#991: John de Nugent

John de Nugent is a white supremacist and hardcore anti-semite engaged in a whole range of whacko theories about history, science and pretty much any field of research imaginable – often to prop up his bigotry, but mostly because he is absolutely lunatic. As for the former, a good example is his response to the discovery that we all carry some Neanderthal DNA; according to de Nugent Semitic peoples have the most Neanderthal DNA, and this is empirically verifiable by looking at their slanted foreheads (archived here). Also, if Nugent deems you to look like a Neanderthal, it apparently means that you are a Jew, and therefore evil. Those are the ways of John de Nugent.

Thus, we get the whole gamut from secret societies, government conspiracies and the New World Order, to UFO rantings. The Jews are behind it all, and the rest of us are unwitting accomplices to their nefarious schemes: “why do you lefties favor muzzie immigration, which in its medieval and misogynistic attitudes contradicts everything you stand for? Hmmmmm? I know why – the Jews who are manipulating you want to use these aggressive, dark-gene hordes to thereby destroy the white indigenous peoples. and their genes.”

At least his own website is a dead giveaway. The color schemes and general design are typical of Internet kooks in general, and the contents consist of endless stream-of-consciousness rants propped up with youtube clicks and apparently unrelated illustration. Next to his section “white safety zones,” we get “reincarnation evidence,” and then “racist Israel seeks to genocide whites in a global holocaust” and “the Norman conquest gives England to Jews.” Much of his writings are devoted to the Solutrean hypothesis, for which he has plenty of evidence – two documentaries on Discovery Channel have featured the idea …

Diagnosis: An easy one, really. John de Nugent is a white supremacist and conspiracy nut, and peppers it all with woo and pseudo-history. Not unusual for his kind, but deep fringe lunacy nonetheless.

#990: Christiane Northrup

Christiane Northrup is an MD (OB/Gyn) who has risen to rather frightening levels of fame through her promotion of woo and denialism in the cause of women’s health. She is, as expected, a regular guest on Oprah (where she has advocated the use of Qi Gong to direct qi to the vagina, apparently to cure all manner of female ills and promote fantastic orgasms in the process), and writes columns for the Huffington Post, two items that amply serves to illustrate what kind of person this is. She has also published a long row of best-selling books.

What she offers to her patients include virtually the whole gamut of holistic medicine. Northrup promotes the medical use of chakras, astrology, angels, mysticism, feng shui, Tarot cards, and of course female intuition. No, seriously – Northrup is the kind of doctor who gives you a diagnosis after a round of Tarot solitaire has shown that the pain in your chest is really an indication of unfulfilled spiritual needs, misaligned stars and a strained relationship to your guardian angels.

Among her most recent books, The wisdom of menopause has managed to become frighteningly popular in a certain segment of the population. In the book you can read all about your seven emotional centers, chakras, and have it backed up by “evidence” such as: “My divorce culminated during what is astrologically known as my Chiron return … simultaneously I had been under the influence of an astrological configuration know as a yod … the purpose of this was to move me out of my old life …” Wisdom galore, in other words. And it is to a large extent downwards from there (though she does, in fairness, provide some serious advice as well): you will find the whole range from aspartame conspiracies to nonsense claims to the effect that scientific studies have confirmed that our “emotional style” influences our risk of breast cancer and our ability to recover from it. “All illness is a hologram,” says Northrup (which, due to the blatant lack of meaning, doesn’t even qualify as a hypothesis), and to understand it you have to listen to the message your body is sending you – if you were honest about your feelings, you might not have developed cancer.

As for her astrology, she has spelled out her beliefs in her newsletter “Health Wisdom for Women”. Astrology, according to Northrup, “is truly a science,” though she gives no indication that she is able to distinguish science from wishful thinking. “If you’re skeptical, think about how the moon influences your menstrual cycle,” which it most certainly doesn’t. The fact that the claim is false doesn’t stop her, though: “the moon influences your menstrual cycle and the flow of emotions and fluids in both your body and the oceans. This has been very well documented,” blithely unaware that the moon’s gravitational force on her is less than that of any tiny object in her immediate environment (the “ well documented” inflection is not further elaborated upon). According to Northrup, “people born at exactly the same time and place lead remarkably similar lives and even die at the same time from similar causes, despite having completely dissimilar DNA. They are known as astral or spiritual twins.” Of course, there is no statistics that even remotely suggest anything but the complete opposite of her claim. Truth and accountability have never been known to stop a delusional crackpot from venting her incoherent theories, however.

