They Go Low, We Go High? (with Cecil Cicirello)

Speaker 1: Here we go. Speaker 2: Stand by. Speaker 1: Three, two, one. Speaker 3: The thinking atheist. It's not a person. It's a symbol. Speaker 2: An idea. Speaker 1: The population of atheists in this country is going through the roof. Rejecting faith. Speaker 3: 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 3: Way assume nothing question everything and start thinking this is the thinking atheist podcast Hosted by Seth Andrews.

Speaker 1: Several people have been asking me about the recent Fort Worth Unholy Trinity event, which happened last month. They couldn't make the live show, so they were like, hey, are you going to release the video and the audio to YouTube? I had to check the footage. And it came out pretty well. And so I have it scheduled to go out online on September the 29th, just a few days away.

And I will have the audio here and a YouTube link with that. And that's going to happen on the 29th, just FYI. This is a bonus release, totally free to patrons and everybody. But it is a rebroadcast of a conversation I had just a few days ago with Cecil Cicerillo of the Cognitive Dissonance show. I was actually a guest on his show. I was the co-host because Tom

of Cognitive Dissonance has been going through some major, M-A-J-O-R, major things. health issues, hospitalized, major surgery. Cecil has been updating everybody on Tom's condition and all of our love goes out to him and his family as we monitor his progress. And I'll try to keep you updated as I get information in on all of my channels. But obviously the co-host chair being empty, Cecil called and he said, hey,

would you want to fill in? And we just chatted. Like a couple of frontline activists, a couple of insiders in the movement, people who have been doing this a long time, we talked like we would talk if we were just privately having coffee together. You know, we just hung out for well over 60 minutes and it was just, I don't know, there was something about it. I thought, well, maybe you would like to listen in on that. And I will link to the source in the description box.

Just a couple of guys talking about life, the universe, and everything. And I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed sitting in that co-host chair. Here we go.

Speaker 2: So I'm joined by Seth Andrews from the Thinking Atheist podcast. Speaker 4: Seth, welcome back to the show. Speaker 1: Always good to hang out with my brother. How are you guys holding up in Chicago, Illinois? Speaker 2: We're struggling, but we're surviving. So I wanted to talk to you today, Seth. Before we jump into anything... I see that you're sort of bouncing around the United States doing little kind of like little tours.

Speaker 4: So you just did one in Texas. Tell us about it. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's having done so many years of conventions and I'm always honored to be a part of it. But being a producer, sometimes I will sit in the audience or even be on stage and go, wow, I wonder what this would be like if. If this was added, what if we did an introduction? What if we had production level like this? What if we honed the schedule so it was more focused here and there? Everybody's got

an opinion, and certainly I'm no exception. This year, I thought, well, I've got an idea for a three-hour punctuated show. I wonder if it would go over. So in March, in my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I mean, buckle of the Bible Belt, Oklahoma, I had Forrest Balkai and Gutsick Gibbon and myself. And I got the OU Schusterman Center, which seated 300. And I thought, I wonder if anyone would

buy tickets for this. Boom. Sellout. It was crazy. And I got to produce it the way I wanted to. And then I did a similar show with No Illusions of Scathing Atheist and God Awful Movies. We did that in Cincinnati. boom. Of course, he's a big draw. And he's awesome because Noah's that nice mix of snark and sarcasm, but also intelligence and empathy and compassion. He's a good juggler of that. So, I mean, he can go hard,

but it comes from the best place in the universe, right? And he talked about how he had survived a heart attack as an atheist, which was such a compelling story. And that was a big deal. And then I reunited the Unholy Trinity, which was a tour that I did a decade ago with R.N. Raw and Matt Dillahunty, so we reunited on stage in Fort Worth, and it sold out, and it was a big deal. So Natalie's like, you're kind of good at this. Maybe you should do more.

And I'm like, Jesus, it's a lot of work. Speaker 4: I mean, it's a lot. Speaker 1: It's stress and pressure and– but you know, there's no feeling like seeing an audience respond and they laugh at all the right places. And Matt did a beautiful eulogy just after Dolly Parton passed away. And he called her like a Christian humanist. And he talked about many of the things in her life, a lot of which weren't

publicly known that she had done great humanitarian work. She was very inclusive. She was a compassionate, she was the best of us really. And, uh, At the end, there were tears in people's eyes. And then you realize what a privilege it is, and it's worth every piece of work that goes in. So, you know, will I try it again in 2027? Probably. With who? I don't know, but I've got some ideas.

Speaker 2: I know some people who put on conferences, and the amount of work that goes into that is really intense. So even just putting on just one single show that you want to sort of mimic that sort of thing has got to be a real, just a ton of work. Speaker 1: Well, it's kind of fun, too. I mean, I've got to. Like, a British announcer shows up at the very beginning, and he's like, you're probably asking why the opening announcement is being done with a British accent, you know? And we'd make fun of ice, and we'd do all these other things.

And then there's, like, a high-impact thing with almost explosions in it, and then everybody walks out on stage. I mean, it's a lot, but I think we pull it off. You know, it's like, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! But... Hey, man, you know, people dig it. So that's awesome. Speaker 4: That's awesome.

Speaker 2: And, you know, speaking of conferences, you just spoke at BajaCon and you had a you had a a. a talk that you gave called Go Fact Yourself, Skeptics Aren't Immune to Fake News. And I'll link it in the show notes. I watched it and it was really impressive.

I'm going to let people obviously watch it on their own, but give people sort of a 5,000 foot or 30,000 foot view of what this is. What did you talk about at BajaCon? Speaker 1: Did you really watch it? As busy as you are. Absolutely. It is so hard for activists to be able to hit the brakes and and sponge up anybody else's content at length. And I'm like, I'm sorry, you're doing all that you do, and you watch the entire hour-long video?

Speaker 4: It was excellent. It was really well done. So tell us what it was about. Speaker 1: Well, you know, Blue Water Atheist Humanist in Sarnia is a wonderful convention. They're right on the border of The U.S. and Canada. And so when I went up there, I thought, well, I can do an hour on why everything in the United States is on fire and why we have become a national clown car, etc. But I figured everybody else was probably going to be doing a bunch of that. But, you know, something that's been on my mind. is this

notion that just because we have figured out that there is no evidence for any God anywhere, right? I'm an atheist. I don't really lead with that, even though it's in the title of my show. I've really been leading with humanist. But a lot of us look and act like we have leveled up intellectually to the point where everybody else is the unwashed. And we are the superior thinkers and we really can't be fooled. We are not emotional primates, right?

