#2819: Maria Espinoza

The Remembrance Project is an anti-immigration organization founded by Texas couple Maria Espinoza and Tim Lyng in 2009 and devoted to “[e]ducating and raising awareness about the epidemic of killing of Americans by illegal aliens” through promoting harrowing anecdotes of crimes committed by illegal such. Espinoza had, by 2009, already made a name for herself as president of the Houston chapter of the Eagle Forum, which should give you an indication of what kind of group TRP actually is. To Espinoza, there is conspiracy afoot: immigration isn’t just a threat; it is a manufactured threat and a deliberate attempt by the powers that be to ruin America: “This Biden-Harris administration, I believe, just hates America. To your point with the border, this is intentional, it's for a reason, and the reason is to destroy our country. And we have to get a hold of it”. And it’s not like she didn’t warn you; prior to the 2020 election, Espinoza claimed that the US is “at risk of invasion under a Biden Adm[in]!”

 

And even before QAnon, Espinoza had determined that “Child molestation and rape are very numerous in this illegal alien demographic!”; indeed “unsecured communities, human trafficking, molestations of our children, are all part of the vernacular of this disease that illegal immigration speaks”. The TPR has also promoted conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and that Trump’s reelection was stolen from him – “Trump Won! STILL My President! Cheaters never win...wait and see!” tweeted Espinoza in February, 2021. Of course, Espinoza’s respect for the democratic processes she claims to champion is not unequivocal; in 2018 she suggested that anti-immigration actvists should find some kind of “little loophole” to remove officials who disagree with her on immigration from public office before the next election.

 

TRP is, however, at the forefront of the anti-sanctuary-cities movement and has had some serious impact, especially with the Trump administration, and it enjoys the support of a number of members Congress. TRP is also closely connected to people central to the white nationalist movement, like Paul Nehlen.

 

Indeed, Espinoza has herself tried to run for Congress, both in 2016 and in 2020, on a platform of “work[ing] to stop Socialism and the Democrats' liberal agenda, and work to peel-away the indoctrinating tentacles of education that has encroached upon parental rights and the privacy of our children.” Her 2016 platform also included e.g. a moratorium on Muslim immigration, prohibiting same-sex marriage, drug-testing welfare beneficiaries, and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

Diagnosis: It’s hard to motivate much more than an exasperated sigh here, but yeah, Espinoza is yet another conspiracy theorist in a position of somewhat significant influence and power.

 

Hat-tip: SPLCenter

#2818: Scott Esk

More shit from the past! Scott Esk is an Oklahoma fundie who supports stoning gay peopleto death. In particular, Esk was a 2014 Oklahoma state House candidate for the Tea Party, and although the state was already famous for its anti-gay policies back then, Esk was apparently dismayed by his fellow candidates’ reluctance to grow a real spine on the issue: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it,” said Esk, adding that stoning gay people to death “goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I’m largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.” You see, stoning “was done in the Old Testament under a law that came directly from God” and “what was done back then was what’s just. … And I do stand for Biblical morality.” Now, to pacify those with some concerns about his suitability for the legislature, Esk was quick to add that “I never said I would author legislation to put homosexuals to death, but I didn’t have a problem with it.” So there.

 

And if you consider aspects of his view to be offensive, Esk is ready to set the record straight: “The fact is, that it’s much more offensive knowing what obscene things homosexuals do with each other than it is for somebody to hold the view that it is indecent.” Esk ultimately received 5% of his district’s vote in the primary; not much, perhaps, but it means that a number of people did vote for him, and he received some 43% when he tried again in 2022.

 

Diagnosis: Thing is, Scott Esk and his views represent a major strand of American “libertarianism” – one that makes “libertarianism” hard to distinguish from Taliban- or ISIS-style theocracies – and he does, apparently, enjoy far more support than reasonable people would like to think.

#2817: Thomas Ertl

Veterans Today (VT) is an infamous conspiracy website focusing (primarily) on various anti-semitic conspiracies about, well, virtually any event taking place anywhere in the world, including, in particular, Holocaust denialism; VT did, for instance, famously publish (VT editor) Jim Fetzer’s Sandy Hook truther conspiracy theories (‘Did Mossad death squads slaughter American children at Sandy Hook?’).

