#3051: Patrick Howley

Patrick Howley is a pro-Russian “racist, antisemitic, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist”; founder and former editor-in-chief of the wingnut conspiracy website Big League Politics (BLP); former reporter for a number of other wingnut media sources like Breitbart, The Washington Free Beacon, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller, The Epoch Times and so on; and popularizer of QAnon conspiracy theories. Howley has for instance hosted programs on Patriots’ Soapbox and participated at AFPAC, and he pals around with the circle around Dalton Clodfelter and Nick Fuentes. Currently, Howley is writing for the wingnut conspiracy website National File, which largely publishes propaganda for neo-nazi groups. To the general public, however, he might be most famous for the controversies that erupted in April 2022 after he complained that there were too many Black people at the CMT Music Awards (“Country music is different. It’s not Wakanda,” said Howley).

 

Conspiracy theories

Under Howley’s leadership, BLP became one of the major and early promoters of QAnon conspiracy theories; in an article from January 2018, for instance, BLP published a profile article about the “revolutionary citizens” who were trying to decode Q drops, claiming e.g. that this movement, “centered around the 17th letter of the alphabet and also the 17th letter of the ancient Greek alphabet”, in fact “dates back to 345 BC, where ‘Q’ created an underground resistance […] to study and circumevent the tactics of the Romans”, that “President Trump is aware of their movement, that the Deep State is actively trying to silence and frame and imprison truth-tellers, that a missile was witnessed fired near Singapore aimed at Air Force One, the significance of the number 17 to President Trump, and so much more.” Though BLP claimed that the article was written by “a truth-teller who chooses to remain anonymous at this time”, it was published under Howley’s byline.

 

And Howley has indeed engaged in and promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on numerous occasions, including the core tenet that “America is [at least unless Trump is in charge] a human trafficking colony for pedophilic financial elites” as well as “a Goy army for war tyrants.” (Yes, you only have to scratch the surface of most QAnon subscribers for the global Jewish conspiracy to emerge, and in the case of Howley, you don’t have to scratch at all.) Or, even more explicitly: “There is a religion called satanism and that religion, which practices witchcraft, believes – due to the teaching of Aleister Crowley – that their spells and their summoning of demons from Hell is enhanced by child molestation and child sacrifice. That is a fact [Yes, there’s that trick again]. That is a fact of our world and you can call it a conspiracy theory, but it is something that we have to confront.” And satanism is the religion of the globalist elite, including Hilary Clinton: “It’s very clear to me that she is a satanist. It’s obvious. It was very, very clear to me that she was a satanist. John Podesta is a satanist and I believe George Soros as well is a satanist.” To counter this powerful satanist movement, Howley has boldly suggested that “[a]nyone who has ever consumed the adrenochrome of children should be banned from holding public office.” Howley also wants to bring back literal witch trials for Clinton and her ilk.

 

BLP, meanwhile, had by 2018 established itself as a significant disseminator of conspiracy drivel (e.g. publishing Laura Loomer’s nonsense), and had for instance played a major role in the spread of Seth Rich Murder conspiracy theories and the notion that former President Obama was actively trying to take down President Donald Trump by forming a “shadow government” and by surveilling and targeting Trump Tower and the Supreme Court (e.g. by “hacking” Chief Justice John Roberts – which, according to Howley, is also how Obama got Roberts to vote to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in 2012). At the same time, they made influential efforts to try to downplay the role of neo-Nazi relationship to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, even trying to blame the death of Heather Heyer on an anti-racism activist and UNCA professor. BLP also supported white nationalist Paul Nehlen in his unsuccessful 2017 attempt to challenge former House Speaker Paul Ryan in his GOP primary, as well ​​the congressional campaigns of neo-Confederate candidate Corey Stewart and Roy Moore.

