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#1771: Jennifer Hutchinson

January 6, 2017, 11:34 pm
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Jennifer Hutchinson is the author of Unlocking Jake: The Story of a Rabies Vaccine, Autism & Recoveryand a typically clueless anti-vaccine loon with a poor grasp of reasoning and evidence and an even worse grasp of how vaccines actually work. Hutchinson is the kind of person who, apparently with a straight face, can say things like “[v]accines create artificial immunity, which damages the natural immune system and leaves children more susceptible to diseases of all kinds. Diseases strengthen the immune system and leads to natural immunity.” Yes, it is an appeal to the quasi-religious entity “nature” to draw a bogus distinction. It also overlooks the kind of obvious point that to get your “immune system strengthened” by a disease means suffering from the disease, which – especially in the case of potentially fatal diseases – the whole point was to avoid in the first place. It’s also rather interesting that Hutchinson, in her book, is targeting the rabies vaccine as a cause for autism; it is interesting to read the above passage in light of that. Vaccines do not cause autism. 

Hat-tip: RtAVM. Yeah, we've used it before, and
will probably have to use it again. It's not like
anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists will discard
refuted talking points.
Hutchinson, however, doesn’t think vaccines really work at all: “Many diseases were eradicated or almost eradicated before vaccines were available, mostly due to better hygiene and nutrition and clean water.” Yes, it’s the “vaccines didn’t really save us” gambit. Moreover, argues Hutchinson, “[r]ecent disease outbreaks, such as measles and whooping cough, are mostly among vaccinated children,” which is technically true since vaccinated kinds vastly outnumber unvaccinated ones; unvaccinated kids are still 23 times more likely to contract pertussis. But that’s math, logic and evidence, and Hutchinson has little time for such. She’s got conspiracy theories.

In her article entitled “We’re ‘Anti-Vaxers’ Because We Don’t Have a Choice” she also complains that antivaxxers like herself are called “ignorant”, even though she is rather obviously pretty ignorant about science and medicine and is antivaccine precisely because she is ignorant about such matters. Of course, it really ishard when you don’t have the faintest clue about how to use evidence to guide your credences. In“We’ve Shown Them the Proof” Hutchinson is complaining that the other side is refusing to recognize “proof” of the dangers of vaccines, which she got from Jenny McCarthy, no less. It’s worth quoting her at some length:

“Most of all, I remember Jenny’s words: Their proof. Those are powerful words. If you’re the parent of a child with autism, you have your proof that vaccines can cause or trigger autism. There’s a lot of proof out there. For anyone who is willing to see it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t include our government and most of our doctors. I’m not saying they will admit that there could be a problem with vaccines–far too much money tied up in the vaccine program. Way too much to lose. But I have to wonder, what would they consider proof?”

Hat-tip: RtAVM
Yeah, f**ing proof. How does it work? She does admit that the Institute of Medicine, for instance, has concluded that vaccines don’t cause autism, but reminds us that “thousands of parents of vaccine-injured children have spoken,” too, and that it’s really mean not to take their claims as evidence (here is a good rejoinder to that observation). “So what if it’s ‘anecdotal evidence’? Anecdotal evidence can be a start, right?” asks Hutchinson, apparently unaware of the whole point being that it would at best be a start and that scientists and the Institute of Medicine aren’t satisfied with just a start and has therefore studied the issue extensively. Such details don’t matter to Hutchinson: “What could qualify more as a personal experience–and a more reliable one – than a mother who carries her baby inside her body for nine months, gives birth to him, and then watches him around the clock, catering to his every need?” Yup. The spirit of motherhood provides immunity to confusing correlation with causation and trumps carefully conducted studies anytime in the deranged mind of Jennifer Hutchinson.


Diagnosis: Exasperating ignorance. Even after all these entries it is hard to wrap one’s mind around the abysmal lack of even basic critical thinking or reasoning skills proudly exhibited by Jennifer Hutchinson.
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#1772: Michael Hyatt

January 9, 2017, 1:27 am
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Remember the Y2K scare? We’re not sure Michael Hyatt wants you to. Hyatt authored a fairly typical dystopian survivalist guide for the event back in the nineties: The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos. The book was a characteristic exercise in fear-mongering and dubious arguments from authority (his own: Hyatt’s qualifications in anything related to information technology – the putative source of the Armageddon – seems to have been pretty rudimentary). It described three possible outcomes of the fact that some old computers could conceivably struggle to update their calendar functions without negligible flaws at the date rollover since they recorded years in a two-digit format: brownout (major inconvenience), blackout (life-threatening economic failure), and meltdown (complete societal collapse). Of course Hyatt took the last two scenarios to be the most likely ones – the scenario “no significant consequences” wasn’t even considered. There is a review here.

Hyatt’s target group was evidently rightwing survivalist types, to whom he offered advice like stocking up on guns and non-perishable foods, something the target audience would have done a long time ago anyways. After the date rollover came and went Hyatt has turned to writing books on how to protect yourself from terrorism.


Diagnosis: Ok, there’s a fairly significant chance that Hyatt himself doesn’t believe a word of the bullshit he is engaged in, but who knows? At least those who listen to him are loons, and some of them are probably not entirely harmless either.
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#1773: Joe Imbriano

January 10, 2017, 12:37 am
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Though he is the founder of the American Open University (AOU), which has trained most of the members of the North American Imams Federation, fundamentalist Muslim theocrat Jaafar Sheikh Idris doesn’t appear to count as American – he needs a brief mention, though, for his apparent influence among certain crazier Muslim groups in the US.

Joe Imbriano, on the other hand, claims to have identified the true cause of autism. His contribution is in fact a tiny bit original since the main culprit for Imbriano isn’t vaccines – the by far most popular perceived villain among deranged anti-scientist non-experts – but … [facepalm] … EMF. Which is emphatically no less stupid than blaming vaccines. Imbriano relates his ravings to the public on the website thecauseofautism, which is concerned with two topics: That “WiFi in the schools is dangerous to young children,” and “that Microwave Electro-Magnetic Frequency Emissions acting upon metals in the child’s brain in and out of the womb is the cause of autism.” Imbriano ostensibly got the idea when he tried to microwave a tinfoil-wrapped burger in the 80s, which showed him that microwaving metal is dangerous. On the other hand, according to Imbriano, carbonyl iron powder, which is often used as an iron supplement, does not create a spectacle when microwaved but instead absorbs the radiation. This shows that EMF microwave emissions are “creating electrical discharges and voltage spikes on certain metals,” allowing “metals and toxins to get in the brain by opening the BBB [blood-brain barrier] channels” and producing a “fireworks show at the cellular level”, which is “destroying the myelin sheathing” of neurons in the brain and thereby causing autism in vulnerable populations. It’s rather painfully clear when reading his rants that Imbriano doesn’t really have more than a cursory misunderstanding of the topics he is writing about, but that hasn’t stopped anyone before (and don’t even think about evidence– this is abject pseudoscience; it is confirmation by a priori speculation by someone who has not the faintest idea what he is speculating about).

In any case, certain iron supplements make developing fetus vulnerable to WiFi, and the idea is supported by the claim that anemia “shows up in almost all autistic children”. Then there is something about cord clamping, and … well, let’s just let Imbriano fit all the pieces together himself:

“In summation, we believe that the WSJ article anectdotally confirms [whee] the implication of microwave emissions in having a causative effect on Autism. It is my belief that microwave EMF emissions acting on metals are the elusive missing link. We also believe that if all of the iron supplementation of the women was with carbonyl iron, instead of ferrous sulfate or ferrous gluconate, and, in term deliveries, cord clamping was delayed until pulsation ceases, or C sections were avoided when if at all possible, we could quite possibly, see virtually no autism if my assumptions are correct. If we removed EMF exposure entirely, we may just see the same results as well. The study didn’t specify which form of iron was taken. I would venture to say that carbonyl iron and ferrous sulfate are about 40%/50% ratio in terms of use by pregnant women and the other 10% being ferrous gluconate and other plant based forms which all differ in terms of their EMF absorption and permittivity.”

