#1526: Karen De Coster

Karen De Coster is a blogger and freelance writer and “ardent lover and student of Austrian economics,” whose posts tend to appear on Lew Rockwell and suchlikes, but have occasionally had the honor of making it all the way to PrisonPlanet. The latter group tends to include her health-related ones; you see, De Coster also “stud[ies] health and nutrition issues and I live a paleo-primal lifestyle in terms of diet.” As you’d expect, De Coster is a conspiracy theorist when it comes to health matters, and an ardent defender of health freedom – so ardent that she tends to reject all science and evidence that underpin collective health efforts like vaccines. She’s not above using NaturalNews as a source of information, and has also used this German homeopath who claims to have shown that vaccines don’t work.

In “The Vaccination Nation Aggressors Are the Neocons of the Health World”, she laments how mean skeptics of fraud, quackery and pseudoscience are when they claim that “those folks of choice who own their bodies and make decisions regarding their bodies” are “‘anti-vaccine loons’ because they they don’t want their healthy body, or the healthy bodies of their loved ones, to be stuffed with the government-patented, high-profit, untested, unproven, toxin-loaded drugs of the Big Government-Big Pharma, corporate-state regime?” That pretty much sums up De Coster’s view of the world: Big Pharma and Big Government are in a conspiracy to inject us with toxins for profit, and they wish to force us to vaccinate because … because they simply don’t like that people have the freedom of choice, presumably because they are commies and commies hate freedom. People who accept the science of vaccination are, on the other hand, “fucking retards and mindless automatons,” and examples of how “people love to be slaves.” Also, “how is my unvaccinated kid a danger to your unvaccinated kid if vaccines work?” No, she doesn’t really understand the point, but she’s damn sure that science really is a politically motivated conspiracy against Austrian economics.

And critics of alternative medicine? “Really? The definition of alternative is ‘something available as another opportunity,’ or ‘choice,’ or ‘behavior that is considered unconventional and is often seen as a challenge to traditional norms.’ And the problem with that is…? The problem is that the pushers of collective thinking can’t stand a dissident outlier.” Gotcha. She is, however, probably onto the very reason why altmed promoters chose to call their quackery “alternative” to begin with.

Unsurprisingly, she is a firm supporter of both Russell Blaylock and Joe Mercola, whereby she is “resisting tyranny one word at a time.”

She has also ranted against e.g. the idea that eating meat “is being conveniently linked to a ‘larger carbon footprint,’ another one of those symbolic labels that can’t be quantified without political intimidation and corporate-special interest meddling.” In reality, it’s all about the government trying to control what you do. “Sustainable” is a catchword “of the next generation of food tyrants.” She generally seems to dismiss global warming as a conspiracy by “envirocommunists” (or global alarmist fascists). Whatever’s politically convenient for her.

Diagnosis: De Coster really is a good example of the inability of some wingnuts to distinguish scientific evidence from political ideology; and since her political views are anti-establishment (in some sense), anti-science is, to her, a natural extension. Given the feebleness of her rants on medicine she is (hopefully) probably rather harmless, but her guiding sentiment is surely not.