Northrup is of course also a “vaccine skeptic”. As she puts it: “Getting your child or yourself immunized is a culturally agreed-upon ritual, designed to shore up your first chakra,” but you should apparently not be overly concerned if you choose not to participate in this social construction. Then she, an MD, goes on to quote various antivaxxers with no medical background, concluding that since vaccines don’t always provide 100% perfect protection, they aren’t needed. The real reason people get sick is not because they are unvaccinated … but because of their chakras.

Perhaps her most insidious strategy in her fight against reality-based health measures might be her promotion of thermography for breast cancer, and at that point you don’t get away with ignorance anymore. Ignorance at this level is evil. Period. Her claims are assessed here. Close to that one in terms of vileness is her attempt to dispute the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, which is as uncontroversial as scientific facts come.

A discussion of a few of her claims can be found here.

Diagnosis: A serious danger to public health. Through the misleading veil of formal training, Northrup has a knack for getting away with all the breathtaking ignorance, religious fundamentalism, wishful thinking, distortions, and confabulatory woo she wants – and people do, indeed, listen. An utterly corrupt, horrible human being.

#989: Gary North

A.k.a. Scary Gary

Gary Kilgore North is a Dominionist Calvinist writer, one of the leaders of the Christian Reconstructionist movement (son-in-law of R.J. Rushdoony, for instance), and one of the most explicit Talibanists in the US at present. What distinguishes North from most other central reconstructionist thinkers, such as David Barton, Kirk Cameron or Gary DeMar, is that North actually agrees with minimally sane people that the Constitution does not justify theocracy and is not a continuation of the Bible. North’s response, though, is that the Constitution should be rejected in favor of a new theocratic form of government based on the Old Testament (the Constitution, according to North, was a scam). After all, this is the only proper response to the current decline of America, as described in his book Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. To quote from the book: “The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church’s public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion – must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel.” Yep, those good old days when everything was better.

His political vision is laid out in the “Sinai Strategy”. As most Taliban dominionists, North ignores the New Testament and its teachings of mercy and forgiveness, and instead focuses on various forms of corporal punishment, such as stoning: “Why stoning?” asks North (rhetorically). “There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost … executions are community projects – not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do ‘his duty,’ but rather with actual participants … That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians.” Yep, that’s Gary North for you (he might actually be correct about the last point, but that’s sort of a different matter).

What sort of crimes would merit such punishments? Well, blasphemy for sure: “The question eventually must be raised: Is it a criminal offense to take the name of the Lord in vain? When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime (Ex. 21:17). The son or daughter is under the lawful jurisdiction of the family. The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death. Clearly, cursing God (blasphemy) is a comparable crime, and is therefore a capital crime.” See how unfortunate we are, we who have let the ideals of humanism send us straight into barbarism?

So, in conclusion, when it comes to dealing with religious liberty (from his article “The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right”): “we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” North’s views on education are also presented in homeschooling activist Colin Gunn’s documentary “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America.”

North is also famous – and got his nickname – from his promotion of Y2K hysteria during the late 1990s (the story, including North’s response to the rather obvious failure of his doomsday predictions, is here; also here).

North is also a prominent member within the paleo-libertarian movement, having written for The Freeman (and currently for Lew Rockwell’s site); he was also a research assistant for Ron Paul in the 70s. Much of his writings are, accordingly, attempts to synthesize theocracy with Austrian school economics (or “the reiki of economy”), as he tried in Inheritance and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Deuteronomy or Treasure and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Luke. He has also co-written the book Fighting Chance (promoting Duck and Cover silliness) with Arthur B. Robinson, who is otherwise known for initiating the Oregon Petition.

There is a webpage devoted to Gary North’s bullshit here. One of his recent books, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (with Gary DeMar) is reviewed here.

Diagnosis: One of the vilest, craziest people alive, Gary North still manages to retain quite a bit of influence, despite wearing his Taliban-envy on his sleeves.

