right to vote, but only after passing on a perfectly

qualified female president in favor of a racist carnival barker, stops being calls for celebration when you think about it. So yeah, a bunch of overdue shit happened, but that's kind of the theme of inauguration week already, so it seemed appropriate. And on that note, I'll hand things back over to Noah and Eli. Thank you, Lucinda. Next up in headlines, a Democrat has been elected president. And while for most of our nation, that will mean an improved economy, lower unemployment and positive social change for us here at the Scaling Atheist, it means it's time for Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to write us a letter about what's coming that would make Chicken Little tell him to chill the fuck out. Yeah, the hate group founder who

got to start writing books in defense of hitting your children has some words of wisdom about ethics for us. Let's make sure we give him our full attention, class. This guy knows what he's talking about. Yeah. So for those of you who aren't aware, Dobson does this every time a Democrat takes office. Most recently, he treated us to his letter from 2012 in Obama's America, which might as well have ended with the trans cyborgs are breaking through the door we made with Bibles as I write. We don't have much time. And this year is no different. So, Noah, as we go through Dobson's predictions

here, I'd like you to take a crack at true or false. Are you ready? Can I just say false now and save us some time? No, you cannot. Quote. I can't. I edit the show, so I can. I'm just saying I've chosen not to. If you hear nothing from this moment

forward, listen. It's just the outro music kicks in. Yeah. All right. Quote, the left has now achieved ultimate power in the White House, in the House of Representatives and the Senate. True. True as fuck, you motherfucker. Consequently, as I warned in December, there will be no checks and balances within our system of

government sadly false the most radical ideas promoted by president joe biden and his majority party will be enacted early bird breakfast will start at 7 a.m sharp damn it we can infer from what they have told us that the years ahead will bring more regulation. Which is a euphemism for governance. Less freedom. False. More taxation. Hope so. Less religious liberty.

False unless you define religious liberty the way he does. More socialism, less democracy. True and false respectively. More funds for abortion, less support for the sanctity of human life. True and false, respectively. More funds for abortion, less support for the sanctity of human life. True and false again. Less funding for the military, more illegal immigration. Now he's fucking up his pattern. More restrictions on speech, less patriotism. Oh, OK. True. But only because 400000 dead people can't talk now. Yeah. More wasteful spending. I bet hunter lets the secret service use his bathroom

less support for families more regulations on business more appeasement of china iran russia and north korea uh false true and the alternative is nuclear war you asshole fewer police officers we can only hope more gun control we can only hope and less government of the people by the people and for the people what do you mean you people hold on we can also anticipate quick passage of the horrendous equality act more equality would be another way of saying that. But yeah, true. You might want to keep track of these items as they occur. This is just the beginning. Oh, I certainly hope so.

Exactly. Yeah. So that's quite a series of predictions from French toaster dramas. But I bring this headline up for another couple of reasons. One, any chance to laugh at James Dobson, right? If I could install a camera in his bathroom and laugh at him when he has like difficult shits, I would. But I also bring this up because when Donald Trump was elected, a lot of people on the right and even some on the left told us that we were freaking out over nothing, right? And that Donald Trump wouldn't be so bad and our concern was really just sore losership in disguise. But it's worth noting now that the shoe

is on the other foot. I see a lot of sort of anti-Trump Republicans or the so-called bridge builders saying stuff like, remember how you felt in 2016, be nice to Uncle Chuck. And I just want to take a moment to remind you, fuck that and fuck your Uncle Chuck, right? fuck that and fuck your Uncle Chuck, right? Uncle Chuck's deepest, darkest fears about the coming Biden Gestapo are that gay people will have rights. Yeah, he is terrified that our country will improve in ways that can't be erased next time an election swings the other way. And look, I am glad that he is scared about that shit. And if we're really, really lucky and the Democrats use the power they've been given instead of trying to compromise with the pigeon till he plays chess, he fucking should be. Yeah. Yeah.

