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#1951: Jimmy Matlock

January 19, 2018, 12:33 am
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Yes, it’s the state legislatures again. Jimmy Matlock is a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives for the 21st district (Lenoir City, parts of Loudon County and Monroe County). Among Matlock’s pet projects is to get prayers back in school. In 2014, for instance, he proposed designating the first Sunday of Augst the “Prayer Walking Day” for public schools, crediting America’s Christian majority as justification for the bill and emphasizing that the citizens of Tennessee, by law, “acknowledge that ultimate power, protection, and security come from God.” Apparently the bill was supposed to serve an important role in school shooting prevention.

Matlock’s striking lack of grasp of the relationship between goals and effective means is also well illustrated by his firm support of abstinence-only sex education. Of course, abstinence only sex education demonstrably and unambiguously does not work, but Matlock will have nothing of that: “I believe you can peel back all the data and the only true teaching of abstinence has been proven to work.” Evidence be damned when Matlock believes stuff.


Diagnosis: Theocrat light, with the wingnut’s distaste for constitution, freedom, evidence and decency.
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#1952: Patrick Matrisciana

January 21, 2018, 12:28 am
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Caryl Matrisciana – delusional fundie, Satanic Panic promoter, demon hunter and author of books such as Gods of the New Age, The evolution conspiracy (the theory of evolution is a demonic conspiracy to vanquish God’s word) and Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged (for Chick Publications)  – has passed away. Her husband Patrick, however, is – as far as we know – still alive, and Patrick Matrisciana was responsible at least for much promotion and dissemination of much of Caryl’s work.

Patrick Matrisciana is the founder of Jeremiah Films a media production and distribution company based in Jacksonville Beach. Jeremiah Films releases videos that they claim “promote patriotism, traditional values, and the Biblical worldview of [the] founding fathers”. Of course, he has bought heavily into the United States as a Christian Nationmyth, and the views he claims were held by the founding fathers don’t reflect the views enshrined in the Constitution or those actually held by the Founding Fathers. Instead, they reflect dominionism, delusional paranoia and systematic inability to distinguish reality from low-budget horror movies involving demonic possession.

The common thread in JF’s productions is finding the most lunatic, paranoid, demonic-led conspiracy angle possible, and then try to push a slightly more extreme position. Their films investigate topics such as terrorism, paganism, evolution, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, abortion, Halloween, Islam, Christianity, Cults, the occult, Jim Jones, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Clinton presidency.

Yes, Matrisciana was an ardent promoter of the Vince Foster murder conspiracy, as detailed in Matrisciana’s 1994 film The Clinton Chronicles, which was really produced by Citizens for Honest Government (also Matrisciana’s organization), a project of the organization Creative Ministries Inc., which was largely funded by long-time Clinton opponent Larry Nichols. The film describes a good number of people that Clinton allegedly made sure to get rid of, and although the claims were easily refuted, of course, but the movie was nevertheless a bit of a success, being promoted for instance by Jerry Falwell, which is not a good measure of trustworthiness. To promote the movie, Falwell published an interview with Matrisciana, who was silhouetted to conceal his identity as he pretended to be a journalist afraid for his life; Matrisciana later acknowledged that he was not in any danger, and that the interview was staged for dramatic effect at Falwell’s suggestion, the guiding idea being that dishonesty is a sin only if you’re a librul.

JF’s crown jewel, though, is probably the 13-part series The Pagan Invasion, which watches like the film equivalent of a Chick tract, which it sort of is. The first installment, produced wuth Chuck Smith and Caryl Matrisciana, is Halloween: Trick of Treat, is about the demonic nature of Halloween, and challenges parents with a Biblical worldview “to decide whether to allow their children to participate in celebrations which glorify Pagan Occultism” (review here). Yes, Matrisciana really believes in – and is really afraid of – the powers of pagan magic: clowns and people pulling rabbits out of hats or pretending to pull off their own thumbs and putting them back on, are really nothing to joke around with. The Halloween installment was later followed by The Unwrapping of Christmas: Its History, Myths and Traditions, about how Christmas celebrations are really demon worshipping. That is probably an even harder sell, to be honest, but it is undeniably a decent shot at trying to get paranoid and stupid parents to completely ruin their children’s lives.

Other JF productions include
  •        Global Governance The Quiet War Against American Independence, another anti-Clinton movie accusing Clinton of trying to institute a “one world government” to ban Christianity, cars and private property.
  •        Crisis In The Classroom: Hidden Agendas And Grassroots Opposition.
  •        Let My Children Go. Another raging rant against public schools, accusing schools of exposing students to secular science and other viewpoints than Matrisciana’s, since exposing them to such viewpoints will easily lead them away from his (he is probably right about that).
  •        Behind the Green Curtain. An anti-environmentalist film accusing environmentalism of being a communist conspiracy to eliminate private property.
  •        Gay Rights/Special Rights: Inside The Homosexual Agenda. Homosexuals are pedophiles preying on youths, thus posing an immediate THREAT TO YOU...YOUR FAMILY... YOUR COUNTRY! That one was followed by The Report: The Gay Agenda In Public Education and AIDS: What You Haven’t Been Told, which tells you a lot of things you will never be told about AIDS from people minimally concerned with reason, evidence or truth.
  •        Earth’s Two-Minute Warning. Prophetic end-times drivel. Followed by Apocalypse Planet Earth, based on Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, no less.
  •        A Question Of Origins. A creationist flick attacking evolution as a demonic conspiracy.
  •        Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged. With Caryl Matrisciana and Robert S. McGee. Claims that the Harry Potter series is an occult indoctrination system cleverly disguised as fiction.
  •        The Godmakers
  •        The Secret World of Mormonism
  •        Freemasonry: From Darkness to Light
  •        The Evolution Conspiracy
  •        The Death of Vince Foster
  •        Hillary uncensored! Banned by the Media (heavily focusing on spinning a yarn around the Gala Hollywood Farewell Salute to President Clinton), which was not banned by the media (that’s why they put that suggestion in the title instead to confuse potential viewers the right way); it was, however, largely ignoredby the media since it was a silly, stupid and deranged.
  •        Death by Entertainment: How the Media Manipulates the Masses. Hollywood is part of a (global) conspiracy to combat Christ and promote occultism.

Another important title is Baby Parts For Sale, ostensibly an “investigation into the multimillion-dollar-a-year baby parts trafficking industry” and stem cell research, which suggests that women are pressured into having abortions to support a very lucrative, Satanic industry. It is hosted by evangelist Marlin Maddoux of the syndicated radio news talk program Point of View.


