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#2251: Theodore Shoebat

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We suppose some readers may take a morbid interest in checking in on Theodore Shoebat on a regular basis with the question “who does Theodore Shoebat want to murder today?” (There is a list of people Shoebat wants murdered here.) Theodore Shoebat is the deranged spawn of fake ex-terrorist Walid Shoebat, and even more unhinged than his father. A self-proclaimed “Christian Militant”, Shoebat jr. regularly engages in incoherent screeds fuming with impotent, murderous bloodthirst, which are so over the top that even many other American Taliban figures want little or nothing to do with him. Shoebat is also a self-proclaimed proud fascist” and fan of Franco.

Non-Christians and religious freedom
Shoebat is explicitly opposed to freedom of religion: only “idiots” and “morons” support the freedom of religion, according to Shoebat. He has therefore called for establishing blasphemy laws, for atheist and other non-Christian books, including the Qur’an, to be burned, for blasphemers to be “burned at the stake” and for atheists to be subjected to an inquisition and then put to death (the aim of the inquisition thus being somewhat unclear). Laying out his theocratic vision for America, Shoebat explains that “[o]nce someone begins to teach and to exhibit the signs of a diabolical belief system or an explicitly anti-Christian sentiment, then that person is most definitely determined to be a threat to the body. Once that person is determined to be a threat, then he has to be coerced to either stop what he is doing, reject it, or once he has become so obstinate about it, then the last resort is death.” Expressing non-Christian viewpoints cannot be tolerated, according to Shoebat, “because as soon as you allow attacks on Christianity [non-Christian viewpoints = attacks on Christianity, of course] to be enabled and to thrive, then the Christian spirit begins to decay, it begins to decline and all sorts of moral evils take place like public acts of sodomy, public acts of desecration and degenerate behavior and murder. It just spirals and it goes on and on and pretty soon you have cannibalism, pretty soon you have bestiality and pedophilia.” Part of the problem is of course how fanatic non-believers are: “when you see how fanatic they are, how much they hate Christianity, how much they hate God, how much they hate the church, you really can’t tolerate people like that and those people need the death penalty.” No, we still remain pretty convinced that this is not a poe.

He is, however, especially opposed to Muslims. Of course, he agrees with the most deranged radical Islamists on most issues, in particular the treatment of homosexuals (he has called on God to bless Chechnya for killing gay people, for instance), but sees no problems harmonizing his hatred of Islam and his hatred of homosexual people: according to Shoebat, Islam in general, and ISIS in particular, are “homosexual cults”. He has therefore suggested that Muslims should be hunted down and killed just like we did to the Native Americans – yes, Shoebat also thinks that was the right thing to do with Native Americans: “Any Indian that expressed any sort of anti-American sentiment, [Andrew Jackson] killed them. He had no tolerance for evil and wicked people. He got rid of them and he purged the society of these pagan heathens and he did an American Inquisition and that’s what we need now … Homosexuality? Death penalty. Blasphemy? Should be punished. Pagans coming in to your land? Kill the pagans, defeat them, convert the to Christianity.” Apparently, Andrew Jackson was the epitome of American Values, as Shoebat sees it. MLK, meanwhile, was a “modernist antichrist and Christ-denier.

Still, Shoebat did praise ISIS for the Paris terror attacks, or, as he put it, for murdering “Satanists” in Paris. In his article “France Is a Godless Nation that Deserves to Be Attacked”, Shoebat argued that France has a long history of killing Christians and therefore needed to be punished, and that those who died while attending an Eagles of Death Metal concert were “worshippers of the devil” and got what they deserved. Similarly, he praised the Manchester terrorist attacks, declaring that he had no sympathy for the victims because they are all “sodomite-lovers” and “sluts.”

Shoebat has also called for the invasion of India, forced conversion of its “natives” to Christianity (“You need to Christianize the land. We need to destroy these false religions, end of story. Hinduism is an evil, demonic, anti-Christ religion. It needs to be uprooted from the earth and it has no place in the world”), and for SWAT teams to shut down yoga studios in the US: “I think the U.S. government needs to crack down on this evil, demonic thing called yoga … You’re teaching yoga, have the SWAT team bust open the doors to that place and just arrest everybody.” Oh, and “Judaism is Satanic as well, of course.

He mostly takes a dim view of other Christians, too. When he learned that the Christian chain Chick-fil-a distanced themselves from anti-gay marriage statements made by the chain’s owner and sponsored an LGBTQ film festival, he declared that all employees of Chick-fil-a should be “burned at the stake. Of course, such people are not, really Christians: As Shoebat sees it, Christians who don’t think every LGBTQ person should be killed are not Christian and should themselves also be executed. When radical anti-gay extremist Peter LaBarbera admitted that genocide might not be in line with mainstream Christian ideals, Shoebat called him a “filthy pig” and “demonoid”. Yes, even LaBarbera. The traitors are everywhere. Glenn Beck, for instance, is a practitioner of “Chrislam trying to lure his audience into Islamo-Mormonic deistic universalism, with the help of guys like James Robison, Franklin Graham, and David Barton. Michael Brown, on the other hand, is in a Satanic conspiracy with “sodomites” and “La Raza terrorists,” and anti-Islam activist Robert Spencer is “now supporting the Islamic jihad. Indeed, any version of Christianity except Catholicism is Satanic; after all, “Martin Luther gave birth to Nazi ideology, and Nazism is going to return again with Luther as its prophet. Catholic Christendom will rise again and destroy the demonic religion of Luther,” declares Shoebat.

Shoebat has also, in a moment of astounding lack of self-insight even for him, attacked Ayaan Hirsi Ali for suggesting that Christian Fundies can be just as bad as Muslim ones. 

Homosexuals
A fierce critic of homosexuality, homosexuals and gay rights, Shoebat regularly expresses his opposition to what he calls “gay sharia” and “homo tyranny”. As Shoebat sees it, “[t]he homosexual movement is the most hateful and most vile group in all of the Western world. The sodomites are supremacists; they believe that they have the superior lifestyle, a disposition and constitution more superior than the ‘others,’ who they consider as inferior breeders. This is the ideology of sodomism. Sodomism is the ideology of homosexual superiority, in which the homosexuals desire to usher in – through propaganda, violence and state coercion – a utopia in which homosexuality is seen as a supreme ideal, and those who believe in the conjugal union as is affirmed and established by the Christian Faith, are viewed and treated as enemies.” Ultimately, according to Shoebat, the gays will slaughter all the Christians in concentration camps. Yeah, we have freed us from the chains that anchor us to reality a long time ago.

To deal with the gay question, Shoebat suggests not only burning the rainbow flag but adopting thoroughly medieval views on homosexuality, and he has (repeatedly) declared his support for an “inquisitionwith the goal of exterminating gay people. And it is urgent: gay people must be executed before they succeed in their effort “transform the Scouts into a Nazi-like gay youth club” that will be used to attack Christianity. And make no mistake (Shoebat will not hesitate to remind us): “there is only one solution to the homosexual agenda, and that is death”, since gays “are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such”. So the best solution is to “bring back the inquisition. He did, however, receive some pushback from other anti-gay activists over his claim that Jesus would personally kill gay people, which led him to declare that there was an “inquisition” targeting him in order to make him renounce his views (thereby confirming our suspicion that he doesn’t quite understand what “inquisition” means). His father fortunately came to his defense, pointing out that Jesus destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, hence illustrating that according to the Bible, Jesus would, indeed, personally beat homosexuals to death if given the chance.

He has also complained that homosexuals have sent him death threats, promptly declaring that “all” homosexuals therefore want to kill all Christians. As an example, when the Duck Dynasty series landed in some controversy in 2013 over some comments by Phil Robertson, Shoebat concluded that “[t]he Sodomite nazis are going after Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty , simply because he pointed out a truth to the darkness of the sick, violent, and twisted mindset of homosexuals […] Now they they are suspending him. What the homosexuals want to do to Christians in America is what Muslims are already doing to Christians: slaughter and enslave them. This is why we must fight this evil, and help save persecuted Christians in the Muslim world. Donate now and save Christian lives.” (Note the coda.) “The only thing vile in this situation is what sodomites contrive and partake in, they indulge themselves in acts so diabolical, in things worthy of death (Romans 1:32), and yet we are so careful to make sure that they are tolerated. The sodomite just quoted spoke of ‘loving and committed gay and lesbian couples.’ Really? Let me show you how sinister these morally inept and demonic followers of Satan are …” (and then he cites exactly one example of an abusive gay couple.) Yes, according to Shoebat “the homosexual agenda” is “about conquest, and the persecution of Christians”: “If they succeed, we will live under an outright Homosexual inquisition, and if they really had their way, they would build a homosexual empire.” In conclusion, gay men hold a demonic hatred toward women, and homosexuality and cross-dressing should therefore be outlawed: “Outlaw the sodomite before he outlaws you,” says Shoebat: “You either make the sodomites submit to Christian morality, to the law of God, to the law of Heaven or they will force you to submit. There is no other choice;” and just to be clear: by “submit” he means “be put to death”, because homosexuals, like atheists and “fanatical feminists” and Muslims, “war against the Faith, promote death and hate life”: “a noble government will arise and give these perverts the only thing they need: the sword!

Shoebat did, however, criticize the 2016 Orlando massacre. He criticized it because it should have been “The State”, not Omar Mateen, who “killed the sodomites”, by firing squad. Then he declared that the real victims of the attack were people like him who are being unfairly painted as radicals simply because they openly advocate putting gay people to death.

He is also a supporter of vigilantes in other countries who attack LGBT people, and wants the same to happen in the US, saying that “I wish America had this stuff”  – physically assaulting gay activists is, as he sees it theologically justified – though he also wishes the police would be “given the opportunity to kill more gay people, of course. Killing homosexuals should certainly not be considered a hate crime; after all, “fags kill each other all the time, and the reason why they kill each other all the time is because they’re demon-possessed people and Satan wants them to kill each other because Satan hates humanity.”

