#3014: Jack Hibbs

Jack Hibbs is the founding pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in Southern California, host of the TV and radio program Real Life, and one of the more belligerently malevolent and hate-driven fundies the US has to offer. Hibbs is also a Christian nationalist political activist and podcaster and has appeared as commentator for e.g. Newsmax and Fox News. His ideas and views garnered some attention and controversy when he was invited by House Speaker Mike Johnson to serve as the House of Representatives’ guest chaplain in 2024.

 

Hibbs on politics

Hibbs has been an active political activist both from the pulpit (yeah, fuck reasonable rules) and on the national stage, e.g. as a prominent speaker at the 2023 Pray the Vote event. Indeed, Hibbs’ church has its own political organization, Real Impact (current director: Gina Gleason), which “monitors the cultural landscape, including social issues, legislation, and public policy, through the lens of Scripture” and whose “goal is to educate, equip, and encourage Christians to have a godly influence on our society and culture”. They currently have control over the Chino Valley Unified School District, whose three-member majority is made up of attendees at Hibbs’ church.

 

As a political activist, Hibbs has been a consistent champion of various election fraud conspiracy theories, and not only about the 2020 presidential election: Hibbs called election fraud also e.g. in California’s 2021 gubernatorial recall election, where he claimed to have documented proof that mail-in ballots containing votes for Larry Elder were thrown away in trash cans and ditches – he neglected to actually provide said proof, of course. But then, Hibbs has no qualms about lying about anything else either, especially if his lies can be perceived to support a Christian Nationalist narrative.

 

No fan of Joe Biden, Hibbs has suggested that God put Biden in office “so that the borders would be left open,” thereby allowing terrorists to enter to carry out attacks as punishment for “all of our sins” (such as electing Biden and leaving the borders “open”), all in preparation for the End Times. He has also declared that people who vote for Democrats cannot be Christians, that they are “evil” and that he doesn’t want anyone who votes for them anywhere near his family. Indeed, “the Democratic Party is a death cult”. In 2025, Hibbs blamed Democratic politicians in California for the wildfires that devastated the Los Angeles region, and declared that the Founding Fathers would have had Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass arrested and executed for dereliction of duty (his understanding of the Constitution is naturally a bit like his understanding of most things, possibly including the Bible; Hibbs also believes e.g. that the Founding Fathers banned Catholics from being president or serving in Congress). Meanwhile, he has asked God to forgive the people of California for electing “people with antichrist worldviews” like Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris.

 

That said, Hibbs has had some (rather curious) criticisms of Trump as well. On the other hand, he has also said that critics of Trump other than himself “may be Americans in title, but not in spirit” and that “they’d sacrifice you in a second just to defend their woke ideology.” Critics of Christian nationalism, meanwhile, are “literal cancers” that are carrying out the agenda of “the Third Reich under Hitler.”

 

Note that his obsession with the border is not, for Hibbs, merely a matter of immigration. Hibbs thinks that Mexico is literally planning attacks on the US because of Satan and because “America has forgotten God as a nation”: “I think Tijuana, I think across the border in Mexico, I think that’s Gaza. That’s the U.S.’s Gaza forming. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing rockets being launched from Mexico into Mission Bay [in California], attacking the Navy, attacking homes. I wouldn’t doubt it.” We certainly accept that Hibbs doesn’t harbor doubts, and it confirms, again, our assessment of his cognitive abilities and general awareness of how the world actually hangs together.

 

It is worth noting that Hibbs has been a relentless champion, supporter and mentor of US Representative Young Kim. Kim has, on her side, praised Hibbs for “doing an awesome job shepherding, guiding our congregation”, not the least by helping the congregation figure out “who the candidates are with biblical values so we don’t have the legislation, the sex education that is passing while we were sleeping.”

