Fragment 176–191
2nd March 2026
Longtime member Pippa emailed us the other day after she heard Bronwyn talking about Thomas Driver on our podcast. She said:
After listening to your podcast episode yesterday I was rather delighted, on a tour by the Friends of Karori Cemetery, to come across Thomas’s grave! As mentioned, it’s tucked away down a bank and you’d never find it unless someone showed it to you. Here you can see the plaque from the American Magician’s Society and broken wand.
In the last few days a new video has been released by Mike Winger, where he talks extensively about another misbehaving Christian “prophet” from the US. This time Chris Reed is in the firing line, for basically the same misdeeds as I documented recently for Shawn Bolz - being caught red-handed using hot reading techniques. In this instance, during the Covid years someone called Todd was on a video conference call with Chris, and he became suspicious of just how accurate Chris’ prophetic words were. Chris was mentioning dates, addresses and names of family members and friends - the kind of information you could easily gather from social media accounts.
Todd checked the social media accounts of some of these other people on the conference call, confirming that the details that were being offered by Chris “from God” were all publicly visible on their Facebook account. He then messaged a friend of his, Ben, while he was still on the call with Chris, and expressed his disbelief and disappointment in this false prophet. Ben suggested asking Chris to give a prophetic word for him, which Todd did - he told Chris that he had a friend called Ben Fitzgerald, who would like “a word” of prophecy. Meanwhile Ben quickly logged into his Facebook account and changed some key details of his personal profile.
Sure enough, a few minutes later when Chris started channeling messages from God for Todd’s friend Ben, the details about Ben’s life that Chris relayed all matched the fake information that Ben had just updated his Facebook profile to show.
On top of Chris’ lying, there’s the all-too-normal sexual misbehaviour, along with suspected drug use, and even an attempt to make it appear as if Chris can suddenly speak Russian, passing on a message in Russian from God to a congregant. If you’re thick-skinned enough to watch two and a half hours of a conservative Christian shaming other conservative Christians, here’s the video:
For me at least, it’s quite gratifying to watch someone within the religion who has the bravery to call out others for their misdeeds. It seems that Mike’s become trusted enough within the evangelical community that many senior people who work behind the scenes in megachurches, and who see how two-faced and immoral their leaders have become, are choosing to hand over copies of damning phone call recordings, emails, messages and more to him, so that he can expose the massive amount of wrongdoing within Christianity in the US. I just hope that Mike’s own house is clean enough that nobody makes a takedown video detailing his moral failings any time soon, as these kinds of dog-eat-dog exposés are becoming a staple of light entertainment for me!
On a less salacious note, our SGM last night went well, and our new constitution was approved by our committee and members. There were a few suggestions we had received over the last few weeks about small amendments to the wording, but in the end we decided that sticking as closely as possible to the official wording recommended by Companies Office was the best thing to do (with the exception of a few fun easter eggs we’ve have added to the constitution to make it a little less stuffy).
At the SGM we also approved making Stuart Landsborough a Life Member of the NZ Skeptics. It was pointed out that we might want to add a few more life members, so if you have any suggestions of people who have been in the Society for a long time and have contributed significantly to skepticism in NZ, please let us know by responding to this email.
In this week’s newsletter, Bronwyn has written about an offhand comment I made at the 2024 Go Green Expo in Wellington, taking it a little more seriously than I’m comfortable with and treating it like any good skeptic should - doing the research to see if my hunch was correct (spoiler, it wasn’t!). I’ve talked about my most recent Mormon visitors, and some of the conversations we’ve had over the last few weeks. Patrick has written about a new way of doing pumped hydro energy storage that is more efficient than using water, although I’d argue that it’s much less practical. Katrina’s found an intriguing case of fakery in academia that seems to be expanding in scope as people investigate it more. And finally I’ve been going through our Society’s emails again, and have been trying to figure out what’s behind some of the recent requests from people offering to pay us to publish their articles.
