#2923: Steve Goreham

Steve Goreham is executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America (CSCA), a group of people who try to argue there is no evidence that global warming is man-made or will be a crisis, and which is affiliated with the denialist (for money) organization the Heartland Institute. The CSCA is a fine example of an astroturf organization; it is a member of the well-funded climate change denialist Web of Deceit, and was for instance among the groups that in 2018 signed on to an open letter asking President Trump to ignore criticisms of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. There is a good resource on the group here.

 

A self-declared “researcher on energy and environmental issues”, Goreham himself is, predictably, not a climate scientist (his degree is in electrical engineering), and his audiences are, predictably, those who don’t quite recognize the difference between researcher and blogger & columnist for climate-denialist organizations. He’s regularly described as a “climate change expert”, however, by people and groups that like his conclusions (and he gets invited a lot by such people and groups). For instance, Goreham was one of the signatories to a petition organized by Richard Lindzen of the Cato Institute urging President Trump to pull the US out of the United Nations international convention on climate change (UNFCCC); according to Lindzen, “more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals from around the world have signed the petition below.” Goreham’s signature is telling enough; Lindzen’s list contained, entirely predictably, only a handful of signatories who could be considered remotely qualified or eminent on anything, and none in the field of climate science; rather, it contained plenty og individuals who, for various reasons, were “interested in climate”. Goreham is also the author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic, which baldfacedly and falsely asserts that “the science clearly shows that global warming is due to natural causes, despite the tidal wave of world belief in man-made climate change”.

 

And yes, his arguments are usually centered on familiar denialist lies and talking points (like this one), such as the eminently silly claim that there’s been no warming since 1998, that Antarctica is actually gaining ice, or that warmer weather is actually good for us. Meanwhile, he laments how SUV owners and power company officials are treated like witches were in the Middle Ages.

 

There is a decent Steve Goreham resource here. 

 

Diagnosis: Professional astroturf activist and denialist, and he seems to be good at it. His career opportunities seem endless these days.

#2922: Rebecca Gordon

Rebecca Gordon is an experienced and popular … astrologist, and the author of Your Body and the Stars: The Zodiac as Your Wellness Guide. So yes: Gordon is completely and utterly unchained by anything resembling reality, and her self-help ramblings are a chaotic mess of fuzzy New Age woo, category mistakes and pseudoscientific nonsense. However, in that mess of delusions, there is at least a discernible line of ideas that to some extent gives her work a personal touch: Gordon thinks that there is a direct link between horoscopes and health:

 

“Well, we all have seen the drawing of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci…The human body is actually shaped like a five-pointed star, with a head, two arms, two legs. And you also may have seen the drawing of the Zodiac Man, where you see Aries ruling the head, the first sign of the zodiac, Pisces ruling the feet, and all of the other body parts correlating to different zodiac signs. So the point is that your zodiac sign doesn’t just govern personality traits, and all of the zodiac signs live within you, and this is really about balancing all of the signs within your body.”

 

What it would mean for a ‘zodiac sign’ to ‘live within your body’ is probably not a question you should bother asking her. But yes, the idea is that the Vitruvian Man vaguely resembles a drawing of Zodiac Man, therefore astrological signs determine the health of various body parts. At least that’s what passes for reasoning in Gordon’s circles.

 

And apparently those circles are large enough to have drawn the attention of the producers of the show of America’s favorite charlatan and pseudoscientific grifter, Dr. Oz. So yes, back in 2018 Gordon was hosted by Dr. Oz, where she also gave a public demonstration of her insights: For instance, Oz is a Gemini, and according to Gordon, Gemini rules the hands and the arms, as well as the communication, so it makes sense that Dr. Oz is a surgeon and that he hosts a talk show. How such meaningless blather can be operationalized in a medical setting (ot what qualifies as making sense to Gordon) was of course left unexplained. Also, Tauruses, as evidenced by the “neck of the bull” can easily get too stuck in life and also “get a stiff neck literally.” Is it impressive that Oz managed to keep a straight face through the presentation?

 

Fortunately – since star signs are connected to health – you can also “strengthen your star sign”. Gordon doesn’t quite explain exactly what that means, but apparently it involves standing on one foot and using a Neti pot.