We're not animated bags of meat running around, clicking and sharing and leaning into whatever sort of strokes our sensibilities. And I'm like, well, you know, I get taken all the time. I will see something on the internet, right? Clickbait comes along and it's like, I knew it. I knew this was true and I like and share it.

But how much due diligence did I really do? And it's become so epidemic that I thought, well, how much hate mail do I want, Cecil, right? I mean, because they're going to say he's tone policing or how dare you tell me or you're a snob, you're talking down your nose, blah, blah, blah. Why would you spend any time on our house when their house is so much worse?

I understand that, right? And I lead with, I'm a proud liberal because I think liberal values are largely humanist values. And I'm a fierce critic of MAGA and I despise the cancer of cruelty and grift in this country and blah. So I did a lot of throat clearing at the beginning, you know, trying to get in front of it. And then I just went through a list of memes and links and videos that we have been sharing. In the freethought humanist atheist space that are absolutely incorrect. And I'll

go ahead and sort of spill the beans on the bookend for it. There's a very, very popular meme about... Donald Trump doing a 1998 interview with People magazine. And he said, you know, if I ever run for office, if I ever get into politics, I'm going to run as a Republican because those people are the stupidest people in the country. Now, he may have said this. In fact,

I kind of think he probably did. But People Magazine had their own research staff go in and look. There's no record that he ever said that to People Magazine. So what's funny, Cecil, is that I went online and I said, you know, we got a lot of stuff to choose from that's been vetted. This particular event, there's no evidence that it ever happened. And people turned on me.

Speaker 4: I bet they did. Speaker 1: Right? They turned on me. Why are you a Trump apologist? I know he said it somewhere. I just can't remember where or to who. And then they say, well, it wasn't people. It was Oprah in the 90s. No, it wasn't Oprah. It was somewhere else. I know what happened, but I can't tell you anything about the who, what, when, or where. And I'm like, well, this is a problem because we have tens and tens and tens of thousands

of documented lies and all of the other grift and awfulness to choose from. That's legitimate. And if you and I share something and we get busted because we didn't source it correctly, that shovels ground from beneath our feet. And I have been amazed to see the parting of the seas. Some people are like, yeah, that's true. You know, we really need to be operating from a position of credibility.

And other people are like, dude, who gives a shit? It's a street fight. If lying helps us defeat the fascists, we're nowhere as bad as they are. He probably said it anyway. Let's go hard. And there's been this sort of tug of war of opinions. You've probably seen some of this in your own circle, right?

Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: Like, we'll on occasion cover a story that's a fact check about something that Trump did And and often the like the social media sphere will create something that isn't real. And I'm reminded of a couple of weeks ago there was a video that was put out and it looked like it had come from Donald Trump's social account, his

true social account. And that video was of Trump beating Carney, the PM of Canada, with a hockey stick. So he was it was a cartoon and they were both in hockey outfits. And I think he checks him into the ground and then like hits him with the hockey stick, et cetera. And that wasn't real. That never came from him.

What came from him was an image that he had posted where Carney was on the ground and it looked like he was maybe checked to the ground by Trump. Donald Trump and he had said something, you know, like, have you had enough or something like that? He had said, and that was on his original true social account. But the video portion of that, the one that was created afterwards with AI was not on his account. And while I understand the sentiment of each one is very similar.

It's not the same thing. Speaker 4: And he didn't. Speaker 2: Actually share a cartoon to his Truth Social. So there is a difference. And it's not picking nits. It is important to get things right. It is important to tell people this is a true thing. Because if we lose the true thing part, what do we got? Now it's just rhetoric versus rhetoric. There's no moral high ground to stand on if you don't have the truth underneath you anymore.

Speaker 1: And I want to encourage people or remind them that I'm all about satire and mockery. Like look, JD Vance, we know that the couch fucking never happened. Like we, we know that there's no evidence for that. The jokes are still hysterical and I still enjoy it. I will admit to that because I like the idea of stripping these supposed powerful and self-important people down to their bones and You know, the satirists have long been on the

front lines of defanging the power players. I love the Internet in that way. You know, after Mitch McConnell shows up, right, he's in the wheelchair and and the guy is vacancy. Right. There's a flashing light. And then the meme burst goes crazy.

They got people plugging him into USB. They've got they've got, you know, he's being wheeled through the corridors by police. Speaker 4: Oh, shit. Speaker 1: Annie from the movie Misery or from the book and movie Misery, you know, like he's been held hostage. I mean, it's awesome. My favorite one so far is Mitch McConnell sitting vacantly looking forward in the passenger seat of a car.

And it says, when you're driving your dog to be put down, but you tell him you're going to the park. That's my favorite one. So I get the stripping them bare, right? Speaker 4: For sure. Speaker 1: But I didn't have to make anything up about Mitch McConnell's condition.

Speaker 4: Sure. Speaker 1: I didn't have to put him in a building falsely. I didn't have to put him in the wheelchair falsely. I didn't have to have him being shown how to vote by someone else whispering in their ear. That's all real stuff. And, you know, especially with the Epstein stuff, you know, this is really hot because I think Donald Trump is a pedophile. I think he is a sexual predator, and I think all these things are true about him.

I mean, the guy was a, what, 15-year pal of Epstein, and now he wants to say that, nah, nobody buys that. Nobody with a functioning cerebral cortex buys that. But there were so many Epstein fakes, and one I show in the speech is is he and Epstein are at this party and in front of them, you got a bunch of 13 year old girls that are all dancing and it's supposedly like a big pedophile party. But that whole video is faked. It's AI and it's rooted in a

still image that was taken from an all adult Victoria's secret party that happened many years before. Well, if I say this is fake, I'm not a Trump-Epstein apologist. I'm not saying I don't think he's a predator, but that's where some people have been going. And I find that kind of frustrating, Cecil.

Speaker 2: I think that there was this comment that Michelle Obama said a while back that was, when they go low, we go high, right? I remember her saying this, and I remember there was a sort of a movement from the people on the left that were, they didn't want to get down in the mud.

Speaker 4: They wanted to make sure that they kept things less, less vicious. Speaker 2: And I think people recognize that the viciousness is part of the system now, but I don't think, I think that they blur the line and say, if the viciousness is part, the other tool that the right uses all the time is misinformation. And so what we should do

is create disinformation and misinformation. If we, We're no longer worried about the viciousness. And I think that that's a wrong step. I think that's a bad thing to do. I think that we need to embrace the truth because if we didn't embrace the truth, why would I follow this side over another side?

Speaker 4: There's no reason to do it. Speaker 2: There's no, I tend to think that there are, you know, obviously there's humanist qualities to the side that I belong to, but I certainly think that those humanist qualities become devalued If I continually lie about things or try to trick people into my position, I don't think that that's worth anything.

