#1651: John Gilmore

Anti-vaccine loons exhibit the love/hate relationship with science so typical of pseudoscientists – on the one hand, they have to vigorously deny or pretend not to see that science consistently produces results that don’t support their cherished fantasies; on the other, they will desperately try to use whatever flimsy and imaginary support they can in the scientific literature, wherever they can find it. And applying enough motivated reasoning, Texas sharpshooting, cherry-picking and misunderstanding, you will always seem to find some if you torture it enough.

John Gilmore is as fine an example of these dynamics as any. Gilmore is the Executive Director of the Autism Action Network, and a convinced vaccine denialist. He has testified against requiring health care workers to be vaccinated with the flu vaccine, and has made a number of appearances in anti-vaccine rallies and various new stories that need “balance”, always arguing the dingbat side. Moreover, Gilmore is the author of “2003 Danish Study on Mercury Fabricated? New Study Completely Different Results” (note the question mark. The background is described here, but the short story is this: Antivaccinationists really, really don’t like the so-called “Danish studies,” of which one unsurprisingly found no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, and another found no link between the MMR and autism. Of course, these two studies are mere drops in an ocean of studies finding no such link, but they have nonetheless become particular targets for these loons. You see, some years ago one of the co-investigators of the Danish studies, Poul Thorsen, was charged with fraud and misuse of federal grant money that he purportedly used for private expenses. That Thorsen was not the main author, that the fact that he misused grant money for personal expenses in no way invalidates or affects the results, or that the studies themselves are mere drops in the ocean of evidence, doesn’t matter much to the crazies, who made quite a bit of meaningless noise to divert attention from the real issues. Gilmore, however, appears to think that he hit gold with the publication of a new study, Grønborg et al. (2013). Like the previous studies, Grønborg et al. found no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines – in fact, it found very, very strong evidence for a significant genetic component in autism and no evidence for environmental factors. Gilmore disregarded that part of the study, the part that produced further evidence against the conclusion he wants to be true; Gilmore focused instead on the fact that Grønborg et al. operated with different figures than the “Danish studies”, which is unsurprising since they were studying completely different questions using completely different designs (details here), longer follwups, and took into account the expansion definition of “autism” that has occurred in the meantime, as they should. But to Gilmore, who apparently fails to grasp the basic facts about scientific methodology, the fact that they used a different study design is evidence that the “Danish Studies” were fraud. And if they were fraud, everything must apparently be a conspiracy, and Gilmore’s pseudoscientific denialism is vindicated. The usual story.

In 2005, Gilmore praised the work of David Kirby: “Thanks to David’s incredibly hard work the book has done phenomenally well. Two years ago this was the province of the loonie fringe. EOH has put us in the mainstream. Our main job is to destroy the credibility of the vaccine industry and that’s just what EOH has done.” Wonder whether he, ten years later, still believes that he’s not on the loonie fringe?

Diagnosis: Standard conspiracy theorist and B-level antivaxx mainstay. Oh, but he is not “antivaccine”; he is “pro safe vaccine”. Right.

#1650: Joel Gilbert

It’s a testament to the abject insanity of the fringes of the religious right that Joel Sion Gilbert received the welcome and praise and recognition he did in 2012. Gilbert is a documentary filmmaker and musician and the CEO of his own film production company, Highway 61 Entertainment. As a filmmaker, he is most famous – some might even say “legendary” – for his amateurish conspiracy hackjob “Dreams from My Real Father”, which peddled some, shall we say, unsubstantiated allegations toward President Obama’s birth and background. As Amanda Marcotte put it, the film “peddles a conspiracy theory so convoluted that more traditional birthers must be envious of its creativity”. In fact, the basic conspiracy theory is fairly familiar to anyone fascinated by the clown antics of Gilbert’s primary audiences, namely that Obama’s real father is Frank Marshall Davis, and that Obama therefore got communist genes. What Gilbert adds is primarily that Davis took bondage photos of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, which he sold to nudie magazines. These photos were accordingly prominently displayed in the documentary, and a short clip from the movie displaying the photos is available for embedding for any birther blogger who may be interested. Gilbert also claimed to have mailed out a million copies to voters in Ohio, though there is evidence that the campaign may have backfired a little. Of course, the photos in questions were not photos of Dunham. Gilbert claimed that the photos came from two years of research and that he identified Dunham in the naked photos by using her high school images, saying that “her teeth matched, her nose matched, everything matched” and that the correlation was “obvious.” It … isn’t, and there is presumably a reason why Gilbert avoided using any sort of expert help for making the comparisons.

The documentary was praised by certified lunatics like Bill Armistead (GOP chairman in Alabama, who judged the documentary to be factual apparently based on a documentary he saw; yeah, we know), Jack Cashill and Jerome Corsi, and as Michelle Goldberg pointed out “[w]hat matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right.” Orly Taitz, on the other hand, didn’t like it, since the theory implies that Obama’s father was American and that Obama would therefore be eligible for being president. Gilbert, on his side, claimed that “... ‘birthers’ are barking up the wrong tree. It’s not a question of where Obama was born – but rather, one of paternity.” One wonders, if only occasionally, what the standards of reasonableness these people are assuming actually look like.

