#2184: Ray Rooney, jr.

The digital media editor for the American Family Association, Ray Rooney, Jr., is the kind of person who goes out of his way to warn us that “we’re surrounded by venomous LGBT activists, antagonistic atheists, vitriolic academics, Christian bashers, God haters, Muslim sympathizers, BlackLivesMatter hate groups, and government officials who are hell bent on stripping away every last vestige of Christian heritage and religious freedom from us;” that is, people who disagree with Rooney and may even criticize his views. They shouldn’t do that, since doing so is a threat to his religious freedom.

No, Rooney doesn’t fancy gay people. Homosexuality, according to Rooney, is “unhealthy” and “unrighteous,” “unfruitful and unnatural” (source: his common sense). The real reason homosexuality is wrong, however, as detailed in his column “The Real Problem With Homosexuality”, is that unlike “normal people”, who never disclose that they have sex with someone of the opposite sex, gays just want to “broadcast to the world the details of their sex lives”; because being in a homosexual relationship is all about broadcasting “sex” whereas being in a heterosexual relationship is not, obviously, or put differently: “gay” makes Rooney immediately think about sex, whereas “heterosexuality” does not. Complains Rooney: “I am fed up with the gay community,” and“just sick of hearing about how one group of people demand that everyone in the world accept who they have sex with!” The real problem with homosexuality, in other words, is that it is homosexuality.

Rooney is, of course, also a creationist, and has ardently complained about how evolution together with “pluralism, progressivism, abortion, and pornography” have “all come and established themselves in the culture with barely a collective stir from the people of God.” Except for all the persistent, loud, deranged and deeply confused rage from fundamentalists, of course.

Diagnosis: Dolt.

#2183: Aviva Romm

Aviva Romm is an integrative physician (she actually does, in fact, have a real medical degree), midwife, and herbalist, defender of Goop and its practices, and contributor to the astonishingly insane misinformation on the Goop website. Her association with Goop should give you a sense of the relevant level of trustworthiness Romm is aiming for. Romm’s primary victims targets are pregnant women, busy women, and parents, to whom she peddles her very own line of herbal supplements, books and online courses (herbal medicine for women, adrenal thyroid pro training), such as Healthiest Kids University: Natural Medicine for Children – unsurprisingly, Romm’s main marketing ploy is fallacious appeals to nature. There is a good discussion of herbal supplements here – they are mostly polluted drugs in unknown dosages with unknown effectiveness and potentially dangerous side-effects – and a decent list of questionable “nutritionists” here.

Though she has been part of the Goop defense team to be deployed against science-based criticisms through well-honed and precise marketing techniques and appeals to empowerment – conspicuously and completely avoiding the substance of the criticism – Romm did at one point actually seem to distance herself a bit from Goop, admitting that not everything on the site is effective or evidence-based. “I’m not one of these integrative doctors who basically just because it’s alternative thinks it’s safe and good. I try to keep my doctor thinking cap on as well,” said Romm. She doesn’t, of course, but it is at least interesting to see her admit the difference between thinking as a doctor and thinking as an altmed huckster and more than suggesting that the latter role doesn’t involve much sensitivity to evidence, critical thinking or the significance of accountability. Romm also pointed out that “those drug company commercials are making lots of people millions. So it’s not just one isolated situation with Goop;” a tu quoque is of course always best when presented in the context of a false equivalence. Romm is fond of false equivalences.

Toxins

Toxins feature prominently in Romm’s fearmongering, and she will readily tell us that “many health conditions that are adversely affecting children today can be traced back to environmental toxin exposure.” She is less sanguine about identifying these alleged toxins, of course, or trying to explain how they work or how the bullshit products she sells would help people deal with them. 

Hat-tip Refutations of Antivaccine Memes

She does, however, advise women to refuse glucola (a standard diabetes screening drink), claiming it is a “toxic cocktail”, and credits the Food Babe and the Food Babe’s chemophobia for alerting her to said toxins. Perhaps needless to say, glucola is not what’s toxic here. To attack glucola, Romm invokes conspiracy theories: don’t trust obstetricians or experts who actually work with patients; trust instead her, who don’t and therefore doesn’t need to take any responsibility for her advice (but is rather trying to sell you expensive quackery): the experts are actively conspiring to harm you, as Romm sees it, since nothing sells products better than sowing fear. There is a good takedown of Romm’s FUD tactics and rank dishonesty here.