 

Most of all, however, VT is a Russian propaganda outlet consistently pushing the Kremlin party line, and it is formally partnered with several Russian institutions – like New Eastern Outlook – as well as with with the Iranian state media outlet Press TV. Thomas Ertl is among the writers for VT who toe the Kremlin party line: His February 2022 piece ‘The Ukraine Crisis: Facts Versus Lies — An American Christian Perspective’, for instance, is an attempted justification of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in which Ertl also claims e.g. that it is a lie that Ukraine is a sovereign country.

 

We assume that VT’s Ertl is the same Ertl as the Florida homebuilder and former member of the Council for National Policy who in 2016, for the dominionist Oak Initiative, published a gloriously insane rant about the Access Hollywood video, the release of which Ertl blamed on “the establishment”. The Establishment, you see, is “desperate” to “destroy” Trump because Trump is a threat to “their plans for their New World Order and surrender of U.S. sovereignty”, including “the big banks, and multi-national corporations” [he seems somewhat unclear on Trump’s background]. But more importantly, Trump challenges the satanic underpinnings of The Establishment: “Who of us can know the will of God and plan He has for our great country? But can you not see He is up to something big in the candidacy of Donald Trump?” asks Ertl, asserting (he may be among the first to do so) that Trump may be “a modern-day Cyrus and as President a great defender of the Christian religion.” The Establishment is also working with mainstream media (“deep state papers”) to “keep the pedophilia and assorted sexual perversions of their political associates under wraps.”

 

Diagnosis: For all intents and purposes a Russian bot, and a fine example of how toeing the Kremlin party line, anti-semitism, QAnon and religious fundamentalism blends together to in the dark, rotten stew of hatred in which the US is currently mired and which rather seriously threatens to topple the whole civilization project.

#2816: Joni Ernst

Joni Ernst is the US junior senator from Iowa, a hardcore wingnut and versatile conspiracy theorist. Ernst emerged from the Tea Party in the early 2010s, and was by 2016 sufficiently prominent to be (rumored to be) initially offered Trump’s VP spot, an offer she declined.

 

Like many wingnuts, Ernst has an idiosyncratic and/or poor grasp of the US Constitution, believing e.g. that states can nullify laws passed by the federal government and that local law enforcement officers can freely arrest federal officials attempting to implement Obamacare. She also argued vociferously that then-President Obama had become a dictator that needed to be removed from office and prosecuted for crimes against the Constitution, without being able to identify what those crimes were supposed to be or how they violated the Constitution. In 2014, she also argued that same-sex marriage should be left to the states while simultaneously arguing for a federal marriage amendment that would prohibit gay marriage.

 

Thus far, however, we have mostly dealt with standard wingnut fare; examples of the stuff that really qualify Ernst for an entry here, however, include at least:

 

-       Endorsing and promoting Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, claiming e.g. that the non-binding guidelines would lead to farmers being forced off their land and made to live in cities

-       Believing that there were indeed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.

-       Being a climate change denier: “I have not seen proven proof that [climate change] is entirely man-made”, said Ernst, committing over the course of ten words a lie, a ludicrous strawman, a red herring, and an appeal to ignorance, while simultaneously displaying complete and utter misunderstanding of how science works.

 

Ernst is also on record fuelling COVID-19 conspiracy theories, e.g. by claiming early on that case numbers were greatly inflated and that healthcare providers might be falsifying them.

 

Diagnosis: A good illustration of the fact that the distinction between the mainstream right and the conspiracy-driven wingnut cuckoo-land has been blurry for a while, Ernst definitely has investments in the latter. She is nevertheless a US senator who seems to enjoy quite a bit of authority, recognition and influence among what many would describe as the “mainstream” parts of the right. Scary and dangerous.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2815: Katherine Erlich

Pretty sure this is the right one.

 

Katherine Erlich is a Michigan-based “holistic pediatrician”. And as so many pseudoscientifically oriented quacks who label themselves ‘holistic’, Erlich is antivaccine. Indeed, Erlich is so pseudoscientifically oriented and anti-vaccine that she credulously promotes an online survey marketed at anti-vaccine parents on their opinions of vaccines (conducted by anonymous trolls affiliated with something called the Progressive Health Consortium, which was endorsed by Rashid Buttar) as some sort of evidence that vaccines are dangerous. Despite being obviously delusional, Erlich was nevertheless recruited as some sort of expert witness by the resident antivaxx loon in the Michigan State legislature at the time, Tom Hooker, to testify in favor of his proposed bill HB 5126 that would make it easier to obtain nonmedical vaccine exemptions.