Look, motherfuckers, the way I felt in 2016 was informed. Uncle Chuck couldn't pick that shit out of a lineup. And finally, tonight, Mike Lindell is super sad right now. Yeah, he is. Yeah, he is. Not only did he have to watch Trump very much not continue to be president on Wednesday and see his awesome coup plans completely ignored, even after he typed them up and brought them over there and everything,

we also learned this week that pretty much every retailer on the planet has decided that they don't want to be associated with his coup pillows anymore. In response to his repeated public endorsement of violent insurrection and snake oil COVID cures, Kohl's, Wayfair, and the frustratingly comma-less Bed, Bath, and Beyond are just three of the many major retailers that have elected to dump his product in the post-trump era jokes on them until they agree to add the comma i will sleep in their tubs and wash in their beds we live in a society bbb we live in a society thank you you don't even sell beds and baths stupid now i should point out that lindell is hardly the only pro-trump or feeling the wrath of corporate America at the moment, because as much as they love the willingness of Republicans to deregulate, hiding their contaminated uranium and impoverished black kids while taxing them at a lower rate than that kid's mom.

None of that matters if they provoke a violent revolution that leaves America a failed state. Which is why something like two thirds of the major corporate donors to congressmen who back trump's claims of election fraud decided to stop doing that last week people have weird lines right like everyone who drew their line after grab them by the pussy i'm always just like huh that's your line that's your line weird yeah weird right so yeah as nice as it is to see corporate america finally start to disempower trump several hours before it was too late for it to matter at all was kind of nice but watching mike lindell bitch about the free market deciding it would like to be free of him was a special kind of special and while nothing will ever make living through the trump presidency worth it this is at least a nice start.

Yeah. And it means that the Trump supporting Karens across our nation are about to face their greatest challenge yet. Not buying things at Bed Bath & Beyond. That's all right. Well, I don't know about you, but I need to go buy some scented candles so I can follow him around going, you know, you want some of this. So we're going to close the headlines for the night. Eli, thanks as always. Jumanji.

And when we come back, we will not like Ike. Since its inception, one of the ongoing themes of this show has been the concerted effort to eradicate my love of reading. Since we started the show, we've read the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Case for Christ, and Mama Bear Apologetics, and still I somehow love to read. So now we're calling in the big guns, David Icke. David Icke. That's right. In 2021 and probably well into 2022, Heath, Eli, and I are going to be tackling the asinine ramblings of Mr.

The Shapeshifting Lizards are literally eating our anxiety to claim our monatomic gold himself with his 2018 book, Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told. And if your question is, holy shit, Noah,

isn't that a 750 page Facebook screed of thinly veiled anti-Semitism? My answer is, you're welcome. But before we dive into his fever dream, I think it's important that we learn a little bit more about the man himself. So to aid in our preparation, I've invited in a guy who actually attended part of the original book tour for this tome. He's the project director for the Good Thinking Society. He's the president of the Merseyside Skeptics. He's the host of Be Reasonable and the editor of The Skeptic. And he's a man whose nation will, by the time this episode airs,

have retaken the title of dumbest elected leader in the English-speaking world, Michael Marshall. Marsh, welcome back, sir. Hey, thanks for having me back. Yeah, number one. We're number one. We're number one. We're number one. Yeah, it's been a long time since I could make fun of anyone else's country.

Sorry, let me revel in this for a minute. It's fine. I said for a long time that you guys would get all the way through Trump and out the other side before what we did really started to bite and really started to hit home. And boy, was I right on that. We're just now starting to, I think there's a lot of people starting to think, ah, maybe we did make an error actually, but we're about four years too late for a take-sees-back-sees. Right. Oh, is that what all the smart people have been going on about? Ah, well, babe, it makes you feel any better. I'm

sure we're going to still be reckoning with the consequences of our stupidity for the next hundred years at least. Well, we'll just join you in that. It's just a century of confronting our own stupidity together, hand in hand, staring straight into the abyss that is our own country's arrogance. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. Well, speaking of national arrogance and stupidity, tell us, for those people who aren't literary masochists and can't be bothered as well to go back and listen to episode 79 of Citation Needed, tell us who is David Icke? Yeah, David Icke has a truly extraordinary story, I think, if you look at kind of the progression that he's been on through his career in the public eye, he's been in the public eye in quite some significant ways, even before he went off the rails.