“Should you detoxify before getting pregnant?” asks Romm rhetorically, and continues “[a]s a midwife and functional medicine doctor specializing in women’s health, I get this question often. And if I had gotten this question ten years ago, I might have said no.” “No” is of course the correct answer, but these days Romm’s got products to sell and has changed her advice accordingly. Romm’s blog is full of fashionable detox recommendations (“How to Detox Every Day: Top Ten Foods & Herbs”, “Detox Immunity”, “The Easiest, Most Effective Spring Detox Ever”, “Detoxing Before Pregnancy”), none of them based on evidence, but many based on demonstrable quackery and pseudoscience, like the idea of autointoxication, which was somewhat popular around 1900 but abandoned in the 1930s since no evidence for it was ever found nor plausible mechanism ever suggested.

Romm’s products

Romm’s products are roughly as worthless as her medical advice. Her dispensary contains an impressive range of expensive supplements sorted by categories like  “Natural Detox Support” and “Adrenal and Thyroid Support”. They are associated with a wide variety of nonsensical health claims like “replenish adrenals”, “detox”, “rejuvenate liver function” and “boost immunity” – needless to say, her products do no such thing, which is ultimately actually fortunate for her victims customers clients.

Much of her stuff addresses prevention of and remedies for adrenal fatigue, a bogus condition, and promises to “replenish and restore the adrenals and counteract the effects of an overwhelmed stress response system.” Given that the condition is bogus, at least you will never be in a position to claim that the products didn’t work as intended. They won’t do anything else either, except possibly hurt your wallet. Several of her supplements are targeted at children – or rather their gullible parents – and her “Natural Children’s remedies” section lists plenty of questionable supplements, including “Calm Child”, which is designed to “support calm, focuses attention in children.” She also has a “Super-Charge Your Children’s Health and Immunity with Natural Remedies” online lesson material includes, which discusses “toxins in vaccinations”, and herbal medicines. 

Oh yes, Romm is at best deeply sympathetic to the anti-vaccine movement, having even written a book claiming to “offer a sensible, balanced discussion of the pros and cons of each routine childhood vaccination,” presenting “the full spectrum of options available to parents: full vaccination on a standardized or individualized schedule, selective vaccination, or no vaccinations at all,” and offering advice on how to use  herbs to provide “natural immunity”.

Hat-tip: Mr. Wrong

Among her top recommended supplements is curcumin (found in turmeric, good summary here), which is recommended for “leaky gut” (another bogus condition) and “detoxification from environmental chemicals” (another – you guessed it – nonsense claim). Curcumin supplements are of course demonstrably not going to do anything for anything either. 

Romm claims to offer “evidence-based alternatives” of the kind that empowered women are apparently seeking. She wouldn’t know what “evidence-based” means, of course, but neither, we presume, does her target audience.

Diagnosis: A disgusting excuse for a person. It is hard to imagine that she is unaware that the advice she peddles is bullshit, and her marketing and FUD tactics are so well-honed and appear so deliberate that it is difficult to believe she isn’t completely aware of what she is doing. 

Hat-tip: Sheila Kealey

#2182: Stan Romanek (?)

A veritable legend in New Age ufology circles, Stanley Tiger Romanek is a self-proclaimed alien abductee and starseed, who has built a substantial collection of “evidence” supposedly “proving” the existence of aliens. His evidence base contains plenty of photos and videos of precisely the type you’d expect, audio recordings, drawings and math equations he claims that he should not be able to know but has nevertheless written down, so the only explanation for knowing them is that he has been given the information from extraterrestrials. He is most famous, however, for the so-called “Boo Video” (with Jeff Peckman), which allegedly captures an alien that is looking in through Romanek’s window, and the documentary (or uncritical paean) Extraordinary: The Stan Romanek Story, released on Netflix. 

Why are the aliens so interested in him, in particular? Well, Romanek does claim to be a very important person – almost a messiah of sorts – and that aliens picked him specifically to bring their message to the people of Earth. And yes: we would recommend empathy were we able to shake a few nagging doubts about certain details. Apparently he gets to ride with these aliens in their spaceships quite often, though, and has been implanted with an alien artifact (he cited this as physical evidence for his alien contacts but when a medical test for the implant was requested, he said it had disappeared), sustained mysterious injuries inflicted by them, experienced telepathic communications with aliens, and apparently even been dressed in women’s clothing by aliens. Indeed, he Romanek has even got himself another family of seven alien/human hybrid children; his earthly wife Lisa was apparently initially surprised to hear about this other family, but it seemed to have sorted itself out at least until Stan suddenly met his space wife, a younger human woman, at an Earth convention; apparently he managed to convince Lisa to accept his space wife into the family in the end as well, though. Romanek has also, entirely according to himself, been accosted by “obviously para-military” men who have attempted to intimidate him into silence, but he managed to drive them away with his martial arts skills. 

