Cross examiner podcast tackles rationality versus religion in the case of Internet courtroom

>> Speaker A: For my second season, I was going to start with a joke about homeopathy, but it just didn’t work.

>> Speaker B: Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internets courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host, huh? Uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner.

Welcome to the cross examiner podcast. I apologize for the hiatus

>> Speaker A: Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the cross examiner podcast. I am the cross examiner. I am an attorney. I am an atheist, and I am alarmed. I’m most alarmed about the rise of christian nationalism in the United States and around the world, and even more importantly, the mountains of misinformation that are powering that rise. This is the beginning of season two. I’ve taken a hiatus. I’ve got a lot going on in my life. I’ve got a son that’s going into college next year. I’ve got a younger son who’s transitioned into high school as a child on the spectrum. lots of things at work. I still have a full time job. I do this free with no money or financing or anything like that. So, I apologize for the hiatus. I’m eager to get back into things, and today we’re going to be talking about common ground again. My first episode ever, I entitled Common Ground in an attempt to address a subject that I think we can all agree on, regardless of our religious beliefs, our political beliefs, anything like that. And that was the story about the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Well, today I’m going to be covering a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, and that is alternative medicine, specifically homeopathy, but generally alternative medicine. My background in the law is I practiced for many years, FDA regulatory law. It’s kind of dry. It’s administrative law, and it’s all about food safety, drug safety, medical device, cosmetics, all of those sorts of things that FDA regulates, which is much more than most people realize. But in doing so, I learned a lot about alternative medicine and what the practitioners of alternative medicine will do to try to ride the line of the laws to make themselves look as much like legit medicine as possible without crossing a legal line into breaking the law.

Francis Oldham Kelsey helped create FDA regulation of food in 1935

But today, I wanted to start with a story, and I think it’s a story that people will find interesting, and I’ve not heard the story told very often, and the story starts with a mistake. The year was 1935, and a researcher named EMK Geiling was contacted by a young academic. That academic’s name was Francis Oldham, Kelsey. They reached out to Doctor Geiling and presented their credentials and asked if they needed a research assistant. Their credentials of Francis’s credentials were impressive. They graduated from high school at the age of 15. They attended Victoria College, which is now the University of Victoria, and then enrolled in McGill University, where they received both a bachelor’s of science in 1934 and completed their master’s of science in 1935. So by the age of, let’s see, 35. By the age of 20, they had a master’s in pharmacology. So doctor Geiling received Francis’s communication saying, hey, I’ve got all of these credentials. I’d love to come work with you. And here’s where the mistake comes in. Guiling said, yes. Francis shows up. And due to guiling not understanding the difference between Francis, spelled f r a n c e s versus f r a n c I s, he didn’t realize that Francis was a woman. So he hired a woman that he probably would not have hired back then. 19, 35, 20 year old master’s degree holding woman who was the top of every class she was in. But unfazed, he took her on. The story I’d like to tell is really about Frances Oldham Kelsey. She does a couple of things in her career that you may have never heard of that have saved lives, lots of lives, and saved, many, many people from, suffering birth defects. So to understand her impact, we need to go back and talk about what the state was of United States regulation of drugs in the 1930s. And to understand that, we need to jump further back to understand what it was like in 1906. And I’ll tell you why. 1906 is sort of the beginning of the modern regulatory, scheme that the United States has put in place for medicine, for drugs. Before 1906, there was pretty much no regulation. The only regulation, so to speak, would be what’s called tort, where you sue people, right? You sold me this thing and told me that it would cure my lumbago. and it didn’t. So I’m going to sue you for, false advertising or fraud or whatever there was available. But there was no government agency that was regulating the drugs before it got onto the market or even after it got onto the market. The major milestone here has nothing to do actually with drugs. It has to do with food. And that’s the publication of a book called the Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which described the meatpacking industry at the time. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do. It describes disgusting practices that were going on, completely unsanitary, completely fraudulent fillers that weren’t meat flies in the packing area, disease being spread all over the place, and it shocked the country and the world. In one of the first cases of underground guerrilla journalism, Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks working undercover, incognito, so to speak, in meatpacking plants in Chicago stockyards. The book’s focus was actually on working conditions. It depicted poverty, horrible working conditions, horrible living conditions, no social support for people. This was before Social Security and any sort of safety nets. And it contrasted it with, keep in mind, early 19 hundreds, just before the big depression. So you understand what the wealthiest class, the upper class of America, was doing at the time. In fact, Jack London, who reviewed it, called it the Uncle Tom’s cabin of wage slavery. That was the focus when he described the meat industry. It impacted more in my mind, and from what I can tell, it impacted more the public’s perception over the health violations and sanitation violations than it did about, you know, class inequality. And, that led to many reforms, one of which was the meat inspection act. But the big impact was the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs act. This was the very first time that the United States did anything on a federal level to regulate food and drugs in a serious way. It was a monumental shift in the use of government powers to protect consumers. It created the first version of the FDA. It required that food and drugs bear truthful labeling statements and meet certain standards of purity and strength. Can’t be adulterated, basically, is the modern terms. So that was the cornerstone. That was the cornerstone that created the. The m. Social awareness, the legal structure, the framework, so to speak, and the scientific thrust to focus on food and drugs. From a scientific standpoint, however, it had a tremendous amount of shortcomings. It limited the agency’s ability to protect consumers because it didn’t offer any way to remove inherently dangerous drugs from the market prior to marketing or even after marketing. So they. They couldn’t do anything prior to marketing pretty much at all. And after marketing, their only cause of action, their only way that they could remove something from the market, is for something called misbranding. This is a labeling issue. You called this aspirin. but it’s not really aspirin. It’s something else. It might still do the job, right? It might be like tylenol, if you call it aspirin. It’s not aspirin. It’s mislabeled. We’re going to pull it off the shelves. But if you label it correctly. Hey, this stuff is a, cough syrup, but it contains the following ingredients, which might kill you. And you have the ingredients on your label. It’s, not misbranded so they, people could sell it. And that was a. Seem to be a real problem, but nothing else significant happened for decades. Keep in mind, as I said, this is the great, depression. And then we have FDR’s, new deal. A new deal plays an inherent part in this, and it really should really speak to why there is a significant impact that government can have on people’s lives. Even if you’re not worried about did Trump swim with a porn star or what we’re doing in Ukraine, or all that sort of stuff. So the new Deal was in the early thirties to mid thirties, 33 to 38. And what it was is a package of work projects, financial acts and regulations and creations. Importantly for this story of federal agencies, there was a massive objection to this, mostly by conservatives. The argument went as follows. You’re here creating all of these agencies, the civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Farm Security Administration, the National Industrial Recovery act. The Social Security Administration comes along right here. These are all administrations. And we know today what administrations do. They create regulations, right? Are regulations, laws? Well, they’re rules. They tell you what you can and can’t do, and they say, hey, if you do this, you’re going to be penalized. If you don’t do this, you’re going to be penalized. Those sound a lot like laws. And the argument the conservatives made were constitutional in nature. They say, hey, Congress has delegated their rulemaking authority to the executive branch. Congress is passing these laws to say, hey, go create this Social Security administration. And it’s going to create a bunch of rules about how people are taxed and how these things get distributed and all of that.

The conservatives point out, rulemaking is reserved under the Constitution to Congress