So he was originally a professional football player, a soccer player for I think it was Coventry City until he got injured at the age of 21 and could no longer play. He then went on to become a sports broadcaster. He holds the very strange, just as a quirk before we get into it, he holds the strange record that he was hosting the most watched TV program ever broadcast on one of the BBC's channels, Channel 2, in 1985. It wasn't about what we're going to get into. It was he was a snooker host at the time. But he was like big business, basically. He was the BBC's go-to guy for hosting that kind of sports coverage, like really prestigious sports coverage.

But then he had a change of direction, which may have been... That's such a polite way of saying it, man. Yeah. It may have been precipitated by several different personal crises, none of which I think he's been particularly on record about. But there's something happened to him that caused him to go off track. And he started to essentially start believing in faith healing. He began to only ever wear turquoise because he thought that was an energetic color that would allow him to connect to an energy dimension.

He went on a very famous UK talk show called The Wogan Show with Terry Wogan, an Irish broadcaster. Soon after this big revelation where he revealed that he was the son of God or the son of the Godhead and a reincarnation of Jesus. And there's this incredible clip that I think if I were David Icke, this would have stayed with me a long, long time. I don't know if you've seen the clip, but he's making these kind of statements about what he believes. And the audience are laughing. And he said, well, you know, one of the great things, one of the best things you can do in terms of energy is laughter. Laughter is a great form of energy.

So I'm really happy that the audience are laughing so much because it's a really positive energy. And Terry Warg and the horse said, yes, but David, they're not laughing with you. They're laughing at you. You do realize that, don't you? And it's a really chilling moment. And the audience just cheers like the fucking Beatles just showed up on Ed Sullivan, right? The audience just is like, yes, no, exactly. That's what we're doing. And it's so rough. It's so rough to say. And, you know, I spend a lot of time talking to people who have pretty unusual beliefs. And I feel in that

moment, I feel so much sympathy for David Icke. I found it really hard not to like be there on his side. Like, no, don't, don't shout at this man. Yes, he's wrong. And yes, he's saying all sorts of really nuts stuff, but it feels a bit icky to have the audience kind of treat him that way. But anyway, he then spends the intermediary couple of decades becoming, I'd say the UK's foremost conspiracy theorist. And it's when you think conspiracy theorist, you think that the various different theories out there, you can trace a lot of them back, or at least through David Icke. So the idea that the world is being run by shape-shifting lizards, that the royal family are literally lizards, that 9-11 was an inside job because there's a shadowy New World Order

controlling everything, all of this stuff flows through David Icke and comes out in his hugely prolific writing, his thing about a dozen books, all self-published, all absolute doorstoppers, one of which I'm very excited to hear you have to cope with. I've had it sat on my bookshelf since I went to see him at a tour in 2018, and I haven't made it all the way through myself. So I'm really excited to hear exactly what's in there. But yeah, he is sort of the chief conspiracy theorist. When I first got into skepticism, we used to refer to him as like the king of bullshit, basically. Yeah, no, I think that's a well-earned title.

Yeah, this, believe it or not, will not be my first foray into 700 plus page David Icke books. So, but let's talk about how that one wound up on your shelf. The reason I asked you on specifically is that right as we were settling on this book, the Skeptic reprinted a 2018 piece that you wrote for Gizmodo UK about the time that you actually went to one of his four hour lectures in association with like, I guess, the book tour for this particular book. So how the hell did that happen?

Yeah, he was touring this book. He did his Liverpool show. We saw the Liverpool show was there. We decided to buy tickets. We found out the Liverpool show was like 30 miles outside of Liverpool because no venue in Liverpool would accept him. And the ones that he had booked actually cancelled the booking because of the rampant anti-Semitism throughout his work.

And I can explain a bit more about that in a moment. And so when we saw that David Icke was going to be back on tour, I don't think he'd done a lot of touring for a while. And he used to be able to go to stadiums and fill thousands, literally thousands of people in these big stadium tours. So to see him going to Southport, which is actually where Andy Wilson lives, it wasn't very far from Andy Wilson's house, in fact, at a relatively small venue. It wasn't a huge, huge venue. It was hundreds of people, but not thousands of people. We just couldn't turn down the opportunity.

