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#1631: Charles Fuqua

March 29, 2016, 12:11 am
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Charles Fuqua (I don’t know how it is pronounced) was a candidate for the state legislature in Arkansas in 2012, and garnered substantial financial support from the Republican party, at least until someone close-read his book God’s Law: The Only Political Solution, which advocated not only a theocracy based on Old Testament Law, but even tried actively to justify some of the more unsavory elements of that suggestion. So for instance, Fuqua did argue for the idea that unruly children should be put to death like it says in the Bible. Yeah, that’s right: Death penalty for disobedient children at their parents’ discretion (as long as they follow “proper procedure”, which was presumably filing the request with the elders of the town). Oh, but it’s not really bad: You see, it would have (probably unlike the death penalty for adults) a deterrent effect and wouldn’t be used often since parents love their children so much that they would probably almost never want them to be put to death. Which would, according to Fuqua’s own reasoning, presumably defeat the purpose, but there is reason to think that Charles Fuqua at this stage in his argument would have had some trouble recognizing “conflicts of reasons”. He is also firmly opposed to abortion.

In the same book, Fuqua also advocated expelling Muslims from the U.S. (we know: fairly anticlimactic at this stage), saying it would solve what he described as the “Muslim problem.” We haven’t bothered to figure out precisely what that problem is, but he has described liberals and Muslims as the “anti-Christ” and said that he believes they are conspiring to create a “bloody revolution.” The uniting principle is, of course, that they are enemies of Christianity, and follow the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

It is worth mentioning that the Arkansas legislature was at this time already saddled with Loy Mauch, who has defended slavery and denounced Abraham Lincoln as a Nazi and Marxist. We’ll return to him.


Diagnosis: Whoops. I guess it’s a tough game to stand out among the fringe nutters in the state legislatures. Fuqua has hopefully crawled back into whatever hole he emerged from.
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#1632: Sherry Gaba

March 30, 2016, 1:16 am
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CAM treatments like acupuncture do not work better than placebo. Some CAM defenders have accordingly gone the predictable route – the dumbest route – and argued that this very fact not only doesn’t show that the CAM treatments in question don’t work (which is what it does show), but that it vindicates The Secret. That’s right: the placebo effect demonstrates the efficacy of the Law of Attraction; the Law of Attraction being the idea that if you really want something strong enough, magical forces in the Universe will vibrate them into existence for you (the religious version often involves the intermediate step of sending money to your local televangelist) – that is, the idea that wishful thinking can replace hard work, because magic. CAM regimes are, accordingly, really magical rituals and artifacts you can deploy to channel the spiritual energies of the universe.

This is for instance the theme of Sherry Gaba’s essay“The Law of Attraction and the Placebo Effect”, published on Deepak Chopra’s group blog IntentBlog, who introduces the placebo effect as “[p]eople that believe they are taking a ‘cure’ actually have mild to extremely positive results from taking the placebo, leading to a partial to complete cure of the condition without any real medical intervention.” That is a bit of a misdescription, of course. The effect of the psychological side of the placebo effect only “work” for subjective symptoms: Your psychological state doesn’t actually cure anything but at most (and unreliably so) lead to change in subjective perception of the symptoms. (Other effects lumped in with the psychological effect are effects of changed behaviors of test subjects under observation: people participating in a test of a weight loss drug tend to start doing all sorts of other things, like working out and eating less, that have effects on the outcome – that doesn’t exactly vindicate the Law of Attraction). To Sherry Gaba, however, “[t]he placebo effect is, in reality, the medical proof that the Law of Attraction really works. The Law of Attraction simply says that what you focus in on in your life is what you will receive. In the medical case the patients taking the placebo focused in on becoming healthy and overcoming a medical condition, which is exactly what happened. Some people believed so strongly in the effectiveness of the placebo that they were completely cured.” Which is not how the placebo effect works but how Gaba presumably, well, wished that it worked. And just to emphasize the obvious: the placebo effect does not vindicate bullshit alternative treatments.

In her dayjob Gaba is a “psychotherapist, author and life coach” who specializes in “all addictions” using “traditional and alternative techniques such as somatic experiencing and tapping.” She is the author of The Law of Sobriety™: Attracting Positive Energy for a Powerful Recovery, which lays out her steps for curing addiction and “connect with a universal life force to create a life filled with harmony and peace,” based on the law of attraction. The book is praised as “a masterpiece” by Deepak Chopra

She’s not the only CAM advocate to make startlingly ridiculous claims on behalf of placebo. Robert Schiffman thinks placebo effects are proof of the existence of God.


Diagnosis: Admittedly more of a promoter of fluffy corporate newspeak bullshit than a promoter of pastel energy dolphin teleportations. Her fluffy corporate newspeak law of attraction stuff is nevertheless exasperating bullshit.
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#1633: Brigitte Gabriel

March 31, 2016, 12:24 am
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Brigitte Gabriel is a Lebanese-American fundie TV pundit who used to work for Middle East Television when it was owned by the South Lebanon Army (a Christian militia allied with Israel; the station was later sold to Pat Robertson). Today, she travels the world giving presentations sponsored by wingnut groups, mostly claiming that Jews Muslims are conspiring to seize power in the world, while promoting her personal biography describing her as a victim of Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists. Gabriel’s anti-Islam rhetoric does have the kind of disconcerting quality that have made many Jewish groups uncomfortable with her, but her hysterical conspiracy mongering has been happily picked up by various wingnut organizations, websites such as the WND, and events such as the Values Voter Summit 2015. And there is reason to be afraid, apparently: According to Gabriel, there are up to 300 million Muslims who want to be suicide bombers out there. Moreover, you should remember that it is impossible for Muslims to assimilate into American society, apparently because only Christians can be true Americans. Gabriel has accordingly endorsed Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering America, claiming in the process that “he is the General Patton of our lifetime.” Here is her take on the common “America will not survive if X wins the election argument.

Gabriel heads ACT! for America (formerly American Congress for Truth), an organization that has tied up with various rightwing groups to promote some common and silly conspiracy theories – in particular the delusion that they have to pass laws banning the supposed danger of American courts being taken over by sharia law. Among her other targets are American public schools, whose students are currently being “indoctrinated in Islam” through their history textbooks, which have turned classrooms into “recruiting grounds for Islam” (her group even got the Alabama state board of education to delay approval of history textbooks due to their complaints). She is also somewhat nonplussed that “Jewish leftists in this country” such as Anti-Defamation League president Abraham Foxman “are eager to embrace Islam.” The target of blame, she concludes, should be the universities, which are teaching more complex and accurate  “anti-America and anti-Israel” material – with the help of Saudi oil money. President Obama’s anti-American attitude is also “a direct result of what is being taught at our universities.” And presumably because he spent his childhood as a fanatic Muslim who attended a religious “madrassa” and grew up “praying just like Osama bin Laden prayed”. In fact, he is still a Muslim, according to Gabriel, and a terrorist supporter, a conclusion she can safely make on the observation that she disagrees with him on policy issues.

In 2014 there was much consternation among various less intelligent wingnuts in the wake of the announcement that the federal government will relinquish oversight of the Internet to a US-backed nonprofit. Gabriel’s response was among the more impressivelystupid one. According to Gabriel, Obama is handing the internet over the UN control (which is, in fact, more or less precisely the opposite of what the administration did), and it will lead to the imposition of Sharia law on the Internet. It is hard to reconcile that claim with the assumption that she does, in fact, know what sharia law is. Or the internet. (She doesn’t have the faintest clue what was actually happing, of course, but that is less surprising.)

