#728: John Guardiano

John Guardiano is a “writer and analyst who focuses on political, military, and public-policy issues” for American Spectator. He generally takes a conservative stance. In fact, he usually takes the loony, ultraparanoid, Christian persecution complex-informed stance. For instance, Guardiano is concerned about the “war on Christmas”: “Why, walk into any store in any large metro area, and you'll rarely, if ever, hear someone say, ‘Merry Christmas.’ Those words are now taboo. ‘Happy Holidays’ is all the rage, and the implication is clear: Christmas is nothing special,” which must because of the conspiracy – “a concerted effort, by anti-religious secularists and God-haters, to deprecate the cultural significance of Christmas” – rather than, you now, commercially informed decisions made by the stores in question to boost sales. (Notice also the stocke wingnut interpretation of “secular”.) Furthermore, he is concerned about gay marriage because of bigotry the impact it may have on children, noting the increases in divorce rates and single parents the last thirty years. “What has that to do with gay marriage,” you might ask. “Everything,” says Guardiano: “Sure, this breakdown in the family has occurred independent of the push for ‘marriage equality.’ But it is still part and parcel of an overarching effort to undermine and deprecate traditional marriage and the traditional family.” Yes, another “overarching effort” by godless liberals (and even granting him the effort it is still very unclear what gay marriage has to do with the increase in single parents rather than the opposite). It is also “concentrated”, which means there is a conspiracy going on.

A typical Guardiano screed – in fact, the one that really made the difference for his application for inclusion in this Encyclopedia – is his lament on the death of DADT: “[J]ust as with same-sex marriage, DADT has never been about civil rights or equality. Lesbians and homosexuals have always enjoyed the same legal rights and protections as every other American – including the right to serve in the U.S. military, albeit not openly as gay men and women.” Yep, nothing to do with civil rights. Neither did the question of interracial marriage, presumably.

Here he defends Christine O’Donnell on the separation of church and state, because there is none in Guardiano’s rather reality-insulated mind either.

Diagnosis: Fairly typical rightwing conspiracy theorist – and he is, indeed, a conspiracy theorist, not really very different from Jeff Rense and Alex Jones.

#727: Jeffrey Grupp

Jeffrey Grupp calls himself a “Buddhist and postmodernist philosopher from Ann Arbor, Michigan”, and is a regular on such erudite shows as “Coast to Coast AM” with George Noory, and “Infowars”, where he presents concepts such as “telementation”, the “idea that a deep feeling state inside you can alter reality in ways that you want,” similar to the Law of Attraction. He does, in fact, have a formal education in philosophy, though despite the “Dr.” title that appears on several of his youtube videos he doesn’t appear to have defended his thesis “Quantum Deleuze” yet. He has written the book Telementation: Cosmic Feeling and the Law of Attraction, as well as Corporatism: The Secret Government of the New World Order, however, but that isn’t quite the same.

His focus is the topic of the latter book, namely to be a libertarian conspiracy theorist of the most extreme kind there is. His main concern is the New World Order and the shadowy organization behind it, such as the Federal Reserve, Codex Alimentarius, the North American Union, the WTO and IMF – and all the FEMA concentration camps set up all over the US to incarcerate freedom advocates like himself. In addition, he is worried that the patriot movement is being hijacked by plants of the shadowy organization such as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter: “The New World Order wants worldwide rioting, mass death, economic collapse, sacrifice of lower minions and freemasons of the New World Order, compliance with the climate change (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial) laws and servitude, and a set up of a Brave New World, all over the course of the next decade or decades.” He even has “proof” that the New World Order wants to use the Truth Movement and similar movements to subvert its critics; in 2009 some news agencies said that a Pittsburgh police shooting “was due to the shooter listening to the words of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.” So there. The fact that someone in the media said this is virtually solid proof that there is a conspiracy against Alex Jones. As solid as French postmodernism with a dose of quantum thrown in, on surmises. The logic is indeed impeccable; similar things have happened before: “After World War II, we were told that the war was caused by the mass madness of the world citizenry, not by the New World Order, and thus Truman had to set up all those mental health acts that he did in order that We the People could be cured of our irrationalism.” I think a standard Philosophy class on critical thinking would have told Grupp that a weak analogy based with a piece of your imagination fails to be considered particularly compelling evidence by most people, but Grupp might have been absent that day.

So as you see, the conspiracy is pretty much all-pervasive, and it’s good that we have people like Grupp who sees through it all. He seems, indeed, to be supporting more or less all of these, including how “the New World Order is going to make our Truth and Patriot movements their primary tools of operation to carry out Eugenics and so forth,” and in particular to target the all-time hero of freedom-loving people, Alex Jones.

Diagnosis: Astonishingly crazy and astonishingly paranoid, mixing wingnut paranoia with post-modernism, quantum woo, and the Law of Attraction. You can’t top this one. Possibly a poe.

#726: Stefan Grossman

We have already discussed the hologram hypothesis, which has been invoked as a delightfully ad hoc measure to salvage otherwise miserably falsified 9/11 conspiracy theories. The “Hologram Theory” asserts that no commercial airliners hit the World Trade Center; rather the WTC was hit by “Cruise” type missiles that appeared to the naked eye to be airliners through the use of sophisticated hologram technology. Yes, it’s that silly, and it has to be accompanied by attempts to explain away the people on board those planes. But when you have gone down the road of Hologram Theory I guess you’ll be pretty numb to the problems of those efforts already.