And so I think four or five of us from the Merseyside Skeptic Society went along as a sort of an undercover type thing. So we weren't there openly mocking it. We were trying to have a bit of a conversation with the people around. We were sat next to complete strangers who were absolutely loving every minute of it. We were trying to have a bit of a conversation with the people around. We were sat next to complete strangers who were absolutely loving every minute of it. And so David Knight took us through his grand thesis for this book. And I can come into some of the details in there, but the thing that really struck me most of all wasn't how out there it was, but actually how benign it seemed compared to a lot of stuff that I've seen him writing in the past.

And that's why when I republished this recently for The Skeptic, I said in 2018 when I first published this, that it felt like he was sanitizing some of the more extreme beliefs and hiding some of that language and couching it in terms of how he was anti-woke and all about free speech and hiding some of the more distasteful stuff because I wrote at the time that I was worried he was preparing for a return to the mainstream. And fast forward to now, and unfortunately, it seems that I was right. Yeah, right. Well, so, and that's the interesting thing that I've always found about, because I, like I said, I did read one of his books before.

And then when you see him in interviews, he only gives the barest hint of the true crazy, like he's trying to lure you in a little bit at a time. But I think that's it from what I saw of him. Because up until that lecture, I'd only ever seen him sort of knocking around on fringe parts of the internet, seeing memes of his from his website being shared on various conspiracy areas of Facebook, that kind of thing. So that's why it was so interesting to see him. And what was really striking, not just in the lack of substance, but was also the lack of cohesion and the fact that nobody would notice that he just is constantly contradicting himself

all the way through the ideas he's putting out. So he would casually say things like, the governments of the world have all been put into place by the New World Order who are controlling it and orchestrating everything in that kind of way. And then his very next sentence would be about how George Soros is so evil. And he put a photo of George Soros

and they'd Photoshop lizard eyes onto him. And it was a very naked, anti-Semitic image. And he said, George Soros is evil because he's intent on overthrowing all the world's governments. He said, but if the world's governments were put in place by the New World Order, isn't overthrowing them a good thing?

Right. Like, where's the consistency in this? And this was just constantly all the way through everything he was saying. And that's what really surprised me. He was saying Facebook is an evil tool used by the US government to spy on you. And then in the next breath,

he was talking about how he should have way more fans on Facebook, but Facebook shadow banning him. And he wants more and more people to be fans of him on Facebook. Are you encouraging your followers onto Facebook when you think it's evil? Why are you encouraging your followers to hate Google because of how it was funded by the CIA and yet to go to your YouTube channel to see you talk about this stuff and place it right into Google's hands. It was the idea that aliens are literally, literally feeding on our anxiety. It's what keeps them alive. The alien lizards that rule the world are literally feeding on our anxiety, and their ultimate plan is to replace us all with robots.

Right. Right. And what really struck me is that he presented all of this. And the most dangerous thing he was doing, I think, he presented all of this as freedom of speech. He was saying, I don't care who you offend. I'll offend everybody equally. That's the most important thing. I'm offending everybody equally. And, you know, they want to control your freedom of speech. And as Orwell said, freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. And as I wrote in the piece for that report, I was a skeptic. What Ike's doing actually isn't that. It's close up. It's not that because the freedom of speech he wants isn't to say that two plus two equals four. And as I wrote in the piece for that report, it was in Skeptic, what Ike's doing actually isn't that. It's close that it's not that

because the freedom of speech he wants isn't to say two plus two equals four, but to say that two plus two equals five. That is the freedom David Ike is fighting for. And it's what he spent the intermediary kind of couple of years since I saw him doing

is to be pushing this kind of agenda that is utterly, clearly false and falls apart with even the basic amount of scrutiny, but just using his charisma. And he's a very charismatic person, I think, using that charisma to just elide over those really gaping holes in his logic to hide the fact that he's just constantly contradicting himself and his actual worldview just doesn't hold up. It even internally has no internal consistency yeah well and i think one

of the things that you know one of the small silver linings around 2020 is the idea that like before now people would look at a guy like david i can say yeah but what's the worst that he could do yeah yeah in the middle of a pandemic where we've got people like in Nashville blowing themselves up to get at that evil 5G, it's real hard to ask that question anymore. Yeah. And it's particularly hard to ask it about David Icke because right at the start of this pandemic, there's a conspiracy theorist channel in the UK called London Real run by a chap called Brian Rose, who's one of your lot who came over here. And Brian Rose is another of these people who all he cares about is free speech. He'll defend any amount of free speech.