Diagnosis: Sort of a docu-film counterpart of Jack Chick. Loud, angry, paranoid and completely, utterly insane. His productions are thematically wide-ranging, though, and some of them seems to have found relatively substantial audiences to exploit for this kind of deranged nonsense.
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#1953: Mike Matthews

January 23, 2018, 12:27 am
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Mike Matthews is a young-earth creationist affiliated with Answers in Genesis (AiG), one of the most delusionally pseudoscientific, fundamentalist conspiracy groups in the US. In particular, Matthews is editor-in-chief of Answers magazine, Ken Ham’s in-house vanity journal and (inadvertent) attempt to make Christianity look as silly as possible. Here, for instance, is Matthews himself proving that God exists and that the Bible should be read literally, as a scientific treatise: Basically, you already know it, so it’s just a matter of removing the moral failings that cloud your judgment: “All people already know God because He is clearly seen in His creation, and His moral law is also written on their hearts. But they [i.e. atheists and evolutionary biologists] ‘suppress’, or hold down, the truth in unrighteousness because their proud hearts are rebellious and they do not want to submit to the truth.” Moreover, any inquiry must start with presuppositions, and it is blithely clear that none are better than the Bible (particularly because the Bible is essentially self-affirming, the Bible is God’s word and asserts that God’s word is the truth; apparently Matthews is impressed). Of course, Matthews misses the point that in science one also testsone’s presuppositions; indeed, he explicitly misses the point, by stating that one’s presuppositions must be an “ultimate standard” that “itself must be ‘self-attesting’ and ‘self-authenticating.’.” This is apparently what happens when idiots try to read Descartes’s Meditations without adult guidance. Here is Matthews arguing that the Bible must be true because it is so old.

One of AiG’s primary pastimes is to try to shoehorn scientific data and terminology into a young-earth framework by disregarding everything that doesn’t fit (which is most things). Matthews has – together with legendary crackpot Andrew Snelling – for instance been working on determining the precise dates of the ice ages by reading the Bible and disregarding the facts, concluding that the ice age occurred during the Pleistocene and that the Pleistocene (and ice age) took place sometime in the middle of the Bronze Age during the time of the tower of Babel, four generations after the Flood. The stone age, then (they accept that archaeologists have uncovered stone tools dating from the Pleistocene – earlier, too, but disregard that), occurred among people scattered after Babel, and lasted some 250 years, the primary independent evidence being that it’s absurd that human beings would use such crude and ugly stone tools for millions of years since humans are way smarter than that. So, as expected, there is no independent evidence (supporting their idea; there’s plenty contradicting it, of course. Some more details of their, uh, ravings are discussed here. For a discussion of what happens if you try to cram the Pleistocene climate record into a 250-year period, this one is good.

Apparently, Matthews has two degrees from Bob Jones University, which is as impressive as buying them yourself by following a link in a spam email.


Diagnosis: Oh, the anyone-who-disagrees-with-me-do-so-only-because-their-eyes-are-occluded-by-sin gambit, almost as annoying as and even dafter than the conspiracy theorist’s shill gambit. Matthews is entirely delusional, completely unreasonable, and part of one of the dumbest fundamentalist organizations in the world. Whether his activities help their efforts or not is a question we’ll leave open.
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#1954: Loy Mauch

January 25, 2018, 1:04 am
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Loy Mauch is a member of the League of the South and former head of a Sons of Confederate Veterans post. He is also a staunch supporter of the Tea Party movement and member of the Arkansas House of Representatives for District 26 (primarily Hot Spring County) from 2010 to 2012, since many Arkansans were apparently attracted to Mauch’s support for neo-Confederate causes. Mauch believes for instance that Abraham Lincoln should not be honored in Arkansas and that the Confederate flag is a symbol of Jesus Christ and a biblical government.

As for the civil war, Mauch has compared Northern generals to Nazis, war criminals and communists, saying that “[t]his country already lionizes Wehrmacht leaders. They go by the names of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, etc. These Marxists not only destroyed the Constitution they were sworn to uphold, but apostatized the word of God. Either these depraved infidels or the Constitution and Scriptures are in error. I’m more persuaded by the word of God.” According to Mauch, “[t]he South has always stood by the Constitution and limited government. When one attacks the Confederate Battle Flag, he is certainly denouncing these principles of government as well as Christianity.”

Indeed, Mauch has even written that slavery couldn’t have been that bad because “[n]owhere in the Holy Bible have I found a word of condemnation for the operation of slavery, Old or New Testament. If slavery was so bad, why didn’t Jesus, Paul or the prophets say something?” Mauch’s view of slavery is, however, relatively common among Arkansas lawmakers.

In 2014, Mauch testified at a hearing at a committee meeting to decide to proceed with a law that would separate the holidays honoring MLK and Robert E. Lee. Mauch stated that Lee had committed no crimes, violated no laws and violated no part of the Constitution, claiming that “the historically uneducated continue to denigrate (Lee) with their false accusations,” where “false accusations” means “failure to buy into Mauch’s revisionist history”. (The myth of Lee as the “good slave owner” is relatively common; of course, Mauch wouldn’t really care too much that it’s a myth since he doesn’t think slavery is that bad anyways).

No fan of the 14th Amendment, Mauch maintains that “[t]he 14th Amendment completely destroyed the Founders’ concept of limited government and was coerced on this nation by radical people and in my opinion was never legally ratified as required by Article V of the Constitution. It was essentially a Karl Marx concept and would have never come from the pen of Madison or any of the patriots from Virginia.” Since everything Mauch doesn’t like is communist. Madison, of course, explicitly wanted to apply the Bill of Rights to the states when those amendments were passed.


Diagnosis: Saying something so patently idiotic should make you ineligible for being left home alone, but in Arkansas you get to be elected to the legislature instead. Baffling. Mauch is out again now, but still.
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#1955: Anthony R. Mawson

January 26, 2018, 2:33 am
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Some pseudoscientists have actual education and backgrounds in research, lending them a sheen of credibility in their pseudoscientific research endeavors. A striking thing about pseudoscientists’ attempts to do research, however, is how they systematically and deliberately avoid taking simple measures to validate their findings – they deliberately select biased samples, avoid blinding, neglect asking whether something works in favor of just looking at how it works (and consequently end up churning out garbage through strategies like p-hacking). It really is striking, insofar as it would often have been relatively easy to do it right– it’s almost as if they tacitly know that doing it rightsignificantly lowers the chance of obtaining the results they want.

The research of Anthony R. Mawson is a striking example. Now, Mawson has a real education. He is also an anti-vaxxer and a fan of Andrew Wakefield who really, really want to deploy his skills in the service of anti-vaccine propaganda. Mawson is most famous for his “research” putatively showing differences in general health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated kids, and that the unvaccinated ones are healthier (of course, even if it were true, which it isn’t, it would have been largely because those unvaccinated kids would not have died due to vaccine-preventable diseases because of herd immunity; Mawson’s fans are not able to comprehend this otherwise obvious point, however). To establish the results he wanted, Mawson conducted an internet survey among home-schooling parents, where the opportunity to participate was spread by word of mouth in anti-vaccine groups, and where the largely anti-vaccine parents would report their opinion and assessment of the general health of their children without consulting medical records. It doesn’t take much knowledge of scientific methodology to realize that such a survey is less than worthless (some further details here), and the really striking thing is: whywould Mawson, for a study that apparently required substantial funding (seemingly from various anti-vaccine fundraising efforts) deliberately choose a sample like this, one that any elementary school kid would be able to tell you would make the results worthless, and – in addition – deliberately avoid taking into account measures (like medical records) that would provide any kind of control? How would you explain his choice of methodology if not by i) trying to make sure the data would end up “showing” what he wanted them to show and fearing that using a proper methodology apt to track reality would not yield the results he wanted; and/or ii) it matters less to pseudoscientists and denialists that the study is properly done and reflects reality, than that it exists and can be brought up in online debates and used to scare those who don’t know enough about the methodology (or don’t have time to look at it) to realize that it is complete shit? More details about why it is shit, in case you ever wondered, are here.

