Go Fact Yourself: "Skeptics" Aren't Immune to Fake News

Speaker 1: Here we go. Stand by. Three, two, one. Speaker 2: The thinking atheist. It's not a person. It's a symbol. Speaker 3: An idea. Speaker 1: The population of atheists in this country is going through the roof. Speaker 2: Rejecting faith. Pursuing knowledge. challenging the sacred if i tell the truth it's because i tell the truth not because i put my hand on a book and made a wish and working together for a more rational.

Speaker 1: World take the risk of thinking for yourself much more happiness truth beauty and wisdom will come to you. Speaker 2: That way assume nothing question everything and start thinking this is the thinking atheist podcast Hosted by Seth Andrews.

Speaker 1: I was going to give this speech at the upcoming Rocket City Reason events in Huntsville late October, but... A lot of it is political. And with the climate changing so quickly, I feel like I just need to throw it out there ASAP. So I have another speech that I am releasing. And of all the ones I've given, this may be the most polarizing. It is about skeptics

not being skeptical. And I'm pointing the finger at myself as much as anybody else. I have shared wrong stuff, fake stuff. I have been misled. I have been a victim of my own biases. I have been unskeptical when I should have done my due diligence.

Speaker 2: And. Speaker 1: It sounds like a downer, but it's actually, I think, an interesting exploration into why we lean into certain things, whether it's a meme or article, a claim, a news report, etc. And how do we prevent it? How do we keep ourselves above it all? The presentation runs a solid hour.

The video of it is linked in the description box. For this broadcast, I am not going to take any commercial breaks. I want to. I need to for revenue purposes, but it just feels wrong to break the thing up into pieces. So I'm going to play the whole damn thing uninterrupted. If you want to support me to compensate, you can become a patron. at patreon.com slash sethandrews or

donate at thethinkingatheist.com. The speech was given at the Blue Water Atheist Humanist Conference in Sarnia, Ontario on the 22nd of August. It is titled, Go Fact Yourself. Skeptics aren't immune to fake news. So, have you seen this? Floating

around the internet, Donald Trump, People Magazine, 1998, in an interview where he was talking about becoming a politician in the U.S., and he said, if I was to run, I would run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News.

I could lie, and they'd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific. How do you feel about that quote? This makes you crazy, doesn't it? How strongly does it validate our indignation about this horrible man?

And now I think about all the people I want to show it to, all the mega Republican people in my circle, I just want to show them. I'm going to come back to this in just a second. Forrest Balke was talking about math. I want to talk about the Highlanders. A terrific 1986 movie with Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery,

Clancy Brown. Now, the gist of the film, if you're one of the three who haven't seen it, which is a crime. A few select people are born immortal. And their destiny is to travel through time. assuming various identities to try to sneak through the cultures. They battle other immortals, beheading the only way to dispatch the other until only

one remains. When the last foe is finally defeated, as there can be only one, the Highlander gets the prize. It is the combined power of all the immortals. And Connor McLeod's own words at the end of the film, I feel everything, I know everything, I am everything. Across

religious and political lines, I have met a lot of arguers who remind me of the Highlander. Now, they lack the humility of Connor McLeod. He was kind of an accidental hero in his story. But online or face-to-face, they kind of walked the earth with the swagger of the immortal, someone who has played the game and leveled up. They

got the answer to one question right. Is there any evidence for any God anywhere? And now they are superior thinkers and probably better people. Anybody remember this from, I think it was over 10 years ago, there was A group of people, Daniel Dennett was among them, that wanted to call atheists the brights. People who don't believe in

the supernatural, we want to promote thinking, right? A bright person. Our worldview is naturalistic. Without the supernatural and the mystical, we would be the brights. I always hated this idea.

I mean, I like the idea of promoting thinking and rooting our feet on terra firma, but I mean, if the implication is we are a bright, what is everybody else? Dim. A lot of atheists speak about the religious in this way.

And then they go online and they post comments and podcast links and Clips and quotes and memes that are so jaw-droppingly wrong and unhelpful, I find myself yelling at the monitor in my studio. And that's what I want to talk about today. I have long second guessed even doing this presentation. I'm not as worried about the audience here.

But I know when a version of this talk eventually goes out to YouTube, the audience is going to split like the atom and boom. It's going to be Thunderdome out there. They can be very strong opinions for and against.

