The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have all noticed that Robert Mercer, co-CEO of the giant hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, has emerged as a key backer of Donald Trump.
Mercer, who first spent over $10 million trying to make Ted Cruz president, just gave $2 million to a Super PAC supporting Trump. Mercer is also a top investor in the Breitbart News Network. According to the Post, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah nudged Trump to bring in Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, to run his campaign.
But here’s what the mainstream media won’t tell you: Robert Mercer and his daughter have also funded a gigantic stockpile of human urine in Oregon.
The urine stockpile is the project of Arthur Robinson, a chemist and founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Starting in 2005, the Mercer Family Foundation contributed at least $1.4 million to OISM, enabling Robinson to buy freezers to store his 14,000 samples of urine.
Robinson wants still more urine, as much as possible, and issues frequent appeals to the public to contribute. According to the OISM newsletter, Robinson is collecting it in order to “calibrate analytical procedures that can revolutionize the evaluation of personal chemistry — and thereby improve our health, our happiness and prosperity, and even the academic performance of our children in school.”
How exactly this will work is unknown. Robinson told Bloomberg earlier this year that “We’ve completed experiments here, which we could easily publish, but we want to wait until they are perfect.”
This might make you suspect that Robinson is a troubled crank, but on the other hand … well, there actually is no other hand. He also believes that global warming is a myth and feels that public education is America’s “most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism.”
The key political question now is whether Robert Mercer will be able to bring together his interest in Trump and urine. There’s no way to be certain how this will play out, but here are some potential paths that could be taken by a Trump administration:
- Out: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In: The Strategic Urine Reserve.
- All American Muslims must donate urine. This will both serve as a token of good citizenship and allow analysis of whether urine can be tested for terrorism.
- Trump and Putin meet at a summit. In gesture of goodwill reminiscent of American and Russian astronauts shaking hands in space, they are photographed exiting a bathroom together, each holding a full, warm paper cup.
- All U.S. currency now backed by “liquid gold.”
The name of the Super PAC that Mercer is funding to elect Trump is — this is absolutely not made up — Make America Number 1.
A cartoon from the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine newsletter illustrates how urine analysis can increase your Life Remaining.
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?
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