 

Diagnosis: Abysmal nonsense of the kind that would be laughed out of even the remotest hamlet in the darkest of medieval times. But a lot of people listen, even today, and those people are scary.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2921: Maurice Gordon

And just for a brief, humorous respite between all the toxic sludge (well, this one’s toxic, too, but in a rather helpless way): Rev. Maurice Gordon of Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver received some attention back in 2004 for posting a church sign saying “Jews killed the Lord Jesus” to remind his followers that … well, according to Gordon, the message wasn’t hateful: “It would be hateful if it pointed at anybody alive today. But this has been part of the record for 2,000 years.” His response raises the obvious follow-up question “what, then, was the point of putting up the sign?” According to Gordon, the point was to encourage people to read the Bible. Well, then.

 

Apparently, Gordon’s various signs condemning homosexuality, extramarital sex and abortion had been courting controversy for a while in the Denver area.

 

Diagnosis: Very possibly dead (he was elderly back in 2004). It wouldn’t make much difference to his current level of influence, as far as we can tell.

#2920: Garry Gordon

Shaini Candace Goodwin, the “Dove of Oneness”, graduate of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment and Internet Queen of the cult of NESARA, is dead, though the cult’s offspring and heir is very much alive. And though Garry Gordon is less flamboyant, he isn’t really that much less of a loon (and we just assume he’s still around – he’s been in the game for a while).

 

So Gordon, an actual MD, is former president of the American Academy of Medical Preventics (subsequently called the American College of Advancement in Medicine), a group of doctors who practice and promote chelation therapy for all sorts of ailments for which it is demonstrably useless and dangerous. He has also been medical director and board chairman of Mineralab, a large commercial hair analysis laboratory, and director of a subsidiary of that company selling useless nutritional products. Not the least, Gordon has been among the leaders of the National Health Federation (NHF), a group of promoters of quackery (like Kurt Donsbach and Bernard Jensen) and questionable methods that engage in lobbying campaigns and many other activities promoting quackery and deregulation of questionable methods. The NHF seems to have been particularly active from the 1970s through the 1990s, and was partially responsible for popularizing the idea of “health freedom” as a strategy to promote denialism and woo. Gordon is also Founder/President of the International College of Advanced Longevity (ICALM) and Board Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the National Foundation for Alternative Medicine, as well as Consultant for Longevity Plus, LLC, a nutritional supplement company based in Payson, Arizona, “where he is responsible for designing effective, natural, non-toxic alternative supplements for the treatment of every disease known to man”, a description that really should need no further comment.

 

Gordon is, in fact, one of the self-styled “fathers of the chelation therapy movement”, and has promoted chelation therapy for a range of ailments for which chelation therapy does nothing and is actively dangerous. Indeed, his 1982 book on the topic (with Morton Walker, one of the main proponents of the infamous Gerson therapy), The Chelation Answer: How to Prevent Hardening of the Arteries and Rejuvenate Your Cardiovascular System, has long been a go-to reference for proponents of chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease; needless to say, it is not a scientific study. Gordon is also the author of a couple of sequels, including the 2004 exercise in quackery and quackery-related pseudoscience and fallacies The Omega-3 Miracle: The Icelandic Longevity Secret That Offers Super Protection Against Heart Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, Arthritis, Premature Aging, and Deadly Inflammation.

 

Interestingly, Gordon has also made appearances as a member of the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners for Arizona – almost as if to emphasize how unconcerned he is with the restraints to marketing creativity provided by care for evidence and accountability – where he was e.g. making excuses for homeopathic pratictioners whose patients had died while being subjected to nonsense woo treatment regimes.

 

Diagnosis: A long career of pushing any health-related advice (and lobbying for the removal of legal barriers to pushing such advice without consequences) that can be turned into money and that he knows, or should know, are completely worthless, to people who are often in desperate situations. We don’t know … What would you call that?