As an aside, one has to wonder about the competence of the people at the Institutional Review Board at Jackson State University who approved said study. And it’s not like the anti-vaccine crowd hasn’t tried to obtain the results they want by (deliberately) incompetently done phone surveysand Internet surveys before.

Well, the fruit of Mawson’s efforts, “Vaccination and Health Outcomes: A Survey of 6- to 12-year-old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children based on Mothers’ Reports,” was provisionally accepted by the bottom-feeding journal Frontiers in Public Health (which had previously published – before retracting – a study on chemtrails). Frontierswent on to pull itand eventually formally retract it, something that didn’t prevent antivaxxers from touting it. The peer-reviewers included Linda Mullin Elkins, a chiropractor at Life University – a “Holistic Health University” offering studies “within the fields of Chiropractic, FunctionalKinesiology, Vitalistic Nutrition, Positive Psychology, Functional Neurology and Positive Business” – which suggests thatFrontier uses a too-literal interpretation of “peer-review” for their reviews of garbage pseudoscience.

The study was then, without even attempting to correct for the glaring methodological shortcomings, published in Journal of Translational Science, a predatory pseudojournal published by Open Access Text, as “Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year old U.S. children”. Details (including further details about the utter worthlessness and painfully obvious biases of the study) here. They even published a second study, as bankrupt as the first, using the same data set, in the same predatory journal; that one, too, was eaten up and promoted with gusto by antivaccine conspiracy groups and antivaccine advocates like Bob Sears – InfoWars was all over it, for instance, with delusional comments by one Celeste McGovern, described as  a “vaccine expert”, of Claire Dwoskin’s Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute, one of the antivaccine groups that funded Mawson’s “study”.

In 2011, Mawson filed a lawsuit against the Mississippi State Department of Health, alleging that the state health officer interfered with his position at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (his contract wsa not renewed) after promoting antivaccine talking points. The suit was dismissed in 2012.


Diagnosis: Pseudoscientist and conspiracy theorist. Yes, Mawson has a real education, but what he dabbles in is not science. Dangerous.
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#1956: Jordan Maxwell

January 28, 2018, 12:42 am
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A.k.a. Russell Pine (real name)

Jordan Maxwell is a grand old man of American conspiracy theory, crackpottery and nonsense. His work is largely responsible for the nonsense peddled in the incoherent, made-for-the-Internet “documentary” Zeitgeist, and he has apparently been an important influence on David Icke: Maxwell has long claimed that the world is secretly run by lizards from another dimension. He was also, for a while, editor of the Truth Seeker Magazine, has produced “documentaries” for CBS, and – of course – hosted his own radio show. Maxwell considers himself the world’s leading expert in the occult, based on his powers of imagination and inability to comprehend the significance of aligning one’s belief with reality. He is accordingly notable for having pushed more or less any conspiracy theory or branch of pseudoscientific nonsense you could think of, from ancient aliens and the claim that there is a star-gate in Iraq that teleports people to a military base on Mars, to 9/11 conspiracies.

A main strain of Maxwell’s, uh, thought is astro-theology, an astrological reinterpretation of theology according to which religious doctrines are based on astronomical events. He is also notable for pushing the (rather popular) idea that Christianity is really a variant of the cult of Horus, a conclusion reached by focusing on some similarities and disregarding the vast number of dissimilarities. Maxwell is known to rant for hours about these issues, backed up with a couple of Bible quotes and perceived connections between various events and his presuppositions. Maxwell, however, has little actual knowledge of ancient cultures and belief systems, which is an advantage since it means that there will be fewer facts available to him that would constrain his interpretations.

Much of his work is (in the grand tradition of the insane rantings unfettered by reality or accountability starting with Isidore of Seville) based on drawing ridiculous conclusions about the world based on often imagined etymological connections and similarities in names and expressions. Of course, Maxwell arguably knows even less, if possible, about linguistics than about history, and the technique he applies is the one commonly known as paleo-babble. Some examples of Maxwell’s paleobabble are discussed here. One example: According to Maxwell, “[m]agic wands were always made out of the wood of a Holly tree. It’s made out of Holly wood. Hollywood is a Druidic establishment and the symbols, the words, the terms, the stories, are designed. Think about it. Think about how Hollywood does what they do. I’m not saying they’re evil, I’m just explaining how Hollywood works.” Calling for readers to think for themselves is an effective trick given the critical reasoning abilities required to listen to Maxwell in the first place. Of course, druidic cultures using magic sticks didn’t in fact make these sticks of holly. Bah. Details.

From his website you can currently purchase a set of 28 DVDs containing “the entire works of Jordan Maxwell” for the neat price of $ 570.

Of course, like so many conspiracy theorists of his ilk, Maxwell is himself the target of numerous deranged conspiracy theories (an example), and is often accused of being a tool for the New World Order.


Diagnosis: Utterly ridiculous, of course, yet Maxwell’s influence on contemporary conspiracy theories is significant – he’s been through them all, using techniques and assertions unconstrained by truth, evidence or rules for rational inference.
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#1957: Jacquelyn McCandless

January 30, 2018, 12:19 am
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We will, after some consideration, skip Danielle & Andy Mayoras. Yes, their take on the Sarah Hershberger case, discussed here is misinformed and stupid – and reflects a rather common mindset that makes people think they can legitimately have their opinions count in fields where they have no expertise and said opinions nevertheless conflict with those of experts. Yet, we are willing to overlook lone-standing lapses of judgment and haven’t really found any other example of the Mayorases weighing in on woo.

Jacquelyn McCandless’s forays into nonsense are more thorough. McCandless is an anti-vaxxer. In particular, McCandless believes that heavy metals and vaccines, especially the MMR, are the trigger(s) of autism. They demonstrably aren’t. McCandless, however, does not only believe that they are, but that oral chelation will reverse autism, which it won’t. McCandless has nothing remotely resembling evidence that it will, but she – surely coincidentally – is, in fact, a practitioner of chelation therapy. Her beliefs about these issues have been published on the quack website Medical Voices.