Calling this crazy speculation would be an insult to crazy speculation. Oh, and he cannot help himself: the “battery of immunizations are simply the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the already anemic, microwave EMF damaged, electrosensitive, immunocompromised infant.” So yes, it isvaccines. I’ll be darned.

Diagnosis: Tinfoil hat-style, frothing madman and Dunning-Kruger victim. His influence seems fortunately to be limited.


Hat tip: Respectful Insolence
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#1774: Don Irvine

January 12, 2017, 1:24 am
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Accuracy in Media (AIM) is a wingnut conspiracy organization – ostensibly a “media watchdog” set up to combat “liberal media bias” – founded by Bircher Reed Irvine. It is currently run by Reed’s son Don Irvine, though Cliff Kincaid may be its most publicly recognized representative. In honor of Don’s father, AIM has created an annual “Reed Irvine Award”, given to people who promote conspiracy theories and in general lack of accountability in media; there is a list of some previous winners here. In addition to wingnut conspiracy theorists and global warming denialists, the list of winners also include anti-vaccine activist Sharyl Attkisson.

AIM was for a long time (still is, we think) a main proponent of the Vince Foster conspiracy theory and served in that regard as a mouthpiece for the ravings of Richard Mellon Scaife (a funder of AIM; sourcewatch entry on AIM here). More recently they (of course) turned primarily to pushing birtherism, of course. More generally, AIM has for a long time pushed various conspiracy theories concerning the imminent (or already existing in the shadows) socialist world government led by the UN and a North American Union (here is an example). Apparently the UN is also behind the “manufactured crisis” that is is AIDS in Africa. Oh, and George Soros is involved in various nebulously defined ways.

Here is a flowchart they designed to illustrate the radicalism and nefariousness of CASA de Maryland; it’s the kind of deranged monster that screams “poe” but apparently it is not. And here is a summary of their (James Simpson) report on voter fraud.

But no wingnut watchdog organization is complete without pseudoscience, and AIM has long promoted Intelligent Design creationism, even citing the Discovery Institute as, somehow, a scientific authority. And they have, of course, been pushing anti-environmentalist conspiracy theories and various other forms of wingnut denialism, including global warming denialism, DDT myths and anti-Rachel Carson campaigns. It is probably little surprise that AIM is virulently anti-gay, and equally unsurprising that their anti-gay bigotry comes laced with insane conspiracy theories, including homosexual recruitment conspiracies.

In 1985, Reed Irvine also founded Accuracy in Academia to fight the perceived bias of “liberal academia” and political correctness. Mostly they seem to work to “inform” students about such grave issues as creeping Sharia in classrooms, since apparently many college professors are secretly jihadists, and the War on Christmas.

There’s a good AIM resource here.

Diagnosis: Yeah, it’s like the John Birch society. But apparently quite a few people take this kind of deranged lunacy seriously. Dangerous.


Hat-tip: Rationalwiki.
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#1775: Darek Isaacs

January 14, 2017, 12:32 am
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Darek Isaacs is a young-earth creationist author and filmmaker, and (apparently) close ally/student of the Hovinds. Isaacs is the kind of guy who thinks an important objection to evolution (the theory of death to the weakest on Isaacs’s interpretation) is that it (as opposed to a literal reading of the Bible?) legitimizes rape, since evolution is all about the man propagating his DNA and all that matters in reproduction is the frequency of intercourse, whether the woman is willing or not. Oh, yes: It’s the familiar Hovind-level “understanding” of evolution, in which i) a strawman parody not even remotely related to the scientific theory in question is erected; ii) an is-ought fallacy is committed; and iii) the strawmen is rejected, by the age-old principle of wishful thinking, on the grounds of its ostensibly morally reprehensible corollaries.

Isaacs is, of course, a Biblical literalist. As such he believes that dragons are real, or at least that they were real back in Biblical times, and that 2000 years ago people understood and were appropriately scared of them. “The Bible speaks about dragons,” says Isaacs, and “our authority – everything we do, we have to measure by the word of God. That is what I believe. So we have to go to the Bible, and the Bible speaks about dragons.” It’s the kind of claim that should disqualify Isaacs from any discussion with anyone above the age of five, but which is actually relatively mainstraim among frothingly fundamentalist young earth creationists.

Isaacs is also the kind of researcher who publishes in Answer in Genesis’s house journal Answers; for volume 6, for instance, Isaacs published “Is There a Dominion Mandate?”, arguing that humans do not in fact have dominion over the earth (just think about Hurricane Sandy and all the dangerous wildlife) since The Fall.


Diagnosis: A Ray Comfort in the making, perhaps. Darek Isaacs is astoundingly silly, and one should perhaps not exaggerate his influence, but some people do apparently listen to him for other things than easy laughs.
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#1776: Naomi Isaacson, Avraham Cohen & Rebekah Nett

January 16, 2017, 12:40 am
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Cohen, we think.
Naomi Isaacson is the president of Yehud-Monosson and CEO of SIST, which is apparently some kind of fundamentalist Zionist cult (full name Dr. R.C. Samanta Roy Institute of Science and Technology Inc. and officially an educational non-profit). Avraham Cohen, a.k.a. R.C. Samanta Roy, founded the cult in the seventies as a Christian end-times group – apparently the move to Judaism was somewhat gradual. And he managed to build quite a bit of fortune for himself – like many cult leaders Cohen claimed God-given abilities to read people’s minds, predict their futures, and heal their diseases – until the whole thing seems to have fallen apart in a flurry of bankruptcy claims and foreclosures around 2010 (more detailed story here and here).

Isaacson
It was Naomi Isaacson, however, who managed to draw some national attention when she and her attorney, cult member Rebekah Nett, filed a marvelously deranged brief with a bankruptcy court in 2011 (related to the SIST troubles, of course) in which they called U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher, a “black-robed bigot”, another judge “a Jesuitess” with a “track record of lies, deceit, treachery and connivery” and both, together with some trustees, “dirty Catholics”. They also alleged that the courts were “composed of a bunch of ignoramus, bigoted Catholic beasts that carry the sword of the church.” Meanwhile, Isaacson said, the “things that this Debtor has gone through are worse than the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and blood libels,” and “[s]ince Debtor has been vocal in exposing their dirty deeds, these dirty Catholics have conspired together to hurt Debtor.” Suffice to say, those sort of antics don’t go over particularly well with courts, who ordered Isaacson and Nett to show cause why each shouldn’t be fined up to $10,000. You can follow the link above if you need some actual details of the case, but we don’t think that’s necessary to make a judgment about Isaacson and Nett.

Nett
Nett, who apparently grew up in the cult, later had her license revoked indefinitely for her behavior by the Minnesota Supreme Court for repeatedly making “frivolous and harassing personal attacks and discriminatory statements in 11 different pleadings in five distinct matters.”

Isaacson and Nett emphasized, in their response, that they weren’t caling Dreher a member of the Roman Catholic Church when they called her a Catholic judge; rather, they were “referring to a mentality and an adherence to a universal creed of White Supremacy,” pointing out, for good measure, that Catholics and the Jesuit order were behind the slave trade, the sinking of the Titanic, World War II, the Holocaust and U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.


