Every few years, a new cycle of the aspartame scare makes it rounds on (social) media fuelled by clickbait conspiracy theories, incoherent pseudoscientific rants, and dubious personal anecdotes. In 2019, for instance, the nonsense suggestion that aspartame could lead to MS and that MS could be cured by dropping aspartame (hint: idiotic bullshit), promulgated by spam articles and fake news sites, received – not for the first time  – plenty of shares and much engagement. Now, since it is usually difficult to identify the authors of such stories (or the editors of the sites to which they are posted), we’ll have to go with the name of the person featured in one of these spam anecdotes: Rhonda Gessner, whose sister ostensibly had MS but who, after cutting aspartame on Gessner’s suggestion, could soon rise from her wheelchair and drop all medication.

Now, one would do well to assign a non-negligible credence to the hypothesis that Gessner is a fictional character altogether, but there is in fact a Rhonda Gessner listed with a self-published book How to Cure Asthma Without Drugs on Amazon, and her name appears in connection with marketing efforts on behalf of the idiotic product Kangen water as well.

Diagnosis: Doesn’t mean she isn’t fake, of course (hence the question mark), but if you ever encounter the name, you can at least rest assured that any claims associated with her is lunatic bullshit spam.

Gianforte is a relentless young-earth creationist and has spent significant efforts to promote creationism in the public sphere. Gianforte has donated at least $290,000 to the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, a local creationist sideshow attraction that teaches its visitors that the Earth is some 6000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and that Noah brought the dinosaurs on his Ark; the Gianforte Family Foundation apparently also donateda Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton replica to the ‘museum’. Officially, Gianforte claims that  “I believe young people should be taught how to think, not what to think”, which is silly but also a lie: Gianforte very much wants to tell kids what to think (and has donated millions of dollars to fundie private schools that have very clear views on science and what kids should think), and definitely doesn’t want them to learn how to think (i.e. to be able to assess reasons and evidence). And during his tenure as governor, the Montana legislature, led by Gianforte fans like hardcore science denialist Daniel Emrich, has made several efforts to cripple science education in public schools.

Much of his efforts to promote creationism are made through the aforementioned Gianforte Family Foundation, which is officially dedicated to supporting “the work of faith-based organizations engaged in outreach work, strengthening families, and helping the needy”, and which has promoted substantial funds to wingnut fundie organizations like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, as well as the Montana Family Foundation (“the state’s primary advocate against LGBT policies”), dangerous and deceitful ‘crisis pregnancy’ centers, Doug “the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery” Wilson, and organizations working on legal efforts to dismantle federal campaign finance regulations. Gianforte and his wife, Susan, are themselves longtime anti-LGBT campaigners, of course.

Though initially skeptical of Trump, Gianforte was a relatively early convert, and has since 2016 promoted and attempted to emulate everything associated with Trump, including attempts to market himself as a political outsider and lambasting the nebulously delineated “liberal elite”. But the admiration became mutual after Gianforte assaulted (and lied to investigators about assaulting) a journalist in 2017; the event was widelypraised in wingnutcircles and by wingnut candidates like Jody Hice, and even Trump himself congratulated Gianforte on the assault, thereby becoming the first sitting president that has“openly and directly praised a violent act against a journalist on American soil”. In 2020, Gianforte predictably supported various efforts to overturn the election results, and was for instance a signatory to an amicus brief in support of the famously insane Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit.

Politically (and personally), Gianforte is mostly your usual hardline wingnut, though his reasoning is sometimes unusual. His opposition to retirement, for instance, is backed up by the idea that“the concept of retirement is unbiblical”. As Gianforte points out, “[t]here’s nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it's been an accepted concept in our culture today. Nowhere does it say, ‘Well, he was a good and faithful servant, so he went to the beach’.” Indeed, there isn’t. And to really hammer down his point, Gianforte reminds us that“How old was Noah when he built the ark? 600. He wasn’t, like, cashing Social Security checks. He wasn't hanging out. He was working.” One imagines that reasoning with Greg Gianforte might run into some tricky obstacles.

As a sort of stopped-clock exception to his otherwise consistent stance of being wrong, Gianforte has acknowledged human-caused climate change … though he followed up by pointing out that he “did not have specific ideas on how to address climate change”, that “climate is always changing” and that closing coal-fired power plants would not help mitigate climate change.

Diagnosis: Wrong. Consistently, comprehensively and in all possible ways.

As a conspiracy theorist, Gibbs has been an aggressive champion of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and he made such conspiracy theories a centerpiece of his 2022 Michigan campaign. Gibbs explicitly denied that Joe Biden had been legitimately elected in 2020, and falsely claimed that the 2020 election results were “mathematically impossible”: His reasoning for the latter claim was that Trump won a number of “bellwether states” – states whose results have historically aligned with the general result – yet allegedly fail to win the general election, and the fact that Trump received a larger number of votes in 2020 than in 2016 (“President Trump got something like 15-20% more votes than he got the first time yet still lost, which is probably mathematically impossible”). Gibbs’s understanding of “mathematically impossible”, “probably” and how elections (or anything else) actually work seems to be tenuous at best.

It must be pointed out, though, that Gibbs had, even prior to his government appointments, a long history of promoting conspiracy theories, including the ones that would subsequently form the basis for the QAnon movement. For instance, Gibbs has repeatedly asserted that John Podesta took part in a “Satanic ritual” as part of a larger Satanic conspiracy involving numerous politicians and celebrities; during his 2020 Senate hearings, Gibbs said, of his comments, that“I regret that it’s unfortunately become an issue,” which is not only very far from being any kind of apology but in itself a very strange thing to say.

During his student days, Gibbs founded a “think tank” called the Society for the Critique of Feminism, where he reached the conclusion that women do not “posess [sic] the characteristics necessary to govern” and that women’s suffrage had made the US into a “totalitarian state.” In a characteristically self-undermining manner, his group also said that men were smarter than women because men are more likely to “think logically about broad and abstract ideas in order to deduce a suitable conclusion, without relying upon emotional reasoning” and concluded that women should not have the right to vote. When Gibbs’s role in the group came to light during his 2022 campaign, a spokesperson quickly claimed that the group was created as a satire to troll the libruls on campus, a claim not supported by anything.

Diagnosis: A proud Christian nationalist with the reasoning skills and personal integrity to match. Hopefully gone for good, though there are more than enough similar idiots ready to take his place.

Her efforts also gained some local support, e.g. by local pastor Scott Yirka of Hibernia Baptist Church who though it was a shame that students can’t have “supplementary material” when teaching the origin of man; he hastened to add that he wasn’t “necessarily espousing that you teach creationism”, but he was in fact espousing precisely that.

The board voted to approve the adoption of the advertised science textbooks in a 3-2 vote; Gilhousen was joined in her opposition by one Betsy Condon. As of 2025, Gilhousen is apparently still on the Clay County Schoolboard.

Diagnosis: She might, for all we know, come across as reasonable and caring to those who encounter her in real life. But scratch the surface, and Ashley Gilhousen is also a religious fundie denialist who, in a civilized society, would have no business deciding K-12 textbooks on a schoolboard. Come on.

