Hey atheists — I have a question. Is Lily Jay fake?

If you’ve hung out with the atheist communities on YouTube or Instagram (and if you haven’t, congratulations!) you’ve probably encountered Lily Jay. She’s a chirpy blonde Australian woman, and convert to Islam, who makes short videos in which she tries to poke holes in atheist ideas. Her content is incredibly stupid, but she does have 3 million followers. Here’s an example of the bad, but fortunately brief, arguments she makes.

You want more evidence of stupidity? Here’s another example. There’s so much more on her YouTube channel.

She also rejects evolution for the dumbest reasons.

We evolutionists say we all evolved from one-celled organisms, but we don’t have any 2-cell or 3-cell organisms. Checkmate, atheists!

She’s all over social media. She doesn’t just pester atheists with her nonsense, but there are also lots of videos that start Hey Christians, Hey Hindus, Hey Buddhists, Hey feminists, Hey vegetarians, etc., etc., etc. all with the same sort of stupid gotcha claims. She is incredibly obnoxious. I’ve long been in the habit of instantly scrolling away when that face and the word Hey… appears.

She not only has a huge personal following, but she claims to have built a charitable organization, the Lily Jay Foundation, which has been opening up orphanages and mosques all over Africa. Or has it?

The foundation she recently established, the Lily Jay Foundation, also has a massive following.

Its logo often adorns banners that appear in her videos, usually fixed behind her.

In one of those videos, posted in February, viewers are introduced to “our newest children in Africa”.

They wear white T-shirts, adorned with the same Lily Jay Foundation logo and the Ugandan flag.

“We washed them, gave them new clothes, everything a child needs to grow up in a positive environment,” the voiceover says, over images of happy children.

Except…these propaganda videos all seem to be made with AI.

The woman who appears at the start of the video, enthusiastically announcing the establishment of the orphanage, is not the real Lily Jay.

This blonde woman is a fabrication, made with artificial intelligence. So too are the children with lollipops, and the foundation’s banner behind her.

Further, no one seems to be able to find these charitable constructs via independent sources.

The Ugandan Registration Services Bureau initially confirmed to ABC NEWS Verify that there was no orphanage registered under the Lily Jay Foundation name, or “Ada Nur”, the name Lily Jay has given to the orphanage on her website.

It turns out the foundation isn’t even registered as a charity — it’s a logistics firm.

The Lily Jay Foundation registered its first ABN in 2025, but at the bottom of the foundation’s website is the admission that it is not an actual charity.

“Lily Jay Foundation is a next-generation social enterprise and high-speed humanitarian logistics firm executing rapid aid deployment in global crisis zones,” it read.

“To maintain absolute speed and independence, we operate as a private commercial structure funded by voluntary project sponsorships, which fuel our high-speed supply chain and are currently not tax-deductible.”

If you’re curious about what anyone would have to gain by setting up a fake charity, or why they would do it, the answer is simple.

Lily Jay — real name Lily Jay Hinson — does not appear to currently reside in Australia and details about the 31-year-old’s life are difficult to pinpoint.

Her social media account shows a life of jet-setting luxury, business class travel and expensive-looking jewellery.

Clues online indicate she is originally from the Sunshine Coast and had attempted a career in music and dance before pivoting to become an Islam influencer.

I will be curious to see if her popularity starts to drop, or if YouTube or Instagram kill her lying, phony channels. But I’m not holding my breath — she says what believers want to hear, so it’ll probably continue.

Oops. Her instagram account has already been deleted.

Welcome to my den of iniquity

A military police officer turned researcher got a job as a corrections. No one will be surprised that she discovers that prisons are a hotbed of ugly attitudes and hateful beliefs.

In my observation, the sex offenders seemed to express the most frequent adoration and fealty for Trump.

They had violated the most fundamental boundaries of human empathy, and they appeared to find something familiar in a politician who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” who had been found liable for sexual abuse in the E. Jean Carroll case, who treated women’s bodies as territory to be conquered. They would gather closest to the TV when he spoke, nodding along when he denied accusations, claimed victimhood, attacked his accusers. The people convicted of predatory crimes identified with rhetoric that mirrored their own rationalizations.