Apparently, part of the problem with homosexuality, according to Shoebat, is its link to cannibalism, apparently because of Jeffrey Dahmer. His explanation for drawing the connection is worth highlighting, since it is probably even more deranged than you imagined! You see, the problem with America is that it is too individualistic, only punishing criminals for the crimes they have committed instead of imposing collective punishments in an effort to root out the beliefs or behaviors that led to the crime in the first place. Hence, the correct response to the crimes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would have been to not only punish him for his transgressions, but then also outlaw homosexuality because “it leads to serial killers, it leads to cannibalism, it leads to murder” and is a danger to the collective Christian society. And make no mistake, gay people really want to be murderers and cannibals and the only thing keeping them from doing that is that it’s against the law, as Shoebat sees it. Given Shoebat’s own predilection for murder and torture, combined with his stupidity, it is not hard to see where he is coming from. He did cite what he took to be evidence for a connection between homosexuality and Dahmer, though: a series of papers released by the American Psychological Association that suggest that “rates of military sexual trauma among men who served in the military may be as much as 15 times higher than has been previously reported,” from which he concluded that gay soldiers are committing tens of thousands of sexual assaults every year and that “[c]annibalism and homosexuality and rape are all interconnected.” Critics may point out some holes in the reasoning, but then they wouldn’t be true Christians.

In his criticisms of Southern Decadence, an annual rave for gay people in New Orleans, Shoebat was determined merely to follow the evidence wherever it would take him. Where it took him was that he wanted all the participants killed, of course. They should be killed because they regularly kidnap young boys and rape and kill them during the event. A weakness of Shoebat’s argument is of course that the evidence he relies on is taken from nowhere but his own deranged excuse for a mind. 

Shoebat also wanted the publishers of National Geographic tortured and “burned at the stake” (“this is the problem that I have with the First Amendment … In the Catholic Church, the whole damn crew behind National Geographic would be tried and once they are found guilty, they would be burned at the stake”) because they featured a nine-year-old transgender girl on their cover. Shoebat called the girl “Little Nazi Hitler”: “The kid is obviously evil, obviously a reprobate, obviously just diabolical. You’re a freak. You’re a little demon. You’re a little Nazi Hitler … This little freak would not mind sticking people like me in a gas chamber,” proclaimed Shoebat. “This is sick shit.” There is clearly some sick shit here, yes. 

In general, Shoebat thinks that transgender children are “utterly wicked” and that “parents who encourage this behavior should be arrested and executed.” He wants the children executed, too.

On women
Shoebat believes that women should be banned from voting and holding office. I don’t believe in women in politics,” Shoebat has declared: “I don’t believe in women voting. I don’t believe in the suffragist movement, I don’t believe in women in politics. If they’re so righteous, let them stay at home and teach their children that righteousness.” Indeed, the failure of mothers to raise their children to be proper Christians, he warned, is leading to everything from “losers drinking out of beer bongs and smoking pot” to restaurants serving “steaks made out of human flesh;” yeah, that stream-of-consciousness rant took a somewhat surprising turn, even by Theodore Shoebat’s standards. Meanwhile, feminists who do things he doesn’t like should be “burned at the stake”, of course.

When Trump suggested that women who undergo abortions should be punished, Shoebat agreed, and called women who undergo abortions “sluts”. Then he called for their execution by firing squad.

Miscellaneous politics
Shoebat is a sometime Trump supporter, criticizing what he takes to be aSatanic conspiracy” against the president, mostly because he hopes that Trump will kill Muslims, but also because he hopes Trump will soon enact legislation to have gays and abortionists executed. However, after Trump waved a Rainbow Flag at one of his rallies, Shoebat withdrew his endorsement and called for Trump’s execution instead.

As mentioned above, Shoebat expresses deep admiration for (his image of) medieval Christianity, including the genocide of Cathars, Waldensians and heretical Christian sects on account of their “false beliefs”. He has also criticized evangelical Christian leaders for condemning the genocide. As Shoebat sees it, we ought to return to the Middle Ages, when they had no “fag problem. Indeed, Shoebat has called for a a return to absolute monarchy, pointing out that he doesn’t believe in democracy: “Democracy. More like Demon crazy. The first attempt at democracy was in the Heaven, when Satan and the demons wanted to reform the government and oust out the King, God. God believes in monarchy, Satan believes in democracy. Hence democracy is demon crazy.” At least it looks like an argument. He has also called for a new “crusade”, claiming that “God wants one”.

Shoebat believes that one of the most serious problems facing us today is witchcraft, and he want “practitioners” of witchcraft to be put to death (but of course). And since Hillary Clinton, according to Shoebat, has been using black magic to gain popularity, she should be put to death. In fact, Clinton is also a devil worshipper – Shoebat literally cites his own imagination as evidence for the claim – and a lesbian who “would love to see the death of all Christians. I kid you not. Do not think for a second that that woman, if she had the chance, would [hesitate to] put people like me in concentration camps, would put Christians in concentration camps and kill Christians,” so “What do you think she deserves? This type of woman, this evil, wicked woman, what do you think she deserves? She deserves the death penalty. End of story.”

No fan of Obama, Shoebat has pointed out that “[i]n the most national prayer breakfast, Obama diverted the subject from ISIS and began to express his hatred against the Christian Crusades. The reason for this is because Obama hates Christians and Christianity, and is himself a Muslim jihadist. He continues to support Islam while hating Christianity, and heavily funds and supports the jihadists in Syria. His own family are Muslims and work with terrorists.” 

Sensing some opposition from other rightwingers to some of his proposals, Shoebat has also declared that “both Stephen Bannon and Ann Coulter are absolutely evil, they are enemies of Christendom and are filled with the spirit of Antichrist;” Coulter, in particular, is a “fascistic bitch” who should be put to death for associating with “fags.” The same, apparently, goes for Pam Geller and Tomi Lahren, who is a “little Nazi’ worthy of being put to death for being pro-choice, as well as Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes, and not the least Marco Rubio: Shoebat ostensibly longs for the days when Marco Rubio would be hung from the gallows. It is important to weed out the less-than-ideologically-pure in this crucial battle against the totalitarianism of the gay rights movement.

Shoebat has some views on Brexit, too: “Britain Just Left The EU, And This Will Eventually Lead To A Revived Nazi Germany That Will Go To War With Christendom,” Shoebat declared after the 2016 referendum in a completely random stream of consciousness. We haven’t bothered to determine whether he thinks the fulfillment of his prediction is a good thing or not.

To pull all the strands together, Shoebat has released 858-page book titled Christianity is at War: The Manifesto for Christian Militancy. We recommend maintaining a safe distance to anyone who has actually read it.

There is a decent Theodore Shoebat resource here.

Diagnosis: Possibly the most deranged, hateful and bloodthirsty person with regular access to media in the Western world and possibly anywhere, Shoebat seems determined to demonstrate that there is, indeed, a position to be carved out on the extreme side of ISIS. An utterly repugnant character, of course, but it’s hard to look away.

#2252: David Shormann

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David Shormann is a Texas-based young-earth creationist, president of the “Dive into Math” program, and homeschooling activist with a PhD in marine chemistry. Though a biblical literalist who “believe a biblical framework provides us with the most rational interpretation of the past,” Shormann is according to himself also “a natural history researcher”, and claims that science confirms a literal reading of Genesis. Shormann claims to like science. He doesn’t have the faintest clue what science is or how it works, of course. He doesn’t really like science. According to Shormann, “[t]reating Earth history as just that, history, I can find physical and written testimony that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. And just as most of us have no problem believing Jesus Christ was a real person who lived 2,000 years ago, we should have no problem believing there were about 4,000 years from the Beginning to Christ’s birth. Studying natural history can be an interesting, fun, and adventure-filled pursuit, but it is not real science, and shouldn’t be treated like it is.” Just like history isn’t a science (Shormann explicitly claims that history isn’t science, a standard, utterly delusional talking point pushed by Answers in Genesis; it’s easier for them to assert this as an assumption, since they can then go post-modern relativist and claim that their own preferred creationist narrative is just a “different interpretation”. The idea of testing hypotheses about the past through their predictions about current observables, entirely parallell to how one tests, say, laws of nature, has evidently not crossed his mind – empirical evidence: how the *** does it work?

Shormann’s name was brought to some attention in 2011, when he – despite because of his dislike of science and public schools – was appointed by Barbara Cargill to the science review panel that should evaluate instructional materials submitted for approval by the Texas Board of Education for use in Texas public schools. In that role, Shormann was given ample opportunity to display his belligerent incompetence. His view of biology textbooks is worth quoting at some length: “Also, in the 21st century, high school and college biology textbooks are becoming bloated monsters. Something has to go to make room for teaching 21st Century advances in biology, including epigenetics and bioinformatics. Many chapters have way too many pages devoted to speculative historical claims about origins, dogmatically asserting only one interpretation (evolutionism). A pro-science person would want to reduce or remove the history to make room for 21st Century science. An anti-science person would reject the 21st Century science in favor of page after page about origins. Ask the atheist which they would choose to include in an already oversized biology textbook, new science or history? If they would rather keep the history, then they are anti-science, which contradicts their claims of being pro-science.” 

As for Shormann’s argument that humans and dinosaurs coexisted? “The fossil record shows many things lived at the same time as extinct dinosaurs, including extant (meaning still alive) starfish and coelacanths. Apparently, the so-called freethoughts activists say we’re lying about the human-dino coexistence thing because we have yet to uncover a fossil of a human riding a dinosaur while holding a coelacanth that ate a starfish. Unless this fossil grouping is found, then atheists will claim the Bible is a book of lies and Christians who believe it are liars. Therefore, since freethoughts activists apparently never lie, and possess a perfect understanding of history, we can trust them over God’s word! And if we don’t buy into their belief that freethoughts activists are the source of historical truth instead of God, they will make laws to suppress our skepticism. Of course, I’m joking here, but are the atheists? Unfortunately, I don’t think so.” The fact that there are no species of Mesozoic starfish or coelacanths still extant is not the biggest problem with Shormann’s “reasoning” here. Note also the conflation between scientific biology and atheist activism, a recurring feature of Shormann’s, uh, thought. In 2013, he protested an event held at the Houston Museum of Natural History called “Answers In Science: What On Earth Do We Know?” that criticized creationism. That they criticized creationism means, Shormann declared, that the museum is engaging in bigotry: “Not only are they attacking Christianity, they are attacking one man in particular, Ken Ham. It is un-American to support such religious intolerance and false claims that Christians are ‘anti-science’.” The word “criticism” apparently doesn’t exist in Shormann’s vocabulary.

