#2913: Arthur Goldberg

Arthur Abba Goldberg is a businessman, JD (former professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law), convicted fraudster, and longtime leader in the anti-gay-rights movement and the ex-gay movement. Goldberg is co-founder (with Elaine Berk) and co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) and president of Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality (PATH) – basically Jewish alternatives to what tend to be rabidly fundamentalist evangelical organizations – which are organizations relative to which you want your Erdös number to be as high as possible. According to himself, Goldberg “uses Jewish law texts and scientific study to get to the individual root causes of same sex attraction and help those who are unhappy with their lifestyle reassert their gender identity and change their life”; it is hopefully easy to see some ways in which things are bound to go wrong here.

 

His 2008 book Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change argues (a.o.) that homosexual orientation can be changed through reparative therapy. He used to claim that 65 percent to 75 percent of JONAH clients “are substantially healed after two to five years using JONAH’s ‘gender-affirming processes’,” but when asked in court where his numbers come from, Goldberg of course had to admit that JONAH performed no research and did not keep track of clients’ success rates. He also claims that gay rights activists are only pretending to claim that sexual orientation cannot be changed as part of a “pre-planned agenda,” and that people who failed at conversion therapy simply didn’t try hard enough.

 

In 2012, former clients of JONAH sued JONAH and its founders for consumer fraud; after drawn-out court proceedings, the former clients won, and the New Jersey Superior court ordered JONAH to close and liquidate its assets; Goldberg responded with various attempts at legal trickery (such as essentially just renaming his organiziation the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA)). One suspects it didn’t help their case that they were represented by certified loon Charles LiMandri. It’s worth noting that Goldberg has had troubles in court before; during his career as a businessman in the 1980s, Goldberg orchestrated a massive fraud from 1984 to 1986 in which his firm sold over $2 billion of fraudulent municipal bonds for several cities; he was indicted on numerous counts of bribery, conspiracy and fraud, plead guilty, and spent a bit of time in jail.

 

Despite being demonstrably morally corrupt to the core, Goldberg still seems to think he is in a position to lecture others about morality, publishing screeds like “The Urgency of Restoring the Biblical Values of America’s Founders.”

 

Diagnosis: Old, dumb and utterly corrupt at all possible levels. Hopefully he’s been ushered off the stage for good, but you never know these days.

#2912: Simone Gold

America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) is a wingnut political organization founded to spread conspiracy theories, denialism and pseudoscience about COVID-19. The group rose to fame with their July 27, 2020, media event where the members advocated for the use of repurposed drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine, as treatments for COVID-19 based on no support from research, evidence or good reason; rather, they accompanied the recommendations by accusing the pharmaceutical industry of intentionally sponsoring studies showing the drugs to be ineffective based solely on the fact that the existing serious, peer-reviewed studies didn’t support their claims. Instead of being laughed off stage as the brainrot conspiracy crazies they are, their claims were distributed and promoted by a number of wingnut websites and social media, as well as by then-president Trump and (in particular) Trump jr – heck, remember that Joseph Ladapo rose to prominence as a member of the group. There is a discussion of some of their early antics and claims here. 

 

In 2021, AFLDS pivoted to anti-vaccine activism, making consistenly false claims about the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, including falsely referring to the vaccines as “experimental biological agents”, falsely claiming that they were “not effective in treating or preventing” COVID-19, and falsely claiming that the vaccines were responsible for 45,000 deaths based on utterly incompetent and dishonest dumpster diving in the VAERS database – the latter claim was even used for a lawsuit seeking a temporary ban on vaccinations (so much for “health freedom”) in a case so incompetent and dumb that it was most likely motivated by its potential for fundraising (i.e. grifting) rather than by any genuine hope that it would achieve anything in the courts.

 

On the other hand, they also promoted paid telehealth consultations with “AFLDS-trained” physicians that would prescribe fake medications they claimed were COVID-19 treatments – the grift was so obvious and in your face that it never even registered with many of their fans. The service in question was provided by SpeakWithAnMD, a telehealth website run by legendary conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi for the purpose of distributing various drugs that had been claimed by right-wing figures to be therapeutic for COVID-19. The Intercept estimated that AFLDS and its partners had made $6.7 million in revenue from these consultations between July 16 and September 12, 2021. You can read more about the grift here (it’s even shabbier than it sounds).

 

It’s worth emphasizing that the self-proclaimed frontline doctors have never been at the actual frontline of anything; the group’s members are notable for never having been close neither to doing serious research on nor to treating patients suffering from Covid, despite prominent member Stella Immanuel claiming that she herself had treated and cured 350 COVID-19 patients using a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, and zinc (and also that sexual visitations by demons and alien DNA are at the root of Americans’ common health concerns).