Gilbert’s previous foray into politics, “Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War For Islamic Revival And Obama’s Politics of Defeat” made less of a splash, but Jerome Corsi liked that one as well. “There is no place like Utopia” is his follow-up documentary, which portrays Obama as a “real life Wizard of Oz” bent on implementing communism. Then there is this.

After the Dreams documentary was released Gilbert and Corsi claimed to have found evidence that Obama had a nosejob (they compared old and new photos and based their findings on what they wanted to find) and concluded that this is evidence that Obama was “concerned he was looking too much like Frank Marshall Davis as he got older.” Said Gilbert: “If Obama was identified as Davis’ son, it would connect the Marxist dots of Obama’s entire life journey.” So, Obama “needed the Kenyan father fairy tale to misdirect the public away from the fact that he is a red diaper baby, the child of a Communist Party USA propagandist and Soviet agent.” And don’t forget that he’s a Muslim; according to Gilbert, Obama has a (secret) Muslim wedding ring inscribed (in Arabic) with “There is no god but Allah”. Presumably the ring comes with the magical power of enabling him to activate his communist genes.

Always willing to indulge his audiences, Gilbert has subscribed to a number of other conspiracy theories about Obama as well, for instance that the Aurora mass shooting could very well have been orchestrated by the Obama administration in an effort to promote gun control. The evidence consisted solely of the assertion that “you can’t put anything past them,” and the possible involvement in the shooting would presumably then be further evidence that you really cannot put anything past them. National healthcare is, according to Gilbert, simply a socialist tool to eliminate the middle and upper classes, and part of Obama’s plot to turn America into a bankrupt, socialist state. Remember those communist genes. Marijuana legalization is another liberal plot to hoodwink America into communism by gaining “total control” over a drugged population. And Michelle Obama is an “anti-American extremist”, and that just shows that Barack Obama is comfortable around anti-American extremists. How could such a character have won in 2012? By voter fraud, of course: according to Gilbert Obama stole the election with NSA data and by allowing disabled people to vote.

Gilbert has made contributions beyond politics as well. In 2010 he released the documentary “Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison” (oh, yes), the main idea of which was that after an argument with John Lennon, Paul McCartney died in a 1966 car crash, only to be replaced by MI5 with a lookalike contest winner in order to “stave off any mass suicides of young girls all over the world should they find out that Paul had died in a car crash.” For good measure, the movie also asserted that Lennon’s death was an assassination instigated by his desire to finally tell the truth about Paul’s demise (the motivation seems rather flimsy). Film Threat noted that an “audience’s ability to suspend practical thought and accept the most outlandish concepts imaginable” was “stretched far beyond the fraying point” by the film and its “insistence that George Harrison left behind audio recordings that confirmed the late 1960s urban legend of Paul McCartney’s automobile accident death and secret replacement by a ringer,” and that the documentary contained holes in logic and consistency large enough to be driven through by the Magical Mystery Tour bus.

Diagnosis: Zealous, paranoid and stupid. That, however, is apparently no barrier to making a career among certain groups of people but rather an asset.

#1649: Mark Gietzen & Jonathan Hall

Gietzen. Couldn't find a
picture that was for sure a
picture of the correct
Jonathan Hall.

Fluoride conspiracies are, like all conspiracy theories, stupid, but though they seem to have been overshadowed by anti-vaccine hysteria and wi-fi delusions in terms of public awareness, there are lunatics with internet access, poor critical thinking skills, low levels of scientific literacy, and an unhealthy dose of paranoia who are still championing the anti-fluoride cause. Since they tend to fly a bit under the radar, they have even had some success. The city of Wichita, Kansas, has for instance passed an ordinance banning the use of fluoride in that city’s drinking water supply; the popular vote was swayed in part by the campaigns of Wichitans Against Fluoridation, who, in the words of their leader Jonathan Hall, are “part of the upcoming wave of change,” and has been planning to bring their efforts nationwide.

Part of the reason why they were successful, was the unconditional and deluded support of Mark Gietzen, president of the Kansas Republican Assembly, who applauded the idea of spreading the word: “Since I am connected to the National Federation of Republican Assemblies. I’m going to try to make fluoride one of our core issues,” said Gietzen, who also likened fluoride to lead and asbestos: “Things that we thought were right back then maybe were not such a good idea after all. That’s where we are with fluoride.” Which is false, but we don’t suppose Gietzen or Hall would be anywhere close to a position to assess the facts or evidence: “[T]he latest science confirms that ingested fluoride lowers the IQ in children,” said Gietzen but didn’t cite any science.

Gietzen is otherwise best known as a prolife activist and the chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life. One of their major projects was to place crosses each day on public property in front of George Tiller’s late-term abortion facility in Wichita, and they claimed to have saved 395 babies to date. He is also the author of Is it a Sin for a Christian to Be a Registered Democrat in America Today?