The screaming bald eagle cover and title of Shormann’s book The Exchange of Truth: Liberating the World from the Lie of Evolution nicely sums up his brand of jingoistic science denial.

Shormann is also a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s silly petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism – without having any expertise on evolution, of course; there is a correlation here.

Diagnosis: Flaming creationist and belligerent anti-scientist – not that he would be able to distinguish science from stream-of-consciousness rant if his life depended on it. But althoughhe is  a crazy fanatic, he is also Texas-based, and being a lunatic denialist is no obstacle to achieving the power to influence science and educational policy in Texas, quite the reverse, it seems. 

#2253: Sherry Shriner

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Oh, heavens. 

The rabbit hole is a fascinating place, but the webs of lunacy are often woven according to logics so foreign to any rational mind, that unravelling the ideas going into them is tricky. For instance, the National Economic Security and Recovery Act (NESARA) was a set of proposed economic reforms suggested during the 1990s by one Harvey Francis Barnard, who printed 1000 copies of his proposal titled “Draining the Swamp: Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reform” (note that first part) and sent copies to members of Congress, believing it would pass quickly on its merits. It didn’t. Instead the ideas, unbeknownst to Barnard, took on life as a cult-like conspiracy theory promoted by Shaini Candace Goodwin, a.k.a. “Dove of Oneness”, a former student of The Ramtha School Of Enlightenment and “cybercult queen”, who claimed, contrary to all fact and reason, that the act was actually passed with additional provisions as the National Economic Security and Reformation Act, and then suppressed by the Bush administration and the Supreme Court, who orchestrated e.g. the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War as distractions from NESARA. Goodwin has managed to recruit a number of drone-like followers, including real, physical groups of people at least in Utah and the Netherlands, who pass out fliers and organize weirdly incomprehensible public protests. Sheldan Nidle is one of the followers, and has added his own mix of UFOs and prophecies into the conspiracy. Another active promoter of NESARA is one Jennifer Lee has, who has produced reports on how various otherworldly and “interdimensional” beings are helping behind the scenes to get NESARA announced.

But these loons are not the topic for the present entry. And Sherry Shriner, who is, is not a NESARA cultist. Shriner, who apparently thinks of herself as an Internet evangelist (“Servant, Prophet, Ambassador, Daughter, and Messenger of the Most High God”), does indeed take NESARA seriously, but instead of joining the cult she sees NESARA as a conspiracy run by malevolent reptiloid aliens she feels have been controlling the U.S. Government for a long time. I suppose it is best to just quote a section from one of her many websites, nesarasucks (hyperlinks in the quote are removed and replaced by ours): “BEWARE Of The Deceiver Maitreya & Sananda Esu Immanuel!! See Maitreya’s involvement with the H1N1 Vaccine and RFID Bracelets ... Mass Chip Implantation and Murder See the Bible Codes at [hyperlinks removed]. He’s an evil, wicked, liar who wants to destroy mankind. Wake up People!!! The Lies of the 5th Dimension & The Coming Lies of Maitreya – Who is now being replaced by Sananda! Why? Because Maitreya was destroyed by our Orgone! Sananda has been stood up to replace him! NESARA is the economic and political program of the Antichrist. Known as the National Economic Security And Reformation Act it is better described as a 
National Evil Snake, Annunaki (and) Reptilian Association or simply,Neo-logical Excrement Spread Artfully Round America.” And so on. “Once these Reptiles and Lizards are in control they will ratify parts 2&3 of NESARA that nullify part 1 and begin their own agenda of cannibalism and murdering the inhabitants of America,” proclaims Shriner. Readers may imagine the color schemes and font variations in the original for themselves. 

Shriner, though, promotes lots of other stuff, too, including prophecies about crashing starships and upcoming locust invasions, angels, Planet X, FEMA concentration camps, the “New Age Alien Agenda”, Jesus – not the fake Jesus promoted by the church, but the real one – and “her ancient grandfather King David” (there are apparently zombies, too, involved in the conspiracy). There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of stuff on Zionism as well (“The Talmud and the New World Order”). Apparently, her side is winning, though: “Governments in Terror over Twin Sun’s Arrival – The Twin Sun has arrived into our atmosphere and the aliens and evil beings are in TERROR! They’re all in a panic folks because it signals their coming demise!!” You haven’t noticed that “The Second Sun – The Second Sun is Here”? Well, that is because “[t]hey are trying to hide it with volcanic ashes and extreme clouding.”

Of course, we cannot do the range and depth of Shriner’s ideas any justice here. But it isn’t all innocuous, silly nonsense. Shriner actually drew some media attention to herself in 2017, when a former follower of hers, Barbara Rogers, shot and killed her boyfriend after Shriner warned said boyfriend that Rogers was a “Vampire Witch Reptilian Super Soldier” who would do him harm. A recurring feature of Shriner’s teachings is that the evil forces that manifest in or take over humans can only be discovered through minute details in their appearances and interests, so her followers should be wary and careful around friends, colleagues and family members (we suspect that becoming a follower of Shriner will quickly limit the number of people in the first two categories). In the case of Rogers, it was apparently a picture of Rogers enjoying beef tartare that set off Shriner’s alarm clocks. The subsequent murder of course only confirmed Shriner’s suggestions: “When the demon manifested in her, if it was the demon or a lizard, if she had both, a human's no match for that kind of supernatural strength,” said Shriner, and she wondered whether Rogers was “triggered” to kill her boyfriend after watching a movie in the Resident Evil series with him; Shriner said that the movie is based on a female “super soldier,” whom she knows. Resident Evil is not based on someone Shriner knows.

Shriner’s website offers extensive information on Orgone blasters that will ostensibly kill zombies and evil beings, and keep away aliens and demons. We are sure that there will be few zombies and demons around after you deploy an orgone blaster. Shriner has raised more than $125,000 in a GoFundMe campaign to deploy the blasters.

Diagnosis: At least she is pushing at the limits of hysterical gibberish, but it is only harmless nonsense until someone gets hurt. She should have received the help she needs a long time ago.

#2254: Alyssa Shull

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Alyssa Shull is a graduate of Oral Roberts University, and the founder of The Pink Lid, a conference for teen girls “about self-worth, identity, value, and purity.” We hope, for the sake of self-worth, identity and value, that the conference fails to have an impact among its intended audience (we care less about purity, and so should you). Shull has also written for the Religious Right magazine Charisma, being none too pleased with Beyoncé’s 2013 performance at the Super Bowl and pinning the blame on Satan: “Beyoncé has this beautiful gift, that the enemy (Satan) has twisted to use for his kingdom” and that her performance is further evidence that ‘we need to be aware of the devil’s ploys so we can resist them!’,” claims Shull. She also suggested that a woman is responsible for not “displaying her body to people” in a manner that “causes men to stumble”; evidently radical Islamists are way ahead of the US on questions regarding moral responsibility. For good measure, she also buys into the Illuminati sign nonsense: Beyoncé “danced in a way that should only take place between a husband and wife (well minus the Illuminati signs and the worship ‘I want to feel your energy’ part).” But then, Oral Roberts University doesn’t exactly teach people critical thinking or how to navigate the world in a manner sensitive to truth, reason and evidence.

Diagnosis: Just don’t listen to her nonsense, and you’ll be fine. Unfortunately, too many people do seem to listen to her.

#2255: Matthew Silverstone

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His book. B.M. Hegde
is a legendary promoter
of quantum woo whose
career seems mostly
devoted to claiming that
Ayurvedic medicine is
superior to science-based
medicine. It is perhaps
 indicative of something
that they managed to
spell his name wrong
on the book cover.
Matthew Silverstone is a self-styled “serial entrepreneur” and possible poe. Silverstone has apparently, through spending “two years researching amongst other things the property of water”, made “discoveries that prove very simply how acupuncture works.” And it “is nothing whatsoever to do with chemistry but it is all to do with the unique properties of water and vibrations.” Right. Vibrations. And properties of water that have nothing to do with chemistry (one is forgiven for suspecting that Silverstone doesn’t really know what chemistry is). 

And how come Silverstone made such an amazing discovery that had thus far eluded science? “Western science ignores things that it does not understand, and energy flow is one of those subjects.” Scientific progress is hardly characterized by ignoring things science doesn’t yet understand, but according to Silverstone “If you ask most scientists with a western trained background they will look at you blankly when talking about energy flow.” Well, scientists tend to understand thermodynamics, but Silverstone's ideas are of course not about energy but about shimmering, magical spirit-stuff, like the Force. Admittedly, we have no doubts that Silverstone is able to confront scientists in ways that leave them baffled. Despite his contempt for science, though, “I have managed to provide overwhelming evidence that acupuncture works on simple scientific principles; namely vibrations and the unique properties of water. It is through water that the energy is transferred throughout the body.” Wanna bet on whether his scientific explanation and “overwhelming evidence” involve more than vague handwaving?

Silverstone is, however, more famous for his book Blinded by Science, which advocates tree hugging. Which is fine. We are sympathetic to tree hugging. But not for the reasons Silverstone thinks tree hugging is a commendable practice. According to Silverstone, he has scientifically validated that hugging trees is good for you, and his research shows that you don’t even have to touch a tree to get better, you just need to be within its vicinity to obtain a beneficial effect. Of course, Silverstone does not have the faintest idea what “scientifically” could possibly mean – nor “validated” or “research” – but apparently his conclusion is based on public health reports concluding that children function better in green environments and that “access to nature can significantly contribute to our mental capital and wellbeing”. Silverstone doesn’t go for “access to nature” as the causally efficacious feature here. No, Silverstone’s project is “proving scientifically” that it is … the vibrational properties of trees and plants that give us the health benefits: “everything vibrates in a subtle manner, and different vibrations affect biological behaviours,” claims Silverstone. The exact mechanisms are left as nebulous as the evidence he purports to have, of course, but you need to have a pretty closed mind and be pretty Big Science brainwashed to think that exactitude, detail, evidence or accuracy has anything to do with anything. The whole thing is really pretty much a variant of some branch of Taoism, just peppered with random assertions that things are “scientifically proven”.