I will be accused of tone policing, addressing somebody's tone instead of the argument they're making. How dare I try to criticize or give comments or commentary on how someone else expresses a position? Well, I'd like to think 17 years at a Point position in the movement has given me some equity here, but the truth is all of

us should have the equity. Can we be wrong, and even if we're right, can we frame our correct ideas in a wrong or lousy way? This is a popular acronym, a T-shirt, and it's a poster and some other stuff. Atheist, a thoughtful, honest, ethical, intelligent, skeptical thinker. Oh, I wish

this was always true. Is that the definition of atheism, everybody? No? No? Atheism? A lack of belief or a strong disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods. Has anybody in this room ever met an atheist that wasn't thoughtful or

honest or ethical, intelligent, skeptical, thinking? I have met some atheists in my life. I'm telling you, they are so dense that light bends around them. They're atheists, but they are as dull as a sack of sponges. And I think, come on. And how smug is the messaging anyway? We're

back to the brights. We are the ones who are thoughtful and Honest and illuminated. They are dim. Here's another definition of atheism conjured out of thin air. This crossed my path a while back. Atheism isn't a religion. It's a personal relationship with reality. Now, I like the phrase, we should all pursue a personal relationship with reality. It's in one of my bios. I used to have a t-shirt.

I don't know if we still have it on the store, but I like that. But that's not the definition of atheism, nor do atheists always have a personal relationship with reality. I have met flat earth atheists. I have met anti-vax atheists.

I have met racist, sexist atheists. I have met 9-11 truther atheists, moon landing denier atheists. Atheism is not an inoculation against irrational or wrong beliefs. Hell, it doesn't even address people who came to atheism for irrational reasons. All the aliens have told me there is no God. That person's an atheist. Here's another one I saw recently on

one of the forums. I suffer from that disorder where I speak the truth and others get offended. I can't even read the watermark back there. Maybe you've got better eyes than I do, but okay, great. Truth speaker, you have blessed the enlightened and offended the unwashed. Aren't we lucky to have you in the conversation? You are indeed impressive.

I can't figure out where this one came from. Want peace? Stop being religious. Anyone think that if religion disappeared tomorrow, we would become immediately a peaceful species? I remember Christopher Hitchens once said, I'm absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion and organized religion.

Absolutely convinced on it. Perhaps that meme was trying to be a riff on this. One of the limitations of the new atheist and Christopher Hitchens' work changed my life. And I still actually watch and listen to his speeches. Even all these years after his death, he truly inspired me to find my own voice. but the use of the word religion is reductive here. He was saying the planet's main source of hatred was religion, specifically organized religion.

That may be true, but religions are just one subset of a larger cause of so much of the conflict between us, and that, of course, is tribalism. We have always believed segregated ourselves into tribes, religious tribes, racial tribes, gender tribes, national, regional, local tribes, cultural tribes, identity groups

that privilege themselves and outgroup everybody else. Religions are usually tribal, usually, but tribalism is not limited to religion. Does anybody honestly think a planet of 8 billion people would not continue to find plenty of excuses to hate and murder each other that have nothing to do with religion? Wipe all of the religions off of planet Earth and wait five minutes.

Primates are going to do what primates do. And the meme, of course, doesn't even define religion. What about non-dogmatic, moderate, even peaceful religion? like Jainism. They have supernatural beliefs, but they preach nonviolence to all living things. What about non-theistic and even secular religions? I'm thinking about the Satanic Temple.

They are a religion. What about Christians who have embraced an egalitarian, humanistic evolution of Christianity? The meme is just lazy and reductive and wrong. I screenshotted this one. I saw this a couple of months ago. Some days are peaceful because the most evil people are at church. I

don't even know where to begin with this. What church goers look like after you become conscious... This is how they see anybody who darkens the door of a church and sits in a pew or a seat and sings worship songs and listens to sermons and enjoys the community of church and believes in a God. They're all clowns in clown costumes, dehumanizing to the extreme. Here's a meme that says you don't really love your God. You're scared

of him. Who wants to tackle this one, right? Many people experience a positive sensation when they think of their deities Doesn't make God real, doesn't make God arguments valid, but it's a reality that these people are not slaves to terror. And anyway, your God is so open-ended, it's ridiculous.

