#2864: Carly Fraser

The website Live Love Fruit is a slick and fashionable-looking blog run by one Carly Fraser and devoted to spreading chemophobia and anti-GMO misinformation. Indeed, Live Love Fruit is, according to itself, an “online hub for learning how to live more holistically. Whether you need a natural remedy or healthy recipe,” and it provides advice in the manner popularized by the Food Babe. And Fraser’s recipe seems to be to just make things up: In “Health Dangers of Canola Oil: Not the Healthy Oil You’ve Been Led to Believe”, for instance, Fraser argues that canola oil is bad for our health due to the toxicity of oleic acid – she seems unaware that oleic acid actually makes up most of the fatty acids in the human body’s fat deposits and is also the main fatty acid found in olive oil, which she does claim is healthy. She also suggests that canola oil is the cause of Keshan disease – which is the result of selenium deficiency and a viral infection – and, for good measure, that erucic acid hampers growth in children. Needless to say, her evidence for such claims stems, at best, from misinformation from places like NaturalNews or GreenMedInfo, though with a healthy dose of her own imagination mixed in.

 

Since it seems to be pretty popular, the blog has, in fact, received some attention for Fraser’s lackadaisical attitude toward facts as well as for her rather brazen attempts to deploy misinformation for personal gain. In 2016, for instance, Fraser received the attention of Snopes over a post, shared more than a million times on social media, alleging that various popular brands of tea contain dangerous levels of pesticides. In detail, Fraser’s claims were based on three sources:

 

-       Testing performed by CBC, to which Fraser explicitly claims that “over half of all teas tested had pesticide residues that were above the legally acceptable limit,” which is simply false (none were remotely close to such limits), and that “a large majority of these pesticides are currently being banned in several countries,” which is equally false (though one chemical, endosulfan, is on some lists of restricted chemical, even though the levels identified by CBC were four orders of magnitude lower than the US maximum allowable limits).

-       A Greenpeace report that according to Fraser found “high levels of pesticide residues” in various tea brands in India but which in reality only determined levels “above the analytical limit of quantification” – i.e. detectable – but of course far, far below legal limits. That the dose makes the poison is, in other words, a too complicated a fact for Fraser and her ilk.

-       A 2013 report from Glaucus Research Group on Hain-Celestial teas. Well … note first that the Glaucus Research Group is a short-selling operation, and it produced the report explicitly in an attempt to short the Hain-Celestial stock! Glaucus didn’t even really bother to hide that their report was deceptive and aimed to harm the target company, if not downright dishonest.

 

So Fraser’s descriptions are a mix of the misleading and the downright dishonest. Now, it’s an iron rule of good discussion that you are not allowed to try to explain why someone is wrong before you have shown that they are, in fact, wrong. Fraser, however, is demonstrably wrong, so the why question is legitimate. And to begin to answer the why question, it is worth noticing that Fraser’s post is an example – a textbook example, even – of affiliate marketing: Fraser’s blog receives money from Amazon if people purchase the teas she linked to. Do you think she clearly informed her readers of that?

 

Diagnosis: So, probably a loon – a fashionable chemophobe – but definitely dishonest (indeed we suspect a sort of Belle Gibson-like attitude (though admittedly less obviously destructive): If her claims give her affirmation and income, she is more or less unable to recognize that she’s corrupt and that her claims are complete fantasy). And at least back in 2016 she had a lot of readers and a lot of influence.

 

Hat-tip: Snopes

#2863: Karen Frangos

‘Naturopathy’ is the term for a fuzzily delineated mass of woo, quackery and pseudoscience – mostly ineffective at targeting the health problems practitioners claim that their recommendations target, and often dangerous, especially when the practitioners have deluded themselves into thinking they can treat real diseases rather than any of the many fake diseases that are central to naturopathic mythology; that homeopathy is a major part of their ‘training’ is illustration enough. Naturopaths are, at best, confused but well-meaning people who weren’t qualified to get an education in real medicine, but many – if not most – are dangerously delusional.

