The United States of Insanity (with Aron Ra)

Speaker 1: Okay, here we go. Speaker 2: Stand by. Speaker 3: Three, two, one. Speaker 2: The thinking atheist. It's not a person. It's a symbol. An idea. The population of atheists in this country is going through the roof. 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 world.

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

Speaker 3: Just for ease, I have been releasing the individual speeches from the recent Unholy Trinity reunion event in Fort Worth, Texas. So as I've done Matt's speech and my speech, I figured I might as well release Aaron's speech. The video is linked in the description box, but this is the audio of about a 35-minute presentation where Aron talks about the state of the states and how insane things have

truly become. Speaker 1: Thank you very kindly, Matt. Now, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word, life. It does not mean forever, and it's a mighty short time, but I'm here to tell you there's nothing else, just this world. I deviated from the lyrics you may have expected because Prince, to his detriment,

was a devoted Jehovah's Witness, and he said there was going to be something else, an afterlife. But what did he know? He thought the world was going to end in 2000. So we're going to party like it's a quarter century ago because we're still here. Our world's not going to end until next year. Although, there is a chance, a small chance, that we could still change the timeline,

but only if we are coordinated and committed. And that's what I'm hoping for. And just because we're atheists doesn't mean we don't have hope. That's what brought us together. And Matt, Seth, and I came together as the Unholy Trinity because although we come from different backgrounds with different perspectives, we are very different people, but we have a shared motivation.

We're all former believers who got over it. We got better. And when we came out of this literally stupefying, mentally debilitating belief system of thought control, we started to notice things that believers are conditioned never to notice, like that something is seriously wrong here. Why does unconditional love come with conditions? And why does God not even love all

his own son, his own chosen people sometimes? Because if you have kids, you let all the siblings know that you chose that one. That you have a favorite child, and that the chosen one might murder all the other kids when they fall out of your favor. But sometimes the chosen kid falls out of favor too, and that's when dad allows the other siblings to come in and smite him. You know, responsible parenting. It had to be

that way ever since Snow White took a bite of a cursed apple. Except that it's not a children's fairy tale. It's a fairy tale, but it's not for children because Snow White is naked. Though she is still white for some reason because Christian nationalists said so. And she's a clone from the rib of a magically enchanted mud golem.

And she didn't get the apple from a witch. No, don't be silly. There's no such thing as witches outside of Endor. It came from a talking snake, which is much more reasonable. The curse of this fruit is if you eat of it, you become intelligent, which is a sin.

Because smart people don't buy into fairy tales like this. Smart people ask questions, which is another sin. A sin against faith. Because then... Even the clergy will have to make up new excuses to satisfy your questions, and then they won't be able to believe it themselves. Though it's not necessary that the clergy believe it. It's only necessary that the masses believe and obey. And that's why authorities say,

how dare you question the word of God? The way it was put to me as a child was that ours is not the reason why. Ours is but to do or die something. That's what the grown-ups in my life told me as a kid whenever I asked the kind of questions that they always avoided. We were told to surrender our reason and pay our tithing and do the Lord's work that the Lord can't do himself because he can't do everything. So the church has you do

the work that the church can't do and can't pay for, and then you pay the church for the work they don't really do and that they don't have to pay taxes on like we do. And you're also supposed to rat out any of your neighbors who aren't buying into the bullshits. There has to be, there is to be no reasoning with the infidel because then you're in danger of learning something. So the only safe tactic is that anyone who doesn't believe or who believes differently must be

demonized to force conformity through a tribal mentality of social depression and of deviance. Manipulation of the masses without dissension, that's what it's all about. That's why theocracies historically treat heresy, blasphemy, and apostasy as as capital crimes. Believe whatever we said just because we said so and do what you're told because we told you to. Let us do the thinking. Oh, you can trust us. At the same time, deceivers take

you into their confidence. Take heed that no man deceives you. Isn't that a funny statement from coming from a liar? For many will come pretending to speak for or to and for, excuse me, to and for Christ and will deceive many. and there will be wars and rumors of wars.

Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places, just like there is always every year and has been all of that ever since mankind invented religion and fused it with politics to impose authoritarian control over the ignorant laity, so long as they can remain ignorant. That's why authoritarians

always attack education first. discrediting the educated, praising unreasonable gullibility as a virtue so that folks begin to brag about how stupid they are. The ruling class controls the media and has them criticizing compassion as woke ideology so that we will not stand up for the sake of our neighbors, the socialists accused of being communists, the unionists accused of

being socialists, the gays, unless they're in a Republican closet, and immigrants seeking legal asylum and so on. When any demographic of the others are attacked, we are safe. Or so we think we are. That's not a society. That's a herd. The lions take out the unprotected, the elderly, the calves. But how much stronger would the whole herd

be if they figured out what the lions were doing and came to defend that calf en masse? Four lions on one calf is a win, unless that calf is defended by 30 buffalo. There was a time in our history when we were not strong as gorillas or chimpanzees, but we weren't smart yet either. We were dumb and weak and slow, but we survived because when the predators came for any of us, they had to face all

of us because we are not cattle. We are each individual lives in fear, and only cares about itself. Altruism comes from compassion, from camaraderie, and it's the greatest strength that people have. After that came intelligent inquiry, both of which our compassion and our comprehension must be suppressed by anyone trying to capture or control us. And for myself personally,

the catalyst that motivated me to activism was when I encountered religious reconstructionists online bragging about how their pastor had been on the phone with other pastors across the state so that they could get all of their congregations to vote as a block, so that they could elect right-wing evangelicals to every level of state and federal government, from school board members to judges to senators and so on.

They said they were going to take over the country this way. And this is a direct violation of the Johnson Amendment because Religious extremists don't follow man's laws. They follow God's laws that were written by men, pretending to have a higher calling of righteous indignation, where freedom is compliance, liberty is submission, and where critical inquiry is punishable by law, and where the fear of the Lord is conflated with

wisdom somehow. And this reminds me of a comment that I heard from a child asking if any villain in any movie ever thought that they were the good guy. Of course we know that the absolute worst villains ever are the ones who think that they're the good guys. They're the ones determined to force us all to submit to authority in compliance with their immoral morality. If you're uncertain how to tell the good guys from the villains, it comes down to the ones trying to preserve, protect, and promote your rights versus the ones trying to retract

or restrict your rights. Women have already lost their right to bodily autonomy, and the Heritage Foundation is coming for their right to vote, too, and many of our other rights as well. I was proud to be an American when I used to think I was free. But now Congress is making laws respecting an establishment of state religion and prohibiting all other religious perspectives. As just one example

of that here in Texas, right-wing evangelicals are weaving Bible study from conservative evangelical perspective into public school curriculum funded by hundreds of millions of tax dollars. Does it violate the constitutional separation of church and state? Of course it does.

Will it be struck down by religious judges in the Supreme Court? Thanks to Donnie Dictator, no. And by the way, my wife and I are making a video series examining the right-wing Christian agenda in this curriculum on my channel. I've been to Austin many times, testifying against these encroachments of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, but they keep coming back no matter how many times Christians and Jews testify that they don't want their religion politicized. And now the

conservative evangelicals and Catholics have a Supreme Court willing to lie about their Constitution, what it actually says. And so here we are with an unrestrained Christian nationalist-led movement, And now that the Supreme Court is unbalanced in their favor and Republican Congress is just rubber stamping whatever this administration does, they are litigiously abridging the freedom of speech and of the press and using military force against the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and that's not all. We

no longer even have a guarantee of due process because according to National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, anyone heard of that? Speaker 2: No? Speaker 1: Just a couple, okay. If you declare that you are anti-fascist, then you may be declared an enemy of the state, which is a bit of a Freudian admission, isn't it?