The conservatives point out, rulemaking is reserved under the Constitution to Congress. This is what’s known as the non delegation doctrine. It basically says, you can’t, one branch of the government can’t delegate its rule, its role and responsibility to another branch of the government. It can actually be traced back. This doctrine, this non delegation doctrine, can be traced back to John Locke. He wrote about it in 1690, saying, quote, the legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands for it being but a delegated power from the people. They who have it cannot pass it over to others. And this thinking, this philosophy, held sway, around the world. This was not just John Locke writing for the United States back in 1690, right? This was philosophy of democracy, sort of 101. We need to clearly define when we, the people, are going to surrender authority to someone or something like Congress and then have very, very clear rules as to what we all agreed to. And the argument is we all agreed that this group that we get to vote for gets to make the rules, and then we will obey them. And if that group says, well, we won’t make the rules, we’ll let the executive do it. All of a sudden, that’s a betrayal of the deal. That’s a betrayal of the deal. But a few things happened between 1690 and 1935 or so, and they are the following. First, we had two industrial revolutions. We had the first industrial revolution in the mid 1840s ish starts, the industrial revolution where, society starts getting more complicated. Pre industrial revolution life is pretty simple. You were a farmer, you were a merchant or you were a, banker or a lawyer or some sort of professional. There was no factory worker. There were no mass produced products. People didn’t live in giant cities the way we do now. Like we had big cities. London, obviously, is a great example. But there was not this skyscraper effect, and there was not mass communication, per se. And, the industrial revolution started to change that. We got more efficient. We could produce more goods more quickly. And then there was a second, what they call the second industrial revolution, which is at the end of the 18 hundreds. And that’s where we start seeing factories mass production, and we start seeing technology increase. And we start giving workers the keys to devices that could cause a lot of damage. Right before industrial revolution, a worker might accidentally release or stampede a, herd of cows or horses. And that could cause a lot of damage. But after the industrial revolution, a single blue collar train engineer could derail a train and spill chemicals and destroy a, small town that was surrounding a particular train track. It was like nothing we’d seen before. So we have that. We have a change in the way that we need to think of the world and to structure how the rules are made. Because pre one, thousand 935, pre administration era, where we are able to delegate authority to agencies, we don’t have as many rules. Congress can’t sit here and make, rules about sunscreen and about sunflower, seeds and about, the cosmetics on your face to try to protect you. They don’t have enough manpower. They don’t have enough time. But we were getting more products. We were getting more people. The products were being mass consumed and mass produced. And we were building trains. We were building skyscrapers. Now, we were creating the ability to do massive amount of damage. So it became more important that we come up with a way that we can create these rules, these regulations, to react to problems that are encountered for the first time. You know the old saying that regulations are written in blood? Well, that’s what happens. We realize that trains can blow up if you don’t maintain the proper boiler pressure, right? so we need to create regulations saying, hey, every train needs to be inspected to make sure its integrity is okay, that the people are licensed to operate, all these sorts of things that we try to do to save lives. So that’s the first piece of the puzzle as to why there was a shift away from this non delegation doctrine. The other big thing that’s happening is the Great Depression. The landmark moment where the Great Depression begins is the 24 October 1929 known as Black Thursday, where the Wall street stock market crashed and the whole world was plunged into financial chaos. Massive unemployment, massive halt to productivity, and it lasted a decade, at least from 1929 to 1939. So here we are with these two forces. The world’s getting more dangerous from, amount of damage that companies can do by, harming people from accidents and producing harmful products. And we have the Great Depression. A couple of major developments that change the way that people look at people in power, and not people elected officials, but people with money and the ability to produce goods and provide financial services, those sorts of things. And it becomes very apparent that the old way of doing things is not going to work anymore. Congress does not have time or the resources to tax and create a bunch of federal agencies and create laws and vote on the laws. Keep in mind that if Congress were to regulate, if Congress ran the FDA, let’s say, for example, every new drug application would have to be reviewed by a committee of Congress, probably their experts, right? The FDA would just sit under Congress, but then any action they wanted to take would have to be brought to the floor of Congress, passed in the House, passed in the Senate, and signed by the president, all of which are subject to a, massive amount of industry capture. M see, for example, the modern NRA, preventing any significant gun legislation for basically my lifetime, right? They capture politicians and prevent actual effective policies from being introduced because the people voting on it are not the experts. It’s also subject to politics in the sense of the, people voting for the politicians are ignorant in a healthy sense. They aren’t the experts on food safety, they aren’t the experts on cosmetic, adulteration. They’re not the experts on medical devices. But any particular industry could create an advertising campaign criticizing a politician for voting for a regulation by providing misinformation to the public. So there’s a lot of problems that we run into if we try to fix all of these issues that come up. The Great Depression really solidifies that, and the supreme court starts shifting their views. Pre 1935. The non delegation held the day after 1935. During the New Deal period, everybody realizes we are way too vulnerable to giving all of the power to these tycoons, the wealthy, who will do whatever it takes to just make profit with no regulation. And it was at that exact moment in history when Francis Oldham Kelsey, the young pharmacology researcher, makes a major impact that inspires, in part, in a large part, the creation of the modern FDA. To demonstrate how she was involved here, I would like to read a story. This is a newspaper story from my home state, Maryland. The paper that published it is the Washington Post, and this is dated October 23, 1937. I will put copies of this story. you only have images. They don’t have it on their website. You have to go to archives to get it. But I will put copies of the story up at my website@thecrossexaminer.net. If you want to see the full story, I’ll read selective, paragraphs. So here we go.

Death toll from Maryland use of deadly elixir now stands at 29

The title of this story is seizure of deadly elixir saves Marylander as us hastens to check toll already at 29. This is by Gerald G. Gross, GG, in the post. As I said, death in Salisbury, Maryland, from use of the drug elixir of sulfanilamide was narrowly averted yesterday while airplanes and chemists hastily drafted into service failed to save nine lives in other parts of the nation, 29 deaths in the nation were recorded here last night. Although the American Medical association in Chicago reported a total of 30, with seven other mortalities yet to be verified, Doctor Morris Fishbein, editor of the AMA Journal, said there is no known antidote for the poison, and symptomatic treatment is all that can be given. Scores are seriously ill. Seizures of the deadly potion, whose manufacture has been stopped, have been made from San Francisco to New York, from Detroit to San Juan M. After two one pint bottles were confiscated at a Salisbury drug store yesterday, investigators checking prescription lists discovered that a two ounce vial had been sold to a resident there. Rushing to his home, they found it in a medicine cabinet. Fortunately, only half a teaspoon had been consumed. Had the seizure been made a day later, with the patient following the prescribed dosage. In the meantime, another life might have been taken, officials declared. That’s the, first four or five paragraphs. So this is what was called the sulfomilinide disaster. The history here is that sulfamilanide was a drug that was used to treat streptococcal infection, and it had been shown to have dramatic curative effects and had been used safely for quite some time. In 1937, however, a salesman for the Massengill company, this was in Bristol, Tennessee, he came in and reported that there was increased demand in the southern states for the drug to be made available in a liquid form. To date, it had only been used in tablet or powder form. So the company’s chief chemist experimented and found that, sulfanilamide, it’s hard to say, would dissolve in diethylene glycol, a substance that he thought would be great to use, because it dissolved easily and it stayed suspended. Here’s the problem, though. It is the one of the ingredients you may recognize from antifreeze. And if you know anything about antifreeze, it’s a deadly poison. He didn’t know that, though. We didn’t have this testing regime or a knowledge base to understand that this was actually bad for humans. So the company tested it for flavor, appearance, fragrance. All of that was found to be great. They loved it. And this is exactly what the market demanded. So they created immediately. They compounded 633 shipments, worth of this elixir all over the country, and again tested it for everything except toxicity. And at the time, this is, you know, the 1906 Food and Drug act is what’s in effect at the time. Gave nobody any power to require people to test for toxicity. It was bad for business to sell toxic drugs, but it wasn’t illegal, because the non delegation doctrine said you can’t create agencies to make these rules. And Congress doesn’t have rules to make all. It doesn’t have time to make all of these rules about, safety, about every aspect of human life. And so capitalism wins. The market wants something. We’re going to put a product out there and see if people like it. So the AMA, American Medical association, not the FDA at that time. Again, American Medical association, private entity, the Food and Drug Administration existed, but only under the 1906 act and was basically powerless, to do anything. Problem, right? Nothing about marketing, nothing about testing. The AMA received notifications on October 11 of several deaths caused by the medication in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They notified the Food and Drug Administration, who reached out to Massengill and got the composition of the chemical. They got samples and retained the services of a lab run by doctor Geiling to research. What’s going on here? Doctor Geiling asked our hero, Frances, Frances Oldham, to research this, and she very quickly isolated the toxic ingredient and reported this back to Guiling, who reported it to the FDA. As you heard in the newspaper story, people got onto planes and flew across the country with this new information that she had proven that this was a toxic substance in this drug that was being prescribed in good faith by doctors. This chemical compound had been prescribed for a long time. This was just, a new composition of it in this liquid form. They flew everywhere around the country and probably saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives. 107 people did die, at least that we know of, of, this bad composition. But she, Frances Oldham, saved thousands of lives as a lab researcher under Doctor Geiling, who was contracted by the FDA because they didn’t have all their own labs and all of that sort of stuff. So this made headlines everywhere. You saw them in the Washington Post story. This is in 1937. Yes, yes, 1937. By that time, people had already realized, right, that the old act, the 1906 act, was insufficient and that things had to get going. And they’d already come to an agreement of what the structure would be. Because we’re two years post 1935, coming out of the Great Depression, we’re realizing that the non delegation doctrine is not going to work for a modern technological society. And we have, deals in Congress already to create a new FDA. But it’s stalled. Nobody wants to move it forward. A lot of the details have been ironed out. The courts are ready, as I said. Then this happens. Then Francis proves. Francis Oldham proves that there was nothing the FDA could do. This was a. Ah. Labeled correctly, went out, toxic, would kill people. Doctors prescribed it, caused 107 deaths, and there was nothing the FDA could have done at that point to prevent it. The very, very next year, 1938, the new Food and Drug and Cosmetic act is passed. It’s called the Food, Drug and Cosmetic act of 1938, due in large part to Francis Oldham’s work. And that’s where we get the modern FDA with the power to say, you don’t get to market a thing as a drug unless you submit a new drug application. You submit all of this evidence. We do our own testing if necessary. We have scientists review everything to make sure that it is not only safe. That was the big concern, right? We just killed 107 people because some sales guy said, hey, I want to sell it in a liquid form. A company says, sure, mix it in this thing that dissolves it really easily and sell it, and then we kill 107 people. So not only must it be safe, but importantly, it must also be effective. That’s the language in the FDA. See the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic act of 1938. A drug must be proven to be safe and effective for the claims made on its label before you’re going to be allowed to market it. And it created a whole agency to enforce this, including law enforcement capabilities. There are agents to this day, gun toting police officers that work for the FDA to enforce this stuff, to go find warehouses where people are storing bad things, drugs that are mislabeled, drugs that are toxic. But it was Frances Oldham who did the legwork to prove what was going on here. And she saved lives and basically gave the final push for the modern FDA to take place.