There's another piece of this, too, that you've mentioned. It's a very big piece of the talk you give. And it's sort of the arrogance of, I guess, a lot of atheists and how they feel very arrogant in the way they talk to other people. And one of the things you bring up is the Bright Movement movement. And this was something that I think you attribute it to Dennett, who wanted to talk about the atheists and not use

atheists as a term, but instead just call them brights. Like, they're the ones you think. And I'm actually wearing a shirt. This shirt here says secular thinky person on it. And we created this shirt very specifically as an anti-bright thing because we were like, well, I'm secular and I think, but I'm not smarter than anybody else. I'm not necessarily putting myself up above other people.

Speaker 4: I'm just saying, hey, I'm secular and I think. Speaker 2: And so we created this shirt when we heard about the bright movement because we were both Tom and I will thought, well, geez, you just sound like a dick now. And there's a lot of that in the, I find that in the atheist community. And you could see where there was sort of definitely a split in the atheist community where the people who were not humanists, many of them are around them right now, or they have very right coded things that they're doing. And you could see that there was a split between the humanists and the

people who were not humanists in the atheist community. But I found that they were pretty arrogant too back in the day. Speaker 1: I didn't mean to look away for a second while you were speaking, but somebody showed up at my door. I figured it was maybe somebody pissed off about the speech. You had found my home address. They were getting ready to come after me. So Natalie's taking care of that down there.

Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 1: Well, I think it's tribal. I mean, when I was religious, I was superior in many ways. I found the answer with a capital A. I'm smarter than the unwashed heathens. I think we find it nationally. you know, Americans, we say that about others. And we've seen nation tribes who have been superior and they look down on the troglodytes, et cetera. And, you know, it's just a human thing.

And I think my big protest is that we think we are somehow above it or immune or we don't care. And um, it's the dumb shit to Cecil that just, and I mentioned this in the speech, but the pebbles that we trip on when people are simply expressing goodwill.

So I'm sitting somewhere and I sneeze and someone next to me says, bless you. Speaker 4: I'm like, okay. Speaker 1: You know, I, thanks. I can say nothing. I can not, I can smile. Yeah. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 1: There are some people who will use that as an opportunity to take whatever table they're sitting at and make a soapbox out of it and stand up and bleed and puff their chest and say, well, you know, we don't believe that we are sneezing evil spirits as the

druids once did. We don't believe in blessings from on high. That's supernatural. That's mystical, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, just shut up. You're not helping us, man. You are not helping. Someone just trying to, it's just probably not even thinking about it. Have a blessed day. I'm in the freaking drive-thru grabbing a Wendy's burger. At the end, I'm in Oklahoma. Have a blessed day.

Speaker 4: Thanks. Speaker 1: And instead of deciding, because what have I accomplished? Am I going to change their mind or am I going to look like a total asshole and probably further fortify how they feel non-religious people or non-Christians or whatever are?

They're just, what a dick move, man. I was just trying to be nice. And we're not always very good at choosing our battles. I think the overarching lesson is we're humans. And we do what humans do. So if I see something that leans into a bias, this proves MAGA is a cancer. By the way, MAGA is a cancer.

I just want that on the record. But this proves that we are correct in our position. How often do I do my due diligence, especially when it's not usually all that difficult to be able to go through and check other sources? It's getting harder and harder. I mean, you know what it's like, right? So is my corroborating source fake? And is the source that fact-checked that one fake?

And after a while, it becomes a big noise. And now with the deep fakes going on, I do find I'm overwhelmed, man. And I'm kind of scared. When I come back, the segment of our conversation which talks about a certain podcaster who is guilty of spreading misinformation, disinformation,

conspiracy theories, and undefendable batshittery. Hang on. Thank you for your support on Patreon. It really does make a difference.

And with Patreon changing how they do their support model, it used to be like per upload, and now it's a monthly subscription that's going to kick in on November 1st. And I know that there's going to be a big shift in supporters. I don't know how many I will gain or lose, but I think content creators overall are a bit nervous as we head toward the new year, especially if we do this full-time.

Speaker 2: So. Speaker 1: If you like what you hear and you want to support this host and the site and the work, thank you. The website to become a patron is patreon.com slash Seth Andrews. Continuing my conversation, or actually the conversation that Cecil Cicerillo of Cognitive Dissonance had with me just a few days ago.

Speaker 2: I'm a... Spending a lot of time listening to Joe Rogan now because I do this show with Michael Marshall called the No Rogan Experience. Speaker 1: I'm very sorry for your loss, Cecil. Speaker 4: A loss of a lot. Speaker 1: Jesus Christ, that's three hours of pop, isn't it? Speaker 4: It's a loss of time. It's a lot of work, man.

Speaker 2: But really what I find most– what Joe does the most– Is Joe will confirm his own biases as often as he can. So he gets much of his news from social media. So Twitter is a big way in which he gathers information. And then there's no way to vet it because he doesn't care to vet it because it affirms what he already wants to believe. Now, he

will often try to find out if there's something he disagrees with to try to to try to poke holes in it. So he will fact check things he doesn't agree with, but he doesn't fact check things. Speaker 4: Did I say that right? Yeah, he doesn't. Speaker 1: He doesn't fact check things that. that line up.

Speaker 4: Yeah. A hundred percent. He'll he'll, he doesn't care. He doesn't. Speaker 2: And he has a sponsor perplexity and he types often has his assistant type things into perplexity to ask it a question. And he treats perplexity as a supercharged confirmation bias machine.

Speaker 4: So what he'll do is he'll ask it a question. Speaker 2: If it answers in the way he wants it, perplexity is a genius. It's the smartest little boy in the room. If it answers in a way that is against what he already believes, then he tries to find a way around it. What it had said and often what that is, is, well, how could it know? Well, of course, that's captured. Of course, that thing is captured. Of course, that thing doesn't know that covid vaccines are out to poison us because it's

programmed by people who want to protect the pharmaceutical industry or something. He'll say he'll come up with some sort of scenario to make to discredit. The AI that has given him the answer he didn't want to hear. And I one of the things that that strikes me about that is I think that we act like this a lot on our own. If we see something that that that touches us, that makes us feel like this thing

is true, whether or not it's true itself. Actually, or if it's true in spirit, it doesn't matter to me. And I think that it really needs to be true in reality. It doesn't need to just be true in spirit. Speaker 3: Sure. Speaker 2: Is does Donald Trump resent his voters? I think he does.

