#770: Ted Holden

Ted Holden is a legendary internet crank, well known for trolling and crackpottery since the birth of the medium (appearing on usenet in 1983 and featured in Tim Skirvin’s ancient history of internet loons. His views seem to be not that far removed from those of Gene Ray, though Holden’s sentences are generally more grammatical. His views of how the world hangs together are sufficiently, shall we say, unconventional for Holden to be criticized even by most other internet trolls and kooks, however. He has engaged in sufficiently violent sockpuppetry to have had numerous user accounts blocked at the already not quite reality-friendly website Free Republic. Talk.origins famously used to go through seasonal Holden cycles, and maintains a Holden archive with highlights and debunkings here.

So what are the ideas? Well, apart from the usual paranoid conspiracy theories (the fact that many people reject his ideas is taken as proof of conspiracy) and catastrophism, Holden advocates a version of Velikovskian bullshit, including believing that Venus and Mars were populated in the past and accessible by teleportation; that Saturn used to be located over the North Pole, reducing the effect of gravity and thus allowing dinosaurs to grow big; that people used to communicate by telepathy, developing language only when this ability was lost; and that evolution is bunk, as proved (it is a little unclear how) by the existence of feral chickens and bats.

You can take the “Are you Ted Holden?” quiz here (scroll down).

Recently, baseball player Jose Canseco seems to have taken up the thread from Holden.

Diagnosis: Though hardly particularly influential, Holden has achieved something of a legendary status as one of the ur-trolls of the Internet: thus, he definitely merits inclusion in a comprehensive Encyclopedia of loons.

#769: Jim Hoft

A.k.a. The dumbest man on the Internet

Jim Hoft is a hardcore wingnut who writes for The Gateway Pundit, a website devoted to conspiracy theories and fallacies driven by rightwing fanaticism. The website is, for instance, pretty much consistent in its global warming denialism and red-baiting, but it also toys with birtherism, mainly by JAQing off. In short, it is something of an online version of WND, without even WND’s ever so feeble attempts at constraints.

And Jim Hoft is your typical contributor. There is little point in trying to explore the full range of his nuttery, but this piece of abysmally mindnumbing idiocy is a pretty good illustration of why Hoft qualifies as an entry in our Encyclopedia. And here Hoft confuses closed captioning on his television screen with a conspiracy (it is epic; do see it). And though I am loath to linking to him, this one probably has to be seen to be believed as well; in this screed Hoft attempts to argue that the Occupy wall street protest was really the result of a conspiracy organized by Soros. His conclusive evidence? Soros had once, back in the days, contributed to a Canadian organization that now played a minor role in organizing protests in Canada. That’s what counts as proof of a conspiracy for people like Hoft when politics is involved.

Indeed, Hoft has won some recognition as the dumbest man on the Internet. Among the entries submitted in the nomination process was his claim that Obama celebrated the murder of Daniel Pearl, the time Hoft fell for a satirical story about a San Diego high school rescinding its commencement invitation to President Obama because students apparently discovered that his long-form birth certificate is a fake, as well as this one, this piece of paranoid survivalist gibberish, his insane attempt to paint Desmond Tutu as an anti-semite through inaccuracy and lying, his outrage that the official logo of the Nuclear Security Summit depticting an atom in his mind “looks like” an Islamic crescent, his attempt to characterize the Westboro Baptist church as a leftwing cult, and his – later often repeated by the crazier elements in wingnut “media” – speculation that Obama was photoshopped into the situation room when Bin Laden was killed.

Diagnosis: I’d assume that even Glenn Beck would be forced to agree that Hoft is a loon. But given the moves of the Overton window it is frankly hard to tell at this point. And Beck has, indeed, repeated some of the bullshit Hoft’s deranged imagination has managed to conjure up.

#768: Michael A. Hoffman II

Michael A. Hoffman II is a Holocaust denier, conspiracy theorist, and self-proclaimed scholar of all things Judaic. His self-published books include Judaism’s Strange Gods and Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, and Deceit, and they contain exactly the kind of 30s-style shittery you’d expect from the titles. He has also worked on the projects of e.g. Tom Metzger, Willis Carto, David Irving and Ernst Zündel. According to himself, however, Hoffman is just trying to save the Jews from themselves and the Satanic evils of the Talmud.

Hoffman’s other output includes writings on the occult origins of Judaism and Masonry, and he has written stuff on Holocaust denial, White Slavery (the suffering of white people at the hands of commercial interests in Britain and America negates the sufferings of and genocide against African Americans), and the ravings of Charles Fort, all of which are characterized by the same standards of judgment and critical thinking as his books on Judaism. As for masonry, apparently Hoffman learned from his maternal grandfather that elections in the United States were rigged by organized crime, and there is just a short step from this unsubstantiated premise to the conclusions “[n]othing is at seems to be,” and therefore that the Masons and the Jews are behind everything.

In Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare he outlined his conspiracy theory of a shadow government or “cryptocracy” that gains power through manipulation of symbols and twilight language. Examples include Route 66, which allegedly connects various centers of occult significance, and the Kennedy assassination, in which Hoffman sees ritualistic elements because he is crazy (based on the lunatic ideas of James Shelby Downard, with whom Hoffman coauthored King/Kill-33 before the latter’s death). But there is cause for optimism! Hoffman has stated that the gnosis of this ruling cabal is slowly being revealed through movies such as They Live and The Matrix and other forms of symbolic and subliminal communication since … who knows. He has also attempted to analyze the 9/11 terror attack in terms of human alchemy and psychological warfare. At least Alex Jones seems fascinated. 

Diagnosis: A deeply objectionable character. As opposed to many crackpots, Hoffman is a decent writer and actually takes some care to make his details and data relatively factually accurate. But through judicious application of cherry-picking and motivated reasoning he is able to arrive at precisely the obnoxious, vile conclusions he wants. 

#767: Benny Hinn

Benny Hinn is a televangelist, faith healer and sith lord of apparently staggering popularity and influence, whose main goal seems to be to wait for Billy Graham to die so that he can take over what he deems to be the leadership of evangelical fundamentalism in the US, for God has shown him that Graham’s death will mark the beginning of a huge American revival of religious fervor (meaning, of course, that you should start sending the money you send to Graham, to him instead).

Hinn is a notorious promoter of the prosperity gospel. So if you send Hinn your money God will reward you, and he even has anecdotes to back it up. He does his performances in large stadiums that are televised on his “This is your day” program, called “Miracle Crusades”.

Hinn is also a notable faith healer. He has even issued his own version of the Bible, The Master's Healing Presence Bible, with added bits and quotes. Apparently it is “filled with the miraculous and the powerful manifestation of God, and color-code the sections that deal with “healing, the Holy Spirit, faith, prayer and, the presence of God.” He charges you $90 for a copy. Of course, it is rather likely that Hinn is a fraud more than he is a crackpot (those are not mutually exclusive). In 2001, HBO’s America Undercover tried to follow up 5 of the people Hinn had allegedly healed at a particular crusade, but when HBO checked back a year later, none of the parishioners had been healed at all (two had died). Hinn, of course, blamed the dismal results on HBO. In reality, his assurance that his victims are well after his faith healing is rather likely to lead his victims to abort the treatments and medication schemes they are already using, so it is definitely not an innocent matter of innocuous faith. CBC later exposed Hinn’s tendency to use his church’s money for private purposes, and for employing security guards disguised as men from the church to keep genuinely sick followers away from the stage so he doesn’t need to deal with them (or risk being exposed to something that he cannot heal). Even his efforts to combat the “twin evils” of Islam and secularism seem primarily to be schemes to make money.

Furthermore, Hinn has a long track record as a false prophet, having forewarned that God would destroy the homosexual community in America in 1995, that America’s East Coast would be destroyed by earthquakes before 2000, that Fidel Castro would die during the 90s, and that God had given him a vision that thousands of the dead would watch the network and be resurrected by touching the television screen.

There is a comprehensive Benny Hinn resource here.

Diagnosis: Certainly a loon, probably a fraud, and definitely a spineless, slithering monster, Hinn’s power seems no to be waning despite the fact that he is repeatedly exposed for what he is. Extremely dangerous.

#766: David de Hilster

David de Hilster is an internet crank who tries to promote the theory of autodynamics. Autodynamics was a miserable failure of a theory designed to replace the Theory of Relativity in the 1940s by claiming that the Lorentz transformation equations used in mainstream science are formulated incorrectly, so that special and general relativity equations are invalid, that the neutrino does not exist (which it demonstrably does), that there are particles not observed by mainstream physics (the “picograviton” and the “electromuon”), and that there are alternative models of decay for muons. The theory is, to emphasize, utterly debunked. It is as falsified as theories can be. But that doesn’t prevent crackpots from trying to revive it, especially crackpots like de Hilster, who has the perfect qualifications for spearheading the revival: no physics background and poor critical thinking skills.

He founded NeWiki (“An Encyclopedia For a New World”) in 2007 after his original research had repeatedly been removed from Wikipedia. He also makes, and tries to make, films, such as “Einstein Wrong – The Miracle Year” (it is a bit unclear whether that was actually ever made).

A severe victim of crank magnetism, de Hilster has subsequently gone on to advocate the even more ridiculous Expanding Earth hypothesis. His evidence: “It is quite obvious to most casual observers that South America and Africa were at one time joined. But it is quite unknown to almost all that Asia, Australia and the Americas also were at one time joined. This evidence leads to only one conclusion: 200 million years ago, the earth’s continents were all together on a much smaller orb and since then, the earth has been growing significantly.” 

Diagnosis: A hopeless case of crank magnetism. Probably rather harmless.