 

Politics – and conspiracy theories (and Jews)

“Everything in politics is about the issue of human trafficking”

-       Patrick Howley

 

Howley is of course an ardent MAGA cultist, but insofar as his views are so deeply mired in insane conspiracy theories and wild fantasies, it is a bit unclear what he actually thinks Trump is doing. In any case, according to Howley (in 2022), “the Globalist Regime that currently controls the U.S. government is a genocidal hostile authoritarian cabal operating under the auspices of fake ‘democracy’ to keep humans relegated to Third World slave status everywhere -- and they HATE White men.” Indeed, “globalists are illustrating the end of America with a mentally-vacant pedophile ‘president,’ and a nationwide borderless supply-starved masked Hunger Games-style anarcho-tyranny frenzy driven by jewish propaganda to whip up violence against Whites.” (Yes, Howley has been consistent in his contention that “Joe Biden is a tyrant war pig pedophile!”) At least Trump, Howley imagined, would put an end to such flagrant jewry, which to Howley is perhaps the most central concern: “How often does society have to go through the motions of pretending that Jews are not controlling hostile globalist institutions, lest we be cancelled by the hostile globalist institutions that Jews control?”

 

That Howley subscribes to the Great Replacement theory should come as no surprise: “everyone knows that White people are getting replaced and genocided, but the normies on both sides want to censor you if you talk about it because they support the White genocide.” And he blames not only Democrats here (whose “obsession with destroying Trump is merely a symptom of their fanatical hatred for regular White people in America”); also the GOP is “genociding” white people by welcoming conservative activists of color. For instance, Gov. DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, is a “race traitor” because “promoting minorities over Whites and bragging about it, especially when the minorities are just stooges of the malicious government agenda, is race traitor behavior.” Really, “both of America’s political parties are controlled by competing factions of pedophilic Jews who both seek to sell us to China”. And remember that when people use the terms ‘equity and inclusion’, what they are really saying is that “they want to kill whitey and forcibly rape children” (though it is perhaps not the most central concern here, some might worry about why Howley felt the need to insert the qualifier ‘forcibly’).

 

Evidence of the massive racism Howley thinks exists against white people (young white men are the most racially profiled and discriminated against people in America) is not hard to come by: for instance, “you go into a store, and they’ll follow us around.” The signs might not always be immediately obvious, however, but Howley is willing to help you see, e.g. by translating mainstream media stories to show what they are really trying to tell you: for instance, a story about child care really means “they want to rape your kids” and a story about the Super Bowl actually means “go BLM and kill whitey”.

 

Meanwhile, he reminds black people that “everything blacks hate about white people they are really just talking about Jews.” As such, he is occasionally willing to strike a conciliatory tone, for “[d]espite our differences, we are all getting poisoned by the jews.” Some of that poisoning, by the way, happens through vaccines – Howley is anti-vaccine – and some of the discrimination he faces might be due to the magic effects of vaccines: everywhere Howley goes, vaccinated “normies” who don’t even know who he is instinctively hate him because they know he’s a “pureblood” (during COVID, he called medical doctors and nurses – “Zionists” – “sick little needle dick needle cultists” who are “getting sexual stimulation” from raping children with COVID-19 vaccines). After all, he is, in his own words, “not racist” but simply concerned about the “agenda by the globalists against the white race.”

 

As for the ‘pro-Russian’ characteristic mentioned above, Howley has consistently rooted for Putin’s victory in the Ukraine: “They want me to care about Ukraine so much and I don’t that it just makes me happy to see when they’re sad. Their misery, their failure, their disappointment is funny and gratifying to me”.

 

Meanwhile, Howley’s approach to social issues is perhaps typified by his telling women who criticize the overturning of Roe v. Wade that their concerns are “trivial”: “You’re gonna hush your mouth. I hear a lot of ‘waah, waah, waah,’ not a lot of churning butter. ... We’ve heard enough from you.” Ah, the wit and intellect of Patrick Howley! Also, “leftist women should not be allowed to murder babies. They are demonically possessed.”

