#2964: Rachel Hamm

Rachel Hamm is an author (Life Beginning, some kind of biography/fundie self-help combo book), speaker, notable fan of Robin Bullock, creator of something called ‘The Miracle Mind Mastery’ – “where she helps people become the best version of themselves” – and unsuccessful 2022 wingnut candidate for the position of secretary of state in California. According to herself, she ran for secretary of state because Jesus appeared to her youngest son, who “is a seer” and an authority on spiritual issues for Hamm, in a closet – apparently Hamm thought at first it was an angel, but no: it was Jesus himself. And she would ostensibly make a great secretary of state insofar as she is a Christian (anointed by God, in fact) and therefore honest, fair, and honorable: “Someone who is ... godless very likely would not have those values.” The Jesus closet manifestation was apparently expected, though: “I’ve been a prophetic dreamer so I had spent a lot of 2019 and 20 having a lot of political dreams that I was in office”, said Hamm. Indeed, she is, according to herself, “kind of a forerunner,” meaning that whatever she experiences in her personal life is “whatever God is getting ready to do” on a national or global scale.

 

Her prophetic dreams and fundie commitments weren’t her only qualifications for secretary of state, though. Hamm also has substantial experience combatting Satan and satanists: apparently the neighborhood surrounding her local community college is “known for having a lot of Satanic activity,” and she’s had a number of hostile encounters with Satanists trying to take over her house. In fact, according to her book, Hamm has been battling these forces her whole life, ever since she attended a daycare as a child that was later revealed, at least in her imagination, to be a front for Satan worshippers (“this was a Satanic coven claiming to be a preschool so they could train children in Satanic rituals,” says Hamm), just like in the fictional accounts that launched the Satanic panic of the 1980s. Her apparently biggest victory against her neighbors, however, came when she putatively managed to kill a witch through prayer: apparently this witch – a neighbor “who live two doors down” – was trying to kill her, something Hamm realized on the basis of “a dream that someone has tried to break into my home, murder me and light my house on fire;” she responded by praying hard, and the next morning her mother told her that someone had broken into the home of the witch, “murdered her and lit the house on fire.” With a CV like this, no wonder she thought you should vote for her as secretary of state. Apparently she received the backing of people like Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn.

 

Her campaign was predictably characterized by delusional rantings and conspiracy theories, in particular concerning the 2020 presidential election – according to Hamm, Trump actually won all 50 states in 2020 and would apparently soon (in 2021) be returned to the White House to serve a full 10 years in office, and she’s got proof: she (of course) dreamt it, and accordingly “feel fairly certain that that is what happened and that it’s only fraud that made it look otherwise.” (That said, God also told her that Trump “sacrificed greatly” by leaving office after losing the 2020 election because he is “a good father” who knows that “sometimes their children do not learn lessons unless they learn it the hard way.”) And the nefarious forces that be (libruls) were after her, too, but she refused to bend: although she and her family knew “they might kills us ... there are some things worth dying for;” for instance, Hamm “would rather be dead than live in a communist country.” Here is Hamm and Delora O’Brien weighing in on the War on Christmas. And here is Hamm declaring that Black Lives Matter “is really evil at its core” and “a completely evil, corrupt organization that has harmed our country;” also, “two of the main leaders are witches.”

 

Of course, she perceived that massive voter fraud would be a central challenge to her campaign, and as a means to forestall such challenges she deployed prayer. So Hamm prayed that if anyone tries to steal votes from her, “God will send the angels to steal the vote back” and she also asked her fans to join her in praying that “if they create fraudulent ballots” to steal the California election, “they’re incinerated”. “Let’s ask the angels to go burn ‘em up. No fake ballots!”. (If she did get elected, she promised that she would fight to “make it hard” for people to vote so that “people who are not educated” on the issues – like knowledgeable about which side is backed by Satan and which side is not – are prevented from voting.) When she failed to clear the GOP primary, she predictably insisted that the election had, in fact, been stolen, sort of neglecting to notice that given her framing of the issue during her campaign, it sort of follows that God Himself must be to blame for the result.

