#986: David Noebel

David A. Noebel is the founder of Summit Ministries, and former leader of the Christian Crusade. He made his real breakthrough in the 1960s and 1970s when trying to start a moral panic over rock and folk music. Though he has subsequently assumed a lower profile than, say, Jerry Falwell, Noebel is still one of the most influential and ragingly insane figures on the religious right (the people at Rapture Ready, for instance, are devoted fans).

Noebel’s anti-pop efforts are immortalized in his books Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles (1965), which contains exactly the arguments you’d suspect it to contain from the title, Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution (1966), and the audiobook The Marxist Minstrels (1974), which, once again, asserted the Beatles as well as several popular folk musicians were deliberately using musical styles intended to induce hypnotism in the listener, dumb them down, and then implant subversive communist thoughts in their minds (obviously, for someone like Noebel, communism and Satan are two sides of the same coin). Noebel also claimed that at least one major company making children’s educational records was controlled by Communist organizations and that their records contained hypnotic induction techniques while having children sing along with lyrics like “I’m a little puppet.”

His list of books is extensive, and in addition to the ones mentioned includes his 1977 book The Homosexual Revolution (dedicated to Anita Bryant), which was the publications that led people like Falwell to take up the issue (indeed, some have blamed Noebel for starting the culture wars), as well as Mind Siege: The Battle forTruth in the New Millenium with Tim LaHaye, which concerned the subversive threat against civilization posed by secular humanism. Alleged secular humanist plots included the Trilateral Commission and the National Council of Churches, and the whole book is crammed with conspiracy stuff that would make even Jeff Rense hesitate (review here). The targets included the ACLU (Noebel is a staunch opponent of civil rights and the Constitution), the National Organization of Women, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Association of Biology Teachers, the major television networks and foundationsm, the Democratic Party, the United Nations, UNESCO, Harvard, Yale, and “two thousand other colleges and universities!” Because those institutions try to educate people with facts, truth and evidence rather than Noebel’s own cherished notion of Jesus.

Also worth mentioning are the 1986 anti-gay book AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, co-authored with absolute madman Wayne C. Lutton and anti-gay Family Research Institute head Paul Cameron, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism from 1995 (with J. F. Baldwin and Kevin J. Bywater), the video Countering Culture: Arming Yourself to Confront Non-Biblical Worldviews (with Chuck Edwards), and Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search for Truth (1991), a textbook “interpreting” current intellectual movements, including biblical Christianity, secular humanism, Marxism-Leninism, the New Age Movement, Islam, and postmodernism. It is apparently still widely used among Christian schools, churches and colleges.

His anti-gay efforts are not limited to books. For the WND (surprise) he has written columns blaming the Obama administration and supporters of gay rights for the child abuse scandal at Penn State University, which according to Noebel signified “the demise of moral relativism at the hands of liberalism’s most cherished activity – homosexuality,” despite the, well, the facts. Writes Noebel: “Obama and his radical homosexual mafia plan to sodomize the world and make such perversion seem as wholesome as apple pie and vanilla ice cream,” displaying all the love of Jesus and showing how the “Democrat party espouses a shameless morality in the direct line of Rehoboam, king of Judah, who ‘did evil in the eyes of the LORD.’” Through the nefarious efforts of the “homosexual mafia,” says Noebel, “prayer, the Bible, the 10 Commandments and God may well be illegal, but sodomy is not. Has America fallen for the devil’s spin or no?” (Oh, the cherished fundie myths and distortions, rattled of quicker than you can say “persecution complex”).

His attempts to combat against communism aren’t over either, as shown by his 2010 book “You Can Still Trust the Communists ... to Be Communists (Socialists and Progressives too)” (with Fred Schwarz), where he argues that the US is now a communist country since it espouses virtually all the tenets of the Communist Manifesto (being a communist country apparently means being noticeably different from the Jesus-like situation in Manchester anno 1848?) He also laments the absence of tireless fighters such as Joe McCarthy, whom in Noebel’s eyes “was a hero”.