Market pressure forces companies to take huge risks, just like in this case

So I’m looking at the clock. I’m a half an hour through my episode. I haven’t even gotten to homeopathy. But I do want to celebrate Frances Oldham in one other way and tell one other story. And this is probably going to turn into a two parter. I’m guessing the next major thing that she did is a whole other story. I’ll try to make it a lot shorter, but I really want to celebrate her because it demonstrates what the point of this episode is. And that is there is market pressure in a capitalist society, in a democratic society, where the rules are made, a lot of times by popular vote, there is a pressure to take huge risks, just like we saw in this case, right? We took a big risk of mixing this thing in an a substance we weren’t really that familiar with. Its only property we cared about it is that it dissolves this chemical really easily. And then, we killed a bunch of people. That pressure exists throughout history where there is money to be made, where there’s power to be had. There’s a pressure to sweep that risk under the rug, right? There’s this motivation to sweep it under the rug, I should say. And it takes massive oversight to save lives. And one could argue, like the conservatives still do to this day, that, oh, you know, the market will take care of it. That if you become known as a reckless marketer of toxic drugs, you’re going to go out of business and you will be subject to lawsuit. Individual victims can sue you. Hundred and seven people that died, their families could sue the drug manufacturer. But you know what happens, right? The drug manufacturer has been granted this protection by the state called incorporation. That’s their protection. So when I sue them, I sue the company, but I don’t sue the individuals that were doing it because they were working for the company. Now, you can sue the individuals. You could sue that chemist who did the mixture and say you were unreasonably lackadaisical in your testing. You should have tested for toxicity, so you were negligent. You could sue that individual, but most likely the company will have indemnified them, and you’re going to have a lot of defenses to that. And the money? The money is with the company, then the money’s not with the chemist. He’s making good money, I’m sure. But 107 people, states, are not going to be made whole by suing an individual chemist. But when you sue the company, you don’t get to any of the assets of the underlying employees. You just get the assets of the company. And what does a company like that do? They shift their assets around. They may declare bankruptcy. Right? They won’t pay off everybody. And then those people will go off and go work for other companies or start up a new organization somewhere else. They’re never held personally responsible. And we like that as a society to some degree, because it. By giving people protection to say, hey, if you guys mess up while you’re running your company, you’re not going to lose your house, you’re not going to, you know, your kids aren’t going to starve because you can’t be sued personally, we’re just going to sue the company that encourages, innovation, that encourages people to go out and create companies small and big. Like, I have an LLC for this podcast, and if I ever get sued for something on this, the podcast has, a shell around it that I’m hope, hopefully personally, will not get sued. And it encourages that, and we like that. But there’s a dark side to it, which is it also absolves, to some degree, people of the consequences of taking unacceptable risk. So if we can’t get it on the back end, if we can’t control companies behaviors by punishing them on the back end, we as a society have to create regulations up front to try to stem the tide of bad motivations. And that’s the culture coming out of the Great Depression. Again, what was that? A bunch of people in corporations isolating themselves personally from liability and causing a massive amount of loss of income to, the whole country. Right? So we now have said as a society, we are going to put all these rules into place, and we are going to inspect, it’s kind of a trust but verify type of system. We’re not going to inspect every single pill that goes onto the market. You’re going to report to us what you’re doing under some penalties of perjury, under a lot of different things, and then when you mess up, we’re going to get you and we will do random inspections and those sorts of things up front. So that’s all tied up in one big ball. Great Depression, industrial revolution, sulfonilamide, all of it. And that brings about the FDA. But she wasn’t done, as I said. So she went on to get her PhD and then joined University of Chicago faculty. And in 1942, she learned she was looking for a synthetic cure for malaria. Malaria kills. To this day, mosquitoes are the deadliest animals on the planet to humans. They kill more humans by orders of magnitude than any other animal on the planet. And she was looking for a synthetic cure to malaria, like many people were at the time. But as a result of those studies, she learned something. She learned that drugs, some drugs are able to pass through the placental barrier. When a mother’s, pregnant, she’s, got a place placental barrier between her and the baby. She learned that drugs can leak through. She went on to get her md, she got married. She ended up being an, associate editor for the AMA journal for a couple of years. And then in 1960, she was hired by the FDA in Washington, DC. At that time, she was one of only seven full time physicians reviewing drugs for the FDA. This is 1960, right? This is 23 years after the new FDA was created, 22 years after the new FDA is created. And they have only seven full time physicians and a few part time physicians reviewing drugs. One of her first assignments was to review a new drug application. This is under the new FDA regime for a drug called Kevadon. It’s a tranquilizer and painkiller with specific indications to prescribe the drug to pregnant women for morning sickness. Now, Kavadon had already been approved by Canada and more than 20 european and african countries. And so it was viewed as, oh, this thing is just going to sail on through. Let’s, let’s give it to this new doctor that’s reviewing for us. But she withheld approval. She requested further studies. She had read studies, at least one study in the british medical journal that showed possible neurological symptoms associated with the use of Kevadon. She also requested data showing that the drug was not harmful to fetuses because she, she had that past experience. There was tremendous pressure from the drugs manufacturer, with the german company, I believe, to get approval. But she stuck to her guns. This young, relatively young, this young doctor new to her position said, nope, there’s enough evidence here of a problem that I want your data and I want you to fully test this for safety and fetuses. I want you to test this for other issues. Now, you may not know the end result that the drug named Kevadon, was not allowed to be marketed in the United States, but you may recognize it by its more technical name, and that is thalidomide. Thalidomide was shown to cause birth defects in babies. If you took this drug while you were pregnant, and she was vindicated with her skepticism, she was vindicated for her research. She saved countless people from being born with birth defects. Typically, you don’t have any arms. You may just have a hand on your shoulder or a small limb sticking out. Thousands of children were born this way in Europe, and it took a long time for them to figure out what was going on. The headline in the Washington Post when this came out, this was in July 15, of 1962.

Francis Kelsey helped create the modern FDA drug regulatory system

By the time they realized what was going on, two years or more, I mean, two years after they applied, for approval in the United States, long after they had been selling this drug in other parts of the world, the headline in the United States on the front page was, heroin of FDA keeps bad drug off of market. Celebrated. She averted a tragedy. The author said, quote, she prevented the births of hundreds or indeed thousands of armless and legless children. She was very humble. She insisted that her assistants as well as her FDA superiors, who backed her stance, deserved credit as well. And yet again, she caused change because the public had a huge outcry after that story came out. There was something called the Harris Amendment, I think it was called, was passed unanimously by Congress in 1962. As a reaction to her work to strengthen drug regulation, companies were required to demonstrate the efficacy of new drugs, report adverse reactions to the FDA, and request consent from patients participating in clinical trials, none of which were in the original or, the 1938 act. So now companies had to demonstrate efficacy. They didn’t just have to be reviewed for efficacy, they were. The burden was now on the companies to do the tests ahead of time. The adverse reactions segment of that is still a major way that we save lives today, that you can’t sweep adverse reactions under the table. There are people who are identified as people who need to report adverse reactions, doctors and nurses and all of that sort of stuff. But the companies as well, everything has to have a serial number on it so we can trace and say, this person took this drug, this serial number from this batch, and had some sort of adverse reaction. I need to report that to a central database so that if we start to see a pattern, we can start pulling things from the shelves, just like we did back in 1937 with the. The antifreeze. Right? So yet again, here she is, making change for the better in the United States. This one woman sticking to her guns. As a result of her blocking the approval, she was awarded the President’s award for distinguished federal civilian service by John F. Kennedy in August of 1962. She was the second woman ever honored that way. After receiving her award, she continued to work at the FDA. She played a, key role in shaping and enforcing the 1962 amendments that I just talked about. And she became responsible for directing all the surveillance of drug testing at the FDA. And she retired in 2005 at the age of 90 years old, after serving with the FDA for 46 years. In 2010, the FDA named the Kelsey Award. That was her married name, Kelsey Award, for her to be awarded annually to an FDA employee for, quote, excellence and courage in protecting public health. And that is her legacy. Frances Oldham Kelsey, nobody you’ve ever heard about, most likely in your life, basically responsible for the modern FDA drug regulatory scheme. Now, why is this important? Why have I spent 40 minutes or so talking about her? not only is she a personal hero of mine, but this story demonstrates one little piece of the big puzzle that we call the scientific method. One little piece of what we call fact based regulation. Science based regulation. One little piece of the puzzle as to why things like homeopathy and acupuncture and crystals should be criticized, should be attacked, should be viewed with. With skepticism. Because when lives matter, we trust the FDA. We trust experts like Francis Kelsey. We trust these people with our lives because they’ve spent their entire lives researching a, topic, pharmacology, specifically pharmacology, with respect to infants, with respect to safety, things like that. They spend their entire lives doing this. They save lives again and again and again. And in our modern world, with the misinformation that goes around the Internet, they’re attacked. They spend 40 years doing something like this. And if she were around today and posting on the Internet, hey, I did this and that, another thing, she died, by the way, in 2015. She was 101. but if she were around today posting on the Internet, hey, this is how this drug works. Or this is why homeopathy doesn’t work. You’d have, ah, 100 people telling her she’s an idiot that doesn’t know what she’s talking about. That’s where crystals and homeopathy and acupuncture, all of that come from, and if it were just a waste of time, a laugh, that, oh, it’s homeopathy. That’s idiotic. It’s just water. What do we care? I wouldn’t be doing these episodes, right. I wouldn’t be talking about this. But I think we can all agree, and this is where I want to find the common ground here. I think we can all agree that we have demonstrated through her story that when you have unregulated manufacturing practices, when you have unregulated marketing, when you have non experts being responsible for the composition of substances that you are marketing for people to put in their bodies, when you have ignorance on the side of the consumers, and when you have sort of this woo element added into this mix, this faithful, mystical, religious element, as you will see when we talk about, homeopathy and other things, it’s a recipe for disaster. To summarize, the FDA’s mission with respect to drugs, it is to make sure that they are safe and effective. And both of those matter. We’ve talked about stories about safety, right? The sulfonylamide, the thalidomide, those things. That’s. The drug isn’t safe. But what about the other end? Why does FDA say it must be safe and effective? Well, that’s where we, we come into the other areas where we can run into disasters. And I think we can all agree, no matter what, if we’re, if we’re conservative, liberal, male, female, old, young, whatever we may be, that in today’s world, where any fool can put together a website that says that they’re a company that has insurance and looks respectable and has stock photos of doctors in white coats that are just actors on their front page and is selling a product to help cure your foot pain, that they run the risk of killing a lot of people and may never get caught, may never be punished, may never be held liable, may never make the families or estates of those dead people whole, that we want to regulate that behavior in a reasonable way so that the good stuff can get to market, but the bad stuff, as much as possible, is kept off the market. I think we can all agree on that. I think this plus many other stories demonstrates that money corrupts. And when there’s a buck to be made, there will be snake oil salesmen at every corner. So I’m going to end this episode here. We’ll dive in next episode with the actual, you know, background history of homeopathy and what the FDA is doing about it right now. Hint, not very much. but I hope you’ve enjoyed this story. I really enjoyed making it. I went through, as you heard, maybe on my trailers for this season, I’ve recorded an episode of this. I have gotten a new computer, and I was. I somehow corrupted the recording, and I was able to use it. So I decided to come back and I added a little bit. It was originally just about homeopathy, but I decided I really like human stories. I think they tell something. So I did a little more research on Frances Kelsey because I had known generally what she had done. But the more I read about what she had done and what her life was like, the more I realized I need to tell her story as the introduction. So consider this your introduction to why we need drug regulation and food and cosmetics and other things as well, but generally, why regulation is good and can save lives. Because under any other system where we let the market handle it, thousands if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of kids, borns without arms and legs, thousands of people dead every year to contaminated and corrupted products because the market solution is too slow and the people running the companies are too unlikely to be personally punished for any of those problems. So this is a great solution. So, as I said, I had to re record this. I did it without a script, pausing now and then to look up, things I forgot. So I apologize for any sort of stuttering or ums or AHs there, but I really wanted to get back into the saddle. I’m excited for this season.