 

BLP

Though Howley is currently out of the BLP, he was one of the website’s cofounders and helped raise its profile, so it seems appropriate to provide a brief rundown of BLP here – they did, after all, continue along the path Howley had laid out for them after he left. BLP is currently owned by Mustard Seed Media, which is owned by North Carolina political operative Reilly O’Neal and pizzagate promoter Noel Fritsch, the latter of whom was also campaign manager for January 6 2021 rioter Derrick Evans.

 

Other conspiracy theorists associated (at various points) with BLP include

 

-       Peter D’Abrosca, who currently covers “crime and campus extremism in higher education” for Fox News Digital.

-       Cassandra Fairbanks (now MacDonald), who currently writes for the Gateway Pundit but who has also written for the Russian state-sponsored outlet Sputnik

-       Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used to be a “correspondent” for the site.

-       Jen Lawrence, who together with fellow BLP figure Dustin Stockton was a seminal figure in organizing the January 6 2021 attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

-       Sonny Joy Nelson, who joined Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign as associate director of strategic communications.

-       Luke Rohlfing, a leading member of the Proud Boys.

-       Lee Stranahan, host of the radio show Fault Lines on the Russian government-backed Sputnik Radio and a central promoter of Russian propaganda and misinformation e.g. about the Ukraine war, but also a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories concerned with the mythical deep state and Soros (e.g. that Charlottesville was a Soros-backed set-up for a violent coup to take out Trump).

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is, and has always been, primarily a shitposting troll at what delusional conspiracy theorists consider ‘media outlets’. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t the unapologetic Nazi he claims to be – and, at the very least, that’s the persona most of those who listen to him are actually listening to.

 

#3050: Rodney Howard-Browne

Rodney Morgan Howard-Browne (H-B) is a South African-born evangelist and conspiracy theorist who has been polluting Tampa, Florida since the mid-1990s as pastor of The River Church and founder and head of Revival Ministries International. He is, accordingly, qualified for an entry in much the same way as other foreign-born loons like Ken Ham and Ray Comfort, whom he might not quite beat on silliness but whom he outpaces on sheer hatred and evil.

 

H-B’s services are characterized by an array of typical charismatic antics, like laying on of hands and worshipers giggling in ‘spiritual drunkenness’ – as well as speaking in tongues, breaking into uncontrollable ‘holy laughter’, shaking, dancing in the aisles, falling over, and similar behaviors – the kind of behaviors that has made it natural for H-B to characterize himself as “God’s bartender” or “holy ghost bartender” (while also declaring that anyone who criticizes his revivals are going to hell). He has apparently also ministered, under one Mike Rose, at the Bethel Assembly of God in Juneau, Alaska, a church that Sarah Palin has been attending.

 

Howard-Browne apparently came to national attention back in 1999 when his Revival Ministries organization rented Madison Square Garden for six weeks for “an effort to achieve a Billy Graham-style faith uprising” called Good News New York, but his reputation was perhaps more firmly established during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, when his church hosted political meetings for the Florida chapter of the Republican Party to rally for then-candidate Newt Gingrich, with H-B leading the flock in calls for a national “rising” of Christian Americans “that will not sit idly by and allow the killing of unborn babies and allow Islam to take over this country”; he also characterized Mormonism as a “cult” that used to have “death squads that would go around killing everybody that was not a Mormon”. His own operation has been characterized as a “cult”, with H-B as “a manipulator leading followers into a cult; a circus ring leader making a good living” through millions gathered from vulnerable followers. (Though he officially distances himself from the prosperity gospel, his followers have made Howard-Browne fabulously wealthy and he tends to become unreasonable whenever poor people are reluctant to give him money.)

 

Through their Revival Ministries, Rodney Howard-Browne and his wife Adonica also operate the River School of Government, a degree-granting program (though hardly accredited in any normal sense) that funds training for people seeking to run for political office. H-B’s own educational achievments include a “doctorate of ministry degree” from “The School of Bible Theology”, the infamous diploma mill from which a range of other fundamentally dishonest religious charlatans and grifters (including Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer, Billye Brim and Benny Hinn) have also purchased their “degrees”.