 

Hat-tip: Quackwatch

#2919: Joe Gooding

Maybe too minor to bother, but Joe Gooding is an internet cesspool operator, conspiracy theorist and general troll. On his website, Gooding covers most of the standard anti-vaccine tropes, or more accurately: He posts coverage by other anti-vaccine activists of standard anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories. Otherwise, Gooding is primarily a tireless originator of smear campaigns against scientists and public health advocates – even though there is little new or original on Gooding’s site, he is somewhat notable for his commitment to the pharma shill gambit; anyone speaking out in favor of vaccines or criticizing anti-vaccine misinformation is, as Gooding sees it, necessarily on the Big Pharma payroll, and he is therefore justified in posting your (poorly manipulated) picture, start hashtags, and encourage associates and other antivaxxers to attack and harass you. (A bit like we do with loons – apart from encouraging anyone to harass anyone – but we are right and Gooding is deluded.) Gooding is also, like many antivaxxers, under the delusion that he is not anti-vaccine (“the Pro-Forced Vaccine element [who would that be, precisely?] has attempted to marginalize the Vaccine Choice supporters with the completely made up term ‘Anti-Vax’”) but fair and balanced (“In an attempt to be balanced, I have created the term “Vax Shill” (#vaxshill) and will articulate it here”)

 

Diagnosis: A minor figure, but an active and angry one. If you ever come across him in any context, you can safely ignore anything he has to say.

#2918: Jay Goodbinder

Ah, yes. Whenever a new and powerful scientific concept is introduced, in particular one that requires a bit of knowledge and expertise to fully grasp, grifters will be there to apply it in their marketing materials as a substitute for less-marketable terms like ‘magic’. So it was with proponents of quackery and ‘quantum physics’, and so it has been for a while with ‘nano’ – most reasonable people would presumably have a feeling of that’s not quite how it works but probably not enough knowledge of the topic to be able to precisely identify what’s wrong with the bullshit. ‘Epigenetics’ is another example of a scientific expression that has been mangled and misused by proponents of quackery and woo since the term was introduced to make their nonsense sound as if it had anything to do with science to the uninformed when they try to handwave how you get from their miracle treatment regimes to a state of health.

 

There are numerous examples – some are mentioned here –and the case of Jay Goodbinder is just one of many. Goodbinder – “ND, DC, DABCI” – offers his advice and recommendations at the chiropractic Epigenetics Healing Center (yeah, they’ve gone all in), where he “specializes in Epigenetic science to help you not express disease and be able to function at your best with functional medicine therapies, Epigenetics, nutrient breathing treatments [?], and lifestyle counseling”. This has, needless to say, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with epigenetics, and we can’t help but note that Goodbinder doesn’t actually say that he has any expertise in epigenetics but in “Epigenetic science”, whatever that means – it’s hard not to suspect that some legal considerations played a role in his choice.

 

Diagnosis: It would be easy to dismiss this bullshit as pure fraud, but we have to leave the possibility open that Goodbinder is also genuinely confused about epigenetics or the validity of his treatments. Those two options are not mutually exclusive, of course.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased medicine

#2917: Mike Gonzalez

Mike Gonzales is as senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, leader (former?) of the South Carolina Pastors Alliance, and member of the 1776 Commission. Beyond that, we could frankly not be bothereed to investigate Gonzalez’s CV or history of silliness in detail, but his affilitions provide ample justification for giving him an entry here. Gonzalez is the kind of person who daftly likens resisting identity politics to defecting from Hitler (in 2013, Gonzalez blamed the Boston Marathon bombings at least in part on what he perceived as a new trend in American schools of teaching “multiculturalism and diversity”), and who claims that Democrats (Obama in particular) are actively trying to use the promise of government handouts to replace freedom-loving Americans with government-worshiping Latino immigrants in a deliberate effort to combat freedom and liberty. Yes, that kind. He has also written a book, The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free, which we honestly admit that we have failed to find the time or inclination to read.

 

Gonzalez is also a member of the Victor Orbán fan club, characterizing Orbán as a “maverick” and supporting Orbán’s alleged project to “replace the shipwreck of liberal democracy by building 21st Century Christian democracy.” At least we are reasonably confident that the present Mike Gonzalez is not identical with the Michael Gonzalez who co-authored the intensely quacky book I have cancer, What should I do: Your orthomolecular guide for cancer management with MegaVitaminMan Andrew Saul.

 

Diagnosis: A powerful figure in a powerful organization. Indeed, the chaotic blend of paranoia and conspiracy theories that is the MAGA movement is largely centered on the goals and ideas that are – admittedly often somewhat more explicitly and coherently – formulated by the Heritage Foundation. Dangerous.