Next episode will focus on creationism in schools and legal issues

I’m going to be. I’m going to be talking about homeopathy as sort of the common ground episode for the first few episodes, and then I’m going to be moving into, creationism in schools. We’re going to be reviewing the, Dover versus Kitzmiller case in depth to understand the lengths to which evangelical Christians in the United States will lie to not only you, not only to school systems, but try to lie to courts to sneak their religion into schools. So next episode, we’ll follow up on more of the homeopathy, and then after that, we’ll get into more of the legal issues. Oh, and I forgot to mention, in my next episode, please tune in to watch me ingest 480 pain relief pills in one sitting, and we’re going to see what happens. Until then, please stay safe. I look forward to talking to you again.

>> Speaker B: This has been the cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing.

>> Speaker A: See you soon.

Speaker A: I got a letter from my lawyer which said, dear Cross examiner, thought I saw you on the street the other day, crossed over to say hello, but it wasn’t you. So I went back one 10th of an hour. $25.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner.

Speaker A: Welcome. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am your host, the Cross examiner. I am an atheist, I am an attorney, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States. And more importantly, I’m alarmed by the massive amount of misinformation that’s powering that rise. I started this podcast to try to bring my experience as an atheist, as an attorney, to help educate so that you could push back against that misinformation when you encounter it in the world. So this is my first episode back after a long family vacation. Thank you for your patience, but we have two kids of high school age, and we’re running out of time to have family vacations before they disperse around the world. So we took a nice vacation. We went down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I was born and raised in Charleston. My dad was in the Navy, so Navy base there, and then Connecticut and Scotland back to Charleston. We went all over the world, went to Myrtle Beach to see my mother in law. My wife’s family is from West Virginia, and I think there’s a federal law that says if you retire while you’re in West Virginia, you have to move to Myrtle Beach, because that’s everybody there flies the West Virginia flag. Had a lot of fun down there. The state is definitely in the clutches, uh, of Christian nationalism. I tried to experience more of it every time I go down there. I experience a lot. I’ll post a video on my website@thecrossexaminer.net of a guy next to me on the beach that was really in the spirit of things. I suggest you go take a look at that ten second video. Fun. We didn’t, uh, interact with them, let’s put it that way. But I tried to take my family to the Golden Egg in Southern Myrtle Beach near Merles Inlet. Golden Egg, it’s one of these breakfast spots you find in any beach town that will serve you pancakes at any hour of the day. Right? And the Golden Egg, I go there every time we go down because it’s special.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker A: As soon as you walk in, plastered on the wall are a bunch of Bible quotes, and then you get your menu, and there’s, uh, like, the first, you know, those big plastic laminated menu, one sheeters you get at IHOP and those sorts of places for your breakfast stuff. The top left corner of the front page of the menu is all about Jesus and coming back and Christian nationalism, how this is a Christian nation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there’s paraphernalia. You can buy mugs and T shirts that are all about God. So I took my family there, and it was all gone. It was all gone. I miss it. So there was not a sign of it left. So I don’t know if it’s new owners or if somebody has seen the light, so to speak, and realized that either it’s bad for business or it just ain’t true. But either way, that’s my minor news of progress in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that the golden egg is no longer Jesus. Uh, breakfast center. So today, to get me back in the saddle for my post summer vacation stint, I thought we would do another episode of Why We Care. So Why We care is my episodes, where I talk about the answer to the question that follows. And the question is, if you’re an atheist and you don’t believe in God, why are you doing this? Why are you so passionate? It seems like you’re all worked up because you really do believe and you’re trying to mentally make a safe space for yourself. So the answer is, if you’re an atheist, why do you care so much that’s these episodes? And my response is, I wouldn’t care, except all of these things happen in our world, and they are acts committed by religious people, people who believe they’re doing something because of God or because of more generically misinformation, uh, pseudoscience, those sorts of things. I care because those people can hurt me. They can hurt my family, my friends, the planet. My best example is we have United States congressman on the Energy Committee, on the floor of Congress saying we don’t even need to research climate science because God promised that he would never flood the Earth again. That’s a congressman saying we should not even research a potential threat to humanity because of my religious beliefs. That’s why we care. So this episode, I just go through my inbox. I’ve got people sending me ideas you can always send me ideas at ideas@thecrossexaminer.net for news stories that happen that are related to this topic somehow. I will say, before we get going, these are unscripted. I just sort of go through my inbox and talk about the news items that are there and stuff that have may have saved that I want to talk about. So I think this is going to be a long episode because a lot of stuff has piled up while I’m gone, but please forgive the unscripted nature. I just wing it. So here we go. First up, we’ve got, uh, a doozy. You may have heard of this group. They are called Moms for Liberty. Or as I heard, somebody on the Internet describe them? Uh, once clanned. Uh, Karenhood, this is a group of busy body moms. Christian. Of course they’re Christian. And they aren’t for liberty. They are for liberty the same way that in the novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth was for truth, and the Ministry for Peace was for peace, right? They weren’t. The Ministry for Peace was the War Department. The Ministry for Truth was the false propaganda department of the government, of the fascist regime. That’s who these people are. They are double speaking, anti liberty Moms for Liberty. So what they do, and you may have heard of this this is a phenomenon that’s been going on for a couple of years now is around the country. They create chapters, and they go to local government. And that’s something that I’ve said a lot on this podcast. Local government’s, where the action at? They go to local government, and they object to school curriculums and book buying and book stocking decisions at school libraries. They love focusing on anything that has to do with LGBT. They love focusing on anything that has to do with race or discrimination. If you want to talk about that in school, in a public school, moms for Liberty is going to come and protest and pick it and do whatever they can to get your school to stop m doing that. It was founded back in 2021, so not that long ago, in a reaction to mask mandates at school. Moms for Liberty, that’s where the name came from. Give us the liberty to infect other kids, right? We don’t want our kids wearing masks, and we’re going to make them pawns in our sort of psychological issue war, where we are sick of putting up with our kids at home, and we want to send them back to school during a pandemic. So don’t make them wear masks and make sure you open the schools. That’s where they came from, was that and naturally, they evolve into what all sort of pseudo religious organizations turn into, which is Thought Police, which is, I want to control everything that’s going on. So that’s who they are. So they were in the news in Indiana. They’ve grown to 285 chapters as of this month. There was a new study this month, 285 chapters across 45 states in two years time, they’ve done this, okay? It’s like a disease. This story that I’m going to talk about is coming out of Indiana. There is a chapter in Indiana that is doing the whole let’s get all of the books taken out of the teen and kids section of our library. They publish newsletters and their newsletter for June. On the left, you see what’s in this chapter. You see how to live as a Biblical citizen, something like that. Biblical citizenship. And the next one was, um what the gays are up to. I forget what the headline was, but that’s basically it. Those are the bullet points in their newsletter. So this is Christian. This is Thought police. This is Christian Nationalism newsletter. And on the right, there was a quote. And the quote said, he alone who owns the youth gains the future. So for, uh, those of us who are students of history, that is a quote from Adolf Hitler in one of his rallies, talking about how we have to form what, the Hitler Youth. Nazis, right. Hitler Youth. And you might think, okay, so some intern found this, or some mom, most likely. They don’t have interns. I’ve got 200 whatever chapters in two years. They’re all running this out of their homes. Somebody found this quote, didn’t know who it was attributed to, and put it on their newsletter. And it’s prominent. Let me make clear. This is a prominent it’s in a big call out bubble, a big blue background, white text call out. That’s the quote. But to dispel any notions that they were confused about who they were praising or who they were quoting, here they put right there, adolf Hitler quote, he who alone who owns the youth gains the future. Close quote. And then in italics, adolf Hitler on the front page of their June newsletter. So they’re saying the quiet part out loud, right? That’s what they’re doing. So that alone is bad enough. I would say it’s got you in journalism for people to go after them if they didn’t cite it as being an Adolf Hitler quote. But they put Adolf Hitler there, so it’s fair game. But the real story is what they’re doing to their library. They have somehow forced the library to do a manual review of all the books in the teen section. That’s going to cost that county $330,000. The press is reporting that most of the books are off of the shelves while this review is taking place. So they’re basically shutting down the library for teen subject matter while people are reviewing books, this book burning N*** type of s*** that they want to do. And again, that would be par for the course of what they’re doing, and we need to push back against that. But that’s, again, not the whole story. The real story is the board of the library has public meetings, much like city council meetings or town council meetings, where the board will hear from members of the public, and you get X number of minutes, two or three minutes to say your piece at the podium and then move on. And a man appeared a few days after this newsletter showed up, a man appeared and spoke out about this issue and told the board, hey, these guys are quoting Adolf Hitler. They’re the ones that you are cowtowing to. And doing this review of the books, I would like to take 30 seconds of my allotted time, whatever his allotted time was two or three minutes, and do a moment of silence in memory of Holocaust survivors and Holocaust victims so that we can really reflect upon this group and what they’re doing to our libraries and what’s behind it. I’d like us to all just take a moment to have a moment of silence for Holocaust victims. Here’s a recording of him, uh, saying that and what happened, and I’m going.