 

But naturopaths, especially through their ‘professional organizations’, have been and are engaged in a concerted effort to expand their income base, especially by trying to fool clueless legislators to pass various bills that would license their profession and give it a misleading sheen of legitimacy and even to officialy recognize them as primary care practitioners (a horrifying idea). Their efforts have been frighteningly successful, and in no state more so than in Hawaii, where they enjoy a broad scope of practice, including prescribing privileges according to the naturopathic formulary. Indeed, through an agreement between the Hawaii Society of Naturopathic Physicians and the insurance provider Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), you may, in fact, choose a naturopathic doctor as your primary care physician, something that practicing Maui naturopath Karen Frangos, President of Hawaii Society of Physicians, calls “a big deal” because it “allows us all kinds of privileges in terms of being able to be part of a professional physician organization like all other medical doctors do”, including “potentially admission privileges in hospital settings.” She even asserts that it “helps close the gap in the shortage of primary care physicians in Hawaii.” It most assuredly does not, except perhaps on paper.

 

The challenge for naturopathic practitioners in Hawaii is of course that insurance companies tend to deny reimbursement for obvious nonsense, with the result that naturopathic care is generally not covered. As naturopath Marsha Lowry at Whole Body Wellness in Makawao and Hale Malu in Wailuku complains, insurance companies are “auditing our charts and kicking back things […] and saying it’s not MD standard of care”. Lowry’s practice offers patients a range of quackery, including homeopathy and IV nutritional therapy. Meanwhile, Frangos and her group have persistently tried to change the situation, of course, backing a number of bills, such as SB 318 (dead; sponsored by Russell Ruderman, Rosalyn Baker – who has elsewhere asserted that “our people don’t need to be treated by quacks”, suggesting that her quack detection abilities are poorly calibrated  – and Mike Gabbard), which would compel insurers to cover care provided by naturopathic doctors; SB 1034, which will lift the cap on the number of visits related to personal injury protection benefits provided through motor vehicle insurance; HB 1952, regarding network adequacy, and SB 2332 (dead; sponsored by Ruderman, Baker, Gabbard, Kalani English, Gil Keith-Agaran, Michelle Kidani, William Espero, Les Ihara, Clarence Nishihara & Brian Taniguchi), which would allow naturopathic doctors to prescribe controlled substances.

 

Diagnosis: Though she wouldn’t appear clearly delusional to anyone meeting her just briefly, that just makes Karen Frangos and her organization all the more dangerous. They’re thus far been frighteningly successful, to the detriment of us all.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2862: Gary Franchi

It has long been a delusion among particularly paranoid conspiracy theorists that FEMA is constructing or on the verge of constructing a set of concentration camps – potentially death camps – to facilitate a mass internment of good patriots, Christians or whatever group the particular conspiracy theorist promoting the conspiracy theory feel that they belong to, in preparation for some (always immanent) government declaration of martial law.

 

Gary Franchi began his rise to fame in conspiracy circles as a leading promoter of the idea. In 2009, for instance, he produced the video Camp FEMA: American Lockdown, arguing precisely that FEMA – a notoriously bureaucratic and chaotic government institution completely unsuited for secretive conspiracies – is building such camps to house political dissenters. The camps are located “on existing military bases now,” said Franchi – adding that “it’s not a big secret” (it is, in fact, not a big secret, but not for the reason Franchi thinks) – but that FEMA was ready to utilize other structures as well, including airport hangars and vacant office buildings; even “[y]our local church may have already signed a deal with the devil.” And then, of course, his rhetoric turned ominous: “If you believe in the 2nd amendment, if you believe in the right to self-defense, then perhaps you will have a different decision to make than the person that will let them kick your door in and drag you out.”

 

Franchi was at that point (and probably still is) national director of RestoreTheRepublic.com, a group (website) dedicated to eliminating the Federal Reserve and the IRS, to making it illegal to implant microchips in people, and ro end globalization since globalization is a means to a one-world government. He also ran the Patriot social networking site RestoreTheRepublic.net and appeared as a host of the ‘Reality Report’ on Freedom.TV and as editor of Republic Magazine, and was a mainstay at various Patriot conferences where he would lay out his conspiracy theories about global elites: “There is a global elite structure of bankers and organizations that are pulling the strings of the parties, pulling the strings of the president, the speaker of the House,” contended Franchi.

 

In the 2010s, Franchi’s media conglomerate evolved into the Next News Network (NNN), an infamous online operation “that recycles stories harvested from far-right publications, fake news sites and Russian media outlets” particularly targeted at exploiting youtube’s algorithms to generate as many views as possible. Prior to the 2016 election, for instance, YouTube’s algorithms “consistently amplified” the NNN’s anti-Clinton conspiracy videos, and in the 2020s, NNN’s COVID-19 conspiracy videos racked up more than a billion views – despite YouTube’s promise to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation. Indeed, YouTube instead gave Franchi a gold “creator Award”. As for the 2016 election videos, the top-performing NNN video was apparently one claiming that Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old (Franchi is more or less open about the claim being simply made up out of thin air); data show that three quarters of the traffic to such videos were due to YouTube recommendations – external traffic accounted for almost nothing.

 

As for COVID, NNN produced much-viewed videos covering the whole gamut of conspiracy theories (with no apparent regard even for coherence), claiming that COVID is a “false flag” to force “mandatory vaccines” and microchips on people and that Bill Gates and 5G cell phone towers were somehow involved – indeed, NNN was to a large extent responsible for popularizing such conspiracy theories among paranoid, reason-challenged low-information groups. Their video “EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Rashid Buttar BLASTS Gates, Fauci, EXPOSES Fake Pandemic Numbers As Economy Collapses”, featuring discredited osteopath and hysterically deranged conspiracy theorist Rashid Buttar, received nearly 7 million views and 1.2 million Facebook engagements before being taken down. In the video, Buttar claimed that Anthony Fauci had the COVID-19 virus created in a North Carolina lab before outsourcing it to China in a deliberate attempt to cause a pandemic for not-entirely-coherently-explained purposes but also that not a single death had actually been demonstrated to be caused by the COVID-19 virus – the plan, of course, was to use an entirely benign virus to introduce vaccines that would then kill everyone, in line with Bill Gates’s depopulation agenda – that the activity at hospitals was all fake, that hydroxychloroquine had “at least 99% efficacy” in treating COVID-19, and that 5G and chemtrails were involved; Franchi himself concluded that Buttar had showed (Franchi doesn’t distinguish showed from claimed without justification whatsoever) that there is fraud “being perpetuated across the world by the World Health Organization, the CDC, Bill Gates, the deep state, the mainstream media”.

 

The audiences for NNN’s massive promotion of evertyhing conspiracy include people like the 87th United States attorney general Attorney General Pam Bondi and Rudy Giuliani, and it has proved to be a threat to civilization also far beyond the US.

 

Diagnosis: Although it would be natural to suspect Franchi of being merely a scrupulous entrepeneur, evidence shows that Franchi has been a deranged conspiracy theorist from the start. Whatever the case may be, as one of the most influential producers and promoters of fake news and misinformation in the US, Franchi is a major threat to civilization.

#2861: Michael W. Fox

Few scientific conclusion are better established, despite protestations from loons and conspiracy theorists, than the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. The Washington Post’s veterinary advice “Animal Doctor” columnist and former vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, Michael W. Fox, is, however, one of those loons and conspiracy theorists who disagree. Indeed, not only does Fox believe, contrary to all evidence, that there is a connection between vaccines and autoimmune diseases and that the medical establishment is in a conspiracy to deny it and discount antivaccine rants and anecdotes suggesting a different opinion: Fox also believes that vaccines cause autism in animals – that, at least, is the delusional idea espoused in his 2016 Local Living column ‘When cats are very needy, they often knead a lot’, where he also promote the silly book Vaccines and Autoimmunity compiled by familiar anti-vaccine stalwarts like Yehuda Shoenfield and Lucija Tomljenovic.

 

Now, Fox is in fact one of several sources for the notion that pets can get “autism”, an idea that has apparently become popular among some groups (no serious science suggests quite that). But Fox’s championship of the idea should probably be seen in light of his having built a significant part of his career on producing eccentric papers on attempts to apply pop-psychology and Freudian concepts to pets, e.g. a paper on the ‘evidence’ of the Oedipus complex in dogs, and similarly eccentric columns for the Washington Post on e.g. post-traumatic stress disorders in cats and obsessive-compulsive disorders and panic attacks in dogs, and so on. It’s all gibberish, but it makes his current notability as a leading advocate for anti-vaccine nonsense to pet owners not entirely surprising.

 

Now, Fox may, in fact, be British, but given his stint as vice president of the Humane Society of the United States (and because we didn’t discover his nationality until writing this post), we’ll grandfather him in here.

 

Diagnosis: Do not listen to this delusional lunatic about anything. Keep a safe distance, and make sure to keep your pets at a safe distance, too.

#2860: Megan Fox (II)

Megan Fox is an actress who has made several stalwart efforts to confirm the myth that people with marketable looks are empty-headed morons. In particular, Fox produced and starred in her own show Mysteries and Myths with Megan Fox for the fake news and conspiracy theory outlet The Travel Channel, the purpose being to try to argue, by omission, misunderstanding and misrepresentation, how archaeologists are in a conspiracy to hide ‘the truth’ about history from all of us. (“History only gives us a one-sided view of the truth,” says Fox.)

 

And Fox is, as she sees herself, supremely well-positioned to take on such a task: having no background in, interest in, or understanding of the processes or role of evidence in disciplines such as history and archaeology: “I haven't spent my entire life building a career in academia so I don't have to worry about my reputation or being rebuked by my colleagues, which allows me to push back on the status quo. So much of our history needs to be re-examined.” I.e., her lack of understanding, knowledge or background makes her more qualified than the experts. In fact, Fox’s credentials stem not only from her lack of background in archaeology or history: Fox “just hated school, period. I wasn’t interested and I wasn’t getting anything from it. I’ve never been a big believer in formal education,” she says, and “to get caught up in something that you don’t feel totally right about or that doesn’t make sense to you is a really, really bad idea.” Her status as a maverick outsider – a veritable Galileo, even – should in other words be ensured. (It does admittedly seem correct that she didn’t get anything from her stints in formal education and that the contents didn’t make sense to her.) And though she doesn’t fancy ‘formal education’, she has ostensibly been long obsessed with “the history of ancient cultures, people and places, always questioning their ‘documented’ story,” according to a Travel Channel spokesperson, and she is a great fan of shows like Ancient Aliens.

 

The series, “an epic and personal journey across the globe” that will challenge “the conventional wisdom that has existed for centuries”, was apparently set to delve into silly and nonsensical questions like “whether Amazon women really existed or if the Trojan War was real” – the target audience presumably being in particular people who would assume that the fact that her journey was “personal” adds credibility to whatever nonsense Fox comes up with.

 

We admit that we cannot be bothered to watch the results – they seem, based on reports from people who actually bothered to watch them, to have been rather blander than they were initially supposed to be, but still full of misinformation, nonsense and desperate attempts to portray well-established facts as somehow novel and game-changing.

 

Diagnosis: Being uninformed and a know-nothing doesn’t make you a loon. But when you add in some self-delusion and delusions of grandeur, like the idea that you nevertheless (or, in this case, because of your status as uninformed) have anything to contribute are in a special position to reject the claims and views of those who really do know something, things change. And Megan Fox certainly combines her complete lack of insight or understanding with serious confidence in the value of her perspectives on issues.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencealert

#2859: Megan Fox (I)

No, not the actress – she’s up next – but yet another dense fundamentalist and creationist. This Megan Fox is (or at least used to be back in 2015) “a homeschooling, Tea Partying, conservative mother of two (with another on the way!) out and about in the suburbs who is also a popular columnist for PJ Media.”

 

A fine illustration of the kind of person we’re dealing with is the video she made of her visit to the ‘Evolving Earth’ exhibit at the Chicago Field Museum in 2015 and her interpretation of the exhibit as a showcase for the silliness of evolutionary biology and of how stupid the scientists are (indeed, Fox is a self-proclaimed specialist in “exposing” liberals and scientists – apparently, scientists and liberals are much the same thing): For instance, at the start of the exhibit, Fox reads a panel saying “At first, all eukaryotes were single-celled, and many still are today”, to which her response is “this makes no sense. No sense” (she hasn’t heard the term ‘eukaryote’ before); then she reads a panel reading “every organism, living and extinct, that is not single celled – including you – is made up of eukaryotic cells”, which she thinks is scientists admitting that evolution doesn’t happen: “doesn’t that suggest that every thing was made up of eukaryotic cells in the beginning, that they weren’t something else that became eukaryotic cells, that they were always and have been eukaryotic cells?” (Hint: no, it doesn’t suggest that). So when the panels start talking about things like mitochondria and evolution, Fox can immediately point out that “None of this makes any sense. It doesn’t make sense to a 5th grader, it doesn’t make sense to a 3rd grader, it doesn’t make sense to a 30 year old. None of this makes any sense.” Therefore evolution is bunk – i.e., since Fox doesn’t know basic biology and hasn’t heard about most of the stuff biologists are doing, the scientists are, just like her, confused and evolution is false: “This is not good thinking. This is muddled thinking. This is thinking from like Darwin’s thinking from a hundred years ago, and we should know better by now.” She does think, however, that “Darwin once said that if the single cell is more complex than I think it is, then all of my theories … I’m going to have to start all over again,” which is … not remotely a Darwin quote but a misunderstanding of a common creationist misunderstanding of Darwin. And to a panel dating the evolution of land plants, her response is, predictably, “sounds dumb. How do you know this? It’s just a fairy tale. It’s all a guess. No one knows. It’s all an opinion. Did they have a video camera then? Show me the video. There are no transitional forms. They made it all up.” Yes, it’s a familiar pattern: Fox is ignorant and stupid, and being confronted by facts and things she doesn’t know makes her angry, therefore all the things beyond her grasp is all bollocks and lies. But there is a teaching moment here: You see, reasonable people would use an exhibition like this to try to learn something; not creationists like Fox, though.

 

Fox’s own conclusion from the trip was that she “found many examples of inconsistencies” (i.e. things she thought were “dumb” – she is unclear about what ‘inconsistency’ means), and she accused the Field Museum of pushing “certain theories as if they are absolute proven law when that is not how the scientific method works” (no, she doesn’t grasp the difference between theories and laws – what did you expect?). Indeed, she “found enough bias” toward facts and evidence (not her words) to conclude that “the Field Museum pushed an agenda with quasi-religious overtones: the cult of ‘science’ where the ‘scientists’ are more like high priests pushing a religion instead of using the correct scientific method.” There is a decent response to Fox’s confusions here.

 

She later had a somewhat similar quarrel with the local library, which aroused her ire because it provided open internet access to the public, which could be used to watch porn! (She was also furious because they wouldn’t let her use the computers reserved for children in the children’s section, because they made her fill out a form to get a library card, and because the librarian was helpful and helped her get online since him being helpful to her suggests he would also be helpful to pedophiles). That quarrel ultimately landed her in court after an intense period of stalking and harassing librarians (including taking photos of their homes and falsely accusing them of drunkenness), filing hundreds of FOIA requests (with Kevin DuJan and dozens of moronic complaints with the Illinois attorney general, and disturbing library board meetings. She and DuJan published their account of the events in a book, Shut Up!: The Bizarre War that One Public Library Waged Against the First Amendment.

 

Thing is, though: Megan Fox isn’t just a local moron. She has written for David Horowitz at FrontPage Magazine and NewsRealBlog, and extensively for PJ Media. She is also a podcast host for The Fringe. In other words, she seems to have readers and listeners who consume her nonsense and nod in agreement with what she says! Flabbergasting.

 

Diagnosis: Megan Fox is stupid and ignorant, and her ignorance is a militant kind of ignorance: if she doesn’t know, then no one does, and any information about a topic she doesn’t know must be false. She is also quite clearly (and at least partially as a result of her ignorance) a weapons-grade asshole. That she also homeschools kids is a tragedy.

 

Hat-tip: Pharyngula

#2858: Judith Fouladbakhsh

“Integrative oncology” attempts to integrate pseudoscience, woo and pseudo-religious quackery with science-based oncology on the false premise that integrating bullshit with reality-based measures will improve the outcome for patients and the true premise that such integration might be financially lucrative. An important component in marketing such efforts is to recategorize science-based techniques, such as diet and exercise, as “alternative” to justify the conclusion that “alternative” treatments work and then use that conclusion to market pure bullshit such as reiki or TCM. Another important marketing component is pointing to the opioid crisis and concluding that we need alternative treatments of pain, neglecting to mention that the alternatives suggested don’t do shit for pain. Though it is dishonest, the marketing is effective, and centers that offer “integrative” treatments to patients and courses designed to indoctrinate healthcare practitioners have popped up all over the place.

 

The Integrative Oncology Program, for instance, was one such effort, funded by a National Cancer Institute R25 grant and designed to offer training of healthcare personnel through an online eLearning component and in-person sessions at the University of Michigan. And yes, it would promote homeopathy, as well as Ayurvedic medicine, naturopathy in general and high-dose Vitamin C. And it would be promoted precisely in the way proponents of integrative oncology usually do it: Co-opt some science-based diet and lifestyle modalities (diet, exercise), and use them as cover for the quackery.

 

Judith Fouladbakhsh was one of the instructors affiliated with the program, and an entirely typical specimen. Fouladbakhsh is an advanced practice nurse and Associate Professor at Oakland University, but she also holds “advanced clinical practice certifications” [certified by whom?] “in Community Health and Holistic Nursing, Healing Touch, Reflexology and Reiki” (i.e. various variants of energy medicine). She is apparently also faculty member at the Beaumont Health System School of Yoga Therapy and can report “extensive experience in complementary and alternative (traditional) medicine, integrative oncology, pain management, public health and cancer nursing”. (Her actual research, however, consists of things like investigating “effects of yoga on breathing, mood, sleep and QOL of lung cancer patients”, which can’t really be deemed obviously “alternative”). Fouladbakhsh is also on the board of trustees of the Society for Integrative Ontology (SIO) and, apparently, developer of the CAM Healthcare Model©. She is also coauthor (with e.g. Lorenzo Cohen, Dugald Seely and naturopath Heather Greenlee) of the miserable failure of a wishwashy, market-jargon-laden infomercial that is the SIO updated clinical guidelines for breast cancer care, which was somehow endorsed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology but which strikingly, and predictably, neglects to try to explain what integrative oncology even is (answer: it is a brand, not a medical specialty).

 

Diagnosis: One of a scary number of genuine medical providers who have conflated market-friendly with safe and efficacious … and that’s the most favorable attribution we could come up with. There are darker and scarier diagnoses that are probably correct, too.

 

Hat-tip: David Gorski @ sciencebased medicine