Diagnosis: I suppose some might feel sorry for them, but these people are deranged, evil and dangerous. Avoid, at least unless you have some expertise in how to help people escape from this kind of thing.
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#1777: Charlotte Iserbyt

January 17, 2017, 1:13 am
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Back in the days Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt was a senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education (Reagan’s first term – she was relieved of her duties in 1982), staff employee of the U.S. Department of State, and co-founder of the educational activism group Guardians of Education for Maine. These days she is most famous for raging and ranting about how current problems in education and prevailing anti-intellectualism in the US are caused by former Soviet KGB agents.

Much of her, uh, research and worries about the American education system are summed up in her 1999 book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. According to the book, schools and universities are part of a conspiracy to suppress creative thinking and brainwash children into toeing the party line. There are several reasons why this should be obvious: For instance, since teaching a child to read, write and do basic math isn’t and shouldn’t be expensive or hard, the fact that education is currently costing a lot of money and takes a long time must be due to the efforts put into subsequent brainwashing.

More precisely, the public education system silently and nefariously work to eliminate the influences of a child’s parent, religion, morals and patriotism to “mold the child into a member of the proletariat in preparation for a socialist-collectivist world of the future.” These evil plans, and the psychological methods used to implement them, were formulated primarily by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education (which ostensibly is at the heart of a great plot to start several large-scale wars and military conflicts to create world peace) and the Rockefeller General Education Board, but were adopted by the Ford foundation and even the president himself: during her stint in the Department of Education Iserbyt allegedly discovered, to her disbelief, how these socialist-collectivist policies originated all the way from President Reagan, Vice President George H. W. Bush, and their policy advisers, including the CIA. Yes: Reagan himself was really a communist agent – Iserbyt suspects he came under communist influence when he was a member of the National Advisory Council of the American Veterans Committee, apparently a communist front organization. And not only Reagan but his administration, the government, various large organizations and even multinational companies. If you don’t see some obvious problems with Iserbyt’s theory on your own, we’re not sure we can help you. One wonders, though, whether Iserbyt might be under some misconceptions concerning what counts as “communism” and “brainwashing”.

Further proof that she is right is the fact that some critics call her a “kook”.


Diagnosis: Well, “kook” sums it up pretty well, but “raving lunatic” seems even more appropriate. We doubt that her own influence is particularly momentous these days, but plenty of crazies have taken up similar causes.
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#1778: Hanan Islam

January 19, 2017, 1:01 am
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Hanan Islam is the executive director of the World Literacy Crusade (WLC), a California Scientology organization, and the founder of the National Association of Alternative Health Practitioners (NAAHP). She calls herself “dr. Hanan”, claiming to be a naturopathic physician with two doctorates and a master’s degree from Rochville University and the Eden Institute. Rochville is demonstrably a diploma mill, and no one seems to know what “Eden Institute” is supposed to be, which probably means it's spam. NAAHP is ostensibly a “comprehensive referral base of more than 1,000 Health practitioners, (MDs, NDs, Chiropractors, Acupuncturists, Homeopaths, Psychiatrists, Psychologists, RNs, Nurse Practitioners, etc.) practicing natural health therapies addressing the full spectrum of physical and spiritual maladies,” though Google primarily return a few sites on or about Islam if you search for it (and none of them, interestingly, appear to name any other member than her).

The WLC has had a bit more influence. It used to run a charter school in Florida, the Life Force Arts and Technology Academy, until 2012, when it filed for bankruptcy. Though Islam had reassured parents that the school wouldn’t be pushing religion (and it received about $800,000 a year in public funding), reports from former students and teachers sort of, well, contradict that claim, and the school seems to admit that its pedagogical approach was firmly rooted in L. Ron Hubbard’s pseudoscientific “study techs”. The WLC was founded by one Alfreddie Johnson, Jr., by the way, a close friend of both Louis Farrakhan and Isaac Hayes (Nation of Islam and Scientology enjoy substantial ties) to use “community-based literacy programs that utilize [sic ] the breakthrough study and drug rehabilitation methodologies developed by author and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard.”

Islam also lists herself as a board member of the African American Mental Health Coalition, an organization that promotes such things as prayer, meditation, herbs and vitamins, and diet as “alternatives” to mental health care, and which lists Andrew Weil and Dr. Oz as their “favorite doctors.”


Diagnosis: A completely ridiculous character, but she has actually been in a position to cause genuine harm. Breathtaking.
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#1779: Fred Jackson

January 21, 2017, 1:01 am
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Fred Jackson is an evil man. He is the news director for the American Family Association, and the kind of guy who systematically blames violent incidents on liberal churches and the media, institutions that according to Jackson are deemphasizing the fear of God and the Bible. Jackson (and his co-host Teddy James at the radio show AFA Today) did for instance maintain that the 2012 Colorado movie theater shooting was a sign of God’s judgment for the failings of the public education system and liberal churches that affirm gays and lesbians. What gays and lesbians have to do with it should be obvious: Jackson is one of the Good guys, but doesn’t like gays, so gays must be Evil and thus in league with mass murderers. The boy scouts are apparently part ofthe Horde as well (in “open rebellion” against God, no less). And the forces of evil are backed by the courts; the SCOTUS gay marriage decision, for instance, led Jackson and Sandy Rios to declare that marriage, the institution God himself instituted in the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve were playing around with the dinosaurs some 6000 years ago, is now dead in the US and that God will have his vengeance on us. Good thing that when people disagree with you or things don’t go the way you wanted them to go, you can always call upon (what they seem to primarily think of as) a big bully friend to beat up the offenders, and claim that some random typhon hitting innocent farmers in Nicarague is evidence that he is doing your bidding.

AFA Today has hosted prominent and well-respected guests like Jan Markell (who for instance agreed with Jackson’s assessment of the refugee crisis in Europe that it is proof that God has “taken down any hedge” of protection – from Muslims, of course – around the continent because of its abandonment of Israel), Jerry Newcombe and Jerry Boykin.

Of course, Jackson sometimes makes forays into political issues beyond marriage equiality as well, for instance when he claimed that demanding public trials for police officers (or, really, holding them accountable at all) “sounds a whole lot like lynching”, or when he agreed with a caller that red states should secede from the US.


Diagnosis: A horrid little man; delusional, mean and zealous.
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#1780: Harry Jackson

January 23, 2017, 12:39 am
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Harry R. Jackson Jr. is a Pentecostal bishop, senior pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, and Presiding Bishop of the International Communion of Evangelical Churches. He is also founder and chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, a group of extremist wingnuts, and co-founder of The Reconciled Church Initiative. Moreover, Jackson is completely, utterly deranged, and an open supporter of Seven Mountains dominionism.

Jackson has for instance supported the position that the US is facing its present challenges primarily because of the actions of the Queen of Heaven, which NAR founder C. Peter Wagner and Cindy Jacobs – and apparently Jackson – think is the demonic force that rules over Roman Catholicism, Islam and other faiths. Apparently she lives on Mount Everest – Wagner has written a whole book on the subject, and bragged about how his efforts to defeat her led to the deaths of Mother Theresa and Princess Diana, and to the “earthquake [that] destroyed the Basilica of Assisi” – but she has apparently also infiltrated the US government. Yeah, that kind of guy.