The Boo Video and Extraordinary

The infamous Boo Video catapulted Romanek to stardom when it was shown on Larry King live. The alien in question looks sufficiently fake, however, that even convinced ufologists tend to distance themselves from Romanek because he makes them look bad (you can watch it yourself here; you can watch some parodies here). Romanek also filmed a follow-up video of an alien looking into his house from a sliding door, which has, shall we say, not managed to win many new converts to his cause among those not already convinced by his first video. His other evidence really isn’t more convincing either. In fact, much of it is so obviously fake that we cannot honestly shake the strong suspicion that Romanek isn’t a loon at all.

The 2013 documentary Extraordinary is a rather feeble attempt to present Romanek as the messianic figure he claims to be, and unintentionally portrays him, his family and supporters as a frighteningly cultlike affair. Some highlights are described here. In his 2009 book Messages Romanek claimed to relay communications from his extraterrestrial informant, and that an (unnamed) astronomer interpreted the drawings he made of planetary alignments supposedly under hypnosis as pointing to September 21, 2012, a date Romanek suggested would be the one on which the aliens would make themselves known to humanity, or perhaps when the natural disasters he saw in other visions would take place.

Romanek’s career hit an abrupt and serious snag in 2017. As expected, both Romanek and some of his supporters appealed to conspiracy.

Diagnosis: Obviously an intrepid hoaxer – he has even admitted as much himself. The relevant question with regard to whether he deserves inclusion here, is whether he really believes his claims about alien visitations and his own role in them, which is not really inconsistent with being an unrepentant hoaxer. We’ll give him the benefit (or disadvantage, we suppose) of doubt, and give him an entry.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2181: Sam Rohrer

Sam Rohrer is the president of the Pennsylvania Pastors’ Network, a branch of Let Freedom Ring, Inc., and former member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (128th District, 1993–2010). Rohrer is an alumnus of Bob Jones University, South Carolina’s attempt to out-madrassa the Taliban, and it shows. Indeed, Rohrer was awarded the 2013 “Alumnus of the Year” at the annual Bob Jones University Bible Conference, which he probably richly deserved. 

Rohrer is the kind of person who tries to argue that a literal reading of the Bible reveals that gun rights come directly from God, and that Jesus’ teachings on non-violence should not be taken literally; it’s apparently the only part of the Bible that shouldn’t. Meanwhile, gun control is part of an Agenda 21 depopulation plot that the government – at least Obama’s government – tried to set in motion. Indeed, Rohrer is heavily into Agenda 21 conspiracies, and thinks that the nonbinding framework for sustainable development “is a control of our property, it’s a control of our legal system to the local level” (the hows matter less than the grand, paranoid narrative, apparently). 

It is also a sin for the government to be compassionate, says Sam Rohrer.

Politically, Rohrer is a full-blown theocrat who claims that “God’s law must always reign supreme” over man’s law. “No court has the authority to overturn what God says and what God defines to be a matter of marriage in this case, so that’s the clearest example where man’s law counters what God has said is what something ought to be.” Purely for political reasons, he also claims to love the Constitution, of course. To back up his claims, Rohrer asserts that if you don’t do as Rohrer thinks God says (i.e. that Rohrer says) that you should do, then the nation will fall under God’s judgment, in which case  “you go nowhere but down.” Accordingly “politicians and everyone who serves in any capacity in any level of civil government is automatically also a minister of God,” and should recognize this obligation. Apparently it’s all about liberty. People like the sound of “freedom”, “liberty” and “the Constitution”, but Rohrer’s fans don’t seem to have the faintest idea what those words could possibly mean (which is why Rohrer ends up, in all earnestness, saying things like “if you put somebody in office who is an enemy of freedom, who is a practicing Muslim, as an example, or a Communist, as an example, an atheist, they will act on what they think is right, but it’s not going to be what agrees with biblical correction.”) Rohrer is apparently a fan of David Barton, whom Rohrer explicitly thinks is a pillar of honesty, which to him then means that the extensively documented dishonesty in Barton’s works can easily be dismissed as a malicious conspiracy.

