#2144: David Reaboi

David Reaboi is a wingnut, founder and senior vice president of the think tank Security Studies Group (SSG) and previously spokesperson for the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a conspiratory-minded rightwing group focusing for instance on the myth of creeping sharia. The CSP has tried to prop up that myth with a study called “Shariah Law and American State Courts: An Assessment of State Appellate Court Cases”, which is – considered as a study– as fraudulent as you get them. It was even pimped by the WND for months: that’s how ridiculous it was. The study ostensibly outlined numerous cases in which the Islamic system of law has been applied in the US. However, anyone bothering to actually look at the cases used would note that every single example in the report in fact shows the opposite of what the authors conclude that they show (“Shariah enters U.S. courts through the practice of comity to foreign law,” Reaboi explained, which “happens, for example, when a judge decides to allow the use of say, Pakistani or Saudi family law (Shariah) in a dispute between Pakistanis or Saudis”); instead, the cases involved the courts refusingto impose laws from Muslim countries (some details here). However, what matters to people like Reaboi is that the cases involved an Arab or a Muslim; thatis what it takes for it to be a case of the courts imposing Sharia law.

Otherwise, Reaboi seems to have been very concerned about what he perceived to be Obama’s sharia sympathies and “the infiltration of the conservative movement” by GOP figures who have suggested that Islamophobia is real. He was also a diligent pusher of various and increasingly insane Huma Abedin conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, SSG’s social media director, Nick Short, wrote about “the sheer amount of money being allocated by Congress to fund what is essentially an invasion of the third-world in the form of refugees and illegal aliens [which] is outright treasonous,” and SSG’s president Jim Hanson described the Orlando shooting as “in keeping with totalitarian Islamic code” and suggested that a homemade clock brought to a school by a 14-year-old American Muslim “was half a bomb.” (What else would a Muslim use a clock for?) 

The CSP, on the other hand, is of course the group founded by Frank Gaffney, who has claimed that Obama is a Muslim and that Gen. David Petraeus submitted to Islamic Sharia law.

Oh, and in 2017 Reaboi and his group were apparently – at least according to the group – advising the White House on the dispute between Qatar and other U.S. partner nations in the Persian Gulf. It really should worry you that not only they, but the White House, think that they are remotely competent to say anything meaningful about the topic.

Diagnosis: Though the topic concerns issues that are partially outside of what we usually cover, the case in question is such a striking case of paranoia-fuelled fraud (without recognizing it as such) that it would be negligent not to call it out. You probably shouldn’t trust a single word that comes out of David Reaboi’s mouth about anything.

Hat-tip: Dispatches from the Culture Wars

#2143: Sondra Ray

Yes, we have encountered her before, but Sondra Ray deserves her own, albeit brief, entry. Ray is an advocate of rebirthing therapy, a silly and not entirely benign brand of New Age psychotherapy, and proudly considers her profession to be spiritual guide, not scientist – “science” being more or less a synonym for narrowmindedness for people like this given scientists’ obsession with efficaciousness and accountability. According to Ray and her colleague Bob Mandel, whatever problems you feel you suffer from are due to the way you were born, and they will help “rebirth” you, properly this time. According to Rebirthing in the New Age, the book she wrote with Leonard Orr, it seems that rebirthing will help you achieve immortality. It’s quite astoundingly ludicrous, really.

Ray is also the author of Essays on Creating Sacred Relationships: The Next Step to a New Paradigm, which apparently helps you create your own paradigm. It’s hard to put how silly that claim is into human words, but it helps to realize that she apparently confuses paradigm with personal set of beliefs.

Diagnosis: Complete idiot. 

#2142: Barbara Weber Ray

Barbara Weber Ray is a psychic, astrologer and Latin teacher, and the author of The 'Reiki' Factor in The Radiance Technique, which describes her version of the Eastern faith healing discipline Reiki, The Radiance Technique® (or TRT). As an astrologer, she is apparently “professional” and “licensed”, whatever that might mean. Now, Ray apparently really has a PhD, in the humanities, but switched to practicing clairvoyance in the early 70s and used, when she for instance also had a radio show called “Star-Talk” to spread her nonsense. 

