#2591: Tom Brady

Tom Brady is a spineless hack who has milked his celebrity status for all it is worth to hawk useless junk, pseudoscience and fraudulent products under his TB12 brand. The brand started as a fad diet and merch shop, focusing on snacks that could be savvily marketed as being in line with whatever diet fad would be in vogue at any given time, including utter bullshit like alkaline water.

 

Brady’s book The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance was a bestseller – apparently lots of people must have been under the strange impression that Brady’s anonymous ghostwriter would have something knowledgeable and worthwhile to say about the issues. The book – or really: infomercial (there are products to sell with every piece of advice) – promotes the pseudoscientific fad generally known as alkaline diets, in particular Brady’s own bonkers nonsense “80/20 diet”, which supposedly means 80% alkaline and 20% acidic – though ‘alkaline’ and ‘acidic’ should not be associated with the chemical interpretation of those words but rather some tarot-based nonsense categorization mostly made up as you go along: his book is all about “alkalizing” foods (which is apparently meant to decrease inflammation in your body – whatever that means – and prevent fractions, which is profoundly idiotic and easily debunked). The label doesn’t mean that the foods are alkaline, or that they make your body – or anything in it – more alkaline (that would of course be really bad). Brady’s health regimen also incorporates harmless stuff like transcendental meditation and harmless pseudoscience like neuroplasticity training. (And for those who wonder: the reason Brady has managed to stay fit for so long is not because of his dietary advice, but because he can afford a personal chef.) Apparently the TB12™ Nutrition Manual, which retailed for $200, quickly sold out.

 

“I'm very cautious about tomatoes. They cause inflammation,” says Brady, who also avoids peppers, mushrooms, or eggplants “because they're not anti-inflammatory”. None of those labels have anything to do with what those words mean, of course; Brady just applies them according to some kind of pseudoreligious scheme based on free association. He also recommends drinking a lot of water, crediting it with protecting him from sunburns. It does not (though one would think it subverted his alkalizing project … never mind). Water, though, isn’t enough; Brady’s water is supplemented with electrolytes, which is utter bullshit but does make it expensive and hence exclusive, which is surely good. Again, he is just making it up as he goes along, just like he does with his claim that “the regimen I follow is a mix of Eastern and Western philosophies” … yeah, it sounds marketing savvy; it sounds informed and broad-minded – as long as you don’t ask him for details about what, precisely, the ‘philosophical’ basis for any of his health claims could possibly be. Brady did not provide such details.

 

In the book, Brady claims his durability is a result of “muscle pliability”, a pseudoscientific idea cooked up by his “body coach” and business partner Alex Guerrero. Guerrero is himself an interesting character, by the way, having a decent rap sheet with the Federal Trade Commission, in particular for his attempt in 2005 to falsely pass himself off as a doctor able to cure cancer, Aids, MS and Parkinson’s disease with dietary supplements, but also for marketing the sports drink Neurosafe, which he claimed could prevent concussions. Brady endorses Neurosafe.

 

Many of the products pushed as part of the TB12 protocols are of course intended to boost your immune system, and it is not all harmless nonsense: at least Brady managed to attract some negative attention with the marketing of the nonsense product Protect (an “immunity blend” which promises to “activate your immune system and counter stress-induced immune suppression”) strongly implied that it would help protect against COVID-19. And yes: it did come with a Quack Miranda Warning to ward off the possibilitiy of the dishonesty getting him in legal troubles.

 

There is a brief but decent takedown of Brady’s bullshit here.

 

Diagnosis: The sports interested guy’s counterpart to Gwyneth Paltrow, we suppose. And he’s had staggering – Paltrow-comparable – success with his utter bollocks and bullshit. And it is, like Goop’s, not all harmless.

 

Hat-tip: Bryan Armen Graham @The Guardian

#2590: David Bradshaw

Apart from recent upheavels related to abortion, the traditional Religious Right has arguably been pushed a bit toward the backseat, at least when it comes to media attention, among wingnut actors compared to Qanon-related cryptofascists, hippie nazies, white nationalists and conspiracy theorists (there’s substantial overlap, though). But they’re certainly still a major source of rot and continues to pose an immediate threat to civilization and liberty, especially in light of the reemergence of Christian nationalism in politics.