I think we've seen some evidence of him resenting his voters multiple times. That doesn't necessarily mean that publicly he called them stupid and that he would run as a Republican because they are stupid. Speaker 4: That doesn't mean that that's true. Speaker 2: Now, the spirit of it may be true, but it doesn't necessarily mean it happened in reality.

Speaker 1: I do feel like he holds his base in total contempt, total contempt. But you're right. Well, I'm going to go back to something that you said a second ago about when they go low, we go high, which is one of the big protests. Again, it's a street fight. You got to get in the gutter. This is world war.

You got to be in the trench. We're going to get money. We're going to get nasty. It's it's what going high is what got us here in the first place. And I totally understand this sentiment that they're the ones who have been ignoring or or exploiting or burning down the house. Right. The rule of law is gone. The Supreme Court is compromised. The checks and balances, the Congress, they're either invertebrates or sociopaths, etc. So playing by the rules when the entire system is broken, that's not going

to get us where we need to get. We're going to have to be more cunning than that. I actually kind of agree on that score, right? There are times when we are going to have to be a lot more playing more of Chess, not checkers, less of a reactionary game, and I think we need to go hard.

But I don't think any of that requires that we sell ourselves out or sell out our values. And there's this mistaken concept. or opinion rather, that by maintaining my integrity and not being a lying, cheating, nasty, violent asshole, by not punching Nazis in the street, I want to sing Kumbaya with the enemy and I want to play nice and I'm soft. I'm going to have a pillow soft approach. And I think that's totally binary, right? Humans

love binary thinking. We love it cut and dry and on a meme and a bumper sticker. We want it simple and, Atheists are not immune from wanting things to be simple. All nothing, A, B, yes, no, black, white, good, evil. But the world isn't always that way. And I think there are ways to go hard and strong and even be cunning and harsh and strategic without becoming them. And,

you know, that's proven an interestingly controversial opinion among my fellow people. I think they think, well, you know, they started it. So, hey, now all bets are off, whatever it takes to put him down. And could I be wrong? Absolutely.

But it troubles me, this idea that I got to become them to beat them. I'm not convinced that's the case. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 4: I'm going to play you a video now, Seth. Speaker 2: This is a video that we played on our show years ago. And so viewers of our show may remember it. There's a MAGA provocateur by the name of Brendan Dilley.

And this was posted on Right Wing Watch's page years ago. I want to say it was almost seven years ago he said this. So I'm going to play it for you. It's about two minutes long. I'm going to share it right now with you. It should share it with audio. Speaker 4: Can you see it?

Speaker 1: Yes, I can see. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 4: Okay, here it is. And here's what I'm going to tell you, MAGA. Speaker 1: I'm going to tell this to all you guys. Speaker 5: It's not your responsibility to correct fake news against your enemies. That's the fucking left's responsibility. Some of you guys don't get this. You don't know how to fight. You're busy being virtue signaling dickwads. All right?

Speaker 4: And I love you. But sometimes you're virtue signaling dickwads. Speaker 5: Dilly, why'd you do fake news about Liz Warren and the Manny Pot? Because fuck Elizabeth Warren. Speaker 4: That's why. Speaker 1: I told all of you. Speaker 4: It doesn't have to be true. Speaker 1: It just has to go viral. Speaker 5: And I stand by that statement when it comes to our enemies. Speaker 1: And I'll make my fucking, I'll be okay.

Speaker 4: I'll make my bed. Speaker 1: I'll lay in it. And I'll deal with my creator. Speaker 5: And I'll say, hey, I'm sorry about some of that fake news I spread against terrible people. You think that I know whether Megan Rapinoe is actually a Satan worshiper? Speaker 4: Of course not. Speaker 1: Of course not.

Speaker 4: I have no idea. Speaker 5: There's some stuff that makes you wonder. There's some stuff that makes you wonder, okay? Makes you look, oh, she might be a Satan worshiper. Do I know that definitively? Did I throw that out there and get it to go viral? I had another dipshit yesterday. He tried to fact check me on that one. Why are you taking up for Megan Rapinoe? Why are you defending Megan Rapinoe?

Whether she is or isn't a devil worshiper doesn't fucking matter to me. That dirty piece of shit is a horrible representation of the United States of America and our values. And if all I've got to do is link together a couple of fucking things that make her look like a Satanist to take some shine off that bitch's moment, I'll do it every time.

Speaker 4: A lot of you don't know how to fight. Speaker 5: And a lot of you don't have the fucking guts to do what I'm doing because, frankly, you're probably better people than I am. Speaker 4: I mean, the chance of. Speaker 2: Them being better people is pretty high, I would imagine. Speaker 1: That's a high probability statement.

Speaker 2: Every single person I've ever met in my life is probably better than that guy. Speaker 1: If I had to listen to his voice for longer than what we just did, I would probably stick my head in a blender. Dear God, does he have a following? Jesus, that's insane.

Speaker 2: It reminds me of that movie, The Happening, where you stick the needle in your ear. Speaker 4: That's what I feel like I want to do. Speaker 1: He'll probably be on Rogan next week and Rogan will just stare at him and go, wow, which is pretty much how he approaches anything that, you know, that makes his eyes go gaga.

Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 1: You know, so geez. Speaker 2: Yeah. But I wanted to play that for you because what that tells to me is like, do I want to just react in the same way as this person is reacting, right? Because I can easily power up some AI stuff. create a bunch of fake stuff and get stuff to go viral, I think pretty easily. In fact, one of the things I could do is possibly program

several AI bots to post for me. And one of the best parts about that would be they don't feel any shame about it, right? Like you and I, if we get called out, we post something and it's like, oh, I got that wrong. I don't know about you, but I get embarrassed when I post something that is genuinely untrue, right?

If I post something that I got tricked on, I get embarrassed by that. I think I should be better than that. Speaker 1: And it takes them about three seconds to find it and bring it to your attention, doesn't it? It sure does. I mean, which is, it's, I think, a feature, not a bug. Yeah. But then it's like, oh, shame. Shame.