Reiki, of course, demonstrably has no beneficial health effects. Her book on the topic, which is notably riddled with quotes by real scientists that have been either judiciously mined, are completely irrelevant to the context, or fake, describes what she perceives to be the history of Reiki (which is not the actual history, since the actual history is too mundane for her agenda), describes how people attuned to cosmic energies (i.e. subtle energies can go on to use TRT, contains a large number of anecdotes and testimonials (many of them are discussed here; they are quite ridiculous), as well as some appendices with quotes and an FAQ that doesn’t really deal with any of the more obvious questions. Among the quotes you will find the “truth goes through three stages” fake quote attributed to Schopenhauer (the relevant Schopenhauer passage actually says more or less the opposite of what promoters of the quote think he says) favored by self-aggrandizing Galileo gambit promoters everywhere. It is not the only fake quote in the book.

There is a decent review of the book here. Among the book's themes is the idea that just as we have food diets now, humans will go on light diets (attributed to John Ott), which Ray compares to what she characterizes as the Light diet ostensibly provided by Reiki (“Light” doesn’t mean light, of course, any more than “energy” in Ray’s book means energy– subtle energy is not energy – but spirit-ether), which people need because people are apparently made both of Light and matter. 

Apparently reiki is a really old technique. In reality, it was invented by Mikao Usui in 1922, but many proponents claim that he only rediscovered it, since being older is better and many proponents have anyways already decided that what they want to be true, is true. According to Ray, knowledge of TRT was orally transmitted for centuries in Asia, but she is the only scholar able to recognize ancient descriptions of the method for what they really are. Apparently reiki originated with extraterrestrial aliens.

Of course, we are just scratching the surface. Did you know that E = MC2 is a tool for activating energy? Or that Ray’s TRT will play a very important role in the dawning of the “New Age”? Neither did we. Nor, for that matter, does Ray. TRT is listed here.

Diagnosis: The kind garbled fluffy insanity that certain audiences just gobble up, Ray’s lunacy has apparently received a modicum of popularity, which does not reflect well on humanity. Complete and utter rubbish.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2141: Dennis Dean Rathman

The Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, which we’ve had ample opportunity to discuss before, contains signatures by what is overall and with only a few exceptions a pitiful group of non-scientists, conspiracy theorists and religious fundies teaching at religious institutions of questionable educational merit, thus serving to undermine its intended rhetorical value of the list more than anything else. Now, Dennis Dean Rathman is a Staff Scientist at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and has contributed to a few publications (in fields unrelated to evolution), so at least he has some genuine credentials in some scientific field. What made his name interesting to us, is that it also appears on an HIV denialist petition for a “Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis”.

Diagnosis: Ok, so we have been unable to locate more information about this figure, but we think we have enough to give him an entry. Loon.

#2140: John Ragan

John Ragan is a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, representing the 33rd District, which puts him in the company of deranged lunatics like Kevin Brooks, Jimmy Matlock and Stacey Campfield. Ragan is famous for believing that homosexuality doesn’t really exist: “A person is a heterosexual because of the presence of genitalia of one sex or the other. No one except a very few with an exceedingly rare congenital deformity have both kinds of genitalia.” Yes, he might be confused about some details here. In 2013 Ragan sponsored a bill – described by Ragan as a “mental health” bill – that says that school officials must “notify parents or legal guardians in the manner specified by law for such a medical referral” if a child is, among other things, suspected of being LGBTQ; he did claim to not be “anti-gay”, and putting the mental-health reference together with his aforementioned denial of the existence of homosexuality, you sort of get where he is coming from. It is not a good place to be coming from. The bill was a modified version of his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would have forbidden public school teachers from saying “gay, lesbian, transgender, or bisexual” in classrooms, a bill that drew national attention. In 2017 Ragan sponsored legislation that tried to limit the terms “mother and father” to households with opposite sex parents in a complicated effort to create trouble for gay couples wishing to adopt children.