 

David Bradshaw, for instance, leads a Virginia-based ministry called Prayer Furnace and is an associate of Lou Engle and Engle’s dominionist movement The Call. Bradshaw is a promoter of “stadium Christianity”, large-scale (stadium) movements to mobilize a massive End Times “harvest” of souls. With Engle, Bradshaw was for instance the organizer the movement Awaken the Dawn, including a 2020 a political (Taliban wingnut) prayer rally in DC whose official goals were to draw some million people to town to bring America “back to God” and wage spiritual warfare against Supreme Court justices who have upheld women’s right to abortion. Some of the project’s affiliated prophets predicted miracles. The event was supposed to involve fifty prayer tents on the National Mall and various stages, all set up for a “Holy Spirit Woodstock”; one may ask what sense of Woodstock they were hoping for.

 

After concerns were raised about the event in relation to the COVID pandemic, Bradshaw remained firm about the tents; the tent events, according to Bradshaw, were “a silver bullet for the move of God in America.” Indeed, the coronavirus itself was part of a “satanic agenda” and a “demonic assignment” specifically employed to take out Bradshaw’s events and similar dominionist prayer rallies. (Engle, meanwhile, called for a global three-day fast to stop the “demonic force” behind the coronavirus from interfering with his plans for 2020; 2020 was apparently of particular importance – it “has been marked by the Holy Spirit as a year of Stadium Christianity and explosive advance of the Kingdom” – partially because of Bob Jones’s prediction that the year that the Kansas City Chiefs winning the Super Bowl, as they did in 2020, would be a sign of a coming revival.)

 

Bradshaw is also author of Awaken the Dawn: An Adventure in Hosting Jesus' Presence and Discovering Your Part in the Story, where he lays out the tenets and ambitions of his movement. “What if the presence of God became so real in people’s hearts that it revived the church and ushered in the next Jesus Movement?” it asks. We genuinely wonder who would feel a need to read on to find the answer to that question.

 

Diagnosis: Though he talks about renewal, we cannot quite pinpoint the novel features of Bradshaw’s approach to things. It’s the same lunatic nonsense as always. But it is popular enough to pose a genuine threat, so we feel the need to cover his tripe, yet again.

#2589: Matt Bracken

InfoWars is familiar enough to most as a source of misinformation and deranged conspiracy theories. But the conspiracy theories aren’t just random nonsense: InfoWars associates are actively using the misinformation and conspiracy theories to promote their own ideological purposes. Infowars associate and former Navy SEAL Matt Bracken, for instance, promotes white nationalism, and when he provides tactical advice to white national groups for attending rallies, he also carefully lays the groundwork for “false-flag” conspiracy theories that InfoWars can promote in the event of violence. In late January 2017, for instance, Bracken claimed (in an interview with the Red Ice website) that the FBI arrested neo-Nazis ahead of a pro-gun rally in Virginia in order to fabricate a timeline of events that the agency (which Bracken likened to East Germany’s Stasi) would later use to smear people opposed to gun control laws; indeed, he repeatedly asserted that the government actively desire and may even provoke violent incidents at such rallies.

 

In general, according to Bracken, the U.S. government is deliberately exaggerating the threat level posed by white nationalism in the US in order to advance a globalist conspiracy to open the borders and ultimately implement a one-world government. “This is at the highest level a battle between globalists and nationalists,” said Bracken, and on InfoWars he has instructed viewers on how to accessorize assault weapons for battle proficiency: “there’s going to be a fight”. And immigration is crucial to the globalists’ agenda: “The globalists want to keep the borders open and keep flooding America and the West with unassimilable Third-Worlders” because an effective means to reach their goal is to “bring in more low-IQ people because low-IQ people always fall for the trick of socialism” – that's evidently not a particularly foolproof strategy, since a number of dumb people evidently don't fall for it.

 

Among examples of government-led false flag operations, according to Bracken, are the 2017 Quebec mosque shootings. Bracken’s reasoning on InfoWars in that case is somewhat hard to follow, but Wonkette summed it up, charitably, as: “George Soros paying off young Quebeçois men to convert to Islam while pretending to be Donald Trump supporters in order to do a false flag attack on a mosque, for the explicit purpose of getting people to not like Donald Trump supporters.”

 

Bracken has himself authored an online manifesto, “Tet, Take Two — Islam’s 2016 European Offensive,” in the style of Anders Breivik and the 2019 New Zealand terrorist (with whom Bracken has expressed sympathy). Bracken’s manifesto, published in 2015 and discussed here, predicted that World War III would break out in 2016 due to an imagined alliance between Muslims and international socialists for the common cause of destroying Western nationalism. The manifesto went on – exactly like the New Zealand one – to blame, at least in part, “emancipated European and American women” for not “producing a new generation” of nationalists.