 

Following her loss, Hamm became convinced that she was destined to serve as press secretary for then-former President Donald Trump when he would be reelected in 2024. She regularly travelled to Mar-a-Lago and urged her viewers to give daily prayers for Trump and against the Democrats, whom she claimed were partnering with Satan to keep Trump from getting elected again. Part of what she would bring to the table in a role as press secretary would be prophetic warnings for Trump. In March 2023, for instance, she released a video in which she claimed to have learned (apparently through her usual sources of information) that “globalists” were planning to kill most of humanity, and she had asked God how to respond; apparently God ordered her to “decree” that He would send a “death angel” to the Capitol in May 2023 to kill a swath of elected leaders: “I’m here to tell you that an angel came to our house and told us that the death angel is visiting the Capitol in the month of May,” Hamm announced. Well, May came and passed with no large-scale slaughter of legislators, so Hamm (“super frustrated”) followed up with another video in which she prayed for God not to change his mind and still send the “death angel” to “kill these globalists” as He had promised (apparently keeping promises is not God’s strong suit): “Lord, please don’t change your mind,” prayed Hamm. “Lord, even now we do agree in Jesus’ name, please send this death angel to kill these globalists who have told us they want to kill 85 percent of us. And so, Lord, we need you to intervene. We need you. […] We need you to step in and send the death angel, in Jesus’ name.”

 

Diagnosis: Wheeee! Apparently even the most wild-eyed fundies in the MAGA movement seem to tend to be wary of this one, but she still has some followers. Completely bonkers at every possible level.

#2963: Julie Hamilton

Discussions of conversion therapy might have faded a bit from public consciousness in recent years, but it still exists and it is still dangerous nonsense. And as far as we know, Julie Hamilton remains one of the leaders of the group committed to the propagation of such therapies. Hamilton is former president of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (shades of Badger’s Law in that name), a group that describes itself as “principled advocates for persons experiencing unwanted homosexual attractions”, and of its mother organization, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH); she is also editor of the 2009 book Handbook of Therapy for Unwanted Homosexual Attractions: A Guide to Treatment, in the preface of which she suggests that conversion therapy can prevent murder. A serial spreader of misinformation, Hamilton’s official position is, in fact, that “there is actually no such thing as conversion therapy” and that bans of such therapies would ban “free speech in the counseling office.” Hamilton was a central feature of the documentary Such Were Some of You, a pro-conversion therapy tool that encourages people to consider “leaving homosexuality” and rejecting the “gay lifestyle” intended for Sunday school children.

 

Diagnosis: We would probably have given her more space 10 years ago, but she is apparently still around and still a hateful and crazy promoter of dangerous pseudoscience; indeed, she might be in a position to cause more harm than ever these days.

#2962: Jeremy Hambly

Jeremy Hambly is an influencer, altright troll and incel guru who runs (or has run) YouTube/Rumble/Gab channels like ClawStruck, Unsleeved Media, and – most famously –  TheQuartering. Now, we cannot claim to have followed these channels particularly closely, but they come across as, more than anything else, ragebaiting shitshows targeted at confused wannabe trolls, and Hambly produces and/or helps spread a not insignificant portion of the kind conspiracy-adjacent garbage that currently clogs up the internet.

 

Unsleeved Media appears to have been focused mostly on themes related to Magic: The Gathering; it was also various examples of silly behaviors related to that theme that originally got Hambly’s career going, insofar as these behaviors resulted in bans from Magic events and later Gen Con (we don’t have the details and don’t really care). Currently, his most popular channel is TheQuartering, which features Hambly’s critical rants against various institutions from a conspiracy-theory-oriented point of view – like accusing Disney (and politicians) of attempting to brainwash children through various forms of woke theory. The channel is absolutely committed to the MAGA cult and toys with (though doesn’t seem to explicitly endorse) various versions of The Great Replacement theory, white nationalism and anti-semitism; likewise, the channel has promoted a number of Alex Jones-land conspiracy theories, including 9/11 conspiracy theories. His twitter/X archive can be accessed here, though it doesn’t seem to be quite up to date. Of course, Hambly is primarily an (unapologetic) grifter and has even pushed Goldco scams on his channel. 