McCandless is, in fact, an MD, though being a medical practitioner and having a professional degree is of course no guarantee that you understand how science and evidence work. She has also written a book, Children with Starving Brains: A Medical Treatment Guide for Autism Spectrum Disorder(contributors: Jack Zimmermann and Teresa Binstock) that we strongly recommend you to avoid. Apparently the book offers “a message of hope in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of autism, ADD and ADHD,” which the author suggests is triggered by “pesticides and heavy metals in vaccines”. There is no such epidemic. The rest of the book is basically one big, baseless toxins gambit aimed at the chemically illiterate.


Diagnosis: Pseudoscientist and conspiracy theorist. Yes, she is an MD, but anyone with a real medical condition would apparently do well to keep their distance. Dangerous.
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#1958: Eugene M. McCarthy

February 2, 2018, 12:52 am
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Eugene M. McCarthy (no known relation) is a pseudo-evolutionary crackpot biologist famous for his completely ridiculous crackpot idea that “humans evolved after a female chimpanzee mated with a pig” (known as the MFAP hypothesis). Now, McCarthy does have relevant credentials, which he knows to exploit in debates – indeed, McCarthy has made serious academic contributions on hybridization (though other academic commentators have noted even here his tendency to endorse any speculative and unsupported claim that looks like it’ll fit his hypothesis) –  and his idiocy has therefore predictably attracted occasional attention from various less-than-serious news media outlets over the last decade. Scientific journals and establishments have been less impressed with his work, which is partially why the media likes to portray him as a victim. You’ll find a short and to-the-point critique of his ideas here.

McCarthy’s “Stabilization theory” is laid out in the manuscript The Hybrid Hypothesis: A new theory of human originssubmitted to the OUP but not accepted after peer-review(it is currently published on his website). In the manuscript, McCarthy rejects the Modern Synthesis, and specifically that natural selection is a primary driver of evolution, as well as the fact that microevolution is responsible for macroevolution. Instead, he plumps for a kind of saltationism that occasionally veers close to creationist baraminology (indeed, McCarthy’s creationist leanings are notable: “To me, organisms have a far greater value when they are seen as ancient and unchanging, existing today much a they did when they came into being long ago, in the remoteness of time. They become something more than mere pawns, forever changing at the behest of a tyrannical environment.” Also “Hitler was Darwin’s biggest fan,” which is as false as McCarthy’s claims about biology, but a telling reminder of his care for facts and accuracy.) In particular, McCarthy argues that hybridization between species is the primary driver of evolution. So, McCarthy claims that armadillos may have descended from ankylosaurs (because they look similar to him: “the modern giant armadillo is so similar to the ancient ankylosaurs that it is only reasonable to suppose it is descended from them”), bats are descendants of pterosaurs, whales of mosasaurs (citing – only – an 18thcentury anatomist), and seals from plesiosaurs. Indeed, dinosaurs weren’t giant reptiles at all, but huge mammals. Everything is, of course, completely contrary to evidence, but McCarthy has a shiny new theory-of-everything and has little time for evidence.

There’s a good criticism of his theory and how it contradicts everything we know about biology, palaentology, anatomy, genetics as well as obvious empirical evidence here. A rejoinder to McCarthy’s feeble response to the criticism is here, and a good rejoinder to McCarthy’s feeble response to to the rejoinder here. Another informative critique can be found here.

McCarthy is most infamous for his ideas about the evolution of humans, though: “We believe that humans are related to chimpanzees because humans share so many traits with chimpanzees,” he points out, so “[i]s it not rational then also, if pigs have all the traits that distinguish humans from other primates, to suppose that humans are also related to pigs?” Well, no, not really. However, after positing and promptly endorsing the extraordinary hypothesis, McCarthy admits that he has no genetic evidence, since “it can be very difficult to identify later-generation backcross hybrids derived from several repeated generations of backcrossing (and this would be especially true of any remote descendants of backcross hybrids produced in ancient times, which is what I'm proposing humans may actually be).” Since he is unable to use the genome to support his hypothesis, he instead points to morphological similarities to make his case, but disregards the fundamental morphological differences that conclusively falsify his idea, as well as the alternative explanations for the similarities that do exist. He has managed to impress both InfoWars and YourNewsWire, however. And the creationists at AiG have predictably responded by completely missing the point and applying their trademark complete lack of scientific insight or understanding.

More recently, McCarthy has expanded on his hypothesis and claimed that humans have hybridized with chickens, dogs, apes, goats, cows, and turtles. His “evidence” is based on mythological accounts (satyrs are evidence of goat-human hybrids, for instance), and imaginative interpretations of stories of women who had grossly deformed stillborn babies with peculiarly warped features.

Diagnosis: Another fine example of pure pseudoscience: Formulate a hypothesis that superficially fits certain pieces of data you’d like to fit together, ignore the vast amount of contradicting evidence, never test it, and maintain it with dogmatic rigor no matter what falsifying evidence might come your way. One might be inclined to believe that McCarthy is also completely harmless, but his work – given the media exposure – has been actively used to try to undermine the legitimacy of real science, so whatever influence he has is certainly not benign.


Hat-tip: Rationalwiki.
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#1959: Matt McClellan

February 4, 2018, 12:42 am
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Matt McClellan is the founder of Christian Worldview Press. Apparently, McClellan is also the proud holder of an M.A. in Theology from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, and an uncompromising young-earth creationist. His bio even lists two articles on creationist pseudohistory published in Answers in Genesis’s house journal Answers: For vol. 4 he penned “Ancient Egyptian Chronology and the Book of Genesis”, and for vol. 5 “Abraham and the Chronology of Ancient Mesopotamia.” McClellan does not appear to have any scientific expertise or education remotely related to the topics, but we suspect the LBTS doesn’t offer courses in critical thinking, so McClellan may not be aware of the need for such expertise.

As for the Ancient Egypt article (discussed here), it is a fine display of both confirmation bias and cherry-picking, the goal of which is to compress the durations of Egyptian dynasties to make them fit McClellan’s reading of the Bible (the goal is not accurate values, but shaving off years without rejecting too many facts and too much of the carefully selected evidence McClellan has a desire to retain.) The Mesopotamia article is discussed here. It doesn’t really even try to deal with such things as evidence. Indeed, neither article really does much except for exemplifying the low standards of the journal.


Diagnosis: Small fish, presumably, but idiotic nonetheless. By himself McClellan is probably harmless, but he is part of a movement that is not, and as such he deserves exposure.
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#1960: Tom McClusky

February 6, 2018, 2:46 am
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The Family Research Council is a rightwing fundamentalist advocacy group justly classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center – and despite its name, none of the activities they are engaged in qualifies as “research” by any stretch of the imagination. Tom McClusky is its vice-president, and a fine example of the kind of hatred, bigotry and imperviousness to reason, evidence and decency that characterizes the organization as a whole. McClusky claims, for instance, that marriage equality may lead to society’s collapse (“Societies that try to do away with marriage, they crumble, they fall apart,” claims McClusky, deliberately pretending not to realize that fighting for the right of gays to marry is, you know, the opposite of trying to do away with marriage), laments the fact that the issue is virtually a dead one even among most conservative politicians, and has warned said politicians of their imprudence given the vast opposition to marriage equality among Americans – polls consistently showing majority support for marriage equality are “skewed”, according to McClusky, since that’s what he chooses to believe. Supporting the family, to McClusky, does not mean supporting families, but rather making life hard for families not organized according to McClusky’s blueprint for how families should be organized. He has also called for “civil disobedience” against marriage equality, though it is not entirely clear what that implies – that he will refrain from marrying a man?

