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Major anti-vaccine and alternative health influencer Joe Mercola has daily Zoom calls with a medium, who goes by the fake name of Kai Clay and claims to be channelling an entity he calls Bahlon. This story was originally revealed by journalist Rick Polito for Natural Products Insider (now called SupplySide Supplement Journal) in February of last year, and his series of articles made mention of video calls between Mercola and Clay. A whistleblower within Mercola’s company has now shared over 100 of these two-hour videos with our Office, and I have watched 26 of them.
One of the videos reveals that Joe Mercola is not simply worth “over 100 million dollars”—a figure which comes from an affidavit and which the Washington Post reported in 2019—but over 300 million dollars. He was one of the early adopters of the Internet and cornered the market on health misinformation and dietary supplements. It is hard to overstate both his reach and the breadth of the connections he has made over the years, which could earn him a spot in Trump’s White House under a Department of Health and Human Services spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Mercola has, in the past, contributed millions of dollars to a major anti-vaccine advocacy group and he hosted a town hall in Cape Coral, Florida, for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during the latter’s presidential run. A private reception was made available to campaign donors.
The videos I viewed, which I refer to as the Mercola Tapes, were stored on an unsecure website, whose services Mercola was using, offering artificial-intelligence-generated summaries and transcripts of videos. They reveal innumerable grandiose ideas being fed to Mercola by Clay under an alleged trance. Mercola now believes he will earn more Nobel Prizes than anyone in the world; that he will create an infrared-light-emitting device that will one day end up in a museum like the first Apple computer; and that he will bring about a chain of international wellness clinics, restaurants, hotels, and farmer’s markets. He has also decided that carbon dioxide will feed the bacteria in his gut and is blowing the gas up his bum regularly, one and a half litre at a time, claiming that it creates a force field around him. He also confesses in the Tapes that he could get committed for appearing “delusional.”
Per Polito’s reporting, Kai Clay’s real name was known to be Christopher Johnson, and I independently confirmed he is Christopher W. Johnson, the CEO of a now-defunct branding agency in New York City called The Whitehorn Group. On his LinkedIn profile, Johnson lists several significant clients, including CNN, MasterCard, and Pepsi, and claims to have been behind the INFINITI automobile brand. He alleges to have been appointed by the U.S. Department of State to the U.S. Afghan Women’s Council led by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.
In 2013, Johnson was interviewed by PBS for a segment on single gay dads, which was used to match both his voice and a unique pattern of beauty spots on the right side of his face to Kai Clay as he appears in the Mercola Tapes. Multiple additional pieces of evidence are revealed in the Tapes that confirm Clay is indeed Johnson, such as him attending high school in Baltimore and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, as well as the name of his brother, David, sixteen months younger than him, who graduated from Calvert Hall College High School a year after Christopher.
While Johnson tells Mercola that he started channelling fifteen years ago, I could find no trace of “Kai Clay” or “Bahlon” before 2019. That year, a company called Whitehorn World LLC was created in St. Petersburg, Florida. Its CEO is listed as Christopher Johnson, and the LexisNexis data sheet on the company shows the word “Bahlon” under the heading “Cross References / Variant Names.” Johnson now lives in Miami, a four-hour drive from Joe Mercola’s house in Daytona, Florida.
In their daily Zoom calls, Johnson uses his own lingo to appear as if he is channelling an ancient spiritual entity. People lacking enlightenment are said to be “in their thimble,” whereas those who have awakened are “in the ocean.” So-called spiritual guides are claimed to put ideas into people’s heads: Mercola is told he has an unusually large number of guides and says that his deceased parents are guides #1500 and #1501. When Johnson channels Bahlon, he simply closes his eyes, speaks in a monotonous voice, and adds the article “the” in front of people’s names. Many of Mercola’s questions to Bahlon contain his preferred answers, which makes predictions easy, and in multiple videos Mercola can be seen telling Bahlon that one of his predictions was clearly false before figuring out a way for the entity to save face.
Having watched over 50 hours of these sessions, I can say that I saw no evidence that Joe Mercola is a grifter who lies; he instead appears to be a true believer who simply jumps on preliminary scientific findings, elaborates contrarian theories about health, and claims to be a genius. Mercola now relies for medical advice and information on both Bahlon as well as ChatGPT, saying that “ChatGPT says so and there’s no reason it would lie.” He does not appear to understand that large language models like ChatGPT often hallucinate answers to queries.