 

Diagnosis: Primarily a ragebaiting shitshow, and as such not the kind of thing we can be bothered to put much effort into investigating. Hambly might, for all we know, not even put much credence in the stuff he produces (or anything else for that matter).

#2961: John Haller

John Haller is a deranged fundie and self-declared prophet affiliated with Ohio’s Fellowship Bible Chapel. Haller thinks that the LGBT “agenda” is a sign of the End Times on par with “actual wars.” As he reads the Bible, before the End Times people will “lose the ability to reason and they think like morons. And I think that we are exactly at that time” in the case of people supporting LGBT rights. To back up his view, Haller points to what he thinks is history: “Both the days of Noah and the days of Lot existed in the historical context”, and the sort of “wickedness and violence” that “filled the earth” in those days are “exactly what we’re seeing” in the present day (people of his ilk tend to have an idiosyncratic understanding of words like ‘exactly’ and ‘literally’). And it “is happening all over the world”. So, the fact that LGBT rights have some degree of mainstream support indicates the Second Coming of Jesus is neigh. “I talk every week about the convergence of all these different lines of Bible prophecy, from Israel to morality to one-world government, one-world religion”, says Haller. We’re sure he does. Currently, he seems to be very concerned with the Israel situation and in particular the idea of a two-state solution, for as he points out, God is only “renting the land to the nation of Israel,” and they do not “have the right to ‘sublease’ it” because that might interfere with the return of Christ and the End of Days, or whatever.

 

Diagnosis: Person who has lost the ability to reason and who thinks like a moron. We guess we’ll see if that leads to anything.

#2960: Kathleen Hallal

Kathleen Hallal is a California-based “mother of three boys with autoimmune issues and food allergies”, something she blames partially on GMO foods and pesticides like RoundUp (and which she also claims to have cured with diet interventions), as well as cofounder of a group called Non Toxic Communities (and coordinator of the group Non Toxic Irvine) and co-founder of Zen Honeycutt’s woo and conspiracy group Moms Across America (MAA). Hallal’s stated goal is “spreading awareness about helping children with chronic health issues” although she predictably appears to have no remotely relevant background in medicine or any other relevant scientific discipline – instead, Hallal is a conspiracy theorist and anti-GMO activist who bases everything she believes on google and fellow conspiracy theorists. 

Now, Moms Across America (MAA) has become familiar for their promotion of scare tactics, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and bad science (some good examples here) disguised as means to empower moms fighting for kids’ health. Their primary objective is a general ban on GMOs and glyphosate, and some examples of the lies and pseudoscience they employ in the name of that goal are discussed here and here; they’ve also, predictably, toyed with anti-vaccine rhetoric. And of course, although MAA classifies itself as a non-profit, it is also an e-commerce company that pushes supplements and ridiculous products like “hydrogen water” through its Health Solution Store, collects and sells consumer data, and gets a commission on sales of supplements from other affiliates.

 

And when real scientists point out that MAM’s scaremongering is based on nonsense and pseudoscience, such as when real scientists debunked their informal test that purportedly found minute traces of glyphosate in breast milk and urine (completely false), Hallal and the MAM had a very predictable response: the shill gambit. Indeed, Hallal seems clinicially unable to entertain the possibility that anyone could disagree with her without ulterior motives, even going so far as to try to doubt whether the real scientists criticizing them are even real people. Never mind that she cannot even remotely back up her shill accusations, that the accusations are false (or at best based on ridiculous n-degrees of separation speculations) or that – ironically – actual shilling has been shown to happen only a few times, and consistently among anti-GMO activists shilling for Big Organic. So it goes.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, her tactics might tell you quite a bit about herself and certainly tell you very little about the people her false and unsupported accusations are directed at. A professional, glitzy pseudoscience promoter, scaremonger and conspiracy theorist, and although Zen Honeycutt is the big star of her movement, Hallal is certainly a significant part of the machinery that gives the Honeycutt bullshit an actual impact. 