 

Bracken has also weighed in on e.g. the J6 Committee’s “demonization of patriots”, the alleged rampant election fraud during the 2020 election (incontrovertible proof will apparently forever be imminently forthcoming) and the “medical tyranny” of COVID vaccine mandates. We really cannot be bothered to look more closely.

 

Diagnosis: Vile and dangerous.

#2588: Caleb Brabham

Caleb Brabham is a (minor) youtube personality, author and frequent contributor to local Texas newspapers. According to his bio, he also “graduated magna cum laude from Oral Roberts University in 2007”. Well, then. In any case, Brabham is a creationist, and he is the kind of creationist who attacks other creationists for not being sufficiently pure – such as those willing to countenance a day–age interpretation of Genesis. Not so, says Brabham, “The Bible is a document of logic and reasoning (Isa 1:18), not a treatise on what someone ‘thinks’ it aught [sic] to say”. And Brabham knows what it says; he needs no stinking interpretation. He also provides some thoughtful points to back up his position; you can read about them here (moderately recommended) – an example:

 

“Before Genesis 1:1, what is known as this world, was non-existent. […] There was no ‘time.’ There was no day or night, as this is what He called the comprising of the 1st day (Genesis 1:2). Without the acknowledgment of time, where did man come up with the idea of 24 hour days, and a 7 day week? Research reveals that every civilization known has made use of the 7 day week consisting of 24 hours for each day.” Research does not remotely come up with that. He really isn’t even trying, is he?

 

Diagnosis: Ok, so this one is borderline too minor even for us, but he put himself out there with his rants, so there he goes.

 

Hat-tip: Sensuous Curmudgeon

#2587: Peter Boyles (?)

Peter Boyles is a recently retired radio talk show personality operating in the Denver area and a persistent wingnut (typical Boyles fare) conspiracy theorist. He gained national notoriety for his decade-long persistent obsession with – and a string of conspiracy theories and false accusations surrounding – the death of JonBenét Ramsey, and later got some attention for his firm commitment to birtherism and his claim that “Barack Obama’s life story is a fabrication”, a topic to which he deployed his by-then trademark level of reason and sensitivity to evidence, facts and reality. Among other things, Boyles promoted the tales of birther hero Terry Lakin.

 

When explosive devices were sent to Democratic Party figures and progressives who had criticized President Donald Trump in 2018, Boyles was one among the many wingnut radioshow hosts who immediately concluded that it was a false flag operation based on, well, absolutely nothing apart from wishful thinking: “My personal belief at this time: This is a false flag, this is a Reichstag fire,” said Boyles.

 

To his credit, though, Boyles did indeed, at the end of his career, try hard to get wingnut representative Patrick Neville to give up his promotion of Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. One cannot help but wonder whether he grew tired of the intense amount of bullshit he has been mired in for decades – Boyles was apparently surprisingly reasonable when it came to matters related to COVID-19 and vaccination, too. Hence the question mark at his entry.

 

Diagnosis: Well, who knows. What’s clear, is that Boyles has been polluting the airways with conspiracy theories for decades, and deserves an entry for that. If he’s come to his senses (somewhat): good for him. But he is also off the air now, and his legacy is overall likely to be a terrible one.

#2586: Richard Boylan

For those really looking to get lost down a rabbit hole, New Age psychotherapies is an obvious place to go. New Age psychotherapies range from the feebly bizarre to the dangerous, and some have even managed to go relatively mainstream. Richard Boylan is a classic in the genre, though what exactly he offers is not entirely easy to wrap one’s head around. Boylan is, according to himself, a “Ph.D. behavioral scientist, anthropologist, university associate professor (emeritus), certified clinical hypnotherapist, researcher, and Councillor”, as well as “a consultant to Star Kids and Star Seed adults seeking to understand better their origin, identity and mission, in order to have full awareness and clarity about their identity, inner growth, spiritual development, and future path.” Precisely. He is also president of the Star Kids Project, Ltd., and “provides hypnotherapy for recalling the full details of partially-remembered close encounters with the Star Visitors which are stored in subconscious memory.”