What if I thought Mother Nature was divine? I feel warmth and comfort in the rays of the sun and hearing the swaying of the trees. You get it, right? This one makes me crazy. And people continue to share it on atheist forums, Facebook, etc. If money is the root of all evil, why do they ask for it

at church? What's wrong with it? It's the love of money. If you actually go to the scripture and you quote it correctly out of 1 Timothy 6, for the love... of money is the root of all evil. How hard would it have been to fact check that one before sharing? Oh,

how cute. Praise Jesus. Oh, no. It's brainless. Here is a pastor or priest removing the brain from a congregant as they walk into the door of a church. Welcome.

You won't be needing this. I will take your Beyond the jaw-droppingly wrong-headed and offensive claim that churchgoers have empty skulls, we have made the assertion that all of the world's clergy are working together to conduct a mass lobotomy. Atheists aren't trying to take away your religion. We're trying to give you back your sanity. Here is a similar take.

Someone says, I pray to God every day, and we reply, it's cool that you're so open with your mental illness. So unfair and untrue in regard to religious people. And it makes necessary discussions about true mental illness so much harder.

I was not mentally ill when I was a 30-year Christian. I had a bad idea. My IQ didn't change on either side of the border. I wish people would stop with this stuff. And the next one's a big one.

In MAGA America, with Christianity, the Christian Nationalists, the invocations of God and country, the rewriting of our history, the fictional stories of our founding fathers, etc., There's been a big discussion about whether or not even the most casual Christians, by calling themselves Christians, are in league with the hardliners.

They are enablers. They're like the silent Germans during the Second World War, just as guilty because the Nazis were operating right next to them, and they cannot claim ignorance. So here's the guilt by association maneuver I made this chart.

So If you're a Christian, you are adjacent to Christian nationalists, white Christian nationalism. They're full of bigots and racists. They fuel domestic terrorism in the United States. They are Nazis. Therefore, you might as well be a Nazi. Except that many of our greatest humanist allies today are Christians. Amanda Tyler

founded Christians Against Christian Nationalism and fights on that front line every day, saying ending Christian nationalism will require us to directly confront a persistent myth that the United States is a Christian nation. She's Baptist, and she's on our side.

We may disagree on theology, love to take her to coffee sometime and talk about that, but as was said earlier, We may disagree on beliefs, but we line up on values. A whole bunch of Christians in the United States don't want Gilead. They don't want a theocracy. They are not the silent and complicit Germans of the 1940s. So many are aware of what's going on. They are grieved to

their bones, and they are out representing what they believe is a Jesus of love. John Fuglesang has written, the bigotry and hate out of his Bible. I'd love to have a conversation with this guy. I appreciate his heart.

I disagree with how he interprets his Bible, but okay. He's promoting a personal Jesus, not a national one. I think he's kind of defanged the Bible. We can have that discussion. He is a loud, proud Christian, but he's fighting on the side of humanism. Love, acceptance, compassion, grace, humility, humanity.

That guy a Nazi, even by association, don't bet on. April Ajoy is one of my favorite people. She wrote a book called called Star Spangled Jesus that condemns Christian nationalism and promotes equality and safety for all. We actually did a sit down on camera conversation, I think it was last year or the year before. She was amazing.

We sat down in a room and we just chatted for an hour. We sparred a little bit over the Bible and its interpretations of slavery and homosexuality. And she did admit some of the problems and she had some ways around some of the other problems. But at the end of the day, we began and ended that conversation absolute allies as humanists, shepherds, values. She is one of

the best humanists I've ever met. Christian? Full of hate? Nazi? Dim? She's the resistance. We're lucky to have her. This meme says we are all born atheists until someone starts telling us lies. I don't think this one's helpful at all.

There are many evolutionary reasons why people develop a God belief. Dr. John Walthy is a neuro, he's a computational neurologist, and he's done a lot of really thick writing about mechanisms within us biologically that can be environmentally triggered. to get us to lean into a higher power belief. That is a whole other conversation that you should have with him or you should read his book, right? Our pattern-seeking brains

can lean into cosmic agency naturally, well beyond religious indoctrination. And when you're six months old, I guarantee you the baby isn't processing theological language and pondering whether or not the cosmos was divinely designed, right? Are you an atheist if you can't even have a conversation about it? It's a bad argument. It's not helpful. There's the Christian apologist

paradox meme. The apologist believes the claim that lying is a sin, but to defend all of the religious concepts behind that statement, they have to lie. What about the Christian apologists who genuinely believe that it is true? Lying, to make an untrue statement with the intent to deceive.