Threats to his vision I: Immigrants

There are ample threats to Rohrer’s vision for America, though. Islam, for instance. Rohrer was quite shocked by the 2018 elections, when two “devout Muslim women who hold to a view of God and law and morality that is completely opposite to our Constitution” were elected. The lack of self-awareness is pretty intense, even by fundie theocrat standards. At least his stance on immigration follows the same lines of lack of reasoning; as Rohrer sees it, America has “changed the historic biblical rules” (?) regarding immigration, and “this is a reason why God must discipline our country.” As a consequence, we have now “millions of people” who “have no respect for our God, they serve primarily the god of Allah and they embrace Sharia law,” which permits them to engage in terrorism. Until the US endorses the letter and spirit of the First Amendment and realizes that it cannot tolerate “two competing Gods … we’re going to find ourselves in increasing trouble.” As a solution to the ills, Rohrer suggested that we should require immigrants to “accept the God of the Bible,” just like the Constitution prescribes. It is probably worth mentioning, in this context, that “progressive Christians” aren’t really Christians either.

Indeed, Muslim jihadists had by 2016 infiltrated the Obama administration at the highest levels, and (then-)CIA Director John Brennan is, as Rohrer sees it, a Muslim convert who is on the side of the terrorists.

When push comes to show, however, the main problem is immigrants in general, not really their religious convictions. The recent refugee caravan, for instance, is a “fight against God himself”. Rohrer’s reasoning is … weak, but it ends with concluding that those who favor immigration are on the side of the Antichrist. Of course it does.

Threats to his vision 2: The gays (of course)

Another threat is, of course, the gays. It was obvious to Rohrer gay marriage could not be legalized since judges should rule according to “moral law” established by God, and having, in fact, been legalized, it is threatening to “destroy the very fabric of our nation” and, like everything else that is not working according to Rohrer’s convictions, will “invite God’s judgment on the nation” (mass shootings, for instance, are part of said judgment). Gay marriage will apparently lead to “tyranny” as well, for good measure, and the judges responsible for legalizing it are “activist judges” and “ideological idealists” that “may have been motivated by an intentional defiance of God.” The legalization of gay marriage also means that “the moral position leadership of our country has been forfeited,” says Rohrer; apparently the new moral leader of the world – here Rohrer agrees with many religious right leaders – is Russia.

He also lamented that gay rights activists don’t realize that they, too, have lost a “great, great freedom” with the legalization of same-sex marriage. His reasoning behind the conclusion isn’t really reasoning.

Threats to his vision 3: Women

And then there are women. Apparently having women in power is a sign of God’s judgment. When making the claim, Rohrer hastened to add that “the real condemnation is not the women in office, the condemnation is the disregard and the absolute inability for male leadership to perform as God intended it,” so that he wouldn’t come across as sexist.

Miscellaneous Trumpisms

Shocked by the “lack of respect” shown by some people toward President Trump, Rohrer promptly and predictably declared that opposition to Trump “creates the circumstances … out of which will come the Antichrist,” explaining (or whatever you prefer to call it) that the “enemies of Christ” (globalists, Islam and the cultural “establishment”) are “all working together” because “they hate God, they hate the Constitution, they despise Jesus Christ, they want to destroy Israel and the United States.” And those who don’t support Trump’s immigration policies are definitely on the side of the Antichrist.

After all, as Rohrer sees it, it was God who put Trump in office, no less. Rohrer didn’t explain how God did that (without committing voter fraud).

There is a decent Sam Rohrer resource here. Rohrer is not to fond of rightwingwatch, and has said that if civil war breaks out, it will be because of groups like Rightwingwatch and others who don’t think what he thinks they should think.

Diagnosis: As deranged, confused and fanatical as they come, and unfit for any audience. He’s got one, though, and must be considered moderately dangerous.

#2180: Brian Rohrbough

This is really a tragic case, but we need to cover it. Brian Rohrbough is the former (2008) vice presidential candidate of America’s Independent Party, running on the ticket with Alan Keyes, and president of the splinter anti-abortion group American Right to Life. 

Rohrbough’s career as a fanatic wingnut started for real when his son was killed during the Columbine High School Massacre; Rohrbough – understandably enough – sought explanations, and settled, completely without foundation in reality, on the conclusion that America was plagued by a “culture of death”, specifically manifested through (or caused by) legalized abortion and the removal of religion from public school classrooms; specifically, Rohrbough blames school violence on the theory evolution: “This country is in a moral free-fall [it really isn’t, by any coherent standard]. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value,” because as Rohrbough understands it (which is not) the theory of evolution is a value system. He did, of course, offer no evidence for a causal link or even a correlation between teaching evolution and moral deterioration, for rather obvious reasons.

