Encyclopedia of American Loons

Anti-vaccine loons exhibit the love/hate relationship with science so typical of pseudoscientists – on the one hand, they have to vigorously deny or pretend not to see that science consistently produces results that don’t support their cherished fantasies; on the other, they will desperately try to use whatever flimsy and imaginary support they can in the scientific literature, wherever they can find it. And applying enough motivated reasoning, Texas sharpshooting, cherry-picking and misunderstanding, you will always seem to find some if you torture it enough.

John Gilmore is as fine an example of these dynamics as any. Gilmore is the Executive Director of the Autism Action Network, and a convinced vaccine denialist. He has testified against requiring health care workers to be vaccinated with the flu vaccine, and has made a number of appearances in anti-vaccine rallies and various new stories that need “balance”, always arguing the dingbat side. Moreover, Gilmore is the author of “2003 Danish Study on Mercury Fabricated? New Study Completely Different Results” (note the question mark. The background is described here, but the short story is this: Antivaccinationists really, really don’t like the so-called “Danish studies,” of which one unsurprisingly found no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, and another found no link between the MMR and autism. Of course, these two studies are mere drops in an ocean of studies finding no such link, but they have nonetheless become particular targets for these loons. You see, some years ago one of the co-investigators of the Danish studies, Poul Thorsen, was charged with fraud and misuse of federal grant money that he purportedly used for private expenses. That Thorsen was not the main author, that the fact that he misused grant money for personal expenses in no way invalidates or affects the results, or that the studies themselves are mere drops in the ocean of evidence, doesn’t matter much to the crazies, who made quite a bit of meaningless noise to divert attention from the real issues. Gilmore, however, appears to think that he hit gold with the publication of a new study, Grønborg et al. (2013). Like the previous studies, Grønborg et al. found no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines – in fact, it found very, very strong evidence for a significant genetic component in autism and no evidence for environmental factors. Gilmore disregarded that part of the study, the part that produced further evidence against the conclusion he wants to be true; Gilmore focused instead on the fact that Grønborg et al. operated with different figures than the “Danish studies”, which is unsurprising since they were studying completely different questions using completely different designs (details here), longer follwups, and took into account the expansion definition of “autism” that has occurred in the meantime, as they should. But to Gilmore, who apparently fails to grasp the basic facts about scientific methodology, the fact that they used a different study design is evidence that the “Danish Studies” were fraud. And if they were fraud, everything must apparently be a conspiracy, and Gilmore’s pseudoscientific denialism is vindicated. The usual story.

In 2005, Gilmore praised the work of David Kirby: “Thanks to David’s incredibly hard work the book has done phenomenally well. Two years ago this was the province of the loonie fringe. EOH has put us in the mainstream. Our main job is to destroy the credibility of the vaccine industry and that’s just what EOH has done.” Wonder whether he, ten years later, still believes that he’s not on the loonie fringe?

Diagnosis: Standard conspiracy theorist and B-level antivaxx mainstay. Oh, but he is not “antivaccine”; he is “pro safe vaccine”. Right.

Joann Ginal

Lunacy in state legislations is a phenomenon we have covered before, and no: It’s not limited to wingnuts. In fact, the nutters on the left have in many cases been very successful in their attempts to combat reason, science and rationality, and the Colorado legislature is a horrifying example. Joann Ginal, for instance, has been a member of the Colorado House of Representatives since 2012, and was the sponsor of a 2013 bill that would license naturopaths and thereby provide them with the imprimatur of the state to practice quackery as well as, in practice, legalize a range of naturopathic quackery. Colorado naturopaths had (and other naturopaths have)

been fighting for that for a long time. And yes: They finally got (most of) their wish with Ginal, who apparently has some background in medical research. “I am proud that Colorado has taken the lead in ensuring that well trained naturopathic doctors, appropriately regulated, become a viable health care option for the citizens of our state,” said Ginal, brushing over the matter of what kind of “training” naturopaths actually receive. Meanwhile, Sen. Linda Newell (D-Littleton), the bill’s sponsor in the Senate, asserted that “naturopathic doctors are going to be a key component in health care, saving the state millions of dollars through their focus on disease prevention and natural treatment, such as nutrition, lifestyle counseling and botanical medicine,” which suggests that she does not know what naturopathy actually involves – which would not be surprising since there is often a, shall we say, discrepancy between how naturopathic organizations present themselves to lawmakers and the public, and the stuff they actually do (hint: “Why Vitalism is the New Medicine.” Oh, yes. It’s not only prescientific vitalism; it is vitalism and they’re proud of it), but that doesn’t make Newell any less of a loon for sponsoring the bill.

Linda Newell

You can read the details of the bill here. Yes, you will find the “complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is popular” gambit and, interestingly, it uses a 2007 survey by Barnes et al. to estimate that 1.5 million Coloradans “currently receive a substantial volume of health care services” from CAM practitioners, a conclusion contradicted by that survey. Also, “what’s the harm?”.

“But isn’t it at least good that the practice is finally regulated?” some might ask. Yeah, right.

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s as bad and possibly worse than the creationist bills, Ginal and Newell have proved themselves to be promoters of dangerous pseudoscience. Exasperating.

Brian Godawa is a screenwriter (“To End All Wars” and “The Visitation”) and author of books like the Chronicles of Nephilim series and Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. Godawa also produced the documentary “Wall of separation”, which attempts like so much fundie pseudohistory to claim that the Founding Fathers sought a government based on the Bible and therefore that the “wall” between church and state should be removed. (It’s remarkable that the Founding Fathers should have wanted this but actually failed to put it in there.) The documentary is, of course, riddled with factual errors (some discussed here), but more striking are, of course, the errors of omission of all those details that don’t quite fit. The whole thing fits the standard reconstructionist narrative (i.e. paranoid conspiracy theory) nicely, and it is worth mentioning that Godawa himself is affiliated with the Chalcedon Foundation, the home of Christian Reconstructionism.