Politics and race
Jackson’s one-trick-pony trick is to claim that anything and everything he doesn’t like, including abortion, contraception and gay marriage, is a particular threat to the black community and therefore inherently racist. (It’s not clear that he really believes that, though; he has also argued thatminorities should stop complaining about racism and start working with white Republicans.) The IRS for instance: according to Jackson the fact that churches cannot both engage in politics and retain their tax-exempt status is a conspiracy against blacks, and according to his own imagination (and nothing else), such regulations were originally put in place in order to prevent black churches from speaking out in support of the civil rights movement (in reality it originated with an amendment introduced by Senator LBJ in 1954 in response to attacks on him by tax-exempt groups that accused him of being soft on Communism during his re-election campaign). It’s not the only time he’s missed some historical details (he has, in fact, repeated the claim several times); his familiarity with the views and campaigns of Martin Luther King seems shaky at best, for instance.

Moreover the Obama administration’s contraception mandate isa means of anti-Black population control – a “silent effort of the powerful to control black breeding” – but Jackson is a bit thin on details as to, you know, how that’s supposed to work.

And Jackson has extensively blasted what he calls African Americans’ “adulterous relationship” with Obama, “adulterous” because “there’s no romance” between the Democratic Party and African Americans and Hispanics. Just think about it. And part of the problem is the “assignment of Hell” that has been in place since 1967 and which is attempting to “erase sexual differences” through the LGBT community, but the above claims of course suggests that Jackson is somewhat confused on issues related to love and sexuality. He has also implored minorities to leave the Democrats’ “ideological plantation” (he likes to use these kinds of phrases, but rarely elaborates – it makes you look awfully silly, Harry), and reminds us that a vote for Obama is a vote to bring “divine vengeance” on America (like so many of his ilk, Jackson seems to think of God mostly as his violent friend on whom he can call to beat up those who disagree with him). After the 2012 election Jackson argued that God is moving to “take out” voters who chose “race over grace” and didn’t “care about homosexual marriage” – he himself won’t condone violence, of course, but his crazy-as-shit bulldog God won’t hesitate.

In 2016 Jackson, who otherwise seems to have been considered too crazy even for CPAC, joined Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board (in fairness, one suspects the purpose of the board was to collect some of the loudest fringe lunatics – to satisfy the Texas Taliban voter block – and let them yell it out without having to actually listen to them), and argued for instance that God won’t heal racism under Clinton because she is, like anyone who dares to disagree with Jackson, “anchored in anti-Biblical darkness.” In January (2017) Jackson’s group created a “POTUS shield” to “renew America’s covenant with God” and declared Trump anointed by themGod.

(More on) zeh gays
Jackson, who is completely delusional on these issues, has called on people to pray – preferably in tongues – against “the Enemy”, Satan, whom he is convinced is ultimately behind marriage equality (also, donate money!). According to Jackson, legalization of same-sex marriage is “an assault”: “The Enemy wants it to be a legacy, or a seed that is planted in this generation that corrupts, perverts and pollutes” society. He has elsewhere claimed that Christianity is the foundation for freedom and religious liberty, but curiously does not seem to be in favor of either.

Jackson thinks abortion and gay marriage are to blame for the erosion of the black family: “I don’t know of anybody black who says, ‘I hate gay people’ [he himself prefers to call them pawns of Satan who spread corruption, pervertion and pollution]. We’re more accepting generally. But you overlap that – homosexuality and gay marriage – with broken families, and we don’t know how to put it back together.” According to Jackson “[t]wo people of the same sex who marry and try to indoctrinate children into that lifestyle does nothing to strengthen marriage or families,” and “[i]f you redefine marriage, you have to redefine family.You’d have to redefine parenting. I’m looking at the extinction of marriage. And black culture is in a free fall.” Moreover, “sexual abuse does not happen” in straight marriages; it’s exclusively a gay thing (but he doesn’t hate gay people; he only think they’re depraved, violent enemies of America and decency and possessed by Satan), and if same-sex marriage is legal, then “polygamy and many other forms of marriage” will “automatically sweep the land” (note the delectable insertion of “automatically”; I don’t think he knows what it means). And of course, to Jackson being in favor of marriage equality means that you’re, like Obama, wishing to “wipe Biblical marriage from the Earth” since you can’t have both homosexual marriages and heterosexual ones coexisting. In general, the gays will bring in Armageddon – though apparently the end times are coming soon anyways and that is apparently a good thing. He has written extensively on these issues for the Taliban leaflet Charismamagazine.

In 2009, Jackson led the anti-marriage-equality efforts in D.C., and even filed a lawsuit after the D.C. Board of Elections refused to allow a ballot initiative on marriage equality, claiming the initiative would violate D.C.’s Human Rights Act. He lost, several rounds. He also led subsequent efforts in Maryland, where he claimed that D.C. public schools are teaching “children – young children – to explore and examine the differences in heterosexuality, homosexuality and transgender lifestyles,” and that activists trying to repeal marriage equality are “not trying to impose our views on others” but that gay rights advocates “are trying to impose their agenda on us.” I don’t think that’s how it works.

Miscellaneous
Jackson also believes that condoms promote AIDS, just because.

There is a fine Harry Jackson resource here.


Diagnosis: Barely coherent bag of hate, bigotry and insanity. He’s a clown, of course (Pennywise-style), and gets a lot of attention as such, but we have to believe that his actual influence is relatively limited.
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#1781: Kevin Jackson

January 25, 2017, 3:51 am
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We could perhaps have awarded an entry to Cicero-based bishop Herman Jackson, who threatened a federal judge with the wrath of God – “because of Judge Sharon Coleman’s continual mocking of God’s ecclesiastical order and the sanctity of family/marriage, the wrath of God almighty shall soon visit her home” – but he is otherwise just a fraudster and crook.

Kevin Jackson is less well-hinged. Jackson is a wingnut radio personality affiliated with the Black American Leadereship Alliance (together with people like Jesse Lee “thank God for slavery” Peterson, Charles Butler and Vernon Robertson), and the kind of guy who claims that feminists are waging “a war against beautiful women” and that President Obama “has taken America back into the 1960’s except now whites are enslaved to blacks.”

On Feminism
In more detail, Jackson complains that society is currently being run by “women who look like men, act worse than men, and who have essentially sacrificed their womanhood at the alter [sic] of ‘achievement.’” (We don’t like to link directly to this kind of shit, but his article “Ugly Teachers: Product of Women’s Movement” is something to remember him for). “There is a war against beautiful women, and it’s being waged by the Women’s Movement, ironically …,” says Jackson, and “[l]et’s face it, the women who rise through the ranks in Leftist politics look like dudes. In fact, if you put high-ranking female political Plutopians against their ‘male’ counterparts, it would be the CHICKS WITH … well … CUPS, and I’m not talking bras. … Women on the Left secretly wish to build a society of powerful ugly women … to match how they feel (and are) inside. A beautiful Liberal woman (not that I’ve ever seen one) might as well be fitted for knee pads and given Bill Clinton’s ‘How to Pleasure a President While On Your Knees Under a Desk’ manual and a box of Cuban cigars.” He’s not a feminist.

Miscellaneous politics
So, yeah, the influence of women and liberals has been pretty nefarious. Indeed, the influence of liberals is so powerful that they have even “changed the definition of pedophilia,” says Jackson, presumably referring to the delusional and profoundly dishonest (though Jackson might actually believe it) wingnut idea that growing social acceptance of and civil rights for gays and lesbians will lead to the normalization of pedophilia. Here is Jackson weighing in on Dylann Roof (the murderer). Apparently the murders are to blame on liberals, since “he’s a product of culture, a culture Liberals own.”

Jackson is also vehemently opposed to immigration reform, claiming that undocumented immigrants are “mostly criminals” and “undocumented freeloaders”. “It’s Jim Crow laws being touted as immigration reform, and immigration reform is just a euphemism for treason,” said Jackson, once again apparently blithely unconcerned with truth, evidence or what words mean.