 

That H-B is fundamentally a fraud and grifter is demonstrated not only by him flaunting a fake degree, however, but equally well by his MLM involvement; him and his wife were top-ranking distributors for Monavie, the infamous acai berry pyramid scheme, until that business folded in 2014, and H-B has more recently served as “North America Emerald Director” for the MLM company Jeunesse.

 

Politics and Trump

A Trump sycophant, Howard-Browne was one of 17 evangelical pastors (frauds) who visited the White House to pray for and lay hands on President Donald Trump in 2017. On the occasion, H-B did his best to draw attention to himself by claiming that his blessings averted “a planned attack on our president and that’s all I can tell you about right now; I know what I’m talking about, I’ve spoken to high-ranking people in the government”; he refused to tell Secret Service any specifics or what his sources were, however, citing pastoral privilege. He had previously praised God for giving America a “Rambo” to take on the global conspiracy to destroy America that he claims exists (“Donald Trump Is the New World Order’s Worst Nightmare”, said Howard-Browne).

 

For H-B, Trump was God’s answer to the spiritual troubles ruining America. As he laid it all out in Charisma in 2014, America (at that time) had only “two or three years” left, due to “an increasingly rapid decline in America’s morality” that has been going on “since prayer was removed from schools in 1962. Abortion was legalized in 1973. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage in 2004.” (America is “demon possessed”, said H-B.) That process had, for some reason, caused God to lift “a measure of His hedge of protection around America”, exemplified not only by Christians “meeting with persecution in the marketplace, and anti-Christ agendas are working overtime to send America into a downward spiral of darkness” but by “natural disasters”, “economic disasters”, “famine”, politicians and schoolchildren being shot, “pastors are falling into sexual immorality in America” and “violent protesters”. Enter Trump, who according to H-B, would at least delay the coming of the Antichrist.

 

Unfortunately, Trump would face massive opposition from the global elite of Satanists that really run the world to implement “that Antichrist one-world religion and one money system.” Throughout Trump’s first period, H-B warned his followers not only about how intent these elites were on removing Trump from office but of the possibility that they might be able to recruit the assistance of Vice President Mike Pence. Indeed, one of the major threats to Trump was always betrayals from people who should be loyal, such as John Bolton,: H-B declared that Jesus would “beat the crap” out of Bolton, just as described in the Bible.

 

Much of his views on politics (and much else) is laid out in his 2018 book The Killing of Uncle Sam: The Demise of the United States of America, co-written with conspiracy theorist Paul L. Williams. H-B is also worried about upcoming EMP attacks that would wipe out half the population, which we mention mostly because it seems likely that H-B’s source here is Chuck Holton, whom we just covered; that H-B listens to Holton is a good reason why you should not.

 

Conspiracy theories and QAnon

“Russiagate is a complete fabrication, high level individuals, politicians and media heads need to be arrested & go to prison!#UraniumOne #LockHerUp #QAnon #ClintonFoundation #CrookedHillary #FusionGPS #corruption #HumaAbedin #Comey #DrainTheSwamp #8chan #4chan #WhiteRabbit”

-       Rodney Howard-Browne’s New Year greeting, January 1, 2018

 

A staunch conspiracy theorist, Howard-Browne has been a guest at InfoWars e.g. to claim, in 2018, that a series of bombings in Austin, Texas were being used by “anarchist terrorists” in an attempt to bring “everything under control” (a characteristic anarchist terrorist goal), that churches and religious groups were being censored in the U.S., and that “globalist gremlins” were attempting to thwart Trump’s agenda. He then presented Alex Jones with a handgun to show that Jones was “protected by God” because that’s what normal people do for normal people reasons. Later in 2018, he even co-hosted InfoWars, an opportunity he used to assert that Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be shot for treason. (She is far from the only SCOTUS or political figure H-B would enjoy seeing shot for treason).