Here is Gabriel agreeing with Dennis Michael Lynch that Obama (“a girly man in an empty suit sitting in the White House endangering the country”) is intentionally allowing ISIS to gain territory in order to cause a refuge crisis that he can use as an excuse to settle said refugees in the US to forcibly “intermingle America.” No, the step from there to demanding an end to lizard people mind control over Americans through chemtrails is not a big one.

Here is the leader for the Texas chapter of ACT! for America, Dorrie O’Brien, talking about stealth jihad; yes, these people are in all seriousness promoting ideas that remarkably resemble the most medieval ideas of the kind of Taliban-style fundamentalism they imagine that Muslims in general support.


Diagnosis: It is interesting (but hardly surprising) that groups like Gabriel’s tend to promote policy suggestions and a sense of paranoia that to a very large extent resemble the target of their paranoia. As for Gabriel herself, there are reasonable people who take her seriously. Don’t. Brigitte Gabriel is a deranged conspiracy theorist.
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#1634: Sandra Gade

April 1, 2016, 12:06 am
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More bullshit dredged up from the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. Sandra Gade, a signatory, is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, though I have been unable to locate any research in her name. Nor does she have any expertise in any area related to evolution, of course, and there is ample evidence that she doesn’t have much of a clue about what evolution (or science in general) involves.

Gade received a little bit of attention in 2006, when she started a petition to ask the Oshkosh school board for an “advisory referendum” requesting that students learn evidence for and against evolution, in the manner recommended by the Discovery Institute. Of course, the alleged evidence against evolution is not evidence against evolution, but creationist ravings based mostly on misunderstandings, motivated reasoning and poorly developed critical thinking skills (there is a comprehensive selection of PRATTs at her webside (cached)). Nor was Gade really particularly interested in the research- or science part of evolution teaching. Gade was concerned about Jesus. “The way evolution is being taught is antagonistic to students’ religious beliefs,” said Gade, and therefore a apparently a violation of the First Amendment. She also asserted that Wisconsin students are being brainwashed because what Wisconsin students are (ideally) taught is science and fact rather than what Gade wants them to believe, which is not based on science and fact.

At least the schoolboard does not seem to have been impressed.


Diagnosis: Stock denialist, motivated by very typical, fundamentalist reasons. Probably harmless – more village-idiot than David-Barton material.
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#1635: Robert Gagnon

April 2, 2016, 1:20 am
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Presbyterian theologian Robert Gagnon does not like gay rights. And he has an explanation for why others do: It’s in part because of “heterosexual guilt”. Says Gagnon: “A lot of heterosexuals have, you know, we’ve not done all that well in some areas of sexual ethics. That includes issues of divorce, remarriage, that includes premarital sex, includes abortion. And if you can give a pass on the issue of homosexual practice, in effect it’s a way of exempting our own guilt, and it’s accommodating in a way that’s self-serving.” One is almost tempted to admire his brazenness: If you support marriage equality, it’s because you are trying to downplay your own moral shortcomings by excusing others’. Gagnon himself, on the other hand, need no such self-deluding, self-serving excuses.

He has also compared homosexuality to incest, but “[w]hen I compare homosexual practice to incest it is primarily to make the point that if we are opposed to the latter we should also be opposed to the former, since both involve a union of persons who are too much alike on a structural (formal, embodied) level: too much sameness as regards kinship (incest) or gender (homosexual practice), not enough complementary otherness.” Which might be an argument against intra-racial marriage if it weren’t so abysmally stupid on its own terms. But at least we can appreciate how much his arguments reveal of his own personality. (For the record, Gagnon actually thinks that homosexuality is a worse sin than incest.)

No wonder Gagnon has become a leading voice among those who oppose gay rights and churches that fail to condemn them (Here, for instance, is the ex-gay “Sunday school documentary” Such were some of us that he appeared in). He has offered some more traditional arguments, too, however. Gagnon has for instance asserted that same-sex relationships are doomed to failure because two men, without a feminine counterpoint to their hyper-sexuality, will become promiscuous, adulterous and contract sexually transmitted infections. And two women cannot have a stable relationship and will develop mental illnesses because they don’t have a man in their lives to keep their needy, demanding personalities in check.

But really, to make sure you don’t misunderstand him and thinks he just care about the quality of your relationships, he has been crystal clear that Christians who don’t warn their friends to abstain from gay sex, and thereby let them go to hell for their sins, will be judged by God for failing to warn them. Here is Gagnon claiming that homosexuality is a declaration that your “maleness is only half intact.” He has also received some attention for his defense of updating older religious texts to make their anti-gay message more explicit.


Diagnosis: And among his gang Gagnon’s arguments seem to be considered to be among the more “intellectual ones”. Words fail.
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#1636: Steve Gaines

April 3, 2016, 11:55 pm
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Yes, let’s run yet another anti-gay lunatic. Steve Gaines, of the Bellevue Baptist Church in Tennessee, was one of Rick Santorum’s valued supporters during the 2012 Republican primaries. Gaines thinks that gay rights and gays in the media are a serious threat to America’s security and economy: “America’s economy and America’s safety are more tied up with what’s going on in those courts in Massachusetts than what’s going on in Wall Street or over in Iraq,” said Gaines, but didn’t explain how: “Radical homosexuals and lesbians seek to take over our nation. You cannot watch television without being subjected to Gay propaganda. They seek to brain wash our citizens so they can make same-sex marriage the law of the land” is not an explanation, nor is “I personally believe that if America does not repent, she is headed for national disaster,” though apparently it is God who is going to cause it, out of revenge, and if He does, then it seems pretty unfair to blame the gays for these disasters, doesn't it?

Moreover, Gaines has warned us that since “homosexuals and lesbians cannot reproduce biologically so they prey on the children of normal people, seeking to entice them to be trapped in their perverted lifestyle,” since homosexuality is not a sexual orientation but a conspiracy to control the world.

One interesting detail about Gaines, though, is that his own moral compass seems to be broken. Or to put it differently: It is unclear whether his endorsement in the end helped Santorum’s campaign.


Diagnosis: Delusional nitwit fundamentalism, and that, predictably, comes with being an a**hole. Noisy, but we're not sure he has a lot of influence.
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#1637: Dan Gainor

April 5, 2016, 12:29 am
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Yeah, we’re on a roll with them, so here you go: Dan Gainor, journalist and leader of the Business Media Institute (BMI), a branch of L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, and director of its Culture and Media Institute (taking the reins after Robert Knight), whose goal is “to advance, preserve, and help restore America’s culture, character, traditional values, and morals against the assault of the liberal media,” anti-gay activist. To illustrate the work of the BMI, their 2006 report is useful: It concludes that various TV programs, including Law & Order, were “biased against business.” Beyond businesses, according to Gainor, the media is conspiring against Christians; the media is for instance covertly attacking Christianity by reporting on sports (instead of religion) and by covering non-Christian faiths. And GEORGE SOROS IS BEHIND IT‼‼Gainor didn’t like the movie “Norm of the North” either (because “Norm goes on his own little polar bear jihad against capitalism”). Another BMI report accused the news networks of bias in favor of the Gardasil vaccine; yes, the BMI is anti-vaccine as well, though they attack vaccines from the fire-and-brimstone side where disease is considered just punishment for sin rather than from the point of view of flaky woo.