 

Now, Erlich is, in fact, a board-certified pediatrician, but that does, of course, not mean that the advice and treatment regimes she offers at Healing the Whole Child are reality-based. Now, according to herself, she “takes a practical and individualized approach to pediatric care that focuses on the principles of health, wellness, and the safe resolution of illness”, which, of course, all pediatricians do, but for Erlich, that’s not really what ‘holistic’ approach means (even though it’s what she claims it means):‘holistic’ means that she integrates what she calls ‘natural methods’, which is code for woo, into what she offers. And Erlich promotes a wide range of woo, including homeopathy; her website also features a section called ‘Health Tips’, which requires registering and which features a Quack Miranda Warning. Moreover, Erlich is co-author of Super Nutrition for Babies, which is, among other things, a pseudoscientific guide to ‘toxins’ and which has been endorsed by e.g. Natasha Campbell-McBride and the Weston Price Foundation, which really should tell you everything you need to know.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, she endorses it all, as long as it can be marketed with a ‘wellness’ or ‘natural’ tag (so: anything) – unless, of course, it is something that is actually beneficial to your health, like vaccines. Erlich doesn’t endorse that. Stay away from this one, and even more importantly: keep your kids away.

#2814: Allan Erickson

We admit that we have no precise idea who Allan Erickson is, but at the very least he is a wingnut with a blog and and a major persecution complex. And who is he afraid of? Zeh commies, of course. Communists and atheists – which, to Erickson, are two sides of the same coin (we haven’t seen him try to explain what he thinks communism is). And given that the commies are everywhere, everything Erickson doesn’t like is interpreted as part of a communist ploy. So it goes. That communism is a serious threat is shown by what Erickson (hilariously) believes is the outsize influence of the rightwing’s favorite imaginary boogeyman, Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals Erickson consistently fails to grasp (and at least grasp the context for) and has read, because he is stupid and afraid, as some sort of Satanic manifesto.

 

And Erickson, in the manner of conspiracy theorists in general, uses his paranoid understanding of Alinsky as the framework with which he interprets the actions and utterances of anyone he disagrees with. Obama, for instance, as Erickson wrote in 2015, “loves Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which sanctions violence and thuggery”, an “atheist thug motivated by hate using violence to achieve only strife and division” who, like the DNC (“a virtual army of Alinsky assassins”) and leftists in general, “refuse to take personal responsibility, always blaming someone else, and demanding the rich pay their bills”. Yes, those poor rich people are heavily oppressed in the US: “Since the rich are in the minority, the rich are an easy target because they cannot adequately defend themselves”. In short, “Man without God is a beast. Beasts like Alinsky and Obama now roam the country,” and it’s all “about gaining more iron-fisted control, for the Left is all about control, total control”.

 

Fortunately for Erickson, Ben Carson was there to fight them: Carson “makes Obama look bad, real bad. And in that, he makes the Democrats look bad, really, really bad. He increasingly makes the MSM look bad. With each attack, Carson gets stronger. Figure that. And so Carson must be destroyed, otherwise, the work of the atheistic communists will be for nothing these last 100 years.”

 

Diagnosis: Probably very minor, but also very typical.

#2813: Mani Erfan

There’s a lot of these, and Mani Erfan is yet another. Erfan is a preacher and author affiliated with Frank Amedia and one of the “prophets” and “apostles” of the POTUS Shield ring of deranged end-times loons.

 

And he does, indeed, believe that we are in the end days and that “the Lord is coming back.” In order to bring about the return of Christ, however, Islam “has to be completely broken down” first. What, exactly, that involves is somewhat unclear, and pointing out, as Erfan does, that Iran must “crumble” doesn’t add much clarity, but one important thing we can do, as he sees it, is to show unwavering support for Israel: American Christians, says Erfan, must resist attempts by “the enemy” to diminish U.S. support for Israel, and in that respect, POTUS Shield is fighting “for the very survival of our nation at the seat judgment [sic] of Christ.” Otherwise, his efforts encompass mostly a lot of decreeing and yelling, some gavel striking, and prayer.