According to Jackson, then, it is pretty clear that America needs a white president, though he is quick to add that the sentiment isn’t racist: “Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American.” I don’t think … that claim is true. But Jackson digs elaborates: “The election of a recognized black president was not supposed to change anything. In fact, it was supposed to (1) ease any perceived racial tensions, and (2) allow the government to focus on legislating without race. So America would be more free than ever to discuss the issues. Not the case. And that is why having a white Republican president is best for the country.” That’s not a coherent line of reasoning to the conclusion that wanting a white president rather than a black one isn’t racist, in case you wondered.


Diagnosis: We’re reluctant to use the expression “Uncle Tom”, but Kevin Jackson is a racist. He is also a complete and utter moron. Fortunately, his impact is probably pretty limited. Still.
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#1782: Raynard Jackson

January 27, 2017, 12:59 am
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Raynard Jackson is a wingnut political consultant with some influence, having been involved in every Republican presidential campaign from H to W, in addition to plenty of Congress and Senate races. He’s done multiple TV appearances, enjoys – apparently –some popularity as a talkshow host, and has penned a number of columns for the Texas Taliban newsletter Charisma often concerning … yeah, it’s gay marriage again.

Jackson doesn’t like gay people. He has argued that the Boy Scouts have “sold their souls to the devil” for having “decided to make 97 percent of its troop members uncomfortable in order to satisfy the perverted needs of 3 percent.” They ended up there after “radical homosexuals” targeted them as part of their scheme to turn kids into “pawns in an adult game perpetrated by immoral homosexual activists,” and insisted that “there will be hell to pay as a result of that bonehead decision.” Nebulous threats are a common argument strategy for people like Jackson when they encounter developments, policies or claims they don’t like.

Later he called on social services to take MSNBC host Krystal Ball’s daughter away from her for “indoctrinat[ing] her daughter about homosexual marriage.” Apparently, telling kids that homosexual marriage is OK makes you “without question an unfit parent;” even though it “may not be child abuse legally, but morally it is definitely abuse, and I am amazed that even liberals of goodwill have not criticized [Ball] for such abuse.” Then he kicked it up a notch, and claimed that progressives want to “take another person’s child and brainwash them into believing that homosexual marriage is OK” and “brainwash innocent children to perpetuate their radical liberalism.” Is it “OK for Ball’s 5-year-old to begin experimenting with kissing boys and girls or touching her classmates in intimate places?” asked Jackson rhetorically. I don’t think that’s part of telling kids that gay marriage is OK, but leads one to wonder how Jackson would talk about (heterosexual) marriage with his own kids. After calling for the government to take Ball’s daughter away, Jackson concluded that: “This is why we need to keep the government out of our lives to the greatest extent possible.”

In 2014 he warned that homosexuality and immigration are hurting African American men, and that only white female right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham can save the black community by fighting President Obama. No, really. He said that. There is high rates of unemployment, high incarceration rates, and homosexuality occurring among black men, and “[t]his is why black men need more white women like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham.” The argument is apparently enthymematic, but we still have to puzzle out the tacit assumption; it should be interesting.


Diagnosis: Asshole and idiot. There are plenty of those to go around, but as opposed to most Jackson seems to enjoy a modicum of influence.
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#1783: Larry Jacobs

January 29, 2017, 1:09 am
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Yeah, yeah. Another anti-gay lunatic. The World Congress of Families (WCF) is another wingnut anti-gay hate group – as is virtually guaranteed by the presence of the word “Family” in their name – and Larry Jacobs is their executive director. Though the WCF is US-based, it has an international focus (there’s a good profile here), and works tirelessly to prevent countries from decriminalizing homosexuality (something that really wouldn’t go over particularly well in the US anymore) and to support the implementation of anti-gay legislation. Jacobs has accordingly cheered on Russian laws banning gay pride demonstrations and supposed “homosexual propaganda,” calling the ban a “great idea” and praising the initiative as a means for “preventing [gays] from corrupting children” (Jacobs calls the ban Russia’s “child protection law”). He even called the Russians the “Christian saviors to the world.” Jacobs’s group even planned to arrange their eighth international conference at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses in Moscow in 2014, although it was apparently cancelled. According to Jacobs Russia has “got a problem with marriage rates and fertility, and it doesn’t help if you’re encouraging non-reproductive behavior.” Just think about it for a second (Jacobs obviously didn’t). In 2013 Jacobs was also involved in pushing for similar measures in the Ukraine.

Meanwhile, “radical leftists, radical environmentalists, radical feminists and radical LGBT groups” are tirelessly working “to break the family apart”, since the family “is a threat to the state”, promotes freedom, is a threat to authoritarianism and “radically opposes their leftist agenda”. No, it’s not the argument of a reasonable person; Jacobs left that boat a long time ago. It’s worth remembering that WCF is the only group in this debate that actively opposes families and actively seeks to ban families that don’t conform to their ideal.

In 2015 Jacobs repeated his claim that Russia is the “hope for the world”. He also complained about how cultural Marxism has become a threat to freedom and freedom of speech in the West and lauded efforts to ban positive descriptions of homosexuality. We in the West have also “lost the freedom of education and culture;” no, it’s not clear what that means, but “[l]et me explain,” said Jacobs and proceeded to produce a word salad. At least he emphasize that “there is also a spiritual element to this.” Good to know.

In 2014 the WCF launched a petition accusing the Human Rights Campaign of being hateful since the HRC was quoting the WCF’s own hateful bigotry toward gay people and describing their efforts abroad to institute oppressive measures that they recognize wouldn’t fly in the US.


Diagnosis: Extremist with theocrat leanings who apparently hates America and the Constitution. His influence is hard to gauge since he seems most concerned with supporting hate, tyranny and violence abroad.
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#1784: Laura Knight Jadczyk

January 31, 2017, 3:35 am
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Laura Knight Jadczyk is a “scientific mystic and PaleoChristian Shaman.” (Please let that sink in.) Primarily, she’s a blogger most famous for promoting Comet Elenin, Planet X and Nibiru nonsense (though apparently the 2012 apocalypse was a false flag operation to fool thinking people like herself) – but she is also deeply into free energy conspiracies, trutherism (she has even written a book, 9/11 The Ultimate Truth with Joe Quinn), JFK conspiracies, various conspiracies centered around Mossad, the Denver Airport conspiracy theory (check it out if you don’t know it), New World Order conspiracies, Earth changes, aliens and HAARP. If you've taken the first step, why not go the whole way?

Her Cassiopaea website is worth a visit. Not everything there is entirely clear to us, but apparently Cassiopaeans are aliens, possibly from the future, who communicate with humans via channeling. Jadczyk has channeled them herself. They told her that the Men in Black are “lizard projections”. So there is that. They may also be trying to kill us. Who knows. Much of the website is devoted to The Grail Quest And The Destiny Of Man, which has something to do with finding the Holy Grail through a mix of alchemy, hallucinations and dreams, Christianity and (we suspect) vibrations. There is also a lot about The Wave, which has something to do with souls and earth changes.

As for the real world, it (every nation) is – according to the “Sign of the Times” website, which she helps moderate, and which is “The world for the people who think” – controlled by psychopaths by means of dominant personalities. She has this information from a book she wrote with a Soviet professor. The professor, however, fled with the book in his memory when he discovered the truth. She is also miffed about how corporate science hide the Truth by the wicked trick of peer review.