Speaker D: To use the rest of my time for a moment of silence in response to Moms for Liberty, who I think a few of the guys have already left, so it must not be that important to be here. Ah. Who quoted Adolf Hitler yesterday in their newsletter saying that he who controls the youth controls the world. Disgusting moment of silence to think about what that means today.

Speaker A: Hear that coughing going on? That’s Moms for Liberty, of course, disrupting this moment of silence. That’s objecting to what they’re doing, objecting to the fact that they’re quoting Adolf Hitler and remembering, uh, Holocaust victims. Let’s m continue.

Speaker C: Oh, that’s pathetic.

Speaker A: You’re right. Random person in the audience. That is pathetic. So who you guess got thrown out of the meeting? And if I’m asking the question, you know the answer. Of course, it was the speaker who got thrown out of the meeting. So, M, let’s hear how that plays out.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: No, I’m not my time up.

Speaker C: I can’t be.

Speaker D: I can’t either. I’m speaking. You guys are grabbing, so I might.

Speaker A: Take that time back.

Speaker D: Please don’t address me like you’re asking me not to address you.

Speaker C: Can you please go ahead with your comment and then take your seat?

Speaker D: I’m going to need an extra 30 minutes because I keep being interrupted.

Speaker C: Okay, can you please take your seat? Please take your seat, sir.

Speaker D: I asked for 30 more seconds because I was interrupted rudely by the board. Um, you’re going to escort me out as I’m asking a moment of silence for Holocaust? No, he did not.

Speaker C: Okay. Officer there’s. Officer Cunningham, can you please escape?

Speaker A: And the Moms for Liberty applaud the man being denied the liberty to take advantage of his allotted time to speak about how horrible it is that they are quoting Hitler and trying to ban books. This is the world we live in. This is why we care. This is Christian Nationalism 101. Go in, control the local school boards, control the libraries, shut down education, shut down, uh, any sort of information that disagrees with your point of view. That’s what these people are doing. If this was the 1950s and 60s, these women would be the same ones you see in the footage from school integrations. The white women that were out there screaming bloody murder with a look of murderous intent on their face as young black children were escorted by National Guard troops into schools, forcing integration. That’s who these people are. The modern day version of this. I’m not exaggerating when I think that the Internet guy on reddit who called them Clanned karen Hood is f****** 100% right. This is why we care. People are doing this based on misinformation. They believe that there’s a God. They believe that they know the mind of that God, and they believe that the mind of that God approves of what they’re doing, and it gives them justification to commit atrocities small and big. So as to why we care. This is why we care. This is why I’m donating my time to try to educate people about what’s going on and especially how to fight back against it. Right? Go and elect school board members, library board members who won’t put up with this bullshit. Okay? It sounds like looking at the video and listening to the words, it sounds like the board person, she was in over her head. She sounded like a nice old lady who was very confused. And it’s like, oh, you’re not talking, so let’s just move on type of thing, which is always what gets bureaucrats in trouble with the law. Okay? This is a side note again, stream of consciousness. The thing that gets government in trouble is when government officials in trouble is when they choose the expedient option over the Constitutional option. I’m not saying there’s necessarily Constitutional rights involved here. You could make some arguments that it was a public forum. He was denied his time based on content. Right? That’s a First Amendment violation. You are letting some people speak in the public forum that you sponsored, and you’re allowing their content. You’re not allowing his content. Right. Nothing he was saying was obscene. He was holding a moment of silence, which the courts have said is speech. It’s not like being silent is not speech. When you say, I am going to have a moment of silence for this purpose. So you could make that constitutional argument here. Okay? I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about generally. If you’re a government official and you have this frustration, there’s somebody here who’s bugging you and you don’t like what they’re doing because they’re making you do things by the book. Don’t try to get around the book. The book’s there for a reason. It’s the officials who take the shortcuts and just say, just shut up and sit down. That’s what gets people into trouble. And that’s what the Mobs for Liberty were applauding. A person not giving this guy his due time. It’s kind of like the Tinker case from the Vietnam War. Famous, uh, first amendment speech. Student is wearing black armband in high school to protest the Vietnam War. Administration officials hate that because they’re war mongering hawks. So they discipline her some way. I believe it was a suspension to kick her out of school. And what did they cite? She was disrupting the school, so we just made her go away. Well, you can argue the facts of whether there was any disruption or not, right? I’m sure there were people on both sides and people p***** off and all that sort of stuff, but they took the quick approach of let’s just ban her because she’s participating in the speech we don’t like, rather than going through any sort of process. And the Supreme Court said, no, students don’t give up their rights at the school door. Students still can speak. The court held that it has to be a substantial disruption in order for a school to be able to do anything about it. And it was a minor disruption. The administration officials were minorly inconvenienced that they got some protests from people about this person wearing the black armband and they brought the hammer down on it. This board member of the library was minorly inconvenienced that this person was asserting their rights. Like, hey, you’re having a public forum. You’re a government entity. I get to speak and, uh, I’m not being allowed to speak. And she kicks them out. Now, to be fair, the cop who has to escort him out, if you take a look at the video, is hanging his head down and shaking it like, oh man, I’m so sorry, dude. And the speaker is like, he’s fine with it, but we have to keep in mind what these people are all about. Okay? So when you recite the facts, it’s crazy. Moms for Liberty, whom the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that keeps track of extremists and terrorist groups. SPLC has classified them as a far right extremist organization. So a far right extremist organization cites Hitler on their newsletter as they are forcing the school, the local, excuse me, library board to pull books from the shelves. All the reporters from the area were saying that the shelves were nearly empty in the teen section of the library and spend over $330,000 manually reviewing those books after citing Hitler and all of that protest a moment of silence for Holocaust victims by disrupting it and then cheer when man, who was conducting Moment of Silence, is kicked out of meeting. Those are the facts of the case. That’s what’s going on in this country. That’s why we care. These religious nut jobs are really seeking to change the very core nature of our country. All right, enough about that. Let’s move on to the next one. What else do I have? Okay, this one is disturbing. So it started out with this story. Former Christian missionary convicted of sexual abuse and incest after victim under the age of twelve contracts. Gonorrhea, that’s where I started with this story. But this rabbit hole goes pretty deep, so strap in. So the man’s name is Jordan D. Andrew Webb from, uh, Fort Dodge, Iowa. And what he was convicted of, So we have all the facts on the table here. He was found guilty by a jury trial of sexual abuse with a person under the age of twelve, child endangerment and incest. So that while they don’t say who the victim was, that all leads me to believe it was his daughter. Incest is somebody that you’re closely related to, right? But child endangerment is somebody that you’re responsible for. So either it’s his daughter or some close relative, depending on the incest laws in Iowa. Some close relative that he was put in charge of. Because you don’t get child endangerment without being responsible for the child, right? So that in and of itself is a horrible story. And we can have conversations let’s touch on that for just a moment. If this was just the story, it would be bad enough. And we can have conversations about what kind of God lets children get raped, right? What kind of God makes that physically possible? Because you get all of these Christians, all of these religious people, god is great, god is all loving, God cares, and all of this. Why does this happen if there is a real powerful, loving God? And, uh, you may remember one of my favorite moments in the history of the show, the Atheist Experience, where Tracy Harris is having a conversation with a caller about this topic, right? And she points out the difference between me and your God is I would make it impossible for anybody to rape a child. It would just be physically impossible. Like, I can’t fly, I can’t read minds, I can’t hurt people with my thoughts even if I want to. None of that is physically possible. We could have designed people in a way that it was physically impossible. Either you never have the urge or physically things don’t happen, so you can’t do it. I, as a god, would make that an effect of life. You can’t rape a child. Your God says, you go ahead and rape that child. I’m going to close the door. You rape that child, do whatever you want, but I’m going to be very cross with you afterwards and you better apologize for it or I’m going to not let you come into heaven. That’s the difference between them and the caller responds by saying, you’re assuming that that girl isn’t a sinner. At which point they hang up on the monster caller. Uh, and that’s a great example. My favorite example in the history of the show, possibly it’s one of their most famous clips.

Speaker C: Um.