Diagnosis: Anti-fluoride scare mongering is really as crazy as anything, and though it may seem like a blast from the past to many, it’s still going strong. Hall and Gietzen are dangerous – but more importantly, they’re tragic figures: Think how much good they could have achieved if they’d devoted their energy to actually helping people.

#1648: William J. Gibbons

The Institute for Creation Research isn’t particularly notable for doing, you know, research – instead it is, as you would expect, and organization devoted to outreach and to counter real research with Biblical literalism. One arguable exception is a series of five expeditions to the Congo to find Mokele mbembe, which is a fictional creature that ICR member Williams J. Gibbons claims is a living dinosaur. The institute has, not unlike Bigfoot researchers, been a “hairsbreadth away from filming a specimen” for more than a decade now. In fairness, Gibbons isn’t the most prominent Mokele mbembe advocate; that dubious honor probably goes to Richard Kent, a British fundie who thinks that the Mokele-mbembe is real, alive and knock-down evidence against evolution (note that even if it existed, it would be as much evidence against evolution as monkeys). Kent also thinks that dinosaurs were dragons whose small nostrils made them breath fire.

Otherwise, it’s the usual stuff. Gibbons holds a “Ph.D. in Creation Science Apologetics summa cum laude, Emmanuel College of Christian Studies, Springdale, Arkansas,” which is roughly as impressive as something you printed out off the Internet. Gibbons likes to debate evolution, but doesn’t really understand it and tend accordingly to debate it in a manner reminiscent of Duane Gish, preferring for instance to avoid responding to challenges to his own position or responses to his own questions in favor of irrelevant strawmanning. As well as the usual tropes, of course, from gaps in the fossil record to quote-mining, the no-new-information argument, complaints that scientists don’t accept debate invitations from creationists or that evolution is an atheist plot (“Eugenie Scott who heads the pretentiously named National Center For Science Education is another virulent atheist. The real purpose of that organization is not to promote good science, but to enforce humanism and atheism at any cost, and often with the help of their friends in the ACLU. The very fact that Dr. Scott has a portrait of Charles Darwin hanging on the wall behind her desk says it all”), misrepresentations and misunderstandings. Gibbons has even has his own version of “why are there still monkeys?”: “Much of the fossil evidence reveals that many of our alleged ape-ancestors were contemporaries and sometimes overlapped one another,” says Gibbons, and apparently thinks that it is an argument against evolution. He’s got more than one version, in fact.

He’s also written a couple of books, including Claws and Jaws with Kent Hovind, no less.

Diagnosis: Little new to see here, but once again we have a fundie crackpot illustrating how utterly intellectually – and morally – bankrupt the ICR actually is. Preposterous.

#1647: Michael Geiger

HIV denialism is the view that AIDS is not caused by HIV. Not only does HIV denialism involve a type of denial of evidence and our understanding of how the world works that is pretty much on par with advocating that the Earth is flat; it is also one of the branches of denialism that have had the most immediate and measurable negative impact on humanity, including the deaths of over 330,000 South Africans while a “review council” set up by HIV denialists was delaying treatment.

Of course, if you deny that HIV causes AIDS, you need to produce another mechanism. Usually these proposals involve rejecting of every piece of knowledge and understanding of medicine we have obtained since the Bronze age in favor of gibberish. So Michael Geiger, for instance, thinks AIDS is caused by loneliness. In general, Geiger is a proponent of the “dangerous” thoughts hypothesis: negative emotions directed at HIV positive people contribute to killing them. He has even accused another HIV denialist of helping to kill famous denialist activist Christine Maggiore, who died of AIDS, by worrying about her: “Have we as yet learned nothing ... of how easy it is to plant projections of sickness and death onto our own selves, as well as our friends, acquaintances or even onto our children and thereby help to create those fears into our realities?” No, Michael, it doesn’t work that way.

Geiger is entitled to reject scientific consensus, however. After all, HIV researchers who believe that HIV causes AIDS are funded by various pharma companies – and there is big money at stake. Accordingly, Geiger can just simply reject of the science without even engaging with the data. On the other hand, people who are not HIV researchers and therefore not funded by Big Pharma do not have the relevant expertise, and can therefore be dismissed as well. It’s a rhetorical win-win for Geiger, who promptly concludes that you should listen to Peter Duesberg.

Now, we admit that we don’t really know exactly who Michael Geiger is, apart from a relatively vocal HIV denialist, but we do know that he has a tendency, like many of the craziest cranks, to not only infest comment sections on articles on the phenomenon, but to contact the employers and colleagues of people who speak out against AIDS denialism (with emails containing misspellings as well as links to incoherent conspiracy rants and to pictures of scientists photoshopped to look like monkeys), which is … not typical behavior for sane, science-minded and evidence-guided researchers. He does appear to be a film director and member of the board of directors of HEAL San Diego, which is probably an organization you should avoid.

Diagnosis: Troll. And as opposed to most trolls, who are merely annoying, Geiger might actually be dangerous.