Diagnosis: Mostly spam. Dressed in the garb of New Age pseudoscience. But still spam.

#2256: Frank Simon

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The American Family Association is a group of bigoted, unhinged fundamentalists. The national leaders are crazy enough, but the wild-eyed Talibanists you find in their various state chapters might occasionally be even crazier. Frank Simon is the director of the Kentucky chapter, and he believes that the 1962 Supreme Court decision prohibiting government-led prayer in schools led to “the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture” (as well as teen pregnancy and violent crime). Accordingly, legalizing government-led school prayer is “one of the best ways of returning God’s protection to America,” Simon thought, and promptly started a petition to change the Constitution.

No fan of gay people, Simon has a long history of anti-equality activism that borders on the, shall we say, unhinged, in particular through his group Freedom’s Heritage Forum, which in practice is just a de facto lobbying wing for his church. He has for instance promoted, in addition to pseudoresearch by Paul Cameron, Scott Lively’s The Pink Swastika, a piece of Holocaust revisionism that claims not only that gays weren’t systematically murdered by the Nazis, but were rather the architects of the Holocaust. And as Simon sees it, the evil continues: “There are hundreds of children in America who are dying of AIDS because they were sexually abused by homosexuals,” Simon said back in the early 2000s, based on data he found in the place where he usually finds data for his claims. There really are not, and it should be unnecessary to point that out. 

In his anti-gay campaigns, Simon is locally famous for using any means possible to win, and has a long history for instance of paying for anti-equality ads where he tries to link homosexuality to pedophilia. In 2004 he mailed what was more or less gay porn (graphic descriptions of sexual acts) to 65,000 households as part of his attempt to prevent renewal of the Kentucky Fairness Ordinance. The move seems to have backfired somewhat.

Diagnosis: Raging maniac. But Simon is resourceful and desperate enough to use any tricks at his disposal, and has been doing so for decades. So yes, he’s had an impact. It is less clear whether he is overall helping his cause or not.

#2257: James Simpson

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Accuracy in Media is a wingnut “media watchdog” run by Don Irvine. It was founded with the expressed purpose of combatting “liberal media bias” but actually – and predictably – ended up combatting accuracy instead, in favor of promoting wingnut conspiracy theories. It’s a perfect fit for wild-eyed conspiracy theorists like Jim Simpson, who for instance opposed the Obama administration’s comprehensive immigration reform plan because he believed it to be part of a Marxist push to destroy America and potentially make President Obama a dictator. He also accused the “illegal immigration lobby” of using the tactics of Nazis and Communists in promoting “ideas that are self-evidently destructive,” and asserted that there would be no room for compromise because reform proponents are Marxists and Marxists will only be “emboldened” by attempts to compromise: “When dealing with Marxists, the ‘moderates’ compromise away our rights, our livelihoods and our country to people and agendas that are inherently destructive to our society,” said Simpson and warned that immigration reform would mean the end of America, for instance because immigrants want to “destroy the culture” and ultimately “create a huge pool of voters” that they can use to institute “despotic governments.” “Accuracy” is not an apt term to describe any part of Simpson’s rant.

Immigrants destroying America – as part of some liberal plot to “dilute” America with not nice people – is of course a recurring theme in Simpson’s, uh, thinking. For instance, Mexican immigrants are often “child rapists” who are coming to the US because they will ostensibly get off easier in the justice system. Another common topic is of course voter fraud, something that Simpson is very concerned about, based on little evidence beyond what his paranoid imagination can dream up: In a 2014 rant, for instance, Simpson argued that  voter fraud is a massive, “existential threat to our American Republic,” but the only “proof” of voter fraud happening he managed to list was college students voting in the state where they attend school, which is legal (not counting his references to Kris Kobach’s infamously dishonest and silly voter roll “crosscheck” system, which was carefully designed to yield false positives that weren’t controlled for). Of course, in Simpson’s mind, campaigns to replace the electoral college with a national popular vote and efforts to restore felons’ right to vote also count as conscious efforts to increase voter fraud. So there is that. “Democrats’ attitude toward voter fraud is the voting version of reparations for slavery,” complained Simpson.

Simpson thinks boycotts of companies by people he disagrees with are “economic terrorism”; it’s different when his side engages in boycotts, of course, since his side only engages in boycotts when they “are attacked first”.

Diagnosis: Yes, he is a fairly typical specimen, but that doesn’t make the delusional, paranoid garbage that passes for thought in Simpson’s head any less garbage. And people do listen to him, it seems.

#2258: Stephen Sinatra

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Though he is, indeed, a cardiologist, Stephen T. Sinatra is better known as one of the most prominent and comprehensively lunatic woo-meisters, or “integrative medicine” practitioners, working in the US at present. In addition to being a cardiologist, Sinatra is a “certified bioenergetic psychotherapist”; we can probably safely assume that the certification is worth about as much as the bioenergetic psychotherapy it certifies. He also the proud owner of certifications from the Massachusetts Society for Bioenergetic Analysis, the Certification Board for Nutrition Specialists and the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine, a discipline that is emphatically not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties or the American Medical Association. All the certifications mentioned are of the kind that conveys less credibility on any practitioner bothering to obtain them. Sinatra is furthermore the author of the monthly newsletter Heart, Health & Nutrition and founder of Heart MD Institute, and proprietor of the “Healing the Heart” workshop, the psychospiritual component of a “healing” program where patients would, among other things, request guidance from “spiritual powers”. Sinatra is frequently featured on questionable talkshows, broadcasts and media outlets, including the Dr. Oz show and Suzanne Somers’s dangerously crazy book of cancer woo.

Bioenergetic psychotherapy is crackpottery based on the lunatic ravings of Wilhelm Reich, and has nothing to do with bioenergy as it is understood in real sciences – even practitioners occasionally admit that it is not science but instead “informed by science.” (It is not informed by science in any legitimate sense of the word “informed”.) Bioenergetic psychotherapy is, however, a classic tooth-fairy science underpinned by “worthless studies designed to generate false positives – the kind of in-house studies that companies sometimes use so that they can claim their products are clinically proven.”

In his books and newsletter, Sinatra otherwise promote a broad palette of quackery, from nutritional supplements to detoxification. In particular, according to Sinatra, to maintain good health you need to resolve your emotional blockages” as well as physical ones: “whenever you confront a person with an illness, you have to involve everything, including the spiritual.… Every illness has a psychological and a physical component.” (Or put more succinctly: if you’re sick, or the advice you take from him doesn’t work, it’s your own fault.) His “metabolic cardiology” seems to be a kind of energy medicine – Sinatra is a disciple of James Oschman – focusing on the use of electroceuticals such as grounding or “earthing”, ostensibly to improve the body’s capacity to heal at the cellular level (Sinatra is one of the most prominent promoters of the quackery of earthing in the US). This is not how anything works, of course. 

And by the way, apparently the current epidemic of type 2 diabetes is also directly caused by rubber-soled shoes, which insulate us from Mother Earth’s vital 3.83 Hz vibrations, a frequency that “thins our blood so it’s like red wine, not ketchup.” You don’t want your blood to be like ketchup.

So what is the rationale for earthing? As Sinatra explains it, the Earth is a reservoir of free electrons, and without a connection to this reservoir, our cells are unable to balance harmful positive charges; he also includes pictures from live cell microscopy to illustrate how positive charge makes blood cells clump. Of course, our cells don’t need an infusion of electrons and live cell microscopy is a bogus test – Sinatra’s pictures are also unable to show a positive charge, and the blood cell clumping is an artifact that anyways would be irrelevant to the alleged health effects. 

Sinatra also claims that we are bombarded by electromagnetic radiation from modern technology, which may disrupt subtle electrical communications in our body; grounding reduces these induced voltages. In reality, of course, there is  no evidence that EMF disrupts communication in our body or that grounding would offer any help whatsoever if it did (subtle” is probably a key term here). Ultimately, however, it’s all about the New Age: earthing is important since our connection with the earth carries information that helps align us with the greater network of intelligence of our planet. Try finding scientific evidence to contradict that, ye philistines. And the point about aligning with an intelligence network is wild imagination not supported by anything in science or reality.

But, ah, yes, the part of Sinatra’s claim you were waiting for: vibrations. Perhaps the (current) core idea in Sinatra’s otherwise somewhat amorphous medical philosophy is vibrations. According to Sinatra, “the whole essence of life is really vibration … when people are sick, their vibration goes down,” but “if we can increase the energy of our cellular framework … our lives will thrive … Vibration is the key to life.” What it means, or how Sinatra measures decreasing vibrations, is of course unclear (we have, of course, left the world of real medicine – or reality – far behind at this point). But he is pretty clear about what causes lowering of your “vibrational energy:

-       Drugs/Alcohol/Sugar
-       Chronic illness
-       Negative emotions – hostility, fear, anger, shame, resentment, depression …
-       Over-vaccination in the newborn and infants [Sinatra is of course anti-vaccine; what did you expect?]
-       Living in the energy of entitlement
-       Living in a false self – My life is a lie
-       Any misrepresentation of … The Truth!

That last one is rather revealing, though: This is cult-speak. Stephen Sinatra is trying to build a cult. Otherwise, you should in particular avoid consuming veal, since the angry vibrations in the flesh of animals raised inhumanely can be passed on to those who consume them. Fortunately, you can also increase your vibrations by eating “high vibrational foods,” many of which you can coincidentally and conveniently find in his online store. “[G]rounding the body, FIR sauna and the utilization of very low frequency pulsed electromagnetic waves” also help “assist the quantum energy of the body.” According to Sinatra “[t]his is the new wisdom that will assist us in the good vibe/bad vibe technological age.” “Wisdom” is certainly not an apt term for any of it.

As for EFM, “the chaotic, unseen, and unfelt environmental electrical fields we humans are increasingly exposed to from all the electronics, appliances, and telecommunications in our lives,” what is Sinatra’s evidence for harm? Well, Sinatra will baldly assert that the evidence shows that power lines cause leukemia in children, which is false, and that cell phones cause brain cancers, which is equally untrue. Primarily, however, Sinatra will point out that “[i]llnesses like multiple sclerosis, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and autism have been proliferating in recent years. The incidence of cancer is up, particularly among young people,” so electropollution must be the cause. Correlation is causation, even when there is, in fact, no correlation.