So my intent, and the intent of many believers, is to try to spread truth, facts, reality. So if the information's false, but my intent is to try to be truthful, am I lying? And I can already see people are getting out their laptops to send me a nasty email over this one. Knock yourself out. Go ahead. Are there apologists who lie? Damn skippy there are. Evangelicals and preachers

and teachers and parents and anybody lying for whatever motivation. Speaker 3: Sure. Speaker 1: But a lie as a verb, right? Lying as a verb speaks to intent. What do you intend to do? And yes, I do draw the distinctions. But it's interesting that many of my fellow non-believers do not. And I'll let you guys fight that out over dinner tonight. Couple more.

Exposing children to religion should be considered a form of child abuse. Now, this is sticky. Because I do believe that many of the hardline fundamental, especially the damnation, hellfire, and shaming religion, aspects of fundy religion are abusive to children.

I lived so many years of my life terrified of hell, apologizing for the sin of being born. There was no one worthy, no, not one. My identity stripped from me, cheated out of a chance to learn properly about the world I lived in. In many ways, I do feel like there is abuse. But what does exposing children to

religion mean I think children should be exposed to religion. I think a comparative religions class should be taught in every school. Let's expose children to the religions of the world, at least the main ones, and let's talk about that.

I was exposed to Christianity. I escaped that belief because I was further exposed to Christianity, began to see it for what it was. Such a broad, clumsy, unhelpful statement.

So let's jump from this, from religion, to a broader conversation about politics and the culture in the United States. Now, I'm a humanist, and my humanist convictions land me solidly and strongly in the liberal column. So don't freak out, okay?

Don't freak out on me and think, what's the matter, you moderate, you watered down your values, you're a sellout, you're weak. I doubt anyone in this room would do it, but I'm telling you, on YouTube, they are going to crucify me. And I've just accepted that, all right? As an enlightened liberal believer, Am I easy meat for the click-baity stuff, especially online, that turns out to be not

so true? Check this out. A popular meme called Damn Those Pesky Facts. This, and I'm going to get into the specifics, it is hard to read. This sucker is being shared by eager seculars that prove our founders never intended a Christian nation. And it's messy. The internet especially does not like Messy, but let's take a closer look and see what we can see. The first quote attributed

to Thomas Jefferson from his work titled Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court of Virginia. Christianity neither is nor ever was a part of the common law. Now he was commenting on a specific case which involved the Saxons.

and how the courts should approach claims of Christian tradition. It was very context-specific. See what I mean by messy? Christianity was not part of the common law of the Saxons specifically because they were not yet Christians, so he was saying it is not part of the common law, but he was speaking in the context of a specific group.

Was he also referring to the overall? That's an interesting and a nuanced question. Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shown on man. This is an alteration of a much larger statement that was written in a letter by Jefferson to English theologian Joseph Priestley. He was speaking personally to Priestley in a letter and he was criticizing

systems that perverted Christian philosophy, which he also referred to as sublime and benevolent. Now, we know Jefferson was a deist, right? He sliced the miracle verses out of the Bible, and the Jefferson Bible is on display at the Smithsonian even today so people can see it. But he also admired

some of the philosophies and teachings of Christianity. So the entire quote as shown doesn't correctly say Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shown on man. He is referencing a specific situation in a conversation with one guy. Messy.

Religions are all alike founded upon fables and mythologies. There is no record that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote those words. We have plenty of Jefferson ammo in the church-state conversation. This is his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, right?

The Danbury Baptists were freaking out because the Congregationalists were kind of running the show, they were flexing their muscles, and they were afraid the Congregationalists were going to run everything and define what the government was. And they said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't want this denomination being... the law of the land, or determining the law of the land, and what did Jefferson do? He wrote a letter back to them, and he said, believing with you that religion is a matter

which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people. which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting

the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state. He could not have been clearer. It's sourced, it's vetted, it has context, he said it, he meant it, no ambiguity. This is a much better choice.

for conversations about our secular democracy. Here's another one that's hugely relevant. Neither pagan nor Muslim nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion. Sourced, vetted, accurate, real. Let's share this.

Back to the meme. John Adams is up next. I have referenced Adams a whole bunch in my own work. Perhaps most famously in the first quote, the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. Now, John Adams himself did not say or write this, but he did sign his name to the document that contained it. Tripoli, they wanted assurances that when we use their shipping lanes, we wouldn't

use that as an excuse to colonize them with Christianity. They wanted a guarantee. You're not going to come in and mess with the culture, right? So the Treaty of Tripoli was drawn up to assure them. Adams signed it. There it is. The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.