Speaker 2: There's so many segments on this show where we'll go back and be like, oh, we got this wrong or, oh, we got this wrong. And I think there is, there should be some, some leeway for that, obviously, but I could create an AI, something like an AI that's posting for me. That'll never feel shame. It could just post the wrongest shit ever. And it doesn't matter. It'll just keep posting it over and over again. I'll never look at the comments. It won't give a shit. And so I could do that. I could probably arm a whole bunch of different things to fight against this guy. But like,

I don't know that I ever want to look in the mirror and see Brendan Dilley staring back at me. Yeah. Speaker 1: I would wish that for you as well. You know, there would be an intervention. Well, and on top of that, we know that outrage is the currency of the internet, right?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 1: If we, you know, and there have been a lot of studies done about the things that cause people to engage and return. And of course, This makes people rich. It has made I don't know how many people rich pushing our buttons. And to them, it doesn't make any difference whether or not the facts are there, whether the data supports it. It hits our amygdala and we fire up and we click and like and share and engage and we go there. And before you know it, they

have monetized our genuine sense of justice and our grief about injustice. But we are being manipulated. And when I think about that, I just get angry. I think my sense of justice and my grief about injustice is very precious to me because it speaks to my values. It speaks to the cruelty I want to see defeated and the grift I want defeated and all of these. Someone brought to my attention the term kakistocracy, government by the

worst people. I'd never heard the term until a few months ago. Kakistocracy is now a word that I use in common conversation, and it grieves me. I don't know if we'll survive this in the United States, even after Donald Trump is gone.

Speaker 4: What's next? Speaker 1: The machine that allowed him. What happens if someone actually smart enough to properly manipulate it long term shows up? And I have lost faith in people. I've severed relationships or what's going on. I mean, all of this is extremely personal. And to know that there's some grifter, sociopath, clickbaiter, whatever, who knows that about me and says, oh, if I can get him to click here, my advertisers pay me off and I laugh all the way to the bank.

That is one thing I think that has given me a little bit of pause, but I'm still knee jerky. I mean, it's not like I'm above it all, Cecil. I'm guilty, man. I've shared wrong shit. And I've had to go back and correct the record. And you're right. It's kind of this red-faced, oops, I'm human. I'll do better kind of a thing, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2: I posted a couple years ago, there was a story that came out from Rolling Stone and actually got me not to read Rolling Stone ever again. Whenever I see something from Rolling Stone, I don't even go there. Speaker 4: I won't check it. Speaker 2: I'll try to find the story somewhere else from this point on because they posted a story about COVID. And they had said they had talked to a doctor in– it might have even been Oklahoma. It was maybe Nebraska or one of the states, Missouri. One of those ones by you over there.

Speaker 1: If it was anti-vax, it was Oklahoma. Trust me. It's my home state. Speaker 2: What they said was that the lines were so big at the– emergency room because people were taking ivermectin that other people couldn't get treated. And they spoke to a doctor who said this. Now, admittedly, the headline says, doctor in so-and-so says this. So it is on me, too, because I should have read that headline and said, well, who the fuck is this doctor? And why is this not vetted through the hospital? And why didn't you double check this stuff?

Speaker 4: It's on me, too. Speaker 2: But on the reporter who posted this, because it's a clickbait headline. It's a clickbait headline to confirm my biases that people who are taking ivermectin prophylactically to prevent covid were in the wrong. They weren't doing it based on doctors.

They were doing it based on a viral Internet sensation. That's a bad thing to do. And what what I saw as a person who was sort of fighting against that disinformation was. I saw a way that I could say, hey, here's the folly of your ways. Here you go, guys.

Here's what you're doing wrong. And it's showing out in emergency rooms. And then I posted it. And then afterwards, like a bunch of people were like, that's not a verified source. And I realized after I was done, I had to post an apology that was like, yeah, that's absolutely not a verified force. Speaker 4: What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did I post?

Speaker 3: That. Speaker 2: I should have read the goddamn headline that says it's not a verified source. It's just a dude who said something out loud and the Rolling Stone posted it. So I feel the same way. I wanted to confirm my own biases so hard. I posted something that was incorrect and we need to be careful again.

Speaker 1: I did. And I want to come back to the media, but I did one. This was years and years and years ago about this pastor. He's like in Kenya or something. And he was baptizing people in crocodile infested waters and got eaten. And we were It was an aha moment. Look how stupid people are when they're infected with Christianity.

Speaker 4: Well, there's no doubt. Speaker 1: That Christianity is, you know, especially Fundy Christianity, it is a machine for destruction and harm and bad ideas. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 1: But that story turned out to be bogus. It was just a fake thing that had been flying around. But I'm busy yuck yucking it up. And I like and share because this guy got eaten by a crocodile. So Darwin Award. Ha ha. That kind of thing. But it was never vetted or verified. It never happened. Hemet Meta,

a friendly atheist, actually did a story on that. This free bonus show continues with Cecil of Cog Dis in just a second. Hang on. Do not forget that October the 23rd through the 25th in Huntsville, Alabama, it's the

Rocket City Raisin Conference. The event has two keynotes, and I get to be one of them. I'm going to kick off Saturday as the first keynote, and then Forrest Valky is the closing keynote. So it's almost like a father-son thing. It's like they're going down from age. Let's start with the geezer, and then we'll go down to the young fella. who has boundless energy and good skin and is the really smart one. So thanks for that, Forrest.

And Rocket City Reason, it really is going to be a ball. And I love the fact that it's going to be in Alabama, and people are going to be traveling from all over the country, as I've seen sort of the advance buzz on it. So this one-day conference is going to be at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Marriott in Huntsville, and I believe we're going to get to tour the U.S. Space and Rocket Center on Sunday morning.

Big deal, great conference, get your tickets. For October 23rd through the 25th, the website is rocketcityreason.com. Okay, continuing kind of a coffee table chat. Cecil Cicerillo, who invited me to sit in on cognitive dissonance. Coming back to the media, I'm pissed off because I feel like the media in this country has completely absolved itself. I say completely. Has completely.

In many alarming ways, en masse, absolved itself of the responsibility. Like, how did members of the media even sit at those tables at the correspondence dinner as Donald Trump was insulting the hell out of the free press? Where's the mass walkout?

Where are people who are... Whenever he's calling... Female reporter Piggy, why are the other reporters not immediately in solidarity saying, fuck you, you don't treat us like that? And then you've got the soft sell headlines. RFK Jr., vaccine skeptic, claims this. And I'm like, he's not a vaccine skeptic.

Speaker 4: Denier. Speaker 1: He is a brain-wormed agent of anti-science and wacky conspiracy theories. And yet these soft headlines are everywhere. And I just feel like, why? Why are we giving these people a pass?

And if you want to see true reporting, like hardball reporting, with a few exceptions... You either read Heather Cox Richardson in the United States, a random now random 60 minutes article, which is then surrounded by a bunch of MAGA friendly shit.

Or you have to watch foreign news. You have to go to Britain or Australia and see them talk about our politicians. And, you know, what the media sort of. In that way, complicit, it makes things even worse, right? Finding what's real and what's true. Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can blame a lot of that on the defunding of the– journalism in general because the lower pay they get, the more they have to create headlines that will get.