Indeed, Godawa used to write movie reviews for the Chalcedon Foundation’s website. As you’d expect, he called “Brokeback Mountain” “a brilliant piece of subversive homosexual propaganda,” since it depicted gay men as “manly” instead of “fey queens,” which is an example of “the normalization of the freakish minority,” and concluded that “homosexualism” is “an ideology and religion whose goal is to overthrow the Christian paradigm of morality.”

Godawa was also one of many people upset by “historical inaccuracies” in the Aronofsky movie, “Noah”, calling it a “postmodernist fancy” and writing that the script “is deeply anti-Biblical in its moral vision.” Ooh, and what moral vision might that be? Killing everyone on Earth for their perceived moral failures? Why, yes, precisely that: “Killing all humans but eight in order to start over (as the Bible portrays) may seem harsh to our thoroughly Modern Millie minds … it reaffirms that Image of God in Man that gives man value despite the evil.” Hubris does not come hubrier than that last sentence, but at least we get to know the types of actions Godawa considers to be objectively morally acceptable but which postmodernist sensitivies have told us are not. (He was also concerned that this “uninteresting and unBiblical waste of a $150 million” would make it difficult for Christian screenwriters like him to find employment).

Diagnosis: Let’s hope that last prediction comes true – but we fear not. (Ok, so that’s more of a conclusion than a diagnosis, but we’re pretty sick of these people by now.)

Floyd Godfrey is an “ex-gay” therapist who apparently has gained some traction among people like Linda Harvey. Godfrey thinks that homosexuality is just like cannibalism. “[T]hose who struggle with homosexual feelings, they’re so hungry they just want to eat it up, they want to assimilate, they want to eat what they don’t feel like they have. If you look at cannibals they would eat the leaders of the tribe, they would eat those that have the qualities they so admired. A young man with homosexual attractions is so envious, he’s jealous of other boys, he puts them on a pedestal, he might idolize them, he’s jealous of them, so he’s trying to assimilate what he feels like he doesn’t have.” Apparently the idea was first put worth by British howling fanatic Elizabeth Moberly. We haven’t bothered to try to figure out in more detail what these incoherent ghouls are blathering about, but apparently Godfrey himself is an ex-gay, so he may be trying to express some kind of self-biographical gibberish.

Diagnosis: Just stay the f*** away, will you?

Many fundies have warned us about the dangers of pop music. It’s really a calling card for the lunatic fringe of maniacal fundamentalist. And, as Johnny Marr puts it, Jeff Godwin belongs to “the lunatic fringe of the anti-rock movement” – indeed, Godwin doesn’t hesitate to call out his fellow anti-rock activists as closet rock fans and devil worshippers and has for decades been Jack Chick’s go-to-guy for information about rock music and popular culture – Chick published Godwin’s first three books Devil’s Disciples: The Truth About Rock Music, Dancing With Demons: The Music’s Real Master, What’s Wrong With Christian Rock? One thing that distinguishes these and his other books from those of other anti-rock writers like Jacob Aranza, is style. Godwin’s books are poorly written, unstructered and argumentatively incoherent hate screeds characterized by fuming rage and lunatic ravings, whereas Aranza could fool you for four or five seconds before you appreciate the howling insanity expressed by his otherwise grammatically well-formed sentences.

According to Godwin, rock and roll music (yeah, we know) traces its origins back thousands of years. Its rhythms were written by Satan and his demons and have, accordingly, a subliminal power to control a listener’s mind. Those rhythms eventually found their way, via Africa, into blues, jazz and other forms of African American music and the rest of us received this Satanic curse through African American voodoo culture. Indeed, one of Godwin’s main ideas is the “voodoo beat theory”: The rock beat has the same time signature as the human heart (no, he hasn’t listened to much rock music), and hence clearly hypnotizes and brainwashes listeners into accepting a message so evil that it could only be Satan’s.

It’s not only the rhythms, though; rock music is loaded with references to sexual behavior of all kinds, and therefore encourages fornication amongst youths and inspires lust and rage, as well as preaching “rebellion, hatred, drug abuse,” it encourages “mind decaying, death-dealing drugs”, in slang terms only understood by teens, “suicide, fornication and the dark things of Satan”. Of course, it is not only promiscuous sex that is being promoted, but abnormal sex, as epitomized by that nexus of darkness David Bowie, the “limp wristed king of the abnormal world of Homo Rock”. All screamed rock vocals are in fact inspired by the sound of the “homosexual penetration of the male”, and whip crack drum beats are just a gateway to filthy and unhibited homosexual S&M. The hypothesis tells you not so much about rock, but might tell you things you might not want to know about William Godwin.

Of course, the actual messages have been backmasked (oh, yes), even though Satan’s presence has never required hiding. “I believe that even now Satan and his demons are blaspheming and insulting God and the Lamb with their horrible rock record covers and backmasked broadcasts from Hell,” says Godwin. As opposed to some backmask lunatics, Godwin doesn’t think Satan has snuck into the messages without their knowledge, however; rock musicians, producers and promoters are outright Satanists who maintain secret but deliberate alliances with Satan and his demons (“the Lord has also revealed to some Christians that incarnate demons from the netherworld actually are members of some of the most popular bands ...”). How do they do the backmasking? Simple: Rock stars summon (literally) demons when they’re in studio to ensure hit records; the backmasked messages are merely the signatures of the supernatural presences. And once the demons have been brought into this world by the artists, playing a rock record is enough to call them up to possess the listener or anyone nearby. To say that “addiction to rock ‘n’ roll is a form of demonic possession,” is to make an understatement. And we’re not only talking about rock here: all of popular music is Satanic, since “NO ONE makes it big in secular music without selling out to Satan.” “We Are the World,” for instance, with its message of “Love is all we need” is wrong and demonic because “Jesus Christ is what this world needs!”

Finally, Christian rock is a diversion created by Satan. The Christian content preached in Christian rock is feel-good, inoffensive religious messages and does accordingly not genuinely preach Christ, who according to Godwin is not this effeminate, mild and benevolent guy he’s sometimes portrayed as being; that mild and merciful guy is apparently a creation of Satan and good grief this guy is insane. A particularly sinister example is Stryper, as evidenced e.g. by their “To Hell With The Devil” album, which Godwin predictably (no, seriously: you must have seen this one coming) takes to mean “To Hell WITH the Devil”, which happens to be the fate of all Stryper fans, so there.