Like many similar groups, USRTK started out as an enviromental activist organization motivated by a reasonable distrust of corporations and a thirst for accountability, but paranoia (and the usual appeal to nature taken as a guiding creed) soon got the better of them and led them straight into pseudoscience and conspiracy theories – at first mostly about Monsanto, glyphosate and GMOs, but they quickly pivoted to more general conspiracy mongering: The group is perhaps most familiar these days as a resource for conspiracy theories related to covid-19 – in particular the (false and quite dingbat silly) notion that COVID-19 sprang from so-called “gain-of-function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology– and their nonsense was widely used as a source even by mainstream media that were unaware of their ties to Mercola, The National Vaccine Information Center (“the most powerful anti-vaccine organization in America”) and Robert Kennedy jr. Part of the reason for the media’s error is presumably that the USRTK, as opposed to, say, NVIC, tries to maintain a sheen of trustworthiness and legimitacy and to avoid overt conspiracy mongering – as Callum Hood points out, the USRTK is a “respectable-looking branch” of a vast ecosystem of interlocking anti-vaccine and science denialist groups.

Gillam herself has close ties to Robert Kennedy Jr.: excerpts of her book on Monsanto was for instance published on Kennedy’s website, and she has appeared on his podcast. Indeed, Gillam is good at drawing attention to herself, and the book in question, The Monsanto Papers, was widely featured on – and gained her several interviews with – various pseudoscience and conspiracy sites. The book is evenhandedly reviewed here, and does exactly what you’d expect it to do: According to Gillam, both in the aforementioned book and in her other books Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science, Monsanto markets glyphosate while knowing it to be carcinogenic (it isn’t) while not warning users about the danger (because there isn’t); then they attack its critics (Gillam is a victim, of course). For the claim that roundup is carcinogenic, Gillam has plenty of anecdotes; as for the science? Well, through comprehensive and repeated reviews of thousands of studies, 17 national and international regulatory and scientific agencies have found glyphosate to be safe and non-carcinogenic; one single one (IARC) has – for demonstrably dubious reasons– not (discussed here and here). Guess which one Gillam cites as definite proof (the rest are presumably part of a Monsanto-led conspiracy).

Diagnosis: Well, categorizing her as a loon is probably imprecise; Carey Gillam knows exactly what she’s doing: She is a profession FUD merchant bent on undermining trust in any institution, investigation or evidence that doesn’t line up with and support the conclusion she has arrived at for ideological and pseudo-religious reasons. But she is extremely influential and has a significant fan base.

Hat-tip: Genetic literacy project

Now, similar events presumably played out a lot of places in the US in 2020; the story here got wider attention after someone set up a GoFundMe account to support the barista. Gilles promptly went public claiming that she was entitled to some of the money raised and sued the GoFundMe creators for defamation and slander. Later the same year, Gilles also sued Sprouts after having been denied entry to one of their stores for not wearing a mask; Gilles explicitly argued that her rights were violated under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (they obviously weren’t) and the state’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, but failed again to specify any medical condition that prevented her from wearing a mask. The courts were not impressed.

Then she tried to capitalize on the attention she received by hosting a local “Burn Your Mask Bonfire” with (according to herself) leaders of the anti-vaccine movement; “the bonfire is to bring awareness and to stop the discrimination, leading to COVID digital vaccine and digital currency,” said Gilles, without explaining what a digital vaccine might be or what digital currency would have to do with it. That event, which is covered here, involved the participation of Joshua Coleman and a number of colorfully paranoid local dingbats, including (we note their names here in case they pop up in positions of power in the future):

-       Brandon Ross, the event’s co-host

-       Genevieve Peters, who herself had a history of trying to capitalize on being denied service for not wearing a mask. “For millions of years, we have had viruses. … We have had bacteria. And all sorts of … microorganisms,” said Peters, and “God gave us our immune system” (and how well did people do relying exclusively on God’s immune system back in the days, Genevieve?) She also touted hydroxychloroquine as a preventative means, urged the crowd to follow the advice of the insane group of loons known as “America’s Frontline Doctors” and likened Americans obeying mask rules to Jews following Nazi edicts amid the Holocaust (indeed, anyone criticizing her are just like the Nazis: “When people (say) I’m not being kind and … thoughtful — I might as well get on that train in Germany as well”)

-       Carmen Estel, a local “Holy Fire Reiki Master Practitioner” who ostensibly channels healing methods from Jesus and angels. “I am not dying in my time. I am dying in God’s time. … If God wants me to die of the virus, I will die of the virus,” said Estel, which is a funny way of marketing your healing services.

Participants would toss masks into a bonfire while claiming the masks were “tools of terror” and a “precursor to adult mandatory vaccination”. Messages on the burned masks included the usual paranoid conspiracy drivel (“Lies by the mainstream media”, “Nice try, Satan”), and participants claimed to be “ready to die for this mission” and that the masks can’t protect anyone since “Jesus and only Jesus can save.”

And Gilles, who calls herself a yoga teacher and is a promoter of the delusions of Earthing (“Not wearing your shoes is really healthy. … There’s magnetic energy in the ground”), really went all in on Covid conspiracy theories, suggesting that Covid itself wasn’t that dangerous: all those dead people really had pre-existing conditions (so they don’t count), and besides: “They’re killing people with respirators. Educate yourself.” Rather, it is the measures to protect against Covid that are dangerous here: “Ya know, the masks don’t protect against COVID. … They cause cancer (and) kidney problems, too.” They don’t, but the idea of using proper means to align your beliefs with reality is as foreign to Gilles as the idea of trying to be a decent person.

Diagnosis: Indeed: the idea of using proper means to align your beliefs with reality is as foreign to Gilles as the idea of trying to be a decent person. Instead, Gilles is paranoid, delusional, angry and mean – altogether a hopelessly terrible person.

Note that Gillman emphasised ‘a science-based approach’. It is important to say that, of course, for looking at what the SSIHI actually offers, you’ll find precisely what you expect: acupunture, traditional Chinese medicine, naturopathy, functional medicine, IV infusion therapy, and – yes– homeopathy. 

Diagnosis: We suppose Howard Gillman believes his MAHA-adjacent actions are ultimately good for medicine and that what UC Irvine recommends and teaches its students to recommend is, in fact, science-based – large sums of money can get people to believe anything. And although Gillman is probably not personally anti-science, the fact is that he is among the major enables of quackery and pseudoscience in the US today.

A.k.a. Tim Treadstone

Anthime ‘Tim’ Gionet, popularly known as Baked Alaska, is an alt-right media personality, influencer, troll and promoter of neo-Nazi nonsense – including neo-Nazi slogans and photoshopped images of people he doesn’t like in gas chambers– and anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Although he has a long history of being banned from social media (from Twitter in 2017 for violating its hateful conduct policy, and from YouTube in 2020 for a video of him harassing store workers over a face mask requirement), Elon Musk reinstated his Twitter account in 2022– it quickly got suspended again, though, prompting Gionet to assert that now he knows “what it’s like to go thru the holocaust”.

Gionet started his online career as a writer for BuzzFeed, and would early on trade in “parody” and “ironic” “jokes” with racist, conspiratorial and Nazi content; at some point, the ironic distance collapsed and Gionet underwent a process of radicalization culminating in his participation in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville – Gionet held a speaking slot – and, subsequently, the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. On social media, Gionet is best known for various gonzo stunts and delusional viral campaigns, but also famous for his often spectacular own goals (his livestreamed videos from January 6 were e.g. used by the FBI to identify other participants).