Currently, Gainor and his group have had a particular focus on homosexuality, however. So, according to Gainor, marriage equality advocates will “undermine our entire country and everything that made us free.” And to achieve this goal, those advocates have coopted the media, who is now engaging in“full-blown fascist propaganda" tactics to promote marriage equality. And thus, “it’s Christians who stand up to traditional marriage who are actually the ones being discriminated against” (quote by Efrem Graham that Gainor endorsed). So, yes – that kind: like any good paranoid conspiracy theorist, Gainor thinks that those who disagree with him not only, you know, disagree with him, but that they want to “kick us out of the country, lock us up, or shoot us,” which sounds strikingly like psychological projection. Here is the Culture and Media Institute’s Andrew Collins on the show Glee (and here is Paul Wilson giving his two cents as well).

It’s not only gay rights, though. Gainor also thinks that 2007 snowstorms in Denver prove that there is a “Northeast bias” on global warming – if the leftist media had been living in Colorado than on the East Coast, they would have been more skeptical of global warming. Since that’s how climate science works.

In general, Gainor’s stated goal is to combat bias in the media. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the faintest clue how biases actually work or how to recognize them. A telling example of that is his recent pronouncement that now that NBC has terminated its financial relationship with Donald Trump, no one from that channel can cover the Republican primaries now because they’re “biased”: “No NBC reporter is now qualified to cover the presidential election,” said Gainor. “They have chosen an activist position – and the same goes for Univision. If they don’t want to discipline their president of content, then they’ve made their decision: they’re an activist organization, not a news organization.” But if they had retained Trump’s show and thereby had a direct financial connection to him worth millions (for both)? (And as Ed Brayton points out, one wonders what Gainor would say if one of the networks was invested in a television series with Hillary Clinton worth millions of dollars.) Anyways, to Gainor it is an example of classic liberal media bias: “They are picking and choosing who the American public is allowed to see, interact with, and vote for” by dropping the show, concluded Gainor. “That’s not their role.” Words fail.


Diagnosis: Ah, yes: With all his might Gainor is trying to combat bias in the media. However, when your general outlook is best characterized by delusional paranoia and motivated reasoning turned into (something close to) an art form, this is what the result will look like. It’s not pretty.
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#1638: Blaine Galliher

April 6, 2016, 12:52 am
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Blaine Galliher was a member of the Alabama House of Representatives (30. district) from 1994 to 2012, when he resigned to serve as Governor Bentleys Legislative Director. For our purposes Galliher is most notable for his strategy for getting creationism taught in public schools. While legislators have not had much success forcing creationism onto the curriculum, Galliher’s bill would allow schools to offer academic credit for a released time program of creationist instruction taking place off school property. His colleague, Mary Sue McClurkin (R-Indian Springs) thought “this would be a real good [opportunity], to be able to study religion.” According to legal experts, the strategy would not be less in violation of the Constitution than the usual creationist attempts. And at least Galliher was pretty forthcoming about his intentions: “They teach evolution in the textbooks, but they don't teach a creation theory,” and “[c]reation has just as much right to be taught in the school system as evolution does and I think this is simply providing the vehicle to do that.”

Apparently the bill was introduced at the behest of a former teacher who was “fired in 1980 for reading the Bible and teaching creationism at Spring Garden Elementary School when parents of the public school sixth-grade students objected and he refused to stop,” one Joseph Kennedy, who “still has a dream of teaching public school students about creationism.” Kennedy and his supporters were poised to offer a course on creationism if the bill should have passed. Which, of course, it didn’t (though it passed committee).


Diagnosis: Alabama still doesn’t have much of a reputation for its public education, and anti-education zealots like Galliher are at least partly to blame for that. There are plenty of them where he came from.
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#1639: Betsy Gallun

April 7, 2016, 12:58 am
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How LGBT-related issues are covered in schools probably varies, but in 2013 it was discovered that Maryland’s Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) system had what is – hopefully – a novel approach. In their health PGC seventh-graders were shown the video “Acception”, which promotes ex-gay therapy disguised as an anti-bullying message that turns out to be “want to avoid being bullied? Get straight” – it’s a pretty fringe-crazy documentary (it probably doesn’t need to be mentioned that ex-gay therapy has been widely condemned as ineffective and harmful), and reasonable people might want to know how it ended up on the curriculum for PGC students.

Well, it turns out that infamous ex-gay therapist Richard Cohen, who was proudly and permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association in 2002, had managed to land himself a position on the PGCPS Health Council. It is not known exactly how that happened, but it is telling that the district’s (now retired) supervisor for health education, Betsy Gallun, thinks students deserve to learn about ex-gay therapy and emphasizes that she “feels very badly that it’s coming under scrutiny” when the story broke, which is surely not the right response. A district spokesman later reported that the district has now pulled the video “because there was too much focus on alternative lifestyles.”


Diagnosis: That offshoots of the Texas Taliban is trying to ruin public education from the inside is hardly news, but still deserves exposure and mockery. And it’s still hard for us to fathom how someone can manage to be so brazenly underhanded as Betsy Gallun. Hopefully neutralized, though.
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#1640: Adriana Gamondes

April 9, 2016, 12:40 am
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Dare we suggest that the anti-communist campaigns of older times are partially to blame for the situation? It is at least pretty undeniamble contemporary libertarians include a fair share of insane conspiracy theorists, a group that is sure to greet any government initiative not only with criticism but with paranoid delusions about covert depopulation agendas or one-world government plans. So it is really not surprising that many antivaxxers – traditionally (but apparently inaccurately) associated with the granola left – have been drawn to certain versions of libertarianism (actually, the direction of attraction is probably in the other direction).

Adriana Gamondes is one example. Gamondes is “the mother of twins who are currently recovering from vaccine-induced GI disorders,” which pretty much sums up the actual evidence base for her anti-vaccine views and her credentials in the relevant area. Those “credentials” suffice to be allowed to write for the tinfoil-hat conspiracy website Age of Autism, though, and Gamondes’s paranoid-libertarian take on the issue is strikingly similar to stuff you find on sovereign citizen websites, as e.g. in her rant“Libertarian Backlash against Reason Magazine’s ‘Corporatist,’ ‘Pseudolibertarian’ Compulsory Vaccine Campaign” a response to a piece by Ronald Bailey (a libertarian who has written a lot of very sensible stuff) where Bailey argues in favor of coercive vaccination from a libertarian premise (basically that libertarianism is not a justification for putting others at risk). Of course, Gamondes’s version of libertarianism, at least when it comes to vaccine-related issues, is “if my decisions hurt you, that’s your problem and no reason for me not to make those decisions.” In particular, it’s Gamondes’s goddamn right to spread whatever disease she wants to those who for various medical reasons cannot be vaccinated and to undermine herd immunity. After all, “[a] single person picks up and loses an incalculable number of microorganisms per day. This is done invisibly, without a person’s knowledge, whether he is healthy or sick, without malice, without intent, and without the ability to stop it (even if you try). No one can know how many billions of microorganisms were exchanged in a given day, nor who will be susceptible to them. No one can prove beyond reasonable doubt which person dropped which microorganism.” So there: Even if she harms you, you can’t prove that it was her, at least not conclusively. (At least other libertarian commenters on Bailey’s piece took the more convenient just-reject-science-when-it-doesn’t-fit approach of “[h]erd Immunity is more Bullshit from Big Pharma with NO logic behind it!” Ah, “logic”, the mass term: there is much logic flowing through those comment sections)

Of course, as an antivaccer Gamondes doesn’t really believe that vaccines are particularly safe and efficacious in any case – a libertarian approach is at least partly a strategy for trying to counter the obvious point that you subscribe to crazy crackpottery by changing the topic to a political one: “It doesn’t matter what I believe; it’s all about individual rights”. Gamondes is otherwise a loyal fan of the discredited Andrew Wakefield, and his (and his followers’) attempts at “science”, and will view anyone who disagree with him as shills for the pharmaceutical industry, and the pharmaceutical industry as suppressing Wakefield’s research purely because of money – the money-generating mechanism is left, shall we say, underdescribed. Which is another tactic to avoid engaging with science, evidence and reason, of course: dismiss your opponents as corrupt. Indeed, Gamondes is apparently the one who “created” the infamous Photoshop piece known as the “Thanksgiving baby feast”, where the heads of scientists, journalists and bloggers who had spoken out in favor of vaccination were photoshopped onto the heads bodies of people sitting down to eat a baby for Thanksgiving dinner. The post was deleted from the Age of Autism blog, but the difference between this and the regular shill gambits at Age of Autism is purely a matter of vividness, not reason and the strength of their inferences.