 

Erfan himself is – according to Erfan – an Iranian-American (former) half-Jew, half-Muslim who at some point became a Christian. He is the author of something called True Wealth: How to Fulfill your Dreams without Losing Your Soul, a book we really, really can’t be bothered to look at in any more detail.

 

Diagnosis: Raging lunatic, fundie-style. We don’t know how many followers he might have, but he seems to be among those who are eminently replaceable without much difference by any number of shrieking fundies out there.

#2812: Jillian Mai Thi Epperly

In any effort to record lunacy and lunatics in the US, Jilly Juice will serve as something of a centerpiece – few things come more hilariously, ineptly and frighteningly insane. Jilly Juice is (essentially) cabbage water left in a warm room for three days after a dangerous amount of salt is added, and which its inventor, Jillian Mai Thi Epperly, who has no medical or scientific background whatsoever, claims can cure more or less any disease and non-disease known to mankind. That’s silly enough to merit laughs and finger-pointing, but Epperly and her product went on – given the predictable consequences of actually ingesting the product – to become the focal point, peppered with incoherent religious fundamentalism and somewhat random spouts of bigotry, of something resembling an explosive diarrhea cult back in 2017 and 2018. As Epperly herself put it, “I’m proud of being a leader of a poop cult”. And her Facebook group did, at one point, have some 60,000 followers, although it is unclear how many among these were true believers and how many were merely curious to see where this clown train wreck could be heading.

 

The claims

As for the product itself, Epperly, a random woman from Ohio, claims to have developed and used it to cure herself of chronic illnesses, allergies and a range of common ailments. As she sees it, her juice targets candida, which is a fungus that naturally occurs in the gut, but which Epperly claims, as laid out in her self-published manifesto Candida: Weaponized Fungus Mainstreaming Mutancy and based on no understanding of human or other biology whatsoever, does not only attract gut parasites but is the root cause of all human disease, broadly construed. As the story goes, candida supposedly causes harmful bacteria to multiply and create holes in the intestine, which again allows toxins from food to enter one’s bloodstream; Epperly refers to the process as “leaky gut syndrome”, an expression she picked up, with no recognizable attempt to understand or assess it, from other woo sites on the internet.

 

Though her product doesn’t, in fact, target candida, which has nothing to do with any of the conditions she describes, consuming a gallon of the juice every day will, as Epperly sees it, prevent leaky guts and cure you of (among other things):

 

-       Autism

-       Cancer

-       Psoriasis

-       HIV

-       Down’s syndrome

-       Being gay or transgender: According to Epperly, the gay and the transgender are caused by mutations in the reproductive system (“is our society ready to accept that gay lesbian and transgender is a mutation of the human body,” she asked her followers), and as such curable by her fermented cabbage.

 

The juice can also reverse vasectomies, apparently: “Yes it will reverse his vasectomy just as it will untie your tubes if you had your tubes tied. Remember mother nature did not intend for you to have your tubes tied or men to have vasectomies that’s all Western medicine we’re reversing all of what western medicine has done to mutate us,” Epperly responded to a potential cult follower. Open your mind. “It’s very easy to make broad claims when you understand how the human body works and you see very specific measurable results in real time within,” says Epperly, and that passage constitutes the totality of the evidence she has for her claims. Indeed, just for good measure (if you’re following her at this point, there’s probably no limit to what she’ll get away with), the juice can also cause you to regrow lost limbs and organs, reverse balding, and let you live to be over 400 years old (or forever).

 

No, Epperly does of course nott provide evidence for the claims; indeed, Epperly provides no hint that she recognizes evidence as a relevant parameter. Nor does she provide any indication of what the mechanisms by which her product would achieve the alleged effects would be supposed to be, beyond incoherent ranting that doesn’t even amount to technobabble, since Epperly doesn’t have the necessary vocabulary to technobabble: “We’re using a different context in my world, and the manifestations from the salt and the accessing of the nutrients is gonna give you a different context of what the symptoms are. So essentially what it is, is we’re trying to turn an atheist into a Christian,” says Epperly – i.e. (to the extent that the thought process is intelligible), ingesting fermented cabbage water will change your perception of your symptoms and thereby change the underlying disease, because religion. It is probably unnecessary to point out (though we’ll repeat it) that Jilly Juice won’t target candida, even though – and more importantly – none of the conditions she claims to target have anything to do with candida.