Sinatra has promoted other kinds of pseudoscientific nonsense, too, of course. He is for instance co-author, with Jonny Bowden (proud holder of a “degree” from the diploma mill Clayton College of Natural Health), of the book The Great Cholesterol Myth: Why Lowering Your Cholesterol Won't Prevent Heart Disease-and the Statin-Free Plan That Will. Though less flagrantly nonsensical than his vibration woo, the book – which, to emphasize, hardly enjoys any better foundation in science than his claim that misrepresenting his claims may cause you ill-health by lowering your vibrations – is probably even more likely to cause actual harm to people than his vibration nonsense. (There is an overly fair review of the book here.)

Diagnosis: Egregious nonsense and lunatic New Age ravings, all of it. Of course, if you are able to distinguish evidence-based medical claims from lunatic New Age ravings, you are probably not in Sinatra’s target audience, and he does seem to have found one, for whom the fact that he is, indeed, an MD will probably give him some unwarranted credibility. And make no mistake: despite their laughable silliness, Sinatra’s advice has the potential to cause real and serious harm. Dangerous.


#2259: Matt Singleton et al.

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Matt Singleton is a Baptist minister in Louisville who also runs an Internet talk-radio program. A staunch supporter of the nearby Ark Park, Singleton is a fierce critic of evolution, calling teachings on evolution a lie that have led to drug abuse, suicide and other social afflictions. His criticisms have, not the least, been directed at Kentucky’s academic standards for public schools, which, as they should, include evolution: “Outsiders are telling public school families that we must follow the rich man’s elitist religion [no less!] of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky constitution says is the right to worship almighty God,” Singleton said. “Instead, this fascist method teaches that our children are the property of the state” – relatively silly though possibly effective rhetorical gambit showing that someone is completely out of touch with anything resembling reality, of course.

Singleton made the comments when the Kentucky science standards were up for review in 2013. He was not the only one. Parent Valerie O’Rear, for instance, said the standards promoted an “atheistic world view” and a political agenda that pushes government control. Dena Stewart-Gore, meanwhile, suggested that the standards would marginalize students with religious beliefs, leading to ridicule and physiological harm in the classroom, and create difficulties for students with learning disabilities: “The way socialism works is it takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them,” she said, adding that “we are even talking genocide and murder here, folks.” This would be an unusual definition of “socialism” outside of America.

Diagnosis: No, there is probably nothing you can do. It’s hopeless. 

#2260: Mark Sircus

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Marc Sircus is a near-legendary crank and promoter of cancer woo, perhaps most familiar for his Transdermal Magnesium Therapy, which is not something you should get involved with under any circumstances. Sircus, like many quacks, are fond of adding meaningless alphabet soups to his name, and usually titles himself with “O.M.D” (“oriental medicine doctor”, which does emphatically not have anything to do with doctor or medicine, but does convey a hint of racism), as well as “Ac.” (probably “acupuncturist”) and “DM (P)”, which is new to us but may have something to do with pastoral medicine. None of the “credentials” are worth the price of the paper on which they are printed, if they are printed anywhere at all, but they are apparently good for marketing purposes. We encourage people to ponder why Sircus feels the need to add meaningless letters to his name in his promotion materials given that readers are unlikely to have the faintest clue what they are supposed to be short for, and Sircus presumably knows that they don’t. 

Sircus is so into cancer woo that he is even associated with the delusional rantings of Tullio Simoncini (both are apparently sources trusted by people like Joe Mercola). According to Sircus, “[c]ancer is, fundamentally, a relatively simple oxygen deficiency disease and the use of bicarbonate increases oxygen carrying and reaching capacity.” Or in other words: “I don’t have the faintest clue about physiology, but I am merrily making up nonsense” (explanation here if you need it). The idea that sodium bicarbonate is an efficacious treatment for cancer must count as one of the most idiotic (and vile) disciplines of cancer woo out there – though the competition is fierce – relying as it does on blatantly false, conspiracy-theory driven delusions about what cancer actually is. According to Sircus, however, and his book Winning the War on Cancer, “[s]odium bicarbonate happens to be one of our most useful medicines because bicarbonate physiology is fundamental to life and health.” This is not how “because” works (and that is not the only problem with the claim). Sircus has observed, though, that many chemotherapy treatments include sodium bicarbonate, and asks whether it could be that the results one sees when using chemo and sodium bicarbonate is the result of the latter rather than the former, and promptly concludes that it is. “There are no studies separating the effects of bicarbonate from the toxic chemotherapy agents, nor will there ever be,” claims Sircus, suggesting a conspiracy. In reality, of course –Sircus isn’t even close to reality – sodium bicarbonate has been provided as part of a chemotherapy regimens not to treat the tumor but to protect the kidneys, given that certain chemotherapy regimens cause massive tumor cell lysis, though it is less commonly added these days since questions have been raised over whether it is actually beneficial. (Moreover, a controlled trial where one group of cancer patients only gets sodium bicarbonate without chemo is not very likely to pass ethical review boards, for obvious reasons.) Bah, details: Sircus has a panacea and a conspiracy theory to underpin the claims on its behalf; details are irrelevant. Instead, Sircus goes on to claim that baking soda can cure H1N1, too.

Sircus is the leader of something called the International Medical Veritas Association (remember Badger’s Law!), which is apparently different from the infamous HIV/AIDS-denialist, antivaccine Medical Veritas International organization (Badger’s Law predicts such confusing similarities among these kinds of organizations), and also writes the IMVA blog. A telling entry on the blog is his “Cancer Still a Mystery to Medical Science”, discussed here. You can already guess the gambit he tries to use, can’t you? Yes, there is still a lot of stuff scientists don’t know about cancer – that’s why they do research – and no, that doesn’t mean that you get to fill the gaps with whatever unsupported bullshit you fancy. In fact, Sircus goes one step further: he is claiming that physicians are deliberately making money by “complicating” the subject of cancer. To Sircus and the quacks, cancer isn’t “complicated;” the complexity of cancer is just part of a conspiracy, and/or the myopia of scientists blinded by the “reigning paradigm” that cancer has something to do with cells or DNA (the “cherished chosen belief system” of scientists and physicians who defend it with “fanatical fervor”); according to Sircus, that is “just […] a theory”. The rest of the post is a long list of familiar cancer quackery, including vitamin C quackery, where Sircus cites a recent study published in Cancer Research to support his case – or rather, he doesn’t cite the study, but a news story about the study that completely misrepresents its findings, and then ignorantly proclaims that “[o]ncologists never made it to first grade as far as knowledge of nutrition and its role in health and disease.” It’s hard to decide whether to laugh or to cry. 

So, what’s really the cause of cancer? Well, I think it’s worth quoting him at some length: “The germ theory of cancer is quite legitimate though medical authorities continue to crucify Dr. Tullio Simoncini for his focus on fungus and yeast as a central part of the cancer paradigm. Long before Simoncini walked the earth we have had research connecting fungus to cancer. Fungus is a microbe, and many scientists believe viruses, fungi and bacteria are all different stages of the microbe life cycle. Neither Dr. Dannenberg nor Dr. Simoncini is a medical heretic but many subjects in our contemporary civilization are just too taboo.” One would have liked to know a bit more about the “many” scientists who don’t know the difference between fungi, viruses and bacteria (some suggestions as to where Sircus picked up the idea here), though even that claim isn’t nearly as ridiculous as the idea that Simoncini is anything resembling a legitimate scientist, however. 

Sircus is, of course, also an anti-vaccine activist, advocating (in his post “String the Bastards Up”) killing scientists at the CDC for crimes existing only in his feverish imagination: “I think these people should be lined up against a wall. Actually there is no punishment that could possibly compensate for the suffering of autism and the tragedy of vaccine deaths” and “I am calling for the conviction and the worst possible punishment under the law for certain people in government who are in the medical field.” It’s unlikely that explaining to him that vaccines demonstrably do not cause autism would help much. This is what might happen if you are unable to distinguish reasonings from violent, paranoid fever dreams. And instead of executing them, “we are letting doctors in white coats inject poisonous heavy metals into babies and paying them well for it,” laments Sircus. As telling as his baseless, conspiracy-driven hatemongering against those who are actually helping people, is the fact that no vitriol is directed against his fellow bicarbonate sodium-quacks, who are demonstrably killing people, and being paid for it, by injecting people in desperate situations with what is, in effect, poison.

Part of it all is, of course, motivated by Sircus’s hatred for real medical doctors, in particular oncologists: “Oncologists certainly don’t cure cancer since it’s illegal to even speak about curing cancer and since most of their patients die no matter what the doctors say or do.” None of those claims are remotely true of course. It is, however, true that real doctors tend to reject most of the nonsense Sircus promotes, which makes it hard for people like Sircus not to ascribe them malicious intentions. As for his own views, we are still waiting for his magnum opus, the (ostensibly) 3000-page Conquering cancer, which supposedly sums up Sircus’s various views on the topic (one recent(?) addition being electrochemical cancer quackery, discussed here), as well as his fundamental misunderstandings and lack of understanding of basic biology, physiology or medicine. 

Another one of his inventions is “natural allopathic medicine”, which according to him and his e-book is a “new therapeutic principle that revolutionizes both allopathic and naturopathic medicine offering a radical shift in medical thought and practice” that focuses on “pH management, cell voltage, magnesium and iodine medicine, cannabinoid medicine, carbon dioxide medicine, re-mineralization of the body, increasing oxygen transport and oxygenation of the tissues, opening up of blood vessels, saturation and healing of cells with concentrated nutrition via superfoods, breathing retraining, emotional transformation processing, detoxification and removal of heavy metals and radioactive particles.” Apparently you can use it to treat Ebola: “Instead of using toxic pharmaceuticals that diminish the immune system by further driving down nutritional status we use we treat and cure through the fulfillment of nutritional law.” It’s hard not to suspect that his success criterion is “no one complained”. Evidence? “Just ask an emergency-room or intensive-care-ward doctor right after he has injected magnesium chloride or sodium bicarbonate to save someone’s life.” I think we can safely say that emergency room doctors are not using magnesium chloride or sodium bicarbonate in emergency situations for their nutritional value. He doesn’t offer any other evidence for any of his claims, apart from some cherry picking and misrepresentations of some papers thrown together in a speculative jumble.