Diagnosis: An extremist’s extremist, whose rabid bigotry, denialism, paranoia and lack of understanding of reality make him always on the verge of lapsing into the grammatically incoherent. He is nevertheless extremely powerful, and must be considered one of the most dangerous people alive today.

#985: James I. Nienhuis

James I. Nienhuis is a young-earth creationist blogger (Dancing from Genesis), who not only takes the Bible entirely literally, but also assumes a literal interpretation of Plato’s description of Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias (reinterpreted, of course, to avoid any potential conflict with the Bible). Thus are the results of failing to understand how truth and evidence works.

Nienhuis does admit the existence of the last Ice Age, but claims that it ended circa 1500 BCE. Somehow that observation also disproves global warming (most of the claims are covered in his book Ice Age Civilizations, which is, needless to say, not particularly fact based). He has also tried to show that every god outside of the Judeo-Christian mythology is a descendant of Noah, and his discussions of politics borrow the talking points straight from the WND. (Admittedly, this entry is more or less a paraphrase of this).

Diagnosis: While not a particularly unusual type of denialist – and not, in the grand scheme of things particularly significant – Nienhuis is a rather mindnumbing example of how someone can be fractally wrong on absolutely every single issue as a result of combining fundamentalist religion with ignorance.

For a similar phenomenon, you can try to search up Greg Nikolettos’s youtube videos, though Nikolettos doesn’t really deserve a separate entry.

#984: Richard Niemtzow

Richard Niemtzow is a radiation oncologist and Air Force physician (and former affiliate of The Mutual UFO Network and alien contactee) and an ardent promoter of woo in the military, most famously “auricular acupuncture,” or, as it’s sometimes called, “battlefield acupuncture,” (yep) which is, insidiously enough, offered for post-traumatic stress disorder. But Niemtzow (and his colleague Stephen Burns) goes further than acupuncture – he also promotes healing touch and reiki, “energy medicine” based on medieval vitalism. “Healing touch (also called therapeutic touch or Reiki) is an energy-based, non-invasive treatment that restores and balances the human energy field to help decrease pain and promote healing,” says Niemtzow and his allies, and have conducted unblinded pseudostudies to justify it (along with something called “chakra spread”, which includes instructions to “focus on the love that God has for this person while slowly spreading both hands outward as far as possible three times”; “pull access energy off the legs and feet by placing your hand over each leg and moving slowly downward”; and “visualize energy being pulled up from the earth through your spine and spreading throughout your body.”) If the above-mentioned nonsense “study” is not enough to convince you, Niemtzow has another one, which is really just a collection of anecdotes – in short, when faced with a need for more studies, Niemtzow and his ilk do less rigorous ones, which is the only way he can get the studies to show what he wants them to show. He has nevertheless apparently been somewhat successful at evangelizing for his diverse brand of quasi-religious bullshit.

You can see navy captain Elwood Hopkins defend woo in the military here, giving you an object lesson in how not to do critical thinking and assessment.

There’s a good article on the nefariousness of Niemtzow’s practices here.

Diagnosis: Madman and crackpot, and apparently one of the most influential such at present. Unintentionally evil, and wielding enough influence to be able to cause some actual harm to real people.

#983: Sheldan Nidle

Sheldan Nidle is the founder of the Planetary Activation Organization, which is for all intents and purposes a UFO religion. Nidle himself claims to be capable of telepathic communication and thus to be in contact with extraterrestrials. Apparently the extraterrestrials relate important information to Nidle, such as the informtation that initially made him (somewhat) famous, namely that the world would end on December 17, 1996, with the arrival of 16 million spaceships and a host of angels along with “the Photon Belt.” He assured us that we would have “16 years of light 24 hours a day” after the Photon Belt “hits [our] pineal glands,” something that would “activate all 12 strands of [our] DNA.”  When this did not occur, Nidle claimed the angels had transferred humanity into a holographic projection in order to give it a second chance – though he also removed all reference to it from his website. At least he became the proud recipient of a Pigasus award for his prediction.

