Now, much of what you’ll encounter on Dalley’s show is precisely what you’d expect from wingnut conspiracy theorists, albeit embellished with an even for ridiculous wingnuts startling amount of allusions to violence, and there is, frankly, little that otherwise distinguishes her contributions from the rest of them. Dalley is an antivaxxer, for instance – virtually every major antivaccine activist in the US has appeared on her show at some point – and has in particular promoted various falsehoods and conspiracy theories related to (of course) the Covid vaccine: “Pfizer admits that vaccinated people can shed the vaccine on unvaccinated people,” says Dalley, completely without any foundation in anything resembling reality. Even more disconcertingly, Dalley has been pushing conspiracy theories suggesting that hospitals are actively killing Covid patients rather than helping them by pushing real medicine instead of fake cures conspiracy theorists have deluded themselves into thinking are efficacious.

In August 2021, for instance, Dalley presented a longer segment in which she explained how she ostensibly saved her diabetic husband from murderous hospital staff when he got “COVID pneumonia”: Apparently her husband went to the hospital with extremely low oxygen levels after his Ivermectin failed to cure him (Dalley convinced herself it was just because the dose was too low), but although doctors wanted to put him on a ventilator, he was able to walk out of the ICU after just a few days because, as Dalley’s utterly unverified anecdote has it, she had demanded that the hospital give him massive, intravenous doses of vitamin C instead. Then she provided instructions on her website for people who want to fight the hospital COVID protocols, including “Don’t let them do Remdesivir. It can cause organ failure,” and “REFUSE THE VENT” because apparently ventilators are instruments for mass murder rather than life saving – Dalley’s guiding idea being apparently that hospitals allegedly (facts have nothing to do with this) has a financial incentive to put people on ventilators because it gets much more federal money for the treatment than it would for vitamin infusions that don’t work.

Of course, Dalley’s conspiracy mongering isn’t restricted to antivaccine nonsense. In 2018, for instance, she quickly dismissed the news that several explosive devices sent to Democratic Party figures and Trump critics as a false flag operation based on nothing but wishful thinking: “It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s the false flaggy time of the year,” said Dalley. Her show has also been described as one of the best sources for information about the New World Order by precisely the kinds of people you’d expect to claim such things.

Diagnosis: According to Dalley, “[t]his country is need of truth and logic right now,” so she’s basically admitting that you shouldn’t listen to her program. Take that piece of advice.

Hat-tip: Mother Jones

Despite increased popularity of anti-vaccine messaging, antivaccine views are still widely regarded with the suspicion and ridicule they deserve. One tried-and-tested method for changing people’s minds, however, is: Newspeak. If you can’t change the facts, obscure them by inventing a new nomenclature. That, at least, was the motivation for antivaccine lunatic Guggie Daly in an article (‘Vacctivism Terminology: How to Empower Instead of Cower’) she wrote for the insane rot of pseudo-religious pseudoscience and denialism Natural Mother Magazine: Instead of calling your kids “unvaccinated,” wrote Daly, use “vaccine-free” or – to maximize the potential for being misleading – say that your child “has an intact immune system”; and instead of “vaccine-preventable diseases”, use “vaccine-associated diseases” (Daly denies, against all evidence, and all of reality, that vaccines effectively prevent disease). And of course: instead of calling yourself “anti-vaxxers” – a term that media manipulation has made so “negative” – use “vaccine safety advocates”: That, by the way, is an Orwellian ploy as old as the antivaccine movement itself. “I encourage transparency and better ethical standards from pharmaceutical companies,” added Daly while encouraging precisely the opposite for her own group of fervent denialists.

Of course, redecorating the map doesn’t change the terrain, and in reality, vaccines were and are safe and effective. But Daly and her ilk have left reality behind a long time ago. As Daly mistakenly sees it, vaccines “are an optional, experimental product based on an unproven theory. Informed, consenting adults can choose to take them if they want. But it’s medical malpractice to force them onto non-consenting children. Instead of people demanding that vaccine companies, doctors and the government prove that this medication is safe, effective, necessary treatment in our children [which we do demand, and the demand has been thoroughly met], we take on undue responsibility to prove that vaccines are ineffective, unsafe and unnecessary. Completely backwards.”

As for Daly herself, ‘Guggie Daly’ is apparently the pseudonym of a Missouri-based “mommy blogger” who has, apparently, achieved some popularity in antivaccine movements for her (deranged) posts on vaccines and home birth. There is a brief portrait of her here.

Diagnosis: Absolutely insane antivaccine conspiracy theorist who has elevated her antivaccine views and her ‘crunchiness’ to a New Age-religious identity. She is garbage, and anyone who takes advice from her is garbage, too.

Though Daly is behind efforts to repaint his group’s messages in friendlier and more inclusive terms– mostly just emphasizing how much they love people while denouncing them as being manipulated by Satan and claiming to be nonpartisan while taking explicit positions on political issues– Daly has himself spread plenty of hate against LGBT people. He has, for instance, claimed that same-sex marriage endangers civilizationand thatSatan himself is behind same-sex marriage since “he hates marriage because it’s a reflection of God’s image”–“the Enemy hates that, it’s disgusting to him,” said Daly, “and with that, he wants to break it down, he wants to destroy it.”. Here is Daly trying to invoke Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel to argue why it is important to denounce the decision to allow “openly practicing homosexuals” in the Boy Scouts, which, as Daly sees it, will undermine “the character and safety of the boys.”

In a more conspiratorial mode, Daly has also claimed that “homosexual activists” wish to restrict the speech of anyone opposed to homosexuality, and that campaigning on behalf of LGBT rights“it really is a form of fascism.” On the pseudoscience side, meanwhile, Daly has supported and promoted the discredited anti-LGBT study by Mark Regnerus.

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s hate, and hate pinned up by pseudoscience; and trying to portray your hate as something other than hate isn’t going to make it less hateful. But the religious right remains a powerful political force in the US, and Focus on the Family remains more or less in the center of the religious right; Daly’s political influence is, in other words, difficult to overestimate.

Jennifer Daniels is another one-time MD gone rogue, and though she is still alive (as far as we know), she is no longer an MD, having surrendered her license in response to being confronted with the legal dimensions (having her license revoked) of her absolutely batshit nonsense claims about health and medicine; indeed, Daniels had been in trouble with the New York Department of Health over her claims and behaviors for a long time before surrendering her license. According to herself, though, she “had her medical license suspended due to not prescribing enough drugs and truly healing her patients,” which is demonstrably a bald-faced lie. She currently resides in Panama, where she produces books, radio shows, and videos; sells supplements; advises clients as a health coach; and provides “Holistic Mentoring Consultations”.

Daniels is perhaps best known for her advocacy for turpentine, no less, which according to Daniels is the Fountain of Youth and able to cure a wide range of conditions (including a number of fake ones) but which according to reality is poison with no recognized or plausible benefit for any condition whatsoever. Among the conditions turpentine was supposed to be able to cure, according to Daniels, was chronic Candida; now, it is technically true that patients after taking turpentine would no longer suffer from chronic Candida, but that would of course be for the reason that none of them had chronic Candida in the first place. Chronic Candida is a fake disease.

Daniels allegedly got the idea of using turpentine from asking African-American patients if their slave ancestors had an affordable miracle cure that cured everything. In the beginning, she tried it herself, and it is worth quoting her description of what happened at some length: “I think my IQ went up like 50 points, I could just feel it, all this mental energy and understanding and clarity, just like when I was 10 years old, everything was very clear and focused. I said WOW what a feeling. I did some math problems, I said this is pretty good.” Since she had heard that turpentine could cause seizures, she went on to determine the maximum safe dose: stopping when she felt a little twitch or “even softer than a twitch.” Then she gave it to her family. How Daniels obtained a medical degree in the first place is a very, very good question –Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have things to answer for.

As for scientific evidence, Daniels refers to a review study from France that doesn’t at all say what she claims it says. In general, however, Daniels is “not much of a fan of research”. The reason she gives for not being a fan is “because every research project I’ve been involved with, I’ve been asked to falsify data.” Given her general grasp of things (and level of honesty), we suspect that she might have misunderstood some instructions and the distinction between falsifying a hypothesis through testing and making up data.

If you are going to use turpentine, you have to follow her instructions, however: First, you take her Vitality Capsules, which according to her “clean out the bile ducts and the gall bladder system as well as the small intestine, large intestine”, promote circulationand contain “no chemicals”. Then you must to follow her diet instructions (organic, and abstaining from GMOs and “dead food”). And then turpentine will be so successful that Daniels, according to herself, stopped using antibiotics in her practice (but if you experience some worries here, Daniels reassures us that “[t]here is no medication that turpentine interacts with”, a claim she pulled directly out of her ass and for which she has no evidence or tests to back it up). She has also recommended turpentine for children; indeed, children should start getting turpentine in castor oil when they reach 30 pounds to prevent Candida and parasites.

Moreover, turpentine ostensibly improves eyesight (users were, according to Daniels, able to discard their reading glasses) and resolves tinnitus, and it helps with diabetes by healing the pancreas – it will ostensibly allow Type I diabetics to lower their insulin dose. That said, Daniels’s recommendations aren’t limited to turpentine; she can also give you thicker and less gray hear: “use minerals, small willow flower, and shou wu”.

