Breaking news here, folks: an extensive new report from Mother Jones, in conjunction with the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” has found that thousands of Christians are being sold a terrible lie: apparently, someone has told them there’s an omnipotent deity nonconsensually impregnated a young virgin 2 millennia ago and now they aren’t allowed to have sex until they’re married or else they’re going to be tortured for an eternity. Jesus, that is a bad scam.
Okay, sorry, no, that’s just a little silly atheist humor. No, this is actually a story about a completely different scam targeting Christians: Life Surge.
Now, I hesitated to talk about this because for people who know scams, this is not, in any way, new. This is the same bog standard scheme that elevated people like Tony Robbins to fame: promise the average down-on-his-luck Joe that you can teach him the secrets to success for nothing, or next-to-nothing, and once he shows up to your class or seminar or conference, you tell him that the REAL secrets are hidden behind the VIP curtain, and to see them he just needs to pay you a little more. And a little more. And a little more. And a lot more. And so on, until Joe goes bankrupt or wises up and cuts his losses.
The reason why Life Surge is news is twofold: one, because, as I mentioned at the top, it targets Christians by explicitly framing it around faith in God. And two, because of the celebrities who are helping fleece Life Surge’s victims: check out the next big revival in San Jose, featuring none other than Magic Johnson! He played basketball. Other events have featured Joe Montana (he played football), Jeff Foxworthy (comedian who was famous in the ‘90s), and “the Benham Brothers,” who apparently do real estate and hate gay people.
Despite those, um, famous luminaries, Pablo Torre and Kiera Butler of Mother Jones decided to focus on Tim Tebow. Now, if you aren’t an American football fan and/or a very conservative Christian, you probably have no idea who Tim Tebow is. And if that’s the case, you may get a less than accurate picture of who he is if your introduction was in the recent episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out about Life Surge.
I say this because Torre and Butler spend the first ten minutes of that show straight up glazing Tebow: he’s so wholesome! Everyone loves him! He was a great football player and he’s a very charming man who is an excellent public speaker! He’s an AMERICAN HERO.
The hagiography stumbles, if you’re paying attention, like when they talk about what a great public speaker he is while showing him on stage at Life Surge basically opening with “Webster’s dictionary defines ‘surge’ as…”
That gave me the confidence to know that it’s not just me, it’s them: Tim Tebow is not, and has never been, a charming, smart, and wholesome person. To be fair, I’m sure there are far right Christian evangelicals who think of him like that, but it’s simply not an accurate portrait of him at all.
Now, to be fair, I assume that Torre and Butler are speaking about Tebow like that either because they genuinely believe it or because they want to exaggerate Tebow’s influence in order to show how insidious the scam he’s promoting is. And it IS an insidious scam: as they detail, Life Surge convinces people who are already struggling financially to take out multiple credit cards in order to buy classes that promise to teach them how to be smarter financially, which…yeah, there’s a reason this scam isn’t unique. It sells itself.
They also may have been complimenting Tebow in the hopes of appealing to him and his, um, “better nature,” which seems to have worked. Shortly after the article and podcast went live, Tebow announced that he was pausing his relationship with Life Surge while his team investigates how big of a scam it is.
So that’s all great: I’m glad they highlighted this scam, and I’m glad they got a “big” name to drop out. But I still can’t get over just how hard they rode for Tebow.
In the Mother Jones article, at least, there’s an early mention of something not so “wholesome” about Tim Tebow, even though it’s buried in a paragraph as a point supporting the assertion that he is wholesome: “in 2010 he starred with his mother in an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad sponsored by the right wing faith advocacy group Focus on the Family.”
Yeah. As a football fan, that was part and parcel of my introduction to Tim Tebow: he entered the NFL in 2010 as a back up quarterback for the Denver Broncos, which would not normally earn him a ton of exposure and clout. But he was already a celebrity, not just because he was a pretty good college athlete, but because he was a very good publicist. He and his family clearly knew how to work the media, and by the time he made the NFL, he was already well-known for writing Bible verses on his face during games and for kneeling in the end zone and praying after touchdowns. His family were evangelicals who spent the ‘80s Baptizing the heathens in the Philippines, where they set up an orphanage called Uncle Dick’s. Don’t make weird jokes. Dick is just the guy who gave them the money to set it up. I’m sure lots of kids have benefited from Dick’s, and Tebow has benefited from all the good press for his charitable visits.
Anyway, Tim Tebow’s anti-abortion ad for Focus on the Family aired in 2010 DURING THE SUPER BOWL. He scored an ESPN documentary in early 2011, and later that year he published his autobiography (which he only “co-wrote”), followed quickly by a “young readers” version. By this point he was only in his early 20s but his football career was already over. He wasn’t performing at the level that the league had hoped, so he got passed to the New York Jets who dropped him in 2013, and he never played another regular season game.
So, he wasn’t very good at football (or at least not good enough to play in the NFL), he unabashedly wanted women to not have bodily autonomy, and he’s so stupid and uncharismatic that even the clip someone uses to show how smart and charismatic he is has him looking up “surge” in the dictionary. From all of this, we can guess that the only reason he’s famous at all is because of a skilled public relations team and good old fashioned Christian gullibility.
And that’s why I object to Torre and Butler’s framing: the story here is not “how did Life Surge convince this wonderful Christian to join their predatory scam?” The story is “this lifelong Christian scammer started scamming for a predatory Christian scam.”