And make no mistake: Tom McClusky is the victim here. Anti-bullying policies in public schools, for instance, are really “bullying by the federal government and by a homosexual agenda that seeks to make children hide their Christianity and their religion in the closet and to silence those who would speak out against what they don’t believe.” That’s right: Support marriage equality, and you’re bullying Tom McClusky. To remedy the situation and combat bullying, McClusky has been active in efforts to purge gays from positions of power in the Republican Party. Apparently, Uganda’s famously draconian anti-gay bill is a good anti-bullying measure, too.

Like many anti-gay activists McClusky succeeded in tying himself into some interesting rhetorical knots after Obama invoked the Golden Rule to endorse marriage equality (Patrick Wooden, for instance, complained that Obama was “quoting Scripture to debunk Scripture”). McClusky explained that using the Golden Rule is a reason to support the freedom to marry for gays and lesbians, is just like using the Golden Rule to condone suicide (you shouldn’t support the right of same-sex couples to wed just as you shouldn’t help a depressed neighbor commit suicide, claimed McClusky). That parallel doesn’t really work, Tom.

McClusky’s activities aren’t limited to anti-gay efforts, however. He is also a champion of defunding Planned Parenthood, has been involved in efforts to stop the creation of a National Women’s History Museum, and is a vocal opponent of the Violence Against Women Act.


Diagnosis: Stop bullying McClusky by disagreeing with him, supporting decency and criticizing violence against women, will you? McClusky is an evil person, and accordingly a victim of people who criticizes him for trying to act out his evil way.
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#1961: Cher McCoy

February 8, 2018, 12:59 am
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Cher McCoy is a Viriginia Tea Party member, member of the Virginia Federation of Republican Women, and a conspiracy theorist. As so many Tea Party members, McCoy thinks environmentalism is a UN-led agenda (in particular Agenda 21, the mandate and purpose and limits of which she doesn’t seem to fully grasp) to control the lives of good Americans and institute a New World Order. Obama is (was) one of their pawns. Tea Party activists like McCoy have accordingly rallied against any local or state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy, including expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space, claiming that such measures would be government measures controlled by the UN to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

“They get you hooked, and then Agenda 21 takes over. Your rights are stripped one by one,” said McCoy at a Board of Supervisors meeting in Roanoke in 2012, and identified smart meters as a particularly nefarious part of the conspiracy: “The real job of smart meters is to spy on you and control you – when you can and cannot use electrical appliances,” said McCoy. The proper response would apparently be to strip the government of its powers to regulate companies’ rights to do business as they like.

Diagnosis: Perhaps we could suggest a tinfoil hat, just to make sure the smart meters don’t read your brainwaves, too, Cher? The scary thing is how manythey are, the people who think – to the extent they think – like McCoy. Even the White House’s got one (or a few) of them.


Hat-tip: the Denialism Blog.
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#1962: Mark McCutcheon

February 9, 2018, 12:25 am
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The Final Theory is a work of complete crackpot physics by one Mark McCutcheon, promoting an expansion theory according to which the reason gravity is so indistinguishable from an acceleration is because it is acceleration, caused by matter expanding at an ever accelerating rate (the theory thus obviates the need for a gravitational force). The idiocy, and brilliant display of lack of even the most rudimentary physics, is laughed at here, though several commenters seem unsure whether or not it is meant as a crazy joke. We are not going to try to unravel the nonsense here, but some main points are discussed here.

Of course, scientists haven’t endorsed McCutcheon’s mad rantings. The explanation for that is that scientists are stupid and don’t know anything and will therefore go to great lengths to defend dogma. Apparently, among the things scientists don’t know is why putting things on tables doesn't break them. McCutcheon’s premise for concluding that scientists don’t know, is that he doesn’t.

What’s interesting, though, is the promotional material. The back cover of the book, for instance, features quotes from scientists like Steven Weinberg listed so as to make it look like the scientists were endorsing the book, when in fact the quotes are not referring to the book at all. On amazon, the book has mostly five-star reviews by mostly new users without significant review histories using curiously similar phrasings and writing styles, since negative reviews tend to be mysteriously deleted – though even McCutcheon cannot prevent the “people who liked this also liked” section from showing books by David Icke. Wikipedia, too, seems to have had some trouble with McCutcheon fans.

Diagnosis: Probably harmless, but that he has fans is a damning testament to the curious habit of conspiracy theorist (who “think for themselves” and have no time for expertise and background knowledge) to accept any ridiculous nonsense about topics they don’t understand, and then defend the position as aggressively as possible and by any possible means.


Hat-tip: Adamus.
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#1963: Bob McDonnell

February 11, 2018, 1:17 am
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Robert Francis McDonnell was the Governor of Virginia from 2010 to 2014. He is also a former Virginia house member and Attorney General. Currently, McDonnell is a “distinguished full professor” at Liberty University, the local fundamentalist pseudo-educational institution. His qualifications, apart from general religious right nuttery, include an MA/JD from the even less reputable Regent University (then Christian Broadcasting Network University), and his thesis there sparked some controversy when it was released to the public in 2009, though it didn’t prevent him from getting elected governor. McDonnell has later appeared in (utterly insane) promotional videos for Regent “University”’s school of law, offering a fake quote (“It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible”) he attributes to George Washington and claims never to have forgotten during his years as a politician. That’s pretty much how Bob McDonnell rolls.