Accordingly Godwin recommends that parents should burn anything relating to rock in their homes immediately and double their daily prayer time. That’s the only way you can secure your home and your family from the gangs of roving rock-and-roll-summoned demons now during the final days of the Earth.

Diagnosis: Ah, yes. Another one of those who add a bit of color to life – probably harmless, but we should probably feel a bit of pity for him, at least until we realize that he really how unsavory of a character he really is.

Pretty sure this is right.

A.k.a. The Rev

With great ignorance comes great arrogance, and with regard to health and lifestyle issues few groups demonstrate the effect more spectacularly as the hive of conspiracy mongering, scientific illiteracy, critical thinking failure and delusional confidence that is the Thinking Moms Revolution. The website offers advice on all sorts of health-related issues based on information from crackpot sites like GreenMedInfo, Mercola, NaturalNews and a range of anti-vaxx sites, as well as nonsense conjured up by their own powers of intuition. No, seriously. This is an anti-vaccine group, and although their Manifesto states that “[w]hen it comes to helping others, Thinking Moms are short on opinion, strong on scientific data, medical facts, nutritional healing options and documented legislative history,” their “scientific data” bears approximately the same relation to scientific data as their mental processes bear to thinking.

Lisa Goes’s is the author of their manifesto, which pretty explicitly endorses a strategy of never questioning any crackpottery or woo no matter how ridiculous it might be – as opposed to anything promoted by Big Pharma or backed by evidence, of course – including homeopathy and energy medicine. Goes is also a hardcore and notoriously clueless anti-vaccinationist and has contributed to Age of Autism, where she has been pushing familiar autism biomed nonsense. Indeed, her involvement in the anti-vaccine movement is far more insidious even than that: Goes was, for instance, pretty heavily involved in pushing Alex Spourdalakis as a cause célèbre for Age of Autism and their crackpottery, and against what they initially saw as the evils of Big Pharma (which it wasn’t); more details here.

Diagnosis: No, thinking doesn’t have much to do with Lisa Goes’s antics. Not a person you should listen to under any circumstance.

Dan Golaszewski is a chiropractor who appears to be deeply into all sorts of insane woo and pseudoscience. His business is “[a]ligning spines and lifestyles with God’s ultimate intentions”, and he seems to believe that vertebral subluxion “results in a lessening of the body’s God-given, innate-ability to express its maximum health potential.” Oh, yes. That, and natural stuff – though it is not clear what makes the stuff he promotes any more natural than the alternatives except that he says so. Golaszewski promotes the idea that most health problems and diseases are caused by misalignment, in particular asthma and heart disease (his particular ideas seem to come from one Josh Axe), which chiropractors can help with because they often originate from the “arc of life.” Oh, yes. But he doesn’t offer “to diagnose or treat any diseases or treat any diseases or conditions other than vertebral subluxation…” or anything that might make him, you know, responsible for the advice he is offering (as per his disclaimer). It’s just that doctors don’t know everything about health matters and you shouldn’t really trust them but instead visit Golaszewski’s website, and so on.

Now, there are plenty of people like Dan Golaszewski out there. The only reason he is singled out in particular, is because we noticed the very typical manner in which his defenders responded to criticism.*

Diagnosis: Crackpot. And what he’s doing is certainly not harmless.

*This entry is a result of the Streisand effect.

Some people believe that vampires exist or even that they themselves are vampires. Of course, what they mean by “vampire” varies, and common varieties are “psychic vampires” or “energy vampires”, where “vampire” seems to be mostly a fancier name for “asshole” (or to denote people that the paranoid loons who use this terminology have decided, for whatever reason or none, that they don’t feel comfortable around).

A good example of the kind of people who believe in vampires is Inanna Arthen. Another is Bruce Goldberg. According to Goldberg energy vampires (unconsciously?) drain the energy of those unprotected people around them – though he prefers the term “psychic parasitism” (duh!). In particular, energy vampires do their damage by telepathically draining their victim’s energy resources (yes, it’s that kind of “energy”). Apparently vampires also come in different forms, including “the ethereal type”.

Goldberg, however, endeavors to help them. He offers advice on how you can ~~ostracize~~ protect yourself from them on his website, and “highly recommend[s] my Spiritual Growth experience CD album and my book Protected By the Light to fully benefit from this topic,” of course. His website features articles like “Reincarnation Documented Live on Network Radio” (that would be Coast to Coast AM) and “Art Bell’s Past Life in Atlantis.” There is also “Am I a Time Traveler”, which even yours truly can’t make any sense of whatsoever, but apparently time travel will be discovered in 3050 and Goldberg has met such travelers: “The first time traveler I met in hyperspace (the fifth dimension) was a pure human calling himself Traksa. He lives in the thirty-sixth century on Earth when time travel is manifested by way of teleportation. This means that Traksa can beam his physical body back to our century without requiring a spacecraft. Time travelers use names that represent their current mission. One of Traksa’s assignments consisted of introducing me to Art Bell. If you spell his name backwards it reads ‘ASK ART!’ [just think about that for a moment] I have had the pleasure of being interviewed by Art nine times. Good work Traksa.” He’s even got pictures of his encounters. Well, they’re drawings. The drawings are done by his friend Janine Cooper, but Goldberg assures us that Cooper “got her inspiration from her own subconscious, not from photos or movies. Traksa told me that he telepathically directed her in each of the portraits,” so it’s entirely legit. He even has a book, Time Travelers From Our Future.

Goldberg also seems to have a history of using hypnosis to discover patients’ past or future lives as alien abductees, ostensibly to help them, and offers “Private Hypnotherapy Sessions By Computer” if you are willing to cough up $450.

Diagnosis: It’s hard to take him too seriously, but you never know. If it is a joke it’s not particularly professionally done, so either way Goldberg is probably a complete idiot.

