#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.

#2809: Yousef Elyaman

Yousef Elyaman is a Florida-based MD who specializes in the quackery known as “functional medicine”. But even though functional medicine is quackery, medical doctors could actually get continuing medical education credits for attending his talk on the subject at the Integrative Addiction Conference 2015 (“A New Era in Natural Treatment”), given that the conference was sponsored in part by Continuing Education, Inc., which is accredited by the American Council for Continuing Medical Education. Elyaman is also affiliated with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, a horrible quack organization.

 

Elyaman’s day job is Medical Director of Absolute Health in Ocala, Florida, where he, according to himself, has “integrated a functional medicine approach into insurance-based primary care”. Moreover, Elyaman is Medical Director at HumanN, a “leading nutraceutical company”, i.e. a supplement producer – Elyaman pushes a lot of supplements through his Doctor E’s Choice online supplement store – and the author of Your Healing Power, which is ostensibly “a guide to mastering one’s genes to reverse disease.” Needless to say, you can safely leave that one on the shelf.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, Elyaman is a real MD. But there are many real MDs, and it might be wise to choose one that hasn’t given in to the useless tests and useless supplements (and hefty invoices) that make up most of the quackery known as ‘functional medicine’.

#2808: Phil Elmore

As a former WND correspondent, Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor deputy undersecretary (under Trump) and well-established conspiracy theorist Curtis Ellis seems to have passed away, but there are more where he came from: Phil Elmore has also written columns for the WND, lambasting libruls and gay people.

 

As Elmore sees it, the “progressive mind-control mob” (e.g. those in favor of marriage equality) is not only trying “to establish thoughtcrime” punishments and take away the rights of conservatives but really wish to have their opponents killed – “You must therefore be denigrated, punished and silenced – and that’s only because the libs haven’t yet worked up the courage to murder you. Yet” – presumably because that’s what he himself would have liked to do to those who voice their political disagreement with him (at least he cites no other evidence for his conjecture). 

 

So ok, that one’s old, and subsequent encounters we’ve had with Elmore mostly consist of him accusing those who disagree with him on politics of being “simpering pansies”, “fat, arm-flailing children”, “effete liars” and “almost certainly gay”.

 

Diagnosis: Angry, stupid and irrelevant.