Apparently, according to Daniels, “Liver time is 1-3 AM; lung time is 3-5 AM.” We’ll just leave that there without comment.

Oh, and she is of course anti-vaccine: “There is no vaccine or injection Dr. Daniels recommends.”

Diagnosis: It’s hard to imagine that she is unaware of the ridiculousness of her claims, but it probably doesn’t matter, since at this level, stupidity becomes indistinguishable from malice. Completely bonkers, but contrary to what you’d probably think: there are people to listen to this kind of stuff.

Hat-tip: Skepdoc

So yes, most of Dankof’s contributions to these outlets consist of free-ranting about various conspiracy theories he has dreamt up or found in the darker corners of the internet and which he has promptly adopted. For instance, his November 2012 Press TV segment “US, Israel plan Assad removal to hurt Iran: Analyst” claimed, without evidence (screw evidence), that “Zionist-affiliated arms dealers, oil consortiums and bankers seek to overthrow the Syrian government …to pave the way for an American and Israeli military attack against Iran.”

And make no mistake, the “Israeli regime orchestrated 9/11 attacks”; Dankof is more than ready to rant about “the kinds of forces that some of us think are very much involved in covering up the truth about 9/11, and that includes a disproportionate power that the Israeli lobby has and that Jewish interests have in the United States in our news media that keeps some of this stuff from being discussed”; indeed, “it appears to me that the United States is, as obviously as we know, co-opted by the Israeli lobby, so is the United Nations and Israel is simply using the United States to buy what it wants.” Fortunately, as Dankof wishfully sees it, “The American people are increasingly sick of [Jewish control] they’re sick of the pack of lies that all of this is based on, they’re sick of the Israeli control of their foreign policy and their government and their news media.” In a 2011 article, Dankof even quoted from and wrote that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately reflect the state of the world.

Diagnosis: Old-school neo-nazi. It would be somewhat curious to know how he responds to new-school QAnon-related antisemitism, but we frankly cannot be bothered to check or think too much about it.

As Dasher saw it, “my platform begins with God. That’s really what this whole thing is about. In Washington, when we look at what’s going on, we see an erosion away from that platform.” Of course, people who believe they are representing God in politics have a tendency to project wildly, and Dasher followed up by accusing the federal government – not himself – of “believ[ing] that they’re God”; government is, according to Dasher, intent on “gain[ing] control over every aspect of our lives” as part of a plan to create a “culture of dependency.” And the “swift drift away from God will usher in tyranny and death”: “Tyranny will get its foothold – if it already doesn’t have it – and in the end, there will be mass carnage and mass death. It’s inevitable.”

He then went on to blame the Sandy Hook shooting on atheists and post-modernists (though the shooter “was made in the image of God. But somewhere along the way he believed what the atheist says. He reduced humanity to nothing more than a collection of atoms” – Dasher cited no evidence, of course, since evidence is an atheist post-modernist tool), whom he also accused of “brainwashing a generation” through rap music and general “moral decay” and erosion of liberty (whatever he means by ‘liberty’). He also advocated for schools to “arm the teachers” but warned that government officials intend to repeal the Second Amendment in order to eliminate all other freedoms.

Apparently, the disturbingly insane documentary Torchbearer, a “Christian war film” about Phil Robertson directed by Steve Bannon, was the brainchild of Zach Dasher.

Diagnosis: Possibly old news. Dasher is a fanatic loon and conspiracy theorist, but might not possess the level of unhinged frenzy that seems required to make it into the limelight in 2024. Still, he does apparently have some powerful allies.

For the purported association between cell phones and cancer, perhaps the leading “authority” on the conspiracy side is Devra Davis, an epidemiologist, toxicologist, author, founder and director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and former professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Davis has also served on several governmental and non-governmental organizations, before founding and assuming the position of president of the insane pseudoscience group the Environmental Health Trust, an organization devoted to trying to argue that (and pushing pseudoscience apparently indicating that) mobile devices, WiFi, 5G, and other radio-frequency systems pose a health risk to humans and a risk to the environment, despite being in direct conflict withall credible evidence, scientific consensus, and reason. Indeed, Davis has a history of being careless with facts and evidence in her other works, too, and even of engaging in other straight-out conspiracy nonsense.

Her views on cell phones are summed up in her bookDisconnect: The TRUTH About Cell Phone RADIATION, What the INDUSTRY Has Done to Hide It, and How to PROTECT Your FAMILY (capitalization in the original). In the book, Davis focuses on studies (mostly shoddy) that appear to support its alarmist conclusions while deliberately ignoring or falsifying information about studies showing no harm and dismissing them as products of a vast, industry-led conspiracy on the grounds that they reach a different conclusion than the one she is looking for. And accuracy really isn’t Davis’s strong suit: “if you examine only those studies that have analyzed people for a decade or longer you find one thing: Every single one of them shows that long-term heavy use of cell phones has increased the risks of brain tumors”, says Davis, citing the rantings of one infamous Swedish alarmist (Lennart Hardell) as well the large-scale Interphone study, whose conclusion, in direct contradiction with how Davis describes it, was that “[o]verall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phone”. And that example is merely one illustrative example of her style, and not the most egregious one. Here is an even-handed review of the book.

So Davis is aware that the current science is pretty clear that there has been no increasein brain cancerafter cell phone use becamewidespread. In response, Davis claims to have unpublished research “taking a more sophisticated look” and that you should trust instead. And perhaps because dimly aware that appealing to mysterious unpublished studies is less than convincing, and because the massive lack of evidence for the purported association (and the clear and unambiguous evidence for no association) is a sore point for Davis, she tends to just lie about the existing evidence: In a 2016 episode for the Australian TV program Catalyst, for instance, she brazenly and completely falsely just asserted that “every single well-designed study ever conducted finds an increased risk of brain cancer with the heaviest users [of mobile phones]”. The claim was quickly refuted by real scientists, but some damage to the public was likely already done: despite being full of nonsense, Davis and her rants are frequently cited by people who don’t know much about the science or evidence, including major media outlets.

In her book, she also tries to defend, by inventing an elaborate conspiracy and appealing to a putative frame-up, the results of Hugo Rudiger, who was found guilty of scientific fraud and whose results could, once the fraudulent parts were removed, not be replicated. A signifant part of the book is also devoted to desperately pushing the decidedly evidence-anemic idea that cellphones are a threat to male fertility, discussed in some detail here (the few studies that ostensibly supports the idea have notoriously failed to replicate). She falsifies physics, too: “[e]lectromagnetic waves ability to travel depends on how long they are. The faster a wave oscillates and the smaller it is, the shorter the distance it can reach”, says Davis.

Davis’s ideas had, not surprisingly, a significant impact during the Covid pandemic. Though not herself explicitly linking 5G to Covid symptoms, Davis vocally asserted, without evidence, that 5G wireless technology poses health risks. Her nonsense was used as an alleged source of authority e.g. in Sacha Stone’s new-age conspiracy film 5G Apocalypse: Extinction Event.

Diagnosis: Though she lacks the wild-eyed incoherence of most anti-cellphone activists, Davis has plenty of paranoia and conspiracy allusions to offer. What she doesn’t have, is evidence, science or a care for facts, accuracy or accountability. It is probably no exaggeration to call her one of the leadings proponents of pseudoscience in the US, and her influence is disconcerting.

Hat-tip: Lorne Trottier @ Sciencebased Medicine

As a self-declared “anti-feminist” activist, Davis has indeed frequently been described as 'the female Andrew Tate'. She claims that “women should not vote” and that “the courts, the legal system, all of society is basically pandering and simping for women.” In an attempt to clarify her views, she also tried to argue that“only five per cent of women wanted the right to vote” and that “if feminists want the right to vote, right, then it should come with the draft”, and seems as unaware about the status of the draft as she is about most other things going on around her. She also thinks that divorce should be illegal (“tHAt’s JuST mY OpIniOn”).

And as with a lot people with the inclinations and mental abilities of Pearl Davis, things quickly ended up in antisemitic conspiracy theories. Indeed, her video (since deleted) in which she performed her song “Why Can’t We Talk About the Jews?" (including phrases like “Now I'm not saying Hitler was a good guy, but I just wanna know why” and “now there’s all these conspiracy theories, and the more they talk, I think maybe they're right”) seems to have made even erstwhile fans somewhat uneasy. In an interview with Piers Morgan (an erstwhile fan who was not impressed with said video), Davis tried to claim that the song was about cancel culture and free speech rather than anti-Semitism – though she also asserted that “I don't really have a strong opinion either way” about the Holocaust. Then she claimed that Piers Morgan was censoring her by criticizing her. Ironically, Davis often claims that she just wants to have all claims on the table for debate; as she amply demonstrates everywhere else, however, she doesn’t really mean debate; Davis has no aptitutde for or wish to engage in debate.