John Adams wasn't even president when this was signed. It was George Washington. And as Andrew pointed out, this was a national proclamation. It wasn't a John Adams thing. It was a government thing. The entire government represented by all of our founders saying we are not a Christian nation.

It's amazing how context actually makes the Tripoli example even more powerful. The second quote was originally published in something called the Shaker Manifesto. The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Muslim nation. This quote was attributed to George Washington 79 years after Washington died, so it wasn't even originally attributed

to John Adams. Staffers have said at Washington's estate, his staffers, the researchers, the historians, the curators say there's no evidence that George Washington ever wrote or said this. It's likely someone grabbed and changed some language from a 1796 document called the Treaty of Peace and Friendship. Washington never said it.

Adams never said it. Stop sharing it. Washington's estate did highlight a verified quote from 1790 where Washington talks about giving bigotry and persecution no sanction and that good citizens deserved protection from it. It's not as catchy, it's not as click-baity, but at least it actually happened. Moving to

Thomas Paine. Finally, this one's real. A genuine quote. From Thomas Paine's 1794 work, The Age of Reason. But how hard would it have been to add the source to the bottom of that quote? Paine was a critic of organized institutions. He wrote these exact and verified words in The Age of Reason. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian,

or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and and monopolize power and profit. This is useful in our conversation about the founding fathers, and that quote applies today for sure.

And the last one in the pesky facts meme, James Madison. Yes, James Madison wrote those words in an 1822 letter to the American statesman Edward Livingston. He said, religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together. The second quote is almost certainly a fake.

James Madison, the purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries. This cannot be found in any known literature before 1994.

It doesn't read like anything that Madison ever wrote. Doesn't even sound like his voice. Why do we spread spurious quotes alongside real ones? And where's our outrage over the lack of sources and context when we demand it from everybody else? Christians aren't the only one who like to quote Albert Einstein. This is a popular one. Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not

sure about the universe. Now, it's a clever quote, and I kind of like it. This particular quote, scholars have found no written record Einstein ever wrote or said this. It's fun, but whoever said it wasn't Al. No evidence that Einstein ever said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, despite the

fact that it was included in a book published in 2010 by none other than Princeton University Press. The ultimate quotable Einstein attributed this to Einstein, and they didn't properly fact check it. The first incarnation of this claim didn't appear until 1990. Didn't appear next to Einstein's name anyway.

That was 35 years after the guy died. The poor man. As Einstein once famously did say, I never said half the crap people said I did. Who doesn't love a good line from Mark Twain? No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot. Mark Twain. It's strange that the

Mark Twain Museum in Hartford, Connecticut put their own research staff on a hunt for this quote and found, quote, no trace of it. It might feel useful for us when we invoke him, but if he didn't say it, he didn't say it. And that matters. Here's a few in the social mediaverse you might enjoy. A ton of

my fellow liberal skeptics wrap their arms around this quote. Stephen King, Fox News did to our parents what our parents were afraid video games would do to us. Except it's not Stephen King's quote. Now, some people are going to accuse me of being pedantic, and maybe I'm being pedantic, but let's clarify. Stephen King only shared an unattributed quote.

He didn't come up with it. We have to ask ourselves, How would Stephen King, the writer, feel about being credited with a line that he didn't write? He himself said no attribution. Ah, that's small potatoes. I'm not going to get stuck here. Let's move on. Here's a bigger one along these lines. Reportedly, on November the 11th of 2024, Stephen King got kicked off of X this morning for

calling Elon Musk the first lady. Once again, big respect to Stephen King. This was during the height of Doge, and he had his head up Donald Trump's ass, and blah, blah, blah. Liberals jumped on this like crazy, because it sounds like something Stephen King might do. He roasts these guys constantly.

Talking about that transactional marriage that Trump and Elon had, it roasts the ego of some cretinous, wealth-hoarding, man-child oligarchs feels so good. But Stephen King was not banned from X.