Speaker A: The best example of how people who are that caller is probably a good person. They don’t go around raping people. Maybe they do, I don’t know, but they’re probably a good person. But because they’re so invested in their religion, it causes them to twist any sort of reality, to settle any sort of cognitive dissonance they may have. On one hand, I believe my God is loving and cares for people and wouldn’t just let innocent people suffer for no reason. On the other hand, I’ve got a parent raping a child and God is letting that happen. Well, the only way I can resolve that is to assume that the girl has a sinner and deserves what she’s getting. That’s where religion takes people when they really want, uh, to believe the premises, right. They have to twist the conclusion in order to accept the premise. So that’s a conversation we could have if this story was all that there was. The way the guy that got caught is girl gets diagnosed with Gonorrhea, he had Gonorrhea. Now, additionally, the reason it’s relevant to religion is because he is a missionary. He was sent by the Harvest Baptist Bible College and Church to St. Lucia as part of their Christ in the Caribbean project from 2019 through 2022. Now, this year, I’m not sure, actually. Let’s see. He was arrested in April 22. Okay, so when he comes back, let’s put it together. Um, I don’t have to spell it out for you. He goes to the Caribbean as a missionary, has sex with prostitutes or whomever, and contracts gonorrhea, comes home, has sex with his daughter, twelve year old daughter, and only gets caught because the daughter contracts gonorrhea, goes to the doctor, gets diagnosed, and the doctor’s like a twelve year old with Gonorrhea. We know what’s going on here. A search warrant was executed on the church in addition to his residence, I believe. I know it was at the church. I assume they, uh, executed a warrant at his residence. He was arrested and was convicted, and faces up to 32 years in prison. So the second conversation regarding why we care, right? The reason we care for this particular story, for this particular aspect, is in this country especially, people put an unjustified amount of trust into people in religious positions, in religious organizations. Just look at the Catholic Church’s history. Everybody assumes it’s only the Catholic Church that does this. No, it happens everywhere. You get bad people. Bad people will do bad things. Good people will do good things. It takes religion to make a good person do a really evil thing, right? To, uh, commit atrocities. Here we’ve got a bad person doing a bad thing. They were caught and thankfully arrested. And this person, hopefully the child, will get lots of therapy and be able to get over with this, um, this person. I hope they go to prison for a long time. So that would be the end of the story. We could say, look, why does God let bad, horrible things happen to innocent children? And, uh, being religious shouldn’t make you extra trustworthy. People should be very skeptical. Just because you’re a Christian missionary, you work for a church, whatever, doesn’t mean you deserve any extra trust at all. 1 may even argue it means you should get a little less. I’m not going to say that, but I mean, given the stats, maybe that’s what’s going on here. So that’s the first part of this story. I’m going to jump to the second part of the story, and then we’ll make the connection. So another story coming out of the same city, fort Dodge, Iowa, dates back to February 27, 2009. The title of this story is anchor Charter Training Center. A children’s center is unlicensed in Iowa. That’s the the headline of the story. There’s news stories dating to this period about this school. Anchor Charter Training Center at this particular story reports that, um, it’s had 24 runaway juveniles, that it cares for a child endangerment charge that involved a paddling incident and one case of criminal mischief over the years. But the headline at this time, 2009, was, there is a 16 year old sex offender living at this center. And it’s an unlicensed center. It doesn’t have a license. They’ve got 35 kids here, one of which is a sex offender, and they have a history of problems. Okay, that’s the story from 2009. Guess who owns and operates that center? A church. That is correct. But it’s also the same church that employed the missionary that raped his child. Harvest Baptist Church of Fort Dodge. Okay. That’s how I found out about them. Like, I started researching them and, oh, they’ve got a history of criminal sexual conduct going on in their facilities dating back to 2009. But the story doesn’t end there. Back in 2017, the state was trying to tighten up on unlicensed facilities like this. And there is a senator, Senator Tim Crayonbrink, back in 2017 proposed to make the Anchor Charter Training Center, operated by Harvest Baptist Church, exempt from any of these new requirements, school accreditation requirements. They deserve to stay open and serve these children. He said, I will not change my mind on this. What would we do with them if they’re not in this facility? The kids are safe, they are well fed, everything is fine. These are all exact quotes that he’s saying. There’s only one path left, and it’s to make an exemption for the school. So now we’re getting a better picture of what’s going on here. Uh, at least this church, and probably many others like it in Fort Dodge, has a history of flying under the radar, cutting corners, doing things that they’re not licensed to do, employing sexual offenders, hosting sexual offenders. They have entered into settlements with parents who have stayed at this place. And they have politicians trying to create exemptions so that they don’t have to be inspected by the state. This is why we care. We’ve got religious organizations abusing children and politicians trying to help them cover it up. It started with just this one story. One missionary is, uh, convicted of raping his kid. And it leads to a history of holy crap, look at what’s been going on in this one town with this one church. This is why we care. They fly under the radar. You would not know about this. Like, when I read the story about the rapist, I had no idea that any of this history happened for this art, uh, Anchor Charter Training Center, the Harvest Baptist Church. I had to Google it, do research, cross reference stuff. Put two and two together. That’s crappy reporting that should have been front and center. Hey, they just got convicted of this guy doing this to his kid after they sent him out to the Caribbean. By the way, did you know that? Although there’s this whole history of this church doing stuff like this in this community, this is why reporters are important. This is why reporters who live in your community and remember the history know to, oh, yeah, they’ve had a problem that’s ongoing. Let’s talk about that in the story. They don’t talk about it in the story that was sent to me. They just talk about the rapists. So we cannot defer to religious organizations and give them any sort of trust whatsoever. Just because you’re a Christian, just because you’re a church, just because you say you serve children, doesn’t mean that we should defer to you, that we should give you any sort of trust in our society. In fact, it may mean that you deserve a little less. So this is a very, very good example of one little story that can grow to make you realize this stuff is happening everywhere, and it’s exhausting to report on it. Exhausting. All right, next story. You may have heard of the wonderfully alliterative name Tommy Tuberville. Are you familiar with Tommy tuberville? He is the Republican senator from Alabama. So that should set off red flags if you don’t know who he is. He is also an absolute moron. He may be, uh, the dumbest senator in the Senate. He’s out dumbed by, like, Marjorie Taylor Green and Bobert in the House, but in the Senate, he is up there as far as just being a blathering idiot. He was in the news this week. He doubled down on previous comments about white nationalism and how white nationalists are not racists. This is a United States senator saying that, um, that’s just some people’s opinion, was his quote. I think the original quote he, uh, had was he was on an local Alabama radio station. This is always how these people get called out. They get home, they’re in their comfortable racist south, and they go on an Alabama talk show on a radio, and he asks and he was asked whether he believes white nationalists should be allowed in the military and because they’re racists. Right. Should we have white nationalists in the military? And he said, quote, I call those people Americans. It’s a political answer. It’s non responsive. Of course, he didn’t say yes or no. The implication is yes, but that’s not what he said. Chuck Schumer immediately responded because, uh, tuberville has put a hold on military nominations. He’s gumming up the works as far as letting nominees get approved by the Senate for high ranking military positions. So Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, quote, last night, given another chance to clear the air, he suggested that, no, white nationalists aren’t inherently racist, that, yes, white nationalism is American and that the definition of white nationalism is a matter of opinion. Schumer said, It’s hard to believe that the senator from Alabama has to be corrected. Again, the senator from Alabama is wrong, wrong, wrong. The definition of white nationalism is not a matter of opinion. Now, we could quibble at the edges about that because all definitions are a matter of opinion. But what matters is when we talk about white nationalism and what everybody means by it is racist, N*** type people that want to take over the United States and make it favor whites in its policies and laws. And Tuberville, who recognizes that a vast majority of his voters are white nationalists, is trying to say, well, no, it doesn’t mean you’re racist, right? It just means you want to favor white people. Again, denying reality, trying to trying to gaslight his constituencies or gaslight his listeners into thinking that it’s not so bad. It’s just like Trump saying there’s good people on both sides regarding the Charloteville N*** march and killing. It’s disappointing, but again, falls into this category of why we care. This man is a Christian nationalist. Don’t be mistaken by the discussion about white nationalism. It’s very closely tied. So he is willing to be the face of it and willing to try to justify it, soften it, and lie to people about what it is in order to trick people into being okay with some sort of part of the concept. So, again, another entry in, uh, our Why We Care. I wouldn’t care about religion if these religious zealots weren’t out there trying to turn our country into a racist N*** stronghold. And speaking of Nazis, Josh Holly was in the news on the 4 July when he tweeted the following quote patrick Henry, as in he’s quoting Patrick Henry. It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faith have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here. Close quote. So Holly on the 4 July tweets out a quote from Patrick Henry making it very clear that this great nation was, quote, founded by Christians on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Close quote. So if I’m talking about it, you know that it’s not true, right? Right. It’s not true. Patrick Henry never said that. That’s always bad enough when somebody does this. We just had a story earlier where somebody was quoting Adolf Hitler, but attributed Adolf Hitler and got the quote right. So white nationalists can quote people correctly. Josh Holly can’t, apparently, but it gets worse because the quote actually comes from the Virginian, a white nationalist publication, and the quote was, uh, published in 1956. So, yeah, Josh Holly quoting white nationalist propaganda, that is false. So he published a fake fact. We’re a Christian nation. If you’ve listened to my previous episodes. You know, that’s just demonstrably not true. Which is why they have to come up with all this bullshit, these fake quotes. So a fake fact and a faked quote from a white nationalist rag. That’s what he did. And of course the internet jumped all over him. My favorite response was a tweet that says Patrick Henry quote if you put fake quotes in my mouth after I die, I’m going to come back as a ghost and poltergeist the s*** out of you. At Josh Holly. To top it all off, he’s got a degree in history, so he knows what he’s doing. So I know what you’re thinking. He’s going to just blame it on a staffer and move on. That’s not what he did. He doubled down. He followed up the tweet with a second tweet that said quote, I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American founding. Quote that’s his response. That’s a senator’s response. This is where politics is in the United States. That rather than be like, oh, truth matters, I apologize. I didn’t mean to lie to you on two points. I will fix this. I will delete the tweet. I will post an actual quote by Patrick Henry and I still love America and uh, only in America can we make these mistakes without fearing, uh, uh, retribution from the government, right? All sorts of different great Patriotic 4 July, Maya Culpas you could make no, he goes into the uh, point of the entire GOP organization right now, which is you mad bro. That’s all they care about. I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American founding. This is the man who gave the fist pump salute to the January 6, uh, insurrectionists, the religious rioters, and then ran from them as they were invading his office space, right? This is the man and he’s sitting here saying like major triggered and things like that. Again, what a disconnect and what a liar. I wouldn’t care about religion. Again, speaking with this theme of this episode, why do I care? Because there’s people like Josh Holly who have a huge microphone out there who are lying their constituents. So that when they hear this, they’re like, oh yeah, it is a Christian nation. And then they go and they listen to their preacher and the preacher tells them it’s a Christian nation. You heard my episode if you’ve listened to it, about the preacher, Kenneth Copeland, who did a whole like in two or three minutes of talking he had 28 different errors, who then lies and tells him it’s a Christian nation with a bunch of false facts. And then on Kenneth Copeland’s network, we’ve got a guy who’s saying we’ve always been a Christian nation. And the reason the Islam is so successful and we aren’t right now is because we don’t have people passionate enough to strap bombs to our chest. I hope you see the pattern. All the statements I just said are all true. We’ve got all these Christian nationalists telling the lie that this is a Christian nation that was founded on Christian principles, um, and that the founding fathers all were devout Christians and wanted this to be a Christian nation, when none of that could be further from the truth. And they know what they’re doing. It’s all one big machine. Let’s all sing the same message. Let’s all chant the same mantra. And if we say it loud enough and long enough, if you repeat the lie long enough, people will start to believe you. So this is why we care. We’ve got to push back against stuff like this next story is out of Kansas City, Missouri. The, uh, headline is missouri public schools will be allowed to teach electives on the Bible under New Law. So it was actually a bipartisan bill that got signed into law by their Republican governor, Mike Parson. When was this signed? In the week of the 7th, so fairly recently, about a week ago. It goes into effect this coming year. And the Bible will be taught in school as an elective in a social studies class. The names of the courses that are listed as examples, but not limited, uh, to these is Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament of the Bible, and quote new Testament of the Bible. So, basically, old Testament. New Testament. We’re going to study the Bible in public schools. I’m actually not against things like comparative religion classes. Like, if you were to have a class in a public school, that was comparative religion, let’s study the Quran, the Old Testament, the New Testament. Throw in some other stuff in there. As far as what major religions the, the district once represented, I think that’s very educational and it opens people’s eyes. The more that you read the bible and other scriptures, the more you realize they’re all the same and that they all can’t prove each other wrong, and none of them are true. The more you study the Bible, if you’re actually studying the Bible, the more you’re convinced it’s not true. The problem comes in is when you limit your courses that you’re offering to one religion. These courses are only about the Christian Bible. They’re not offering a, uh, comparative religion. They’re not saying that they’re going to study it under a particular view, like study it as literature versus study it as historical fact versus study it as religious doctrine. I haven’t seen the guidance. I don’t think there is any guidance. Uh, so this is singling out one religion to be favored over others. They’re going to have arguments about that. They’re going to have arguments about the nature of the curriculum, things like that. It’s definitely concerning. It’s more example of what we are seeing. If the GOP takes over local government around the country and forcing religion back into schools, we should not just offer this now, one could argue, like, hey, all of our students are Christian. And it’s kind of like when you choose which foreign language to offer at your high school. We don’t offer, uh, the traditional Native American languages at our high school because nobody in our community wants to learn how to speak that. They all want to learn how to speak, uh, French and Spanish. So that’s what we offer. My local school district has a lot of Korean students, and they want to study Korean, or they want an easy A, just like I take English for an easy A. So we offer Korean and English in my school district, whatever it may be. And they could make that argument. Right? When it comes to religion, that’s a special decision, right? It’s not just like picking French versus German. It’s picking one religion over another. And when the First Amendment gets involved, we have some establishment clause problems. This current court may not see a problem with this. I haven’t done a lot of research on the history of this. Uh, like, how often has this been tested by federal courts? I’d love to go do that. I just want to bring it up as another example of why we care. For those of you who keep saying, why do you atheists care so much? This because it’s being shoved down people’s throat. And if you’re a student in this school and you elect not to take this class, you are now different. You are now the person who chooses not to do this. If you are a student who does take the class, but you are an atheist and you are seeking to enter into genuine discussion, you may be surprised when the teacher starts preaching this as true, and you are saying, actually, there’s no justification for that, and you start getting a failing grade. If you are taking this as an atheist, and you notice, hey, you are only discussing the good parts. You know, when you go and you take, ah, a Bible study at a church, it’s always funny how they start with the good stuff, the gospel, little baby Jesus being born, little baby Jesus dying for our sins and saving us. Uh, all of that stuff. They don’t ever get into the nasty stuff like, hey, God ordering you to go and kill everybody in that city and take the children and take the infants and bash them upon the rocks, because that’s what m makes God’s happy. The smell of burning flesh in God’s nostrils is what really gets them off. All of that stuff that’s never, strangely enough, never taught. So if you’re an atheist or a secular student or someone who’s Islamic, let’s say, right, you’re a Muslim in this class, and you’re asking these questions about, why aren’t we studying this other stuff? The teacher may be prejudiced against you. It opens up a big can of worms. So it’s best to stay out. If you’re going to do it, do it as a comparative studies, right? Do it as something where you are studying it as literature. Compare the histories, all sorts of stuff you can do. So it’s a tough call for me on this particular issue without doing more research. It definitely raises a ton of concerns, and it is why we care. Next story. This is a video of an interview a reporter did in Pickens, South Carolina. Yet another South Carolina story during a Trump rally. They’re talking to fans of Trump in line at a Trump rally. So listen to this. What should President Trump do on day one when he gets back in?