In his Regent “University” thesis, The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of The Decade, McDonnell was largely concerned with increases in divorce rates and the number of children born in sin out of wedlock, the public policies he claimed contributed to those increases, and a set of proposed “solutions” that would later to a large extent function as his political platform (without remotely addressing the alleged problems they were supposed to address): opposition to abortion, support for school vouchers and covenant marriage, and tax policies favoring heterosexual families. According to McDonnell, government policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.” He also described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family and criticized the 1965 Supreme Court decision that legalized the use of contraceptives, writing that “man’s basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter.” After the thesis was released, McDonnell’s responded by refraining from endorsing its contents, but he didn’t renounce them either. He continued to be firmly opposed same-sex marriage, advocating a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

In 2010, McDonnell also issued a proclamation designating April 2010 “Confederate History Month”, a proclamation notable for failing to mention slavery. When confronted with that omission, McDonnell responded by saying that “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

At a more personal level, McDonnell is heavily into woo, and he and his wife have received some criticism for improper spending at the Executive Mansion on items like energy drinks and “detox cleanses”. The corruption charges he faced in 2014 (later dismissed) also concerned large sums of money he received from one Jonnie Williams Sr., former CEO of Star Scientific, a company developing questionable “supplements”. (His old protégé Pat Robertson offered up some particularly insane defense strategies during the trial)


Diagnosis: Oh, he’s far from the worst loon to be elected to public office. But good grief: McDonnell is nevertheless a serious loon.
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#1964: Stephen McDowell & Mark Beliles

February 13, 2018, 12:46 am
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You may not have heard of them, but Stephen McDowell and Mark Beliles are two of the scariest people alive in the US today, and – at least arguably – vastly more influential than you’d ever expect unless you had intimate knowledge of the inner circles of those powerful, wealthy, tireless and frighteningly big American Dominionist groups that make the Taliban look like defenders of reason, freedom and tolerance – this, despite the fact that McDowell and Beliles so abjectly delusional that we wouldn’t trust them to add the numbers two and four together without injuring themselves.

McDowell and Beliles are, for instance, the authors of the (apparently) popular homeschooling textbook America’s Providential History, which outlines the Seven Mountains strategy, combines the legalistic fire-and-brimstone Biblical framework of the Reconstructionists with the zeal of the New Apostolic Reformation, and provides a list of “Christ Guidelines for Resistance to Tyranny” with the explicit warning that there “may come a time when we must resist lawful tyranny.” Basically, the book espouses the thoroughly paranoid, conspiracy-theory-fuelled anti-government sentiment familiar from today’s extreme wingnuttery, but fueled by religious, Satanic Panic-style fervor.

A recurring theme of the book (described in more detail here and here) is that the whole notion of scarcity of resources is a communist myth, and that any shortage is due simply to people not having sufficient faith: “A secular society will lack faith in God's providence and consequently men will find fewer natural resources ... The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality […] In contrast, the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth.  The resource are waiting to be tapped." This is clearly borne out by the data, which demonstrates that the poverty of a region is inversely correlated with its inhabitants levels of faith; history is for instance clear about what happens to your crops when you neglect to make the proper sacrifices –just look at the Aztecs; they got the point. And “[w]hile many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large, with plenty of resources to accommodate all the people He knew would come into existence. […] All the five billion people on the earth could live in the state of Texas in single family homes with front and back yards and be fed by production in the rest of the United States. Present world agriculture areas, if developed by present technology, could feed 31 billion people.” And if you wonder on what data their conclusion is based, it just shows your lack of faith. The thing is, of course, that the data the rest of us are currently using are collected by secular, and therefore don’t correct for the inherent laziness of secularists: “Those with a secular world-view will lack a God-inspired strength and work ethic.” In fact, it’s not only a matter of effort: “In a Christian economy people will earn more with less work,” which means, for instance, that crime will disappear and people will start to respect the Ten Commandments. And the most important measure to take to reach this situation, is to abolish Government in favor of Christian control of the economy.

Their chapter on the Civil War and Reconstruction also gives a useful illustration of some contemporary wingnuts’ view of the Confederacy (more on that here). In fact, it is primarily concerned with the religious revival they think they can find among the Conferedate Army (“While the Confederate Army was enjoying revival (up to 150,000 Southern troops were saved during the war), it also enjoyed phenomenal success in almost every major battle”) and detailing the admirable religious faith of the Confederacy’s heroic generals. The Reconstruction era, meanwhile, is described as an unholy attack on Christianity: “After the war an ungodly radical Republican element gained control of the Congress. They wanted to centralize power and shape the nation according to their philosophy. […] They used their post-war control of Congress to reconstruct the South, pass the Fourteenth Amendment, and in many ways accomplish their goals.” Then McDowell and Beliles go on to criticize the evil of the 14th, 16th, and 17th Amendments and suggest that separation of church and state was a consequence of the more godly South being defeated. As for slavery, McDowell does elsewhere (on the Wallbuilders website, in fact) describes slavery as “America’s original sin,” but then states that “In light of the Scriptures we cannot say that slavery, in a broad and general sense, is sin.” Jesus means you can have it both ways.

Along the way, they also repeat plenty of religious fundamentalist myths about American history, such as the Aitken Bible myth.

Their chapter “The American Apostasy and Decline” claims that the decline of America is due to the abdication of authority by Christians to the “conspiracies of men,” which includes “the humanists, the ACLU, the big bankers, the Trilateral Commission, the New Age Movement, the World Council of Churches, the Homosexuals, the Feminists, the Communists, the Democrats, the Pope, etc.”

McDowell and Beliles are also the founders of the Providence Foundation, an organization seeking to “disciple the seven areas of culture.” The foundation’s “National Transformation Network” also offers courses by Paul Jehle and David Barton. McDowell and Beliles themselves have conducted training in dominion-style politics since the 1980s, including courses on “biblical economics”, which is basically Ayn Rand-style economic theory founded on judiciously selected quotes from the Old Testament. Much of their activities have taken place abroad, and they have accordingly also written an international textbook, Liberating the Nations. It’s pretty scary stuff.

Many of their strategies and ideas were apparently developed during their association with the militant fundamentalist group Maranatha Campus Ministries in the 1980s.

McDowell also appeared in the “documentary” “One Generation Away: The Erosion of Religious Liberty”, one the religious right’s many propaganda pieces promoting their persecution myth, and which was lauded by Rick Santorum and the Heritage Foundation.

Diagnosis: Deranged madmen, utterly and completely out of touch with anything resembling reality or accuracy, and as evil as they are delusional. But they’ve also enjoyed more than their share of influence. Dangerous.


Hat-tip: Talk2Action.
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#1965: Joel McDurmon

February 15, 2018, 12:24 am
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More theocrats. Joel McDurmon is the current Director of Research for Gary DeMar’s Reconstructionist, dominionist organization American Vision (more here), taking over the steering wheel after DeMar stepped down in 2015.

Now, even McDurmon is a bit alarmed by the increasing influence of the even more extreme New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Of course, the difference between NAR and his own group is primarily one of strategy, not goals (and don’t be fooled: both groups present genuine danger). As McDurmon puts it, although Reconstructionists like himself aim to “properly recriminalize sodomy, adultery, and abortion,” they seek to implement such policies through evangelism, not by seizing control – the Seven Mountains advocates of the NAR, by contrast, seek to seize control in order to institute a theocracy.

And make no mistake: McDurmon is a theocrat. McDurmon wishes, for instance, to criminalize blasphemy, and in a strikingly broad manner that would include any utterance or behavior that are not pleasing in the eyes of McDurmon. “Unless men first revere God and honor an ultimate allegiance to the divine origin of mankind, and protect these beliefs by legal consequence, they shall denigrate everything glorious that man can be, and then protect their perversions and obscenity by recourse to legal force (as we have begun to see now),” says McDurmon; in other words, he God should have such legal protections to stem the tide of those who disagree with him on e.g. gay rights secular atheism, the proponents of which wish to ban Christianity. After all, criticizing and calling out bigotry is the same as banning Christianity, so either Christianity must be banned, or its critics must be. To understand McDurmon, it is helpful to remember that distinctions are not his strong suit: his version of Christianity should not be banned; therefore it must be made legally mandatory for everyone.