 

AFLDS was founded by Simone Gold and Tea Party Patriots-cofounder Jenny Beth Martin, though Gold’s relationship with the group has become somewhat chaotic over the years: In early November 2022, AFLDS sued Gold for using – entirely predictably given the kind of person we’re talking about – the group’s charitable funds to buy multi-million-dollar mansions and cars for her and her boyfriend’s (that would be ALFDS’s former Communications Director John Strand) personal use (more here); apparently AFLDS hired a “forensic auditor” to do a thorough exploration of the organization’s financials while Gold was in prison.

 

Because of course she was in prison. On January 5, 2021, Gold spoke in D.C. to people gathering to participate in the “Stop the Steal” rally, in which she said that COVID-19 was non-fatal and spread misinformation and insane conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines, e.g. saying that “if you don’t want to take an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine, you must not allow yourself to be coerced!” Then, on January 6, Gold joined the insurrectionists and illegally entered the Capitol building, pushing law enforcement officials to get inside, along with John Strand, where she gave another speech. She later said that she “regret being there” because she was obviously concerned that ‘controversies’ about her actions could detract from her work with AFLDS, and in February 2022, she pleaded guilty to and was sentenced to 90 days in jail for a Class A misdemeanor. Always a grifter, Gold used the trial to fundraise $430 000 for her legal defense, which even her lawyer more or less admitted was pure grifting.

 

The claims she made on January 5, 2021, were in line with the claims she has tended to make elsewhere. Gold is most famous for her promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a “safe” alternative to COVID vaccines, in direct conflict with reality. Equally out of touch with reality, of course, is her persistent promotion of ivermectin. She is also opposed to face masks, of course. And Gold has been willing to use all available means to market her conspiracy theories, such as claiming that the US government experimented on Black people to test the general safety of vaccines in a desperate attempt to gain traction with Black communities. And like with so many of the conspiracy theorists associated with AFLDS, Gold’s background in research or patient care, despite being an MD, is … at best unclear – in 2020, for instance, she made a video trying to convince people she was affiliated with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA, which she was certainly not.

 

She has been quite successful among wingnut groups, however. Her “White Coat Summit” press conference was co-sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots and was broadcast by Breitbart, and she was a speaker at the 2020 AMPFest, as well as at an event for donors to the Council for National Policy in November the same year (both Gold and AFLDS colleague James Todaro are part of that group); in December, she was part of a summit hosted by Turning Point USA. In 2021, she was part of the “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible Church in Oklahoma with regular allies like Jim Caviezel, Mike Lindell, and Lin Wood (evangelicals have consistently been an important demographic for AFLDS’s disinformation efforts). In May, 2021, she arranged an RV tour across the US named the “Uncensored Truth Tour”. And so on.

 

She currently (or at least relatively recently) runs GoldCare, a telemedicine service that charges $1,000 per year for individual memberships, and – needless to say – does not accept insurance.

 

Diagnosis: One of the most brazen grifters alive in the US (and the competition is fierce). Yes, she probably honestly believes at least some of the claims and conspiracy theories she and her group have been producing, but successful grifters tend to do just that (when you tell a lie often enough you start to believe it yourself and so on). That she is still perceived as an authority by anyone at this point, is flabbergasting, but she is. A piece of utter garbage masquerading as a human.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2911: Jon Gold

Oh, hey, this is an old one we bet most of you had forgotten. Jon Gold was one of the movers and shakers of the Truther movement back in the early 2000s, tirelessly promoting the work of various conspiracy theorists, giving interviews with various conspiracy (or somewhat baffled mainstream) media outlets, appearing on shows with people like Cynthia McKinney, and organizing protests and conferences such as the 2010 Treason in America event. As for his own positions, Gold was notable for his “just asking questions and demanding accountability” BS and would only rarely make concrete claims himself – instead mostly directing his audiences to conspiracy theorists who did – but he did in fact carry out some actions of protest: In 2011, for instance, he drew a decisive yawn from the world when he chained himself to the White House fence to demand accountability (his own report is hilarious: “One of the police rode their bike up to where we were sitting, and parked. He stood there for a minute or two, and then said, ‘are you Mr. Gold?’ I responded, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ He asked, ‘are you still planning on chaining yourself to the fence?’ I said, ‘that is my intention.’ He said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’ To me, it was clear intimidation, but lucky for me, I am one stubborn individual.”).

 

Inside truther circles, Gold was, however ,frequently reputiated and accused (e.g. by Kevin Barrett) of being a plant for his reluctance to endorse the anti-semitism that was part and parcel of the troofer movement. So it goes.

 

We have no idea what he’s up to these days, though he published a book, We Were Lied to About 9/11, in 2018 containing interviews with various conspiracy theorists. If you wish to get a feel for the character, he’s covered here. 

 

Diagnosis: He made some noise in his day, In hindsight, it all seems rather pitiful. Probably mostly forgotten.

#2910: Indur Goklany

Indur M. Goklany is a science policy advisor to the United States Department of the Interior and one of the most influential promoters of climate change denialism in the US. Goklany has an extensive network, and has worked with numerous organizations promoting climate change denial, such as the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Global Warming Policy Foundation – for instance taking part in the CEI’s film Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies are More Dangerous than Global Warming Itself, and writing papers for the Heartland Institute, who also paid him $1,000 a month in 2012 for writing a chapter in their book (pure and unadulterated corruption of a government official, of course (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denialgate)) – which was also the qualification the Trump administration relied on when promoting him to a position charged with reviewing climate policy in 2017. In 2020, it was predictably revealed that he had repeatedly tried to insert misleading language on climate change into the agency’s scientific reports.

 

Goklany is trained as an electrical engineer, and although he has published numerous reports, documents, books and rants about climate change and climate change policy, he has of course been involved in no relevant scientific research on climate-related issues.

 

The kind of nonsense he promotes and inserted into official reports (some also made it here) belongs to the category of nonsense usually promoted by climate change denialists, including falsely asserting that there is a lack of agreement among scientists and (at best misleadingly) arguing that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has various beneficial effects. At a Heartland-organized conference in 2017, Goklany presented a correlation between rising CO₂ levels and life expectancy and GDP, concluding that “we’re actually living in the best of times, and carbon dioxide and fossils fuels are a good part of that” – we don’t think he’s that oblivious to how to reason about correlation vs. causation, so we’ll chalk that one up to rank dishonesty. In response to the WWF’s and the UN’s claim that stabilizing population would help sustain the planet, Goklany pointed out that “the problem, however, is not population but poverty,” which ought to be a textbook example of a non-sequitur.

 

There’s a decent portrait of Goklany and his deeds here. 

 

Diagnosis: We’ve got no doubt he is a true believer w.r.t his denialism, which makes it notable that he feels the need to support his claims with rank dishonesty. He has anyways caused a lot of damage and seems to be on a trajectory to continue to do so.

#2908: Rebecca Goff

Craniosacral therapy is pseudo-religious quackery based on a number of fundamental errors about human anatomy and lots of murky New Age fluff about life energies and vibrations – indeed, even among quack therapies it stands out as a particularly wildly nonsensical one. But how would you go about taking such New Age delirium even further down into the rabbit hole of pink warm fluffy phantasms? Well, you could of course augment craniosacral therapy with some other stock New Age silliness, such as … dolphins. Oh, yes: Say hello to AquaCranialtherapy®, an “advanced modality, [that] is a mix of osteopathic based cranial sacral moves, dolphin therapy movements, and visionary emotional release work developed through years of cetacean research”. In particular, AquaCranial therapy’s “extremely light touch decompresses the spine, cranium and other areas of bone and tissue. This balancing of the CranioSacral System eliminates physical stresses from the body acquired throughout a lifetime.” If you were looking for testable hypotheses or even statements that make sense when you spend a second to think about them, you’re thinking about this the wrong way.

 

The therapy in question was developed by Rebecca Goff of Maui – a “licensed massage therapist” and “certified marine-mammal naturalist” (that would be a 4-week holiday designated as a “course”, and which promises “fun and exciting stories to tell their friends and families about a one-of-a-kind experience”) – by “combining lessons learned from studying the behavior and movement of dolphins and whales with CranioSacral Therapy” – in other words, by trying to produce insights about human anatomy (in particular human skull sutures) by looking at whale behavior from a distance and trying to draw analogies to a model of human anatomy that would be considered stunningly obsolete even by 19th century phrenologists.

 

Goff, who according to herself is “on the cutting edge of Cetacean Therapy Research and one of of the most experienced people today in the field of Aquatic Biomagnetic Healing”, has more to tell us about the therapy, but we won’t bother since it’s challenging to find anything suitable for putting into grammatical sentences in the pastel-colored fluffy nonsense she produces. Nor does it really matter; Goff’s AquaCranial Therapy is one of the novelties offered (or at least used to be offered) at the Four Seasons Resort & Spa on Maui along with Ayurvedic massage, Thai massage, Hawaiian temple lomilomi and outdoor adventure activities. It’s a White Lotus spa treatment for real-life White Lotus travellers, with gentle massages in warm waters in tropical environments; it’s probably lovely and completely beyond our price range.

 

Diagnosis: On the surface, at least, it is probably harmless, but Goff might be a true believer or get it into her head that what she does could offer real help for real people in real difficult situations (she seems to suggest that some of what she does could assist with homebirths, for instance) – and then things could quickly get ugly.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2907: Tim Goeglein

If you haven’t paid attention, this might sound like a blast from the past, but Focus on the Family is one of several Taliban-adjacent groups of sadistic, pseudo-fascist trolls that feel weaponized by current developments in American politics. Timothy Goeglein has, from 2009, been the group’s Vice President of External and Government Relations, after having been Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison from 2001 to 2008 (eventually being booted for systematic plagiarism – and note that it reflects a character trait, not a lapse in judgment, on Goeglein’s part). As such, Goeglein is a representative of that group’s ideas and values, which is more than sufficient to earn him an entry here. He makes his own take on those ideas and values clear in his 2019 book American Restoration: How Faith, Family, and Personal Sacrifice Can Heal Our Nation, which focuses on cultural areas that Goeglein thinks would restore United States to its “Judeo-Christian foundation” and constitutional principles. To put his book in perspective, Goeglein also thinks that George W. Bush “is a great thinker”.

 

So for instance, Goeglein is predictably very paranoid about the perceived threat to religious liberty posed by “the political agenda of organized homosexuals”, claiming that gay rights are bringing about “a new era of intolerance against those of us who are men and women of faith” and that former President Obama “savaged and attacked” marriage, life and religious liberty.

 

Diagnosis: We could of course go on, but really: there is nothing new and surprising here. Goeglein is mostly trite. But he is still not only a loon but a powerful one.

#2906: Peter Glidden

Naturopathy is a vaguely defined assortment of quackery whose popularity (and it seems to be popular) runs entirely on marketing and fads rather than evidence or efficacy. And naturopathic “education”, such as it is offered e.g. by Bastyr University – the the self-proclaimed Harvard of naturopathic medicine – does, as you’d expect, not induce students into practices supported by facts and evidence but by handwavy appeals to intuitions, anecdotes, tradition, popularity and pseudoreligious ‘theory’. Nonetheless, many naturopathic practitioners have deluded themselves into thinking that their advice isn’t merely worthwhile but genuinely important, and through legislative alchemy, naturopaths have even achieved official stamps of approval – licensing – in a number of US states.

 

Peter Glidden is a licensed licensed naturopath who graduated from Bastyr University in 1991. And like many promoters of quackery, Glidden has developed a real animosity toward practitioners of real medicine and toward real medical advice, which tend to contradict the nonsense advice he himself likes to give, as expressed e.g. on his show Fire your MD now. According to himself, Glidden is a member of a group of “real doctors, who deserve to be called physicians because there are only a handful of us in the world who are actually taking upon themselves the task of helping to eliminate human suffering.” And he probably really believes that; were it not for the harm he is causing people with real medical problems, we’d almost feel pity for him: Glidden really wants you to take him, rather than real doctors with real educations that he himself would never manage to pass, seriously, and has worked so hard to construct and maintain the illusion of being a real physician that we have no doubts he has deluded himself into thinking he is, something that is probably part of the backstory for him being fined $5,000 and served a cease and desist order in 2012 for practicing medicine in Illinois without a license. According to Glidden, medical doctors (at least he is not waffling about integrative medicine) use therapies that are “based upon a methodology and an understanding of the human body, which is inconsistent with reality”. Meanwhile, he himself has – according to his bio – managed to reverse Downs syndrome of fetuses (i.e. reset chromosomal disorders) by using naturopathic medicine and nutritional therapies. When Glidden says ‘reality’, he doesn’t mean reality. His book The MD Emperor Has No Clothes: Everybody is Sick & I Know Why is discussed here .

 

Glidden is most famous, however, for a video consisting a deranged conspiracy rant that went viral in 2012 – possibly due to a social hacking experiment by Anonymous – and racked up over 17 million views and 671,000 shares. In the video, Glidden promotes a number of baseless conspiracy theories (e.g. that one “Dr. Hardin B. Jones recently revealed that chemotherapy doesn’t work 97% of the time, and doctors only recommend it to get kickbacks” – that the quack Hardin Jones died in 1978 is not the wildest miss in that claim) and insane delusions; for instance, according to Glidden, “the reason that people get cancer in the United States and the reason that we have completely lousy outcomes is because medical doctors are driving the research bus. Research funds should be spent on homeopathy and naturopathy.” Of course, naturopathy and homeopathy doesn’t really need research funds either – it’s not like NDs like Glidden would tailor his advice to what the research says (at least if it didn’t say exactly what he had already decided he wanted it to say). The video is discussed here; other errors, nicely demonstrating Glidden’s dishonest and incompetent use of scientific literature, are discussed here .

 

Despite the flaws and generally insane idiocy of the contents, the video keeps being cited by various quacks and conspiracy theorists (who, because they are incompetent, stupid and dishonest, don’t even bother to google ‘Hardin Jones’), such as this one.

 

Diagnosis: Insane quack on a joyride through dreamland loaded with anger, inferiority complexes, paranoia and conspiracy theories. Nothing that falls out of his mouth has any discernible relationship to reality, but if you listen it will hurt you.

 

Hat-tip: Brit Hermes @ naturopathic diaries