 

The consequences

What the juice actually does, if consumed at the recommended dosage of a gallon a day, is to cause (through salt poisioning) severe nausea, headaches, dizziness, fever and potentially death from hypernatremia, which Epperly describes (perhaps not the death part) as “feeling the healing”. A gallon of Jilly Juice contains, after all, roughly 28,008 mgs of sodium, which is roughly 12.5 times the recommended maximum daily dosage. It will also, notably, cause explosive blasts of diarrhea: Epperly calls these affectionately “waterfalls” and denies that the diarrhea is real diarrhea – rather, ‘waterfalls’ flush out the parasites, which are then visible in the toilet bowl (which has lead to some hellishly deranged pareidolic images around the internet). Her website’s FAQ section does in fact contain a few actual pieces of fact about water and salt cut and pasted from the Internet – though mixed with e.g. claims that salt is a “positive element” for the immune system, whatever that means – that stand out as grammatically coherent sentences containing real words in a sea of garbled handwavey word salads. She does claim that “I get all my information from PubMed, from government resources,” but also that “I pull it all together to have a different intention”. That’s one way of putting it.

 

In fact, Epperly has basically admitted that she just made everything up as she went along and that her facebook cult served as a laboratory of sorts: She’d watch how “the protocol” affected her followers, and adapt her ideas to the results. The idea that her product expels parasites, for instance, was one that only emerged after people posted photos of their bowel movements to the group. “The group actually was a research tool, a database tool, to share what they were passing. And I’m like, Oh my god. That’s coming out of you in waterfalls?”

 

Nonetheless, Epperly also claims that infants can benefit from drinking her juice in addition to breast milk: “a baby could potentially live on this along with coconut oil and be fine, and would be able to flourish and grow because they’re getting access to nutrients.” And cult members have indeed been documented to be feeding her product to sick children – indeed, Epperly has herself encouraged using force to inject her product into children who resist, and is on record trying to convince parents that babies will grow demons inside of them if they are not given her juice (Epperly seems to believe, at least occasionally, that the alleged parasites are demonic entities that can influence our personalty, moods and thoughts). As for potential CPS attention, Epperly has recommended that parents should try to lie to them and that they anyways shouldn’t be worried because they are protected under “Kosher Laws”. Reality will present her followers with a constant flow of surprises.

 

Her cult rules include “never trust a fart” (that’s no. 1), “even if you think you’ve only pee’ed, take a swipe at your backside just to make sure” and “your most common phrases will soon be ‘pain is healing’ ‘i’m drinking the juice’ and ‘outta the way, I’m about to waterfall’”

 

Epperly’s claims relatively quickly gained the attention of otherwise toothless authorities, and the Ohio state Attorney General opened an investigation into her business in 2018 after multiple complaints and her product having contributed to at least one horrible death. Since Epperly’s understanding of legal matters seem to be roughly at the level of her understanding of human biology, she responded to formal requests with some strikingly dingbat rants, and was accordingly told by The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Ohio Attorney General to remove all unsubstantiated claims from her website and any other advertising materials. As for the aforementioned death – a patient suffering from cancer who substituted real medicine for her product – Epperly responded that the patient simply did not consume enough Jilly Juice, that he “really should have kept going” (her grasp of what actually happened seems flimsy and not entirely coherent), that the medical industry may have contributed to his death, that she “can’t be held accountable” for deaths resulting from her product, that “[o]ut of like 60,000 people that took my juice, how many people have [died]? It's not fair to hold me to that kind of standard”, and that “correlation does not mean causation”, which is … an interestingly desperate attempt in this context. Epperly was also temporarily banned from Facebook for violating the platform's hate speech rules by ranting wildly about homosexuals.