She also, probably unaware that it is relevant to judgments about the state of her anti-semitism, praised Nick Fuentes: according to Davis, Fuentes is a “good person” and based on looking at his Wikipedia page before having him on her show, she didn’t believe he was antisemitic or racist, despite Fuentes explicitly denying the Holocaust and promoting white supremacism. (Her reasoning seems to be based on the currently popular reasoning pattern “I agree with X; I am a good person (presupposition); racism is somehow associated with being a bad person; hence, X is not racist”)

Diagnosis: Ultimately, Davis is possibly best categorized as an extension of the boogaloo movement and the post-truth movement popularized the last decade or so: She’s just saying stuff, without the slightest care about facts or reason, and without recognizing why facts and reason matter to the topics she discusses – partially because she seems unable to grasp facts or employ reason. And her popularity is unsurprising, insofar as a lot of people share those traits and are desperate to sympathize with and pander to someone who shares their ineptitude for and dislike of details, fact-checking, consistency or serious analysis, and someone who can help channel their rage at “elites”, i.e. those who do care about and are able to engage with such things.

Her subsequent activities include traveling the world as a celebrity with wingnuts like Harry Mihet on behalf of Liberty Counsel to spread the message that“same-sex ‘marriage’ and freedom of conscience are mutually exclusive, because those who promote the former have zero tolerance for the latter.” Emphasizing that connection is important, since otherwise it would be somewhat tricky to avoid the obvious tension between what they were actually doing – campaigning against legalizing same-sex marriage in places like Romania– and what they claimed to be doing: “encouraging religious freedom”. Of course, their attempt to construe their efforts, including Davis’s refusal to issue marriage licenses, as a matter of religious freedom is hard to maintain if one cares at all for the facts, and the mask frequently slips. As Davis fan Randy Smith, leader of a group of supporters, illuminatingly put it: “at the end of the day, we have to stand before God, which has higher authority than the Supreme Court”. Or, in other words: nothing here really has anything to do with either the Constitution or religious freedom.

After her antics, Davis quickly acquired a number of fans, including Liberty Counsel (whose founder Mat Staver represented her in court), Focus on the Family and Jim Jordan.

Here is Kim Davis describing, as she saw it, the persecution of Kim Davis. The description leaves little doubt that she deserves an entry here.

Diagnosis: Befuddled fundies who are deeply confused about the meaning of such basic words as “freedom”, “right” and “job”, and who deeply endorse their identification as victims of not being able to force others to live the way they’d like them to live. The religious right has of course been using them as props for all they’re worth, but hopefully they’re nearing their expiry date as wingnut props by now.

John Dawson, however, is a champion of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and Seven Mountains Dominionism, and the founder (with Alaskan Apostle Mary Glazier) and leader of something called the International Reconciliation Coalition (the words making up the names of these organizations appear to have been chosen more or less at random). And he is American enough, even though many of his organization’s efforts to promote hate, evil and insane fundamentalism are taking place abroad. Dawson himself apparently originally hails, like Ray Comfort, from New Zealand.

To give an indication of what kind of guy we are talking about, Dawson wrote (together with Jane Hoyt) the foreword to Cindy Jacobs’s book Women of Destiny: Fulfilling God’s Call in Your Life– taking Cindy Jacobs’s claims seriously is more than  enough to qualify you as a loon on its own. But Dawson is, in fact, the author of numerous books himself, and some of them have been frighteningly influential in dominionist circles, including Taking Our Cities For God and Healing America’s Wounds. Now, given the rather violent antics of the New Apostolic Reformation, you may sort of have an idea what the former might be about– and Dawson’s book was indeed one of the early guidebooks for applying the rabid fundie idea of spiritual mapping of cities to identify demonic strongholds (“you should have the census in one hand and the Bible in the other”) before using looting, violence, rage and prayer to expunge said demonic influences. Prayer is an important weapon in their arsenal: “The prayer of a human being can alter history by releasing legions of angels into the earth. If we really grasped this truth, we would pray with intensity, and we would pray constantly”; given its power, one would have hoped that people of Dawson’s ilk would restrict themselves to employing that one; unfortunately, they don’t.

As for Healing America’s Wounds, it might superficially look like a book calling for apologizing for the harms caused by genocide against Native Americans, slavery and other atrocities, but the angle it takes is … well, lunatic: what Dawson calls for is application of the principle, later central to the NAR, of “Identificational Repentance and Reconciliation”, a spiritual warfare tool to be used to overcome the resistance of ethnic, racial, and religious populations to converting to evangelical beliefs: you see, their resistance is really caused by demonic “strongholds” – that is, the groups in question (and their resistance to Dawson’s brand of religious fundamentalism) are really controlled by demons due to sins they or their ancestors have committed: Native Americans are controlled Baal, and Roman Catholics and Muslims by Leviathan and the demon the Queen of Heaven. And removing the demons to facilitate mass conversion requires the “taking of territory” along the lines of the tactics outlined in Taking Our Cities For God. At least unofficial NAR leaderC. Peter Wagner recognized Dawson’s book as an crucial spiritual warfare textbook; his Fuller Theological Seminary students have been required to read it, and it served as the foundation for NAR’s “Reconciliation Walk” in the Middle East to apologize to Muslims and Jews for the Crusades and then convert them, in order to – in Wagner’s words– tear down the “primary [demonic] stronghold to blind the minds of Muslims and Jews to the gospel for centuries.”

Apparently, Dawson has a background as as a leader with Loren Cunningham’s organization YWAM, which continues to produce insane fundamentalists to this day, and he has even enjoyed a stint as president for that organization. Dawson is also deeply involved in the organization Toward Jerusalem Council II, which is devoted to establishing cooperation between NAR fundies and Messianic Jews for the purpose of converting Jewish people in large numbers, something that is crucial to ushering in the End Times.

Diagnosis: Though less obviously visible in the today’s loon landscape, perhaps, the lunatic fringes of the Taliban remains a force to be reckoned with in the US, and people like John Dawson continue, despite being raving lunatics, to wield a lot of influence. Still scary as hell.

The College case summary is instructive enough:

-       Dean used unscientific methods of testing, such as hair analysis, Vega and Interro testing, iridology and reflexology as well as treatment not medically indicated and of unproven value, such as homeopathy, colonic irrigations, coffee enemas, and rotation diets.

-       She did not individualize her patients and try to reach an appropriate diagnosis and treatment but rather pre-diagnosed them without individualizing them with her preferred nonsense diagnoses candidiasis and immunodeficiency problems.

Conspiracy theories

According to herself, her loss of a license was obviously an attempt by the “medical establishment” to remove her, and the entire incident was “staged and fake removal of my medical license in Ontario.” Because of course there is a conspiracy afoot: “[t]he conclusion I draw from my experience with the medical establishment is that they will do anything they can – up to and including pushing people to commit suicide – to maintain their monopoly on disease care” because the conclusion that the whole world is in a conspiracy to get you is far more palatable than the obviously correct one that you made a mistake. She is currently the director of the pseudoscientific Nutritional Magnesium Association where she advertises herself as the “Doctor of the Future”. And she currently also contributes to NaturalNews, which in any sane world should be diagnosis enough. (She has also, to add insult to injury or something, apparently also been a repeated contributor to Huffington Post).

The conspiracy theory complex she has built is elaborate. Of course, much of her work, including her articles and lectures, is heavy with irrational Big Pharma conspiracy theories (“the future of medicine is unfortunately in the hands of Big Pharma; it’s got nothing to do with patients anymore or even doctors for that matter”), and the list of people and organizations ostensibly in the pockets of Big Pharma is staggering. When the FDA is, as she sees it, harassing proponents of homeopathy just because they are earning money by promoting nonsense quackery to people in desperate situations, Big Pharma is the ultimate source. She frequently cites NaturalNews as a source for her claims, as well as a source for medical information.

But Dean is, perhaps most famously, author – together with several other deranged quacks (Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and, not the least, Gary Null– of the rather infamous 2005 paper Death by Medicine, published in the quack and pseudoscience outlet the Journal of Orthomolecular medicine, where they try to argue that modern medicine does more harm than good by examining statistics of deaths due to pharmaceutical drugs. Of course, the paper is blithely lying about many the numbers by wildly extrapolating, and even when the numbers are (more or less) correct, the authors misrepresent them and their significance (basically, anyone who dies during treatment in a hospital is counted as a death by modern medicine). There is a brief but telling takedown of their ridiculousness here, and a slightly more detailed discussion of the idea here. Despite its misrepresentations, errors and baseless extrapolations, the paper has become wildly popularin denialist and altmed circles, and has beenwidely used, despite its lack of quality and its sordid provenance, as a source for further speculation and extrapolations. Undeterred by facts, evidence and science, Dean went on to publish a book to speculatively elaborate on her misrepresentations in the papers, Death By Modern Medicine, with forewords by Joseph Mercola and Julian Whitaker, no less.

And as Dean seems to see it, the conclusion of the paper (and book), that modern medicine is killing you and not helping you allows her to reject science wholesale – not just the results of studies she doesn’t like, but the whole epistemological framework, including such features as evidence, accountability and accuracy– as vestiges of her grand conspiracy. And she has promptly gone on (or continued to go on) promoting various forms of pseudoscience and quackery free from and unfettered by concerns for evidence, safety, accountability or accuracy.