#2959: Tommy Hall

Just a very brief note on this one should suffice. Tommy Hall is a random creationist with a youtube channel. Hall rejects the theory of evolution, based mostly on standard creationist PRATTs, and, like most creationists, he fails to understand even the basics of the theory he is rejecting, biology, and of science in general. You can read a discussion of a silly video he made in 2016 – with a laugh track – here where he tries to list “failed predictions” of evolution that are either not failed, not predictions, or based on such deep misunderstanding of the original hypothesis (and current state of affairs) that the claim makes no sense in the context of the field he is trying to criticize. And no, Tommy Hall: horizontal gene transfer is not Lamarckianism; epigenetics is not a vindication of Lamarckianism; yes: there is junk DNA; and we don’t think “vestigial” means what you think it means. Here is a discussion of his response to critics.

 

Diagnosis: Proud and loud minor grinch inhabiting Mount Stupid. Unlikely to sway anyone who has a minimal understanding of things scientific.  

 

Hat-tip: PZ Myers 

#2958: Bob Hall

Dingbat morons in state legislatures is nothing new, and Texas has been riddled with them for a long time; these days, however, state legislative dingbattery seems to be a potential pathway to the national political scene. Now, we don’t really think Robert Lee Hall III, a feeble Tea Party candidate who has been serving in the Texas state legislature since 2015, is in any way bound for Washington, but his ideas have travelled. Bob Hall is primarily associated with promotion of misinformation and debunked conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, including pushing the nonsense idea that COVID-19 vaccines skipped animal testing, and encouraging people to forego the vaccine. Instead of protecting yourself by taking the vaccine, Hall predictably recommended worthless bullshit such as hydroxychloroquine.

 

Indeed, Hall – who of course has no medical background – introduced a proposal to ban any entity, public or private, from requiring vaccination of their employees (the proposal would prohibit “discrimination” based on a person’s vaccine choices). According to Hall, and completely contrary to reality, “the mere fact that a person has not received a specific vaccine does not make them a threat to others’ health and safety”; moreover, “in contrast, vaccines they have elected not to have may very well be a threat to their own health and safety” – as Hall, like many other anti-vaccine activists saw it, because he and they are confused morons, the COVID vaccines were “experimental” treatments. Hall supported his proposal with testimonies from people like legendary pseudoscientist and quack Ben Edwards.

 

But Hall was antivaccine before COVID, too. In 2019, for instance, Hall sponsored Texas Senate Bill 2350 (SB2350), which sought to prohibit the administration of vaccines that did not meet criteria Hall had copypasted from various anti-vaccine websites; the bill tried for instance to tell the FDA what criteria they should use for approving new vaccines, it perpetuated standard antivaccine falsehoods about vaccines potentially causing cancer and infertility, and it tried to parrot false antivaccine myths to the effect that vaccines aren’t sufficiently tested for safety. The bill died in committee, but only after it had been widely championed by various anti-vaccine groups in Texas and beyond.

 

Part of the popularity of Hall’s efforts among Texan antivaccine activists was due to the (alleged) fact that it was (purportedly) “rejecting the federal narrative” (Davis Taylor of the conspiracy theory hub Tenth Amendment Center). And indeed, Hall is very much worried about federal narratives and federal other things: in response to the disastrous winter storm that left millions of Texans without power or water for days in 2021, for instance, Hall was quick to declare that “the absolute worst [mistake] that we could make would be to join in with the national grid. That would put us back underneath federal control. And the last thing we need is additional federal government messing with Texas.”