If you say that you're against fascism, that means you're against the Trump administration. And likewise, if you support local social programs, they'll call you a socialist. If you are a socialist, they'll call you a communist. And if you are a communist who believes in everything that America used to stand for, then you'll be labeled as anti-American. NSPM 7 says that if you are not a capitalist, then

you're anti-American. If you're anti-Christian, then you're un-American, which is worse than being not American. And if you believe, let's see, hold on, I got lost here. And if you believe in tolerance of immigrants, and if you believe in gay and trans people, non-binary, LGBTQ, which I prefer to refer to more simply as queer folk, if you think that all these people, regardless of race or gender or religion, economic opinions, that they all have the same rights as Americans,

as do rich, straight, white, cisgendered, capitalist Christian men, then NSPM 7 says that you may be declared a domestic terrorist. Yeah, and there are specific rules for how to deal with foreign people, terrorists. There are no such rules for those erroneously, unfairly, or unjustly deemed to be domestic terrorists. If they put you in that category, they can just disappear you off

the street and gulag you into a concentration camp, maybe in a foreign country where no one will ever see you again or hear your case. We've already seen worse than that done to folks who never even made that list. And without our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression and due process, neither of which we effectively have anymore, not the guarantee, then we are not a free country in any sense.

Some will say we were never a free country before, but we were more free before Trump than we are now, and we should be more free now than we have ever been. But 70 million people decided to vote the wrongest way possible, and tens of millions more sat on their hands saying stupid things like, don't vote, it's a broken system. Those idiots are at least as much to blame as those who voted for the greater evil on purpose.

Such were the religious reconstructionists that I was talking to way back all those years ago. They told me how they were going to overturn our once proud precedent setting science-based secular democratic republic and replace it with an oppressive theocratic authoritarian regime. Just look at the measles and COVID outbreaks in our military and Texas in particular. After Texas eased vaccination requirements this week, the San Perlita School District

shut down due to a COVID outbreak. And they've just declared, I think, here in Texas, they had a child die for the first time in, I don't know, decades. It's partly political due to having RFK Jr. and anti-vaxxer Quack in charge of the Department of Health, but it's also religious due to growing clamor from religious people for religious exemptions to recommended vaccines. It doesn't come as a surprise to any of us. We warned about Project 2025. I

get that you can't read a 900-page document, but you can sift through it, and there are certain things you can target. Those Reconstructionists that I was talking to way back then were like the villains in a James Bond movie or that old Batman TV show in how they revealed their fiendish plan only because they were convinced that they had already won and that there was nothing that you or I or anyone can do to stop them. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

The first draft of what would become Project 2025 was originally detailed in the wedge strategy that was leaked from the Discovery Institute around Y2K. The first step of that plan was to attack science education in order to make the people more susceptible to religious indoctrination. The conflict between evolution and creationism was something that I knew an awful lot about at that time, things that most people wouldn't know unless they went to college and then only if they took specific courses. So I started my YouTube channel

to make the important information readily available for people who had no education at all and maybe a short attention span. And by the way, last week, I passed the 20-year milestone on YouTube. I will let Matt and Seth say what inspired them into action if they want to talk about that, but this is what motivated me. When you see something, say something. And fortunately, we each had our own way to do that. When I met Seth, he

was an activist on the radio showing that there was a human heart behind the secular mind. When I met Matt, he was on television destroying arguments of scriptural literalism and philosophical fuckery. Radio and TV. So I felt like an imposter because all I had was a YouTube channel. I was a guest on Matt's TV show a couple of times.

And I remember walking into that TV studio in Austin, Texas, which back then, was the same studio that Alex Jones used to broadcast Info Wars. Now, so far as I know, the two men never met because they were there on different days of the week. But every week, Matt Dillahunty and Alex Jones walked down the same hallway. And I thought that was remarkable because Matt showed up to spread logic, reason,

human compassion, and the best understanding of factual or philosophical truth possible in this moment. And Alex Jones went there to do the very opposite of all of that. Guess which one of these guys made hundreds of millions of dollars off their show? Because we all know that sex sells, but so does bullshit. Big time, major league bullshit, as Carl Sagan put it. Excuse me, George Carlin. Getting my