Magnesium woo

As for pseudoscientific panaceas, Dean’s quackery of choice is magnesium. According to Dean, more or less any health condition is caused or triggered by magnesium deficiency (yes, it’s the One True Cause for All Disease), and can be cured by buying her magnesium supplements. Indeed, Dean apparently sells her own, very special type of magnesium, ReMag, which is apparently better, so don’t you go ahead and buy whatever ordinary kind of magnesium you can get your hands on. 

Now, Dean admits that she has received a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration stating that she cannot say magnesium can treat a disease because saying that it can treat disease would be lying. But, reasons Dean, the real problem she needs to circumvent is the fact that the FDA requires that drugs be tested for safety (and efficacy), so she must avoid committing herself to anything “that will make magnesium a drug and subject to drug testing,” insofar as (she doesn’t explicitly say that) her health claims wouldn’t fare well under testing. So Dean’s solution is to emphasize that her magnesium and vitamin supplements are not drugs because they haven’t been tested for safety or efficacy. Her live-radio website, for instance, contains a Quack Miranda Warning that also emphasizes “A vitamin is not a drug, NEITHER is a Mineral, Trace Element, Amino Acid, Herb, or Homeopathic Remedy. Although a Vitamin, a Mineral, Trace Element, Amino Acid, Herb or homeopathic Remedy may have an effect on any disease or the structure and function of any body system.”

So according to Dean, her magnesium and vitamin supplements can, in fact, cure practically all diseases. Magnesium, in particular, “helps to alleviate heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, diabetes, depression, arthritis, and asthma,” and is, in her words, a “miraculous mineral” (though again: “You may need a particular kind of magnesium [her ReMag] to achieve therapeutic levels”). As she sees it, “[i]f you were to list today’s leading chronic diseases, heart disease (angina, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol) along with diabetes, osteoporosis, depression, generalized inflammation, and toxicity are found at the top. Magnesium is a mineral and nutrient that when eaten or supplemented in the proper amounts and form, has had a miraculous healing effect on these and other serious health conditions” (she promptly added long Covid to the list in 2022, as a putative “new label” for magnesium deficiency). She has no real evidence for these claims, which are false, but since magnesium is, as she sees it, not a drug, she doesn’t need evidence (note that that’s actually what she says). “Evidence” is presumably something that belongs to science, with its oppressive focus on facts, reason, evidence and accountability, which are all just tools that Big Pharma uses to suppress people who wants to get your respect and money from just making things up. Instead of scientific evidence, Dean cites e.g. What Doctors May Not Tell You for her claim that 200 mg magnesium daily“showed 80% reduction in migraines with 200 mg magnesium”, in direct contradiction with an actual metastudy on thequestion (which did admittedly not include What Doctors May Not Tell You). She also recommends homeopathic magnesium.

In addition to the real medical conditions her magnesium supplements can cure, she Dean’s claims to be able to treat non-real and nonsense medical conditions (and probably much more successfully, for obvious reasons), including yeast overgrowth syndrome, detox reactions, multiple chemical sensitivity, and electromagnetic sensitivity. As the reader probably recognizes, Dean is hardcore on chemophobia pushing: “Toxic chemicals are being found in all foods, all bodies of water, and all humans in every study performed.” And don’t try to tell her that the dose makes the poison or talk to her about the difference between trace amounts detected by sensitive instruments and poisoning. Science is dumb! Instead, Dean quotes “detox expert” Sherry Rogers, who thinks everyone should use far infrared saunas to eliminate (unspecified) stored environmental toxins (by unspecified mechanisms).

Her claims are summed up in her book The Magnesium Miracle, published in 2003 and updated in 2017, and briefly reviewed here. Her work is also promoted by the Nutritional Magnesium Association, an organization apparently devoted to hyping magnesium as the cure for all ills and featuring all manner of magnesium quacks.

Cholesterol denialism

Dean also belongs to a group we might not have covered as extensively as we should: cholesterol and statin denialists. Dean claims, in line with her general tendency to prefer conspiracy theories over reason (and especially over the possibility that there might be details she is missing or has misunderstood), that the American Heart Association “simultaneously is covering up statin side effects”, that cholesterol does not cause or increase the risk of heart disease, and that cholesterol levels above 200 are not dangerous. And to achieve a synthesis of her cholesterol nonsense with her magnesium quackery, she asserts that magnesium operates as a “natural statin” (natural statins are of course better than other statins) and keeps cholesterol in balance. And to turn that synthesis of denialism and quackery into money, she markets her “Total Body ReSet” bundle of dietary supplements for cholesterol, which will cost you $299. She also recommends clay baths and footbath detoxification.

She has furthermore stated that chronic inflammation is the cause of heart disease and that cholesterol is unrelated. That claim is, to put it mildly, not supported by scientific evidence, but evidence was of course never part of the package here. She also endorses the pseudoscientific nonsense of the British leading cholesterol denialist Malcolm Kendrick.

Dean is also an anti-fluoridation conspiracy theorist, and claims that she knows “that fluoridation of tap water is a disaster afflicting the population with an epidemic of chronic disease, including arthritis and cancer.” She cites Russell Blaylock, no less, as her authority. The claim is false, and Dean cites no evidence to suggest otherwise. The connection to cholesterol denialism? As Dean (though emphatically not reality) sees it, statins are potentially toxic fluoride compounds and may release fluoride ions that can irreversibly bind to magnesium, thereby contributing to muscle pain. That idea flatly contradicts elementary chemistry, but whatever. Fluoride atoms in statins are not released as ions.

Antivaccine views

Determined to get everything wrong, Dean is an anti-vaccinationist and has written several garbled and conspiracy-filled articles claiming that vaccines do not work, despite the fact that they obviously do. She is, for instance, the author or an article “The Politics of Mercury Poisoningin Autism” for something called Total Health Magazine, in which she touches on an impressive array of antivaccine tropes, including appeals to the largely mythicalautism epidemic and citing safeMinds as an authorative source.

Diagnosis: Consistently wrong about everything (almost to the level of being genuinely impressive) and fundamentally disgraced as a consultant on anything related to health and medicine. Unfortunately there are i) people for whom being disgraced is apparently considered a virtue, ii) people in desperate situations willing to try virtually anything, iii) lots of people who don’t have medical expertise themselves and wouldn’t really be in a position to know what a dingbat purveyor of potentially dangerous nonsense Dean actually is when they come across the drivel she is producing for various outlets. As a result, Dean still has a victim fan base. And even after some 2700+ loons, that is genuinely shocking.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki; Harriet Hall @SciencebasedMedicine

DeCotes has also had a career providing “spirit guide readings”, where she would consult the Akashic Records to give you advice related to your spirit guides. Specific advice and information is, however, something self-declared psychics understandably need to be careful with, so she seems to have at some point modified her services to focus on “intuitive readings” about what areas in your lives you are being “blocked” from realizing according to your Akashic Records, claims that are a bit trickier to actually test insofar as the Akashic Records are inaccessible to ordinary people (you can pay for expensive courses to get access).

Diagnosis: This kind of thing is hugely popular, perhaps mostly because of the lack of substance (reality is hard and uncompromising, so it is best to avoid it), as well as its concern with ephemereal care and empathy. But what little substance you find is magnificently delusional. Now, there is nothing about DeCotes and her services that obviously stand out from a long line of providers of similar services; rather, she serves as a more or less random illustration of a trend that is disconcertingly popular. We severely doubt that she manifested the coverage she receives here, but she is of course free to interpret this entry as a summary of her file in her Akashic Records.

In 2017, the Rochester Public School Board decided to take seriously a state law that requires students to be vaccinated for diseases such as measles, mumps and even chicken pox, to the consternation of local antivaccine loons, of which there seems to have been a number (more than 70 had to be ordered to leave school). The requirements weren’t really strict: exemptions were available for those rejecting vaccinations for health or religious reasons, but parents would have to fill out paperwork, something that apparently required too much investment in their children’s well-being or was too mentally challenging for some.

Local antivaxx mom Kayla Dee was one such. Angry with the law, Dee explained that“my religious beliefs are if you get sick with something, it’s part of your plan in life. So, why get the vaccinations to try to prevent it? Yeah those diseases are going to suck if you get them, but if you live through them, great! If you don’t, that’s your plan in life. Also, medically, it’s against my beliefs because who really know what’s in these vaccinations?” Well, weknow precisely what’s in the vaccines, but a much more pertinent question is: Why does Dee care, given her general view on medicine?

The scariest thing of all is that, in the present situation, Dee decided that she would be homeschooling her children while she fights against the state law. And she is allowed to that.

Diagnosis: No, this is not satire. Really. That she is even allowed to be in the vicinity of children is preposterous.