He'll platform anyone, although realistically, he only platforms a very narrow set of views, a very specific set of conspiratorial views under the guise of free speech. And he'll always package that as, I may not agree entirely with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death my right to sell it. That is essentially his business model. And he did an interview with David Icke. He did a series of interviews with David Icke, one of which first went out on his YouTube channel and then got taken down.

And then it was broadcast on a TV station here in the UK, in London. And that received a huge number of complaints and was actually censured by the broadcasting watchdog. And so he went on to host another interview with Icke live on YouTube. and it got something like 400,000 live views before it got taken down. And in that interview, Ike is saying about how COVID doesn't exist. It's just a hoax. It's a deliberate ploy because what they're actually doing is they turn on the 5G towers and the 5G pulls all the oxygen out of the air, which leads to respiratory failure, which is what mimics the symptoms of COVID-19. And the reason that they're doing that

is they put the 5G towers near to all people's homes in order to suck all the oxygen out of all people's homes so they can kill the old people, so they can fill the temporary mortuaries and the temporary morgues that they've set up in a way to deal with the pandemic. And he's saying all this and it's going out live and people are believing this. And it wasn't long before we had people burning down 5G mats

here in Liverpool even. It wasn't long before we had people gathering in literally tens of thousands in London to hear Ike speak and to hear Piers Corbyn, the brother of Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, who's also a COVID denier and conspiracy theorist. Cobb and the former leader of the Labour Party, who's also a COVID denier and conspiracy theorist. Those events in Trafalgar were lighting the touch paper, basically, of this mass COVID denialism movement. And where that's gone now is people are turning up to hospitals, filming in the hospitals to prove that the hospitals are empty by finding an empty corridor and filming that and putting it live. And we've got doctors and nurses currently being abused by people outside of the hospitals after they've just finished doing a 20-hour shift saving lives,

being told that, oh, you're lying. You're actually killing people. None of this stuff is true. Release us all from these lockdowns that we have. Don't wear your masks. Embrace the freedom. And I honestly think a large part of that you can attribute to that video, that interview that Ike did with Brian Rawls. And Ike's narrative has unfortunately gone mainstream here in the UK. So, okay, so I want to circle back to this before we run out of time, because you've already mentioned it a couple of times, and I've seen a lot of genuine debate about this from people who I do believe are seriously trying to parse this out about the anti-Semitism in David Icke's work, right? Because, look, when I first read his book, and again, I was 24 years old.

I was not a skeptic at the time, and I wasn't very versed in the ways of the anti-Semites. I never picked up anything anti-Semitic out of that book. That being said, the book does refer to the Protocols of Zion as though they're a historical document. So it's real hard to argue that there's not at least an anti-Semitic influence. So clearly you fall on the side that, no, when he says lizards, he means Jews side of this argument. I don't know where I fall. I mean, I think he definitely, well, I can't say definitely.

In my opinion, he seems to think that the shadowy forces behind all of the worst things in the world are linked to the Jews in some way. And there's plenty of evidence that even in the lecture that I saw. So he talked about how the unseen, the elite, and he splits the word elite up into two parts because he's got some kind of bullshit lexicography kind of thing going on as to what that might mean. He says those unseen elite arrived on the earth, these aliens, they arrived 6,000 years ago, exactly in the Middle East, which puts you in a very Jew-ish place to begin with.

And then you look at the different forces that he talks about. He talks a lot about the Rothschilds. He talks a lot about George Soros being evil. Most of the people he picks out as being particularly evil are of Jewish descent. And more strikingly is the imagery that he uses. So, and I even sent a snapshot from the book you're about to read, which I just flicked to a random page and found him mapping out the shadowy agencies that make up the New World Order. And there's six of them. And he puts those six

agencies together into a very specific pattern, drawing lines between them. And it is an unmistakable Star of David. And it's not the only time that happens. Well, and let's keep in mind that like, this is a book that came out in 2017, again, self-published, of course, but this is long after people had started pointing out publicly how anti-Semitic his work is. And long after he had to start defending himself. So like, you would think that that like even if he had only the best of intentions right and didn't actually have an anti-semitic bone in his body he'd be hyper aware of not putting that goddamn symbol in his book anywhere where he's referring to the evil shadowy financial controlling government underground movement that came out of the Middle East 6,000 years ago, right?