But Ragan’s lunacy isn’t limited to anti-gay efforts. In 2012, Ragan co-sponsored HJR 587, a resolution against the United Nations’ non-binding Agenda 21 treaty, based on the hard-right conspiracy theorist fear that the treaty is a plot to establish a New World Order. He is also a firm climate change denialist, having asserted that “[t]he anthropogenic climate change theory, as a scientific theory, fails to meet criteria for explanation of all evidence, testability and falsification,” which, of course, is nonsense – not that we even for a moment would suspect Ragan of actually understanding the meaning of the terms he is using.

Diagnosis: Simply a standard, bigoted denialist and conspiracy theorist. He keeps getting reelected, though, which does not reflect well on people in Tennessee’s 33^rdDistrict.

#2139: John Rabe

John Rabe is a fundamentalist maniac and conspiracy theorist affiliated with Truth in Action Ministries (TiAM), and yes, we could really end this entry right there. Rabe is also a regular cohost, with Carmen Pate, of TiAM’s radio program Truth that Transforms, which is an instance of (the generalized version of) Badger’s Law (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Badger%27s_Law).

In 2012 Rabe said that idolatry and the worship of government is to blame for the protests and recall movement in Wisconsin over Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s push to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of public workers, calling it a “theological issue” (apparently climate science is idolatry, too, according to TiAM – policies targeting climate change could, according to Rabe, lead to the return of communist dictatorships that left “over 100 million people killed”). According to Rabe Wisconsinites who have rallied against Walker’s move are people who have made government “a replacement for God” and moreover that government employees shouldn’t look to government to provide for them. Yeah, it’s not exactly unexpected given the source, but it is worth taking a moment to think about how delusionally insane it is.

Then, of course, there is the anti-gay tirades, including complaints about “activists” with a “harmful agenda” that attack “two thousand years of traditional marriage” by striking down homosexual marriage bans like Proposition 8, as detailed in Rabe’s and Jerry Newcombe’s “documentary” “We the People: Under Attack”. The courts’ discovery of “so-called ‘right to sodomy’ [not so-called by the courts, obviously] in the Constitution” comes of course on top of all their other sins, such as having “silenced voluntary prayer in schools,” which is emphatically not illegal anywhere in the US. Honesty has never been a central virtue for people like John Rabe. As for homosexuality, Rabe has likened it to “bondage” and even “slavery” because it is a communist, liberal un-Godly ploy. Indeed, Marxism and sex seem to be deeply intertwined in the twisted mind of John Rabe, which is why he thinks sex education, for instance, “isn’t just basic biological information; this is really ideological indoctrination form a very liberal standpoint.” He has also claimed that supporters of marriage equality are “unscientific” when it comes to family stability and have “completely ignored” evidence showing that same-sex parenting harms children. Then he lamented the irony that bigots like him often get labeled “unscientific” for their nonsense. The irony is, indeed, fascinatingly many-layered here.

Rabe, who regularly toys with dominionism, is also a fan of the myth of the US as a Christian nation, claiming that “[i]t’s the Christian foundation of our foundation that brought us freedom.” This is, of course, false, but Rabe and TiAM are unsurprisingly not above using fake Founding Father quotes to suggest otherwise.

The decidedly silly commenter chiming in here may or may not be the same John Rabe.

Diagnosis: Yes: bigoted fundie conspiracy theorist. We seem to be repeating ourselves here, but then there is little new or surprising in Rabe’s moronic rants.

#2138: Allen Quist

Michele Bachmann is crazy, but compared to her mentor, Allen Quist, she can at least occasionally come across as deceptively reasonable (they’re close: Allen Quist’s wife Julie was for instance Bachmann’s district director while Bachmann was in Congress). Quist is a soybean farmer, former state representative, and twice gubernatorial candidate who served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 1983 to 1989; he ran for Congess in 2013 and won the primaries, but lost the general election. Most notable for his anti-abortion line, Quist believes that abortion should be a first degree homicide and has even written a book, The Abortion Revolution and the Sanctity of Life, about the topic, which does not even try to engage with the moral philosophical literature on the issue. 

