A video produced by our Office is included at the bottom of this article, which includes clips from these exclusive video sessions.
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 (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鈥檚 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 鈥渙ver 100 million dollars鈥濃攁 figure which comes from an affidavit and which 鈥攂ut 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鈥檚 White House under a Department of Health and Human Services spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Mercola has, in the past, contributed to a major anti-vaccine advocacy group and he hosted in Cape Coral, Florida, for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during the latter鈥檚 presidential run. A 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鈥檚 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 鈥渄elusional.鈥
Per Polito鈥檚 reporting, Kai Clay鈥檚 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 , 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鈥檚 Council led by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.
In 2013, Johnson was interviewed by PBS for , 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 鈥淜ai Clay鈥 or 鈥淏ahlon鈥 before 2019. That year, a company called was created in St. Petersburg, Florida. Its CEO is listed as Christopher Johnson, and the LexisNexis data sheet on the company shows the word 鈥淏ahlon鈥 under the heading 鈥淐ross References / Variant Names.鈥 Johnson now lives in Miami, a four-hour drive from Joe Mercola鈥檚 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 鈥渋n their thimble,鈥 whereas those who have awakened are 鈥渋n the ocean.鈥 So-called spiritual guides are claimed to put ideas into people鈥檚 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 鈥渢he鈥 in front of people鈥檚 names. Many of Mercola鈥檚 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 鈥淐hatGPT says so and there鈥檚 no reason it would lie.鈥 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鈥檚 principles of 鈥渁ir, water, and light.鈥 鈥淎ir,鈥 Mercola has decided, is carbon dioxide up the bum to feed the microbiome; 鈥渨ater鈥 is structured water, the that atoms inside of water molecules can be organized into hexagons and thus water can carry more hydrogen and oxygen; and 鈥渓ight鈥 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鈥檚 business.
In filed by Steve Rye (Mercola鈥檚 former CEO), Christopher Johnson and Mercola鈥檚 new CEO are accused of moving assets from Mercola鈥檚 company into new entities that they control, thus enriching Johnson and the new CEO. The latter is Laura Berry, who prior to becoming the CEO of Mercola鈥檚 company. She now heads a multimillion-dollar wellness empire even though she is a lawyer with 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鈥檚 work for Mercola is being compensated to the tune of .
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 鈥渄estroy the veterinary industry.鈥 His spiritual guides apparently shared with him the plan he needs to enact: 鈥淲e make this a campaign. I don鈥檛 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鈥檚 been inflicted upon by this industry. They will march with weapons on these creatures.鈥 Johnson as Bahlon not only agrees, but he directs Mercola to also pay attention to 鈥渢he industrial side,鈥 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 鈥渢he heart of the Global Cabal;鈥 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鈥檚 sister in which firings are described as 鈥渢he Catholic Purge鈥 at Mercola鈥檚 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 鈥渓ock it tight鈥 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 鈥渁n escape route鈥 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. 鈥淚 haven鈥檛 taken this weapon out of the drawer for maybe two years,鈥 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. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 not in this brain,鈥 he asserts. 鈥淭his brain will never miss. Fear. It鈥檚 essentially fear. I鈥檓 allergic to fear. It doesn鈥檛 exist for me.鈥
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 expos茅 on the Mercola Tapes, which includes video evidence proving our allegations, click the link below and share widely.