It never happened. And a ton of supposed critical thinkers didn't take 30 seconds to check before they shared it with all their friends. Why didn't we do the minimum? It would have been incredibly easy to find out if this really happened. This one also went viral. It's harder to read. But the claim is that now former White

House Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt was dissing Cher, and so Cher shot back. I'm going to make this a little bigger, and I'll read it for you. A rube named Carolyn Leavitt, who holds the title of White House Press Secretary, recently said Cher's activism is irrelevant, outdated, and rooted in a world that doesn't exist anymore. And Cher responded, let's get real for a second, honey. Carolyn Leavitt, born 1997, former

White House assistant, tenure eight months. I've had wigs that lasted longer than that. Lost two congressional races, both by double digits. Host a podcast with fewer weekly listeners than my cat's Twitter account. Advocates free speech, yet blocks anyone who challenges her and her latest accomplishment, calling a woman who has topped the charts in six different decades irrelevant while trending for all the wrong reasons, baby girl. I've

been fighting for rights, touring the world, and reinventing myself since before your parents went to prom. I've faced critics louder, harsher, and far more meaningful than anything you can type, and yet here I am, still here, still singing. So if you want to talk about relevance, sweetheart, take a seat.

I can almost hear that in Cher's voice. Can anybody else? Nuked her from orbit. Awesome. Carolyn Levitt took it in the teeth from Cher. It's amazing. Except you're already ahead of me, aren't you? This never happened. Oh, I would have loved to watch Cher grind Carolyn Levitt into a

fine powder. Oh. Oh. But what I would enjoy, what I want, has nothing to do with what is. Which brings me back to this. Donald Trump saying if he was gonna run, he would run as a Republican because they are the dumbest group of voters in the country.

And I have to again say I despise, I oppose Donald Trump. Childish, vile, sick, predatory, grifting, cruel, disgusting man. He is a manipulator and abuser of people and the system.

And at first glance, when I saw this quote, I just felt my like share finger just go, go, go. I was validated. I was vindicated. Yes, yes, I've always, he may have, yes, he, oh shit. There is no, no evidence that, that he said this. People magazine had people search their archives from 1998 and found nothing. So

no matter how we feel about the man, no matter how many lies he's told, no matter how outraged we are, there's no evidence that this ever happened. As an experiment, I posted this fact check on Facebook, and I told everybody, this is bogus. Stop sharing it as if it is true.

And the responses surprised me. I blurred the names here because I'm not trying to embarrass anyone, but just a few. I'm guessing he said something very similar to that in private, though. You know what? I think that's right. I mean, I don't know, but I can hear him doing it, right?

He switched from his pro-choice to anti-abortion stance right before he announced his run in 2016. Strategic, right? He pandered to the evangelicals, even though we know the only person he worships is himself. He knew Fox News would be in his pocket. Yeah, that's a fair reply. Then came the personal testimonies that defended the Trump quote. I remember

the interview. It was televised, but I don't recall the interviewer. I think it was Oprah in 1988. He has since had the word scrubbed. Someone else I specifically remember seeing an old video. I watched the original from 1998. Does this sound like a reliable evidence chain? Would we accept

this from our opponents, politically or religiously? Invoking a decades-old event that they cannot source, but they know it happened because they saw it a long time ago. He said he loves the poorly educated. He said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and still get reelected. He said enough things that basically make the quote likely to be something he said somewhere to

someone without an official transcript. I won't lose any sleep over someone passing this around. Next guy said, hey, we live in a propagandized world. If it scores rhetorical points to lie, why shouldn't we? The other side has no qualms about that. Now, I don't even know what rhetorical points is supposed to mean, but we are seeing here a clear call that it's okay to be dishonest, ostensibly

in the noble war on other dishonest people. I understand your point, Seth, and agree in principle, but disagree in reality.

This is why Democrats keep losing. He continued, And anytime you're playing a game, any game, against someone who ignores

the rules and is dishonest, you will never ever win by taking the high road you will always lose. I agree that we should all try to be truthful and accurate on the big things, but insisting that every meme and post that isn't 100% accurate be stopped? That's a losing strategy in the war, in my opinion. There's evidence that the message of this meme, That Trump thinks his supporters are stupid is very likely 100% accurate, so why

are we quibbling over the detail of whether he actually said those words in that specific interview? He says dumb enough shit without anyone having to make stuff up, says Ken. Ken, thank you. Thank you, Ken. You are my hero, Ken.

Ken to the rescue in the comments section. Ken. Much appreciated, my friend. We have a vast library, don't we? Of stupid, offensive, untrue Trump quotes that are sourced and buried. I mean, just wacky shit. Global warming being invented by the Chinese and windmills driving whales insane. Airports during the Revolutionary Wars.