As for psychopaths, they are failed organic portals. What? Oh, yes. Organic portals are “people whose abilities of imitation are so developed, so much an integral part of who they are, that they can only be discovered after years of observation. The psychopath is the failed organic portal.” Apparently there are 3 billion organic portals, and they are soulless. The rest of humanity, on the other hand, are distinguished into “pre-adamic” and “adamic” humans, who have different souls and we have no idea but it probably doesn’t matter.

She has also written the book The Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive, which … well, lets just quote the blurb: “If you heard the Truth, would you believe it? Ancient civilizations. Hyperdimensional realities. DNA changes. Bible conspiracies. What are the realities? What is disinformation? The Secret History of The World and How To Get Out Alive is the definitive book of the real answers where Truth is more fantastic than fiction. Laura Knight-Jadczyk, wife of internationally known theoretical physicist, Arkadiusz Jadczyk, an expert in hyperdimensional physics, draws on science and mysticism to pierce the veil of reality. Due to the many threats on her life from agents and agencies known and unknown, Laura left the United States to live in France, where she is working closely with Patrick Rivière, student of Eugene Canseliet, the only disciple of the legendary alchemist Fulcanelli. To this day, Laura continues to undergo ad-hominem attacks on her web pages, her blog and even as faux book ‘reviews’ on book seller websites, by those threatened by the information she reveals in this definitive work. Yet, with sparkling humour and wisdom, she picks up where Fulcanelli left off, sharing over thirty years of research to reveal, for the first time, The Great Work and the esoteric Science of the Ancients in terms accessible to scholar and layperson alike.” The book was published with something called the Red Pill Press.

Apparently Jadczyk is vice president of the Quantum Future Group (QFG). In 2008 the QFG was apparently sued by Eric Pepin, guru-i-chief of the Higher Balance Institute, which offers courses in “multi-dimensional meditation.” Apparently Sign of the Times accused his institute of being a cointelpro group promoting meditation as an act of “falling into confluence with a psychopathic reality” that “leads people more deeply into sleep.” We do not know how Pepin went about demonstrating that the claim is false, insofar as falsehood requires minimal meaningfulness.

Jadczyk’s husband Arkadiusz is apparently a legit PhD in theoretical physics, but also pushes New Age speculations and quantum woo.


Diagnosis: Gibberish. Gibberish everywhere. Gibberish and trans-dimensional martian Leprechauns. Fortunately Jadczyk’s influence is limited, and the fact that most of her sentences are meaningless nonsense probably doesn’t help in the long run.
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#1785: Robert Jahn

February 2, 2017, 2:01 am
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Robert Jahn is a retired American plasma physicist, Professor of Aerospace Science, and Dean of Engineering at Princeton University. Those are some pretty impressive credentials. But Jahn was also a founder of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR), a parapsychology research program that was up and running from 1979 to 2007.

At the PEAR lab, which he co-founded with Brenda Dunne following an undergraduate project to study purported low-level psychokinetic (PK) effects on electronic random event generators, Jahn studied psychokinesis for many years. Over the years, he and Dunne claimed to have created a number of small-physical-scale, statistically significant results that they think suggested direct causal interaction between subjects’ intentions and otherwise physical events. As such – we conjecture – they are responsible for an impressive number of contemporary New Age-based misunderstandings of quantum physics. (Roger Nelson, a colleague of his in the experiments, later introduced the notion of “field consciousness” and currently heads the Global Consciousness Project, for instance.) It culminated in their book Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. Jahn also experimented with remote viewing and other topics in parapsychology.

His results don’t appear to have impressed many outside of pseudoscience and New Age communities. When the US Army Research Institute formed a scientific panel to assess parapsychological evidence they visited the PEAR laboratory, but concluded that results from macro-PK experiments were unimpressive and that virtually all micro-PK experiments “depart from good scientific practice in a variety of ways,” concluding that there was no scientific evidence for the existence of psychokinesis. Other critics have faulted Jahn’s experiments for failing to randomize the sequence of group trials at each session, inadequate documentation on precautions against data tampering and possibilities of data selection, and pointing out the absence of independent replications and detail in the reports: “very little information is provided about the design of the experiment, the subjects, or the procedure adopted. Details are not given about the subjects, the times they were tested, or the precise conditions under which they were tested.” Moreover, the effect was minuscule (50.02 – barely above random), and significance reached only over large numbers of trials (millions of trials with 33 subjects over seven years; most of the “excess” results seem to have been obtained by one of the subjects, who seems to have been a PEAR staff member) – since the apparently “random” results were generated by machines (random number generators), any deviations from randomness over such a large number of trials may simply be the result of the results not being entirely random in the first place. Perhaps most significantly, even though critics pointed out these shortcomings with the experiments over a long time, and the shortcomings would have been easy to fix (double-blinding, for instance), the PEAR lab didn’t. Other researchers have later tried and failed to replicate the experiments, and physicist Milton Rothman at least claimed that most of the faculty at Princeton considered the work of PEAR an embarrassment.

Although PEAR shut down in 2007, Jahn and Dunne have apparently set up a new International Consciousness Research Laboratories, and are currengly selling “a multi-DVD/CD set entitled The PEAR Proposition” for a modest $62. Jahn is also the vice President of the fringe-science group Society for Scientific Exploration (many of his parapsychology papers appear in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, but also in similar pseudoscience publications – none made it to prominent science journals), and has apparently received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Andhra University (which we don’t think is anything to be proud of). His latest book seems to be the 2012 book Quirks of the Quantum Mind. Yes. No.


Diagnosis: A rather embarrassing waste of a career, really. On the other hand, Jahn has had quite some unfortunate influence over particular groups of people (who seem to have wished for rather more spectacular results than the ones Jahn achieved through what are probably confirmation bias and technical shortcomings).
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#1786: Steve Jalsevac

February 4, 2017, 2:01 am
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Steve Jalsevac is co-founder and managing director of LifeSiteNews (LSN), a “news” site pushing the usual wingnut stuff: creationism, anti-gay rhetoric (e.g. praise for the draconian Ugandan anti-gay act, and their Matthew Cullinan Hoffman has argued that anti-gay organizations needto become “nastier”) and climate change denialism (Jalsevac, a Catholic, was none too happy that the Pope weighed in on environmental issues). LSN has also demanded that the Catholic Church excommunicate Democratic politicians (Gerard Nadal), maintained that feminists were to blame for the Costa Concordia disaster (Hilary White), compared gays and lesbians to pagans (David Krayden of the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies), and fervently supported ex-gay ‘reparative’ therapy. Jalsevac has even asked for donations to promote “freedom from the homosexual lifestyle”. That kind.

Some examples:
In 2013 LSN came out heavily in favor of gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli (a fan). In fact, they even claimed that he won the election: “Notice that the map seems to be almost solid red. And yet, Ken Cuccinelli somehow very narrowly lost to his Democrat opponent. To me, something smells about this race,” said Jalsevac. Of course, hat candidates win by numbers of people and that Cuccinelli’s opponent McAuliffe dominated more urban areas just aren’t relevant facts to Jalsevac, who rather “suspect[s] Ken Cuccinelli actually won Virginia, but certain things happened, beyond the betrayal by some Republicans, campaign weaknesses and other reported issues, to ensure that that would not be the official result.” Note that it cannot be because of voter fraud (in that case he couldn’t have used the dominance of redness on the map as evidence); it must have been … who knows: perhaps basic arithmetics is a liberal conspiracy or something. And the fact that the party breakdown of the results in Virginia’s counties in the 2013 gubernatorial election looks very similar to those in the 2012 presidential election? The 2012 election was rigged, too, of course.