Diagnosis: We have a hard time believing that her efforts actually help the antivaxx cranks, but Gamondes is at least not a person you want anything to do with. Crazy and dangerous.
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#1641: Zen Gardner

April 11, 2016, 12:18 am
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Zen Gardner – we don’t know if it is a name or a pseudonym – runs the New Age conspiracy webpage of the same name, where he is JAQing off (it’s actually pretty assertive even by the standards of conspiracy theory JAQing offs) about any and all phenomena that could be used to spawn conspiracy theories, which are subsequenty infused with a colorful mass of New Age fluff and pseudoscience. He covers an impressive range of topics, but as a (not particularly bad or good) example you could look up this article about the dangers of “diabolical microwaves”, such as cell phones and wi-fi: “While they [us, the fools] make light of these death-dealing devices and pretend they’re innocuous, the unwitting sheeple wither and die from mutated brain cells, injured immune and nervous systems, organ damage, and our children are predicted to have genetically altered offspring within 2 generations!” According to Gardner and the “research” he has collected from various conspiracy websites, pseudoscientists and his own fertile imagination – as well as some quote-mining – “[c]hronic exposure to even low-level radiation (like that from cell phones), can cause a variety of cancers, impair immunity, and contribute to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, heart disease, and many other ailments.” (No actual scientific research here, of course – proper methodology and data gathering wouldn’t really support the claims, you know). But not only is the science wrong and exposure to low-level radiation dangerous; there are nefarious motives at play: The industry “didn’t have to use these damaging frequencies – they CHOSE to”. It’s all a conspiracy to … achieve mind control, facilitated by the American military, who discovered that “low-level microwaves were the perfect stealth weapon to be used on dissident groups around the world, because you could make dissident groups sick, give them cancer, change their mental outlook on life without them even knowing they were being radiated.” At least he’s forthcoming about showing us what we are dealing with here.

A quick browse through his site reveals e.g. the following:
-       The 2015 floods of the South Eastern US? It was all engineered by the guv’mint; the evidence consists mostly of asserting that it was, as well as looking at meteorological maps that look strange to Gardner’s untrained eyes (“does this precipitation map look natural to you?”). As is global climate change.
-       In “Aluminum and the slave race of the Matrix” we are told that we are being sprayed with aluminum through chemtrails because aluminum “is a prime receiver for electromagnetic signals from information technology;” the “ruling elite” is doing this to create a slave race whose minds they can control by cell phones and wi-fi.
-       Not surprisingly, vaccines are part of the agenda (a “holocaust in slow motion”). Not only are we being forced to receive them; the government gives them to us without our knowledge through genetically modified foods (another major target for Gardner’s rants). All to achieve mind control. After all, most of the diseases against which we are vaccinated are manufactured by the government aswell (that article is written by Sarah Stone, Jim Stone, and Russ Clarke – I have no idea and don’t care). What else do you think was the point of engineering those diseases if not to force us to be vaccinated?
-       Though most science is fraud, astrology is actually real science, presumably because it is done by independents not corrupted by mind-controlled academia which has been folled into valuing irrelevant things like evidence, reason and knowledge.
-       9/11 was a conspiracy (a “trauma-based mass mind control ritual”); no plane hit the Pentagon, and Mossad was behind the whole thing (it “can’t be denied” because one Rebekah Roth claims so in a book.
-       Aliens are everywhere. The Nazis (from “a secret NAZI breakaway civilization” ostensibly on the Moon) have infiltrated the US secret space program, and they are now setting up corporate bases and slave labor camps on Mars and elsewhere. Here is some very, very secret information on aliens and the largest Reptilian and Grey Alien base in America (oh, yeah), revealed by an anonymous scientist “now in hiding” (possibly the same one who according to my spam folder discovered the cure for diabetis and is now hiding from Big Pharma?)
 
According to his bio, Gardner’s “focus is empowering humanity to reach its full potential in conscious awareness and its resultant activation. He writes on a variety of subjects from forbidden knowledge and our manipulated spiritual and historical context, to current political events, in an effort to dismantle old mind sets in order to encourage the awakening of human consciousness and bring meaningful change to a world that’s under full frontal attack by powers that seek to deny humanity its health, freedom and ultimate discovery of who they truly are.” Rather standard fare, you might say, but to Gardner thinks his noble goals allow him to dismiss skeptics and critics and “this hyper critical, deeply cynical attitude that seems to be infecting the research community,” which seems to be in notorious disagreement with Zen Gardner on absolutely everything because they are, in fact, psy-ops controlled by the Powers that Be to undermine people like him and bring us all to “the ultimate dream state the THEY work hard to lull us into.” (Who has a cynical attitude again?) It’s actually a neat trick for avoiding having to actually deal with the evidence against his views or worry too much about avoiding the standard pitfalls of poor critical thinking skills. Reason, evidence, accountability and critical thinking are for the closed of mind, not for enlightened messiahs like Gardner and his sycophants, and reason, evidence, accountability and critical thinking are just weapons the powers of evil use in their war on those, like Gardner, who have discovered how to free his mind of all vestiges of accountability or sensitivity to facts. The rest of us are mind-controlled slaves, and that Gardner has discovered this to be the case means that he must not only be i) right, but also ii) an exception to the mind control scheme that has enslaved the rest of us, one who has managed to free himself by opening his mind.

Of course, Gardner isn’t only under the illusion that he’s right; he also thinks he’s winning “I still think the vibrational changes and all the awakened are doing and the full on exposure of the western/Israeli insanity is having a very real effect and profoundly wearing on the collective.”


Diagnosis: So, compared to the relatively modest influence of Gardner’s efforts this entry is on the long side. But he really is very silly. Of course, he also has a non-modest view of his own importance, and the combination of smugness and delirious paranoia is as charming as ever.
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#1642: Jim Garrow

April 12, 2016, 12:30 am
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Though his time in the limelight seems to have come to an end, Jim Garrow did at least manage to establish himself as one of the most deranged wingnuts in the looniverse – as some sort of singularity of paranoid rage that helped the rest of us recognize that there are fringes even beyond the furious delsuions of Michael Savage and Rick Wiles. Garrow seems to have first come to attention after the death of Andrew Breitbart, which he blamed on Obama. Now, Garrow wasn’t the only moron to claim that Obama killed Breitbart to shut him up, but Garrow added Michael Hastings and Tom Clancy to the list (evidence: they died, therefore Obama must have killed them), and – for good measure – that Obama is a Saudi secret agent. And bisexual ( “everyone” in the intelligence agencies are aware and help him out by bringing him boys to the White House). Indeed, Obama also had Lorette Fuddy, the Hawaii health director who died in a plane crash, killed as part of a birther cover-up. And of course – what did you expect from someone with the cognitive abilities of Jim Garrow – Obama also tried to kill Garrow himself (one day his car allegedly didn’t work, which was obviously a government-organized murder attempt). Good thing the Obama administration isn’t more adept at these types of operations. Actually, it’s not really just a matter of incompetence: While God didn’t protect his friends from Obama’s hit squads, God intervened to save Garrow from the assassination attempts: “They are being eliminated, now they tried to kill me a few days ago but it didn’t work because God intervened; we are not alone in this fight against lies and Lucifer [Yes, Obama is also the Beast and the whore of Babylon] and those people who would like to take down first of all the blessing of God from America but also take down America as an entity on the earth.”