Yeah. So it's almost like that by itself is almost an admission that if you're not trying to spread anti-Semitism, you're at the very least, you know, you're not above nodding towards it. Yeah, I mean, A Star of David is not the only way of connecting

six dots. Right, exactly. It's not the only configuration. And David Icke has, I think he may still have a YouTube series called Dot Connector. And as I wrote in the piece, it was a joke I stole from a friend who I attended it with. He's very good at connecting a very specific pattern of six dots. You give him six dots and he will connect those dots pretty well into a specific pattern. I would think that, I honestly think David Icke thinks he isn't anti-Semitic. I would honestly believe that. But I think what he would say is, it doesn't need every Jewish person to be involved in this

for the people who are evil in this to be Jewish. So I think he would sort of, maybe that's a way he'd try and rationalize around it. But the effect of it is, every single force that you're pointing out as being in control of the world and being evil and wanting to literally scare you to produce fear so they can feed on your fear and anxiety. If every single one of those forces happens to be Jewish, you should be really looking at yourself as the way you see the Jewish people as a whole. Right. Yeah. Well, and, you know, he'll point out that, oh, well, look at all of these people I've accused of being listeners that aren't Jewish. The Queen, George Bush, et cetera, et cetera, right? But if you actually go into the work, like the movers and shakers always seem to be like the high, you know, those people always seem to be puppets of their Jewish masters at some level. Yeah.

Well, yeah, but also I don't know that he doesn't believe that the queen is related to the bloodline that stems back to that 6,000 years in the Middle East. Because he talks about how that you can identify these different groups because of their bloodline. Right. And so when he talks about the royal family being part lizard and being from the, I forget the exact name he has for the lizard people, he talks about that as a bloodline thing because they are descended from the aliens that landed on earth, the unseen 6,000 years ago in the Middle East. So I don't think it's that he'd

point to the queen and say, you see, she's evil and she's not Jewish. I think he'd point to the queen and say, you see, she's evil and she's related to the Jews. I don't think he'd be as explicit to that, but that is the implications of what he's actually saying. Right. He would say Anunnaki or whatever it was but yeah yeah so yeah okay so and that circles us back around to i think the most important question when you're talking about david ike right so his greatest defense is that it's really hard for sane people not just to take him seriously right but but to imagine others taking him seriously. Like you said, he'll contradict himself in one sentence. Yeah.

So when you tell people you're genuinely concerned about, you know, how much credibility the queen is a secret lizard in a person suit guy is gaining, you're lucky if you just get laughed off. So I know this is sort of like, you know, the key question of all of skepticism. So feel free to dance around it a bit. So I know this is sort of like, you know, the key question of all of skepticism. So feel free to dance around it a bit. But how do we get people to see that as a genuine threat? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that we can do to make people realize it's a genuine threat. You don't need to believe everything David Icke says to believe some of what he says. And in fact, a lot of the people who are burning down the 5G masts, when they do that, they're not doing that because they think the queen is a shape-changing lizard who drinks the blood of babies. They're

doing that because they think the 5G mask is pulling oxygen out of the air and causing COVID symptoms in other ways too. So you don't need to believe everything Ike says to believe some of the things Ike said, and especially to believe some of the most harmful things that he says. So that's kind of part of it, is that sometimes the lizard stuff can end up being a bit of a smokescreen because it paints him as a clown. When actually, even though I honestly think he sincerely holds the beliefs that he espouses, the ramifications of those beliefs and what people will do if they buy into those beliefs are serious, even if they don't buy into all of those beliefs. And I think the other thing, it reminds me a lot of what people said about Donald Trump when he was first running. And they said, well, the problem was that liberals took him

literally, but not seriously, and his followers took him seriously, but not literally. And I think that's also true here as well, in that a lot of people who will follow a lot of what David Icke says are taking him seriously in the sense of the things he's warning about are really serious. These are big, serious questions he's posing, big, serious allegations he's making, big, serious dots he's connecting. Now, he may not literally mean every one of those things, so there's a plausible deniability in there, both for Icke and for his followers. But he certainly means that we should be wary of George Soros, and we should be wary about the control that Facebook has. And he certainly means that we should be wary of George Soros and we should be wary about