Cutting drug prices by 1500%. The Islamic Republic of Japan. Voting stations requiring you bring in your license plate from your car. You gotta treat women like shit. Quiet, piggy.

If Ivanka wasn't my daughter, I might be dating her. Hey, you know, a purge day of legalized crime might reduce crime for the rest of the year. Mexico will pay for the wall. Gaza's ruins would be a great spot for a new Trump resort. Gas and grocery prices will drop on day one. Russia-Ukraine will be fixed on day one.

Warnings to everybody, the Democrats, the Libs, the deep state are conducting post-delivery abortions. COVID will just go away. The election was rigged. I could just shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and I'd be even more popular. He was actually right.

It's pathetic. The January 6th insurrection was a, quote, day of love. Day one dictator. They're making mice transgender. Shithole countries, vermin, immigrants poisoning the blood of our country. They're eating the dogs.

They're eating the cats. Jesus Christ, we could be here all night and barely make a dent. And we would have something that we are always, always demanding from everybody else. Documentation and vetted sources. Washington Post chronicled more than 30,000 lies in Trump's first term alone. And this does not include, it's just the lies. It doesn't include all of the

other freak outs and the insults and the grift and the predation and dehumanization. So you and I are right here right now. We are enlightened people. We are seekers and spreaders of truth. We are the supporters of skepticism and scientific rigor. We are agents of the evidence. and we don't take 30 seconds to verify a source or we simply decide it's okay to share it when it's fake if it helps us or we think it helps us.

A few more very quickly. Those of us who are absolutely convinced that Trump sexually abused underage girls, we had our aha moment when this photo circulated online. Trump, Jeffrey Epstein being serviced like a foot wash or something by an underage girl. Now, there are vetted, sourced, actual photos of these two men, longtime friends in various scenarios. This

photo is not the smoking gun that people think it is because it was made with AI. And fakes like this have become their own subset of Trump criticism. Check this out. The video of Trump and Epstein partying with underage girls. Man, this was shared by liberals left and right. See, they're creeping on the young girls. Except that Snopes did a few seconds of digging and revealed that this was

made using A.I., It was built from a real photograph from a party which had no minors in it. It was a Victoria's Secret party which took place in 1997. No children were even present. Here is the original photo.

There's a ton of this stuff out here, much of it going right after our amygdala. For clicks, for propaganda reasons, for profit. They play to our sense of justice, they manipulate our emotions, they push our buttons, and they make it so much harder to separate what is true from what is not. So if Trump is a predator, but

this example is a fake, should this be introduced as evidence? to prove our case? And if we share it without knowing or caring, are we making the struggle for justice even harder? I'm not saying he's not guilty of horrible things.

I'm not defending the man. I'm not going soft. I'm not trying to play nice. I'm not oblivious to the stakes. I'm simply saying the famous physicist Richard Feynman was absolutely right. He said, you know, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. We're not immune from motivated reasoning when our biases cause us to arrive at the conclusions we want and or when we rationalize an opinion or behavior which

might be wrong or harmful. None of us are immune. The 17th century English philosopher Francis Bacon described it like this in a book he wrote in 1620 on logic and the scientific method, Novum Organum. And the sourced, sourced quote says this, the human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections. Whence

proceed sciences, which may be called sciences as one would, for what a man had rather were true, he more readily believes. We also have to remember and honor our own humanity and not ignore the humanity of everyday people around us. I want to come back quickly as I get ready to close about how some atheists talk about Christians.

They're scared of God, they're clowns, they have no brains, they're mentally ill, they're liars, they're bigots, evil, whatever. It was years ago and I had somebody at a Q & A session and they heard me talk like this. And they said, with all the damage being done right now by religion, specifically Christianity, biblical Christianity, et cetera, why are you soft? You're a frontline atheist activist. Why are

you using conciliatory language at all? This is a religion that has done immense damage. Went on and on and on and on. And I waited for him to finish, and I acknowledged his legit frustrations. And I said, well, when you're talking about people who identify as Christians, being hateful, bigots, and stupid, and dishonest, and weak, and evil, if Christian

means all that, I want you to know that you're talking about my wife. She was a Christian when we got married. Blows people's minds. She wasn't a hardcore Christian, but God and Jesus. She was a Christian. Her journey

has taken her really into more of the sort of the spiritual category these days. She doesn't really identify as anything. But spiritual, there's something out there. She thinks we go on after death. Maybe grandma's looking in from on high somewhere. Okay. But for many years after our wedding date, she called herself a Christian. Now, I'm not trying to use Natalie as a gimmick here, but it was amazing to see

the expression on my challenger's face when I showed him a human being who is my life love. who is the Christian, he said, was all of those horrible things. Natalie's my person, and I am hers. We have had our spirited discussions about life, the universe, and everything. Trust me.