Deevers self-identifies as a “constitutional conservative” for marketing purposes, but doesn’t actually recognize the Constitution; instead, Deevers explicitly dismisses any notion of separation of church and state, has vowed to apply“the word of God to every issue” and believes that the Bible “has prescribed governing and then He has also prescribed the means for our governing and that means is in accordance with His word. If we do otherwise, then we are essentially usurping the sovereign role of God through Christ, who has been seated above every power in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth.” Or, if it is still unclear: “Either you’re coming under the rule of God, your Creator […] you’re going to come under the rule of the serpent. So, it’s a serpentine theocracy or a rule of God, and there’s not a space in the middle.” Indeed, Deevers have emphasized, literally, his wish to take the US back to the 1600s, well before the Constitution and that liberty thing and those ideas of inalienable rights arrived to undermine good theocracy: “Why can’t I go back to a ‘Lex, Rex’ age [1644], or a ‘Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos’ age [1579]?” asks Deevers.

Deevers also self-identifies as an “abortion abolitionist” and is the author (co-sponsored with Senator Warren Hamilton) of a bill classifying abortion as homicide, which would allow both doctors and mothers to be prosecuted and to potentially face the death penalty if charged with first-degree murder. The bill also allows for wrongful death lawsuits on behalf of fetuses. And for those who might be concerned about the relationship between anti-abortion measures and IVF, at least Deevers is clear: parents who use IVF are “waging an assault against God.” He also advocates ending no-fault divorce.

In 2024, Deevers also introduced a bill to ban all pornography, i.e. anything involving sexual acts, nudity, partial nudity, or any content that appeals to a sexual fetish, such as BDSM. According to the bill, anyone who buys, views, procures, or possesses porn would be punished by up to 20 years in prison, while anyone who poses for or otherwise assists or offers to assist in the production and distribution of such materials would be punished with a year in prison. Initially, he didn’t even bother to try to invoke the Constitution for that one, but instead lectured fellow lawmakers about how pornography is a tool of Satan and must be outlawed so people “can be set free” to give their lives to Jesus, and pointed out that anyone who views pornography knows that they are violating “the holy character of God”. This is “spiritual warfare”, said Deevers. But he also – perhaps dimly aware that someone who is a self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative” should pretend to care about the Constitution – eventually went on to claim that“Our Constitution says this very thing: We get our rights from God” (it most certainly says no such thing but “constitutional conservatives” are not the kind of people who care about distinguishing the Constitution from imprecise allusions to the Declaration of Independence), and that therefore God’s law, as Deevers interprets it, supersedes what the Constitution actually says. He has elsewhere proudly explained how the justification for bills he introduces is built entirely on provisions from the Bible.

As you might expect from someone like Deevers, he is also rabidly anti-vaccine and not afraid to deploy every anti-vaccine gambit and conspiracy theory in the book, no matter how silly. Deevers is particularly inclined to going Godwin, and he hasfor instance compared vaccine mandates to the Nuremberg laws. Before being elected senator, Deevers also claimed that governments were pushing the vaccine under the cover of utilitarianism, and “these were the same equations, the same moral principles that were used in the 19th and 20th centuries to immunize the society against becoming infected with bad genes, Jewish genes, low IQ genes” (it most certainly was not) – note also the presupposition that governments are intentionally using vaccines to kill people – before invoking the Nuremberg Code, which antivaxxers like doing but which Deevers seems to understand not much better than he understands vaccines: “You do understand what road this is heading down,” said Deevers. “If they can force you by utilitarianism to take a jab for a disease, they can force you to do it to protect you from people whose IQ is lower than yours or people whose skin color is different than yours,” just like governments being able mandate seatbelts (or restrict access to porn) means that they can also force you to commit genocide or put people in concentration camps, just like that.“And they’ve done it over and over.”

Of course, Deever is not alone – indeed, the Oklahoma state legislature have been plagued by frothingly insane religious fundamentalist anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists for a while, such as governor Kevin Stitt, the aforementioned Warren Hamilton, state senator and creationism advocateNathan Dahm and state senator Jake Merrick, former pastor at Tulsa’s Living Rivers Millennial Church (led by the militant anti-vaccine activist Paul Brady), all of whom, like Deevers, spent time others could have spent doing good in the legislature pushing for abortion bans and laws to block vaccine mandates.

Diagnosis: In fairness, Deevers is, as a senator, doing exactly what he promised he would do as a senator during his campaign. Unfortunately, what he promised to do was fighting for a kind of raw theocracy that would make hardened Taliban veterans blush. Completely insane.

DeGraw makes her case in her ebook Why Christians Shouldn’t Celebrate Halloween, heavily promoted by Charisma magazine, containing what DeGraw describes as nine “teachings” about Halloween based on the assumption that “[t]he demonic realm is alive and active”. Though people often recognize that “evil forces” drive actions like mass shootings, laments DeGraw, for some reason “when it comes to the pagan celebration of Halloween, we somehow do not see it as having the same demonic and evil impact as those other tragedies”. Part of the motivation for writing the book, seems accordingly to have been to try to sort out the mystery of how people could miss the obvious similarities between trick-and-treting and mass shootings when they’re virtually identical. “The effects of Halloween and human sacrifices are just as real. However, authorities – and the news media – simply don’t report them.” Did you see how elegantly she just threw “human sacrifices” into that sentence?

Meanwhile, Christians who see the holiday as harmless fun are “co-laboring with the works of darkness” and essentially supporting occult practices like having sex with demons and sacrificing babies to drink their blood. (Yes, the connection to QAnon is pretty direct.) Accordingly, DeGraw urges Christians to be on the “counteroffensive” against the “demonic realm”, which is conjuring up “curses, spells, vexes and other evil practices” in October to “destroy Christians, uproot prophetic destinies and come against the plans of God.” The most important step these fellow travelers could take is to repent for their past participation in Halloween the same way they’d repent for “pornography, masturbation, rape, stealing, or vulgar language.” “Why is Halloween any different?” It’s instructive to consider what types of ideas and assumptions you need to make to think that that is a good question.

Diagnosis: Dingbat insane, of course, and though we haven’t tried to trace DeGraw’s subsequent development, we wouldn’t be surprised if they led to the darkest corners of QAnon. Fortunately it’s hard to conceive of her rantings as having much impact on anything.

Hat-tip: Peter Montgomery @ rightwingwatch

Antivaccine views have certainly gained populary in certain groups after Covid, but Theresa Deisher has been antivaccine for a long time, and remains as silly and nonsensical as ever to this day. Deisher is a proponent– perhaps the central popularizer (unless that’s Helen Ratajczak) – of the “aborted fetal DNA” gambit. Indeed, not only is aborted fetal DNA, which are not present in vaccines, immoral and toxic: it causes autism, as Deisher sees it. 

Yes, the explanation for what Deisher falsely thinks is an autism epidemic isn’t thimerosal (which was, after all, removed from childhood vaccines without a budge in autism numbers); it is that vaccines contain (they don’t) aborted fetal DNA. And what magical property of aborted fetal cells is it that gives them the power to cause autism, you may ask? “It creates the potential for autoimmune responses and/or inappropriate insertion into our own genomes through a process called recombination”. No it doesn’t, and although Deisher implicitly admits to having no actual evidence for the claim, she does refer to “groups researching the potential link between this DNA and autoimmune diseases”. Those groups would be ones affiliated with Deisher’s own organization, Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute (SCPI) (which “promote[s] consumer awareness about the widespread use of electively aborted fetal material in drug discovery, development, and commercialization”). Never mind that the hypothesis makes little sense from a biological and genetic point of view. But she does have a correlation, doesn’t she? Well, as she sees it, the switch to vaccines produced using aborted fetal cells correlates with what SCPI concludes are ”dramatic” increases in the rates of regressive autism in children. Since there is no autism epidemic, there is no correlation either, of course; rather, the correlation SCPI claims to see is, at best, a correlation with changes in diagnostic criteria (https://rationalcatholicblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/the-problems-with-deishers-study-part-i-the-numbers/) and diagnostization of autism (but there is, to emphasize, absolutely no correlation between introduction of the vaccines Deisher complains about and changes in diagnostic criteria either). In short, assuming falsely that there exists an autism epidemic, Deisher adds the old and demonstrably false antivaccine idea that vaccines cause autism but concludes, without evidence, that the real culprit is aborted fetal DNA, which aren’t present in vaccines and couldn’t have caused autism if they were.

Deisher herself claims to be an “internationally renowned expert in the field of adult stem cell therapies and regenerative medicine”. For an internationally renowned expert, her scientific output is, to put it mildly, meagre. But the stem cell connection is probably significant– Desiher has “17 years of practice in senior scientific and corporate leadership positions concerning research, discovery, production and commercialization of human therapeutics”. Moreover, her scaremongering about vaccines should probably be seen in light of Deisher’s position as research and development director for the AVM Biotechnology, which promised to “offer ethical alternatives to some of the vaccines that currently rely on the use of fetal tissue form abortions”, marketed at “pro-life people who have been reluctant to use some vaccines because their development came as a result of the destruction of unborn children”. How convenient for AVM (which stands for “Ave Maria”) that such vaccines also cause autism, based on no evidence whatsoever.