 

Content on her website (visits not recommended!), where Epperly markets herself as “I have a protocol to reverse 100% all of your health issues from A-Z forever vaccinated or not, except for major organ transplant patients and surrogate mothers until they bring the baby to term!!” and which includes private forums, can be accessed by paying $30 annually or $5 monthly, and also gives you the opportunity to sign up for private phone consultations at $70 an hour. To people complaining about the price, Epperly has a characteristically lucid message: “I’m not going to put up with somebody sniveling about how they can’t afford to pay for my site which is only $30 a year which is Pennies on the dollar and believe me if people want to know this information they will find a way to move Heaven and Earth and those who snivel and talk about how poor they are they just need to do the recipe and drink and drink.”

 

Even Dr. Phil admitted that Jilly Juice is a dangerous scam.

 

It is probably unnecessary to point out that Epperly’s actual background includes antivaccine activist and chemtrails conspiracy theorist, though it does help set the stage for her mainstay claim that the pharmaceutical industry is in a big conspiracy with doctors to keep consumers addicted to medications (which would, even if it were correct, of course course not be a shred of evidence that her own product is anything but mindrot – apparently some people need to have that pointed out to them). In one of her videos, Epperly also claims to have found confirmation for her theory that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, but she is characteristically short on details.

 

Apparently, she’s got a new book out, too, called Another Arm of the Hydra: The Undefined Life. Unfortunately, the blurb is completely incomprehensible (beyond that the book “is the beginning of the deprogramming so you could save yourself, if you choose”) and we aren’t going to get hold of a copy. It does come with the familiar and completely fake Schopenhauer quote about stages of truth that signals a particularly daft attempt at Galileo gambitry, though.

 

Diagnosis: Genuinely stupid, dangerous and completely incoherent, yet Epperly is apparently in possession of some sort of disarming charisma that managed to pull in enough people at her own or even lower levels of cognitive functioning to create a rather substantial cult – and it is, undeniably, a cult, one that has caused considerable harm to its members and innocent bystanders (in particular children at the mercy of cult members). The whole thing is really one of the most bizarre events in the history of the Internet, and that’s no small feat.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2811: Richard Enos

Richard Enos is an anti-vaccine activist and general conspiracy theorist affiliated with the woo- and conspiracy website Collective Evolution. Now, exactly who he is or where he comes from (he might be Canadian) is somewhat unclear to us, but what is clear is that he has been caught parroting various anti-vaccine nonsense (e.g. the incorrect claim that unvaccinated children pose no threat to anybody) in various media. In 2019, for instance, he was among several anti-vaccine activists trying to argue that New York Senator Joe Peralta’s death was caused by the flu vaccine, exclusively on the basis that Peralta had received the vaccine relatively briefly before his death at a vaccination event he had himself helped organize – the fact that Peralta had been sick for weeks before the shot and demonstrably died of sepsis notwithstanding (Enos, of course, obfuscates on the timeline and presents it as “After Getting Flu Shot, New York State Senator Gets Sick For Two Weeks, Then Dies”).

 

Enos’s main argument – though he is, of course, just JAQing off – is that Peralta himself allegedly “attributed [his illness] to a flu vaccine he had taken” and that “when a person is sick, they have a pretty good idea what caused it”, the latter claim being, as anyone with any medical background (or awareness of cognitive biases) would immediately tell you, utterly and dangerously false: people are absolutely terrible at determining the causes of their illnesses (partially due to this). Confusions about that simple point, of course, is partially what fuels the anti-vaccine movement to begin with. To Enos, however, there are conspiracies afoot: “What I would like to point out, though, is how deathly silent the Mainstream Media is on this possible connection.” The real reason why mainstream media didn’t mention the connection is of course because there is absolutely no evidence it's there, and plenty of evidence it isn’t. But you know.

 

Apparently Enos has also dabbled in UFO nonsense.

 

Diagnosis: Standard antivaccine loon and conspiracy theorist; not a major fish, but silly and paranoid enough to merit an entry here. His errors of thought are disconcertingly common and his kind is legion.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2810: Catherine Engelbrecht & True the Vote

After the 2020 election, wingnut election conspiracy theories went mainstream. But such theories have, of course, been with us for a long time, insofar as raising them has been a rhetorically effective means to support the use of legal means to suppress voters that the ruling party doesn’t like. People like Catherine Engelbrecht, for instance, has been promoting election fraud conspiracies at least since 2008, and she continues to be a key player in the popularization and dissemination of such theories. Engelbrecht is the founder of the King Street Patriots, which was established in reponse to what Engelbrecht and others perceived to be problems and irregularities with the 2008 election that “invited fraud and other problems at the polls” and which brought her to the attention of the Tea Party movement, as well as co-founder of the organization True the Vote, one of the most significant and influential promoters of 2020 election conspiracies.