Diagnosis: Yes, it is mostly a tragic case, and perhaps we should really call out the spineless journalists who give him opportunities to spread this nonsense on e.g. primetime national TV instead. But there is no way around the fact that Rohrbough is a deeply delusional loon either.

#2179: Wayne Rohde

Wayne Rohde is an antivaccine activist, and the founder of the antivaccine group the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, occasional blogger for the antivaccine conspiracy website Age of Autism, and a rich source of trite, endlessly repeated and falsified (and repeated again) antivaccine tropes. Rohde is an attorney, and has, as far as we can tell, no background in science or research. He is nevertheless an active figure at antivaccine conferences and was in 2019 asked to serve on the new Minnesota state council on autism together with fellow antivaccine conspiracy theorist and health freedom advocate Patti Carroll; that state council was initiated by state senator Jim Abeler, a chiropractor and fellow anti-vaccine activist, who justified the appointment of Rohde and Carroll by invoking the balance fallacy. Rohde himself is an executive for the group Health Choice, which advocates that chronic health conditions in children are caused by “unhealthy choices” including “side effects of vaccine choices.” This is not true.

To people like Rohde, vaccines are to blame for most ills. Here, for instance, is (a discussion of) Rohde trying to connect Harold Ramis’s death to vaccines through desperately bizarre speculation. Then he refers to some garbage studies by Shaw and Tomljenovic, websites that say the opposite of what he says that they say, and vaccine court cases. (Indeed, Rohde has written a book about vaccine courts: The Vaccine Court: The Dark Truth of America’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which seems to be mostly an instance of Badger’s Law). Of course, Rohde is mostly JAQing off. But it was the vaccines. Nothing in what he says has anything to do with facts, truth and evidence, but if you start with an idea, stick to it dogmatically, and don’t care about what is actually the case, you can connect almost anything to it with enough ingenuity.

Of course, Rohde denies being antivaccine; instead, he is – when it suits him – an advocate for health freedom. By claiming to be pro-freedom, he gets to call his opponents “fascists”, or “medical fascists”. He likes that. He also likes questioning the motivations of those who disagree with him.

Diagnosis: crackpot conspiracy theorist. He is quite vocal, however, and seems to have some influence in the antivaccine movement. Dangerous.

#2178: Coleman Rogers

QAnon. We are not even going to begin to try to explain the details (see this) of this grand unified conspiracy theory, meme and wingnut delusion, but it did at least emerge from a series of incoherent posts on 4chan in 2017 by someone calling themselves QAnon or Q. Through conspiratorial bullshit, paranoia and deep state fearmongering, Q’s cryptic messages have led to the creation of a remarkable, complex structure of nonsense that still enjoys a (relatively small) group of thoroughly insane followers – or more precisely: the conspiracy works by Q leaving a couple of vague, nonsensical “crumbs” (“[m]any sound like they were written by Deepak Chopra channeling Alex Jones”) that commenters freely use to build whatever insane web of delusions they wish to build. Now, who exactly is behind the conspiracy theory (schema) is unclear, but a couple of promoters (in additional to an unknown number of Russian bots) have been identified, such as Coleman Rogers, known as Pamphlet Anon on his youtube videos and InfoWars appearance.

Rogers’s career took off after Reddit shut down the QAnon Reddit board in April 2018 due to “encouraging or inciting violence and posting personal and confidential information”. Rogers and his wife Christina Urso subsequently launched a plan to replace mainstream media (often a target of Q’s posts) with a continuously streaming YouTube network made up of self-described “researchers” putting together Q’s clues, called the Patriots’ Soapbox. The channel is more or less a continuous broadcast of a Discord chatroom with audio commentary from various volunteers and moderators, including calls for donations. It is, of course, utterly ludicrous; you can search it out yourself; we’re not providing any links.

Rogers has a background as zealous participant in an internet “meme war” where he would claim e.g. that liberals murder children and worship Satan, notions that are currently central to the QAnon mythology. Now, Rogers denies knowledge of who Q is, or that he himself might be Q. Suspicions that he has more insider information than he let on to abound, however. Meanwhile, other wingnut conspiracy theorists have accused him of being part of a deep state conspiracy. So it goes.

Diagnosis: It remains very much unclear whether Rogers believes any of the QAnon stuff or not (or whether he cares). He is nevertheless a serious loon, and one who has actually managed to gain some influence over mostly angry, older and less internet-savvy tinfoil hatters.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki, NBC.