Not surprised by that at all. What is more troubling is that his fellow corrections officers were almost as bad. The rot was a product of the environment, that even the people with more tolerant and thoughtful beliefs would intentionally suppress themselves while the wicked would rage. The description made me think of another place.

The break room had its own speech rules. Conservative officers announced their politics daily and loudly, with no apparent thought that anyone might disagree. The rest of us kept our mouths shut until we sussed out who was in our lane. I privately thought of that second group as the “low-key lefties.” There were not many of us, and some had come to the job from social work. For months I believed my coworkers were almost universally conservative. I was wrong, in an instructive way: the visible politics of the facility was universally conservative, because only one kind of politics could be said out loud there. The environment shaped more than conduct: it decided which beliefs could be spoken, and the beliefs it permitted were the ones that matched how the place already ran.

Sound familiar? Flip the script and that sounds a bit like more progressive environments where conservatives are squelched and liberals express themselves freely. It sounds a bit like here.

And that’s good. The alternative is a den of lies and hatred, like the discussions going on among corrections officers.

The daily subjects rarely varied: their love of Donald Trump, the evils of socialism, the evil ex-wives, the adult children who no longer called. They lamented, often, that the days were gone when an officer could settle things with an inmate with his fists and face no consequences. And trans people. Not a day passed without a long transphobic rant, though trans people were maybe one percent of the incarcerated population, and the officers doing the ranting could go weeks without interacting with one. The centerpiece was a claim repeated as established fact and never once sourced: that the state was spending millions of dollars per trans inmate on gender reassignment healthcare. Years later, records requests filed by hostile conservative media put a real number on it: through mid-2024, Washington’s prison system had spent $592,577.67 total on gender-affirming healthcare, across 44 incarcerated people. That works out to roughly $13,000 per person, around one percent of the break room’s per-person claim, and the sourcing matters: even the outlets working hardest to inflame the issue could not document anything close to the figure repeated daily in that room. I later recognized the same ratio on cable news: a group that is roughly one percent of the country, discussed nightly at a frequency that suggested it was half.

Yuck. I would like to hang out in a place that is the opposite of that.

For the rest of the world, the author makes a suggestion.

None of this is fate, and the fixes are not mysterious. Stop using prisons as the country’s largest mental health facilities, so the people warehoused for illness get a hospital instead of a tier. Change what the correctional officer’s job selects for, through staffing levels, training, and real mental health support, so the rational adaptation stops being callousness. Treat empathy as what the research shows it to be, a teachable skill: a meta-analysis of eighteen randomized controlled trials found that empathy training works, with a medium effect size, across ages and settings. And hold the algorithms accountable for what they amplify. Each of those deserves its own article and its own model legislation, and that is work this publication exists to do.

I’m sorry, Canada

The personal apology of a powerless person in the United States doesn’t matter much, but I sincerely am sorry for what our country is doing to you. Actually, we should be apologizing to the whole world, but Canada is our neighbor and our “silly old deranged grandpa president” is lashing out at them again.

Donald Trump is imposing 50% tariffs on most Canadian goods in response to the country retaliating against previous US tariffs, the White House announced Monday, declaring Canada has unfairly discriminated against American cars, alcohol and dairy products.

Sorry.

Sometimes senile old people get institutionalized, and they are cranky and resentful, and they kick and pinch and slap at the people who are hired to help them, and the relatives (unless they are terribly entitled) feel horrible about it. At least, though, their deranged elder loved one is being confined for their own safety, and is typically too old and feeble to do serious harm. Unfortunately, our foul-tempered nasty old geezer is running free, and has the vast power of the USA at his fingertips, and all the hired help seem to be more interested in enabling him than in being responsible guardians.

Jamelle Bouie knows what he’s talking about.

The responsible thing to do here would be to take all his dangerous toys away from him and put him in a luxurious retirement home with lots of gold geegaws glued to the walls and let him rot away. Unfortunately, too many other people are profiting off their proximity to the demented old fart.