Speaker 4: People to click on it. Speaker 2: They're going to make a clickbait headline that I'll fall for or a more soft headline for RFK so they can get more people to click on that story. Speaker 1: I saw one this morning. Someone so did this and you won't believe what happened next. I'm like, ah, shit.

I don't want to pay this person off, but I kind of want to find out what happened next. Speaker 2: When I think about confirming my own biases, I'm reminded, you mentioned Mitch McConnell earlier, and I'm reminded of a. Speaker 4: Video I saw this week.

Speaker 2: And it was a video, and I'll post the link on the show notes, but there was a video from Reddit where someone had taken, I think it was just maybe 10 seconds of Mitch McConnell. And They had said they had asked him a question like, give us a thumbs up, Mitch. And he's sort of staring forward, just smiling, not reacting to the camera. And I remember this was before he actually had someone help him vote the other day.

So this is before he actually spoke in public, at least easily found spoken public, because what all the comments underneath this video had said was, He hasn't spoken since he's come out. He's in a vegetative state. They're just wheeling him around, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so like all of these things, they keep posting all these things that say he's not all there. It's not all him. And then I went and I dug because I thought, well, that can't be true. And I dug

and I found an actual audio. Now, I didn't find the video, but I found the audio of him actually giving a short speech to the people as he was wheeled in. So he actually did give a short speech. So he is, there is a person in there. There's somebody there. And I think like all of us wanted, I think a lot of us kind of wanted him not to be alive. If I'm real honest.

Speaker 1: It's like that meme. There's one thing about him being alive is that we realized how happy we would be When he finally kicks it, right? Speaker 2: I mean, because this story has been poking around since he went into the hospital. And there was images that they posted of him smiling in the hospital. And then immediately people were saying, well, are these fake?

Speaker 4: Is this AI? I ran this through a thing. Speaker 2: And People were even saying, I ran it through a thing and it came up as AI, even though a Washington Post wound up finding that it's a real photo. So again, I think what we have is... are a push from ourselves to want something to be true so much that we're willing to share or talk about something as if it already happened. Like, I think a lot of people want Mitch McConnell not to be able to speak.

They want that to happen. They want that to see that because then that proves to them that the Republicans have been lying all along about Mitch McConnell's condition. McConnell's camp has been lying about his condition, etc., I don't think that this stops us from thinking about that. I mean, we watched him the other day sitting at a large group of people have to get reminded not to vote with the Democrats who.

Speaker 4: Literally just voted right before him. Speaker 2: There's somebody behind him tapping him on the shoulder like, no, no, you want to say you want to say I hear not. No, you want to say I, I, I. And so so I think that we can there are definitely some. some things we can guess about Mitch McConnell's condition, but I don't think that we can say Mitch McConnell is in a vegetative state.

Speaker 1: Well, and the binary thinkers would hear you say that and think, well, Cecil is saying that McConnell is 100% lucid and he's not addled, you know, and all those things, which is not remotely what you just said. I mean, if he had 10 seconds of lucidity and Or he was coached in what to say in some way. And he was parroting that. I mean, there were a whole lot of other. We've all seen. Was it two years ago when he was standing at the podium? I don't remember the occasion. And he's being a Heska question by

a member of the press corps. And he just goes vacant. He's like, eh, just staring. Speaker 4: He shut down for like 15 seconds. Speaker 2: Someone had to come behind him and be like, hey, Mitch, are you okay? And he was just like staring straight ahead. Speaker 1: They led him off. He was like Spock's brain. Literally, they just grabbed him by the shoulder and they just sort of whisked him out of the room. So we know that the guy is several fries short of a happy meal. We know that there's a problem here. But

if you say this specific instance shows him or reveals that he did speak in a few coherent sentences, there are some people who are going to say all or nothing. And I think that's the problem. Nuance is hard. And the fact that I wake up in the morning and I've had to partition out my internet because it's hard for my mental health. I found myself depressed. I was overwhelmed.

I was exhausted. which is probably what a lot of MAGA wants me exhausted is the opposition, right? They want to overwhelm me. And I've had to punctuate when I log on and which sources I read. Now, granted, you know, social media makes that hard. I don't know why I'm starting to get stuff. I'm getting shit from the department of war. And the Department of Education. So I'm guessing

they're jamming. Like, did Zuck just subscribe me to this shit? Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't know. Speaker 4: Facebook's been like that for a while. Speaker 2: They're starting to just add a bunch of stuff that you haven't even seen before. Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out what to do about X. I still, I don't post personally, but like the podcast and a video, when it releases, I have a program and it sends it out to the platforms. And so there is still an X account. But X being kind of a Nazi bar.

Speaker 2: Yeah, man. Speaker 1: I feel like I need to just pull the plug. Would that even do anything? Have you taken a position on X and what to do about it? Speaker 4: X is either Nazis, bots, or robot Nazis. It's nothing there now.

Speaker 2: If you go to anything on X and you click on something, there will be the most racist, hateful shit under anything that is posted by anybody on the left. It's the worst site possible. And they don't do a lot of hygiene. They don't go in and clean it up.

I think that they don't do that because they want these higher numbers that they can sell to advertisers to say, look how many people and users we have on our platform. But I've heard multiple times from Elon Musk, because, again, I listen to the to the Joe Rogan experience. There is oftentimes he'll either talk about what Elon said or Elon will say. Well, there was they initially said there was only a few bots on there when they tried to sell it to me. But then I found that there was a bunch of bots and then he'll claim

that he got rid of them. But then now it seems like Joe and I think even Elon are both sort of they've sort of said, well, you just can't get rid of them. There's just nothing you can do. You just kind of can't do it. And I think like there just isn't any will to get rid of that stuff. There's not any will to do. to cut that stuff down. Cause it's better for them monetarily. I mean, like it makes more sense if they can turn to any advertiser and say, we have 700,000 daily users or whatever,

that's better than we have, you know, 250 verified thousand verified human users. Speaker 4: And then the rest, we can't verify. Nobody's going to buy that space in comparison. Speaker 1: So I'd like to thank Elon for, Personally busting the boy genius billionaire myth. Yeah, man. All he had to do was shut his hole. Just shut that aperture. under your nose and ride the tony stark myth and do

your tesla thing And then he buys X and goes political and starts to give his opinion in Doge and the far-right party in Germany. And just like all you had to do was shut your hole. And then I'm shouting at the board of directors at Tesla going, what is your function? Like, what does the board do?