According to Grossman “[t]he hologram theory has been attacked and ridiculed like no other theory relating to 9-11. In fact, however, it is based on stringent science, on reports from the military community and on careful analysis of the photos and mainstream media news videos of the alleged ‘plane’ crash into south tower and of at least 11 military stealth crafts close by the south tower.” You can read his argument here. It is rather notable that it seems to rely on the well-known Project Blue Beam conspiracy and the testimony of Thomas Bearden, which is as sound a basis for Grossman’s “stringent science” as taking the idea that the world is flat as a premise.

Of course, we could then discuss why the government would be using holograms when real planes would do the trick, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go there.

You can see an interview with “no-planer” John Lear (this guy) here, and an exposition of the rather more tongue-in-cheek “no building” theory here.

Diagnosis: Fair enough, Grossman is a rather minor figure in the truther movement. But his screeds are nevertheless read by people, and not all of them possess the minimum level of reason to recognize them for what they are. So he’s not completely toothless.

#725: David Grisham

David Grisham, a security guard at the nuclear-bomb facility Pantex, is the leader of the quasi-militaristic Christonazi organization Repent Amarillo, a branch of the Texas Taliban whose motto is “Army of God”, a rough translation of “Hizbollah”. The group advocates the “spiritual mapping” and targeting of specific local areas and venues in order to exorcise “demons” from those areas. Of course, they generally target minorities and vulnerable or small groups, something that has earned them the well-deserved epithet “hate group”. Among their more notable actions are their protests against a small, discrete swingers group, LGBT people, abortion clinics, Muslims, Buddhists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Universalists (who “teaches that everyone is going to heaven. This calls Christ a liar. You cannot be a Christian if you call Christ a liar,” according to Repent), Unitarians (“Pagan and witchcraft headquarters for Amarillo; pagan and witchcraft celebrations and rites are performed here”), and other groups deemed “not Christian”, as well as events such as gay pride events, “Earth worship events”, “Pro-abortion events” or places such as Planned Parenthood, breast cancer events such as “Race for the Cure” (they claim that they want more focus on the – thoroughly discredited – alleged link between abortion and breast cancer), opening days of public schools to reach out to students, spring break events, “Demonically based concerts”, Halloween events, and other “events that may arise that the ministry feels called to confront.” “As Christians, we cannot stand by and watch 67,000 of our neighbors walking through the gates of hell,” states the group, and accordingly views it as their mission to forcibly stopeveryone else from doing what Grisham doesn’t think he would like to do if he got the chance. As for the swingers case, Repent set out to destroy the club through harassment after discovering its existence. On New Years eve, they showed up in military fatigues and bullhorns, blaring Christian music at the swingers’ club building, thereafter stalking the members at every following visit to the club, took video of each member, obtained the swingers’ license plates, dug through their trash, and informed neighbors and coworkers of the activities. Their tactics have frequently involved attempting to get people associated with viewpoints they don’t like fired, but since their charges often include accusations of “witchcraft” their success rate is variable. Their attempt to burn the Quran was unsuccessful as well. Their execution of Santa Claus by a firing squad was more, uh, successful, but only given certain particular criteria for success.

Grisham has also tried to run for office on a dominionist platform, asserting that “so as far as I’m concerned there is no separation of church andstate.”

In fairness, quite a few of Amarillo’s inhabitants have grown tired of the group’s antics, and the groups evangelizing outreach campaigns seem to have backlashed.

Repent Amarillo is part of  RAVEN International, headed by one Troy Bohn. Bohn takes credit for the spiritual mapping (i.e. recognizing where the evil demons lay hidden in Amarillo), and it was Bohn and RAVEN leader Alex Hill who initiated the “Adopt-a-Block” program to organize efforts to remove the demons.

Diagnosis: The group and its members resemble the groups one reads about in horror stories from parts of Africa or Afghanistan. In short, there is really absolutely nothing to distinguish this group from the Taliban or Grisham from a zealous, fundie Taliban mullah. Or a raving madman, which he is.

#724: Jackson K. Grimes

Jack Grimes is the perennial presidential candidate representing the United Union of Fascists, and has failed to gain too much traction with the voters thus far. Though his platform is such named, he doesn’t seem to have a quite clear idea about what fascism is, even though he does consider Mussolini and Saddam Hussein his personal heroes. Hitler, on the other hand, only “pretended to be a Fascist to capitalize on Benito Mussolini’s popularity when he started the National Socialist German Workers' Party, but was NOT a Fascist EVER! More like a Judas goat hung around Il Duce's neck like a millstone with his anti-Semitic insanity.” So there.

His official(!) party website is here (pay attention to the official campaign photo of Grimes, also reproduced to illustrate the article). His frontpage suggests that he is, in fact, slightly more sane and sympathetic than George Hutchins, or another 2008 Maryland candidate, dominionist Fred Nethken, who ran on putting “God back in schools” and saving “American soldiers by replacing them with immigrants” (it is hard to imagine a scenario in which the reasoning behind that position is not self-defeating). Though Grimes’s platform of abolishing Christianity and replacing it with classical Roman paganism might not suggest that he is ideally well-hinged, if anyone wondered (though he seems to waver a little; this one is from 2010). Grimes’s main argument to get you to vote for him is that “Jack Grimes would be the ideal American President because he came from out of nowhere, from nothing, and isn't that supposed to be what the American dream is all about?” You can see him speak here.

His only television-aired presidential debate was an appearance on the Jerry Springer show.

Diagnosis: Superfluous