 

Shortly after the Christchurch mosque shootings in March 2019, H-B tweeted that it was a ‘false flag’ operation: “There is no doubt that what happened in New Zealand as horrific as it is, is a false flag that will be blamed on conservatives when it’s all said and done!” (he later doubled down). Meanwhile the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was “A False Flag MK Ultra PSYOPS To push for the disarmament of America and do away with the 2nd Amendment – this is the plan of the UN Agenda 2030.”

 

H-B was, notably, an early proponent of QAnon. In an October 2017 sermon, he brought the message to his congregation that “human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years” in Hollywood and D.C: “They sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink blood of young kids. This is a fact.” People like H-B, failing to fully grasp the role that evidence and reason play for reasonable people, tend to think of asserting the latter sentence as a sort of spell that conveys truth on whatever just fell out of their mouths. Indeed, you’ll discern the same gambit in several of H-B’s rants, e.g. his 2014 rant (in front of several congresspeople) about how the US under Obama was building concentration camps and gas chambers and preparing to institute martial law: “We’ve been taken over. We are living in occupied territory. It’s like Nazi Germany in 1933 right now in America. People say, ‘That’s just crazy.’ But no it’s not, it’s fact.” (to be filed under ‘Howard-Browne loses an argument with his own imagination’). The gas chambers were ostensibly being built “right before our eyes” – H-B specified in particular one under construction in Kentucky –  as a result, of course, of a UN Agenda 21 plot to pave the way for a “one world government” and “the rise of the Antichrist.” Apparently said one-world government will be based on socialism, Zionism, Masonry, the Rothschild family and owl-worship (presumably connected to this but who the hell knows), and it will empower the “Luciferian structure of the globe that worships Lucifer.”

 

But anyways, with regard to Hollywood (and, it seems, celebrities in general), “they’re prophets of the enemy ... These people are full of the devil, these people can’t even be reasoned with, these are not people you can talk to, they have already given their soul to the devil. These people go through seances, these people drink blood, these people sacrifice children.” Moreover, “many of the Hollywood actors that you go see on a screen, what you don’t know [is] they bring a witch, they do a big seance right there on the set and they worship devils and they allow devils to come into them before they take the part of what they're going to act. It’s a fact.” (Oh, yes.) Hilary Clinton is a witch, too. Fortunately, with Trump in charge, these satanists are at the end of the line: “the next thing to be exposed will be all the pedophilia that is going to come out of Hollywood and out of Washington, D.C. The human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years.”

 

Meanwhile, ISIS is trained and controlled by the CIA. “The ISIS bases are in 49 states in America that the CIA brings them and trains them here and then ships them out to the areas of the world where they want there to be conflict. They are all trained here. Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA, so does Anderson Cooper. Work that one out.”

 

Covid antics, misinformation

Howard-Browne really rose to national fame during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he used for all it was worth (and in utter disregard of human life) to promote his status. H-B famously kept his church open and encouraged his congregants to continue to shake hands because they were “revivalists, not pansies”. His loud and flagrant violations left the Hillsborough County Sheriff with no choice but to place him under arrest because “his reckless disregard for human life put hundreds of people from his congregation at risk and thousands of residents who may interact with them”, something that allowed H-B to play the persecution card and gain the sympathy of the usual crowd (fuck the people he probably killed).