Obama is not only a Saudi agent; he is part of an Arab-Chinese communist conspiracy, no less. And there is more to his sexual proclivities, too (things are somehow connected): Garrow has claimed that “Bathhouse Barry” has an “agreement” with First Lady, whom he calls “Moochelle,” to “feed” his “sexual proclivity.” Garrow accordingly doubts that Sasha and Malia are the president’s children, saying “what needs to happen is somebody needs to get some DNA samples over there” (as if the results of such tests would matter much to Garrow’s conclusions).

But the aforementioned assassination are, of course, just the beginning. In November 2013 Garrow claimed that Obama tried to nuke South Carolina “to devastate all computer related systems on the continent thus taking America back 200 years and guaranteeing a total breakdown in society and with in one year the death of 300 million Americans” (to “see how this would be possible, read ‘One Second After’,” which is a NYTimes bestselling post-apocalyptic novel) and to help George Soros make money by betting against the US dollar (at least Garrow cannot be accused of thinking through his conspiracy theories particularly carefully – there are some rather obvious flaws here) and to replace God with Allah in accordance with his Marxist-muslim agenda. Only the heroic intervention of some maverick generals (who were promptly fired) – or God; Garrow is a bit back and forth – saved us. (And once again Obama sent his thugs to stop Garrow from distributing the information, and once again they failed, of course.) Evidence? Oh, right – some Marxist-Muslim atheist Obama sycophants actually care about that sort of thing. Garrow doesn’t, but he did find some “proof” in an article about dolphins dying off the east coast (from lung disease caused by BP oil spill, in fact), which shows that the heroes (and God) managed to detonate one of those nukes off the coast to thwart Obama’s evil plans. Yeah, that’s right. Obama ended up nuking the dolphins instead. How is that for evil? He admits that he cannot offer further evidence for the claims, but he doesn’t have to: “Some folks have asked me to provide proof for some revelations that I have made. I would suggest that you look at the track record of information that I have shared and with patience you see that it is 100% reliable. Just because you don’t necessarily see it at the microwave speed of your impatient demand, doesn’t mean it won’t ‘unfold as it should’. If you really want me to identify patriots who have put their lives at risk to get me information or have me produce classified documents that could be their source – sorry, prison or suicide are not part of my career plan.” In other words, he can’t give it to you out of fear that the Obama administration, who is already trying to kill him and are going to kill everyone anyways, might try to shut him up. But disclosing the dolphin story seems to have been OK.

Moreover, the 2013 Iran agreement was just a desperate attempt to distract attention from the nukes. With Erik Rush, Garrow concluded that Obama should be tried for treason and executed (yeah, the trial isn’t really necessary) because of their delusions. (Actually, Obama should be (hanged, and) “put down” like a “rabid dog”). The Iran thing was apparently not Obama’s only attempt to divert attention. In January 2014 Garrow asserted that Obama was going to distract the country by claiming that he’s now in “communication with people from other civilizations beyond Earth.” (Note that Garrow assumes that the people Obama would want to impress would in fact have been impressed if he told them that he interacted with extraterrestrials) If that doesn’t work, he will call in troops from Canada to start repressing and killing civilians (he seems to be not entirely clear on the relationship between Canada and the US and its president.)  

His response to Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address is discussed here. It’s not impressively coherent, but it is at least pretty clear that he didn’t like it and that rabid dogs, meteors and Satan are among the stream of consciousness associations he made when reading it.

What else? In January 2014 Garrow told Agenda-21 conspiracy theorist Paul Preston that Obama is borderline mentally ill and about to impose martial law and take over the country nazi-style (whatever that means), even if that strategy obviously pales in comparison with his previous plans for pure cartoon villain qualities: “Yes it is. That’s what a spoiled brat, a petulant child will do [introduce martial law]: throw tantrums. They’ll always go and the pendulum will swing all the way in another direction with them, there’s no common ground, there’s no stability and that’s what we see with this man, he’s not a stable person, psychologically stable or whatever. I believe he is on the edge of being mentally ill.” You go tell’em, Jim. Meanwhile, Garrow is apparently not happy that RightWingWatch keeps quoting the deranged things he says to paint him in a “wacko, weird light”; so, when his own rants are read back to him he at least recognizes that the shit must have been uttered by someone crazy.

In February 2014, however, Obama’s plan had apparently become to impose Sharia law on the US, using guillotines, no less (“We now have a part of Obamacare where we now have legal execution by guillotine. Did you see the list? It’s been added to the list …” It is unclear which list Garrow have seen (probably one produced to him by his fertile imagination), but it is at least that he doesn’t really have a very firm grasp of what the Affordable Care Act actually is.

And, predictably like a clock, Garrow alleged that President Obama blew up the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in 2014 – as part of his “jihad” against China, with whom Obama is in a secret Muslim-communist conspiracy, remember, so it was really all a false-flag operation, apparently part of a scheme (roughly) to hand over the Internet to China.

Something obviously needs to be done, and Garrow himself announced Operation American Spring, a rally to demand the resignation of Obama and every other Democrat in any position of power (heard of such plans before?). Garrow assumed that they were going to get “millions, as many as ten million, patriots” to show up. That didn’t seem to have worked out, but Garrow suggested other courses of action as well: He has already warned Obama that “your days are numbered, Bathhouse Barry,” promising that a guerrilla war against the government is about to start. He later threatened his audience that if they did not join his anti-Obama guerrilla war then they would end up as just “a statistic and the memory of you being wiped from the face of the earth.” He left it ambiguous which side would be responsible for the wiping. In January 2014 Garrow moreover agreed with Pete Santilli (who otherwise wants to shoot Hilary Clinton in the vagina) that it’s time for a military coup to “restore our republic” (yeah, they’re pretty oblivious to the irony there). These people are for real, folks.

Some may wonder how Garrow managed to find an audience, even among the fringes of wingnuttery. Well, apparently Garrow was a CIA agent back in the days – according to none but himself, of course, but that piece of background was apparently enough to give him some attention from certain quarters. Garrow was a CIA agent under St. Ronald. Unlike the “absolute fraud” and freedom-hating Obama, Reagan was a great leader that all of the world feared. According to Garrow, Reagan had him personally deliver a message to Iran’s leaders that if they didn’t release the US hostages taken captive during the Iranian Revolution, then Reagan would nuke Mecca in retaliation. Those reports are presumably classified.