Well, Deisher did produce a study in 2014 (with Ngoc V. Doan, Angelica Omaiye, Kumiko Koyama and Sarah Bwabye), one that was widely circulated in antivaccine circles (and promptly made it onto this list). It is an absolutely bonkers “study” with absolutely astonishing methodological errors that are hard to explain without citing motivated reasoning, as well as reliance on mechanisms that are, to put it diplomatically, biologically implausible. The study is criticized in some detail here and here (“the claims are so biologically and immunologically wrong that the entire letter is just a condensed list of fake claims and fear mongering that can be dangerous when read by someone that does not understand biology”). Why did it take so long for the study to appear, given that Deisher had already decided what the conclusion was going to be? Well, one hint can be found in noting that she had some trouble getting it carried out: a 2013 petition to have access to Vaccine Safety Datalink files to look for a connection between receipt of the varicella vaccine and autism was promptly denied because real scientists “found her proposed study to be critically deficient”.

Now, Deisher’s silly claims about DNA should at least make you seriously worried about the stem cell therapeutics she has been heavily involved in commercializing. And Deisher actually does have a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Physiology. She should know better, but she doesn’t. Indeed, with some of the same coauthors as in 2014, Deisher has followed up her paper with a series of “studies” that are even worse, like the one discussed here, and has even tried to use them in court – the courts were, unsurprisingly, not impressed. A couple of other, abysmal efforts are discussed here. At some point, it is hard not to suspect rank dishonesty.

And it is not like Deisher doesn’t have a history of rank dishonesty. As a staunch opponent of Planned Parenthood, she has been more than willing to use subversion to discredit that organization. Deisher was for instance instrumental in David Daleiden’s dishonest undercover sting operation in 2015 targeting Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donation programs.

More recently, Deisher has, like so many antivaxxers, thrown her lot in with the MAGA crowds, and has made appearances at wingnut happenings like AMPFEST20 together with a long list of QANON promoters.

Diagnosis: We recognize that her antivaccine efforts have presumably been boosted by personal tragedies, but those tragedies had nothing to do with vaccines, so interpreting them as having a connection is the result of already existing unjustified assumptions. And no amount of personal tragedy justifies the dishonesty and misuse of science to try to undermine public trust in one of the most important measures we have for preventing suffering and death.

Jon Del Arroz is a science fiction writer (“the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction”) and moron with ties to Vox Day. He is also – you guessed it – an antivaxxer, as well as a general rightwing fundie conspiracy theorist, groyper wannabe and asshole, who believes that vaccines are not only dangerous but a means for active population control. So when Rockland county declared a state of emergency after a measles outbreak in 2019 and banned infected children from public spaces, Del Arroz described it as Rockland County having “in effect declared Martial Law on its citizens” in a move “very similar to government overreach in New Zealand based on one shooting – they’re grabbing all of the populace’s guns”. Yeah, distinctions… how do they work? But there are also conspiracies afoot (“Something smells fishy here”). Why? Well, “First, if vaccines worked so well and they made us all immune, why should we be panicked about someone having it?” asks Del Arroz, rather oblivious to the fact thatnot everybody is vaccinated and no one has claimed the vaccine provides 100% immunity so that the efforts to prevent of outbreaks would really benefit from herd immunity. “The truth is [Del Arroz is really following an anti-vaccine script here], most outbreaks of measles and mumps happen to VACCINATED people,” claims Del Arroz, which is flatly false. But his utterly false premises and general paranoia lead Del Arroz to conclude “all the shutting down discussion on any vaccine topic by shaming anyone trying to discuss it seems to have a deeper purpose.” Oh yeah: “are these used for something else, like creating a populace who ARE chronically diseased all the time and further dependent on the government healthcare?” asks del Arroz, though he is quick to pivot to “the discussions need to be had” if anyone were to correctly identify him as a deranged conspiracy loon on the basis of his nonsense. Well, the discussions about vaccines and vacciny policy have beenhad. There are tons of scientific literature and discussion. Del Arroz is of course not interested in those discussions since those are based on facts, and facts, like distinctions, sit poorly with Jon Del Arroz. 

“Our own president (http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2020/07/2356-donald-trump.html) said it: ‘Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!’ I’ve yet to see him be wrong,” says Del Arroz, which tells you a lot of his ability to and interest in even trying to look. Vaccines do not cause autism.

Del Arroz served as a consistent purveyor of antivaccine conspiracy nonsense throughout the COVID pandemic and was ultimately banned from Twitter. Before being banned, he posted a slew of conspiracy nonsense, including blaming a mythical increase in cancer rates among young people on injection of an “experimental mRNA editor”. He has also asserted that hat American Muslims should be “forcibly converted to Christianity” and complained that social media “suppress stories involved in QAnon” (no links provided).

Diagnosis: Blathering moron. But although it is not surprising that ignorance, paranoia and general bigotry would quickly lead you to conspiracy theories, the sheer number of people who have been led to conspiracy theories through ignorance, paranoia and general bigotry is a serious cause for concern.

Hat-tip: Pharyngula

Heather Del Castillo is a Forida-based “holistic health coach” who at least used to run a health-coaching business called Constitution Nutrition. The business sold a personalized, six-month health and dietary program involving 13 in-home consulting sessions, priced at $95 each. Cynics would perhaps say that Del Castillo’s credentials were precisely suited for the kind of business she was running: a certificate from an unaccredited, for-profit online diploma mill called the Institution for Integrative Nutrition. Florida courts were not impressed, however, and used the Florida Dietetics and Nutrition Practice Act (DNPA), requiring that people offering such services needs to be qualified and licensed on order to protect against precisely the kind of potentially harmful bogus advice that business like Del Castillo’s are wont to offer, and ordered her to stop and to paya fine.

Del Castillo and her lawyers, on their hand, tried to invoke the First Amendment and argued that the DNPA’s requirement that people offering nutrition advice be qualified and licensed had the effect of giving qualified and licensed nutritionists a “monopoly”, or, to put it in the sort of terms people like Del Castillo tend to put it, that they are in a conspiracy to suppress the truth to keep people sick.

Diagnosis: So we haven’t actually managed to determine precisely what kind of advice Del Castillo was offering, but the fact that she did obtain a diploma from a diploma mill should be … disconcerting enough. So is the Dunning-Kruger dimension to failing to recognize that the topic on which you are offering advice, is one you have no knowledge about or insight into. She well deserves an entry her, and if she isn’t a loon, she is certainly someone to avoid.

Medical abortion is usually accomplished by taking two medications: mifepristone and then, later, misoprostol. If you want to know the exact mechanisms, look them up, but at least mifepristone works by blocking progesterone, which is needed to allow a fertilized egg to latch on and develop. Now, George Delgado has invented something he calls “Abortion Pill Reversal” based on the idea that a massive dose of progesterone taken after mifepristone (but before the misoprostol) could prevent contractions and reverse the first step of medical abortion. The procedure, known as “abortion reversal”, has no credible evidence to support it; Delgado claims that “our success rates with our most effective protocols are 65–70 percent survival”, but those figures are founded on a study (by Delgado and Mary Davenport) with six individuals and according to real medicine, mifepristone alone without misoprostol has no more than a 50–70 percent chance of terminating a pregnancy. Delgado’s study is, in other words, meaningless. And importantly, his procedure, large doses of progesterone, can have negative side effects.

But there is money in it! There is, since Delgado and his scheme have the backing of deranged and delusional wingnut fundie politicians. In Utah, for instance, state Representative Keven Stratton and state Senator Curt Bramble introduced a bill in 2016 mandating that doctors inform all women seeking abortion care of the procedure, despite the procedure’s worthlessness. Confronted with the lack of scientific backing, Stratton and Bramble admitted that they are not necessarily experts on the matter either. “We’re not doctors,” said Stratton. And no, you’re not: Shithead fundie loons are what you are. (Of course, as of 2023, state legislatures have other and more effective options for dissuading women from seeking abortions, though Utah has, at the time of writing, not managed to ban abortions outright.)

Diagnosis: Pure pseudoscience, and like so much pseudoscience, motivated by religious fundamentalism and ideology. Though not as scientifically bankrupt as, say, Theresa Deisher’s antivaccine nonsense, the similarities are there, and Delgado’s nonsense have the potential to cause real harm.

Did you know that there is an “education onslaught” being carried out by LGBTQ activists in Texas public schools? Well, the Texas chapter of the vehement anti-LGBTQ group MassResistanceclaims so, and has arranged a variety of gatherings and events to warn people about the nefariousness of the gay agenda, including (for instance) a 2017 “Teens4Truth” conference in Dallas aimed at teaching teenagers and their parents stuff like “how to counter LGBT issues in your schools” and “how LGBT activists are influencing your children.” Joined by fellow activists Sharon Armke and Caryl Ayala, Jennifer Delgado warned that one of the ways LGBTQ activists are pushing their agenda is through nefarious gay-straight alliances, which are being used to “recruit” teens to gayness and who knows what: “Gay-straight alliances – you really have to watch out these because these are adult homosexuals coming into the schools to mentor kids and we know that there is a problem with adults preying on young teens, especially in the male homosexual community. It’s how they recruit them, and they’re doing it in the school through these gay-straight alliances.”

Diagnosis: No, she has no idea what’s going on, but won’t let that prevent her from fighting it with all she’s got. Utterly deluded, and like so many utterly deluded people, she is very, very angry.