 

H-B would otherwise dedicate COVID-era sermons to misinformation about COVID and mocking those who were concerned with the spread of what he called a “phantom plague” deliberately designed to shut down churches and terrify people into receiving a vaccine that would cause mass deaths as a population control scheme – he claimed to find evidence of such an agenda in a 2010 document produced by The Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network that few of those listening to him would bother to read anyways. Apparently, the whole COVID debacle was a strategy initiated by the globalists after they had been forced to conclude that the “climate change narrative for global governance failed”. The COVID vaccine, specifically, is a satanic plot to change your DNA and “remove the God factor out of people so they won’t feel God.” Also, you have to recognize the connection between COVID measures and the racial war they are whipping up; the goal is to “disband our police department so that they can bring in a United Nations police force of 500,000 people” to implement “gun confiscation, ultimately. That’s why they’re trying to push this thing with COVID-19.” (Even H-B seemed to struggle to connect the dots he wanted to connect here.) Anyways, “[t]hey’re trying to drag it out so they can put masks on every single person because that is the forced compliance that will come, and then everybody will have to get a vaccine. If you go and get the vaccine, you'll be dead within a couple of years.” It is apparently all so clever that ordinary people struggle to grasp even how the suggested plan is supposed to be in any way coherent. H-B declared that he would “not compromise”.

 

He also claimed that he would cure Florida of coronavirus. After all, he had previously, in a 2019 video, delusionally claimed that he and other worshippers at his church had cleansed Florida of the Zika virus.

 

It is worth noting that H-B’s antivaccine views predate and go way beyond COVID. According to H-B, vaccines are really just an eugenicist effort to impose population control on the world by sterilizing people and giving them diseases, and he vowed “go Old Testament” if anyone ever tries to forcibly vaccinate him, something H-B of course believes is likely to happen.

 

Meteorology

In September 2017, Howard-Browne received some media attention after referring to Hurricane Irma as a “nothingburger” after his and other fundie dingbats’ “prayer took the teeth out of the storm”. Irma caused the death of fifty people in the US and Caribbean and resulted in power outages affecting 5.5 million people in Florida, but whatever.

 

Howard-Browne has also weighed in on climate change, asserting that climate change is not real because the Book of Genesis says that the seasons will never end, which is an argument most websites providing answers to questions about climate change don’t seem to have explicitly addressed. Indeed, he has devoted whole sermons to the issue of climate change, which, as he sees it, is “a total fabrication”; H-B can for instance inform you that all the scientists are lying and that “the ice caps are not melting”, based on information he has personally gotten from his “Eskimo friends.”

 

As for the weather patterns, “we have to get into the whole thing of weather modification, what they’ve been doing with the chemtrails, what they’ve been doing with creating drought, manipulating weather,” explained Howard-Browne, adding – predictably – that “this is not some conspiracy theory, this is fact”. Well, then. The goal of this they is “all about creating food shortages. We used to be in a place where the world's food supply was six months in backup; it’s down to days, one crisis and people are starving. I mean, you can go within 11 days from today into people eating each other.”

 

Yes, they’re really out to get us. The food we eat, it’s “got all the GMOs in it ... It’s not even a food, it’s a chemical. That is what’s killing our people.” And “the water supply that’s in many of the cities, it’s got fluoride in the water. Fluoride in the water. Fluoride is not there to protect your teeth. Fluoride causes cancer. Fluoride lowers people’s I.Q. Fluoride makes people passive.” And on top of that, there’s “the stuff they spray in the air.” So “people are poisoned everyday through the food supply, they’re poisoned through vaccines, injections, their poisoned through the food they eat, the water they drink, even the sodas they drink – and I can go on and on and on – and then the air.”

 

Diagnosis: That anyone would believe that Howard-Browne is anything but full of shit is one of the things that comes closest to a miracle these days, and it is, like many things these days, a shit one. A bloodthirsty, legitimately insane fraud, huckster, misinformation merchant, conspiracy theorist and cult leader; a suitable villain for a spoof of a YA fantasy novel, perhaps, were he not so obviously cognitively malfunctioning.

 

#3049: Terrence Howard

Terrence Dashon Howard is an award-winning film and television actor, and probably famous enough that we don’t have to say much about that part. He is also an amateur-mathematician, and that’s where our interest picks up. (He has also claimed to have a PhD degree in chemical engineering from South Carolina State University (SCSU), an institution he never attended and which does not confer doctorates in chemical engineering).