 

In 2021, he tried again, with a bill that “would require physicians to disclose the excipients contained in a vaccine” in order to scare as many as possible from getting the vaccine by the familiar antivaccine gambit of listing alien-sounding chemicals (the bill would not require physicians to mention risks associated with foregoing vaccines). Among the ingredients Hall mistakenly believes vaccines contain are, in addition to aluminum and MSG, “fetal parts […] that people for religious reasons might not want to take that vaccine”. According to Hall, the motivation for the bill was “just a matter of making an informed consent knowing what is being done to them”; Hall is apparently so practised at anti-vaccine talking point parroting that he can’t even construct meaningful sentences, but he does, strikingly and unintentionally, reveal a bit about what these kinds of people mean by 'informed' (it’s not informed). In his presentation of the bill, Hall notoriously also kept repeating the myth that vaccine manufacturers have no liability; based on that piece of misinformation, the extra level of ‘informed consent’ is needed because “we are doing something so dangerous that the federal government has put up a barrier relieving the pharmaceuticals and doctors of any responsibility for any adverse affect [sic].”

 

For his efforts on behalf of wingnuttery and conspiracy theories, Hall was invited to speak at Michael Flynn & Clay Clark’s Reawaken America Tour. Hall was also a speaker at Richard Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s training event for Texas law enforcement officials in Houston in February 2021.

 

Diagnosis: Dingbat moron with little or no grasp of what goes on in reality, but with strong feelings about it based on paranoia, fanaticism and conspiracy theories. Still very dangerous, though.

#2957: Wolfgang Halbig

One of the craziest conspiracy theorists and most despicable pieces of garbage currently in operation in the US, Wolfgang Halbig is primarily famous for his relentless promotion of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, for his harassment of parents of victims of the massacre, and for his contributions to Infowars on the topic. He was finally arrested in 2020 and charged with unlawful possession of the personal ID of one of the fathers he had tormented and for releasing the father’s social security number “to hundreds of people via email” to enable and encourage other deranged conspiracy theorist to harass the families of the victims as well.

 

According to Halbig, the Sandy Hook massacre was a government-perpetrated hoax to give authorities an excuse to take away Americans’ right to bear firearms (how exactly that was supposed to work is unclear in light of the aftermaths of earler mass shootings) employing crisis actors as purported victims. And in the wake of the event, he quickly became a leader of the ragtag mass of insane clowns pushing ludicrous conspiracy theories through his website. In particular, Halbig had a set of 16 questions that he claimed that the authorities could not answer and that he therefore argued proved that the event was staged. Of course, answers to his questions, like why paramedics and EMTs weren’t allowed to enter the school (they were) and why victims weren’t transported by helicopter (because the few wounded individuals could be more effectively transported by ambulance and the rest of the victims were dead), were readily available e.g. in the Connecticut State Police report on the shooting, but Halbig and his followers claimed that those answers were fictions because after all people who commit such hoaxes can’t be trusted. So it goes. The website also touted Halbig’s “credentials” as a former security director for schools in Seminole County, a position from which he claimed to have worked on the official investigation into the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 (a claim for which there is not a shred of evidence), something helped him solicit tens of thousands of dollars to his GoFundMe account.

 

Of course, Alex Jones presented Halbig as a “leading expert” on Sandy Hook on his show. Indeed, Halbig was largely responsible for concocting the Sandy Hook conspiracies that was pushed by Alex Jones, and he was thus, unintentionally, instrumental in Jones’s downfall. That, of course, does not mitigate our assessment of him as pollution incarnate.

 

In 2019, Halbig’s efforts paid some dividends when he was approached by the National Rifle Association – specifically NRA training coordinator Mark Richardson – to help sow doubt about the Parkland shooting.

 

Diagnosis: A disgusting piece of filth and a disgrace to humanity, Halbig has turned being evil and being a moron into his retirement hobby; the nasty clowns and groups of trash morons that follow him presumably provide him with the attention and feeling of doing something meaningful that this otherwise pitiful abomination presumably feels he needs and deserves. And keep in mind that the NRA is even worse rot than Halbig since they don’t even have the lunacy card to play.

#2956: Paul Hair

Paul Hair is a fundie wingnut conspiracy theorist and a reasonably prolific writer for Matt Barber’s website Barbwire while that one was still running. We don’t know what he’s up to these days, but it’s unlikely to be anything good. 