Gionet has views on Jewish people (“I was JQ’d long ago — pay attention!”). For instance, “Jews do control the news”, which is demonstrated by the fact that Gionet can’t spout anti-semitic conspiracy theories or call for genocide without someone criticizing him. Indeed, evidence of the Jewish conspiracy are everywhere: for instance, in 2016 “Trump got 304 electoral votes”, is the “45th President of the USA” and “saved 800 jobs from Carrier”, and “304 ✖️45➕800 = 14,880”, which“really makes you think” – 1488 is a number of apparent significance in neo-Nazi circles; and though it is not the most idiotic part of Gionet’s reasoning, it is worth pointing out, if you didn’t notice, that his math is wrong as well. And although Gionet is an ardent fan of Trump (Trump himself signed Gionet’s arm next to where he had Trump’s face tattooed), he isn’t necessarily a fan of all of Trump’s associates – he has for instance tweeted cartoonish images depicting Trump-associate and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is Jewish, in a gas chamber.

Of course, Gionet has views on race issues in general, a mainstay being attempts to interpret anything having to do with the topic of racism as being an attempt to commit or justify “white genocide” and chanting things like“You will not replace us”, “White Lives Matter” and “I’m proud to be white” at various protests such as the Charlotteville Unite the Right rally. Following Roy Moore’s loss in 2017, Gionet urged white people to have more children and “form some sort of coalition” because white people are “the ones that are picking the right people” (the loss was apparently a “blacklash” against MAGA, and also “maybe women shouldn’t vote”). In 2018, he supportedPaul Nehlen’s congressional campaign.

At the beginning of 2019, Gionet claimed to have changed his views and ways and tried to rebrand himself by condemning alt-right nonsense, but he quickly allowed himself to be sucked back in, professing his adherence to Groyper ‘ideology’ and posting videos of himself harassing bystanders and doing stupid stuff, ending in a new string of own-goals as well as an assault charge. Of course, his waffling has drawn some criticism from other wingnut groups; Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit, for instance, which has relentlessly pushed false flag conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection, accused Gionet of being an undercover federal agent at the event who deliberately sought to incite violence to frame Trump and his allies; Gionet, in turn, responded, predictably, by accusing Hoft of working for Biden and being a pedophile.

There’s a decent Tim Gionet resource here.

Diagnosis: A crazy, dysfunctional but apparently central node in the chaotic network of nonsense hate and conspiracy theories that is the current wingnut fringe. And though he is a champion of neo-Nazi conspiracy theores and white supremacy, the characterization by a former employer of his may be apt: “I don’t think Tim believes in anything. I think Tim just wants someone to love him.”

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

Samuel A. Girod is a Kentucky-based Amish snakeoil salesman and convicted felon. Indeed, Girod is somewhat notable for being a classic snakeoil salesman– looks and all – of the kind parodied in old vaudeville shows in the early 20^th century. His product, a concoction of chemicals called “TO-MOR-GONE” was claimed, without a shred of evidence or substantiation, to cure skin disorders, sinus infections, and cancer, and turned out to be based on bloodroot extract, which makes it a relative ofblack salve and suchlike, and which is highly caustic, thoroughly dangerous and complete (and potentially fatal) nonsense as a health product.

When confronted by legal authorities, Girod, somewhat expectedly, went full sovereign citizen: “I am not a creation of state/government, as such I am not within its jurisdiction,” and “The proceedings of the ‘United States District Court’ cannot be applied within the jurisdiction of the ‘State of Kentucky’”. That argument didn’t exactly fly in court (Girod may for all we know be unaware that American history has dealt with such claims rather … decisively) and Girod ended up with a six-year sentence; it didn’t help that he also threatened witnesses. Predictably, the altmed community came out to support Girod, because “natural” and “health freedom”; his victims be damned. Girod himself later tried to capitalize on his story by shamelessly portraying himself as a victim in his book A Good Life Interrupted (blurb: “When Samuel Girod began selling Chickweed Healing Salve out of his kitchen with herbs grown in his garden and the surrounding fields, little did he know that the business he so loved, which he had literally built from the ground up, would catch the eye of the federal regulators who wanted him out of the way”)

Diagnosis: Dangerous and remorseless chiseler and grifter. Avoid at all costs.

Hat-tip: Steve Novella @ SciencebasedMedicine

Colonic irrigation is quackery and has no place in prevention or treatment of any medical issue. And although the case of Jimmy John Girouard et al. is so old that we’re unsure what they’re up to these days or if they’re even around, colonic irrigation is still being offered as an altmed regime for people with genuine health problems, so we decided they deserve an entry nonetheless. Girouard, his business partner Alice Coudrain, and his company, Colon Therapeutics, built equipment for and pushed such treatments on victims through the Years to Your Life Health Centers (officially run by one Cynthia Pitre), despite FDA warnings, until the government took action back in 2003; it took at least one dead patientfor them to do so.

The Years to Your Life Health Centers had until then advertised colonic irrigations as a “painless” procedure that would boost your immune system, increase energy and help with“indigestion, diarrhea, constipation, weight loss, body odor, candida, acne, mucus colitis, gas, food cravings, fatigue, obesity, diverticulosis, bad breath, parasitic infections, and premenstrual syndrome”; Cynthia Pitre even claimed that colonic irrigations were key to her successful battle with breast cancer.

Neither Girouard nor Coudrain had any medical training, of course, and Pitre received her certificate as a “certified instructor” (signed by Coudrain and Girouard) after a training course held in a trailer behind Girouard’s house, which of course failed to inform Pitre about the dangers associated with colonic irrigation (another Years to Your Life and later defendant, Candace L. Stowers, had similarly deficient training).

Diagnosis: Fraudulent, malicious and negligent shitfucks. And although this particular case is old, similar fraudulent, malicious and negligent shitfucks are running wild today and should be called out whenever and wherever they’re encountered.

David Gisselquist is a fundie, conspiracy theorist and HIV “dissident”. Gisselquist thinks that e.g. Africa’s AIDS epidemic is the result of HIV-contaminated medical practices – in particular contraception and vaccines – rather than primarily driven by sexual transmission, and has written a number of books (Points to Consider: Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa, Asia,and the Caribbean) and papers arguing for this claim in a journal called the International Journal of STD and AIDS (the peer review practices of which are … unclear). Gisselquist has of course not done research of his own – he has a degree in economics – but rather selectively reviews past research that he thinks can be twisted into looking like it would support his dingbat denialist delusions.

Now, there are plenty of nonsense pseudoscientists out there with home-made theories designed to fit some ideologically motivated presupposition. They become dangerous when people start to listen. And people have listened to Gisselquist– even the World Health Organization (WHO) tied up valuable resources in a multinational investigation into Gisselquist’s claims, finding, of course, that Gisselquist’s ideas were nonsense from start to finish. Also The Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa had to spend limited resources to debunk Gisslequist’s drivel.

Despite being a kook, Gisselquist also for a while made it onto the list of reviewers for The Lancet, a position he preditably used to wreak as much havoc as possible on research (and the dissemination of research results) on HIV, e.g. by suppressing good research. It is notable also that distorted versions of scientific articles reviewed by Gisselquist ended up fundie conspiracy sites.