James Goll is the Director of Prayer Storm, Coordinator of Encounters Alliance, and co-founder of Encounters Network, as well as author of numerous books (we don’t know them in detail, but titles like The Seer: The Prophetic Power of Visions, Dreams, and Open Heavens, Dream Language: The Prophetic Power of Dreams, Revelations or Angelic Encounters are not testament to a healthy relationship with reality). Goll is a proponent of Seven Mountains dominionism, affiliated with C. Peter Wagner, and instructor at the Wagner Leadership Institute. So he is not only a raging fundamentalist, but a true dominionist of the kind who wants a literal reading of the Bible to serve as the law. Of course, he is also, demonstrably, a false prophet, and the Bible is pretty clear about what to do with those, but the laws of the Bible should presumably only be interpreted literally when they apply to those who disagree with Goll.

His Mitt-Romney-will-win-the-2012-election prophecy is actually rather hilarious: During a baseball game in a dream he had in 2008 “the external voice of the Lord came to me saying, When the nation has been thrown a curve ball, I will have a man prepared who comes from the state of Michigan and he will have a big mitt capable of catching whatever is thrown his way… But the Lord said there would be a man prepared who would come from the state of Michigan who would have a big mitt. Little did I know at that time that Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, was born in the state of Michigan. Little did I know, when I received this in 2008, that he would win his party’s primary for the 2012 national elections!” The level of delusion required not to laugh at this drivel is staggering, but apparently people listen to James Goll. His “prophetic insights” for 2014, for instance, were less detailed (they concerned the future, after all; descriptions predictions you allegedly made about past events can be as detailed as you’d like, but predictions about the future must necessarily be a bit woolier); they still managed to reveal an absolutely deranged mind: Apparently Goll meets with angels (including “warrior angels”) the way whale.to tinfoil hatters meet with aliens, and with the help of angels Goll has received prophetic insights about spiritual warfare, the visions of “prophet Bob Jones” and achieving “the full restoration of the supernatural” and such things. Goll has also written extensively on faith healing, claiming that it trumps “science and the medical arts” (though admitting that it is a bit unpredictable).

Diagnosis: Blathering maniac; ragingly insane fundamentalist of the kind one really should expect to meet only in parodies of fundamentalists. But despite appearances to the contrary, Goll isn’t funny.

If nothing else, the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism nicely illustrates the bankruptcy of the DiscoTute anti-evolution campaigns (and their Intelligent Design movement, which really is just an anti-evolution movement). Of course, the value of appealing to petitions in discussing scientific questions is one thing; another is that the signatories they actually got constitute a motley crew at best, many of whom are non-scientists and few of whom are actually experts in any relevant areas; and even if they were experts, which they aren't, they would in any case only comprise a negligible fraction of working scientists in the fields. To illustrate that, the National Center for Science Education initiated their own tongue-in-cheek response, Project Steve, a list of living scientists named “Steve” (or variants of the name) who support evolution. As of 2012 the list contained 1187 signatures – as many as the total number of signatories to the Discovery Institute list – of which two-thirds are qualified biologists; and, as random searches quickly reveal, the Project Steve signatories are overall far more consistently active scientists and researchers with real credentials than the Discovery Institute list. To underscore that point, the Discovery Institute’s list had 12 or 13 signatories whose names would have qualified them for the Steve list as of 2012 (possibly a few more if you count middle names, which are usually not given on the Discovery list), of whom at least two are non-scientists (Stephen Meyer and Stephen Cheesman), one a certified crackpot (Stephan Gift), and a single one of whom is a biologist, C. Steven Murphree, who has later regretted his involvement with the Discovery list and signed Project Steve instead. One almost feel sorry for them.

Steven Gollmer is another “Steve” on the Discovery Institute list, and a fairly typical entry. Gollmer does have a PhD in Atmospheric Science from Purdue (which has little to do with evolution) and is currently affiliated with Cedarville University, a small Bob-Jones-University-like institution in Ohio that teaches young-earth-creationism and requires all students to have a minor in Bible studies. Like most institutions of that kind, Cedarville faculty is notoriously inbred (i.e. many of their “scientific” faculty have their degrees from … Cedarville), but Gollmer is apparently an exception. What about his scientific credentials? In line with the school’s position Gollmer has declared that “[o]ur approach to science and origins is based on the presupposition that our highest and ultimate authority is the unchanging Word of God,” which effectively means that he rejects the science part of it all. He has also been active in creationist attempts to impose lesson plans on the Ohio State Board of Education, and is a signatory to the CMI list of scientists alive today who accept the biblical account of creation.

Diagnosis: He might have a degree, but Steven Gollmer is not a scientist, and he hates science to the core of his being. Like so many of the signatories to that Discovery Institute list.

It’s amazing what you can get away with when your audience is scientifically illiterate. George Gonzalez doesn’t understand quantum physics, but neither does his audience; and if you even wonder whether “quantum neurology” as offered by a chiropractor has something going for it, then you are surely disposed to swallow any bullshit you may be served. Gonzalez is also the author of Holographic Healing, the very title of which should suffice to scare away anyone with an even remotely developed critical sense.

According to Gonzalez “We now understand that the Nervous System is inclusive of every aspect of action and communication available to our body. It includes our physical body and our all aspects of our nonphysical body: also known as our energetic body, Bio-Energetic Field, Aura or LightBody. It includes our mind, our thoughts, our emotions and our Spiritual connection.” Well, no: I am pretty sure even George Gonzalez have no actual understanding of what he is trying to say, since what he is trying to say makes no sense whatsoever. He also offers something called the GRT LITE™, which is some kind of light therapy and accordingly pure bullshit backed up by no evidence or plausibility whatsoever.

What about his evidence? Well, Gonzalez does assert that research is important and an important component of his quantum neurology™ seminars. Of course, he doesn’t have the faintest idea how to actually do research; he has case studies – anecdotes, really – written up by someone (himself) apparently completely lacking any shred of knowledge of neurology or idea about how to evaluate cases.

Diagnosis: There probably is no law prohibiting Gonzalez from doing what he is doing, but unless you wish to commit money and effort to something based on abysmal ignorance of how physics and medicine and, well, reality work, as well as garbled nonsense, you ought to stay well away from this one.