Diagnosis: Simply a wild-eyed, raging lunatic who used to shake fists at the moon, unicorns, plastic bags and windmills, and who was at some point picked up by mistake by the clowncar running the crazier fringes of wingnut media. It is telling that it took them so long before they notied. His 15 minutes in the spotlight seem to be over, at least.
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#1643: Brian Gaston & Rachel Goldstein

April 13, 2016, 12:39 am
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We admit that we are not entirely sure who, exactly, Brian Gaston is, but his work has at least been published by the conspiracy website Food Freedom News. Gaston is at least an anti-vaccinationist, and a rather unhinged one (which sort of goes without saying, but Gaston goes even further than most), and an example of his work can be found in the article “Unspeakable Outrages Across the Country”, penned in 2012 as a (gloating) response to a failed attempt to tighten the rules for exemptions from the public school mandatory vaccines in Vermont.

We don’t know what his relationship with Rachel Goldstein is either, other than that in the aforementioned article Gaston cited an article of hers called “Have Rabbis Forgotten The Experiments on Jewish Women at Auschwitz?” (the link is not for the faint of heart). You see where this is going, right? Mandatory vaccines are just like the Nazis because Gaston and Goldstein wants to invoke the nazis when describing those he disagrees with regardless of whether the analogy holds at any remotely interesting level. According to Gaston and Goldstein “giving untested, unknown vaccines is a ‘medical experiment’ and violates the core principles of the Nuremberg –  informed and unambiguous consent” (of course, the vaccines in question are among the most extensively tested medical procedures in existence, but we don’t expect people like Gaston and Goldberg to be informed about such things). In particular, vaccines are like Nazi experiments designed to rapidly and secretly sterilize Jews and other racial “undesirables”. How? Ah, you’ll be sorry you asked:

“All of the mandated vaccines for their children must include information that polysorbate 80 is a sterilizing agent and one that is ‘preferred’ as such in a pharmaceutical industry patent, and therefore deemed effective” (the polysorbate gambit is described here. Needless to say, it’s ridiculous). That is, through vaccines, children are being “compulsorily sterilized in this deceptive manner. This is a criminal assault on their children’s bodies. In truth, parents should give this attack an even more seriously criminal label, because ‘imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’ meets the UN’s definition of genocide.” Yes, vaccines are filled with toxins as part of a covert genocide plot. According to Gaston, not only is vaccination a crime against humanity on the order of Nazi sterilization experiments, but it’s a way for big pharma to cement its hold on humanity: “The Nuremberg Code was written to protect the world from the gruesome experiments performed on concentration camp prisoners by the pharmaceutical industry. They industry sought a means to covertly sterilize those they wished to use merely as workers or slaves, and to take over control of the world.” That link is also described by Goldstein: “Records show the Merck pharmaceutical company received a major share of the Nazi ‘flight capital’ at the close of World War II,” asserts Goldstein, and that shows that Merck is still in a Nazi conspiracy to kill American children (as also shown e.g. by the link she imagines exists between vaccines and SIDS; the link is of course the opposite of what Goldstein thinks). To back it up, she cites “research” done by Matthias Rath and things she has found on various conspiracy websites, including stuff by Joe Mercola and Jane Orient, no less.

But Gaston has more: “The same industry is still covertly sterilizing. And just as Monsanto is attempting to ‘own’ food through patented intellectual property claims and is abetted by spread of its GMOs through contamination by pollen [yes, we cannot resist some utterly silly anti-GMO tropes, can we? … though we thought that Monsanto didn’t want their patented seeds spread like this – apparently that’s just false-flagging], vaccine-enforced DNA contamination through injecting patented GMOs into children’s DNA provides a means to take control of human DNA. Here the companies are abetted in this human-DNA contamination not by pollen but by corrupt state legislators.”

Yes, that’s right: “Those legislators are abetting both the covert compulsory sterilization of America’s children (genocide), and the deceptive take over by multinational corporations of the ownership of American children’s human DNA (biopiracy).” Yes: By vaccinating your children, you turn over ownership of their DNA to big Pharma: “Those being vaccinated with the new DNA vaccines are automatically turning their ‘intellectual property’ over their own DNA over to the vaccine manufacturers by allowing that DNA to be contaminated.”

Oh, whee. Of course, most vaccines don’t have appreciable amounts of DNA left. But apparently for Gaston, these trace amounts will integrate with and contaminate your genome (and the polysorbate-80 in them make you infertile). Come to think of it, things actually work like this according to homeopathy.


Diagnosis: There is in fact a lesson here: It really is impossible to parody the antivaccine movement; whatever you try, they’ll do it better themselves. It’s hard to find words to adequately describe how removed from any semblance of reality and how deep into paranoid epistemic hell Gaston and Goldstein actually are.
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#1644: Dave Gaubatz

April 14, 2016, 12:00 am
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Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America is an astonishingly delusional conspiracy screed, published by WND Books, that was marketed at paranoid idiots and accordingly achieved some popularity in 2009. The author, Dave Gaubatz, is a former Air Force investigator and Arabic speaker who got his son to go undercover as a Muslim to obtain an internship at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. It really wasn’t necessary – as a deranged conspiracy theorist there was only one possible outcome of the undercover search: Islamists are about to take over America, and the government is trying to cover it all up. Other than the undercover operation, Gaubatz has claimed that he personally found Saddam’s long-lost and non-existent WMDs while he was in Iraq in 2003, but has sort of failed to provide evidence – and that, of course, is just further evidence of a conspiracy: the Syrians and Russians took them, while the U.S. government suppressed the information and destroyed Gaubatz’s documentation to avoid the “explosive revelation of their own lethal incompetence.” Gaubatz also refers to Obama as our “Muslim leader” and a “self-admitted ‘crack head.’”

He is nevertheless taken seriously by deranged wingnuts, in particular former House wingnut Sue Myrick, who wrote the foreword to the book. Myrick has, with regard to domestic security threats, earlier remarked: “Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.”


Diagnosis: Look; this kind of stuff is seriously deranged. The fact that it is taken seriously by so many, even people in positions of power, should scare you shitless.
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#1645: Debra Gauthier

April 15, 2016, 12:17 am
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We endeavor to cover people who accuse others of having made a covenant with or being in league with Satan. We are a bit more wary of calling out people who think that they themselves have made covenants with Satan, since such beliefs are usually indicative of other types of issues than the critical thinking wreckage incidents we aim to cover. But Debra Gauthier has tried to push her delusions in public, so we’ll give her some attention. Gauthier, a Nevada police officer, is an ex-gay who “bought the lie” about homosexuality until she became a Christian and renounced her identity as a lesbian, and she is currently engaged in projecting her fundamentalist, rabid delusions onto her former self as part of an effort to justify her portrayal of homosexuality as a practice inspired by the devil. According to herself, she turned heterosexual after attending an Exodus International conference, but while she lived “the homosexual lifestyle” she made a “covenant with Satan” during a same-sex wedding ceremony and also ended up dating a “practicing witch,” who she “met at a New Age conference. [The witch] introduced me to demon worship and a new level of darkness.” And “one evening as she began to seduce me, my spiritual eyes were opened, and I saw the demon in her sneering back at me.” No, really: They are literally demons. Like on TV. Or like in Mike Warnke’s imaginary Satanic Panic stories from the 80s. Here is Gauthier on the 700 Club talking about her experiences.

She has also written a book, Bright Lights, Dark Places, about life in a male-dominated Las Vegas police department. The message of that book is somewhat compromised by her obvious derangedness.