 

At least he repays favors. Since it was Mike Johnson who invited Hibbs to speak before Congress in 2024, Hibbs quickly called an emergency broadcast when Johnson later came under threat from other Republicans seeking to remove him. As Hibbs saw it, Johnson was “under spiritual attack” from the demonic powers “that are surrounding Washington D.C.” (indeed, from “principalities and power and dark, dark, invisible rulers in high places”) and that are seeking to prevent the US from helping Israel, and he led his followers in prayers that God would “bind every satanic demonic power and stronghold, every twisted narrative, dialogue, lie, manipulative plot and plan, the literal wiles of the devil” to protect Johnson’s speakership.

 

Hibbs on gays, sex and reproduction

Like many of his ilk, Hibbs has strong feelings about sex and reproduction. Although he emphasizes that he would “never judge” in vitro fertilization, he also asks people to remember that “God opens and closes the womb according to his will” and that IVF is a process where people “throw away 500 children” to get one child; in other words, IVF is mass-murder of children and a mockery of God but hey, ‘no judgment’.

 

His views on gay rights, meanwhile, are apparently formed as an entry in an ongoing competition for attention by being more hysterically dumb and fanatic than the last bigot; homosexuality “destroys your body and it ruins your psyche, and it ravages your soul”, according to Hibbs, and after the Supreme Court approved marriage equality, Hibbs warned his congregation that “it’s going to be like it was in the days of Lot”, where “violent” LGBTQ people would go door-to-door and threaten “to sodomize people who disagree with them.”

 

A particularly nefarious player is apparently the public school system, which wants to “mentally molest your children ... thereby setting them up for the day of actual physical molestation, to get them to think it's OK to go through the horrific abuse of rape in the name of education.” Apparently the public school system is already responsible for natural disasters like Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which according to Hibbs were caused by “debased reprobates” indoctrinating students into a religion of sex and perversion and telling God to “get your Bible out of our class because we want to teach our kids pornography.”

 

Hibbs on other religions

Hibbs claims that Jewish people should abandon their religion – at least “true Jews” are those who don’t “get bogged down in Judaism, which ... cannot save you.” Getting them to do so is a challenge, however, since Jewish people are under the curse of a “God-given blindness”, but it is also pretty urgent: Hibbs predictably connected the attacks on Palestine to prophecies of the End Times, so it is important for his Christian followers to convert Jews to Christianity as soon as possible.

 

At least there is hope for Jewish people. Islam, on the other hand, “is violent, it is deadly, it’s a death cult” (yeah, them too), and Hibbs has warned his followers that their Muslim neighbors are going to turn on them “very soon” and side with ISIS. A companion guide issued by his church provides more details on how Muslims are a threat to the US, e.g. because “Muslims are mandated to expand where ever they are. They must convert you and or your children. And they must kill those who do not convert.” Moreover, “if you’re a good Muslim, you cannot swear allegiance to the US Constitution. You’re not allowed.” Disaster might already have struck in places like New York: in November 2025, Hibbs said that “some are speculating that ... this will be the last Christmas in New York for as long as Mamdani is the mayor.” “Some” here would presumably refer precisely to Hibbs himself.

 

At least he has denounced Paula White as a “false teacher” and Kenneth Copeland as a “goofball” and a “charlatan”, but although that might to untrained eyes suggest some level of appreciation of reality, we are pretty confident that it is, in Hibbs’ case, merely a matter of gatekeeping his segment of the market. 

 

Hibbs on science

Hibbs have argued that we should “cancel Darwin” ostensibly because “Hitler Loved Evolution”; as Hibbs sees things, “Hitler’s love for evolution drove him to believe in a supremely evolved race! The Aryans were at the top and the Jews were at the bottom.” No, he doesn’t have the faintest grasp of the theory of evolution, but he does of course not care either. Apparently he doesn’t need to, since he’s already got a slamdunk argument against the theory of evolution: anyone who believes in evolution must oppose marriage equality, since homosexuality cannot lead to procreation and is therefore inconsistent with evolution; indeed “LGBTQ actions prove the existence of God”, adding (perhaps because he is dimly realizing that he is sliding in a, for himself, awkward direction here) “because God’s word says this would be some of the outcome and actions of the Last Days.” Betcha those closeminded scientists hadn’t thought of that one.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he’s said of other insane and stupid shit, too, but … well, you get the gist. And no, you probably don’t want your family to come near Hibbs or anyone who thinks his deranged and hate-fueled misunderstandings of the universe works have something going for them. Apparently many enough, including people in positions of power, thinks precisely that.