My terrible confession

I get up early every morning, and practically the first thing I do is check the news to see if our ghastly president is dead yet. I have high hopes that sometime in the near future he’s going to suffer a miserable painful death (or a quick painless one, I don’t care), and instead every morning I discover that he has instead done something incredibly stupid and destructive, and our representatives in government have done nothing significant to stop him. And then I feel deep disappointment.

It’s a poor way to start my day, but it’s every day right now. Yeah, I’m a terrible person, but that guy is worse.

Now I have to go for a walk to temporarily clear my head of all this despair.

I’m probably the only person to feel this way.

What? The all-meat diet isn’t a panacea?

I don’t follow the day-to-day activities of the Peterson family, Jordan and Mikhaila, so I had just assumed that they were still pushing that cure-all diet of eating nothing but beef and salt. They aren’t! They’ve given up and shifted to a series of new diets. Mikhaila in particular is a real flibbertigibbet on her claims. The all-beef diet is so 2018.

In 2018, the all-beef diet had cured Jordan’s depression, tens of millions of people learned. But in 2026, Mikhaila admitted that her dad’s mental woes had not vanished: “it’s not the kind of depression you can normally diet and exercise away.” The carnivore diet had helped, she now claimed, but the much-vaunted magic bullet had been an exaggeration. It hadn’t even worked for her: in 2020, she thought beef was making her sick, so she stopped eating beef and switched to lamb and bison. Why? She hypothesized—and so much of what she does is hypothesizing and marketing her unproven conjectures—that North American beef was aged more and the ageing of the beef somehow made her sick. Croatian beef, eaten while on a trip, apparently wasn’t aged and she could digest it fine, but since she didn’t live in Croatia, she had to make changes. So, her exceptional diet was in like a lion, out like a lamb.

But now the all-lamb diet is also obsolete. She flipped through a whole series of hypothetical causes for illnesses, and hypothetical treatments.

The answer, at first, was her breast implants, which she had removed. Then, it was the “terrible tree allergies”she experienced while living in Tennessee, giving her brain fog. Subsequently, she moved to Miami in 2022, but the ill health did not abate. It turns out there was mould in her Florida house, which forced her to completely renovate it, sell it, and move to Arizona to undergo “mould treatment.” (I will be using the Canadian/British spelling; it is written “mold” in the United States.)

And so she took to her microphone to denounce mould as an invisible cause of illness. She created the website biotoxin.com to share papers linking mould to every conceivable disease and condition—autism, migraine, pain, even Parkinson’s disease. Sure, you can find individual studies showing preliminary evidence that there might possibly be some kind of link between mould exposure and, let’s say, dementia; but this should not be understood as “mould causes dementia.”

It’s not mold (mould) anymore, though. Her latest fad is…mitochondria. Maybe health problems are caused by bad mitochondria?

Mitochondria are real: they are the little factories inside of our cells charged with turning our food into energy. Some people have actual mitochondrial diseases because a key component inside their mitochondria is mutated. A much vaguer phenomenon known as mitochondrial dysfunction is also real, but it has been grossly exaggerated and serves as one of many boogeymen du jour for the Make America Healthy Again movement. Mikhaila Peterson had to jump on the bandwagon, and her first mention of it on her podcast appears to be from early 2023. So, now, this is her main culprit.

It’s all garbage noise, lacking in empirical evidence or supporting clinical studies, but that’s what enables her incessant flitting from cause to cause to cause, endlessly using her speculations to promote products that she can sell on her website. She’s a classic snake oil peddler. You don’t need to invest in a wagon and a fancy painted sign, and go to all the trouble of traveling from town to town anymore — just put up a website and take credit card orders, and when the grift dries up, switch in a new website.