Diagnosis: Moronic conspiracy theorist on a crusade – like so many moronic conspiracy theorist – against not only facts but the people who rely on facts in their work. And as opposed to many such (individual) conspiracy theorists, Gisselquist has been causing actual, measurable harm.

Hat-tip: Seth Kalichman @ Denyingaids

Before the Food Babe and a slew of other silly fad diet and nutritional pseudoscience promoters, there was Ann Louise Gittleman and a slew of other silly fad diet and nutrional pseudoscience pomoters (there’s lots and have been lots of them for a long time and they won’t go away anytime soon even if the cast changes). Now, Gittleman is a general promoter of various kinds of woo and quackery, but fad diets have been her mainstay, and she has written more than two dozen books recommending nonsense based on nonsense – the most influential of which being probablyThe Fat Flush Plan, which recommended a much-criticized “detox” and exercise program. Gittleman considers herself a ‘nutritionist’ and can boast a Ph.D. in holistic nutrition from Clayton College of Natural Health, an unaccredited and now defunct diploma mill – her degree is basically spam.

Gittleman apparently rose to general attention back in 1994 for her appearance in a campaign promoting Rejuvex, a quack dietary supplement for menopause symptoms that is not supported by scientific or clinical evidence. It was, however, her 2001 The Fat Flush Plan that really established her as a pseudoscience guru; the book was a New York Times best seller and landed her appearances on a variety of TV programs, such as 20/20, Dr. Phil, Good Morning America, and The Early Show. It is fraudulent garbage through and through, but its commercial success put Gittleman on her path, and loads of related nonsense followed in its wake.

Her 2010 book Zapped, for instance, tried to make a rather blunt case of alarm about electromagnetic radiation. It did so through frightening-sounding anecdotes about people who claim to find themselves battling unexplained ailments, some references to shoddy studies and pseudostudies, carefully avoiding mention of real science on the issues (which of course fails to support her case), and featuring the pronunciations of familiar pseudoscience promoters like George Carlo. Worst, as Gittleman sees it, is that “cell phone radiation has been associated with many types of cancer, the best known being brain tumors. The longer the hours of use, and years of use, the greater the risk,” a claim that is demonstratively false and, for someone who has written a book about it, tantamount to baldfaced lying. But she’s good at tapping into zeitgeist scares: “And a new condition is emerging in children called ‘digital dementia’  from overuse of RF-emitting technologies.” Even Gittleman has to admit that the condition is (always) ‘emerging’; digital dementia is not a real thing. Her claims about cell phones and radiation eventually got picked up by Goop, which is, we suppose, precisely where they belong.

Meanwhile, her otherwise fabulously nonsensical drivel book Get the Salt Out tried to distinguish good and bad salt, and even suggested a test: “Put the salt you now use to a test to determine its metabolic acceptability: add a spoonful to a glass of plain water, stir it several times, and let it stand overnight. If the salt collects in a thick layer on the bottom of the glass, your salt has failed the test: it is heavily processed and not very usable by the body. To give your body salt it can use, switch instead to an unrefined natural salt that will dissolve in a glass of water as well as in bodily fluids. This experiment gives you a visual example of what refined salt can do to your system: collect in body organs and clog up the circulatory system.” This is … incorrect; Gittleman evidently relies on her customers not actually performing the test.

More recently, Gittleman has tried to make a career on the bandwagon of altmed gurus claiming that we suffer from parasitic infections and that this is the cause of a lot of ailments and troubles. At the 2016 Microbiome Medicine Summit, for instance (a self-congratulatory quack orgy that had preciously little to do with medicine), she presented her findings in the talk Parasites May be the Hidden Cause of Your Health Issues, revealing for instance that although most real tests won’t usually detect said parasites, they’re nonetheless there (indeed you’ll most easily detect them yourself “4 days before and after a full moon”). But fret not! There is help to be found: If you visit her website, you can purchase “My Colon Cleansing Kit” – conveniently on sale at the time of the conference for just $96 (that’d be three jars of random herbs and probiotics). Does she have any evidence for any of her claims? Well – and this is really a fair illustration of how quacks work – according to her website, “a study in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene found that 32% of a nationally representative sample of the US population tested positive for parasites”. Now, she doesn’t name the study in question, but it’s this one. Does it say, as Gittleman reports, that 32% of a representative sample of Americans tested positive for parasites, you think? According to the study, 32% of sick patients referred to testing because their doctors suspected parasitic infections tested positive for parasitic infections. That’s … not quite how Gittleman frames it, is it?

Diagnosis: To be a bit melodramatic: Yes, a lot of Americans are suffering from parasitic infections: shitfuck parasites like Ann Louise Gittleman preying on people who are genuinely suffering to sell them lies, fear and useless and expensive treatments and products. Gittleman is corrupt through and through, and she probably doesn’t even know it herself.

-       Giuliani defending his client, Donald Trump, on NBC

“Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do”

-       Another brazen Giuliani attempt at Newspeak

Good grief! And yes, that could basically be the complete entry, but OK: Rudolph ‘Rudy’ Giuliani is the former Mayor of New York City, one-time World Trade Center Hero – few careers have gone more thoroughly and embarrassingly to shit than Giuliani’s– failed 2008 presidential candidate and recent Donald Trump sycophant, shill and indicted criminal. Now, Giuliani is indeed best known for his performances as a disgusting, ratfucking, groveling disease. That behavior, however, has been duly covered elsewhere (e.g. here ); we’ll skip it – and skip biography – and concern ourself with some of the stuff that qualifies Giuliani as a loon, and there’s plenty to choose from, such as:

Covid nonsense

Giuliani was a seminal promoter of Covid-19 conspiracy theories, starting with a 2020 Fox News interview where Giuliani happily (and coughingly) pushed denialism on the science on using facial masks. As a self-appointed science advisor to the president, Giuliani also tried to convince Trump about the alleged benefits of hydroxychloroquine, and promoted a range of quackery, including the use of “placenta killer cells” in a stem cell treatment as well asDidier Raoult’s quack cocktail (plus zinc), on his podcast and on social media.

Stop the Steal antics

Immediately in the wake of Biden’s 2020 victory, Giuliani arranged a press conference denying the results; the press conference was held at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping business site in an industrial area rather than at the location of the Four Seasons hotel chain, obviously because someone in Giuliani’s gaggle made a mistake – Giuliani, characteristically, vigorously denied that any mistake had been made and that the location was the plan all along. Trump promptly put Giuliani in charge of all election lawsuits speculating that massive fraud had taken place and that Trump himslf should be president, and Giuliani immediately went to work promoting demented conspiracy theories and wild accusations:

-       At a November 19 news conference, Giuliani baselessly presented a number of idiotic conspiracy theories, including a conspiracy theory that“votes (were) counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro” because Smarmatic, which produced voting machines for one single California county in the 2020 election, was founded by immigrants from Venezuela; also “Soros”– the conspiracy theory seemed, due to its incoherence and level of nonsense, ad-libbed, but it had in fact already been promoted by Giuliani’s associate Sidney Powell. (This was the infamous hair dye meltdown press conference).