Diagnosis: When you, regarding a topic you know nothing about, disagree with everyone who knows anything about it, you should at least stop to consider the possibility that you are wrong before you conclude that everyone else is in a nefarious conspiracy against you. But that’s what people like Sircus, who have staked their careers on the second of those options, need you not to do. It does seem, however, that Sircus is a true believer rather than an outright fraud, though it’s an interesting question whether there really is a legitimate distinction to draw when you encounter characters like Mark Sircus.

#2261: Jane Skrovota

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Jane Skrovota is hardly a big name in bigotry; indeed, she is just a Lincoln, Nebraska local lady whose only claim to notability is a graphic diatribe she delivered during a public hearing before the Lincoln city council in 2012 on a proposed ordinance to ban discrimination against gays and transgender citizens in employment, housing and public accommodations. That rant is, however, deliriously insane. You can hear it in full here. Some choice quotes:

Winter Wipe Out TV Show have broken bones and man slaughter every minute. Winter wipeout show is produced in Holland by gay bi’s and orgiers. Why do gays like to see people perishing?

P.E.N.I.S. goes into the anus to rupture intestines, the more a man does this more likely he will be a fatality or a homicider. Getting pleasure while the other man passes away reverberates another homicide later.” 

UNESCO United Nations has gender and bioethics conferences combined. Only gays go to gender studies. Gays are the bio ethic genociders in hospitals Ah, children can be eliminated the FEDS stated in this December 11th article ah the Lincoln General Star page six. Gays should not be employed in hospitals or any health occupation.” 

Lesbians and Gays rarely live past 40 years old because it is common for the partner to do away with them or they self inflict.”

Have No Gays in Education. A high percentage of gay men in school grounds molest boys partly because they do not have AIDs yet! Be on the side of the innocent boy who gets Fs and Ds a year after being molested.”

To avoid going gay like Hillary Clinton did, college students need single rooms and single-gendered dorms. Going lesbian is not normal. A college woman is seduced with illegal Rohypnol to go gay, otherwise they think it’s abhorrent.”

AIDS is a Candida fungus disease. Roman senators went to Roman baths to be promiscuous gays, bis, and orgiers, and then went to The Colosseum to watch Christians get mauled and perish. Do gays become sadistic? Yes. They cuss after coupling, don’t like the land they lay on, and 80% of those that did treason by the year 2000 were gaysDon’t employ gays in military, education, health, or psychology. They are the genociders, molesters, treasoners, deranged.” 

Jesus was kissed by Judas, a homo, who tried to sabotage Jesus’ kind ideas. Do you choose Jesus, a celibate, or Judas, a homo? You have to choose.”

Don’t worry, there is plenty more where those quotes came from.

Diagnosis: So no, not an influential public figure by any stretch of the imagination, but we just had to include her all the same.

#2262: Sharon Slater

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Family Watch International (FWI) is a hate organization that lobbies the United Nations for pro-life and anti-gay causes, including the imprisonment of gay people around the world. Sharon Slater, its president, is apparently opposed to the death penalty for gay people, but she is fine with imprisonment. The FWI for instance arranges an annual, invitation-only global policy forum for UN delegates to promote their policy objectives, where Slater has particularly emphasized ex-gay messages, including “the personal testimony of a patient who is successfully reorienting from homosexuality to heterosexuality” and a speech from an alleged expert Slater conspicuously refused to name. According to FWI literature, “so-called ‘homosexual rights’ are driving much of the current worldwide assault on marriage, the family and family related issues.” There is a good, if old, portrait of Slater, the FWI, and their efforts here.

Like many anti-gay groups, Slater and the FWI focus much of their attention on Africa. After all, their ideas for how to treat gay people probably won’t fly in the US anymore (not that they’ve entirely stopped trying), but fanatic bigots still have some clout in certain African nations that makes it possible to turn their bigotry into policy; by claiming that the West is imposing its corrupt, “anti-family” values on the rest of the world, and that the “developing world” is the last holdout against the “homosexual agenda” (Slater is no stranger to lying, of course), these groups often do find favor with people who otherwise find themselves struggling under the weight of a global economy designed to exploit and indebt. 

And as long as gay people get to suffer, these organizations – FWI included – are not above creating alliances e.g. with Islamist extremists, for instance in developing a UN “Declaration on the Rights of Children and Their Families”, which is basically an anti-marriage-equality statement: It calls upon the UN to recognize a “family with a married mother and father” as the preferred family organization, and “call upon States Parties and the United Nations system to discourage sexual relations and childbearing outside of the marital bond”. The effort was at least in part set in motion by Slater’s and the FWI’s “Protect the Family” petition, which is not really about protecting families but attacking families organized in ways different from the one Slater fancies (i.e. those led by grandparents, single parents, same-sex parents, and countless other configurations of people caring for people – Slater is, in fact, explicit about this goal – family values™ are not about family values). Slater is also a frequent participant and keynote speaker at the World Congress of Families, which is not about families either.

FWI has been deeply involved in promoting abstinence-and fidelity-only initiatives in Uganda, and has praised Nigeria – where same-sex couples can face up to 14 years in prison or stoning at the hands of Sharia courts – as “a strong role model” for other regional governments “on how to hold on to their family values despite intense international pressure.”

As mentioned, Slater and the FWI are also opposed to sex education: “It’s destructive. It’s pornographic. It’s designed to change all the sexual and gender norms of society by sexualizing children everywhere. It’s probably one of the most insidious attacks on the health and innocence of children ever imagined,” says Slater. In a radio interview, she also said that sex education is a plot by Planned Parenthood to turn your kids into sexual deviants so they can make more money on condoms, STD tests and abortions. There is, Slater asserted, “an intentional, targeted effort to get to your children and change the way they think about sexuality, to encourage them to engage in sexual activity, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual or self-stimulation, because if they can recruit children into this worldview and this sexual ideology, then they’ll have the future, if they can train up the next generation in all these radical ideas. And that’s what they’re after. In fact, even Hitler said, ‘He who owns the minds of the children owns the future.’” Because whenever organizations or people disagree with you, it is always because they are in a greed-motivated nefarious conspiracy against you, the US and Jesus.

Diagnosis: Deranged bigot. But Slater and her organization are not mere fringe lunatics with Internet access – their power and influence is frighteningly real, if mostly realized abroad: Slater is genuinely knowledgeable of the workings of the UN, and possesses enough political skills to exploit that knowledge; few loons covered in our Encyclopedia rival Slater and her organization for harm and suffering caused.

#2263: Patricia Slusher

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Chronic Lyme disease is (almost certainly) a non-existent condition, but the diagnosis remains popular in woo-minded and (largely overlapping) conspiracy-minded groups. There is, accordingly, a thriving market for people who “diagnose” and “treat” chronic lyme disease, and they are often termed LLMDs, or “Lyme Literate” doctors. Some of these are spineless or deluded MDs; many are not. Patricia Slusher is not. Slusher is an “ND” – a naturopath, or not a doctor – and a “CN”, i.e. “certified nutritionist”. That certification means nothing, of course: Ben Goldacre once got his cat, which had been dead for years, registered as a certified member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants – Slusher presumably got her certification from something called the American Health Science University, which you can read about here. She is, however, treating patients for “chronic Lyme disease”.

According to one of her patients, “[f]or the first 3 weeks my Lyme protocol consist of taking 3 supplements from Percision [sic] Herbs, LLC; LYX, Spirex and Puricell and spending 30 minutes 2X a week getting a Quad Zapper treatment.” The Quad zapper is a Hulda Clark device, no less. So, Slusher treats her patients with Hulda Clark devices and worthless supplements, as well as with homeopathy. It’s fortunate that chronic lyme is not a real disease. That, however, doesn’t clear Slusher of wrongdoing – her patients are clearly suffering, and taking their money is not likely to make things better. 

Consultations with Slusher start out with “Quantum Reflex Analysis”, which is applied kinesiology with “quantum” added on (Slusher likes quantum mumbo jumbo), and an examination of the patient’s tongue, nails, and face. Then you can sign up for:

-       The Zyto Biocommunication Health Evaluation, a bogus electrodermal diagnostic process using a biofeedback machine hooked up to a computer.
-       Avalon Photonic Light Therapy (equally nonsensical).
-       Distance Consultation and Testing: you don’t actually need to come to her office; sending a photo or handwriting sample will do. 
-       Saliva Hormone Testing. Yeah; no.
-       “Detoxification” treatments with ionic foot baths, no less.
-       Chromatherapy Light Goggles, because “God designed people to be exposed to full spectrum sunlight several hours a day”, with color pairings for various organ systems.
-       Electronic acupressure
-       A chi modulator.
-       Meridian therapy.

Slusher, who describes herself as an energy medicine “doctor”, obtained her naturopathic “degree” from the Trinity College of Natural Health; now, accreditations by the official naturopathic college organization, the Association of Accredited Naturopathic Colleges, really shouldn’t convey any sort of authority either, but it is worth pointing out that even they don’t recognize Trinity.

Diagnosis: You probably have to be stupid or desperate to fall for any of this, but those are precisely the characteristics of the victims Slusher targets. Complete and utter bollocks.


Hat-tip: Harriet Hall @ Sciencebased medicine

#2264: Brad Smith et al.

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In 2013 a group of pagans planned and arranged a festival to celebrate the summer solstice in Pahokee, Florida. It is probably little surprise that the event was not exactly welcomed by the area’s resident Talibanists, who packed a city commission meeting and demanded that the city prevent the festival from taking place because pagans, devil worshippers. We suspect many of them would be firm defenders of religious freedom but also be baffled if told that religious freedom means that people who hold religious views different from yours also have the right to have and express them. 