 

Like most fundie wingnuts, Hair was deeply concerned with LGBT rights, and issued a fair number of dire warnings about the way America was going (“That people still don’t fully grasp how important sodomy is to autotheists, and how they have damaged society with their promotion of it, shows how successful they have been in their manipulation. It also shows why America is doomed”). And like most fundie wingnuts who don’t get their will, Hair would see Christian persecution everywhere. When Sonny Hernandez of Reforming America Ministries was criticized for claiming that Christians should stop defending the rights of people to practice other faiths, for instance, Hair portrayed him as a victim of anti-Christian persecution – and no, he didn’t see the irony. And in Hair’s case, like in so many other cases, his persecution complex is of course fuelled by conspiracy theories. So, when Obama (an “authotheist” and “Satanist” – Hair didn’t like Hillary Clinton either) met with leaders of other faiths, as was his job, Hair would straightaway assert that the agenda of the meeting was to coordinate attacks on Christians.

 

Upon Trump’s election in 2016, Hair immediately called upon him to “nominate Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore to be the next secretary of state.”

 

Diagnosis: Whatever

#2955: Noel Hadley

Noel Hadley is a rabid fundie and a flat-earther with a number of self-published books to his name, perhaps most notably AVOID SCIENCE FALSELY SO-CALLED: Flat Earth, the Reformation, and the Science Delusion. We haven’t read it but wager a guess that the title tells you a lot about the book also beyond the case he is trying to make and how (nor have we read any of his other titles, such as Milennial Kingdom + Mud Flood). Hadley, who apparently used to be a professional wedding photographer, seems to be something of a mainstay at various flat-earth gatherings, and his presentations appear to make numerous fascinating and largely unintelligible claims also about other science-echoing issues. Did you know that Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA was informed by ancient Egyptians because “did Pharaoh not wear a cobra on his crown as a symbol of the divine word and third eye – the pineal gland – by which true hidden knowledge might be discovered to the devoted initiate?” and cobras look a bit like DNA. Sort of. Also other cultures, like the Aztecs had ideas about DNA, since they talked about ladders going between heaven and Earth so gods could go up and down – yeah, we don’t quite follow the thread here but neither, we suspect, does Hadley; coherent chains of reasoning is not his style. Even young-earth creationist Danny Faulkner seems to have been somewhat baffled by Hadley’s presentation at a flat-earth conference he attended.

 

Hadley also appears to be a recurring feature on the youtube channel The Earth is NOT a globe, which purportedly offers “A Flat Earth versus the globe debate whether it be biblical or scientific or hopefully a little bit of both”. The adverb ‘hopefully’ seems to be doing some work there.

 

Diagnosis: As if all the nuts and bolts that hold ordinary reasoning together got unscrewed and the disparate elements rather got stuck together randomly with glue. His rants are somewhat fascinating at first, but one tires quickly. We wish we could dismiss him as harmless, but in these times …

#2954: Michelle Guppy

Michelle Guppy was at least at one point coordinator of the Houston Autism Disability Network and has spent some years tirelessly promoting anti-vaccine nonsense in Texas. Guppy is in particular notable for her defense of and advocacy for the work of discredited fraud Andrew Wakefield; Guppy, who believes that her own son is vaccine injured (her list includes PANDAS, which is, needless to say, not a vaccine injury) because he is autistic, something Guppy falsely attributes to vaccines, also thinks that her own son har benefited from Wakefield’s fraudulent nonsense. In 2011, for instance, Guppy received some attention for organizing conference at the Baptist Church in Tomball, Texas, with Wakefield as a keynote speaker; for security, Guppy hired armed guards to intimidate critics, and to journalists there to write about Wakefield, she had some admirably clear instructions: “Be nice to him, or we will hurt you.” So there.

 

Diagnosis: Antivaxxer with an average antivaxxer ability to identify and evaluate causal relationships, and she fails with precisely the kind of zeal and paranoia that so characterizes her movement. Somewhat dangerous, perhaps, but it is unclear whether her influence extends much beyond the Houston area.