Speaker 4: Just get rid of them. Just fire them. Speaker 1: What other CEO of any company would lose the amount of money for an organization and not get shown the door? I just want to have a personal conference call with each one of them and ask, are you, in fact, like Mitch McConnell, vacant between the years?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: He's made people who were staunch green advocates hate Teslas. Speaker 4: I don't know how that's possible, but he made them hate that car. Speaker 1: That's always a good business model. Show contempt for your base customer. Good thinking, Elon.

Speaker 2: This makes me think about famous people, though. And one of the things that we run into when we talk about misinformation and disinformation is often people will take a famous person whether it be a famous person who's now deceased, like a Mark Twain or an Albert Einstein, or modern people like, you know, maybe Stephen King, or I have a link I'll put in the show notes about a

Billie Eilish video that was altered to portray her refusing to release music until the war ends that Trump has created, right? This is a Reuters fact check. But this is something that will happen is as... people out there will find a mouthpiece for this idea they have or something, and they'll alter it to make it seem like that person said this thing.

Speaker 4: What do you think is behind that, Seth? Speaker 1: Well, one of the problems is that the fake quote may align with the position, opinion, and value that that person had in real life. You know, Twain was a fierce opponent of religion, and there's a lot of vetted Twain quotes out there. But, you know, if you see a fake, it sounds like something Twain would have said.

And so it's so much easier to lean into this Stephen King. I gave the Stephen King example where he was banned from X because he called Elon Musk the first lady. Right. Because Musk was kind of in bed with Trump, et cetera. But, you know, it turned out not to be true. Stephen King was never banned from X.

That specific incident didn't happen. But Stephen King. despises Elon and roasts him constantly, and Trump, etc. Another angle of this is like the founding fathers, Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Washington. In many cases, they wrote and spoke very boldly and fiercely in defense of our secular democracy. Many were fierce critics of especially organized religion. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, some great,

great examples. So if we see a founding father, quote, that says definitively that religion is a cancer on humanity and the United States would never have been founded as a Christian nation. That sounds like something that reflected their secular values. And we share it if they didn't actually say it, but it did reflect kind of what they may have thought that becomes this area where the apologist, right? The, uh,

the apologist for sharing a personal truth or non-truth, they say, well, it's what he meant. And I think all somebody like, he's not even a pseudo historian, David Barton, he's a liar and a fake.

Speaker 4: He's a liar, yeah. Speaker 1: In Christian circles. He has no back, for those who don't know, sorry, Cecil Kramer, real fast. David Barton has no background or education in history. And yet he is being paraded around evangelical Christian nationalist circles as someone who can chronicle history about the Judeo-Christian founding of our nation and the Christian founding fathers, who apparently all wore crosses and prayed at meals and waved the Christian flag above

the American flag, according to Barton, right? The guy's just a total liar. And so whenever... We post something that says, no, the David Bartons of the world are full of shit. And then those people find out that our sourcing was wrong.

We look like idiots. And there's no reason for it, given the fact that we have dozens upon dozens upon dozens of really good source material that don't fall apart under scrutiny. It doesn't cost us anything to use the real and discard the fake. That's my point. One last short break on this free bonus show. I will be

right back after this. Continuing the conversation I had just a few days ago on the Cognitive Dissonance show as I filled in the co-host chair for Tom.

Speaker 2: Before we end, I wanted to ask you, because I live in a pretty blue area up here in Illinois. I live near Chicago. I'm not in Chicago anymore, but I'm near Chicago. And so, you know, there is a red element out here in the suburbs, but it's not, you know, MAGA country, so to speak. I know you live in a pretty red state, pretty red area. So far, Trump hasn't been doing great as far as most of

the things that a president can do. Are you starting to see any cracks at all in some of the diehardness that has come from the deepest, reddest areas of our country? Speaker 1: I've noticed a lot of quiet quitting.

Speaker 4: Ah. Speaker 1: So there used to be a lot of Trump flags. And I don't know what it is about Trumpers, but they love their freaking flags. I mean, flag, flag, flag, flag, flag. They were everywhere. Those flags are not being displayed nearly as much. I'm thinking of one guy. He's on my tennis team. He voted for Trump and he bought into the billionaire genius, you know, outsider myth. And of course,

the whole time I'm banging the drum going. Hey, read Tony Schwartz's expose for The Art of the Deal and look at The Apprentice and the writings of the producers and look at his history and his father bailing him out and bankrupting casinos and predation and women and blah, blah. I was literally trying to convince him. No luck. Right.

No luck. So Trump's going to come and he's going to save the country and go America. And then and then he has, especially in the last year. You can see he's looking around going, uh-oh. Now, why it took him a decade, I don't know. But he's finally come to this point where he's like, uh-oh. We're at war with Iran, and we want to annex Canada and conquer Greenland.

And he's posting, what, AI videos of himself dropping feces bombs on Americans? They just literally started to have an aha moment. And he hasn't come to the point where he's like, I was wrong. I will now reverse my position and join you progressives on the front lines to defend democracy. I don't think he'll ever get there. But he went strangely mute. And then we were at a gathering.

And I heard him make a joke at the expense of MAGA. And I thought, okay. He not only got to the point, somehow, after all these years, he did get to the point where he... distanced himself, but he felt bold enough in my presence to actually dig at the community that he once was a part of. And I think there's a lot of that. Now, the quiet

quitters piss me off because I don't think they should get to skate. You are part of the machine that brought all of the damage to this country. And now you want to just say, oh, sorry, and then just fade off into the distance. I get pissed about that.

Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 1: But then I think, well, they're waking up. How many of us have had to wake up from bad ideas? Should I create a space for them so that they may one day, you know, I don't know, join me over here in a more egalitarian point of view? I struggle with it. I don't even know what the right answer is to this question, Cecil.

Speaker 2: I think one of the things that you touched on, though, is Is it possible for us, if we, there's been a lot of people that I've run into that have said basically, I don't ever want to deal with anybody who's ever voted for Trump ever again in my life. I don't want to deal with them. I don't want them over here. Get away from me. You're the worst people, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that was me. Speaker 3: Sorry. Speaker 1: Last week, that was me. Speaker 2: If we jettison every single person who voted for Trump in the last election, we are not going to win another election because they beat us last time. And you're not going to energize six or seven million people to come out, outpace them.

Speaker 4: I don't think. Speaker 2: So you're going to have to go from the pool of voters that you already have, and you're not going to have enough die-off of the MAGA to cause that to be enough for you to win. You've got to win hearts and minds on the other side. in order for you to do that. Now, I think there, I, I, I want to think, I'm not saying that it's true, but I want to think that a lot of people were struggling financially in many different ways in Even still

that Biden created a pretty soft landing from the from covid. But still, I think it still struck a lot of people and a lot of people were really financially struggling. And when you're financially struggling, what you do is you flip the thing on and off until you find something that works. And I think a lot of people in our country struggle. I don't know how many, but I think that there certainly was a group of voters that were just looking to reset the system as quickly as possible because it wasn't working for them. And I think

that that is something that that I can't look at those people or I shouldn't look at those people. I do kind of, but I shouldn't look at those people and say, hey, you really fucked up. What I should do is say, look. this is not worked out. Let's try something else because they are open to trying something else.

