#2309: Christopher Earl Strunk

Birtherism might be getting old, but since the central players are unlikely to be up to anything good these days either, we think it’s worth reminding people of who they were. Christopher Earl Strunk is a guy who files a lot of lawsuits (there is an interesting list here), including suing the New York State Board of Elections and others in 2011 to prevent President Obama from appearing on the 2012 presidential ballot. Strunk apparently alleged that Obama was connected to a massive conspiracy involving hundreds of people at behest of the Roman Catholic Church and especially the Jesuits. Judge Arthur Schack said of the case that “if the complaint in this action was a movie script, it would be entitled ‘The Manchurian Candidate Meets The Da Vinci Code.’” Strunk was fined some $177,000 in costs and penalties for filing “a frivolous” suit and wasting the court’s time. There are some absolutely fascinating details here.

Perhaps Strunk’s most recent suit is a 2019 lawsuit challenging New York’s new abortion law. To get a sense of where it is coming from – and possibly its likelihood of winning (update: it didn’t) – you can consult the part of the suit that contains Strunk’s thoughts on how fluoride lowers IQ. 

Apart from filing lawsuits, Strunk also writes books, including Soul Envy: SCOTUS in between the I.R.S. and Antioch Ministries (apparently a deranged take on some court case, written with Ronald Dean Joling and Eric Jon Phelps, whom we have encountered before), Jesuit Social Justice versus Le droit des Gens: The Global Estate versus Nation States, and Loose Nukes: The Kursk’s Unregistered Missiles (with Phelps, one Anatoly Miranovsky and Michael Shrimpton, the former British barrister and conspiracy theorist who was convicted in 2014 for falsely reporting that Germany was planning a nuclear attack on the 2012 Summer Olympics.) In 2016 he apparently also tried to run for President. It is unclear if anyone noticed.

Diagnosis: Colorful nuisance, mostly. But it remains staggering how many of these people there are, and how many fans they’ve actually got.