#2953: Lalo Gunther

Lalo Gunther is the Director of Online Community and Conference Ministries, specializing in “Youth Ministry”, and (currently) Special Events Coordinator for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). As such, Gunther is the head of the ICR’s conference series and blog Your Origins Matter (YOM), and coordinated e.g. YOM’s launching conference in Dallas in 2012, where they e.g. got former astronaut Colonel Jeffrey Williams to present some pretty pictures of space and provide some sort of sheen of legitimacy to the stock creationist presentations by creationist stalwarts like Jason Lisle, Nathaniel Jeanson, Henry Morris III, and Randy Guliuzza. The YOM blog consists primarily of regurgitating creationist materials already published by the ICR – though, since the purpose is outreach (the YOM is purportedly a platform for “conversation” and “tools to dig deeper into the study of origins”), they tend to remove any ‘technical’ or ‘scientific’ content (which does not require much effort given the nature of the originals) – and videos of interviews with ICR members.

 

YOM also helps you arrange a Demand the Evidence Conference at your local church. Neither they nor their clients actually want the evidence.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, this one was brief, and brevity will do. Fundie denialist.

#2952: Steven Gundry

Steven Gundry is a pseudoscience-based wellness guru who has, apparently, managed to achieve something close to stardom in the wellness community. One thing that has presumably contributed to his success is the fact that Gundry is, indeed, a (former) cardiothoracic surgeon, something that presumably gives his nonsense a sheen of legitimacy to people with no background or knowledge in medicine and who don’t bother to look too closely. He does apparently have little or no scientific background in the fields to which he currently tries to contribute copious amounts of nonsense – Gundry is a nutritionist, not a dietician; his audience consists of people who don’t know the difference.

 

Gundry is probably most famous for promoting the pseudoscientific lectin-free diet, e.g. in his apparently quite popular book The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain, which appropriately made this list. The supposed paradox of the title is the idea that consumption of grains, legumes and fruit (Gundry calls it “toxic candy”) leads to obesity and weight gain, a delusion that is not supported by any evidence but is contradicted by massive amounts of research demonstrating an inverse association (example, if needed; here’s another; meanwhile, Gundry’s own research to contradict consensus is … a poster at a conference). According to real scientists who care about integrity and nevertheless bothered to read the book, “even more egregious [than his well-worn quack gambit of referring to articles that don’t remotely say what he claims they say] are the wild claims he makes with no referencing at all, which is most of the text ... Sometimes it almost seems like this author is just making things up that sound good”. Examples include random assertions that “Up until 10,000 years ago, the average human stood about 6 feet tall” (patently false) and that most of his stage 3 and stage 4 cancer patients got better (no publication or study cited). The book does check every box on the standard pseudoscience gambit list, however. There is a decent review here.

 

Gundry’s guiding, erroneous idea is that lectins – which a lot of plants contain plenty of – cause inflammation (they’re “highly toxic”) and are really the cause of many modern diseases, including numerous autoimmune diseases, cancer, heart disease and some of its risk factors, weight problems, slow infant growth, diabetes, mental health problems, and neurological conditions like Parkinson’s, dementia, and “cramps, tingling, and numbness”. His Plant Paradox diet accordingly tells you to avoid all foods containing lectins altogether. Indeed, a main claim of Gundry’s is that “the continuous availability of fruit is one of the biggest contributors to the obesity crisis”; just think about that for a second (Gundry adds that fruits today are worse than before because they are GMOs, a claim that is false – the only GMO fruit available in the US is papayas – and would anyways have been bonkers crazy, but which probably works quite well with his intended audiences). In reality, by contrast, the evidence of the benefits of high-lectin-containing diets “is so overwhelming as to render Gundry’s arguments laughable”; Gundry, by contrast, has exactly no evidence and no remotely plausible mechanism for the purported effects of lectins on weight. According to endocrinologist and past president of the American Heart Association Robert Eckel, Gundry’s diet advice contradicts “every dietary recommendation represented by the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association and so on”; moreover, it is not possible to draw any conclusions from Gundry’s own attempts as ‘research’ due to the absence of control patients in his studies.