There seems to be plenty of lunatics in the US prepared to refight the Civil War, but since their leaders tend to be as competent as David Icke forum participants we are probably in no immediate danger. The New Confederate Army, for instance – which appears to be primarily a facebook group – seems to have fallen on hard times due (in part) to problems with dissenters and traitors who are trying to raise their own new Confederate Armies, and its founder and leader General Charles Goodson seems to be ready to launch wars on these traitors since they are “trying to destroy me and the Confederate liberation cause” and “have spies on all of my pages.” According to Goodson, the dissenters are “no different from the Europeans who collaborated with the Nazi’s during WWII. They are pro-Imperialists, no matter what they tell you, they are for the Empire,” and they also tend to accuse Goodson of being like Hitler.

You can watch a summary of their political positions here, but with clowns like this any movement toward realizing those goals seem bound to implode more or less immediately. If you wish to join them, the application form is here; you do, however, have to “solemnly swear and affirm, that [you] will support and defend the Constitution of the Confederate States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.

I am pretty sure our Charles Goodson is unrelated to this Charles Goodson, but I betcha they would have lots to discuss.

Diagnosis: Just sit back and watch the sordid affair run its course. Or do something completely different; that’s OK, too.

When Gwen Goodwin ran as a candidate in a Democratic primary for the NYC City Council in 2013 she ended up losing spectacularly to Melissa Mark-Viverito. Since she is a serious loon, Goodwin did not react reasonably to the loss: She sued. In particular, Goodwin accused Mark-Viverito of a conspiracy that put a black-magic mural on her building that cursed her and robbed her of energy; Mark-Viverito had earlier led an urban-art campaign called Los Muros Hablan (“the walls speak”), an effort to celebrates Latino culture by painting murals on walls, and as part of the campaign a five-story image of a bodiless rooster atop wooden poles was painted on Goodwin’s building, and “[a]ccording to neighbors of Puerto Rican and other backgrounds, in the Caribbean culture, this constituted a curse and a death threat, as a swastika or a noose would symbolize typically to many Jews or African-Americans,” said Goodwin. I don’t think that comparison puts her in a particularly favorable light. In any case, Goodwin alleged that she endured “emotional distress” from the spell, which distracted her from running a winning campaign: “This intimated me and caused me fear. I’m a Christian. I don’t believe outside my religion, but strange things were happening” (yes, there’s a contradiction there, but never mind). As evidence, she claimed that she suddenly got a blood clot in her foot and that a close friend began “acting crazy” right after the mural went up. We haven’t even bothered to check what eventually happened to the lawsuit.

Diagnosis: Just based on this story alone we can imagine some alternative explanations for Goodwin’s lack of success in the primaries. We would probably prefer not to have her as a neighbor either.

James Samuel Gordon is an author, Harvard-educated psychiatrist, and one of the truly big names in quackery and pseudoscience promotion. Gordon promotes mind-body medicine – in particular unproven and alternative techniques – and is the founder and Director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), an “educational” organization, as well as a fellow of the Fetzer Institute. The Fetzer Institute funds a range of alternative medicine initiatives – notably an infamous and thoroughly flawed David Eisenberg study on altmed – and has sponsored forums for advocates of psychedelic experience and spirituality. Gordon is, in short, a pretty powerful proponent of alternative and complementary medicine, or “integrative medicine” – the practitioners tend to change the designator every time the public starts to associate the current name with what they actually peddle (Gordon himself has tried to rebrand pseudoscientific nonsense as “self-care strategies”).

Gordon himself is a “licensed acupuncturist”. And like many promoters of altmed (and as the changes in designation would suggest) he is not afraid to use misrepresentation to further his cause: A typical and dishonest gambit is the bait-and-switch tactic of lumping nutrition and exercise – which belong squarely in the science-based medicine – in with “alternative treatments” to suggest that plenty of alternative treatments are demonstrably efficacious (they need to do that, of course, since none of the actually alternative treatments are).

He is also a guru of sorts, and his book The Golden Guru: The Strange Jouney of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh includes a description of his own rebirthing in India as well as a defense ofviolent psychotherapy (yup) and attempts to defend the egregious excesses and abuse committed by Rajneesh, the televangelist fraud and cult-leader who taught him. If you don't remember them, the Rajneesh cult actually made some headlines back in the day, especially in 1984, when Rajneesh’s followers apparently recruited hundreds of mentally ill and drug-addict street people to come to Oregon to vote as part of a plan to take over their section of the state through the ballot box. They also, famously, inoculated salad bars with salmonella bacteria to keep local residents away from the polls – the first confirmed instance of chemical or biological terrorism to have occurred in the US (Rajneesh himself was deported from the US for immigration fraud somewhat later). Gordon has offered plenty of Rajneesh-inspired therapies in his psychiatric practice, including the “mind expanding” technique of whirling and spinning to dizziness, and decades after Rajneesh cult’s influence had faded Gordon continued to sell Audio CDs of Rajneesh’s “Dynamic Meditation” and “Kundalini Meditation” at his own CMBM Online Bookstore. Merely to call this shit “nonsense” is to overlook the danger it may pose to people in vulnerable situations.

Despite his background as a Rajneesh fan the Clinton administration viewed Gordon as fit for tasks that required accountability and responsibility when they appointed him to the position of chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary andAlternative Medicine Policy (WHCCAMP) (to the protest of real psychologists who have long recognized Gordon as a promoter of potentially dangerous and untested treatments).

He has been in the game for a long time, though:

- Gordon directed the Special Study on Alternative Services for President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health.

- In the 80s he designed and implemented a study track for medical students in integrative and alternative medicine at Georgetown’s medical school (which appears to have turned into something close to a pseudoinstitution at this point).