The author of this article points out how transparent and simple Mikhaila’s game is by playing it himself. For instance…

I want to show how easy it is to construct these stories. I opened my old molecular biology textbook (Molecular Cell Biology, 4th edition, by Lodish and others) at a random page (769, if you’re playing at home) and imagined a theory I could promote on Mikhaila’s podcast based on the information that was on that page. My textbook reminded me that myosin is a molecular motor inside our cells and that it moves, like a train, on actin filaments. And funnily enough, you can break myosin down using an enzyme called papain. In what is papain found? The papaya fruit.

I could now use this knowledge to go on her podcast and, with adequate confidence and calm in my voice, promote my papain-free diet, sure to cure brain fog and chronic fatigue and likely to help you build muscles. Myosin, after all, is crucial to cell function. You don’t want it to break down, now do you? I might also be able to find a molecule that blocks the action of papain and sell it as a supplement so that people could continue enjoying papaya without feeling sluggish. And if the papaya-eating masses are not a big enough consumer base, I could add that other fruits contain similar enzymes that break down—read “damage!”—the essential proteins we need: pineapples, figs, kiwis, mangoes. All the more reason to platform me and my theory.

This is how you take molecular research, grossly misinterpret it, and turn it into a profitable health crusade.

Oh my god. I have concerns about my loss of income with retirement, and I glanced to the left of my computer, and I have shelves full of books on genetics, the biology of cancer, cell biology, and evolution. I’m sitting on a gold mine! I have a lot of basic knowledge about cellular processes, and about the developmental and evolutionary history of those processes, and with a trivial amount of effort I could turn all that into a wonderful grift.

If only I could come down with Alzheimer’s in the next year, a specific form of neuronal deterioration that selectively takes out any sense of integrity, self-respect, and restraint. Or maybe a serious blow to the head that scrambles my frontal cortex? It’s going to take a serious bit of brain damage to allow me to compete with Mikhaila.

Ugly man, ugly statue

Serves him right. This sculptor thought he could cash in on the Charlie Kirk frenzy, but it backfired on him — now he’s left holding the bag.

A New York sculptor has been left furious after spending $100,000 of his own money to build a lifesize statue of Charlie Kirk, only to find that no one wants to buy it.

Sergio Furnari, originally from Italy, had hoped the statue of the deceased far-right activist, which he intends to display in Times Square, would raise “millions” of dollars. Instead, he said he has been inundated by messages from people saying they intend to urinate on the sculpture.

Not only do they want to piss on it because Kirk’s reputation is in the toilet, but man, that is one ugly-ass statue.

“I wasn’t a fan of Charlie,” he said. “Like one thing that I couldn’t stand about him while he was alive [was] when he was talking about Palestine. [Kirk would say]: ‘Oh no, Palestine doesn’t exist.’ I thought: ‘Well, this guy must be out of his mind.’”

Instead, Furnari said he made the statue in an effort to “glorify and to exercise the first amendment, this freedom of speech” – although at points during the conversation, Furnari also said he made it to support Charlie Kirk’s wife; to “glorify democracy”; and to “commemorate a person”.

Sergio Furnari with his statue of Charlie Kirk. Photograph: Sergio Furnari
He later added: “Why am I making the statue? The same reason why Michelangelo did the Pietà, or Michelangelo did the David, or Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Why? Just to commemorate a moment, you know, a person.”

Right, it’s all the same reason: to make money. He thought it would be lots of money, but it turns out to be negative numbers of money.

Until then, Furnari is left with a 6ft 4in statue of a renowned racist, which he has spent $100,000 making, and which no one wants to buy. Maybe it is cursed after all.

Nice summary. That should be how we remember Kirk — as a big ol’ racist.

Guess who else is back?

One of the virtues of the heat is that we have lazily allowed our backyard to run wild. Thigh-high grasses, thistles, strange forbs, all kinds of happy weeds are growing everywhere, and with them comes the fierce invertebrates. Welcome home, Argiope aurantia! The queen of our yard has returned, finding a bounty of grasshoppers and other insects thriving in her domain!

Our backyard is fenced off and isolated from the sidewalk and road, so I hope none of the philistines in the city works department are going to complain and order it all cut down. I like my personal backyard jungle.