 

Meanwhile, Gundry’s own line of supplements purportedly protects against or even reverse the supposedly damaging effects of lectins and include the Lectin Shield (“to assist the body in the fight against lectins”) and the Enhanced Circulation Formula (“designed to keep your blood flowing smoothly, carrying oxygen to all essential organs, tissues, and muscles”) – it’s notable that his list of ‘yes’ foods in his book consists of mostly expensive and hard-to-obtain products, making his own supplement series an attractive alternative for those who may have bought into his bullshit (he assures his audiences that this conflict of interest shouldn’t undermine his authority, though); and yes, his website does have a Quack Miranda Warning. Ostensibly, he even runs an experimental clinic investigating the impact of a lectin-free diet on health because it might be useful for marketing purposes to be able to refer to something like this. His lectin-free nonsense is apparently also popular with proponents of Dave Asprey’s mostly bullshit bulletproof diet and has moreover been promoted (of course) by pop stars and celebrities.

 

Currently, he is also the host of the Dr. Gundry Podcast on health and nutrition (not recommended) and writes articles for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website. That last fact alone should really be sufficient to fully capture the sort of character we’re dealing with here, but just to pile it on: Gundry has even expressed support for Joseph Mercola, claiming that Mercola provides “very useful health advice”. To top it all off, Gundry also pushed pseudoscientific anti-vaccine nonsense (anti-vaxxers called it a “study”) about mRNA vaccines during Covid, because of course he did; the misinformation was quickly debunked by real scientists, but Gundry’s audience isn’t very good at distinguishing good sources from clown train horn honks.

 

His latest book is apparently Unlocking the Keto Code (2022) – yup, Gundry knows to hitch the fad, which is crucial to maintain your success on the wellness pseudoscience idiot circuit. Before moving on to lectins, Gundry had published the book Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution: Turn Off the Genes That Are Killing You and Your Waistline (2008), which we haven’t read and neither should you.

 

Diagnosis: Once Steven Gundry was a respectable medical practitioner; now he is full of shit. His nonsense reads as the worst kinds of spam and content-covering ads and is about as trustworthy. Whether he himself believes the confused rot that falls out of his mouth is not always clear to us (we wish to be charitable, but a principle of charity sort of pulls in two directions here), but people apparently listen. Good f**king grief.

#2951: Zach Guiler

Zach Guiler is a preacher affiliated with the Canal Church of Christ in Waverly, Ohio, and a creationist. In a 2017 letter to the editor of the local newspaper The Pike County News Watchman, he helpfully lays out his reasons for why people continue to believe in the theory of evolution even though Guiler himself has “proven time and again in our Wednesday night apologetics class that the Theory of Evolution is an illogical lie”. The reasons are:

 

1.     that “for the past 50 years, evolution has been the only thing taught in schools”, and not “as an unproven theory, but as scientific fact.”

2.     that “it has been portrayed in popular culture and the media that the most intelligent people believe in evolution”; therefore “people claim to believe in evolution, not based on facts and evidence, but because it will make them appear to be in the same league as those who are educated and intelligent”.

3.     that “it is claimed that the vast majority of scientists believe in evolution”; it is unclear whether Guiler actually believes they do (they do), but in any case “even if the majority of scientists believe in the theory of evolution, that doesn’t make evolution any less of the lie that it is”. Don’t be “a sheep following the masses” or, as the case might be, those who actually know anything about the subject matter. Cynics might also wonder whether he advocates the same attitude in other contexts.

4.     that many accept evolution because they “[t]don’t want there to be a God”. That must be a significant motivation since “[n]o one believes in evolution because of the evidence”. Why not? Because “there is virtually no evidence to back the theory up!” – Guiler hasn’t bothered to try to look up any of it: and indeed, “[E]ven those who believe in evolution must admit this.” It is presumably the influence of Satan that prevents them from voicing this admission.

 

Or in short: “Creationism has evidence while evolution is void of any” and “Creationism is logical while evolution is improbable”. He doesn’t mention any of the evidence; we suppose he means that you should take his word for it.

 

Diagnosis: And just like that, Zach Guiler demolished the core tenets of modern public school science curricula. Why won’t those darned scientists listen? It must be Satan, mustn’t it?