- His own CMBM was founded in 1991 to offer professional training programs in mind-body medicine and integrative oncology to health and mental health professionals in order to help them integrate pseudoscientific techniques into their practices. He and his followers have apparently also trained local teams in Kosovo, Israel, and Gaza to make the CMBM model a fully integrated and sustainable part of the local healthcare systems there. In 2008 they apparently even won a research award from the US Department of Defense to study their mind-body approaches with veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

- In the 90s, Gordon was also co-director of the Mind-Body Panel at the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), together with Larry Dossey and Jungian transpersonal psychologist Jeanne Achterberg, and managed to steer OAM’s and NCCAM’s Mind-Body research into mysticism and parapsychology.

- Gordon has also organized a series of Comprehensive Cancer Care Conferences for practitioners of pseudoscience, quackery and New Age craziness, as well as representatives for the NIH and the American Cancer Society. His book based on these conferences, Comprehensive Cancer Care, is not a trustworthy source of cancer-care-related information.

- He has even been part of the “Scientific Advisory Board” of John Mack’s Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (Mack is a proponent of “alien-abduction therapy” to help the hundreds of thousands of Americans he believes may have at some point have been abducted by aliens).

- Heck, Gordon was a speaker at a 1997 conference of followers of “orgone energy” theorist Wilhelm Reich – though he did admittedly seem reluctant to endorse their ideas (suggesting that they should “test” them; yeah, right). But he has pushed the Gonzalez protocol.

His latest (?) book is Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression, which outlines a program “adapted from mythologist Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking [bullshit] studies of the world’s mythic heroes and heroines.” Like most of Gordon’s work we suspect the evidence base for the claims is limited to the author’s ego.

Diagnosis: One of the most dangerous people alive – he has a pretty non-modest view of his own self-importance, but there is no doubt that Gordon has had plenty of negative influence of medical practices and standards of care in the US.

Much of the information for this post was obtained from quackwatch’s entry here.

A.k.a. “Dr. Jay” (he likes to call himself that)

We’ve been hesitant about this one, but ultimately decided that we had to include him. Jay Gordon, and M.D., would of course vigorously deny that he is “anti-vaccine”, and although a case could be made that he is less blatantly anti-vaccine than some other members of the anti-vaccine movement who also deny that they are anti-vaccine (such as Robert F. Kennedy), Gordon is anti-vaccine by any reasonable definition, and has managed to become something of an authority in the anti-vaccine movement (anti-vaxxer Bill Maher, for instance, has said that he finds Gordon “extremely credible,” based on his own lack of expertise and minimal understanding of the field). Gordon is, or at least used to be, a pediatrician to Jenny McCarthy’s son, and has surely done little to dissuade McCarthy from her delusions – quite the contrary (apparently he is pediatrician to Mayim Bialik’s children as well). He also hangs around with leaders of the anti-vaccine movement (and various peddlers of quackery such as homeopathy), gives speeches at anti-vaccine rallies, such as the “Green Our Vaccines” rally in Washington, D.C. in 2008, and hasn’t exactly used those opportunities to take a pro-vaccine or pro-science stance. Instead, Gordon is fully on board with the deceptive anti-vaxx strategy of claiming that they just want to get Big Pharma to make safe vaccines, falsely implying that they aren’t safe already. Of course, the standards of safety they are assuming are standards that could never be achieved in any world remotely similar to the actual one. And, to emphasize: Given their utter insensitivity to any reasonable weighing of the risks of getting a disease (and the accompanying hazards) against the possible negative reaction to vaccination these people are emphatically in the crank camp.

Gordon’s website suggests that he wants to provide parents with information that would enable them to make the best choices for their children (which should not mean balancing sound advice with crazy crackpot denialism, but Gordon is unable to see the distinction). His “information” includes links to artciles he has written, including, for instance, his “Autism and Toxins” published in the venerable journal Huffington Post, suggesting “[t]hat there is no proof that these shots are as safe the makers say they are” (yes, seriously: read that again, and you’ll see why dr. Gordon can be correctly accused of misleading parents). In the article, Gordon just dismisses the science, and instead offers his intuitions. He admits that he has “no proof that vaccines cause autism” (no shit) but claims, against better knowledge, that the question has not been adequately studied. Indeed, Gordon explicitly says that we should dismiss evidence, science or the judgments of scientist when these go against “experienced doctors” (himself) who use their “eyes and ears” and listen to “parents who are certain that vaccines caused their children’s autism”; those who dismiss the latter are just “mean-spirited” (and to emphasize: note his distinction between the kind doctors, like himself, and the “mean-spirited” ones who follow science instead of intuition). And when pushed on the issue, Gordon has even tried to argue that we need to redefine “science” to incorporate a broader evidence-base that also takes seriously what he already knows in his guts to be uncontrovertibly true and therefore not refutable by properly done studies. Here is a deconstruction of some of his other misconceptions about vaccines. Here is another.

Gordon also peddles the stupid myth that vaccines are full of toxins such as aluminum and formaldehyde, and although he does vaccinate children on parents’ request, he does so rather unwillingly and advices against following the standard schedule because of his intuition-based misconceptions about how the immune system works (in stark contrast to the recommendations of those who actually know how it works, of course) ; according to Gordon “the immune system, like every other system of the body, matures slowly, and that it can better tolerate viral infection at older ages and better tolerate one virus at a time,” which probably sounds reasonable to those who don’t know much about the topic but is, in fact, nonsense.

But he denies being anti-vaccine; oh, no – he just wants to have a conversation and for his misconceptions (and those of his fellow anti-vaxxers) to be taken seriously. As a matter of fact, Gordon has even said that “I can tell you that my very strong impression is that children with the fewest vaccines, or no vaccines at all, get sick less frequently and are healthier in general. I truly believe they also develop less autism and other ‘persistent developmental delays.’” So, yes – he does believe that vaccines cause autism (Another example? What about: “It’s true that the onset of autism often coincides with the time that kids are getting their shots. But the vast majority of times that I see a temporal relationship, I’m assuming it’s not a coincidence;” because … post-hoc fallacies are not fallacious when he is making them? He offers nothing else). He just doesn’t want to say those words out loud. What about herd immunity? “What I really want is an honest discussion of the risks and benefits of each vaccine and combinations of vaccines for your child. Just your child;” not about herd immunity, in other words. Once again, Gordon is anti-vaccine by any reasonable definition of “anti-vaccine”. Heck, he has even claimed that scientists are involved in a Big Pharma-paid conspiracy to cover up the vaccine-autism link (“The proof is not there yet [so how does he know? That’s right: He just does]. It will be found. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another fifty years and hundreds of court cases to convince the government and the public. Private industry is once again duping the FDA, doctors and the public”). How more anti-vaccine do you think it is possible to be?