-       On November 21, Giuliani showed up in a Pennsylvania courtroom to argue one of his ridiculous fraud lawsuits e.g. by citing an affidavit (from one Russell Ramsland) falsely claiming that several precincts in Michigan had over-votes (“of 150%, 200%, and 300%”) using data from Minnesota counties. The judge was not impressed.

-       Later, Giuliani tapped Mellissa Carone as a star witness at a Michigan House and Michigan Senate Oversight Committees panel concerning Trump’s fraud allegation. That’s a tale in itself.

-       On December 18, Giulani famously led a group of kooks (Powell, Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne) to quarrel with White House lawyers and convince Trump that by various connivances the election could be overturned. They succeeded.

-       On January 6, 2021, Giuliani tried to rile crowds up by arguing that there should be a “trial by combat” to settle the election. Afterwards, he blamed the coup attempt on “fascists” in the “Democrat party”.

Giuliani was also, with the help of the Trump administration, the primary coordinator in the December 2020 campaign to steal the election by disrupting the Electoral College process: the scheme was to have illegitimate electors from seven battleground states that Biden won sign fake certificates falsely claiming that Trump was the victor, and then attempt to persuade governors to sign the bogus certificates, in order to put pressure on Vice President Pence to admit that no winner could be declared in these states due to the existence of the bogus certificates. The scheme was so obviously bullshit (and illegal) that even many of the appointed fake electors refused to go along.

It is worth mentioning, as the Dominion Voting System lawsuit against Giuliani does, that much of his antics also had a commercial side: After hitching his wagon to Trump’s, Giuliani has become a prominent product ‘influencer’, selling gold coins, silver, nutritional supplements, cigars, a “conservative alternative” to AARP, and protection from ‘cyber thieves’. Due to his multiple false statements about the 2020 election, however, he also had his license to practice law in NYsuspended and was ultimately (July 2, 2024) formally disbarred. At some point before Trump left the White House, Giuliani requested but was not granted a presidential pardon for unspecified criminal acts.

It is also notable that when Trump, Giuliani and others were indicted in August 2023 for involvement in a conspiracy to circumvent the democratic process in Georgia, Giuliani was charged with RICO offenses – mob laws he himself has spent decades claiming credit for. He didn’t particularly enjoy the irony. His antics in Georgia included bald-faced lying to the State Legislature in order to promote a conspiracy theory that accused two (named) poll workers of stuffing ballots from “suitcases” hidden under a table covered by a black cloth (a claim picked up by a number of fake newsand conspiracy theory outlets, including Trump himself) and of hacking into Georgia’s voting machines while passing USB thumb drives between them “as if they’re vials of heroin and cocaine”. The incident didn’t turn out the way Giuliani had (presumably) hoped.

In April 2024, Giuliani was also indicted for his involvement in the conspiracy to circumvent the democratic process in Arizona, after having spent some time desperately trying to evade agents tasked with serving him the indictment.

Diagnosis: Maggot.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

He wasn’t alone, of course. Fellow committee member Ben Waide didn’t want evolution to be part of biology standards at all: “The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science– Darwin made it up. […] Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny.” Waide didn’t expand on what he thought ‘rudimentary, basic scientific examination’ might involve.

Diagnosis: He’s still there, and he is still presumably a creationist and a flaming moron – yet we suspect he is no longer even the craziest person in the Kentucky state legislature. So it goes.

And though his organization has gradually downplayed the mercury scare bit of their anti-vaccine nonsense (since thimerosal has been absent from childhoold vaccines for some 25 years now), conspiracy mongering about mercury was always Gladen’s thing; his personal history as an antivaccine activist is detailed in Trace Amounts (2014), one of a significant number of anti-vaccine propaganda screeds that were originally marketed as ‘documentaries’ (of sorts), for which Gladen himself was one of its directors (the other was one Shiloh Levine). According to the movie (brief review here), Gladen at one point suffered from sudden and unexplained health issues, used the Internet to do his own research, and concluded that he suffered from mercury poisoning. Then he created a timeline according to which – ‘surprisingly’ – his symptoms started immediately after a tetanus shot that contained thimerosal. So Gladen did more Internet searching and convinced himself that thimerosal could cause his symptoms, chose a specific chelation protocol and found a doctor willing to administer it, against all scientifically grounded advice, whereupon his symptoms temporarily (but only temporarily) improved. He also concluded that his symptoms resemble autism (in reality, of course, mercury poisoning symptoms do not resemble autism), and off we go. At no point did he or his doctor actually verify that the mercury poisoning diagnosis was correct, of course. But based on his own internet searching, Gladen anyways arrived at what he took to be confirmation that vaccines are the cause of a largely mythicalautism epidemic and decided to make a movie. Along the way, the movie weaves in a large number of anti-vaccine talking points (and carefully circumvents the massive amount of evidence against his hypothesis) – many of them discussed here – and conspiracy theories (in particular the CDC whistleblower conspiracy) ,and we are subjected to the appearance of a number of familiar quacks, grifters and antivaccine conspiracy theorists, such as the Geiers and Boyd Haley.

The movie nevertheless gained a bit of traction after having been aggressively marketed – through what the movie’s publicist, Jenni Weinman Voake, describes as a “handful” of influencer-oriented, salon-style screenings held at private homes – and was subsequently heavily promoted by deranged conspiracy theorists like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (of course), Jim Carrey, Ed Begley, Jr., Danny Masterson, Cindy Crawford, and Bob Sears– the CHD has a substantial budget for these kinds of things. It was, for instance, heavily used by RFK in his lobbying efforts targeting Oregon lawmakers who could influence Oregon Senate Bill 442, which sought to remove personal belief exemptions from vaccination requirements. Gladen himself is a recurring feature at various antivaccine misinformation and lobbying events, though doesn’t seem to be among the most flamboyant ones.

Diagnosis: Though perhaps not among the most familiar names in the antivaccine horror clown circus, Gladen is a loon’s loon and has been instrumental in constructing and developing one of the most immediate and serious threats to civilization. A hideous piece of rot.

Diagnosis: Glantz is presumably a rather typical influencer: She is stupid, ignorant and poor at reasoning, but supremely confident in her views and supremely willing to take on any fact or expert if it doesn’t gel with her branding. And her influence probably isn’t negligible.

Hat-tip: Michael Simpson @ Skepticalraptor

As for “informed consent”, the PIC means that parents should be exposed to antivaccine misinformation that overstates the risks and underestimate the effectiveness of vaccines, in order to ensure that they are properly frightened into making the bad choice that PIC wants them to make. For instance, in their educational materials on the MMR vaccine, the PIC states that“the chance of dying from measles was 1 in 10,000 or 0.01%”, which is less than a tenth of the actual rateestablished by thorough research– so how did PIC arrive at their figure? By assuming that “nearly 90% of measles cases are benign and therefore not reported to the CDC”. They do not cite sources … but even if they are right, the actual number of kids dying would remain unchanged– if the official numbers were 1 000 000 kids getting the measles during an outbreak and 2000 dying, the PIC would jump in and say that in reality, 10 000 000 kids got measles of which 2000 died: measles is just even more contagious and widespread than expected and the risk of death or hospitalization for an unvaccinated kid remains the same … which to a person with normal reasoning skill would be all the more reason to get the vaccine. PIC does not embody reasoning skills. For the record, there has been no reported death due to the MMR vaccine– which would also spare you a long list of serious and common complications from measles. PIC, by contrast, supplies documents indicating a range of mythical risks associated with the MMR vaccine (such as claiming that it leads to seizures) harvested from various conspiracy outlets that they, for good measure, say are “peer-reviewed”, meaning presumably that more than one antivaccine activist has endorsed the source (their sources are not independently peer reviewed or published in any kind of reputable journal).