Among the protestors were Brad Smith, a funeral director and apparently the Florida Director of Kids for Christ, who called the event “an abomination”; “I just found out about this today. I am disappointed in the city of Pahokee for allowing this group to come,” he said, under the delusion that the city has the power to deny groups that Smith doesn’t like the ability to exercise their fundamental constitutional rights. Evangelist Lillian Brown, of Saints on the Move, pointed out that “God cannot heal our land if we have witches and warlocks violating our community,” which is a fine example of fractal wrongness. At least if you ever wondered how witch burnings could go on for centuries back in the days despite the patent ridiculousness of the charges, people like Lillian Brown should give you some indication. Rev. Raul Rodriguez, of Church of God Door of Jesus Christ, just pointed out that “we don’t need this in our town. Not now. Not ever”, even though whether Raul Rodriguez needs the event or not seems to be strikingly irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Daniel Mondragon, however, warned that by hosting the event “we are opening ourselves up to things we should not, like belly dancing and magic spells;” belly dancing and magic spells are almost equally bad, and the former could potentially even take place: “We do not welcome these things. This is the first annual event, and it should be the last.” Dire warnings also from Bishop Jared Hines of New Destiny Community Church: “This event is not only detrimental to our city but to our county. What goes on at that lake will affect us all; it will move from the dike and into our homes.” Pastor Eugene Babb of Harlem Church of God, meanwhile, in an apparent attempt to top the others, asserted that “we cannot expect our city to survive and prosper if we allow these things.”

When their attempts to prevent the event from taking place by legal means failed, they resorted to their most powerful weapon: prayer. Pastor Jorge Chivara of the Hispanic Nazarene Church led the effort: “We want to begin praying about what’s taking place before the event, during the event, and after the event,” Chivara said.

Diagnosis: Yes, they are theocrats, plain and simple. It is a very telling illustration of what many fundies think religious freedom amounts to, at least. Though the delusional nitwits described here – they really give Sir Bedivere’s audience a run for their money – are local nitwits with negligible influence on civilization considered individually, their actions and responses also seem to be pretty standard fare many places in the US.

#2265: Daniel Smith

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Alternative medicine isn’t medicine, but at least most woo is in itself probably as harmless as it is useless (the conspiracy theories and falsehoods involved in marketing them less so). MMS, or Miracle Mineral Supplement, is different. MMS an aqueous solution of 28% sodium chlorite, an industrial chemical that, when prepared in a citric acid solution, forms chlorine dioxide. Yes, we are talking industrial-strength bleach, and its effects on the body are what you’d expect from that. MMS is nevertheless promoted as a cure for HIV, malaria, viral hepatitis, the H1N1 flu virus, common colds, acne, cancer and much more. Its inventor, Jim Humble, has no evidence for any of his medical claims, of course; instead, he claims to be a billion-year-old God from the Andromeda galaxy. 

In recent years, MMS has in particular been promoted as a “cure” for autistic children, in particular by deranged lunatic Kerri Rivera. But there are several other promoters of MMS around as well. Louis Daniel Smith is hopefully not anymore, though: In 2015 he was found guilty of selling industrial bleach as a miracle cure for numerous diseases and illnesses, including cancer, AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, lyme disease, asthma and the common cold through a business called “Project GreenLife”, and sentenced to 51 months in prison. In particular, the jury convicted him of one count of conspiracy to commit multiple crimes, three counts of introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud or mislead, and one count of fraudulently smuggling merchandise into the United States. Before the trial, three of Smith’s alleged co-conspirators – Chris Olson, Tammy Olson and Karis DeLong, Smith’s wife – pleaded guilty to introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce. The most scary part, however, is that Smith was part of a network of at least 1,700 people selling MMR around the world; stopping him was, in other words, likely to make only minimal difference to the worldwide distribution of MMS. Smith’s numerous fans and followers were of course quick to yell “conspiracy” and “oppression” and “health freedom”.

According to the instructions for use that Smith provided, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting were all signs that the miracle cure was working, and, despite a risk of possible brain damage, they suggested that the product might still be appropriate for pregnant women or infants who were seriously ill. Officially, however, the sodium chlorite was imported for use in wastewater treatment facilities, conveniently sold in 4-ounce bottles for $20 apiece. It is, in that light, only a remarkable coincidene that Project GreenLife also happened to sell citric acid, the other component of MMS, and provided information about use “for your safety and convenience”.

There is a good discussion of MMS here.

Diagnosis: We don’t generally cover ordinary criminals, but have to make an exception here. Hopefully he learned a lesson, but we are not really very optimistic, and there are many more like him. An extremely dangerous fellow – crazy, stupid and completely without scruples – so we recommend maintaining a safe distance.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2266: David E. Smith

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The Illinois Family Institute, a state affiliate of the American Family Association, is, not surprisingly, an anti-marriage-equality organization and its executive director, David E. Smith, a fundamentalist bigot (Smith succeeded Peter LaBarbera in the position; Laurie Higgins is their director of school advocacy). The IFI is also a vociferous opponent of abortion, the separation of church and state, “activist judges”, gambling and drugs, and was correctly designated a hate group by the SPLC.

In spring 2013, when a law legalizing same-sex marriage was postponed by the Illinois legislature, Smith was ready to explain why: “The Body of Christ here in Illinois has risen up and has really made a noise and made a really concerted effort to make sure that our state lawmakers know without a doubt that we object to the idea of them redefining marriage,” Smith said: “They do not have the moral authority to redefine marriage as God created it.” This was not the reason for postponement. Moreover, neither Smith nor his fellows at the Illionis Family Institute have the power to raise zombie Jesus, even though they probably wouldn’t be prevented from doing so by alignment restrictions. 

Later Smith sent out a fundraising appeal where he warned that if activists failed to stop marriage equality legislation in Illinois, “America will collapse” like Sodom and Gomorrah, and compared his fight against the evil agenda” of gay rights to that of American soldiers in WW2: “We should be inspired to defend marriage with the same courage, conviction, tenacity, and sacrifice that the greatest generation fought to defend American principles and to honor their fallen. If we don’t stop the enemy from achieving his goal of destroying the family, there won’t be any monuments to visit.” Yes, it’s always the end of everything; only apostates would ask for evidence or reasons.

In 2012, IFI called for parents to remove their children from classrooms led by teachers who support LGBT-related instruction; in particular, in their document “Challenge Teachers, Not Books” they encouraged parents to “object to teachers rather than texts”, and offered suggestions for parents who are “fed up with the subtle and not so subtle messages that activist teachers of a liberal bent work into their classroom teaching through their classroom comments, curricular materials ... and even their desks and classroom displays.” The IFI has also for a long time advocated teaching creationism in public schools, ostensibly as a way to present “both sides of an argument” (they aren’t really interested in both sides, even if there were two sides, which there aren’t), and have made recommendations to Illinois educators to keep explicit references to evolution out of public school classrooms in Illinois.

Diagnosis: Fundie loons, and though they have probably lost the war people like Smith are still trying their best to cause as much harm as possible. A real, if relatively minor, threat to civilization.

#2267: E. Norbert Smith

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One of Smith's books labelled
"non-fiction". Smith does of
course not want you to
consider the evidence - he
wants you to consider the
fragments of evidence
he carefully selects and
interprets for you.
A.k.a. Doc Gator

E. Norbert Smith is a near-infamous mainstay of creationist organizations and fundie anti-science efforts. The reason is, of course, that Smith is one of those rare specimens among creationists who does indeed possess a Ph.D. in Zoology, from Texas Tech University. Smith is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s idiotic petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism (his dissent being not even remotely scientific, of course), as well as the CMI list of scientists alive today who accept the biblical account of creation. He seems to be currently affiliated with the website Creation.com (previously with godofcreation.com), and was formerly on the board of directors for the Creation Research Society. He has also taught courses for various fundie extremist mockeries of educational institutions, including a “graduate course” for the Institute for Creation Research as well as an online course in Creation for Liberty University.

Now, Smith might, in fact, have written some real research articles back in the 70s and 80s. For the last 30 years or so, however, he has focused on writing articles for the Journal of Creation, children’s books (of course: this was never about science, truth or evidence, but cult recruitment) – including a number of books about Al-the-gator under the pseudonym Doc Gator – and various anti-science books with titles like Evolution Has Failed and Battleground University. In the latter his main complaint seems to be that universities teach critical thinking to students, something that often gets in the way of accepting his denialist talking points on pure faith. Smith does not appear to have any current academic affiliation, however, and is surely not a working scientist by any stretch of the imagination.

And if you ever wondered whether his creationist research had any scientific merit, you can read about his pitiful forays into creation hydrology here. The measures taken to avoid actually testing the core hypothesis are rather striking.  

Diagnosis: A mainstay of creation science, which stands to science like pretend gold stands to gold. We cannot let real scientific testing or evidence get in the way of good dogma, can we?

#2268: J.C. Smith

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J.C. Smith (right) being interviewed.
The appreciation of science, evidence and medicine among chiropractors varies. Chiropractor J.C. Smith represents the non-appreciating faction. According to Smith, science and scientists, biased as they are toward truth, evidence and reality, are waging a war against chiropractors, especially those who, like Smith, find themselves on the more overtly pseudoscientific end of things, and in 2011 he (self-)published his magnum opus The Medical War Against Chiropractors: The Untold Story from Persecution to Vindication detailing the battle in an exposé comparable, in his view, to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s exposé of slavery. According to Smith, the American Medical Association has waged a dirty war on perceived competition, and the motive is primarily money – though not only that: according to Smith, real MDs are apparently attacking chiropractic because it is based on a vitalistic philosophy, which doctors and scientists oppose because they are mostly atheists. The fight for the legitimacy of chiropractic is according a “religious war to keep the heretics out of the medical den of iniquity.” It is, apparently, also an attack on academic freedom and comparably to the bigotry in America before Civil Rights, when desegregation led to resentment and deadly attacks. The book-burning mindset of scientists and medical doctors will, as Smith sees it, go down in the annals of history alongside Joseph Goebbels’s book-burning policy. Indeed, Smith’s book contains a remarkable amount of references to Nazis and racial prejudice in addition to its more predictable half-truths, falsehood and general crackpottery. 

The general narrative of the book is approximately as follows: Before chiropractic licensure was approved chiropractors occasionally got themselves in legal trouble for practicing medicine without a license, and as Smith sees things, this was apparently a bogus charge, but one that forced noble chiropractors to hide like Anne Frank or escaped slaves; chiropractors persevered despite AMAs aggressive efforts to combat quackery, however, and finally got their long-awaited licensures. AMA is, throughout the book, compared to the KGB, Gestapo and CIA, and he even mentions the showers of Auschwitz; medical doctors are like storm troopers, and criticizing chiropractic is like making Rosa Parks sit in the back of the bus. Suffice to say, the book probably did not do chiropractors who want to be taken seriously any service. There is a good and reasonably comprehensive critique of the book here.