Speaker C: Lock him up.

Speaker A: Lock him up.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: The deep state. Take it down.

Speaker C: Take them to train station.

Speaker A: Take him to train station. I didn’t say that. Take him to the train station. Trump woman says, what should Trump do on day one? They should take the deep state. They should take the Democrats to the train station. And the reporter, if you could call him that, repeats that so the audience can hear it, and then says, I didn’t say that, with a smile on his face. While everybody around, this woman is smiling. Shoulders are chuckling, jumping up and down as they chuckle. This is a reference to, of course, the Holocaust. Let’s take our political opponents, put them on a train, and take them to gas chambers and kill them all. This is what is going out as news. This is what these people think is a good idea to report to the rest of the country. That’s already in a very tense sort of mental situation. Again, I can’t say for sure that these are all Christian nationalists, but looking at the crowd, they are all white. They’re all in South Carolina. They’re all supporting Trump. They’re wearing the Lions Not Sheep T shirts that you may have seen going around. And they’re telling people that we should take our political point, uh, and put them in the gas chamber. It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it in the country. These people need to be stopped. This news service, whatever it was, RSBN. I don’t even know that one. It seems like a very OAN type of thing. Should be ashamed of themselves. I know that they aren’t. I know that this is what they know they make money off of, is putting controversial people on camera. But the fact that people feel comfortable saying this makes me very, very aware of my naivete and my innocence back. Pre. Trump. Pre. Obama when I used to have these conversations, late night conversations at school, like, I just don’t understand how the N*** movement took over Germany. I know they were down on their luck and they lost the first war and all that stuff. But how do you jump from that to, like, we should just kill millions of people? And now I get it. I mean, I get it. We are living in that sort of about to have crystal knocked type of moment in our country where the Christian nationalists are using Trump as their leader to help them deny reality and shift blame onto any scapegoat that they can possibly come up with. And right now, it’s atheists, it’s Biden, it’s the deep state, whatever that means. Ignoring the fact that he had four years, uh, Trump had already had four years to do anything, to do absolutely anything to help his voters, and did nothing. The one major piece of legislation that he passed during the two year period where he had the House, the Senate, and the White House for two years, what did he get done? He passed a trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy. And the people in this line, let me tell you, are not wealthy. These are blue collar workers spending their time, their valuable time off of work, showing up at a Trump rally and telling people that we need to bust their political opponents off to gas chambers. What is wrong with you people? This is insane. This is why we care. These people don’t believe this. If they don’t have pastors telling them that we’re a Christian nation, if we don’t have Trump holding up the Bible upside down and pretending to be one of them, right? They’re excusing the p**** grabber in chief. These are not what I was raised to believe were good, moral people, which is what they think of themselves as. They are potential gang murderers. They are willing participants in a, uh, genocide. If her particular statement, which is chuckled at sheepishly and with a wink today, becomes a slightly more serious proposal tomorrow. Because we realize, of course, that all of our political opponents are pedophiles. And that’s our excuse to, of course, send them to the gas chamber, which, if you’ve been listening to this show, you realize the vast majority, if not all, of the pedophiles we’re catching are all conservatives, they’re church members, they’re Boy Scout leaders. All of those people tend to be the ones that are getting arrested, not the politicians that these people want to point at. So this right here, these people in the street that have been affected by all of these opinions floating around in the ether, affecting their perception of reality, this is why we care. We don’t get people proposing mass execution of political opponents without religion in the mix. We just don’t get it. We do get it today, because that religion is being weaponized against rational thought. Speaking of which, here’s a great example of that.

Speaker E: Today, I’m, um, announcing a new plan to protect the integrity of, uh, our immigration system. Federal law prohibits the entry of communists and totalitarians into the United States. But my question is, what do we do with the ones that are already here, that grew up in? I think we have to pass a new law for them.

Speaker A: So this is Trump, uh, saying that if he’s elected president, he’s going to keep the Communists and, uh, totalitarians out and that we probably need a new law for those people who grew up here and have communist leanings right, and I guess totalitarian leanings that we need a new law to handle them, too. He, uh, goes on with some details.