Greg Glaser is the general counsel for PIC – Glaser is, as such, a “vaccine rights attorney” (not a medical professional) in California with a litigation and transactional law background. And as Glaser tells his backstory: “After my daughter’s first round of injections, the experience forced me to open my eyes and actually research the matter. I found a suspicious list of vaccine ingredients, and an absolute certainty of widespread, under-reported vaccine injury across our population [a misleading claim at best]. Seeing my nephew suffer after the MMR vaccine also prompted me to research holistic ways to detox from vaccine injury.” Yes, he diagnosed his own child with vaccine injury (though he is notably vague about it). And yes, he thinks you can, and should, do a vaccine detox. A holistic detox. You should not.

Otherwise, Glaser’s website is stuffed with the usual antivaccine (and Covid) pseudoscience, misinformation and conspiracy theories you usually find on antivaccine sites and which Glaser has found in sources like the National Vaccine Information Center and other members of PIC. He was also involved in lawsuits against California’s school vaccine mandate, and with fellow antivaccine lawyer Ray Flores, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of Joy Garner, leader of the antivaccine group ‘The Control Group’ (the name is supposed to convey the delusion that all vaccines are experimental and that the unvaccinated constitute the control group), against then-president Trump since he was allegedly ultimately responsible for the California school vaccine mandate that Garner, Glaser and Flores thought was unconstitutional, a case that must be considered baseless and delusional – as confirmed by the courts– even by antivaccine conspiracy theory standards.

Indeed, in 2020, Glaser and Garner were also behind a “survey” called ‘The Control Group Pilot Study’ designed to “prove” that the unvaccinated are healthier than vaccinated people (they aren’t), which even antivaxx organizations seem to have recognized as being pretty worthless – it is discussed here). Basically, the “study” was a (yetanother) survey advertised on various anti-vaccine sites (you had to request a paper version) asking people frequenting those sites simply about what chronic diseases they have and their vaccination status – Glaser and Garner didn’t even control for age, weight, or any other demographic factors. That’s it … except for some random-capitalization rantings about the evils of Common Core mathematics, the corruption of science, and the VAERS database. (Garner’s defense against potential criticism concerning lack of scientific rigor is worth quoting: “I see some people think the survey’s not ‘scientific’ enough. But the real point here is: According to WHO’s definition of ‘science’ do you claim this? If you’re looking for The Control Group to fall in lock-step with the sort of ‘science’ pharma has to offer you, we’re not you’re huckleberry” – in particular, the study is “NOT being conducted for publication in a pharma-funded medical journal”, it “IS being conducted based upon the Federal Rules of Evidence for submission under a particular branch of law” and though it “is possible that the results could be skewed by some people, but this happens with ALL surveys [yes … but good science at least attempts to reduce bias], and we already have so many participants willing to identify themselves, (and even testify in court) that we will be able to show these affects are only minimal in our study” [that’s … not the issue]; also, they were “using PAPER hard-copy documents, and those are REALLY tough to fake”.)

As for Glaser’s group, PIC, we have encountered them before through the group’s founder Shira Miller, who, although she is educated as a physician, currently runs an Integrative Center for Health and Wellness specializing in “anti-aging” medicine and holistic “medicine”. But it might be informative to use this opportunity to do a relatively comprehensive rundown of their leadership group, which in addition to Glaser and Miller includes:

-       Douglas Mackenzie, MD, Director and Treasurer (California), a plastic surgeon and member of AAPS (he’ll get his own entry later)

-       Cammy Benton, Founding Director (North Carolina)

-       Yoshi Rahm, DO (California), who is, predictably, also “board certified in holistic and integrative medicine”.

-       Joyce Drayton, MD (Georgia)

-       Paul Thomas, MD (though note), Founding Member (and one of the movers and shakers in the antivaccine movement) (Oregon)

-       Ilona French, Community Director (California), who has no discernible medical background but was ostensibly associate editor of a medical journal, Dialysis and Transplantation, for which the closest google hit is an entry on Jeffrey Beall’s list of potentially predatory journals

-       Semi-legendary antivaccine champion Gary Goldman, “independent computer scientist” andComputer Science Advisor (Mississippi)

-       Legendary antivaccine activist and “false authority”Tetyana Obukhanych

-       Jane Orient, MD (Arizona). No, seriously!

-       Tiffany Baer, MD (California), well-known in California antivaxx circles for being willing to write medical vaccine exemptions (she works at the same clinic as Kelly Sutton, see below)

-       Michelle Veneziano, DO, Founding Member (California), who has long questioned the safety of vaccines: When investigating, she “discovered many studies that questioned their safety; I also found that these studies are not easily located in the medical literature.” Well, there is a goodreason for that; people like Venezianogo for“there must be a conspiracy afoot” instead.

-       Antivaccine movement leader and pseudoscienceproducerChristopher Shaw, PhD neurobiology (Canada)

-       Tawny Buettner, Nurse Advisor (California) and organizer of a 2021 rally outside her employer Rady Children’s Hospital to protest a state mandate requiring health workers to be vaccinated against COVID if they are to work with vulnerable groups

-       Robert Krakow, P.D., Advisor (New York)

-       Sandy Reider, MD (Vermont)

-       Philip Incao, MD (Colorado) (deceased), a germ theory denialist who was also intoHIV denialism.

-       Kenneth Stoller, MD, Hyperbarics Advisor (!) (New Mexico). One of the practitioners placed under investigation by the Medical Board of California for writing bogus medical vaccine exemptions in 2019.

-       Jacques Simon, Esq. (New York), another lawyer, and one who apparently likes to advise doctors on how to write medical vaccine exemptions in California.

-       Nikki Leeds, Outreach Director (California); no discernible medical background

-       Edmond Sarraf, MD, Founding Member (California), affiliated with the Southern California IntegrativeWellness Center and who has “an open philosophy about vaccines”

-       LeTrinh Hoang, DO, Founding Member (California), who runs a practice offering “holistic, integrative pediatrics” combining homeopathy and osteopathy, and is coauthor with Lauren Feder of The Parents' Concise Guide to Childhood Vaccinations (not recommended)

-       Pejman Katiraei, DO, Founding Member (California)

-       Kelly Sutton, MD and specialist in anthroposophic “medicine”, Founding Member (California). One of the practitioners placed under investigation by the Medical Board of California for writing bogus medical vaccine exemptions in 2019.

-       Stuart Fischbein, MD, Founding Member (California), who has had some troubles with the California Medical Board

-       Debra Gambrell, DO, Founding Member (California), another anthroposophical medicine practitioner and star of Ty Bollinger’santivaccine conspiracy propaganda series The Truth About Vaccines.