heroes confused. Yet here we are, gathered today, a dozen years after our tour in Albuquerque, Amarillo, San Antonio, extended down under to Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, Australia. And what has happened in the decade or so since then? Well, if you've been in a coma for the last 11 years, I've got bad news. I remember when we went down under and some Australians asked me if I thought that Trump would be elected. And at the time, I was

still willing to give my fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt that Maybe we weren't that stupid. Yup, we are. Somehow my hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers and other independent sources pushing back prior to 2016 were no match for the hundreds of millions of dollars annually being pumped into legacy propaganda campaigns, trying to divide and conquer Americans

in an attempt to Christianize our country. which was never about the truth of God. There is no truth of God. It's all about control, manipulation of the masses, extorting you for the benefit of the ruling class, which at this moment are the plutocrats in the oligarchy. I remember being more hopeful about turning things around back in 2016, but to my surprise, there were other self-identified non-Christians in league with conservatives to promote the Republican Party, like Dave Rubin,

who spoke at the Reason Rally a decade ago. He's a cultural Jew who identified as an atheist then, but now he says he's an agnostic who believes that Judeo-Christian values were important foundation for society. I hate the label of cultural Christian too. I'm a cultural Satanist. And later we found out that Dave Rubin and a number of other people that belong to this media group that he

belonged to were being funded by Russia. So I'm glad I was never popular with that crowd. And back then, it was no secret the GOP was overtly controlled by right-wing evangelicals, but there were still arguments in secular circles about making peace with the Republican Party. Yeah, sheep make deals with wolves. It was as wrong-headed as the log cabin Republicans, thinking that they could change the direction of

the openly homophobic and transphobic Christian nationalist GOP. It's not like they kept their theocratic and anti-queer plan secret. After Trump appointed three theocratic Supreme Court justices, every prediction about the demise of Roe v. Wade came true. And that was never a secret to anyone either. It was always on the top of their theocratic hit list. And then you had supposed pro-choice Republicans like Senator Susan Collins buying

into the bullshit that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett sold to Congress to get her vote and get them confirmed to the Supreme Court. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. I don't know how GOP leaders could be any more blatant about what their agenda was.

At that time, it was the complete opposite direction we needed to be going with the balance in jeopardy, replacing Supreme Court justices with extreme court injustices. I bring up that today because we have to meet the current moment and not be fooled by cheap rhetoric that is undermining what little democracy we have left in our republic. Which brings me to the topic today. The progress of secularism in the U.S., which being the hegemony that it is,

affects the whole planet. It might seem a good idea to let Christians take over because they follow Jesus. Because every Christian believes what Jesus said, right? Speaker 2: Right? Speaker 1: So whenever they need a plan, you know, a plan of action, they say, what would Jesus do? And then they do the total opposite. Today's Christians claim that they have a whole nation. This means a Christian nation. A Christian nation would be the best nation, right? Because it's Christian.

And being Christian means that they're better than everyone else. And these Christian nationalists are certainly better than anyone else, right? Especially the white ones. Those are the superior Christians. Christian supremacy is white. And we know that a country that is based on the word of God and believes that Jesus is God is going to revere the words of Jesus, right?

So we know that a Christian nation will offer food and clothing and other charities for immigrants, right? Because we love our neighbor as ourselves and we treat the foreigners among us as well as we do our own native born, just like God and Jesus both said, right? Would Jesus call immigration and customs enforcement on anyone ever? Remember when Jesus said not to pray in public like the hypocrites do?

Does that mean that all these Christian nationalists are hypocrites? Remember when Jesus repeatedly warned us not to store up treasures in this world, but to use acts of kindness to be later rewarded for them in the afterlife? Jesus said it would be virtually impossible for a rich man to get into heaven. So how did so many modern Christians ever start preaching prosperity gospel? Jesus said to arrange charity donations to clothe the homeless and be especially charitable

to immigrants and all of that, everything opposite of what the Christian nationalists are doing now. They're even demonizing empathy as woke ideology. They don't want you to care about other people. Speaker 2: How Christlike.