 

2011–2019

True the Vote’s first major effort to try to force elections to yield the results they want outside Texas was their attempt to thwart the attempted recall of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker by using their own methods, mostly consisting of making systematic errors, to “check” petition signatures. The TtV concluded that only about half the signatures were genuine, a claim that was of course dismissed by all legal bodies because it was false and stupid, but which nevertheless allowed Engelbrecht and TtV to claim that fraud was “rampant”. The scary part, though, was that TtV apparently easily managed to recruit some 17 000 volunteers (mostly out of state) to help do the footwork to build their conspiracy theory, and they placed hundreds of people to monitor the polls – the justification being that the monitors were necessary because of “discrepancies” in the recall petition process (a claim that had already been thoroughly refuted) as well as what TtV claimed to be “Wisconsin’s long history of election fraud.” Interestingly, though unsurprisingly, TtV themselves don’t apply their own standards for judging whether signatures are genuine when they sign their own petitions.

 

TtV was instrumental in spreading fear and conspiracy theories (“flood of illegal voters”) surrounding the 2016 election as well, e.g. arguing that reported cyberattacks against elections systems in two states were really orchestrated by the Obama administration to justify taking control of elections in the states. The evidence, according to TtV board member Gregg Phillips, was that it’s “what the left always does”. The incident, whose existence was based solely on it being ‘what the left always does’ will subsequently be used as evidence that this is, in fact, what the left always does, which will be evidence that the next incident is a false flag, and so on in a closed epistemic loop ad infinitum. Indeed, Engelbrecht has accused Obama of running a “political machine” that makes “Watergate seem like a stubbed toe” to target … well, herself in particular.

 

With regard to the same election, Engelbrecht claimed that polling places staying open late – referring to an entirely legitimate practice – is evidence of voter fraud. She also claimed, based entirely on her own imaginative capacities as a village idiot, that Obama was intentionally signing up noncitizens to commit voter fraud, and TtV released a report falsely claiming that mass-murderer Arcan Cetin had illegally voted as a noncitizen in three elections because Cetin had in fact voted in those elections – TtV did of course not bother to check whether he was a citizen, which he was.

 

TtV did, however, since the early 2010s, manage to ally themselves with politicians and government bodies to aggressively suppress voter registration efforts under the guise of combatting a (completely mythical) “epidemic” of voter fraud. Ultimately, however, for Engelbrecht the voter fraud conspiracy theories are a religious issue: the fight over vote-by-mail, for instance, is a “spiritual battle” for “control of the free world”.

 

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Engelbrecht was attempting to raise $1.2 million “to conduct a comprehensive forensic audit of the entire election – all 136+ million votes” under the false assumption that “between 800,000 to 3,000,000” votes may have been cast by noncitizens, so as to ensure that then-president Trump’s claim to have won not only the electoral vote but the popular vote as well became true.

 

2020 Election

Shortly after the 2020 election, TtV launched its Validate the Vote campaign led by Engelbrecht herself. Officially, the purpose was to ensure that the 2020 election was proper and to “ensure public confidence and acceptance of election outcomes”. The campaign promptly went about using any conceivable effort to support Trump’s Stop the Steal claims, including finding (or creating) whistleblower witnesses to election wrongdoing, data analyses to locate irregularities, and a number of lawsuits to obtain access to voter rolls. Their whistleblower locating efforts included creating a “whistleblower compensation fund” to “incentivize election malfeasance reporting”, i.e. to pay people to make accusations of voter fraud – or, in other words, to undermine public confidence in the vote and acceptance of election outcomes, by any means possible.

 

None of their efforts provided a shred of evidence, of course, but since the goal of the effort was of course not to verify the integrity of the election or to help ensure public confidence that it was legit, but rather to promote the Stop the Steal Agenda, Engelbrecht continued to state that the group’s investigations are “ongoing”. Rather shortly after the election, TtV was sued by North Carolina money manager Fred Eshelman, who had donated $2.5 million to the group, for failing to come up with convincing evidence for voter fraud (that suit was also quickly dismissed by the courts but the fact that it was filed is pretty telling).