-       Jonathan Wright, MD and holistic practitioner (quack), Founding Member (Washington)

-       Robert Rowen, MD (and “integrative physician”), Founding Member (California)

-       Bob Sears, MD, Founding Member (California). One of the practitioners placed under investigation by the Medical Board of California for writing bogus medical vaccine exemptions in 2019.

Diagnosis: Yet another group that could, at first glance, come across as consisting of people with something worthwhile to say … but you don’t need to dig much to start to discern the insanity of the antivaccine clown troupe that is the PIC. They undeniably have some influence, however.

And it’s worth asking whether there is any point in giving an entry to Darryl Glenn, insofar as there has been some years since we’ve heard from him … but then, you never know what kind of shit the MAGA administration is able and willing to unearth, so perhaps a brief note is in order (he did reappear and try to run for mayor of Colorado Springs in 2022 on a platform of opposing mask and vaccine mandates). Glenn was an obscure county commissioner in Colorado who won a five-way Republican primary in 2016 and went on to lose by a vast margin in the general election because he was an insane moron and voters recognized him as such (those were the days). Glenn was for instance a climate change denialist, radically anti-gay, fanatically devoted to Trumpuntil it seemed inconvenient, and believed that Social Security is like Jim Crow because people “bow to the government and not to God” – rather milquetoast by today’s standards, in other words.

Diagnosis: A deranged loon by 2016 standards. These days, he’d be viewed as, at worst, a moderate compromise candidate. But we’re sort of trying to refuse to move with the Overton window. Glenn deserves an entry, even if he doesn’t seem to be getting much attention these days.

Peter Glidden is a licensed licensed naturopath who graduated from Bastyr University in 1991. And like many promoters of quackery, Glidden has developed a real animosity toward practitioners of real medicine and toward real medical advice, which tend to contradict the nonsense advice he himself likes to give, as expressed e.g. on his show Fire your MD now. According to himself, Glidden is a member of a group of “real doctors, who deserve to be called physicians because there are only a handful of us in the world who are actually taking upon themselves the task of helping to eliminate human suffering.” And he probably really believes that; were it not for the harm he is causing people with real medical problems, we’d almost feel pity for him: Glidden really wants you to take him, rather than real doctors with real educations that he himself would never manage to pass, seriously, and has worked so hard to construct and maintain the illusion of being a real physician that we have no doubts he has deluded himself into thinking he is, something that is probably part of the backstory for him being fined $5,000 and served a cease and desist order in 2012 for practicing medicine in Illinois without a license. According to Glidden, medical doctors (at least he is not waffling about integrative medicine) use therapies that are “based upon a methodology and an understanding of the human body, which is inconsistent with reality”. Meanwhile, he himself has – according to his bio – managed to reverse Downs syndrome of fetuses (i.e. reset chromosomal disorders) by using naturopathic medicine and nutritional therapies. When Glidden says ‘reality’, he doesn’t mean reality. His book The MD Emperor Has No Clothes: Everybody is Sick & I Know Why is discussed here .

Glidden is most famous, however, for a video consisting a deranged conspiracy rant that went viral in 2012 – possibly due to a social hacking experiment by Anonymous – and racked up over 17 million views and 671,000 shares. In the video, Glidden promotes a number of baseless conspiracy theories (e.g. that one “Dr. Hardin B. Jones recently revealed that chemotherapy doesn’t work 97% of the time, and doctors only recommend it to get kickbacks” – that the quack Hardin Jones died in 1978 is not the wildest miss in that claim) and insane delusions; for instance, according to Glidden, “the reason that people get cancer in the United States and the reason that we have completely lousy outcomes is because medical doctors are driving the research bus. Research funds should be spent on homeopathy and naturopathy.” Of course, naturopathy and homeopathy doesn’t really need research funds either – it’s not like NDs like Glidden would tailor his advice to what the research says (at least if it didn’t say exactly what he had already decided he wanted it to say). The video is discussed here; other errors, nicely demonstrating Glidden’s dishonest and incompetent use of scientific literature, are discussed here .

Despite the flaws and generally insane idiocy of the contents, the video keeps being cited by various quacks and conspiracy theorists (who, because they are incompetent, stupid and dishonest, don’t even bother to google ‘Hardin Jones’), such as this one.

Diagnosis: Insane quack on a joyride through dreamland loaded with anger, inferiority complexes, paranoia and conspiracy theories. Nothing that falls out of his mouth has any discernible relationship to reality, but if you listen it will hurt you.

Hat-tip: Brit Hermes @ naturopathic diaries

So for instance, Goeglein is predictably very paranoid about the perceived threat to religious liberty posed by “the political agenda of organized homosexuals”, claiming that gay rights are bringing about “a new era of intolerance against those of us who are men and women of faith” and that former President Obama “savaged and attacked” marriage, life and religious liberty.

Diagnosis: We could of course go on, but really: there is nothing new and surprising here. Goeglein is mostly trite. But he is still not only a loon but a powerful one.

The therapy in question was developed by Rebecca Goff of Maui – a “licensed massage therapist” and “certified marine-mammal naturalist” (that would be a 4-week holiday designated as a “course”, and which promises “fun and exciting stories to tell their friends and families about a one-of-a-kind experience”) – by “combining lessons learned from studying the behavior and movement of dolphins and whales with CranioSacral Therapy” – in other words, by trying to produce insights about human anatomy (in particular human skull sutures) by looking at whale behavior from a distance and trying to draw analogies to a model of human anatomy that would be considered stunningly obsolete even by 19th century phrenologists.

Goff, who according to herself is “on the cutting edge of Cetacean Therapy Research and one of of the most experienced people today in the field of Aquatic Biomagnetic Healing”, has more to tell us about the therapy, but we won’t bother since it’s challenging to find anything suitable for putting into grammatical sentences in the pastel-colored fluffy nonsense she produces. Nor does it really matter; Goff’s AquaCranial Therapy is one of the novelties offered (or at least used to be offered) at the Four Seasons Resort & Spa on Maui along with Ayurvedic massage, Thai massage, Hawaiian temple lomilomi and outdoor adventure activities. It’s a White Lotus spa treatment for real-life White Lotus travellers, with gentle massages in warm waters in tropical environments; it’s probably lovely and completely beyond our price range.

Diagnosis: On the surface, at least, it is probably harmless, but Goff might be a true believer or get it into her head that what she does could offer real help for real people in real difficult situations (she seems to suggest that some of what she does could assist with homebirths, for instance) – and then things could quickly get ugly.

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

Goklany is trained as an electrical engineer, and although he has published numerous reports, documents, books and rants about climate change and climate change policy, he has of course been involved in no relevant scientific research on climate-related issues.

The kind of nonsense he promotes and inserted into official reports (some also made it here) belongs to the category of nonsense usually promoted by climate change denialists, including falsely asserting that there is a lack of agreement among scientists and (at best misleadingly) arguing that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has various beneficial effects. At a Heartland-organized conference in 2017, Goklany presented a correlation between rising CO₂ levels and life expectancy and GDP, concluding that “we’re actually living in the best of times, and carbon dioxide and fossils fuels are a good part of that” – we don’t think he’s that oblivious to how to reason about correlation vs. causation, so we’ll chalk that one up to rank dishonesty. In response to the WWF’s and the UN’s claim that stabilizing population would help sustain the planet, Goklany pointed out that “the problem, however, is not population but poverty,” which ought to be a textbook example of a non-sequitur.