Minor and forgotten, perhaps, but worth a brief note: Joseph Delimater III is a resident of Anne Arundel and associate of gibberingly insane theocratMichael Peroutka, the radicalChristian Reconstructionist and southern secessionist 2004 presidential nominee for the U.S. Constitution Party and later county council member of Anne Arundel, Maryland, where he ran partially on the platform that the Maryland General Assembly is “no longer a valid legislative body” because it has passed laws that, according to Peroutka, is in violation of “God’s law.” (Peroutka, just to remind people, is also an ally of the League of the South and once donated a dinosaur fossil to Ken Ham’sCreation Museum to keep it out of the hands of zeh evolutionists.) Delimater, on his side, won the 2014 primary for county sheriff on the promise to resist implementation of any law that violates God’s law (in particular, of course, marriage equality-related stuff); according to Peroutka’s communication director, John “teaching children about MLK is child abuse” Lofton, Delimater “would evaluate each piece of legislation to be sure it was authorized by God in the Bible, the U.S. Constitution and the Anne Arundel County Charter.” Delimater himself claimed that his best quality as a candidate is “knowing what the law is,” having taken a twelve-week course on both the state and federal constitutions at Peroutka’s explicitly theocratic Institute of the Constitution.

Delimater didn’t win. Still.

Diagnosis: Obscure, perhaps, but nevertheless a wild-eyed ISIS sycophant and a genuine danger to his surroundings.

We’ve had ample opportunity to write about stem cell quackery (e.g. here), which has become a serious problem over the US the last fifteen years or so. In addition to those dubious clinics that market themselves as ‘experimental’ to prey on people in difficult situations with a glimmer of alleged hope in the form of treatment regimes unsupported by evidence, scienceor reason, the marketing potential of ‘stem cells’ has also been discovered by a large array frauds, quacks and promoters of alternative medicine

One such is Martha DeMarco. DeMarco is one among many promoters of dubious stem cell-related bullshit, and she offers it for a wide range of conditions including aging, musculoskeletal pain/injury, sexual enhancement, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure, and cancer. DeMarco, however, is not a doctor, and she has no background in science, medicine or any related field whatsoever. Instead, DeMarco is a homeopath with an “education” in “professional homeopathy” from something called “the Teleosis Homeopathic Collaborative.” Indeed, DeMarco is, according to herself, “nationally certified in homeopathy,” whatever that means (it certainly doesn’t mean that any official or minimally sensible body has recognized her non-education in pseudoscience), and a “Registered Homeopath, North America”, a meaningless slip of paper handed out by the cargo cult-science cult the North American Society of Homeopaths. Apparently, she is herself on the Board of Directors of the Council for Homeopathic Certification and Secretary on its Executive Committee. Now, the joke in ‘homeopathic stem cell therapy’ writes itself and may at least indicate that what she offers is less obviously harmful than what is offered from some other quack purveyors of ‘stem cell therapies’. Still.

DeMarco also offers gemmotherapy, which is … plant stem cell remedies “made principally from the embryonic tissue of various trees and shrubs”. If you suspect that DeMarco really doesn’t have the faintest idea about how stem cell therapies – the stuff she is marketing to her victims – are supposed to work, even at the most foundational level, you are probably right. This has nothing to do with reality. Stem cells are, for people like DeMarco, magic props in some pseudo-religious ritual.

It is worth noting that DeMarco is the daughter of Roger Callahan, the inventor of the amazingly nonsensical pseudopsychological quackery known as thought field therapy. Indeed, DeMarco can herself boast the “credential TFT-Adv”.

Diagnosis: Insane religious fundie, really, and though the religious fundamentalism is expressed with something more akin to fluffy nonsense and affirmation rather than anger, it still has the potential to cause significant harm to real people.

Bob DeMaria is a chiropractor marketing himself as “the Drugless Doctor”. DeMaria is not a medical doctor, however. That doesn’t prevent him from having views – silly views – on all sorts of medical topics, like vaccines. DeMaria thinks thatnatural immunity is better than “vaccine-induced” immunity, and he believes that there is a link between vaccinations and autism (there isn’t), presumably because vaccines, as DeMaria sees it, contains elemental mercury (they don’t, of course). Or to use DeMaria’s own formulation: “In the human body, when we have vaccines, or when we have antibodies that are made, it is made in our body to fight an organism and it’s permanent. When they vaccinate a human being today, they use particles and the real issue is what are they using as the base, part of this whole agar and all this growing substance, which is mercury and egg whites and all that, and aluminium, that can be quite toxic to the system.” No, Bob DeMaria doesn’t have the faintest clue about what he is talking about. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for humanity, neither do many of the people who cross his path.

DeMaria also thinks that girls who have the HPV vaccine become dirty sluts and that Coeliac disease is caused by vaccinations affecting glands in your neck (coeliac disease is of course an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine).

So what are his qualifications? DeMaria – or “Robert F. DeMaria DC, DABCO, FASBE, NHD” – can boast doctorates! One in “natural health” from Clayton College of Natural Health, an unaccredited diploma mill that has also sold diplomas to people like Gillian McKeith and Robert Young, and one in Chiropractic from the National University of Health Science (NUHS), an alternative medicine school. As a NUHS graduate, DeMaria subscribes to the idea, invented by the founder of chiropractic, D.D. Palmer, that subluxation is the sole cause of all disease, an idea Palmer claimed to have learned from a deceased physician in a séance, which still today remains the idea’s sole evidence-base and embodies its complete relationship with reality. As DeMaria sees it, God gave Adam the ability to heal himself, and that is an ability we have all inherited as his descendants – we just have to ensure that a chiropractic (him) clicks our backs into place, and then God’s breath will take care of everything else.

Most of all, though, DeMaria is “the Drugless doctor”, and he has plenty of promotional materials about why he “became drugless” and has been practicing drugless “for nearly 30 years,” Of course, since DeMaria is a chiropractor with diplomas from diploma mills and not a medical doctor, DeMaria has never had the authority to prescribe drugs in the first place, and his whole schtick is really an attempt to muddy the waters about his credentials to attract potential victims. Of course, he does push plenty of useless dietary supplements, and if they did work, which he claims they do (they don’t), it is unclear how he could market himself as “drugless”; DeMaria doesn’t even attempt to square that circle, insofar as his followers don’t seem not to notice.

Apparently, his daughter-in-law, Casen DeMaria, is also currently a Drugless Doctor and starring in youtube videos that give people health information like “lungs are important for breathing” and falsely claim that chiropractic adjustment can help with allergies and asthma and that thermography is effective in screening for breast cancer (it really, really isn’t).

DeMaria has views about other health-related issues, too. Indeed, in his youtube series “Ask Dr. Bob” on YouTube’s worst channel for health-related misinformation, iHealthTube , DiMaria answers questions from fans on a range of topics, and consistenly ends up recommending using products that – remarkably enough – are sold on his website. You can for instance use his product chlorella to protect yourself from the radioactivity of the radioactive clouds that the American government are secretly releasing into the environment to prevent rain. He also claims, without evidence, that GMOs are harmful and must be avoided because why not when your whole business model is based on being completely disentangled from reality anyways.

ADHD misinformation

A common topic in DeMaria’s videos is ADHD. DeMaria has many inaccurate and potentially dangerous ideas about ADHD and potential (alternative) “treatments” for ADHD, trying to sell struggling parents supplements that have been shown not to work as well as restrictive diets that have been shown not to provide any benefit for the symptoms of ADHD.

According to DeMaria, “docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) bathes the brain, and gives the brain information that just helps the brain function optimally” (which is entirely inaccurate, of course) but certain foods “sabotage” DHA somehow and that’s the cause of more or less every mental problem. So, DeMaria recommends various dietary restrictions based on gut feeling, thin air, and supplements he happens to sell, including DHA supplements in the form of fish oil, which demonstrably do not work to alleviate ADHD symptoms. In another video entitled “Causes of ADD and ADHD Your Doctor Doesn’t Know About!”, he claims, of course, that ADHD is caused by misalignment of the spine. There are obvious reasons why you doctor doesn’t know that. DeMaria doesn’t tell you those reasons.

He also claims, without evidence of course, that dairy products, sugar, and food dyes cause or worsen the symptoms of ADHD. Well, he’s got no evidence, but he’s got a gotcha question that’ll probably stump you: “I’m not tell am not telling anyone to stop dairy, but when is the last time you saw a cow eating cottage cheese, milk, or ice cream?” It stumped us. He also says that “milk contains arachidonic acid (ARA) which sabotages DHA”, a claim that is supported exclusively by his imagination, lack of understanding of (and lack of understanding of the significance to such claims of) physiology, biology or chemistry. Also, a woman whom he adviced to stop giving milk to her child allegedly “wrote a five starreview on Amazon for me”. So there is that. DeMaria’s claims that sugar damages DHA have similar evidential support and coherence, but at least pays homage to the debunked suger-hyperactivity-link myth. Then there are food dyes and the insane piece of quackery that is the Feingold diet.