the control that Facebook has. And he uses those legitimate concerns to then snowball into bigger actions that are actually really quite dangerous. So we need to take David Icke seriously, even if we don't take him literally and recognize that he can do an enormous amount of damage amongst people who follow him in that way as well. And then the thing that really baffles me the most, or the thing that we really have to kind of look out for the most, is it's the spread of his beliefs. How far they get that they end up surfacing in places completely divorced from their origin. And in a way, we're lucky that he stamps his name on all of the memes that he creates,

because I've seen them appear on family members' Facebook pages who have no idea who David Icke is, but just think that's a really interesting point that they've made. And why wouldn't the government answer that question? And is that really just a coincidence? Surely it can't be. So we also have to take into account that you don't have to even know who he is to see the propaganda and misinformation and disinformation he's disseminating because of this kind of decentralized way that his followers promulgate it. Yeah, well said. As you were talking about that, I was reflecting on the way that I actually came around to reading David Icke in the first place was when a friend of mine gave me that book, The Biggest Secret, and said, read this, ignore the lizard stuff, but read the book.

There's a lot of good stuff in there. As though somebody could think that the world leaders were secret alien, interterrestrial, extraterrestrial aliens. Yes, he believes both of those things. He espouses both of those contradictory beliefs in that book, but still have some good points to make is entirely beyond me. Well, I'll tell you what, I could talk to you about it all day. Unfortunately, the show's only so long. So Marsh, I really appreciate your insight and all the work that you're doing. And if the listeners want to hear more from you, and with

that accent, how could you not? I advise them to check the show notes to learn all about his other projects. We'll have them linked there. Marsh, thanks so much for hanging out with us. Oh, thanks for having me on and good luck plowing through the book. It's going to be a joy to listen to you suffer it. I'm glad it'll be a joy for somebody. Before we fade to black tonight, I wanted to let you know that if you can't get enough me in your life, there's a little bonus me to go around. Friday night, that's the 22nd at 7 p.m. Eastern. I'm going to be joining friend of the show Thomas Smith on Twitch while he plays the Wisdom Tree classic Bible Adventures, which is one of the dumbest concepts in the history of video games.

So be sure to check our Facebook page for a link to tune in live on Friday evening. Anyway, that's all the blessing we've got for you tonight. But we'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more. If you can't wait, they'll all be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our sister's hot friend got off a moose dipping at 7 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday. And an even newer episode of our half sister's citation needed to be at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, this show wouldn't earn its episode number if I neglected to thank Heath Enright for always being a huge part of the show, whether he's here or not. I also want to thank Eli Bosnick for always being here for the show, whether we like it or not. I also want to thank the lovely and talented Lucinda Lusions for finding all good news stories, believe it or not.

I also want to thank Stu from England for providing this week's Farnsworth quote. Pretty hard to follow up the one from last week, but solid attempt, dude. He didn't have anything to plug, so he asked instead that I tell his friend Tom from Malta to go fuck himself. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's and last week's best people. And holy shit, are there a lot of them here? Here we go. Stansky J. Yolanda, Honey Shot, Craven, Josh, Sarah, Dempchen, Jack, Amdkus, Jacqueline, Aaron, Jennifer, String Base Theory, Originalism is Here, Say, James, Zachary, Calvin, Erica, Troy, James, Maya, Tiffany, Jason, Jamie, Lee, Simon, Keith, Jenny, Christopher, Mel, Fassadero, Christina, Mary, Lime, Green Morpheus, Joshua, Reverend Jesus H. Christ, For No Good Reason, Sickeningly Unloved, Power Couple, Rob, Ruge, Lemon, Stealing Horse, Gremlin 6, Beverly, Ryan, Joanne, Emma, Randy, Trevor, Wendy, Whose generals are even more impressive than that list. Together, these 61 sexy secularists secured our scatological sarcasm for another year by giving us

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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 for permission. If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at ScalingAdeus.com. He's not the fucking president anymore, Morgan. The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle and a Thunderstorm LLC. Copyright 2021. All rights reserved.