Diagnosis: Zealous anti-vaccine facilitator (we do sort of suspect he really knows better). Because he does, in fact, possess a medical degree his misconceptions, half-truths and myths – precisely what the parents he caters to want to hear, of course – seem to carry a lot of weight among those who don’t know better. Dangerous.

Christopher Grace is a professor of psychology at Biola University, a fundamentalist institution that, despite being fully accredited, has a history of not always being very appreciative of science, truth, evidence or decency. Grace is also the director of Biola University’s Center for Marriage and Relationships, which does not appear to the kind of center that would help Biola escape its aforementioned reputation. The center is not particularly concerned with the scientific qualities of its inquiries. And Grace’s own credentials as a scientist are not exactly of the kind that would obviously impress real scientists – yes, he has a publication record, ostensibly in ”the field of psychology”, but publications in “the field of psychology” in magazines and journals such as Journal of Theology and Psychology or Theology, Marriage and Family: A Christian Journal don’t really count.

Several of his publications in these magazines concern evolutionary psychology and intelligent design, and Grace appears to be one of the founders of what he calls “intelligent design psychology,” which is apparently supposed to be an alternative poised to displace evolutionary psychology. We admit that we haven’t bothered to consult his “scientific” output. Grace is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, so his appreciation for science and taking a scientific approach to his studies of reality is evidently poor.

Diagnosis: Another pseudoscientist working at an institution that likes to pretend to be a scientific one. As such he probably deserves a mention, though he seems to be a small fish.

Maurice Robert “Mike” Gravel is a former Democratic senator from Alaska (1969-1981) who has achieved some popularity among left-leaning voters for his liberal stance on abortion, gay marriage, pot, welfare issues and climate change-related measures – popular enough that he briefly ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2008 before switching to the Libertarian Party. So yes, he has taken a very reasonable stance on plenty of issues, has even supported more funding and rigor in science education, and is opposed to creationism and politics governed by religion (he has even released a video on YouTube called “The Oppressive Nature of Religion”, and tends to dodge questions about faith in debates, saying rather that society should be guided by love, not religion).

But Gravel is also a serious conspiracy theorist. He supports a new investigation into the 9/11 attacks, saying that “critically important evidence has come forward after the original government building reports were completed.” That “evidence” seems to refer to the work of controlled-demolition loons like the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

He’s also a UFO conspiracy theorist. In 2013, he was one of several former members of Congress (e.g. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick) to accept $20,000 from the Paradigm Research Group, an advocacy group for UFO disclosure, to be part of what they term a Citizen Hearing on Disclosure – modeled after congressional hearings – regarding their delusional belief that the U.S. government is suppressing evidence concerning UFOs. Gravel was apparently totally on board: “Something is monitoring the planet, and they are monitoring it very cautiously, because we are a very warlike planet.” And he made sure to take a jab at skeptics: “What we’re faced with here is, in areas of the media, and the government too, an effort to marginalize and ridicule people who have specific knowledge,” thus undermining in a matter of seconds many years worth of good work on behalf of sound science and science eduction in the areas of e.g. biology and climate change.

Diagnosis: Once he may have been (at least more or less) a good guy. At present he’s the cranky old conspiracy theorist uncle who ruins Thanksgiving dinners. It’s sad, but you really, really shouldn’t be listening to this fop at all anymore.

Simon Gray is the guy who registered the domain for Above Top Secret back in 1997. As most of you know, ATS is an internet dump for conspiracies, UFOs, paranormal rubbish and anything that smells of crankery and pseudoscience. It’s currently rather slick – by conspiracy website standards – and even a touch self-aware, as befitting what is probably the most popular conspiracy pit on the Internet. It’s all bullshit, of course – so much so that if ATS is ever a source for a particular claim, that is pretty good evidence that the claim is bullshit.

But who is Simon Gray? Ah, now that’s a tricky one. Apparently Gray is a conspiracy theorist who is particularly fond of UFO and Roswell-style conspiracies, but it is hard to find much information apart from a few interviews he has done for his own site. He doesn’t seem to be particularly prone to making public appearances.

Of course, given the intended audience for ATS, Gray and his website have therefore – entirely predictably –become common targets for conspiracy theories themselves. Here is a complaint about how ATS censors Sandy Hook truther material, presumably because they are agents for the government – one John Lear, for instance, thinks ATS is a “CIA front” for the purpose of collecting UFO information from the public (since UFO loons are generally unwilling to volunteer that information to anyone and everyone, right?). Meanwhile, a former member has exposed ATS’s Zionist connections (but of course), and this guy claims that ATS broke into his house and tampered with his computer because of the information he was posting; these ones think ATS is in a conspiracy with google to push pages exposing the ATS conspiracy as far back as possible. And so on, and so forth.

Diagnosis: Yeah, that is the predictably result of venturing into the epistemic abyss of conspiracy theories. We don’t really know the extent to which Gray himself believes any (or all) of the shit posted on ATS, but he deserves an entry nonetheless for the Internet pollution he’s partially responsible for spawning.

Described as David Barton’s sidekick, Rick Green is a former member of the Texas House of Representatives and an associate of Barton’s organization WallBuilders, a wingnut political organization that seeks to revise, censor and manufacture America’s “forgotten” history as a Christian nation. In 2010 Green also sought a position on the Texas Supreme Court; he lost that one, despite receiving the backing of luminaries such as Chuck Norris, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel and Liberty University, Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Legal Institute, and state legislators like Warren Chisum. To give you an idea of why he received these endorsements, let us point out Green’s claim that the separation of church and state is the “exact opposite” of what the Founders wanted and simply a tool to move the country “towards socialism and communism;” the separation is also, for good measure, responsible for increases in out-of-wedlock births and crime. Evidence? If you need to ask, you’re probably a commie. (Interestingly, Green nevertheless appeared to agree with Danny Holliday when Holliday visited the WallBuilders show to argue that gay marriage violates the separation of church and state; once again, you probably shouldn’t ask). He tried again for the Supreme Court in 2016 – this time also picking up the endorsement of Ray Comfort – but failed once more.