Of course, a ban on blasphemy is part and parcel of dominionism, and American Vision subscribes to the central tenets of dominionism, such as the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, exclusion of non-Christians from voting and citizenship, and application of Biblical law, including – as mentioned –  a ban on homosexual acts, adultery, witchcraft, propagation of idolatry and blasphemy. McDurmon himself has said that “God revealed that the homosexual act is a civil crime, and it just so happens that He revealed that the homosexual act as a civil crime deserves the death penalty.” He has also said that a proposal in Uganda to impose the death penalty for homosexuality didn’t go far enough because it should also impose “Old Testament law” and make adultery a capital crime as well. He later backpedaled and emphasized that he doesn’t officially demand that the state should necessarily require the death penalty for homosexuality in general, but merely for “the ‘act’ of sodomy.” For claiming that the state doesn’t necessarily have to impose the death penalty on such offenses, McDurmon has in turn been criticized by other theocrats, such as J.D. Hall, who have argued that abandoning Mosaic penologies such as the death penalty means that McDurmon and others who hold similar positions cannot be said to hold to Christian dominionism (or theonomy) in any meaningful way. So it goes.

American Vision, however, is an influential group, and several important political candidates (including presidential candidates) have lent them their ears, for instance at their Freedom 2015 National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa, which was put on by Kevin Swanson. Apart from conferences (such as their annual “Worldview Conference”), the group publishes books “primarily for use in Christian schools and for home schoolers” (obviously), newsletters and podcast, and is deeply involved in the creation “science” movement.

Apparently Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt is a fan of McDurmon’s attempts to rewrite the history of the US.


Diagnosis: Deranged madman, and as evil as he is delusional – just like the pair in the previous entry. It’s a widespread condition, and we should be seriously worried.
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#1966: Pat McElraft

February 17, 2018, 12:14 am
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Pat McElraft is the Republican representative for the 13th district in the North Carolina House of Representatives, having served since 2006, and currently one of the Deputy Majority Whips. McElraft is a climate change denialist, and largely responsible for the 2012 law banning the state from basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise due to climate change, a move that drew international attention and scorn.

McElraft herself called the law a “breather”, allowing the state to “step back” and continue studying sea-level rise for the next several years without doing anything, so that they can achieve more accurate prediction models. (We hope we don’t need to point out the problem with that kind of reasoning.) In her defense, and in a characteristically Orwellian fashion, McElraft, although admitting that “the environmental side say we’re ignoring science,” pointed out that “the bill actually asks for more science.” As McElraft saw things: “We’re not ignoring science, we’re asking for the best science possible, the best extrapolation possible, looking at the historical data also. We just need to make sure that we’re getting the proper answers.” Or, put differently, we’ll continue to ask for new and “improved” scientific results until we find someone who tells us what we want to hear.

“In 1974, the alarmists were talking about the ice age coming in,” said McElraft: “What has happened, has the ice age come in?” Scientists did not say in 1974 that the ice age was coming, but the myth that they did is admittedly popular on pseudoscience and conspiracy theory websites.

In elections, McElraft has occasionally been challenged by sensible people who realize how deranged and delusional she is, but McElraft has won with safe margins every time. This is because the majority of people of Carteret and Jones Counties are stupid and/or have short-term stakes in seaside properties, the value of which would decline if sea-levels rose. “You can believe whatever you want about global warming,” said McElraft, “but when you go to make planning policies here for our residents and protecting their property values and insurance rates, it’s a very serious thing to us on the coast.” Climate change should therefore not be the basis for such policies.


Diagnosis: Utter madness. Complete, undiluted insanity.
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#1967: Alex McFarland

February 18, 2018, 2:09 am
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As Director of the Christian Worldview Center at North Greenville University (not a university), organizer of the Truth for a New Generation Conferences, and co-host of the radio program “Exploring the Word” (on American Family Radio), Alex McFarland has managed to make something of a name for himself as one of the most delusional, most deranged fanatical extremist on the fringes of the religious right. He has also written numerous books and served as Director of Teen Apologetics for the extremist hate group and cult Focus on the Family, and yes: his primary target seems to be younger and more impressionable people, some of whom are surely receptive to his death-cult-like hate and extremism. He is also president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte.

When explaining his own Project 2026 for instance, he described it, an initiative to save America from annihilation at the hands of “the four groups that are actively working to secularize and destroy America: humanists; atheists; militant homosexuals; and Muslims.” Boo to humanism. And that coalition – they’re allied, you know – has allies in “apostate” churches and people “that are enlisted for Satan” that are pushing for the destruction of America. 

McFarland on dissent
In general, McFarland’s go-to argument is that if you disagree with him on anything you are really trying to ruin America, and his friend God might beat you up, too, so you better not. Also, it may be treason.

In 2015, for instance, McFarland reacted with horror to students and libruls protesting Bobby Jindal’s prayer rally, calling it “borderline treasonous” (they’re disagreeing with something McFarland agrees with after all – and even voicing the disagreement – and if they’d just read the Constitution McFarland’s read they’d have realized that disagreeing with McFarland just might violate that constitution); the protests also exemplified an “intense spiritually oppressive environment;” clearly “Father of Lies, Satan” was the one really behind it all. McFarland also invoked the Founding Fathers, since The Founding Fathers would never have sown discord by protesting anything. Obama’s Syrian refugee policy was treasonous, too, as was Obama’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast. On the other hand, in 2016, McFarland claimed that God intervened in the election to save the Constitution and get Trump elected, which doesn’t sound like it would be something the fake Constitution most of us are familiar with would allow.

By contrast, those who voted for Obama in 2012 “need to get on their knees and ask for God’s forgiveness.” Interestingly, McFarland himself was apparently no fan of Romney, however, mostly because of Romney’s Mormonism. Here is McFarland explaining how Mormons are not Christian, and that Mormonism is actually more like Islam, because McFarland doesn’t fancy either. (According to McFarland, next to the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, Islam is the worst thing to ever happen to humanity.)

Obama, too. According to McFarland, President Obama refused to fight radical Islam because he is secretly a Muslim. After all, there were no bombings or drone attacks or military interventions in Afghanistan or the Middle East during Obama’s presidency.

Here is McFarland on the fact that some people actually say out loud that they don’t believe in God (it’s “both disrespectful and intolerant of those with deeply held beliefs”). After all, people like McFarland would never proclaim his faith out loud, try to convince anyone to conform to his beliefs (except when arguing that failing to place Bibles in hotel rooms is harmful because it potentially deprives guests of “an avenue to truth that could rescue that individual from a very dark place and help save a life”) or accuse those who disagree with him of being in league with Satan.