Nidle founded the Planetary Activation Organization (PAO) in 1997 to prepare the world for the arrival of 10,000 alien ambassadors later that year. The PAO also predicted that benevolent extraterrestrials would help transform the earth into a terrestrial paradise by the end of the year 2012, though we are still … well, no, we aren’t really waiting.

One of the most delectable details of Nidle’s crazy is his ventures into economy woo. According to Nidle, the Annunaki are currently focusing on the establishing of a new financial and monetary system for the entire planet, including new global governance, to herald their return. “The first item on this agenda is to liberate you from any type of slavery, and there are many forms that presently burden you. The most overt form of slavery is your legal and financial systems, so these will be the first ones to be remedied. Restoring your innate sovereignty is predominant in our actions. Beginning with the material aspects, there will be full debt forgiveness, universal prosperity, an end to illegal taxation, and a formal government declaration of a new form of governance. Only then are you to be restored completely to your natural, Creator-given rights.” Apparently the powers that be are in a conspiracy to keep all of us in economic hardship (and reduce the population) so that we don’t realize that there are many realities that can help you get what you want because our conceptual scheme only allows us to see one of those many realities until you have evolved a higher consciousness. The Annunaki, however, are about to introduce new currencies that have vastly greater buying power than our current currencies (no, Nidle seems oblivious to the shortcomings of such schemes), though the short excerpt is of course unable to capture the glorious, megalomaniac, fanatically religious delusions that are Nidle’s ways of viewing the world. The efforts will also make the Earth’s biosphere magical, and the magic will generate Love.

Nidle has recently weighed in on the missing Malaysian flight 370 and confirmed that it “is in a higher dimension”.

Diagnosis: Completely beyond the reaches of coherence, meaning, and reason, Nidle apparently continues to attract followers of his version of senseless gibberish. More or less like Time Cube, though with a bit more charisma - or whatever you choose to call it.

#982: Don Nicoloff

Don Nicoloff is a radio talkshow host (“Evident Footprints”) who has developed “his metaphysical gifts through the discipline of mastering previous physical and mental limitations.” Although Evident Footprints covers pretty much any crazy conspiracy theory and any form of woo imaginable, Nicoloff is first and foremostly a birther. In fact, Nicoloff was one of the first to take up the Obama birth certificate issue, and has subsequently taken the birther conspiracies to interesting levels. Not only is Barack Obama “really” Barry Soetoro, but also Barry Rockefeller and hence member of the Rockefeller family – one of the families that apparently really run things in the US. And senator John McCain is a fraud as well (he is really one John McCann, II). So was George Bush sr. (really George H. Scherff, Jr.) and Dwight Eisenhower.

So who was George Scherff, jr.? Well, Nicoloff has procured a “family photo” from 1938 with (according to Nicoloff) Martin Bormann and Joseph Mengele. So the Bush family (a.k.a. Scherff) was really high-ranking Nazis. Scherff sr. was, for good measure, the assistant of Nicola Tesla as well, a position he used to steal Tesla’s revolutionary technologies and give them to the Nazis. The John McCain story, with its conspiracies and Nazi connections, is told here, and the thorny and long-winded story of Obama is told in several parts here.

In order to justify his claims, Nicoloff produces a rather tortured reinvention of pretty much all of 20^th century history. “What we are taught about history in American schools is not history, but a fairy tale,” says Nicoloff. “Better yet, it is propaganda designed to hoodwink an unsuspecting society about its true heritage and the treasonous acts and sabotage that were conceived in order to bring about a New World Order.” He even redefines “research” to support his conclusions (and for good measure, uses the dangers of water fluoridation as an example). The main justification for his way of telling the story is that a secret, powerful organization out to control the world would use deception. Therefore Nicoloff is right.

Nicoloff has made several radio interviews with Ken Adachi, where they discuss birther stuff, Planet X, Elenin, HAARP, reptilian overlords and “how gifted people are dispatching the main demons from the planets this very moment” (“[t]he lower astral is having a huge make over right now”).

Diagnosis: It is rather interesting that Nicoloff’s rants managed to get more or less mainstreamed in certain segments of the population, but there you have it.