Speaker 1: How Christlike. Some of my viewers complain that I should just do science and not bash religion. Others say that I'm good at both of those things, but they say that I shouldn't talk about politics. But remember, the reason I started my channel was because of politics, specifically doing my humble best to keep from getting to where we are right now. But having failed to stop this on my own, we need to work together. If you were

hoping for a different topic today, understand that the current situation demands that we talk about what's happening right now. Not things that might have happened 2,000 years ago, nor millions of years ago either, but this year and next year. This is going to sound like hyperbole, but it's not.

We are facing an existential situation more serious than we have ever experienced collectively in our lives, not just as atheists, but as Americans. Don't tell me I'm biased, that I'm uninformed or otherwise wrong about politics, because I know better.

We need to be of one mind on this issue. Any self-professed secularist who supports the blatantly theocratic GOP is contradicting themselves and endangering our collective rights. So there must be some other reason why they're hassling me for calling out their party. What other reason would they criticize me for speaking out against the conservative right? Is it that they don't mind being ruled by irrational authoritarians with anti-science policies like having an anti-vaxxer in charge of our national health?

If you're complaining that my channel has become political, then you've never watched my videos because they've always been political. It's like when they complain about rage against the machine. I heard this recently, people complaining that rage against the machine had become political. They were always.

And I'm not going to be quiet about the religious right running things. It's no longer safe for me to speak out or to stay quiet. Since I'm still at risk either way, then I will not go quietly while they ruin everything for everyone. I have no issue with James Tallarico, though he is a Christian. I met him and spoke to him twice where he and I were

on the same side defending secularism. Don't blame the Democrats. I disagree with the old guard on a few things. Most people do. That's why progressives are gaining influence in the party. But Democrats aren't doing any of this. Sadly, they're not doing anything. Yeah, we need Dems who will do more than just write strongly worded letters, especially to

an illiterate. We need Dems who know how to play hardball against an opponent that they know is not going to play fair. It doesn't matter if you don't agree with the Democratic candidate on everything. The Republican candidate doesn't agree with you on anything. Figure that out. They're not

working for you. They vote however their owners tell them to. Progressives work for the people. So don't say that both sides are just as bad. Both sides are bad. But one is not that bad. It can be fixed, and it's being fixed. But the other side is exponentially worse than this nation has ever seen. None of the elected

Dems are worse than any of the appointed Republicans. So, there may be only a few good people in politics, but they are all allied with the Democrats. The best Republicans...

have all resigned rather than be associated with the criminally corrupt, amoral monsters that are in power now. Although, as we've already seen in recent primaries recently, establishment corporatist Dems and fascist Republicans will be routed if we can get out to vote, if they don't find a way to stop or restrict the elections instead, because that's what they'll try to do. Texas has already suspended over a million voter registrations, so check yours to see if it's still good. If

your vote didn't count, they wouldn't be trying so hard to discount it. So make sure you vote while you still can. And I know that every election since 2016 has been the most important election of our lives. But this next one for the midterms may be our last shot at having elections at all. Because Trump has already said if he gets what he wants from Congress and

the courts, and he always does, it seems, then we in this room will never see another free and fair election. He said so publicly. The Heritage Foundation is the fundamentalist Christian organization behind Project 2025, the plan to replace our democracy with theocracy. Their president, Kevin Roberts, stated on camera that a second American revolution will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. So you know how serious

they think this is. I'm serious too. I want our successful resistance to remain bloodless. But the way I see it, we have to win this or die trying because what they are threatening is not something we can live with.

Just think about all those people who voted wrong in 2024 on the excuse of how bad could it be? And now they're going to have to win. to wonder how much worse can it get? And now before I lead us in a closing prayer, yeah, just kidding. We know that wishing on a star doesn't do shit. We have to rely on each other. We are free thinkers, so we think for ourselves. But we need to try

to work together for our own sakes and for the common good. Let's do whatever is in our power to keep this nation secular and put an end to this fundamentalist idiocracy. Let us hope that it is mercifully short so that we can get back to sanity.

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