McFarland on gay people and women
Well, but of course. When Obama came out in support of marriage equality in 2012, McFarland reacted the way you’d expect from someone hateful, dumb and delusional, saying  that Obama’s support for marriage equality has put America under “the judgment of God” and “will contribute to the damnation of so many souls,” especially “impressionable young people” and “his own daughters.” Then he went on to doubt Obama’s Christian faith.

Apparently Satan is using gay and transgender identity to “debase and devalue and harm the ones made in God’s image.” So, to those who think that homophobia and bullying of gay and transgender people is a problem, McFarland would answer by pointing out that it is “psychologically destructive” homosexuality that causes problems for LGBT people, not bullying. You see, gays are really just victims of “emotional pain and sometimes molestation”. Then he claimed that Christians were the ones actually facing persecution in America.

Also in line with his general principles for reasoning, McFarland concluded that God didn’t prevent the 2015 San Bernardino shootings because of abortion and gay marriage. Indeed, gay rights (and the Obama presidency) is God’s punishment on America for the sins of liberals. Apparently Obama, gay people and liberals were also to blame for a Malaysian jet being shot down over Ukraine in July 2014, just because Jesus, God.

Gender equality is an abomination too. In 2017, when a Chicago megachurch named a woman co-pastor, McFarland was shocked: “Women do much, much, much great ministry, and men and women are definitely in the eyes of God equal in worth, and value, and personhood, and dignity, but I see making a woman the senior pastor of a church as really a capitulation to acquiescing to the spirit of egalitarianism – the secular mindset that there must be no differences between males and females.”

He was not impressed when President Obama in 2016 invited a lesbian pastor to read scripture at the White House’s Easter Prayer Breakfast. Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition, meanwhile, was downright demonic.

McFarland on evolution
Teaching evolution in schools was, according to McFarland, a cause of the Fort Hood shootings, since whenever you wish to explain something like this you point to something you already disagree with, ignore the facts, and assert that whatever you don’t like was the cause.

The theory of evolution is, according to McFarland, also the cause of racism. After all, there was no racism before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. “The Bible teaches that there is only one race, the human race, and that all people are made in the image of God,” McFarland pointed out, so racist views must come from elsewhere. According to McFarland, the Founding Fathers also knew that all men are created equal and blamed “150 years of Darwinian evolution” for supposedly undermining that core American principle. “Evolution, for about 75 years, has had a stranglehold on American education,” McFarland declared), “and so the number one reason for racism is belief in evolution,” since schools have become more racist since the 1950s when they started teaching that all humans are related through relatively recent common ancestors, and slavery was either i) mostly justified not by reference to the Curse of Ham in the Bible, by the theory of evolution, before that theory was discovered; or ii) wasn’t racist at all: maybe people of different races just have different roles, just like people of different genders?


Diagnosis: Ridiculous madman, whose arguments usually consist (exclusively) of labeling those who disagree with him with the worst labels he can think of – “treason”, “Satan”, “the Founding Fathers would disagree” – regardless of whether there is any relation between the meaning of the label and the person or phenomenon labeled (indeed, it’s interesting to see the extent to which religious right talking points consist only of this trick – as opposed to us calling them out as “loons” by showing how and why they are loons). McFarland does apparently have some influence on the religious right, however. Dangerous.
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#1968: Shadrack McGill

February 19, 2018, 11:59 pm
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Shadrack McGill is a former Alabama state senator (until 2014) most famous for his 2012 argument against raising teachers’s pay: raising teachers’ pay too much, according to McGill, would “attract people who aren’t called to teach. To go in and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. […] And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ’em.” Apparently, not raising teachers’ pay “is a Biblical principle”. Of course, McGill had, at that point, just voted for a bill that almost doubled his own pay. When called to defend that choice, he failed miserably.

McGill is also opposed to the separation of church and state, pointing out that “we were established to be a godly nation, a Christian nation. We need God in government. We need God in the public school.” Otherwise, his political positions were mostly what you’d expect.


Diagnosis: (Former) state senator in Alabama.
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#1969: Daniel McGivern

February 23, 2018, 1:03 am
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Expeditions to find Noah’s Ark are a dime a dozen, and they tend to end with delusional religious fanatics proudly proclaiming that they have found it, since if you’re delusional enough to engage on a project like this to begin with (other than for the laughs), you are usually not the kind of person who has the faintest trace of a clue about how to assess any evidence you may come across. Ron Wyatt found it; Bob Cornuke found it in 2006; a Chinese team found it in 2010 (though that was probably a hoax rather than a matter of delusion); and in 2011 a team of “scientists” led by Daniel McGivern discovered two large sections of Noah’s ark resting just below the surface atop Mount Ararat in Turkey – it was Pat Roberston’s Christian Broadcasting Network that used the term “scientists”, by the way. Apparently the team used military satellite imagery and ground penetrating radar technology to locate the ruins, which they promptly believed were wooden. “The evidence is overwhelming,” McGivern added. “This is the large piece from Noah’s ark.” Methinks McGivern has a poor grasp of the meaning of the word “overwhelming”. Other people who saw the satellite images maintained that the structure in question looked suspiciously like rocks.

The discovery would apparently have been “the greatest event since the resurrection of Christ,” though McGivern curiously seemed to have had no plans to actually excavate it. He did plan an expedition, however, led by a local guy who have apparently been involved in Noah’s Ark hoaxes before, but apparently that expedition came to nought. Even the WND appears to have been skeptical.

Diagnosis: Ok, so we’re not entirely sure McGivern is actually a loon. But anyone who listens to him certainly is, and apparently some people did.


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#1970: Charles H. McGowen

February 25, 2018, 12:10 am
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A brief glance at the signatories to the Discovery Institute’s silly petition “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” yields preciously few actual scientists – and even fewer people with actual expertise in any relevant area – but plenty of people like Charles H. McGowen. McGowen is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, but we have found no actual research to his name. Instead, McGowen is the author of creationist books like In Six Days (1976), described as a “treatise on the creation/evolution controversy”, and its sequel In Six Days: A Case For Intelligent Design (2002), which is marketed as (yet another) “great teaching tool”; i.e. it is a book intended to hoodwink audiences, in particular children, with no background knowledge in the field. McGowen himself seems to have done no actual research on evolution or design, but then the Intelligent Design movement was never about science or research anyways, but about public relations.

McGowen apparently Rejects theistic evolution in part because it “requires a refutation of the absolute, inspired, inerrant truth of God’s Word,” which shows that his dissent from “Darwinism” is at least not a scientific dissent. McGowen is also Contributing Editor for the Reformation & Revival Journal.


Diagnosis: At least there seems to be little remotely scientific about McGowen’s forays into biology or his dissent from science. Just another fundie loon, in other words. There are plenty of those. At least he serves as a good example of the kind of people who signed the Discovery Institute’s petition.
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