His book. It is published
by Tate Publishing.
Apparently there is a sequel,
too: To Kill a Chiropractor:
The Media War against
Chiropractors. 
As for his claims on behalf of the efficacy of chiropactic, Smith decides to go all D.D. Palmer. Deep into subluxation woo, Smith is very concerned about the proper flow of nerve energy, claiming that spinal dysfunctions disrupt the flow and cause heart attacks and visceral disorders like dysmenorrhea, asthma, enuresis, and infantile colic. Indeed, spine dysfunctions can even cause brain damage and premature aging. And manipulation is, of course, effective for all these disorders. As evidence for his nonsense, Smith relies for instance on the 1979 New Zealand Chiropractic Report developed by a panel consisting of a barrister, a chemistry professor, and a retired headmistress of a girls’ school (and comprehensively discussed here); the NZ report relied primarily on selected testimonials, draws conclusions in direct conflict with all current evidence obtained by using actual scientific methods, and nevertheless concluded that chiropractors should be strictly monitored, not present themselves as doctors, not encourage patients to consult a chiropractor in preference to a medical doctor for any condition, and not mislead the public into believing that chiropractic is an alternative to medicine. To bolster his case, Smith has arguments from popularity and patient satisfaction, and even arguments from antiquity: according to Smith, Hippocrates and Imhotep wrote about chiropractic (they did not). He also quotes Gary Null and Dana Ullman, and dismisses critics as being in cahoots with the AMA.

Smith also runs a website called Chiropractors for Fair Journalism, where he attacks critics of woo for oppression and for engaging in mafia tactics (The Institute for Science in Medicine, for instance, is referred to as “The Medical GoodFellas”), and accuses anyone who points out the pseudoscience and quackery that underlie chiropractic of “bigotry”, like: “His [Morris Fishbein, MD] intolerant quasi-KKK attitude about all non-allopathic CAM professions set the tone for the Jim Crow, MD, bias we see in many members in the medical profession today.” Likewise, efforts to inform the public of medical science and medical evidence that Smith doesn’t like is “fear-mongering and slander”. The main problem, though, with organizations like the ISM, which offers medical information and criticize pseudoscience, is apparently that they seek to “alone determine[…] what qualifies one method as ‘pseudo-scientific practices’ and the others as ‘scientific’,” and that “it is not its role to act as watchdogs since this is a governmental issue within each state. No one has endowed ISM to act as such, but the AMA has never subjected its power to any governmental agency in its quest to remain the medical monopoly.” Not indicative of a particularly well-developed ability to draw obvious distinctions or avoid massive strawmen, is it? 

Diagnosis: A shining illustration of the all-too common failure to distinguish criticism from oppression and facts from opinion. At least his efforts are probably unlikely to do quacks any favors.

#2269: Lamar Smith

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US representative for Texas’s 21st congressional district for 16 terms until 2019, and for several years the head of the House Science Committee, Lamar Seeligson Smith was for several years perhaps the most dangerous loon in the US (in part because he was far from the only loon on said committee). A notable climate change denialist, Smith received ample funding from oil and gas companies (and built his own fortune partially on oil and understood nothing of the science he criticized and rejected. Before joining the science committee in 2013, Smith was chair of the House Judiciary Committee, where he for instance proposed the 2011 Stop Online Piracy Act (which did not go particularly well for him). Smith has also had a career e.g. as contributor to Breitbart and as a business and financial writer at The Christian Science Monitor. He has no science background.

Perhaps Smith’s main goal during his tenure on the Science Committee was to put all climate research on ice, e.g. by slashing NASA’s budget for earth sciences, subjecting grant reviews at the National Science Foundation to “extra scrutiny” and trying to rewrite the funding standards to replace peer review with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress, and railing against environmentalists and the media for buying into the “climate-change religion” (a Christian Science follower himself, Smith might not have exactly been disposed to grasp the distinction). 

His strategy as head of the science committee was nicely laid out at a Heartland Institute conference in 2017: “Next week we’re going to have a hearing on our favorite subject of climate change and also on the scientific method, which has been repeatedly ignored by the so-called self-professed climate scientists.” Of course, by “scientific method”, Smith didn’t mean scientific method. Smith doesn’t have the faintest grasp of scientific methodology. He meant my politically motivated conclusions. A key element of his strategy, however, has obviously been to try to redefine common scientific terms to rig the rhetorical game for public opinion. He also supported writing legislation that would punish scientific journals publishing research that doesn’t adhere to standards of peer review, which might sound reasonable until you realize that the standards in question would be those crafted by Smith and his committee. It might be instructive, in that regard, to note that Smith has claimed that the journal Science is “not known as an objective” journal. His favored sources for science-related talking points, on the other hand, are primarily misguided criticisms of science from climate change denialists and conspiracy theorists that are notably not, at present, published in peer-reviewed journals – clearly, then, there is something wrong with peer review.

As an illustration of his strategies as head of the Science Committee: In 2015, Smith accused federal scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of colluding to doctor data in a global warming study that refuted the long-held denialist misconception – “myth” is probably more accurate – that the planet’s warming had “paused” on the grounds that he didn’t like the answers. In particular, Smith accused the scientists of tampering historical global temperature data to advance Obama’s “extreme climate agenda” and promptly subpoenaed the scientists and other NOAA staff, demanding that they turn over the data as well as internal emails related to their research in a rather explicit attempt at bullying and intimidation; neither Smith nor his crew would of course have the expertise to review the data, all of which were already publicly available to review anyways, making it rather abundantly clear that his efforts never had anything to do with the data or the analysis of them. And yes, it really is the head of the science committee engaging in InfoWars-style delusional and baseless conspiracy theories, though we admit that the fact that the administration engages in such may not strike people as that surprising anymore. (The documents, needless to say, contained no support whatsoever for Smith’s allegations.) To see how ridiculous this particular conspiracy theory actually is, this one might be helpful. 

And with regard to Smith’s publicly funded political witchhunt of scientists: as chair of the House Committee Smith issued more subpoenas in his first three years than the committee had done for its entire 54-year history – the NOAA case was certainly not an isolated one; no organization supporting research into climate change would apparently be safe if they didn’t come up with the answers Smith likes. To justify his practice, Smith cited the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s as valid legal precedent for his investigation, no less. And of course, Smith continued to use the talking point that the “global warming has stopped” as if that and other studies soundly refuting the claim had never happened. 

Other favored tricks include lying, misconstruing scientific studies and cherrypicking, and under Smith’s leadership the House Science committee held hearings that featured the views of prominent climate change deniers in an attempt to provide false balance. In response to the 2014 release of the fifth version of the IPCC assessment, Smith apparently tried to play bored, saying that the report “says nothing new,” which, if true, is somewhat difficult to construe as a criticism. Perhaps more tellingly, he also said that “[s]imilar to previous reports, the latest findings appear more political than scientific” – telling, because it actually does illustrate Smith’s inability to tell the difference. He also said that “it’s time to stop fear mongering and focus on an honest dialogue about real options.” It is safe to say that Smith wasn’t really interested in an honest dialogue.

In 2016 Smith hosted an event where noted climate expert Sarah Palin was invited to promote the denialist film “Climate Hustle,” which dismisses global warming as part of a conspiracy to help government takeover and claims that rising carbon emissions are, in fact, beneficial. 

In 2017, after praising the physical and mental powers of president Trump, Smith encouraged people to get their “unvarnished” news directly from the president, not from the media. Smith has long been worried about “liberal media bias, accusing Google of blocking “references to Jesus, Chick-fil-A, and the Catholic religion” and thanking Fox News for being “the only balanced coverage out there.” It’s instructive that balance is the core value here rather than truth and accuracy, but then, as his Google accusation amply shows, Smith has little time for such old-fashioned virtues; he is hip and post-truth. Otherwise, Smith has expressed deep concern for the free speech of spambots.

Diagnosis: For a while Smith was possibly the most dangerous man in the US. Though officially retired, he still wields plenty of influence, and the standards he set – conspiracy mongering and post-truth – seem to remain firmly in place. 

#2270: Robert Smith II

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Smith in a not-quite-recent
photo.
We’ve encountered one Robert Smith before. The current entry’s Bob Smith, however, is perhaps the most high-profile loon of that name covered thus far: Robert Clinton Smith served as a member of the United States House of Representatives for New Hampshire’s 1st congressional district from 1985 to 1990, and the whole state in the US Senate from 1990 to 2003 (nominally a Republican, Smith has also had a long involvement with the Constitution Party); he even tried his hand at the presidential election in 2000, but withdrew his candidacy before the primaries began. During his Senate tenure, Smith was best known for his strident opposition to gay rights: he voted to keep anti-gay employment discrimination legal, opposed hate crimes protections, and refused to even institute a non-discrimination policy for his own employees. Notably, with Jesse Helms, he introduced a 1994 amendment denying federal funding to schools that “encourage homosexuality” by teaching about LGBT families in an inclusive way (it passed) – Smith called such messages “trash”. Smith and Helms also proposed special protections for the Boy Scouts’ right to discriminate; “Rome died from a lot less than this,” said Smith, adding that “when you dilute your moral code to this extent, and if this keeps up, the obituary for America is going to be written.” With regard to confirmation of LGBT nominees, Smith said that sending Ambassador James Hormel to Luxembourg was “like sending Louis Farrakhan to Israel,” and that confirming Roberta Achtenberg as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could lead to America becoming “a society cast off from our moral underpinnings and set adrift.”

His long list of wingnuttery also includes asserting that the National Endowment for the Arts is unconstitutional and consistently advocating for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education, supporting school vouchers instead. Part of the reasoning for the latter was of course based on Smith’s desire to get more religion into public education; Smith has otherwise also co-sponsored a suggested constitutional amendment to mandate school prayers. 

Diagnosis: A deranged pile of rot fueled by bigotry. He might be considered more of a village idiot or curiosity at present, but the level of lunacy involved doesn’t exactly set him much apart from many of the loons currently in positions of power.
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