 

#3013: J.D. Heyes

JD Heyes is a fringe conspiracy theorist and contributor to insane conspiracy outlets like NaturalNews, where he primarily focuses on conspiracy theories related to Covid-19 (“Covid-19 bioweapons”), climate change denialism (climate alarmism is a “real mental disorder”), 9/11 trutherism, and various wingnut conspiracies targeted especially on Biden (e.g. the risk that “leftist tyrants” like then-president Biden might use “emergency” measures to promote his agenda – funny that). In particular, Heyes appears to have been instrumental in the creation of the NaturalNews project Hoggwatch.com, the purpose of which was to smear and spread conspiracy theories about David Hogg and other survivors of the Parkland shooting.

 

Many of Heyes’s beliefs are presumably on display e.g. in the list he and Ethan Huff compiled of the NaturalNews “recipients of the 2015 Journalist Courage Awards” and “recipients of 2015 Celebrity Hall of Shame Awards”: Heyes falsely believes e.g. that vaccines cause autism, all manner of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories about GMOs, and that, apparently, all and every scientist with real credentials who defend conclusions based on research and evidence about anything are in some sort of vast conspiracy against paranoid fundie wingnuts like himself. More details here.

 

In particular, Heyes dislikes Wikipedia. Responding to a complaint by the lunatic fringe organization the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) that Wikipedia correctly describes “energy psychology”, “energy medicine” and “emotional freedom techniques” as pseudoscience, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that “if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of ‘true scientific discourse’. It isn’t.” That kind of view obviously riled Heyes, and insofar as he couldn’t quite manage defend ACEP on scientific grounds, he – true to form – decided to go big on conspiracy instead.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, you know the kind. The wild-eyed angry, paranoid and delusional clown, the kind most of us dread being stuck in conversation with or run into at family gatherings. Heyes’ set of beliefs about the world appears to be almost perfectly complementary to the facts, but that, of course, doesn’t prevent him from enjoying an audience.

 

#3012: Andrea Hess

The Akashic Records are an imaginary compendium of all knowledge that some exceptionally delusional self-declared psychics claim exist on some non-physical plane. This non-physical library ostensibly contains records – indeed, “energetic records” – on everyone who exists, including their entire past and future ‘soul journey’, and said psychics will claim to be able to access your particular records for a fee. The idea has its foundations in 19^th century Anthroposophy and Theosophy traditions, mixed with orientalism, vibrations and quantum woo, and it is so stupid it hurts.

 

Andrea Hess is one such psychic. Hess is the founder of “Soul Realignment®”, which is ostensibly an “intuitive, energetic healing modality that utilizes information contained in your Akashic Records to align with your soul’s purpose”. Also “[c]lear karmic patterns and restrictions, gain a better understanding of YOU, and allow your true, divine self to SHINE”. Apparently there are a number of practitioners of Soul Realignment out there, suggesting that there is, in fact, some money in this nonsense (you can peruse the website of an acolyte, one Iris Emmy, here, for instance).

 

Diagnosis: Intelligent people believe stupid things, but if you buy into this shit, you are not intelligent. Sorry.

 

#3011: Mark Hertsgaard & Mark Dowie

Hertsgaard

Silly fear-mongering about new technology is as old as technology, and although one could very well argue, in a non-lunatic way, for applying some version of a cautionary principle, the level of caution should at least be sensitive to the level of evidence: for a lot of technology critics, however, credences aren’t budged by evidence; rather, their worries get augmented with conspiracy theories instead. We have had several opportunities to write about baseless scaremongering concerning cell phone radiation and wifi, and the idea that electromagnetic radiation from cell phones and wireless networks causes adverse health effects, from cancer to mental illness, is an idea that, like homeopathy, just won’t go away, regardless of the evidence and has instead given rise to a whole industry of fake diagnoses like “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”. It doesn’t help that the idea has sufficient sensationalist potential for shoddy pseudoresearch to be picked up by mainstream media, or that the IARC erroneously categorized cell phone radiation as a “possible carcinogen” (even if “possible” in their classification system actually means probably not).