Speaker E: Using federal law in section 212 F of the Immigration and Nationality Act, I will order my government to deny entry to all Communists and all Marxists.

Speaker A: All right. He’s going to use section 212 F of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Ina What does that actually say? Let’s read it. This is, uh, section 1182 of title eight of the Federal Code. Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may, by proclamation and for such period as he shall deem necessary suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. So this is broad power that has been delegated from Congress to the executive to say, hey, if you’re finding a particular alien, a particular person who’s not of the United States or a class of aliens, some group that has the same characteristic. Everybody who is carrying a weapon, everybody who is a member of a terrorist group, things like that. If you find that admission into the United States they used to say entry. Now they say admission is the word use. If admission to the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, you can basically forbid them. And this is the section that he tried to rely upon back when he did the Muslim ban, as it was known. He tried to disguise it as well. We’re just banning entry from certain countries, but all of those countries were of, um, Muslim origin. Here he’s being much more explicit. I am going to issue an order that’s saying anybody who’s a Communist can’t come into the country. Obviously, no definitions. He’s not big on any sort of details on anything or actually doing anything, but that’s what he says. He’s going to go further, though, and describe why we don’t want these people in the country. So let’s listen in.

Speaker E: Those who come to and join our country must love our country. We want them to love our country. We don’t want them when they want to destroy our country. Welcome to America. We want to destroy your country. Thank you very much. So we’re going to keep foreign, Christian hating communists, marxists, and socialists out of America. We’re keeping them out of America.

Speaker A: So we’re going to keep foreign, Christian hating communists, marxists, and socialists out of the country. Christian hating. Now we are out in the open, right? This is Christian nationalism. If you’re not Christian, you can’t come to this country. I’m going to couch it as, uh, he noticed how he added socialism. At first, it was totalitarians and Communists, and then it was Communists and Marxists and socialists and Christian hating people that are of that type. So this is the rhetoric that we hear from Christian nationalists that sounds very similar to prewar Europe, right? Let’s keep the Other. As Orson Scott Card described it in Ender’s Game and in the series of Ender’s books the Varelsa, the Other, the Alien. Let’s keep the alien type of person literally and figuratively, away from me. And here it’s focused on religion. Would this pass constitutional muster? Right? Uh, absolutely not. If he came in and said, anybody who’s not Christian that doesn’t like Christianity is a threat, would be detrimental to the interests of the United States of admitting them. That finding could be questioned, and I think the court would jump in and say, no, this is a violation of the First Amendment. Now, one makes all these sorts of arguments as saying, well, they’re not citizens. They have no right to be in here. But you would find test cases where people who have some sort of interest vested in them. As soon as you show up on the shores, the Constitution gives you certain rights. Right. As soon as you are physically here, we would find people who made it to America, and now they’re being denied admission, um, based merely on their religious views. The fact that they have religious views that the President doesn’t like, I can’t imagine the Court would go along with that. Well, actually, I could imagine this Court going along with that, but I don’t think they would. I’d love to love to get a constitutional scholar in here to break that down for me. I did a little bit of research, and the Supreme Court has only addressed this particular section once in its history. And that was back in 90. What, 90 something? Let me see. 92 no, 93. 93. It was sale. Or sale, maybe. Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc. And that was an executive order by Bush SR. Ordering the suspension of admission of any aliens coming to the United States by boat without proper paperwork. That was the class that he was forbidding, and the Court was fine with that. There was a previous, uh, issue under the 11th Circuit in 92 on a Reagan order that was very similar. Boat, uh, traveling immigrants without proper paperwork were banned. And again, they were fine. And there’s a couple of histories dating back to the 1950s, uh, about similar statutes. This is relatively new, this particular section, but there’s nothing in here where the President says, I think that admitting people that don’t like Christians to the country, uh, is detrimental to the interests of the United States under this section. Therefore, I’m forbidding it. That does not seem to hold muster. It’s not an area, immigration area is a little hazy for me, to be honest, because you do have that question mark of which rights apply. I could go and dive in, I’m sure, and maybe we’ll do an episode on that. Better yet, to talk to an expert and find out at what point, like when your foot touches if you step off of a dinghy and your foot touches land. Because this has been a case on immigration coming from Cuba, where people the decision literally has been is part of their body touching dry land. Right. What rights are now attached to you? Because some do. Because the Constitution doesn’t say it only applies to citizens. It applies to anybody who is physically in the United States. Just because you’re not a citizen doesn’t mean I can do whatever I want to you and the Constitution doesn’t apply. But the court has agreed that there’s some things that you some things that you’re allowed to do regarding regulating immigration, even if the person’s here where you don’t have the right, uh, that a citizen would have. I would love to get into a conversation. So if anybody’s interested in coming on and talking about that particular issue, because it is going to be a continuing issue from the GOP for the next two decades, I’m sure, trying to keep non Christians out of the country because this is a Christian nation, please give me a ring. I would love to interview you. I’m looking at you, Ryan Jane, of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. If you’re listening. What is FFRF’s take on a proposed ban on, quote, Christian haters entering the country? Um, I’m pretty sure I know what your position is, but I’d love to chat with you about it. Let me know. Next up, we’ll talk very briefly about the submarine incident you may have heard of. I think the entire world heard about this. The Titan sub that was pulverized, crushed instantly, as it was, um, trying to make it down to the Titanic. I cite this not as a religious issue, but as a repeated mantra on this show of, uh, if you believe things based on insufficient evidence, you can hurt yourself or others. By all accounts, the guy that was running that company was both a sort of scientific engineering guy, but also a maverick. And it sounds like, uh, in reading everything and listening to his interviews, he believed things about his own capability that were not justified based on the evidence. Especially the evidence of other experts coming in and saying, hey, using carbon fiber hole attached to a metal, uh, end caps. That’s a bad design. It’s going to wear out over time. And sure enough, he killed four other people. Thankfully. It sounds like it was instantaneous. Just, you are first. The quote I heard was, you are biology, and one millisecond later, you’re just physics. You’re just particles floating in the water. So, yeah, small and large, you. Shouldn’t go around just believing you’re going to be safe and that everything’s just going to be okay because, hey, it’s you or hey, this guy is a, uh, CEO. He must know something. Get the evidence first. Next we’re going to and finally we’re going to end on a, uh, funny story, somewhat funny story. It’s still a little weird and disturbing, but the headline was as follows. This was an NPR story. A fishing line encircles Manhattan protecting sanctity of Sabbath. What’s that about, you might wonder. Well, it turns out that for observant Jews, I don’t know how orthodox you need to be in order to believe this particular rule. Ah, it’s a mystery to me as to which rules people choose to apply and don’t apply. But, um, there is a rule that says you are not allowed to leave your home carrying anything on the Sabbath, the day of rest. Right. No carrying on the Sabbath. And according to the laws, nothing can be carried from the domestic zone into the public zone on the day of rest. Saturday. That means no carrying house keys, no wallets. If you’ve got a kid, you can’t push a baby stroller. So all of that would not be allowed. You must stay in your home shelter in place on Saturdays, unless you are walking inside of this enclosure, this symbolic enclosure, as far as I can tell, called an aruv, eru v. Aruv. Now I’m relying on this NPR article. It says that the aruv was first established about 2000 years ago to allow Jews to more realistically follow the laws of the Sabbath rest, particularly the one of no carrying. Right. I find that interesting because if it’s almost 2000 years ago, that means it’s long after the Torah was written. So it sounds to me like somebody’s like, you know, we’re getting pretty sophisticated here. Cities are busy. Uh, why don’t we invent an excuse to not have to follow one of the rules, right. So if nothing can be carried unless you’re inside of an aruv and you want to go about Manhattan, guess what? You surround all of Manhattan in an aruv. This symbolically extends the domestic zone into the public zone is what is the theory. So they literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars stringing a fishing line around most of Manhattan. I’ll put a map up on my site of where it goes, but they have an interactive Google map. I’ll try to find that for you to show you how big it is. But it goes all the way down to Lower Manhattan, the top of Lower Manhattan, all the way up to Harlem. It includes all of Central Park, Washington Square, Midtown most of midtown, except for H***’s Kitchen. I find that interesting. There’s a lot of space, uh, that’s covered by it. So they run a fishing line and every Thursday I think it is, yes. Every Thursday before dawn, a rabbi drives the perimeter, checking to see if wind or fallen branches or anything has broken the line. And there are usually a few breaks. So a construction company is called, and the rabbi gets in a cherry picker with fishing line in hand and repairs the aruv. Okay, that’s $125 to $150,000 a year this community pays to string a piece of fishing wire around Manhattan. I kid you not. So I’m not saying that this is why we care, but if you’re willing to spend $150,000 a year for your magical barrier to get out of following a rule in your book, how important is that book, and how realistic are those rules? I don’t know. You tell me. Am I being, uh, a little too picky on this one? I think it’s a perfect example of how people know deep down inside that most of this stuff is just BS. And when it starts to really interfere with what they want to do because they know it’s the right thing or what they need to do, they find ways to not follow the rules. You see lots of Christians with tattoos. Let’s just put it that way. All right, so I’ve gone on long enough. This is my first episode back. I appreciate your time. Uh, next episode, I’m going to be doing I think I’m going to do a quick take. There was a story that came in about Yuri Geller, uh, this week that I was going to do here, but I know I’m going to talk longer about it than anything else. So I’m gonna probably do a quick take on that. And then we’re gonna get back to my faith healing series. We’re gonna do a deep dive on the history of Christian science in America. So I hope you join me for that. Thank you for listening, and remember to have a fun time all the time. I’ll see you next time.

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Speaker C: Sauce. M.