 

According to Howard, he has developed language of logic called “Terryology” (oh, yes), which he ostensibly can use to prove the statement “1 × 1 = 2.” For, as Howard sees it, mathematicians have always been wrong about this (he actually blames the Annunaki for fooling everyone in order to halt the development of Mesopotamia). “How can it equal one?” asks Howard: “If one times one equals one that means that two is of no value because one times itself has no effect. One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what’s the square root of two? Should be one, but we’re told it’s two, and that cannot be.” You tell them, Terrence! He blames his leaving the Pratt Institute over disagreements with a professor regarding this hypothesis, which we admit doesn’t sound all that implausible. He also says that he dedicates up to 17 hours daily to creating sculptures from plastic fragments joined with copper wire, which he argues (well, says) “make up the motion of the universe” and which demonstrate his mathematical model by telling “the truth from within”. His “proof” that “1 × 1 = 2” was published in the journal on Twitter in 2017 but failed to make a lasting impact on the mathematical community.

 

He has later attempted to debunk the Pythagorean theorem, claimed he can “kill gravity” (he is, of course, an electric universe crank), asserted that he does not believe in the number zero, and claimed to remember the events of the day he was born. He has moreover sketched some universal theories of everything (aimed to replace physics) based on combining some presocratic-style nonsense with the New Age idea of sacred geometry, and wants to “rebuild the periodic table” partially on the grounds of his contention that carbon, silicon, cobalt, and hydrogen are of the same color, just “doubled in each octave”. And no, the fact that all of physics contradicts his ravings (to the extent that they are sufficiently coherent to be properly contradicted) doesn’t give him pause: “Everyone is wrong. The universe backs me up. You have all of these physicists saying something different but none of them have 97 patents. None of them have introduced a new form of flight.” He also, for good measure, claimed that a patent he owned at one point was the foundation of VR technology.

 

Some of Howard’s ideas are explained and evaluated here.

 

And yes, this is merely another celebrity who promotes nonsense. Celebrities are, after all, remarkably frequent purveyors of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, presumably because their exposed careers, higher levels of narcissism, and lifestyles “can easily become untethered to the experiences of average people”. But that’s no excuse for anything (and Howard is not a good person). Just don’t listen to them.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it might seem a bit unfair to call someone out for their private pet stupidities when it’s not related to their primary profession (and probably wouldn’t affect their execution of their primary profession), but it was, after all, Howard himself who offered this brilliant illustration of stupidity to the public. We hope someone helps him with his own finances.  

#3048: Roanne Houck

Several states currently have naturopathic licensing laws, something naturopaths and naturopathic organizations (and other pseudoscience organizations) for years have been trying to achieve across the US because it gives their practices a sheen of legitimacy that their quackery, being pseudoscientific nonsense, cannot obtain from facts, science or actual results. Colorado does, despite efforts from naturopathic organization, not – they require registration to hold the title “Naturopathic Doctor” (ND) and give them limited prescriptive authority but has no licensing system – but many Colorado naturopaths nevertheless like to cosplay as real doctors to fool people who actually need health-related help into paying for their services. 

 

Such services include ervices like the services provided by Roanne Houck, who, through Gunnison Main Street Clinic, offers unsuspecting or low-information (or delusional) victims stuff like homeopathy, “detoxification”, acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, and something called Ortho-Bionomy®, a form of osteopathic manipulation. The reason we took note of Houck in particular is that she is also the former president of the Colorado Association of Naturopathic Doctors (its current president is one James Gilchrist, ND, Lac), a position from which she repeatedly and grudgingly had to tell Colorado naturopaths that they couldn’t call themselves “physicians”, all the while fighting hard to expand naturopaths’ scope of practice in the state against the advice of real medical groups – something that, as demonstrated by Houck’s own practices, would have been lunacy.

 

Diagnosis: More of the same. It’s endless, and we might be losing. At least we’ll continue to expose them.