 

But yes, mainstream media must take part of the blame. Nothing draws media – yes, most definitely including mainstream media – like an opportunity to spread fear, and they seem to have few qualms about giving microphones to the most deranged cranks. Like what journalists Mark Hertsgaard & Mike Dowie did in their 2018 sensationalist piece for The Nation, “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe: A Special Investigation” with the tagline “the disinformation campaign – and massive radiation increase – behind the 5G rollout”, which is basically just a megaphone for ultracrank and conspiracy theorist George Carlo to spew pseudoscientific paranoia without having to deal criticism. Most of the piece consists of suggesting that “big wireless” is hiding the science and trying to prevent research because paranoid crackpots are unable to get their incoherent screeds published in good journals – yes, it’s the same strategy employed by antivaccine activists and pseudoscientists everywhere. And though Hertsgaard & Dowie recognize the need for a disclaimer (“this article does not argue that cell phones and other wireless technologies are necessarily dangerous; that is a matter for scientists to decide”), they try mightily to obfuscate the actual status of science, going so far as to suggest that scientific consensus is the opposite of what it, in fact, is by e.g. misrepresenting studies. The trainwreck of an ‘investigative’ article is discussed in some detail here. Despite being shit, it did apparently have quite an impact, and is at least partially responsible for  much noise and chaos e.g. in the British Parliament and for various pointless legislative moves and hearings around the world, from Australia to Oregon.

 

Now, Hertsgaard is otherwise a somewhat celebrated journalist and author, but the shoddiness and deceptiveness of his and Dowie’s ‘investigative’ efforts in the case at hand should really make you seriously doubt any other claim he makes. And there is, indeed, some evidence that he’s toyed with similar crankery with regard to e.g. nuclear energy.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, they are both apparently widely recognized as serious people and have been pretty good at cultivating that image. But Hertsgaard and Dowie obviously have no qualms about pivoting to stock conspiracy theory mongering, pseudoscience promotion and rank denialism when it suits them. They do not deserve to be trusted on anything.

 

#3010: Sonny Hernandez

Sonny Hernandez is a fundie associated with Reforming America Ministries and an Air Force Reserve chaplain. Hernandez is no fan of religious freedom, and has declared that “Christian service members who openly profess and support the rights of Muslims, Buddhists, and all other anti-Christian worldviews to practice their religions – because the language in the Constitution permits – are grossly in error, and deceived;” the comments were targeted at Air Force service members (”Counterfeit Christians”) who might in their missions and work errouneously “put the Constitution – particularly the establishment clause of the First Amendment – above a Christian God”. When his comments created some controversy, Hernandez claimed to be misunderstood, but was not very clear about what his critics had misunderstood or how a correct interpretation would diverge from the one his critics attributed to him. Paul Hair attempted to portray Hernandez as a victim of Christian persecution and steadfastly failed to see the irony.

 

Otherwise, Hernandez appears to be a typical fundie with a typical fundie’s view of e.g. reproductive rights, and keeps warning those who disagree with him not only of Hell and “everlasting conscious torment” but of the ever-imminent “great storm that is coming”. He has also written at least one book, The Atheist Fairy Tale, which purports to refute all sorts of ideas and features Hernandez associates with atheism (“a fictitious, inane, and blasphemous religion that denies the existence of God”), such as the theory of evolution (“pond scum that developed itself into a self-replicating cell”)

 

Diagnosis: Stock fundie. The US is brimful of them, of course, and Hernandez doesn’t seem to be among the ones with the largest impact area. No denying his level of angry delusion, though.

 

#3009: Drew Hernandez

Drew Hernandez is a wingnut activist, conspiracy theorist, sometimes host of Turning Point USA’s daily show Frontlines, and producer of a web show called “Lives Matter” as well as videos for the wingnut Tatum Report website. His videos have often focused on violence he claims is carried out by Antifa and BLM. And since the police, according to Hernandez, “have their hands tied by leftists”, he is a staunch supporter of groups like the Proud Boys, who are willing to employ extrajudicial violence to get anti-fascist “absolutely mopped on the floor”.

