#3030: Tom Hoefling

  

More wingnuts! And this one is also a presidential candidate. Thomas Conrad Hoefling is the founder and national chairman of America’s Party and the party’s 2012, 2016 and 2020 presidential nominee, after seeking but failing to gain the highly competitive nominations for the Constitution Party and the American Independent Party. In 2012, at least, he received some 40,000 votes in total. Hoefling has also served as political director for Alan Keyes’ group America’s Revival and has been a representative for the American Conservative Coalition. 

 

His 2020 platform was focused primarily on his opposition to “the abortion holocaust”. Indeed, Hoefling views abortion as a form of cannibalism: “The bodies of aborted, i.e. murdered, children […] are being cannibalized, with their plundered cells being used to make vaccines” – no, Hoefling doesn’t fancy vaccines (and needless to say, his conspiracy rantings about them are bonkers false) – and “the intelligentsia of our time not only insist on making these products of cannibalism AVAILABLE to the general public, they INSIST on making the injections MANDATORY”, thereby not only letting us get away with being cannibals but saying that “to be a responsible citizen, you and your (unaborted) children MUST BE CANNIBALS”. And no, as Hoefling falsely sees it, vaccines didn’t save us from disease; rates of vaccine-preventable disease fell, according (mistakenly) to Hoefling, due to increased “knowledge about sanitation, human physiology, and health,” not vaccines; quite the opposite: “When doctors insist on going down the cursed path of a Mengele [i.e. by offering vaccines], the only thing that can follow, inevitably, is a curse on our nation.” He is, by the way, not the only lunatic to have compared vaccines to cannibalism.

 

For his presidential campaigns, Hoefling had views on e.g. education as well: children should be “taught, with a solid biblical basis, by their parents, their pastors, and trusted fellow citizens in the old hometown” and not by “far off (spiritually/philosophically hostile) bureaucrats or hired hands”. And you can, if you want, read Hoefling’s chaotically paranoid rants on perceived communist influences in America here. He is also very concerned about the homosexual agenda and the anti-religious conspiracy led by academia and media that “don’t examine issues but follow emotional and often illogical propaganda” in their support of e.g. gay marriage.

 

At least Hoefling has been a consistent and vehement critic of Donald Trump  and MAGA, in particular over their involvement in the January 6 United States Capitol attack, and he has compared Trump to a tyrant and called for the Senate to convict Trump and bar him from ever holding office again – Hoefling also dismisses 2020 election conspiracy theories. As for the 2016 election, Hoefling denounced Trump as a “liberal friend” and “financial backer” of Clinton … so ok, even his opposition to Trump is not quite a stopped-clock moment.

 

Diagnosis: Fringe lunatic; probably largely harmless.