Later in 2013 Jalsevac wondered why Obama has “not been booted out of office” and “not been charged” over his handling of the George Zimmerman case (yes) – alleging that Obama led a “failed attempted lynching” of Zimmerman as part of a “lib-leftist generated Latino vs African-American race confrontation” – and the fact that he has “hatefully undermined the entire social and historical foundations of the nation.” Jalsevac apparently found it incomprehensible that Amricans can support him and his “Black baby-killing abortion genocide.” Indeed, it  “seems to me to be a kind of Jim Jones social suicide cult under the hypnotic control of their cult leader,” said Jalsevac. When Rightwingwatch reported on his claims, Jalsevac responded by accusing them of being funded by George Soros. Also, Benghazi.


Diagnosis: Yet another one. The LSN seems to have a certain readership, however, and the readers are probably not only people looking for a laugh over fuming, raging, crazy conspiracy theories. Scary. 
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#1787: Cathy Jameson

February 6, 2017, 3:58 am
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Cathy Jameson is an anti-vaccinationist and blogger at the antivaxx websites Age of Autism and The Autism File, where she continues to believe, against all evidence, truth and credibility, that vaccines cause autism and for instance gives advice on how to deal with vaccine “bullies” (or how to try to baffle those who know what they’re talking about with bullshit). And of course, Jameson – like so many antivaxxers – gets bullied everywhere, from the mainstream news who “refuses to offer both sides of the vaccine story” to shills for the pharmaceutical industry (who you can recognize by the fact that they seem to know their stuff and therefore disagree with antivaxxers who don’t – many people are apparently not “aware of the many risks of vaccinating or realize how much money goes into this industry”) to doctors, who continue to encourage vaccines despite Jameson’s delusional rantings (“Why is my doctor bullying me about this?”). She also defends Andrew Wakefield. “Do know the lingo,” is one piece of advice she gives to her readers, and reminds them, with regard to Wakefield’s retracted study, to “[t]ell [vaccine advocates] first that it was not a study; it was a paper.” No, seriously. Here she apparently aims for some kind of record in Dunning-Kruger: The conclusion, at least, is that vaccines don’t work and that the CDC must be in a conspiracy to get you hooked on them for nebulous reasons. Also toxins.

Here is Jameson recommending you to stay away from the flu vaccine by pointing out how she “survived the flu naturally” (which in her mind seems to cast doubt on the “CDC’s over-used scare tactic of ‘36,000 flu deaths per year’ statistic” because she didn’t die and it's all about her), and she proudly described how she felt completely awful for several days. No, there’s no price for discovering the problems with her reasoning. The idiocy is so thick the mind boggles, even remembering that we’re dealing with an antivaxx loon. Oh, we’re not done: “Now that I’m over it, and as my family and I get back on track boosting our immune systems naturally with some vitamins, supplements and essential oils, I believe we’ll be able to get through the rest of the flu (and flu-shot) season unscathed.” Reports that she’s able to operate a doorknob remain unverified. Suffice to say her case for the efficacy of those “natural remedies” isn’t impressive.

At least her screeds are useful for illustrating the religious fervor of anti-vaxx dogmatism and how it contrasts with scientific inquiry.


Diagnosis: At least she’s ready to take on the conspiracies that continue to silence her by ignoring her, armed with all the fallacies in the book. Probably one of the most impressive examples of Dunning-Kruger we’ve had the opportunity to cover.
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#1788: John Jay

February 9, 2017, 1:14 am
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John Joseph Jay is the owner of the blog Summer Patriot, Winter Soldier, most famous (though still pretty obscure) for his views on the war on terror. Jay has suggested that we should “kill [Muslims] in sufficient number and with sufficient purpose and zeal that it causes them to stop killing us, and then we should kill them a little bit more, just to drive the point home.” That is, instead of waging a war on terror, we “should declare war on iran, syria, egypt and saudi arabia, as well as libya and the sudan and somalia, and we should kill people by the scores. no science. no precision bombing. no shock and awe designed to ‘impress’ and send ‘signals,’ but old fashion war with wholesale slaughter including indiscriminate death of innocents and babes. down to the last muslim, if necessary.” Jay responded to criticism by pointing out that The Left is lying about him since Muslims are murderous, which isn’t really pertinent to the content of the criticisms. It’s not only Muslims, though; to combat the liberals who at least up until recently were running the country (apparently, to Jay, a front for the Black Panthers, who were apparently contemplating FEMA concentration camps) “you are going to have to kill folks, your uncles, your sons and daughters, to preserve those liberties.” After all, The Left is, according to Jay, prepared to kill you, as demonstrated by the fact that abortion is legal.

It is a bit unclear to what extent and in what role Jay is involved with Pam Geller’s and Robert Spencer’s group Stop the Islamization of America. Daily Kos has described him as a “SIOA co-founder”, something he has denied. Spencer has referred to him as a SIOA board member, though.


Diagnosis: Not among the good guys; that’s for sure
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#1789: Robert Jeffress

February 11, 2017, 1:20 am
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Robert James Jeffress, Jr. is a megachurch pastor (First Baptist Church in Dallas) and host of Pathway to Victory, a widely broadcast radio program aimed at insane wingnut fundamentalists. To get a rough idea about where he stands: Jeffress is a staunch opponent of the First Amendment’s religious protections, which – since the Amendment makes it legal for people to disagree with him on theological and metaphysical issues – he claims will “kindle the anger of God against us”. “What we call diversity, God calls idolatry,” says Jeffress (yeah, blame your hate and bigotry on God, will you), but precisely why we should worry is a bit unclear, since Jeffress thinks the death and destruction of the endtimes are imminent anyways.

Of course, Jeffress is all in favor of religious freedom (and claims that God supports such freedoms) when he perceives that his freedoms are under threat – which they aren’t: what he means is consistently feels is threatened is really his freedom to prevent others from exercising their religious freedoms.

Infidels, Muslims and Catholics
Jeffress has claimed that Islam “promoted pedophilia” and has called it an “evil, evil religion” “from the pit of Hell”. It’s not the only one. “Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists and virtually everyone else” are cult members, according to Jeffress, and in 2010 he referred to Roman Catholicism as “the Babylonian mystery religion” found in the Book of Revelation and claimed that the Catholic Church represents “the genius of Satan.” (Mormons may be the worst, though.) He has also pointed out that “you can’t be saved being a Jew” – Jews are all going to hell together with Muslims and gays and Catholics and Mormons. At least he assured us that he has a Jewish friend in New York, so he can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.

Jeffress is also heavily engaged in the imaginary war on Christmas; in December 2010 he established a “Naughty and Nice List” where businesses were identified based on whether or not they openly celebrated Christmas: “I wanted to do something positive to encourage businesses to acknowledge Christmas and not bow to the strident voices of a minority who object to the holiday.” He didn’t identify any representatives of that minority.

Here he blames Satan for the non-existent persecution of Christians in the US. According to Jeffress, Christians in America today are being treated just like the Jews in Nazi Germany before they were rounded up and slaughtered. It’s unclear whether the description is pure demagoguery or whether Jeffress really is that delusional. Apparently the alleged evidence is that fundamentalist Christians are being “marginalized”; I don’t think the primary problem for Jews in Nazi Germany was being marginalized.

Homosexuality
But of course. Jeffress has claimed that homosexuality is like plugging a TV into the wrong outlet and “blow that TV to smithereens.” In his 2008 sermon “Gay Is Not OK” Jeffress stated that “what they [homosexuals] do is filthy. It is so degrading that it is beyond description [the TV analogy apart, apparently]. And it is their filthy behavior that explains why they are so much more prone to disease.” He has called same-sex marriages “counterfeit”, and lamented (lied) that legalizing gay marriage is going to make the government shut down Christian radio stations. It’s not a lie if you cross your fingers behind your back and whisper “Jerusalem” under your breath afterwards.