 

Oh, yes, it is aliens! Boylan is not only an anthropologist, but an “exo-anthropologist”, and has ostensibly, since 1989, “conducted research into human encounters with the Star Visitors,” which is apparently what spurred him to found his “Star Kids Project, Ltd in 2003”, which seeks to work “with these genetically-upgraded children with advanced abilities, and their families.” Yes, and the really scary ones here would presumably be the parents seeking out Boylan’s services.

 

Apparently Boylan fancies himself a real scientist, and he has presented his research at several conferences, all with scientifically legitimate-sounding names like “the 1992 M.I.T. Abduction Study Conference”, the “1995 Cosmic Cultures International Conference” and the “2008 International Symposium on Star Nations, Rome”. Boylan is also the author of numerous books, including

 

-       Close Extraterrestrial Encounters (1994)

-       Labored Journey To the Stars (1996)

-       Project Epiphany (1997),

-       Star Kids: the Emerging Cosmic Generation (2005)

-       The Human - Star Nations Connection (2012), which promises to teach you not only “how both the Sunday School explanation of where we came from and Charles Darwin’s are both wrong,” but who are really pulling the strings “behind the constant crises, wars, financial turmoil, and political intrigue that keeps our society off-balance,” as well as “the real reason why the UFO Cover-Up has been going on for 70 years” and how to “[d]iscover latent abilities which your children and you never knew you had.”

 

On his website you can find a questionnaire you can use to determine whether your kid is a star seed. We normally don’t link to this kind of stuff, but will make an exception here. You probably recognize precisely the kind of parent for whom this questionnaire is designed. It is also increasingly gloriously deranged as it proceeds, and we suppose that special attention is indeed warranted for parents who answer ‘yes’ on questions that their child has “experienced a 'Walk-In' [replacement of the original human (dying) personality by a new (off-world) personality, which takes on the existing body and continues the life, having memory of earlier years but with different abilities and personality]” or  “has an unusually large bioelectromagnetic-photic field extending outward from their body, (e.g., over 3 feet [1 meter]), as measured by dowsing rods”.

 

Diagnosis: Magnificently insane and utterly unfettered by the constraints that hold others back from completing their path to enlightenment, such as reality and reason. His program, though, can hardly be classified as entirely harmless, even if the parents attracted to it would probably have found other ways to subvert the wellbeing of their offspring anyways.

#2585: Paul Boyer

Anti-vaccine activists in state legislatures seem to be on the rise (admittedly, we haven’t actually counted), but Arizona’s Paul Boyer was antivaccine before it was mainstream in wingnut circles. Boyer has been a member of the Arizona State Senate representing District 20 since 2019, after having been a House representative from from 2013 to 2019, where he e.g. served as the Chair of the Arizona House Education Committee; he’ll be out now in November, however, after voicing his disagreement with Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories (good on him).

 

Nonetheless, getting it right on that score won’t excuse his antivaccine sympathies. In 2019, Boyer introduced a bill that would restrict childhood vaccine coverage under the guise of “informed consent”, Which, of course, has nothing to do with informed – that is kind of the point here, and it’s a common antivaxx gambit. What Boyer’s bill attempted to do was to mandate that parents be told exactly which ingredients and chemicals are in a vaccine before their children are inoculated – the purpose being not to make the parents better positioned to make informed decisions (unless you have a background in chemistry and medicine), but to mislead as many as possible into dropping vaccines by a variant of the toxins gambit and appeal to general chemophobia; there’s a reason why the bill didn’t mandate updated information about the science behind the vaccines.

 

Apparently Boyer himself was scared to learn from the CDC that some vaccines may contain contain phosphate, bovine serum, formaldehyde, fluoride, yeast extracts or human diploid fibroblast cell cultures (cultures of human fetal tissue), all of which might be scary-sounding to chemically illiterate people like Boyer (and yes: it’s both a toxins gambit and a “human fetal parts” gambit there). While emphasizing that he was “not necessarily opposed to vaccinations for children”, he refused to answer questions about whether he himself believed vaccines were harmful. Then he rattled off a list of anti-vaccine talking points, mostly in the “too many, too soon” genre but also, predictably, this: “I don’t know that most parents know that bovine extract or animal parts or fetus parts are in certain vaccines,” said Boyer. “And I just think, as a parent, we should know the answer to that.” That answer is “no”. There are no fetus parts in any vaccines, and there are no animal parts in vaccines.

 

Diagnosis: That this guy would come across as a voice of reason among his colleagues is telling. Good grief.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence