#2225: Joseph Sciambra

We have encountered a couple of ex-gay activists before, and have to admit that it is sometimes difficult not to feel some empathy or pity for them. In the case of Joseph Sciambra concern might be appropriate as well. Sciambra claims to be an “ex-gay” porn star, and says that anal sex “release[s] into the world these rare demonic entities”; indeed, unless everyone immediately commits to abstaining from homosexual activity, we risk that the “devil could be given birth to anally.” 

Sciambra describes it all in his book Swallowed by Satan, where he also claims to have been a neo-Nazi and a Satanist. The book doesn’t exactly scream trustworthiness. Much of it is dedicated to graphic accounts of brutal sex with other men, voices Sciambra heard in his head that he claims are demonic spirits, and even having sex with demonic figures; in one story, he goes to a club to get “gang-banged” and during sex “conceives” a demon in his anus. After sex, the demon apparently “gushed from my body” in his discharge and “would grow and pitilessly hover about me. Sometimes, it spoke.” He blames his descent into homosexuality on innocently using a Ouija board as a child and “an occult sex ritual that I engaged in” with “a gay cabal of male witches,” where he had group sex with a man with “the head of a goat or ram.” At some point he was also possessed by a Nazi ghost. (For those who may be interested, some further excerpts and claims are discussed here). No wonder Sciambra “cannot understand why the gay experiment has not been abandoned like other failed utopian philosophies that resulted in mass murder – fascism, Nazism, communism.”

His YouTube page includes a biopic, “Death in Room #122,” as well as video commentaries like “How to Stop Masturbating,” “Gay Marriage: A Satanic Ceremony” and “Former Gay Porn Star Tells of His Possession by Demons and Deliverance from Satan”. Apparently Bryan Fischer was impressed and invited Sciambra on his show, where they talked about how Sciambra was “devoured by the Prince of Darkness” when he “entered the homosexual lifestyle,” an experience Sciambra described as “scary”. Then he warned kids against coming out as gay and implored gay people to “stop the silliness, stop the lies and stop the deception because how high does the body count have to get before we will admit that the gay lifestyle has been a disaster?” Sciambra knows a lot about lies and silliness, at least. 

Diagnosis: As reliable on homosexuality as he is on Satanism and Nazism, we suppose. We are, however, willing to concede that there might, indeed, be some unusual sexual proclivities at work here. 

#2224: Rob Schwarzwalder

Rob Schwarzwalder is currently Senior Lecturer at Regent University, Pat Robertson’s mockery of educational institutions. And prior to that, Schwarzwalder was vice president of the fundamentalist hate group the Family Research Council. In that capacity, Schwarzwalder would for instance call for boycotts of Starbucks, warning that the company may be endangering the country’s economic health by supporting marriage equality. How, you might ask? Well, because “[b]y supporting a movement that would further vitiate the already weakened family unit, [Starbucks CEO Howard] Schultz is tacitly but actively advocating the continued erosion of the institution – the two-parent, heterosexual, traditional and complementary family unit – without which no economy or society generally can thrive.” How recognizing same-sex marriage would lead to erosion of the family unit is not entirely clear (unless Schwarzwalder believes that gay people, if denied same-sex marriage, would instead opt into stable, loving heterosexual marriages), but this really has nothing to do with reason or evidence, of course. Apparently it has something to do with supporting gay rights being a matter of  “show[ing] a lack of love” and sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage leading to “the withering of the soul and the erosion of society.” President Obama thus got it all wrong, since “there is no love in affirming something God declares wrong and harmful, whether it relates to human sexuality or thievery or malice or deception or anything.” Schwarzwalder has also suggested that legalizing gay marriage might lead to civil war.

To change it up a little, Schwarzwalder claimed in 2016 that defending trans rights is “fascistic” and “the banning of dissent”. Apparently legal or political decisions Schwarzwalder don’t agree with are violations of his First Amendment rights and thus contrary to democracy. And indeed, Schwarzwalder is much concerned about First Amendment rights, in particular religious freedom; he has little idea what religious freedom involves, though. “Everyone should be free to agree with me” is not quitethe correct interpretation.

Schwarzwalder has weighed in on other issues, too. He has for instance argued that conservative Christians do not “cherry pick” the Bible when they claim that the Bible’s command to stone rebellious children doesn’t really mean what it says. The guiding principle to reading the Bible is apparently that you should adhere to the Biblical commands Schwarzwalder favors the way he interprets them, and that principe should be applied universally and without exception. He is also a creationist and climate change denialist, of course.

Diagnosis: Precisely what you’d expect from someone in Schwarzwalder’s position: complete rubbish.

#2223: Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Jeffrey M. Schwartz is a psychiatrist with a genuine research background. He is also a religious fundamentalist, signatory to the Discovery Institute’s nonsense petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, and featured in the 2008 creationist promotion “documentary” Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, where he told Ben Stein that science should not be separated from religion, that is, that dogma should be allowed to overrule empirical research if you don’t like what the data tell you. As for evolution, Schwartz seems to accept evolution in general, but thinks that humans are exempt and able to transcend their origins for reasons that seem to lay closer to Deepak Chopra than to Kent Hovind.

Schwartz is, however, most famous as a proponent of non-materialist neuroscience. Schwartz’s argument for dualism is basically a combination of an argument from incredulity, and a (handwaving) appeal to quantum theory and the New Age (and false) notion that quantum physics somehow demonstrates that a “mind” is a necessary component for anything to happen (Schwartz’s coauthor is Henry Stapp, who is a defender of this, shall we say, non-standard  – though “refuted” would be more accurate – interpretation of quantum mechanics, which would, if true, be evidence for classical idealism, not dualism); there is a concise discussion of their silliness here. Schwartz provides no actual alternative dualist hypothesis that has been worked out in any detail, such as testable predictions, whatsoever, of course, preferring to handwave about a “mental force” that he argues solely by assertion is a natural feature of the universe and not magic. And no: neuroplasticity and what Schwartz calls “reprogramming the brain” is of course not evidence for dualism, insofar as nothing can be evidence for a hypothesis that has not even been coherently defined.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz must not be confused with Jeffrey H. Schwartz, who is also something of a crackpot but does, as a physical anthropologist, at least have a rudimentary understanding of the basics of evolution (and whose writings have been a source of quote mining among creationists like Ray Comfort).

Diagnosis: Pseudophilosophy in the service of religion. Schwartz is a real scientist and has done some real science; but his reframing of his research in handwavy mumbo-jumbo has nothing to do with science. Now, some might say that Schwartz’s views are arguably not that radically silly; still, he has aligned himself with the anti-science movement and stalwartly supports their campaigns against science, reason and civilization.

#2222: Robert L. Schulz

Robert Louis Schulz is an engineer by training, Founder and Chairman of We the People Foundation for Constitutional Education and We the People Congress, and “a constitutional activist with a decades-long focus on holding government accountable to the Constitution, through the First Amendment Right to Petition” – or put differently: a tax protester loon and tireless promoter of what might be termed civics woo, a type of woo that is arguably crazier and more likely to cause immediate harm even than most medical woo. Schulz has been credited with “setting the cornerstone for this new era of militias, tax protesters and ‘sovereign citizens’,” and has apparently filed well over one hundred court actions, on a pro se basis, against government actions he asserts are unconstitutional deprivations of individual liberty. His success rate is, predictably, dismal. Like most central characters in the sovereign citizen movement, Schulz has had plenty of opportunities to test out some of his hypotheses in real life settings, but since he is rather poor at assessing the rich data set his experiences have given him, he appears to have learned exactly nothing. For instance, in 2007 he got in trouble (United States v. Schulz, (529 F.Supp.2d 341)) for selling a scheme based on the premise that withholding tax was voluntary; at least the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York was not impressed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the injunction (517 F.3d 606) (the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case).

Schulz had already gained some attention for making similar claims in 2001, with an ad that named three former IRS agents who claimed that most Americans owe no income tax and that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the U.S. government to levy income taxes, is fraudulent and invalid, and that only employees of foreign-based companies owed income taxes. The campaign won a surprising amount of traction. And of course, Schulz’s arguments, which have been rejected repeatedly by the courts, has predictably been the source of some impressive prison sentences. “Our effort is called ‘Project Toto,’” said one of Schulz’s USA Today ads: “Just as the little dog in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ pulls the curtain back and exposes the truth about the Wizard, our series is intended to ... reveal [that] ... the tax system is founded upon fraud and operates as a giant hoax.”

In 2008, Schulz placed an ad he claimed to be worth “tens of thousands” of dollars in the Chicago Tribune to express his foundation’s belief that Obama was not a US citizen and therefore ineligible for office. Schulz was also a core player in organizing the Jekyll Island Project in 2009 and a subsequent 11-day “continental congress” in St. Charles, which gathered an impressive range of paranoid rightwing extremists and conspiracy theorists, including such fascinating fellows as Tom DeWeese, John Stadtmiller, Robert Crooks, leader of the California nativist group Mountain Minutemen, and Edgar Steele, author for instance of the 2002 essay “It’s the Jews, Stupid!!!”, where he claims that – you guessed it – “Jews are the problem. Jews have been the problem since before they saw to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.” Schulz himself was also a speaker at the We Are Change 9/11 conference in 2010. The St. Charles meeting resulted in the creation of an “Articles of Freedom” document that declares that the federal government “now threatens our Life, Liberty and Property through usurpations of the Constitution.”

Diagnosis: Of course, it continues to baffle us that people never stop to consider whether the question “is this going to fly when I am taken to court?” might actually be relatively independent of the question “is this correct at a theoretical level?” even when they are stupid enough to convince themselves that the answer to the latter is, wrongly, “yes”. Whether Schulz asks himself that question is moot, but at least he seems to encourage his listeners not to; and he seems to have quite a number of listeners.

#2221: Gerald Schroeder

Gerald Lawrence Schroeder is an Israeli-American physicist, author, lecturer and teacher at the College of Jewish Studies Aish HaTorah’s Discovery Seminar. Schroeder does indeed have a genuine science background and may have been a real scientist at some point, but he is also a creationist, and seems to have spent most of the last 40 years doing apologetics, such as investigating “the confluence of science and Torah” and constructing elaborate, tortured ad hoc explanations to get the apparent age of the universe to fit with the literal Biblical six-day account of creation; in particular Schroeder draws on relativity to reconcile a six-day creation as described in Genesis with the scientific evidence that the world is billions of years old using the idea that the perceived flow of time for a given event in an expanding universe varies with the observer’s perspective of that event. As such, it isn’t really young-earth creationism in the traditional sense, but it is still serious nonsense (there is a comprehensive explanation of his silliness here; Schroeder’s non-response to being refuted is discussed here), and still creationism. Although he attempts to reconcile Genesis and science when it comes to the age of the universe, he simply rejects science in favor of the Bible – including the Bible Code – when it comes to all other matters (these areas are, after all, beyond his area of competence anyways, and you can always reject the science of things you don’t understand). Schroeder is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s silly petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism (Schroeder has no expertise on anything related to evolution), and currently seems to be considered something of an authority in the Intelligent Design movement, being invited to give seemingly scientifically informed talks by various denialist groups across the US.

His books include titles like The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (reviewed e.g. here) a book that has generated research such as Andrew Mark Sibley “A Photon Reference Frame and Distant Starlight: Analyzing Ideas from Gerald L. Schroeder’s The Science of God” published in the venerable Answers Research Journal, Answers in Genesis's house journal. Schroeder’s most famous book is presumably The Hidden Face of God, however, since it apparently impressed ex-atheist Antony Flew during his conversion process; it is reviewed here (“[n]o one should read this tiresome book for any serious purpose other than to find examples of popular science-abuse”). Given Schroeder’s background, the most striking characteristic, apart from its New Age-style handwavings, is perhaps the many misinterpretations of and obvious errors in the physics he describes.

Diagnosis: At least he is pretty clear that what he is doing is fundie dogmatism: start with the conclusion you like, try to make the data fit and just reject whatever doesn’t. But Schroeder is also something of a star in the creationist movement, and seems to spend quite a bit of effort promoting denialism. He must accordingly be considered a moderate threat to civilization and human flourishing.

#2220: Jeffrey Schone

Martin Luther College (MLC) is a religious institution (the college of ministry for the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod) in New Ulm, Minnesota, that pretends to offer something resembling “education”. It does not, of course – not even remotely. Instead, they profess creationism, teaches the Genesis story as a factual, historical account, and do their best to prevent their students from being exposed to pollution from reality, truth, science, evidence or similar tricks of Satan. In 2013, for instance, when a local group planned to put on the play “Inherit the Wind” MLC refused to allow them to use any of their facilities for practice, and also pressured the actors to drop out, because evolution is contrary to their teachings. Jeff Schone, vice president of student life at the MLC, made it absolutely clear to its students, WELS members and the public that creationism is the only option. He did admit that he recognized the subtext of the play (or something), but nevertheless said it was unfairly critical of creationism and that most people would only see the criticism. “We felt it was not compatible with what [the school] teaches the Bible says about the universe and the world,” said Schone. “People employing our students need confidence about their views.” In other words, that they prevent their students from being exposed to science, truth and accountability in research, is a selling point for the MLC.

Diagnosis: Deranged Taliban fundie. It may, however, scare us even more that there is a market for the people “educated” at this camp.

#2219: Jeff Schoep

The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is a Detroit-based neo-Nazi organization, and a part of the Nationalist Front. NSM refers to itself as a “white civil rights organization” but objects to being referred to as “racist” and “Neo-Nazi” in part because such descriptions of their goals are unflattering. The descriptionsare not what is wrong here – the group did for instance use the swastika as logo until 2016, and has stated that “When you put on your NSM uniform, you are not just representing the NSM but all National Socialists that fought and died for our Race and our Cause! You are showing the Jews and the rest of the world that our Führer is not forgotten and that his life's struggle was not in vain!”. The aforementioned goals include a US inhabited only by those of “pure White blood” (Jewish people and homosexuals need not apply), and they demand that “all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force” – according to their website “The Constitution was written by white men alone. Therefore, it was intended for whites alone.” Supporters include Randy Gray and Christian Identity pastor James Wickstrom.

Jeff Schoep was chairman of the group from 1994 to 2019. It was hence under Schoep’s tenure that the NSM for instance led the demonstration that sparked the 2005 Toledo riot and the rally that turned into the 2016 Sacramento riot – ostensibly “non-violent” NSM has a history of seeking out violence that distinguishes them from other expressedly non-violent groups. In November 2016, following the election of Donald Trump, the organization changed its logo from the swastika to an Odal rune, apparently eyeing an opportunity to enter mainstream politics. Apparently Schoep worked hard to unite “pro-white organizations”, though he also sought to distance his group from the KKK: “We’re both pro-white, but our politics are very different,” said Schoep, apparently because whereas the NSM is political, the Klan promotes religion. Anti-semitism is of course at the core of NSM’s conspiracy theories, and according to Schoep “illegal immigration from Latin America is driven by an international Jewish conspiracy whose leaders are plotting "the destruction of all races through the evils of race mixing.” 

In 2019, Schoep was replaced as director and president of the NSM by James Hart Stern, a black activist vowing to eradicate the group. Apparently Schoep was responsible for the takeover because he wanted to leave the group due to the legal issues he was embroiled in (nothing suggests that Schoep has become noticeably less lunatic about the issues that constitute the core of NSM’s mission). Matthew Heimbach used to be the group’s community outreach director.

There is a good portrait of Schoep here, and of the NSM here.

Diagnosis: Yeah, well …