Speaker 1: We saw, like I saw a lot of single issue voters. There is a culture of people where if you are anti-abortion, you are now, if you are pro-life, you are now preventing baby murder. Speaker 4: A hundred percent. Speaker 1: And everything else is off the table because if I was to vote for a Democrat or against the Republican, I would be complicit in the murder of the unborn.

And so they become single-issue voters, laser-focused on one thing, and then they can shut their brain off about everything else. I had a conversation. It was almost a two-hour conversation on the phone with someone who was a Trumper. And we talked like every six months for some reason. And it's usually about politics, and they usually call me. And they're like, okay, liberals did this, and I want you to explain what's going on here. And I'm like, do you really want to go down this road? Because it's going to be at least an hour and a half.

And they're like, yes, tell me all about it. And so, I found myself going, I'm like, look, if you were to raise a child, let's say you had a son and your son did this to women and said, grab him by the pussy and move on him like a bitch and was a 15-year friend of the planet's most famous pedophile and was really marked by failure and grift and cruelty and all these other things, creeping around dressing rooms and And he had the hots for his own daughter.

What if your son had said this about his own child, about his own hot daughter, you know? And I went through this list and then I went through some of the headlines that are going on. This was right after Rob Reiner, the director and his wife were horribly slaughtered by their own son. Yeah. Donald Trump. First thing he did wasn't to say this is horrific and must be condemned.

My condolences to the family. He came forward and he said, well, you know, Reiner was he had Trump derangement syndrome. And that's the kind of shit that goes down. Right. So I said, I'm like, how how does a moral person respond to this? And after a while, this person got more and more quiet. And then they said something remarkable.

They said, well, if if Trump is a bad person, what else would I do? I have nowhere to go. It was unthinkable that they would vote Democrat, right? Better dead than Democrat. Democrat is the devil. You know, Democrat is socialism, communism, Russia. It's the end of the world.

It's the apocalypse. And that's the big hump to get over. And so there I am going, well, I'm a Democrat and I hold this position. Is that Too controversial. I have this position. Don't you think that's rather humanitarian? I believe this. Do you think I'm an awful person? Do you think I want all these things? I'm desperately trying to produce the crack that lets in the light. But Jesus, it's a long game. And I don't know if it's going to produce anything. But it was a moment where

I felt like they had... This person had gotten to the point where they had to say. OK, well, is there another option and what would it be? And maybe that seed is maybe it's growing, you know, in the in the darkness of the closet over there somewhere.

Speaker 2: So, yeah, the the even a demotivated Trump voter is better than nothing. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: So even if they won't bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, if they bring themselves not to vote, that is that is at least a minus one, which is certainly a positive in some way.

Speaker 1: You think there's going to be a bloodbath in the midterm? I mean, I don't want to get optimistic because I feel like I don't believe in jinxes, but I don't want to jinx it, man. Speaker 4: I sure hope so. Speaker 2: Tom and I talked about this a couple weeks ago, and I had said to him, I said, this is where the rubber hits the road because we know that the economy is much worse than it was two years ago.

So we know that there are real metrics and real people feeling real financial pain right now throughout the country. Gas prices hits everybody. So we know that there are people feeling this financial hurt, which is what they had said caused this sort of change from Biden to Trump, that's what caused it was mostly people who were upset financially. Well, now we know they should be more upset financially, so

that should cause it to change back. If it doesn't, then I've really thought different things about America, and I really have to I really have to change my mind about what America is and what American values really are.

Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. I think Trump has been a black light on the bigotry that I mean, we always knew there was bigotry here. Speaker 4: Sure. Speaker 1: But I was so naive. I didn't realize that. I mean, I never thought I'd see white supremacists marching in front of Disney. You know, I just.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I saw the rise of the seculars, the religious nuns, and I naively thought, oh, yes, here we are. We're going to become a more progressive humanistic country. Yeah. And then I saw people in my circle on my own family tree. And it's like Trump gave them permission to say the shit. That they have been saying under their breath behind closed doors. Now they can go out and shout it from the mountaintops. And it's awful. So, you know, beyond the fact that he was going to be the

big rescuer for many, I think he has validated their awfulness. Yeah. And I have distanced myself in many ways from them. But, you know, I'm hoping for a pendulum swing. I hate the word hope. It just sounds so empty-calorie. But what are we going to do? Go home? Like, I don't they want me to take my ball and leave.

Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 1: And I just I think, no, I think we got to stick with it. Outlast them. There's a politician. He's running for governor, Massey in Oklahoma. And he has put Trump on all of his campaign materials is like in almost every scene of the television ads. It's in all of his print material, etc., And he's totally tethered himself to Trump. And I have found myself going, please continue. Please,

please put Trump on everything you do until the midterms, man. Speaker 2: What an indictment that would be if he winds up losing. That would be something else. Speaker 1: Please, please run on Trump and for the midterms, man. And so I'm kind of hoping.

Speaker 2: That term to be something. Hey, Seth, if people were going to find your stuff, where would they look? Speaker 1: Oh, I'm easy to find online. Just Google my name or the website and the platform and the podcast, thethinkingatheist.com. I always like to say, I am not the thinking atheist.

I'm not a great thinker. I just flap my gums and tell stories and take calls and have really smart guests, okay? But you can go to thethinkingatheist.com or my personal website, sethandrews.com. And that's also, thethinkingatheist.com is also a great resource if you go to the events page for conventions and events that are fast approaching. There's a lot of good stuff where people get together and we learn things and we hang and we just, I don't know, it's just good

medicine to be among friends. Freedom from Religion, their national convention's on the way. And then Rocket City Reason in late October in Huntsville, Alabama. They're doing a freaking free thought event in Alabama. Speaker 4: That's awesome.

Speaker 1: So anyway, all that's at thethinkingatheist.com. Dude, always a pleasure to be able to hang out. Thanks for letting me play along. Speaker 4: Thanks for coming on, Seth. We appreciate it, man. Speaker 3: Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter. For a complete archive of podcasts and videos, products like mugs and t-shirts featuring The Thinking Atheist logo, links to Atheist pages and resources, and details on upcoming free thought events and conventions, log on to our website, thethinkingatheist.com.