During the 1990s, Quist and Bachmann worked together to demolish Minnesota’s state curriculum standards through the group Maple River Education Coalition (MREC) (later EdWatch), considering the curriculum standards to be a gateway to a totalitarian society built on moral relativism due to its reliance on science and truth. In particular, MREC opposed the Profile of Learning, an attempt to bring the state into compliance with federal curriculum standards, which according to Quist was a step toward a United Nations takeover of Minnesota. Moreover, “sustainability” is just a euphemism for a future dystopia in which humans would be confined to public-transit-oriented urban cores (yes, “mass transit” is a conspiracy against freedom) and if the standards were implemented, Minnesota schools would become breeding grounds for “homosexual indoctrination.” Aaron Miller is apparently another one of Quist’s acolytes, especially with regard to their shared views on science and education.

Indeed, Quist has been consistently paranoid about the UN, especially Agenda 21, for decades, and has emerged as one of the leading Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists on the prairie, making several tours of Minnesota’s Tea Party circuit to warn about the terrors of Agenda 21. Part of the agenda, according to Quist – an especially effective talking point among his audiences – is international gun control, which Obama apparently was continuously on the verge of signing during his whole tenure as president. One of the UN’s major strategies for compliance to the gun ban effort is, as Quist sees it, apparently spreading “the myth of global warming”.

To get a sense of EdWatch’s approach to eduction, it is worth looking at Quist’s current efforts as editor of CurriculumModules.org (CMod), a children’s “education” and “learning” website targeted at homeschoolers, which “challenges the worldwide views of established education” and instead offers religiously motivated pseudoscience, anti-science, denialism and myths. Since Quist is a hardline young-earth creationist, one of CMod’s lessons suggests for instance not only that dinosaurs lived alongside humans in the past but continued to do so well into medieval times. As CMod sees it, history books and science books have falsely determined that dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago. Their counterevidence? “[T]he only reasonable explanation for the Stegosaurus carved in the stone on the wall of the Cambodian temple is that the artist had either seen a stegosaurus or had seen other art works of a stegosaurus. Either way, people and stegosaurs were living at the same time.” There is little reason to think that the stegosaurus depiction in question, which in any case does not depict a stegosaurus (but rather a rhino or a boar) unless severe pareidolia is applied, is not a fabrication. Elsewhere, Quist provides what he takes to be scientific evidence for the existence of dragons, and suggests that the Book of Job should be taught as a science lesson: “Today we know beyond a reasonable doubt – Job 41 is a picture-perfect description of SuperCroc,” which is silly on amazingly many levels. Quist once also told a reporter that he believed women were “genetically predisposed” to be subservient to men. Not that Quist knows what genesare.

As a politician, Quist was notable also for his unhealthy obsession with sex (he spent a total of 30 hours during a single 1988 session talking about it), and in particular sex he ostensibly doesn’t like. He campaigned hard against legalizing same-sex marriage, led efforts to prevent extending human rights protections to gays and lesbians, and famously sponsored a (failed) bill that would require AIDS testing for all marriage license applicants. He managed to draw some criticism for suggesting that supporting a gay counseling center at Minnesota State University would be similar to supporting one for the Ku Klux Klan, saying that “its presence suggests university approval for the homosexual lifestyle and the practice of sodomy … You wouldn’t have a center for the Ku Klux Klan,” and that “both would be breeding grounds for evil –AIDS, in this case.”

No fan of the ACA, Quist called it “the most insidious, evil piece of legislation I have ever seen in my life … [that seems to happen rather often in Quist’s case]. Every one of us has to be totally committed to killing this travesty … I have to kill this bill,” and argued that “Obama, Pelosi, [Tim] Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country.”

Diagnosis: Wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, denialist and bigot. His influence, however, is greater than you might initially think, as he seems to have been training a small army of deranged extremists for the better part of three decades.