 

Apparently he has some clout in wingnut circles and has, for instance, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and on Fox News a substantial number of times. Part of his rise to prominence is due to his ability to insert himself into wingnut coverage of high-profile events. He was, for instance, on the ground in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when the Kyle Rittenhouse affair took place and served as a defense witness for Rittenhouse to claim that the protesters in the area were “antifa”.

 

Hernandez, who believes that the 2020 election was a massive fraud based on paranoia-fuelled conspiracy theories, was not a fan of the Biden administration. Complaining (falsely) that Biden is unwilling to denounce violence by leftist activists, Hernandez also offered an explanation for what was not the case: Biden was unwilling to denounce leftist violence because it would cause him to lose support from the mythical “deep state”. Biden was also a “communist agent”; said Hernandez: “Every single one of us know that Joe Biden is literally, literally [if you repeat a word twice it means the opposite] in the back pockets of the Chicoms. He is a communist agent and we all know that.” Hernandez isn’t profusively concerned with using evidence to support his claims to knowledge.

 

Most importantly, however, Hernandez is a significant producer of QAnon content who has suggested e.g. that the US is plagued by a large numbers of Satanists that are seeking to eat human fetuses. Apparently gay people play some important role here, too: No fan of such people, Hernandez has not only referred to Pride Month as “groomer month” and called LGBTQ people “mentally ill”, but, as Hernandez sees it, the LGBTQ movement’s “end game is to sterilize humanity, depopulate, so that the homosexuals can just abduct children” – one of the means they dispose is to ensure that “the economy is not going to be accessible to you if you do not worship homosexuality”, whatever that means. More nefariously, perhaps, he has made several concentrated efforts to encourage violent wingnut groups to show up at various LGBTQ events.

 

Diagnosis: No, we can’t be bothered to follow the paranoid lunacy and conspiracy nonsense that falls out of his mouth with in any detail; consider the examples mentioned in this entry as a collection of snapshots from Hernandez’s wide-ranging and variegated derangements. But although there are many like him, and hard to keep track, he does seem to be one of the more central one in contemporary boogaloo and fundie-Christian-nationalist-nihilist-‘burn-it-all-down’ movements.

 

#3008: Patricia Herman

Patricia Herman is a behavioral scientist at the RAND corporation and Co-Director of the RAND Research Across Complementary and Integrative Health Institutions (REACH) Center. She is also a “licensed naturopathic doctor”, which makes her qualified for an entry here by default – even though she might immediately come across as one of the less chaotically delusional figures in naturopathy (the comparison class is … colorful), something that ultimately probably makes her more dangerous than some of her colleagues.

 

Herman is a pusher of the de facto CAM scam-by-smoke-and-mirrors known as non-pharmacological interventions, and has, most notably, published papers e.g. on the ‘cost-effectiveness’ of alternative medicine approaches, thus making her a figure of some importance in the grand strategy of trying to provide a sheen of legitimacy to the nonsense practices falling under the heading ‘complementary and alternative medicine’. Her contributions to the study of the economics of CAM include e.g. a paper attempting to do something close to a systematic review by applying economic analysis quality checklists to a number of what the authors deemed “high-quality” studies of alternative treatments to conclude, of course, that there seemed to be a number of “highly cost-effective, and even cost saving,” such therapies. And that, of course, is entirely what you’d expect them to find given the standards they use for “high-quality”. In reality, given that the treatments in question don’t offer meaningful clinical benefits, any cost-effectiveness analysis is meaningless, making their effort an instance of tooth-fairy science. Her paper “The Problematic Economics of Integrative Oncology” is discussed here (yes, she does recognize that the costs of woo are high but fails magnificently to draw the proper conclusions from that recognition).

 

Diagnosis: Yes, she does come across as a Very Serious Person on the issue of complementary and alternative medicine. And no, you shouldn’t listen to what she has to say.

 

Hat-tip: Science-based medicine