Of course, as the “drugless doctor”, DeMaria also peddles all the dangerous myths and conspiracy theories that exist about actual ADHD medication that demonstrably does help people with ADHD, including (but definitely not limited to) the egregious myth that children who take ADHD medications are at a higher risk for developing a substance abuse disorder. He also accuses, contrary to evidence, fact and decency, parents who give their children ADHD medication of child abuse, apparently in contrast with his own practice of making a living out of selling potentially dangerous and ineffective supplements and misinformation to parents and children in difficult situations. In reality, diet doesn’t make much difference to ADHD, which is mostly genetic … DeMaria, who apparently never misses an opportunity to heap abuse on anyone deciding to follow the path of reality, denies that obvious fact, and instead claims that “ADHD kids become ADHD adults. ADHD adults usually have ADHD kids, and the reason is: they eat from the same trough.”

Transfat

Another alleged cause of ADHD is transfat. DeMaria has written a book about transfat, Dr. Bob’s Trans Fat Guide: Why No Fat, Low Fat, Trans Fat is Killing You. Now, there are good reasons to limit trans fats in the diet, so to that extent DeMaria’s conclusion isn’t wrong. But instead of reality, DeMaria supports it with an almost otherworldly array of pseudoscientific nonsense and made-up claims, and what is instructive is how much of an impact DeMaria’s nonsense actually seems to have had. Multiple websites have for instance promoted the myth that trans fats are metabolized very slowly and have a half-life of 51 days. As DeMaria presents the claim: “Do you remember in science class when your teacher talked about Madame Curie’s discovery of the half-life of uranium? Well, trans fat has a half life as well. Through research and experience, I have learned that the half-life of trans fat is fifty-one days.” That claim, of course, is bizarre nonsense and reveals, if more revelation is needed, DeMaria’s complete lack of appreciation for facts or coherence. But he goes undeterred on, with no more concern for accuracy, to blame trans fats for ADHD, depression, and Alzheimer’s. He is just making up blathering nonsense as he goes along.

Applying that principle has, of course, made DeMaria rather productive, and he has, in addition to the transfat one, written a number of books characterized by exactly zero concerns for reality, evidence, research or what harm his misinformation could possible cause. Titles include:

-       “Dr. Bob’s Guide to Stop ADHD in 18 Days”

-       “Dr. Bob’s Guide to Optimal Health: A God-Inspired, Biblically-Based 12 Month Devotional to Natural Health Restoration”

-       “Dr. Bob’s Drugless Guide to Mental Health”

-       “Dr. Bob’s Guide to Prevent Surgery”

-       “Dr. Bob’s Drugless Guide to Balancing Female Hormones”

Diagnosis: Completely devoid of any appreciation for reality, fact, accuracy or how things work – so much so that even in the few cases where his claims are actually supported by reality, his own explanations are a bizarre stream-of-consciousness mess of bullshit and falsehoods. He is a living, breathing embodiment of the principle of PIDOOMA. What you can be certain of, is that DeMaria’s claims – reality or not, harm or not – will end up aligning with his financial interests. In a reasonable society, there would be justice waiting for vile pieces of garbage like Bob DeMaria. In the actual world, he gets money.

Hat-tip: Myles Power; Braden MacBeth @Sciencebasedmedicine

His most obvious instance of antivaccine activism was greenlighting the screening of disgraced fraudAndrew Wakefield’s and conspiracy theorist Del Bigtree’santi-vaccineconspiracy flickVaxxedat the Tribeca Film Festival, which De Niro co-founded – indeed, De Niro admitted that he bypassed the festival’s regular selection process for documentaries and added the film to the festival’s roster. It was eventually pulled due to criticism from scientists and reasonable people (in fact: primarily from other documentary film makers who didn’t want to be associated with the tripe), something De Niro, the person who actually decided to pull the movie over concerns about his public image and market worth, seems to think is an example of “censorship”. But De Niro didn’t really back down. He has later appeared at public events devoted to “vaccine safety” with e.g. anti-vaccine movement leaderRobert Kennedy, jr., complete with fraudulent show-challenges to pro-vaccine advocates to prove them wrong (as judged by themselves).

According to himself, “I want to know the truth,” which, if correct, makes associating himself with Del Bigtree, Andrew Wakefield and Robert Kennedy, jr.’s antivaccine conspiracy theories and misinformation a notoriously poor strategy. About Vaxxed, De Niro claimed that “you must see it”, ostensibly because “There’s a lot of information about things that are happening with the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies [there is: it just isn’t accurate]; there’s a lot of things that are not said”, and yes: there are plenty of claims in Vaxxed that you won’t hear said by real scientists or medical doctors, for obvious reasons. He also recommended the conspiracy flick Trace Amounts. “I’m not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines,” added De Niro, regurgitating theoldestanti-vaccinelineinthebook.

But hey: He’s just asking questions: “Some people can’t get a certain kind of shot, and they can die from it, from penicillin. So why should that not be with vaccines?” asks De Niro, as if real scientists haven’t asked those questions, carefully investigated them and shown that vaccines are safe and effective. He is, like most people who are “just asking questions”, not just asking questions. Indeed, De Niro explicitly asserts that there “is a link” between vaccines and autism (there isn’t) and that both he and his wife, Grace Hightower, believe that vaccines were somehow part of the cause of his son’s autism (as opposed to e.g. father’s age, which does in fact correlate with autism). And as for the fact that science pretty conclusively shows that there is no such link? It’s “much more complicated than that,” proclaims De Niro, without explaining the complication since the complication is really just that he is wrong (and his wife is wrong) and it is hard for him to admit that he is wrong and his wife a crazy conspiracy loon. And yes, of course there is a conspiracy: The reason we don’t know about the vaccine-autism link isn’t that it doesn’t exist but that “it benefits the big drug companies.” Also, confronted with the fact that Wakefield is considered discredited because he demonstrably engaged in fraud and misinformation, De Niro countered: “but how was he discredited? By the medical establishment?” He was discredited by the facts, Bob – the facts, and his demonstrably fraudulent behavior. But hey: let’s poison the well with some JAQ-style allusions to grand conspiracies instead, shall we?

De Niro’s antivaccine rants received praise from Jim Carrey and Alicia Silverstone. And after the brouhaha with Vaxxed, De Niro quickly announced that“Harvey Weinstein and I are working on doing a documentary” on vaccines. It has yet to materialize and one suspects the project might have hit some snags along the way.

Diagnosis: A garbage person full of raging bullshit. And unfortunately, his soapbox is big enough for his bullshit to reach a lot of people, some of whom might, for some reason, think that this befuddled piece of mindrot has anything worthwhile to contribute to public debate.

"Dr." Derin

Derin and Menear are homeopaths. Now, that homeopathy is laughable quackery hardly needs saying, but homeopathic products are also usually mostly harmless, at least to the extent that most frauds are “harmless” and at least as long as you don’t delude yourself into thinking they can actually do anything whatsoever to remedy disease or, even worse, be a legitimate substitute for real treatment. But despite the fact that the proposed mechanisms by which homeopathic products are supposed to treat disease sound too silly to work as a parody of cartoon versions of witches’ brews (or ORMUS), some homeopaths actually think their products can do something. Derin and Menear, in particular, think homeopathic products can be used to treat Ebola.

Of course they can’t, but it is nevertheless worth giving the explanation from homeopathic groups for how Derin’s and Menear’s products are supposed to accomplish what they claim: “Dr. Gail Derin studied the symptoms of Ebola Zaire, the most deadly of the three that can infect human beings. Dr. Vickie Menear, M.D. and homeopath, found that the remedy that most closely fit the symptoms of the 1914 “flu” virus, Crolatus horridus, also fits the Ebola virus nearly 95% symptom-wise! Thanks go to these doctors for coming up with the following remedies: 1. Crolatus horridus (rattlesnake venom) 2. Bothrops (yellow viper) 3. Lachesis (bushmaster snake) 4. Phosphorus 5. Merc. cor.” (Note the quotation marks around ‘flu’ and the inaccuracy concerning the year). Yes, the reasoning is that snake venom “closely fits”  the symptoms of the Spanish flu (whatever that means) and that the Spanish flu and Ebola are somewhat alike, and therefore snake venom cures Ebola … well, that’s not quite all of it: water that has been exposed to rattlesnake venom but have subsequently been diluted not to contain any trace of it, cures Ebola – as long as you have performed the correct psychic rituals during the dilution process. To assert how responsible they are, the homeopaths also warn you “[d]o not try to take care of yourself without the further education and experience that a homeopath can give you” if you think you suffer from Ebola. And remember fellow homeopath Joetta Calabrese’s point: “In the case of Ebola, no conventional treatment or vaccine is available. Fortunately for us, homeopathy has great renown for its healing ability in epidemics.” No, DePape’s deranged detachment from reality got nothing on these people. Even Mike Adams found the ideas too quacky for serious consideration, and that’s a first.

Diagnosis: It’s somewhat tricky to determine how bizarre one’s delusions have to be in order to qualify for a genuine medical diagnosis, but this got to be at least borderline. Their danger to their immediate surroundings is probably limited (one hopes) but it’s not worth it to let them get anywhere near you, your loved ones, your pets or anything else you care about.