All of which brings me to the biggest claim that Torre and Butler make to convince the average audience member that Tebow truly IS a good person with a good heart:
“Tebow’s piety is more than just praying for a touchdown—he has used his fame and wealth for good works all over the world,” writes Butler. “Through the Tim Tebow Foundation, founded in 2010, he has helped orphans overseas, put on events for special-needs children, and worked to combat human trafficking. God “sent his son in the greatest love story rescue mission of all time because that’s how much he values people,” he said an appearance on Fox & Friends last year. “We get to care for people and we get to value them wherever they’re at, and that changes everything.””
And here they are discussing it on the podcast (2:09).
“Even if you don’t have a religious bone in your body, Tim Tebow reads as the most trusted man in sports.”
See, here’s the problem with pretending as though this guy was already a pious superman: if you hear that a person you KNOW to be moral is fighting child sex trafficking, you think better of them. If you hear that a person you KNOW to be the product of an evangelical PR machine is “fighting child sex trafficking,” you take a beat and wonder if that’s actually the reality of the situation.
I will state up front that I don’t know if Tim Tebow’s nonprofit has actually helped any victims of child sex trafficking. Maybe it has! I haven’t been able to find any actual evidence of it, but I’m not an investigative reporter. All I’ve found are articles repeating what the organization says on its own website, like this USA Today piece that is, hilariously, categorized as “college football”: “The Tim Tebow Foundation (has) assisted in rescuing more than 3,500 survivors of child sexual exploitation, per their website.” Okay, but what about “per actual local police departments” or FBI data? There are no names, no conviction reports, no details anywhere to be found.
ICE’s website brags about partnering with the Tim Tebow Foundation for “Operation Renewed Hope” back in 2022 and ‘23, but again, there are no details. What did the foundation do, exactly? Who was convicted, and what were they convicted of? They say that the operation resulted in “the identification and/or rescue of 1,170 child victims.” What does that mean? How many were rescued?
We can learn more by looking at Congressional testimony, not from Tim Tebow but from Eric Hysen, Chief Information Officer at the Department of Homeland Security. Hysen testified that Operation Renewed Hope actually only rescued “several” alleged victims and the arrest of unnumbered “suspected perpetrators.” The real star of the show is that they “identified 311 previously unknown victims of sexual exploitation,” by using facial recognition software and large language models to “enhance” images and create probable identities for victims of sexual exploitation.
There are two major issues with that: first of all, we don’t live in NCIS. There’s no magical way to “enhance” a blurry picture in a way that ensures you’re seeing what’s really there. LLMs “enhance” photos by MAKING UP the bits you can’t see, which means you absolutely cannot rely on them to show you a better, more accurate image of someone’s face on a CCTV camera. I don’t use LLMs so I did a quick search to find an example and it took me about 15 seconds: this guy tried to use AI to “enhance” an old pic of family friends sheltering in a cave, and the bot decided one of the friends was walking around half naked and the man’s wife is suddenly a South Asian man. That’s literally like one more pass through Grok before it becomes evidence of a sex crime.
So no, you can’t use AI tools to reliably identify blurry photos of potential sex trafficking victims.
The second issue is that the Department of Homeland Security isn’t actually (just) using this surveillance network to identify victims of sex trafficking. Obviously. Shortly after Operation Renewed Hope concluded, 142 human rights groups signed a letter demanding DHS stop using this technology, since it is giving them inaccurate data that they are then secretly using to make decisions on detaining or deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
This should worry you even more if you watched the video I made the year prior to that, about “Operation Underground Railroad,” another “anti-trafficking” charity that ended up trying to stop child sex trafficking by, for instance, giving child sex traffickers $30,000 in exchange for two children.
And it should worry you EVEN MORE if you saw my video a few months after that in which I talk about Ashton Kutcher’s “anti-trafficking” charity, Thorn, which collects “vast quantities of information from online ads posted by sex workers, taking phone numbers, names, and photos and using Amazon’s facial recognition technology to help police identify child sex trafficking victims.”
“The problem,” I said back then, “is that the vast majority of that data points to consenting adult sex workers who are then harassed by police and forced underground, further endangering them. In fact, as Engadget reported in 2019, many of the organizations that Thorn partners literally do not distinguish between consensual sex work and sex trafficking: “ On the topic of consensual sex work, Journey Out unequivocally states it is a false “perception” that sex work could be a woman’s choice. Nearly all nonprofits Thorn partners with feel the same way, and say so. So much for believing women, or any daydreams about women being the ones who control their bodies.”
I went on to describe an incident in which the police in an investigation watched one trafficking victim get beaten by her abuser for months while they slowly and patiently built up a case against him, instead of, you know, stepping in and protecting her.
Child predators are a group that everyone can agree to hate. The problem with that is that this also makes them a convenient group to pretend to be fighting while actually doing something else entirely: for Chris Hansen and NBC, that was becoming famous and making a load of money. For Ashton Kutcher, that was laundering his reputation while he campaigned to get his rapist friend a more lenient sentence. For corporations, it’s a way to sell their products to entire governments. And for governmental authorities, it’s a way to surveil the entire population and maybe, just maybe, keep everyone in line in whatever way that means to whatever politician is in charge.
So think of that the next time you hear someone allege that they are a good person because they’re fighting for the children. That’s great, I love that, now show me some receipts. Until then, people like Tim Tebow will just continue to be charlatans who will just move on to the next scam now that they’re caught.