In addition to promoting Barton’s pseudohistory (and running the American Family Association’s Patriot Project), Green has tried his hand at revising history in the name of ideology himself. He has for instance promoted his own 15-week online course in American government based in part on his book Freedom’s Fame, which is to a large extent devoted to discussing the religious commitments of the Founding Fathers as Green, based on Barton’s fictional accounts, imagines them to be so they can serve his purpose (it also contains a chapter “What about Separation of Church and State?”). You don’t need more than a casual skim to realize that the book is not about facts or accuracy. Green also blames school shootings on the absence of forced religious education and of the Ten Commandments in classrooms (and thus on the courts) because he doesn’t actually bother to do any research or give the issue much thought; what matters is that the conclusion fits his agenda (it doesn’t even count as motivated reasoning since Green doesn’t even try). And like Barton, Green tries to show that just about every (positive) aspect of our government and culture is been explicitly anchored in Biblical principles – the connections are usually so tenacious (example) that they would have been laughable were the revisionist, fundamentalist zeal behind them not so scary. Of course, the problem is not only that the connection Green thinks he sees isn’t there, but that Jesus’s teachings, if interpreted as promoting anything to do with politics, don’t seem to have promoted the system Green wants him to have promoted.

Although Barton is a fraud, and not a historian, Green introduces him as “America’s premier historian” on their radio show, which would be a bit like introducing Ammon Bundy as America’s premier expert on Constitutional Law. And in response to criticisms of Barton’s pseudohistory and refutations of his lies, Green has complained that Barton’s critics are “elitist professors” and “leftwing bloggers” since a concern for accuracy and truth is not only elitist but a communist conspiracy engaged in an effort to “disenfranchise Christians” (despite the fact that some of Barton’s most vocal critics, such as Warren Throckmorton, are rather hardcore Christians) – i.e. pointing out that Green is (demonstrably) wrong is oppressing him. And just to make sure people see where he is coming from, Green has also likened Barton’s critics to Adolf Hitler, and compared reasoned criticism of Barton to the Holocaust (as well as quixotically denying that any of his claims have been “proven faulty”). He has even gone so far as to state, on his website, that “[i]f you can show me specifics that back up the image created by the critics [sic] innuendo, I’ll post it right here for the world to see.” Predictably, Green failed his own challenge: Chris Rodda provided precisely what he was asking for, but Green refused to post her criticism nonetheless, ostensibly because doing so would help promote her book (?), thereby demonstrating once more – as if further demonstration would be needed – that he is a fraud and dishonest to the core.

As already indicated, Green doesn’t fancy the gays, but seems not to understand what the fight for marriage equality is all about.

There is a good Rick Green resource here.

Diagnosis: The kind of guy for which the phrase “liar for Jesus” was invented. Spectacularly dishonest, and dangerous.

Not to be confused with rabid British creationist and IS-style fundamentalist Stephen Green, our Steve Green is the CEO of Hobby Lobby, an important example of Corporate Christianity. The Burwell v. Hobby Lobby court case should be familiar enough, but it is worth emphasizing that Green himself is a fanatic religious fundamentalist. Green has for instance spent a fortune

developing a Bible curriculum for use in public schools. Of course, to avoid problems with, you know, Constitutional issues, Green marketed his curriculum as a “nonsectarian Bible curriculum” that would cover the history (with an emphasis on Biblical archaeology, which must at present be considered a pseudoscience), impact and story of the Bible in a non-proselytizing way. Of course, Green really wanted the exact opposite; the curriculum is designed precisely to save souls for Jesus, and since he is a frothing fanatic Green has had some problems refraining from spilling the beans, having for instance explained that his goals for a high school curriculum were to show that the Bible “is true,” that it’s “good” and that its impact, “whether (upon) our government, education, science, art, literature, family … when we apply it to our lives in all aspects of our life, that it has been good.” You see, “this nation is in danger because of its ignorance of what God has taught,” and that’s precisely what Green wishes to remedy: “There is (sic) lessons from the past that we can learn from the dangers of ignorance of this book. We need to know it. And if we don’t know it, our future is gonna be very scary.” The fact that Green has a backstory of partnering with David Barton to produce full page newspaper ads full of precisely the mined and misleading quotes Barton has become so famous for should have been a hint. And yes, the curriculum is precisely a fundamentalist Sunday school curriculum that treats Adam and Eve as historical figures, advocates young earth creationism and claims that science support the creation story in Genesis.

The first target for the curriculum was Mustang school district in Oklahoma, a few miles from the company’s corporate headquarters. The district eventually dropped the curriculum, though, apparently since Green failed to provide them with an opportunity to review the final version and denied their request to pay the legal expenses in the event of a lawsuit. State senator Kyle Loveless later filed a bill that would protect school districts using Green’s curriculum from legal action by attempting to place a “loophole” in the law that would let public schools teach that the Bible is literally true: The idea was apparently to declare a state of emergency and that presenting the Bible as literally true in public schools was “immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety.” The bill doesn’t seem to have had much success.

Diagnosis: Zealous anti-science fundamentalist, and Green has got the money to back up his battle against decency and civilization. Dangerous

#1651: John Gilmore

#1652: Joann Ginal & Linda Newell

#1653: Brian Godawa

#1654: Floyd Godfrey

#1655: Jeff Godwin

#1656: Lisa Goes

#1657: Dan Golaszewski

#1658: Bruce Goldberg

#1659: James Goll

#1660: Steven Gollmer

#1661: George Gonzalez

#1662: Charles Goodson

#1663: Gwen Goodwin

#1664: James S. Gordon

#1665: Jay Gordon

#1666: Chris Grace

#1667: Mike Gravel

#1668: Simon Gray(?)

#1669: Rick Green

#1670: Steve Green