 

2021 and Beyond

Ahead of the 2021 Senate runoff in Georgia, TtV tried to challenge the validity of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. According to the courts, though TtV’s efforts didn’t quite amount to illegal voter intimidation, the group had facilitated “a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges […] TTV’s list utterly lacked reliability. Indeed, it verges on recklessness […] The Court has heard no testimony and seen no evidence of any significant quality control efforts, or any expertise guiding the data process.” In 2022, TtV officially partnered with Mark Lamb’s militant conspiracy organization of “constitutional sheriffs” Protect America Now.

 

2000 Mules nonsense

TtV was heavily involved in – and indeed largely responsible for the misinformation that served as the premise for – Dinesh D’Souza’s 2022 conspiracy theory flick 2000 Mules. The premise of the film was, based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analyses of cellphone location data, that Democrat-aligned individuals had been paid to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin during the 2020 election, and the claims were quickly picked up and endorsed by Donald Trump. Among TtV’s main claims was that phone pings to cellphone towers could help identify individuals who had passed near ballot drop boxes and various unnamed nonprofit organizations multiple times per day,  and they concluded that such people – rather than having legitimate businesses or living in the areas or being e.g. postal workers, delivery drivers or police officers – were paid mules for ballot collection and deposits. The claim is as insane as it sounds. But TtV went on to assert that some of the geolocated alleged mules were present at what they called “antifa riots” in Atlanta in 2020.

 

D’Souza and Gregg Phillips also claimed to have matched their geolocation data with data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). ACLED, on their side – who do not track cellphone data anyways – asserted that Phillips’s claims were categorically false. Engelbrecht tried to help him out by claiming that Phillips was actually referring to a different organization, but declined the invitation to name that different organization.

 

TtV’s claim that there were 1155 paid mules in Philadelphia alone is false, and the Arizona claims were based on a single anonymous witness who said she saw people picking up what she “assumed” to be payments for ballot collection in Arizona. They didn’t even bother to try to provide evidence of payments in any of the other states they covered. Nor did they bother to provide evidence that ballots were collected from a nonprofit to be deposited in drop boxes. As for the claim that individuals dropped off ballots more than once, it is not remotely supported by any of the surveillance videos they actually show – TtV claimed to have a video of multiple drops by an individual, but that they had to have “it taken out because the video is extremely poor quality.” So it goes. TtV also claimed to have helped solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Atlanta, which turned out to be a ridiculously false claim as well.

 

Of course, the movie doesn’t find room to mention that even if the events it claims took place, actually took place, it couldn’t imply voter fraud since absentee ballots deposited in a drop box must anyways be inside an envelope sent to each registered voter that includes the voter's registration information, signature, and a barcode for verification.

 

Legal issues

It is somewhat telling that the TtV has refused to cooperate with official state boards and officials trying to launch investigations into their claims, and Engelbrecht and Phillips have landed themselves in some legal trouble as well over lies, refusing to comply with subpoenas and illegal political donations. Indeed, in February 2024, TtV admitted in a filing with the Fulton County Superior Court in response to the Election Board lawsuit that “it doesn’t have documents about illegal ballot collection, the name of its purported informant or confidentiality agreements it previously said existed.”

 

TtV’s Phillips also landed himself in some trouble when he falsely asserted that Konnech, a poll worker management software company, had stored data on a Chinese server and allowed the Chinese government to access it. That one actually ended up providing Phillips and Engelbrecht with a brief stint in jail.

 

Other Antics

Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were also the founders of “The Freedom Hospital”, a much-hyped effort to solicit donations ostensibly for a mobile hospital to Ukraine, marketing the effort through lies, fraud and disinformation; the hospital never materialized, of course.

 

It is worth pointing out that serious questions have been raised on several occasions about Engelbrecht and Phillips using TtV funds for personal gain. This one is illuminating in that respect. Here is another one.

 

Diagnosis: Insane and zealous conspiracy theorist and myth maker with an enormous amount of influence, especially given that her conspiracies and FUD tactics are largely aimed toward serving the political interests of people in power. Indeed, Engelbrecht must be considered a significant component of one of the most severe threats to democracy and civilization that the US is currently facing.