#988: Richard Noone

Richard W. Noone is a batshit crazy pseudoscientist, and one of the most famous proponents of Charles Hapgood’s crust displacement theory, the idea that formed the basis for the real-life documentary movie 2012. The general idea is, justified through truly painful torture and dismembering of modern physics, mathematics and geology (primarily by the methods of ignorance and blatant denial), that the Earth’s crust sometimes shift suddenly in relation to the rotational axis, causing massive changes to the crust. And as with all true crankery, the hypothesis predicts an immanent cataclysmic event. In his book 5/5/2000, ICE: The Ultimate Disaster Noone predicted that this cataclysmic shift would happen in, well, May 2000 (also here). It didn’t, so later fans had to move the date to 2012, and well …. At least Noone got to be the inspiration for Steven Myers’ absolutely brilliantly unhinged Pharaoh’s Pump Foundation. In fact, Noone’s book became something of a cult classic, though it is hard to find updated or detailed information on its author.

Another defender of Hapgood’s idea, William Hutton (a pseudonym) of the website Hutton Commentaries, wrote Coming Earth Changes: Causes and Consequences of the Approaching Pole Shift in 1996, where he predicted the cataclysm would happen before the end of 2001. Since Hutton is a true crank, he wasn’t stopped by his failures, and co-authored Earth’s Catastrophic Past and Future: A Scientific Analysis of Information Channeled by Edgar Cayce in 2004 (with Jonathan Eagle), where he just claimed it would happen “soon”.

Diagnosis: Absurd crankery. It should be just a source of amusement, but a few too many people take this bullshit seriously.

#987: John Nolte

John Nolte is a Breitbart news editor and a crazy wingnut conspiracy theorist. Oh, there is little beyond the ordinary about Nolte – we really don’t need to go on at length about him, since you can pretty much figure him out on your own – but that just shows that the fanatically crazy has been mainstreamed, not that Nolte is anything but a gibbering lunatic. A typical example: When Obama, on a visit to Belfast, said “If towns remain divided – if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation,” that should be interpreted as a standard, platitudinous, vague and innocuous statement everyone with which we can all agree, right? Well, run it through the wingnut mind of John Nolte, and you get a quite different interpretation; Nolte saw a “chilling” attack on religious education, and according to Nolte, Obama’s speech showed that “leftists like Obama loathe parochial schools because they put children outside of the reach of government,” and drop them into “an environment void of Bibles and trans-fat but loaded with condoms and victimhood.” And the clincher? “Obama singles out Catholic and Protestant schools, and not Islamic schools.” Yes, it is the kind of persecution complex and paranoia that should really merit professional help, but I suspect that Nolte’s standard fan base will nod in agreement instead.

Indeed, a really illuminating illustration of the mindset of people like John Nolte can be gained from his review of the documentary The Tillman Story (before it was finished). First, he complained that the “leftist media” was going to laud the documentary uncritically: “Will they be skeptical? Will they fact check? Will they even bother to pretend there might be another side to the story? These are rhetorical questions.” Of course the leftist media wouldn’t be skeptical in their praise, Nolte concluded. Therefore – without any reference to its contents – since the leftist media is going to love it, it must be a leftist propaganda movie that omits and distorts the facts. A better example of intellectual implosion through projection you’ll be hard pressed to find.

Nor is Nolte very favorably inclined toward gay marriage. More importantly, he has called out the supporters of marriage equality for their dirty rhetorical tactics. For instance, some have called the Family Research Council “anti-gay”, something Nolte vehemently denies, claiming instead that “it’s anti-Christian” (in addition to being ugly rhetoric) to call them anti-gay. Of course, the fact FRC leaders routinely call gay people pedophiles, support laws that criminalize homosexuality or even designate it as a capital punishment in other countries, objected to the Supreme Court’s overturning of such laws in the US, and explicitly call for recriminalization of homosexuality, is … just a difference in opinion. Gay people are the haters, together with the “anti-Christian leftists in Hollywood, the mainstream media, and GLAAD.”

Of course, Nolte is a climate change denialist, but that comes with the job description. His reasoning in general show so little aptitude for evidence, reason or truth that one wouldn’t really be surprised if he were a flat-earther as well. He has, for instance, called “global warming believers” today’s “climate deniers” since they apparently don’t think cold temperatures in winter refute global warming and because they don’t lend proper weight to the recovery of Arctic sea ice.

Diagnosis: Just a sample, but it gives you a reasonable indication of what kind of guy we’re dealing with here.