Moreover, “pro-LGBT businesses” are a greater threat to religious freedom in America than ISIS, according to Jeffress. Now, as earlier pointed out Jeffress is in fact opposed to religious freedom; another interesting thing about the claim, however, is the abysmal level of delusion you have to adopt to seriously entertain the idea that ISIS is a threat to religious freedom in America.

In 2013 Jeffress defended Phil Robertson’s claim that gays are a sexual threat to children and claimed that, while he and Robertson have a right to defend their interpretations of the Bible, “people don’t have the right to label Phil or me or tens of millions of evangelical Christians as hateful because we hold to a historical understanding of the Bible.” People do have that right. Jeffress also refused to pinpoint where in the Bible (or science) it is claimed that gay people are a threat to children. Here is more obliviousness from Jeffress. Also, “... [i]t’s been my experience as one whose been on the forefront of these culture wars that it doesn’t matter how much you smile, how much you show compassion, that if you label homosexuality as a sin you’re going to be labeled as ‘intolerant’ and a ‘hate monger.’” Indeed.

While still a pastor in Wichita Falls (1998) Jeffress got some attention for his attempts to have two children’s books about children with gay or lesbian parents removed from the public library by checking out the books and paying for them rather than returning them to be recirculated. The attempt backfired somewhat after the story was mainstreamed, whereupon the library received multiple copies of the books as donations and demand for the books increased significantly.

Oh, and of course gay marriage is a sign of the end times, like everything else Jeffress doesn’t like. (Fifty shades of gray, for instance; one wonders if he’s read it.)

Politics and Jeffress’s dream of a Taliban-style theocracy
Jeffress’s claim that Romney is non-Christian (“[Mormonism] is not Christianity, it is not a branch of Christianity. It is a cult”) probably didn’t ultimately help the candidate he supported in the 2012 nomination, Rick Perry (only Perry can defeat “the most pro-homosexual, most pro-abortion president in history”). Nonetheless, Jeffress ended up supporting Romney, although he complained that Romney was too focused on economy and not on “the moral and spiritual deterioration of our country.” Being a cult-member and subscribing to an ideology straight from the pits of hell is apparently not a deal-breaker for Jeffress.

In general, Jeffress’s approach to politics is pretty much what you’d expect from a lunatic fundie (though he is perhaps even more blatantly incoherent than most): God sent 9/11 just to warn us that he was displeased with our godlessness, and so on. Though he acknowledged in 2012 that “President Obama is not the Antichrist,” he emphasized that “the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.” Political discourse with these kinds of people is like trying to play chess with a rabid bat.

In a 2012 sermon, Jeffress complained about Supreme Court decisions on the separation of church and state that have “so weakened our nation’s spiritual and social structure that collapse is inevitable.” These would be Engel v Vitale, which forbids schools from forcing students to recite government-composed daily prayers; Roe v Wade; and Lawrence v Texas, which struck down state laws against sodomy; Jeffress lamented that “these explosive, wrong choices our country has made and the inevitable implosion of our country” (yeah, both explosion and implosion at the same time). Moreover, Stone v. Graham, which in 1980 struck down Kentucky’s law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in all public school classrooms, led directly to a tragic 1997 shooting spree in a Kentucky high school by a 14-year-old student.

He has also complained that many people in the clergy “falsely perceive Christ as this little, wimpy guy who walked around plucking daisies and eating birdseed and saying nice things;” according to Jeffress, Jesus was – coincidentally rather like himself – a hateful, flaming bigot. Nonetheless, when declaring his support for Trump in the 2016 election he stated that if Jesus Christ was a candidate himself, he “would run from that candidate as far as possible” and still vote for Trump – apparenty the Bible calls for “a strongman”. Moreover, according to Jeffress, Trump is like Saul/Paul, and will be led by people close to him to a “road to Damascus” experience – Jeffress himself is on Trump’s evangelical advisory board and is currently preaching the gospel of Trump (Trump is like Nehemiah, who also built a wall and was attacked by “the mainstream media”). Of the election itself, in which God miraculously intervened and got Trump elected (which is not voter fraud), Jeffress has said that “[t]his isn’t about partisan politics. This is about good and evil.” It seems to be about partisan politics. Then he accused Hillary Clinton of hate speech.

In general, Jeffress warns us that churches that don’t embrace right-wing politics are going to “surrender the control and the direction of this country to the godless, immoral infidels who hate God,” and has compared failure to endorse wingnuttery to failure to stand up to Hitler (of course).

As for police violence, Jeffress maintains that no one has anything to fear from police officers because they are ministers sent by God to “punish evildoers,” which is such a ridiculous thing to say that one is tempted to laugh were it not so tragic. Apparently if only black people “would teach [their] children to respect law enforcement officers, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

Selected publications
Jeffress has written a couple of books, including Countdown to the Apocalypse: Why ISIS and Ebola Are Only the Beginning, which probably doesn’t need further comment, and Twilight’s Last Gleaming (foreword by Mike Huckabee), which claims that “America’s days are numbered, because this world’s days are numbered,” but that the inevitable end of the world is an opportunity to evangelize. Yes, it’s a relatively common belief, but I suggest taking a moment to think about how rabidly delusionally insane it actually is: it really does outcrazy tinfoil-hats-and-pyramids-protect-me-from-alien-mind-control by quite some distance.

Diagnosis: Incoherent, blathering lunatic running on hate, bigotry and persecution complexes. He is, however, frighteningly influential.
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#1790: Leonard Jeffries

February 13, 2017, 12:24 am
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One of the leading and most famous figures in the movement to push afrocentrism into la-la land, Leonard Jeffries, jr., is a professor of Black Studies at the City College of New York, which is part of CUNY. He is also International Executive Director of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and a founding director and former Vice-President and President of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC). At one point in the nineties Jeffries was discharged from his CUNY chairman position, but he retained his professorship after a lengthy legal battle.

To the general public he is known for arguing that the accomplishments of African Americans go far beyond what is commonly recognized (such as the familiar revisionist interpretations of the history of ancient Egypt) and, accordingly, that public school syllabi are guilty of Eurocentrism (which they certainly are, but not quite in the ways Jeffries imagines). For instance, most people have, according to Jeffries, failed to recognize that Jews financed the slave trade and have later used the movie industry to hurt black people; in particular, “Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people.” So, not only were they racist; there was a genuine “conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood” by “people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani …” His views came to some attention after a 2-hour public speech in 1991 where he referred to Diane Ravitch, Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, as a “sophisticated Texas Jew” (and repeatedly called her “Miss Daisy”) and scholars who disagree with him as “slick and devilish” weaklings before proceeding to give falsetto imitations of various Jewish and other white people.

Jeffries has argued that whites are “ice people” while Africans are “sun people”: “Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in world history,” says Jeffries (whites are also “pathological,” “dirty,” “dastardly, devilish folks”). He is also a supporter of the magic melanin theory, arguing that melanin gives blacks intellectual and physical superiority over whites. According to Jeffries, melanin helps people with dark skin “… negotiate the vibrations of the universe and to deal with the ultraviolet rays of the sun.”


Diagnosis: Anti-semitic conspiracy theorist and deranged lunatic. What is scary, however, is the number of followers he has managed to attract – mostly among people with legitimate claims for redress and justice. Jeffries, though, is probably not helping their efforts.
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