Mercola, under the influence of Johnson, now believes he will bring about a worldwide revolution in health based on Bahlon’s principles of “air, water, and light.” “Air,” Mercola has decided, is carbon dioxide up the bum to feed the microbiome; “water” is structured water, the pseudoscientific idea that atoms inside of water molecules can be organized into hexagons and thus water can carry more hydrogen and oxygen; and “light” is near-infrared light, which Mercola believes can be used by the human body to do a type of photosynthesis, even though the evidence for infrared light to heal the body has been grossly overhyped.
Bahlon is keeping Mercola extremely busy. The health guru claims to be writing a new book every week, using virtual sessions with Bahlon to gain knowledge about parenting, health, and spiritual guides, and editing the AI-generated transcripts of these conversations into tomes. Johnson also helps Mercola figure out the size and design of the wellness clinics they want to build, how their health coaches will be trained, and how much a cheese factory would cost to acquire so that Mercola can sell non-toxic cheese. This busywork has been alleged to be a distraction from what is happening operationally and financially within Mercola’s business.
In a civil action filed by Steve Rye (Mercola’s former CEO), Christopher Johnson and Mercola’s new CEO are accused of moving assets from Mercola’s company into new entities that they control, thus enriching Johnson and the new CEO. The latter is Laura Berry, who knew Johnson prior to becoming the CEO of Mercola’s company. She now heads a multimillion-dollar wellness empire even though she is a lawyer with multiple complaints lodged against her and a petition filed in 2019 for bankruptcy showing debts of nearly half a million dollars. Meanwhile, journalist Rick Polito has reported that Christopher Johnson’s work for Mercola is being compensated to the tune of 1.2 million dollars a year.
This apparent takeover of one of the most successful wellness companies could simply be seen as a gullible guru being taken advantage of. However, the Mercola Tapes reveal the potential for real danger. On February 8, 2024, Mercola tells Johnson that he needs a partner to help him “destroy the veterinary industry.” His spiritual guides apparently shared with him the plan he needs to enact: “We make this a campaign. I don’t know what the campaign is, but whatever it is. We employ tens of millions, maybe even more than that, maybe 70, 80 million people, and they are full-on on board to protect our pets from the damage that’s been inflicted upon by this industry. They will march with weapons on these creatures.” Johnson as Bahlon not only agrees, but he directs Mercola to also pay attention to “the industrial side,” presumably meaning the livestock industry.
This call for mass violence is accompanied by repeated anti-Catholic discourse in multiple videos. Mercola has been led to believe that the Catholic Church is “the heart of the Global Cabal;” that it has one of the best brainwashing techniques on Earth; and that Catholic employees have no place at his company, as confirmed by a legal filing by Mercola’s sister in which firings are described as “the Catholic Purge” at Mercola’s company.
Mercola also mentions in the Tapes how violating an order he signed from the Federal Trade Commission, banning him from selling UV tanning beds, would lead him to prison without appeal. He confesses to a potential plan to go around the order by making a deal with another doctor who would own the company behind a device Mercola wants to sell, and Bahlon tells him to “lock it tight” to avoid Mercola being tied to this maneuver.
The Mercola Tapes reveal a plan for Mercola to move from Florida to Mexico, on land he has purchased, by acquiring a Mexican passport for USD 30,000. Bahlon refers to this as “an escape route” and counsels Mercola on the number of schools he should build there and how many packs of dogs he will need to protect himself. On February 5, 2024, Mercola opens a drawer in his home office and shows Johnson a Glock 45 handgun. “I haven’t taken this weapon out of the drawer for maybe two years,” he tells him. He says he has to do a drill with it and learn how the laser works. He talks about how cops often miss their target from five feet away because of fear. “That’s not in this brain,” he asserts. “This brain will never miss. Fear. It’s essentially fear. I’m allergic to fear. It doesn’t exist for me.”
The potential harms of health-related pseudoscience and the conspiracy theories that often accompany it are laid bare in the Mercola Tapes. Belief in nonsense and a predisposition to think of yourself as a genius contrarian can be exploited by charlatans for their own enrichment. Those who denounce modern medicine often fall back on unproven remedies derived from folk traditions or extrapolated from preliminary laboratory findings that likely will not pan out in humans, and these interventions can lead to serious harm. The quality of the information we receive from alternative health influencers is always suspect: here, one of the major health gurus of our time is revealed to be asking medical questions to an alleged spirit and to an AI interface known to hallucinate. Getting health advice from Joe Mercola at this point is beyond defensible.
To watch the accompanying video exposé on the Mercola Tapes, which includes video evidence proving our allegations, click the link below and share widely.
@jonathanjarry.bsky.social