About gods and the spiritual. Well, we disagree on a lot, but I'll tell you, we share values. Whether she claimed Jesus or Buddha or believes in an afterlife or whatever, she would still be lovely and smart and kind and the best person that has ever happened to me. Now, if I'm thinking in binary ways, if I'm Amped up and I'm ramped up and I'm raged up and I'm trigger happy and I'm more interested in looking right than

being right. I am easy meat. I am easy meat for any button pushing quote or claim or link or meme that comes along. And when I share half-truths and non-truths, I am shoveling the ground beneath my own feet. I am making the outrage industry richer. I am making my own credibility poorer. Who's going to fact check the world if we don't? Who's gonna stand up for what's true

if we don't? Who's gonna represent the best notions of what it means to be a skeptic if we don't? I just don't think we have to become liars to defeat lies. I don't think we have to become inhuman

to defeat inhumanity. Is that opinion naive? Am I deluded? Am I misguided? Have I gone soft? I don't know. Would Erica, the primatologist, need to share some sort of a fake evolutionary link, something she just made up? She just makes up her own primate and throws it into the chain? Does she need to do that if it supports evolutionary science? She doesn't have to. We have the real.

Would Andrew Seidel, the constitutional attorney, need to write some extra stuff into the First Amendment for us to be able to demonstrate that the Constitution is a godless secular document? He didn't have to. Should David and Charis have added more misogynistic verses into the Bible? Because there just may not be enough sexism there for us to see. And what happens to their credibility if and when they get busted?

I reject this argument that we're all like the allied forces using misdirection, disinformation to confuse the enemy during wartime. I just think that's, we're not warrior heroes when we make facts harder to understand. And finally, I'd like to see a movement that doesn't get caught on every little snag.

You and I interact with our world. I've seen this happen. Somebody sneezes and the other person, the religious person says, bless you. And before you know it, somebody gets into like a diatribe about, well, we don't believe the origin of sneezes and spirits and all of those things. Blessings, that's rooted in mythology and the Druids. Jesus Christ, thank you, is the response to bless you when you sneeze. Somebody says,

have a blessed day. Oh, I don't believe in spirits or blessings. No, the humanist response is, thanks, you have a great day too. I have seen us turn on each other over the dumbest shit. One of my favorites is this furious argument that continues today over, well, are you.

Speaker 3: An atheist or are you agnostic? Are you an agnostic atheist or agnostic atheist? Maybe you're pantheist or naturalist or a rationalist, materialist. Speaker 1: There is a group of people on social media who have been fighting for years about whether or not inanimate objects are atheists. Is a rock an atheist? Because the rock does not believe in God. Are you shitting me?

Is this how you want to... Democracy and decency are on the razor's edge. Our nation, the world is on fire. Speaker 2: Are you shitting. Speaker 1: You're arguing about what you put on a name tag? Anybody remember when Neil deGrasse Tyson was rooting for the mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope and he said the word, Godspeed.

Speaker 2: Godspeed. Speaker 1: Godspeed. Success on your mission. Return home safely. Godspeed. You know who turned on him? Speaker 2: Atheist. Why? Speaker 1: He soured on the word even now. He's not a God believer. It would have put a bad taste in his mouth. He was vilified for saying what? A goodwill intention. Godspeed.

All success. Come back safe. Andrew Seidel showed us a video about getting the Ten Commandments out of public schools. That story, that video represents a Jewish man and a Christian woman. Now, how many YouTube commenters are gonna see at the beginning, Jewish man, Christian woman, and write them off instead of welcoming them in? I don't have any

illusions that any of us will ever evolve to the point where we've achieved the prize. I don't think we're going to get there by beheading our rivals unless we're taking a blade to false claims. That's fair game. But you know, maybe the prize isn't a destination. Maybe it's walking through time on the journey with nobility and honesty

and integrity. Highlander said there can be only one. But in the battles... to fight for reality and decency, I think, I think it's going to take all of us. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.

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