Diagnosis: She does have a wikipedia article, but that one doesn’t even mention her demonology and ex-gay ventures. Her influence with regard to such things beyond already wild-eyed, frothing fundamentalists is accordingly questionable.
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#1646: Jeremy Geffen

April 16, 2016, 12:22 am
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The invasion of quackery into academic medicine is one of the scarier developments of the last few decades. Quackery and woo often come with financial support from misguided patrons, or is pushed by administrators (and sometimes doctors themselves) as a way of marketing their institutions to certain segments of the population. Few places are worse in that respect than the University of Arizona Cancer Center, which apparently offers the whole gamut, from Reiki to Reflexology to Acupuncture to Cranial massage, all advertised as “healing” by boosting one’s immune system, complementing conventional chemotherapy and so on – indeed, for a while they even offered the services of faith healer Frank Schuster. Of course, in the case of UA much of the nonsense is due to the malicious influence of Andrew Weil, but he is certainly not the only culprit.

One example (and perhaps not the most egregious) is The Seven Levels of Healing, a program created and offered by Dr. Jeremy Geffen, MD, FACP, who is a “board certified medical oncologist and leading expert in integrative medicine and oncology”. He is also the author of The Journey Through Cancer: Healing and Transforming the Whole Person. The Seven Levels program is, of course, little more than New Age faith healing. Its Level 7 is of course about the “Nature of the Spirit”: “Spirit is our true nature: timeless, eternal, and dimensionless, the source from which all awareness, all creativity and, ultimately, all healing flows.” Yeah, that kind of “medicine”. (And keep in mind: this is offered by a university-affiliated cancer center). The goal of the level is to help victimspatients “discover this spiritual aspect of themselves, and to bring this into full, ongoing awareness. When what we experience as physical reality is threatened, it is more important than ever before to remember that another part of us is timeless and eternal, and remains strong, healthy, and powerful, no matter what our physical circumstances may be. In recognizing the nature of our spiritual selves, and the incredible mystery of awareness itself, we uncover the source of ultimate love and freedom – an infinite ocean from which healing can be drawn.” No. That’s not how it works. That’s pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo. But you don’t need to reach Level 7 to get a taste of the woo; already Level 3, “The Body as Garden” explores “the full spectrum of complementary approaches to healing: nutrition; exercise [note how altmed proponents are often trying to claim that exercise and nutrition are somehow “alternative” – to be able to point to “alternative” treatments that actually have demonstrable health benefits, of course]; massage; yoga; herbal therapies; Ayurvedic, Tibetan and Chinese medicine; acupuncture; homeopathy; chiropractic; and visualization,” though with the disclaimer that they “do not offer or promote these approaches as cancer treatments per se, and we do not believe that they should be viewed in this manner. However, we do believe that they can supplement conventional care by cleansing, toning, relaxing, and strengthening the body, thus giving health and well-being the greatest chance to emerge.” You see, if they make claims to actually cure people they might be held accountable, and the last thing people like Geffen would want is to be held accountable for the advice they offer.

What is particularly frightening is that Geffen is apparently working to get “The Seven Levels of Healing” program implemented in cancer centers across the United States. At least the program has thus far been endorsed by The Wellness Community, but they endorse a lot of shit.


Diagnosis: That some people devote their life to this kind of garbage is actually a tragedy, but garbage it is.
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#1647: Michael Geiger

April 18, 2016, 12:17 am
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HIV denialism is the view that AIDS is not caused by HIV. Not only does HIV denialism involve a type of denial of evidence and our understanding of how the world works that is pretty much on par with advocating that the Earth is flat; it is also one of the branches of denialism that have had the most immediate and measurable negative impact on humanity, including the deaths of over 330,000 South Africans while a “review council” set up by HIV denialists was delaying treatment.

Of course, if you deny that HIV causes AIDS, you need to produce another mechanism. Usually these proposals involve rejecting of every piece of knowledge and understanding of medicine we have obtained since the Bronze age in favor of gibberish. So Michael Geiger, for instance, thinks AIDS is caused by loneliness. In general, Geiger is a proponent of the “dangerous” thoughts hypothesis: negative emotions directed at HIV positive people contribute to killing them. He has even accused another HIV denialist of helping to kill famous denialist activist Christine Maggiore, who died of AIDS, by worrying about her: “Have we as yet learned nothing ... of how easy it is to plant projections of sickness and death onto our own selves, as well as our friends, acquaintances or even onto our children and thereby help to create those fears into our realities?” No, Michael, it doesn’t work that way.

Geiger is entitled to reject scientific consensus, however. After all, HIV researchers who believe that HIV causes AIDS are funded by various pharma companies – and there is big money at stake. Accordingly, Geiger can just simply reject of the science without even engaging with the data. On the other hand, people who are not HIV researchers and therefore not funded by Big Pharma do not have the relevant expertise, and can therefore be dismissed as well. It’s a rhetorical win-win for Geiger, who promptly concludes that you should listen to Peter Duesberg.

Now, we admit that we don’t really know exactly who Michael Geiger is, apart from a relatively vocal HIV denialist, but we do know that he has a tendency, like many of the craziest cranks, to not only infest comment sections on articles on the phenomenon, but to contact the employers and colleagues of people who speak out against AIDS denialism (with emails containing misspellings as well as links to incoherent conspiracy rants and to pictures of scientists photoshopped to look like monkeys), which is … not typical behavior for sane, science-minded and evidence-guided researchers. He does appear to be a film director and member of the board of directors of HEAL San Diego, which is probably an organization you should avoid.


Diagnosis: Troll. And as opposed to most trolls, who are merely annoying, Geiger might actually be dangerous.
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#1648: William J. Gibbons

April 19, 2016, 1:35 am
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The Institute for Creation Research isn’t particularly notable for doing, you know, research – instead it is, as you would expect, and organization devoted to outreach and to counter real research with Biblical literalism. One arguable exception is a series of five expeditions to the Congo to find Mokele mbembe, which is a fictional creature that ICR member Williams J. Gibbons claims is a living dinosaur. The institute has, not unlike Bigfoot researchers, been a “hairsbreadth away from filming a specimen” for more than a decade now. In fairness, Gibbons isn’t the most prominent Mokele mbembe advocate; that dubious honor probably goes to Richard Kent, a British fundie who thinks that the Mokele-mbembe is real, alive and knock-down evidence against evolution (note that even if it existed, it would be as much evidence against evolution as monkeys). Kent also thinks that dinosaurs were dragons whose small nostrils made them breath fire.

Otherwise, it’s the usual stuff. Gibbons holds a “Ph.D. in Creation Science Apologetics summa cum laude, Emmanuel College of Christian Studies, Springdale, Arkansas,” which is roughly as impressive as something you printed out off the Internet. Gibbons likes to debate evolution, but doesn’t really understand it and tend accordingly to debate it in a manner reminiscent of Duane Gish, preferring for instance to avoid responding to challenges to his own position or responses to his own questions in favor of irrelevant strawmanning. As well as the usual tropes, of course, from gaps in the fossil record to quote-mining, the no-new-information argument, complaints that scientists don’t accept debate invitations from creationists or that evolution is an atheist plot (“Eugenie Scott who heads the pretentiously named National Center For Science Education is another virulent atheist. The real purpose of that organization is not to promote good science, but to enforce humanism and atheism at any cost, and often with the help of their friends in the ACLU. The very fact that Dr. Scott has a portrait of Charles Darwin hanging on the wall behind her desk says it all”), misrepresentations and misunderstandings. Gibbons has even has his own version of “why are there still monkeys?”: “Much of the fossil evidence reveals that many of our alleged ape-ancestors were contemporaries and sometimes overlapped one another,” says Gibbons, and apparently thinks that it is an argument against evolution. He’s got more than one version, in fact.

He’s also written a couple of books, including Claws and Jaws with Kent Hovind, no less.