There’s a decent portrait of Goklany and his deeds here. 

Diagnosis: We’ve got no doubt he is a true believer w.r.t his denialism, which makes it notable that he feels the need to support his claims with rank dishonesty. He has anyways caused a lot of damage and seems to be on a trajectory to continue to do so.

Inside truther circles, Gold was, however ,frequently reputiated and accused (e.g. by Kevin Barrett) of being a plant for his reluctance to endorse the anti-semitism that was part and parcel of the troofer movement. So it goes.

We have no idea what he’s up to these days, though he published a book, We Were Lied to About 9/11, in 2018 containing interviews with various conspiracy theorists. If you wish to get a feel for the character, he’s covered here. 

Diagnosis: He made some noise in his day, In hindsight, it all seems rather pitiful. Probably mostly forgotten.

In 2021, AFLDS pivoted to anti-vaccine activism, making consistenly false claims about the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, including falsely referring to the vaccines as “experimental biological agents”, falsely claiming that they were “not effective in treating or preventing” COVID-19, and falsely claiming that the vaccines were responsible for 45,000 deaths based on utterly incompetent and dishonest dumpster diving in the VAERS database– the latter claim was even used for a lawsuit seeking a temporary ban on vaccinations (so much for “health freedom”) in a case so incompetent and dumb that it was most likely motivated by its potential for fundraising (i.e. grifting) rather than by any genuine hope that it would achieve anything in the courts.

On the other hand, they also promoted paid telehealth consultations with “AFLDS-trained” physicians that would prescribe fake medications they claimed were COVID-19 treatments – the grift was so obvious and in your face that it never even registered with many of their fans. The service in question was provided by SpeakWithAnMD, a telehealth website run by legendary conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi for the purpose of distributing various drugs that had been claimed by right-wing figures to be therapeutic for COVID-19. The Intercept estimated that AFLDS and its partners had made $6.7 million in revenue from these consultations between July 16 and September 12, 2021. You can read more about the grift here (it’s even shabbier than it sounds).

It’s worth emphasizing that the self-proclaimed frontline doctors have never been at the actual frontline of anything; the group’s members are notable for never having been close neither to doing serious research on nor to treating patients suffering from Covid, despite prominent member Stella Immanuel claiming that she herself had treated and cured 350 COVID-19 patients using a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, and zinc (and also that sexual visitations by demons and alien DNA are at the root of Americans’ common health concerns).

AFLDS was founded by Simone Gold and Tea Party Patriots-cofounder Jenny Beth Martin, though Gold’s relationship with the group has become somewhat chaotic over the years: In early November 2022, AFLDS sued Gold for using – entirely predictably given the kind of person we’re talking about – the group’s charitable funds to buy multi-million-dollar mansions and cars for her and her boyfriend’s (that would be ALFDS’s former Communications Director John Strand) personal use (more here); apparently AFLDS hired a “forensic auditor” to do a thorough exploration of the organization’s financials while Gold was in prison.

Because of course she was in prison. On January 5, 2021, Gold spoke in D.C. to people gathering to participate in the “Stop the Steal” rally, in which she said that COVID-19 was non-fatal and spread misinformation and insane conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines, e.g. saying that“if you don’t want to take an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine, you must not allow yourself to be coerced!” Then, on January 6, Gold joined the insurrectionists and illegally entered the Capitol building, pushing law enforcement officials to get inside, along withJohn Strand, where she gave another speech. She later said that she “regret being there” because she was obviously concerned that ‘controversies’ about her actions could detract from her work with AFLDS, and in February 2022, she pleaded guilty to and was sentenced to 90 days in jail for a Class A misdemeanor. Always a grifter, Gold used the trial to fundraise $430 000 for her legal defense, which even her lawyer more or less admitted was pure grifting.

The claims she made on January 5, 2021, were in line with the claims she has tended to make elsewhere. Gold is most famous for her promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a “safe” alternative to COVID vaccines, in direct conflict with reality. Equally out of touch with reality, of course, is her persistent promotion of ivermectin. She is also opposed to face masks, of course. And Gold has been willing to use all available means to market her conspiracy theories, such as claiming that the US government experimented on Black people to test the general safety of vaccines in a desperate attempt to gain traction with Black communities. And like with so many of the conspiracy theorists associated with AFLDS, Gold’s background in research or patient care, despite being an MD, is … at best unclear – in 2020, for instance, she made a video trying to convince people she was affiliated with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA, which she was certainly not.

She has been quite successful among wingnut groups, however. Her “White Coat Summit” press conference was co-sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots and was broadcast by Breitbart, and she was a speaker at the 2020 AMPFest, as well as at an event for donors to the Council for National Policy in November the same year (both Gold and AFLDS colleague James Todaro are part of that group); in December, she was part of a summit hosted by Turning Point USA. In 2021, she was part of the “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible Church in Oklahoma with regular allies like Jim Caviezel, Mike Lindell, and Lin Wood (evangelicals have consistently been an important demographic for AFLDS’s disinformation efforts). In May, 2021, she arranged an RV tour across the US named the “Uncensored Truth Tour”. And so on.

She currently (or at least relatively recently) runs GoldCare, a telemedicine service that charges $1,000 per year for individual memberships, and – needless to say – does not accept insurance.

Diagnosis: One of the most brazen grifters alive in the US (and the competition is fierce). Yes, she probably honestly believes at least some of the claims and conspiracy theories she and her group have been producing, but successful grifters tend to do just that (when you tell a lie often enough you start to believe it yourself and so on). That she is still perceived as an authority by anyone at this point, is flabbergasting, but she is. A piece of utter garbage masquerading as a human.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

His 2008 book Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change argues (a.o.) that homosexual orientation can be changed through reparative therapy. He used to claim that 65 percent to 75 percent of JONAH clients “are substantially healed after two to five years using JONAH’s ‘gender-affirming processes’,” but when asked in court where his numbers come from, Goldberg of course had to admit that JONAH performed no research and did not keep track of clients’ success rates. He also claims that gay rights activists are only pretending to claim that sexual orientation cannot be changed as part of a “pre-planned agenda,” and that people who failed at conversion therapy simply didn’t try hard enough.

In 2012, former clients of JONAH sued JONAH and its founders for consumer fraud; after drawn-out court proceedings, the former clients won, and the New Jersey Superior court ordered JONAH to close and liquidate its assets; Goldberg responded with various attempts at legal trickery (such as essentially just renaming his organiziation the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA)). One suspects it didn’t help their case that they were represented by certified loon Charles LiMandri. It’s worth noting that Goldberg has had troubles in court before; during his career as a businessman in the 1980s, Goldberg orchestrated a massive fraud from 1984 to 1986 in which his firm sold over $2 billion of fraudulent municipal bonds for several cities; he was indicted on numerous counts of bribery, conspiracy and fraud, plead guilty, and spent a bit of time in jail.

Despite being demonstrably morally corrupt to the core, Goldberg still seems to think he is in a position to lecture others about morality, publishing screeds like“The Urgency of Restoring the Biblical Values of America’s Founders.”

Diagnosis: Old, dumb and utterly corrupt at all possible levels. Hopefully he’s been ushered off the stage for good, but you never know these days.