Diagnosis: Little new to see here, but once again we have a fundie crackpot illustrating how utterly intellectually – and morally – bankrupt the ICR actually is. Preposterous.
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#1649: Mark Gietzen & Jonathan Hall

April 19, 2016, 11:52 pm
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Gietzen. Couldn't find a
picture that was for sure a
picture of the correct
Jonathan Hall.
Fluoride conspiracies are, like all conspiracy theories, stupid, but though they seem to have been overshadowed by anti-vaccine hysteria and wi-fi delusions in terms of public awareness, there are lunatics with internet access, poor critical thinking skills, low levels of scientific literacy, and an unhealthy dose of paranoia who are still championing the anti-fluoride cause. Since they tend to fly a bit under the radar, they have even had some success. The city of Wichita, Kansas, has for instance passed an ordinance banning the use of fluoride in that city’s drinking water supply; the popular vote was swayed in part by the campaigns of Wichitans Against Fluoridation, who, in the words of their leader Jonathan Hall, are “part of the upcoming wave of change,” and has been planning to bring their efforts nationwide.

Part of the reason why they were successful, was the unconditional and deluded support of Mark Gietzen, president of the Kansas Republican Assembly, who applauded the idea of spreading the word: “Since I am connected to the National Federation of Republican Assemblies. I’m going to try to make fluoride one of our core issues,” said Gietzen, who also likened fluoride to lead and asbestos: “Things that we thought were right back then maybe were not such a good idea after all. That’s where we are with fluoride.” Which is false, but we don’t suppose Gietzen or Hall would be anywhere close to a position to assess the facts or evidence: “[T]he latest science confirms that ingested fluoride lowers the IQ in children,” said Gietzen but didn’t cite any science.

Gietzen is otherwise best known as a prolife activist and the chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life. One of their major projects was to place crosses each day on public property in front of George Tiller’s late-term abortion facility in Wichita, and they claimed to have saved 395 babies to date. He is also the author of Is it a Sin for a Christian to Be a Registered Democrat in America Today?


Diagnosis: Anti-fluoride scare mongering is really as crazy as anything, and though it may seem like a blast from the past to many, it’s still going strong. Hall and Gietzen are dangerous – but more importantly, they’re tragic figures: Think how much good they could have achieved if they’d devoted their energy to actually helping people.
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#1650: Joel Gilbert

April 21, 2016, 1:07 am
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It’s a testament to the abject insanity of the fringes of the religious right that Joel Sion Gilbert received the welcome and praise and recognition he did in 2012. Gilbert is a documentary filmmaker and musician and the CEO of his own film production company, Highway 61 Entertainment. As a filmmaker, he is most famous – some might even say “legendary” – for his amateurish conspiracy hackjob “Dreams from My Real Father”, which peddled some, shall we say, unsubstantiated allegations toward President Obama’s birth and background. As Amanda Marcotte put it, the film “peddles a conspiracy theory so convoluted that more traditional birthers must be envious of its creativity”. In fact, the basic conspiracy theory is fairly familiar to anyone fascinated by the clown antics of Gilbert’s primary audiences, namely that Obama’s real father is Frank Marshall Davis, and that Obama therefore got communist genes. What Gilbert adds is primarily that Davis took bondage photos of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, which he sold to nudie magazines. These photos were accordingly prominently displayed in the documentary, and a short clip from the movie displaying the photos is available for embedding for any birther blogger who may be interested. Gilbert also claimed to have mailed out a million copies to voters in Ohio, though there is evidence that the campaign may have backfired a little. Of course, the photos in questions were not photos of Dunham. Gilbert claimed that the photos came from two years of research and that he identified Dunham in the naked photos by using her high school images, saying that “her teeth matched, her nose matched, everything matched” and that the correlation was “obvious.” It … isn’t, and there is presumably a reason why Gilbert avoided using any sort of expert help for making the comparisons.

The documentary was praised by certified lunatics like Bill Armistead (GOP chairman in Alabama, who judged the documentary to be factual apparently based on a documentary he saw; yeah, we know), Jack Cashill and Jerome Corsi, and as Michelle Goldberg pointed out “[w]hat matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right.” Orly Taitz, on the other hand, didn’t like it, since the theory implies that Obama’s father was American and that Obama would therefore be eligible for being president. Gilbert, on his side, claimed that “... ‘birthers’ are barking up the wrong tree. It’s not a question of where Obama was born – but rather, one of paternity.” One wonders, if only occasionally, what the standards of reasonableness these people are assuming actually look like.

Gilbert’s previous foray into politics, “Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War For Islamic Revival And Obama’s Politics of Defeat” made less of a splash, but Jerome Corsi liked that one as well. “There is no place like Utopia” is his follow-up documentary, which portrays Obama as a “real life Wizard of Oz” bent on implementing communism. Then there is this.

After the Dreams documentary was released Gilbert and Corsi claimed to have found evidence that Obama had a nosejob (they compared old and new photos and based their findings on what they wanted to find) and concluded that this is evidence that Obama was “concerned he was looking too much like Frank Marshall Davis as he got older.” Said Gilbert: “If Obama was identified as Davis’ son, it would connect the Marxist dots of Obama’s entire life journey.” So, Obama “needed the Kenyan father fairy tale to misdirect the public away from the fact that he is a red diaper baby, the child of a Communist Party USA propagandist and Soviet agent.” And don’t forget that he’s a Muslim; according to Gilbert, Obama has a (secret) Muslim wedding ring inscribed (in Arabic) with “There is no god but Allah”. Presumably the ring comes with the magical power of enabling him to activate his communist genes.

Always willing to indulge his audiences, Gilbert has subscribed to a number of other conspiracy theories about Obama as well, for instance that the Aurora mass shooting could very well have been orchestrated by the Obama administration in an effort to promote gun control. The evidence consisted solely of the assertion that “you can’t put anything past them,” and the possible involvement in the shooting would presumably then be further evidence that you really cannot put anything past them. National healthcare is, according to Gilbert, simply a socialist tool to eliminate the middle and upper classes, and part of Obama’s plot to turn America into a bankrupt, socialist state. Remember those communist genes. Marijuana legalization is another liberal plot to hoodwink America into communism by gaining “total control” over a drugged population. And Michelle Obama is an “anti-American extremist”, and that just shows that Barack Obama is comfortable around anti-American extremists. How could such a character have won in 2012? By voter fraud, of course: according to GilbertObama stole the election with NSA data and by allowing disabled people to vote.

Gilbert has made contributions beyond politics as well. In 2010 he released the documentary “Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison” (oh, yes), the main idea of which was that after an argument with John Lennon, Paul McCartney died in a 1966 car crash, only to be replaced by MI5 with a lookalike contest winner in order to “stave off any mass suicides of young girls all over the world should they find out that Paul had died in a car crash.” For good measure, the movie also asserted that Lennon’s death was an assassination instigated by his desire to finally tell the truth about Paul’s demise (the motivation seems rather flimsy). Film Threat noted that an “audience’s ability to suspend practical thought and accept the most outlandish concepts imaginable” was “stretched far beyond the fraying point” by the film and its “insistence that George Harrison left behind audio recordings that confirmed the late 1960s urban legend of Paul McCartney’s automobile accident death and secret replacement by a ringer,” and that the documentary contained holes in logic and consistency large enough to be driven through by the Magical Mystery Tour bus.


Diagnosis: Zealous, paranoid and stupid. That, however, is apparently no barrier to making a career among certain groups of people but rather an asset.
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