#2871: Joel Fuhrman

A former competitive figure skater and, admittedly, an MD – but one who has gone over to the dark side to practice functional and integrative medicine – Joel Fuhrman has managed to position himself as one of the most authoritative promoter of nutrition-related nonsense and pseudoscience in the US at present. Fuhrman is research director of the Nutritional Research Project of the National Health Association, and he has been a frequent guest on American radio and television shows – he even had his own  television special called ‘3-Steps To Incredible Health’ on PBS for a while, and he and Dr. Oz has a long history of mutual back-scratching. Fuhrman’s plant-based ‘nutritarian’ diet – a typical fad diet – is marketed as a way to improve health and lose weight, and, like the recommendations of so many nutritionists out there, he mixes facts and what is probably good advice with nonsense and pseudoscience; as a diet, nutritarianism is mostly harmless, and might even be a reasonable alternative for some. That doesn’t justify the pseudo-religious nonsense, pseudoscience and bullshit Fuhrman uses to market it, however.

 

Fuhrman has been in the business for a while. His first quack book, Fasting and Eating For Health, appeared in 1995, and promotes fasting and his own diet as something that is supposed to (but of course doesn’t) “relieve and even cure such maladies as psoriasis, high blood pressure, diabetes, hypoglycemia, sinusitis, and chronic fatigue.” His most popular book, however, is presumably Eat to Live, which lays out his idea of “toxic hunger”, the inaccurate idea that people are addicted to toxins that build up from nutrient-poor foods. Other titles include Super Immunity, The End of Dieting and The End of Heart Disease.

 

The central element of his ‘nutritarianism’ is nutrient density and his “Health Equation” H = N/C, i.e. that Healthy Life Expectancy equals Nutrition divided by Calories. Accordingly, Fuhrman (falsely) claims that “food choices are the most significant cause of disease and premature death” and that eating foods with lots of micronutrients can reduce not only the risk of obesity but of diseases such as cancer. It cannot. And since the entities in his equation cannot be quantified or the terms be precisely defined, Fuhrman’s ‘health equation’ is a “parlor trick” and not a serious principle for anything. Fuhrman, however, uses his own children as anecdotal evidence that his nutritarian diet will prevent health problems; as for cancer, his claim is that “the immediate impact is that cancer rates might decrease by half. But the long-term impact, over generations, if we get kids eating right, we could decrease cancer rates by 90 percent.” (You don’t need to ask where the numbers come from – Fuhrman has his own science, one that doesn’t need the input of naysaying scientists who fetishize truth, evidence or accountability.) Another common trick of Fuhrman’s is the popular one of incorrectly assuming that association studies show causation, which is a useful trick for finding apparent support for anything you want. His own diet has of course not been tested in controlled trials. There is a good rundown of his diet and its scientific foundations here.

 

Though it seems that his nutritarianism has evolved over time, at least Fuhrman’s version used to be a type of raw food faddism, and Furhman himself would take a pseudo-religious vitalistic view of food preparation, according to which cooking destroys and kills the living antioxidants, phytochemicals, and so – and no, don’t ask whether that’s actually the case: it’s a tenet of a baroque pseudoreglious system – and according to which processed food are “foods whose life has been taken out of them”. And the micronutrients you (mythically) miss out on in this manner, make you exposed to magical toxins that accumulate in your cells and that you need to “detoxify” through some religious ritual.

 

The core assumption, however, is the central lie of so many quacks and charlatans with something to sell you: that all disease is preventable if you just choose the right strategy. (And that strategy is, of course, hidden from you by the powers that be; fortunately, a few brave maverick doctors like Fuhrman are willing to let you in to the exclusive cult of the enlightened). You can read a discussion of that particular falsehood and its role in pseudomedicine here. One particularly pernicious consequence of the idea is that it puts the blame for getting sick on the victims of disease – that those who get sick chose their fate by failing to recognize the strategy of the enlightened.

 

Even more ominously, Fuhrman also suggests that healthy people don’t need antibiotics, and he has been caught trotting out alt-med type tropes against chemotherapy. He has even more than toyed with antivaccine nonsense, e.g. claiming (completely bonkers falsely) that shots aren’t “effective at all – it doesn’t work”.

 

Another important element of his ‘nutritarianism’ is his “Aggregate Nutrient Density Index” (ANDI), a ranking of foods based on micronutrients that has subsequently been adopted by the Whole Foods marketing department.  

 

Then there’s the grift – of course there’s a grift! Fuhrman sells his own line of nutrition-related products, and he also hosts his own ‘Weekend Immersions’ for which people pay up to a thousand bucks to be “immersed” in nutritarianism with a weekend of lectures, cooking and exercise classes and something akin to a religious awakening where converted nutritarians get up on stage to talk about the miracles associated with having nutritarianism in their lives and how they believe it helped them overcome rheumatoid arthritis and stage-four ovarian cancer or what have you. And like functional medicine advocates are wont to do, Fuhrman has hawked expensive and useless tests that are suitable for convincing people that they suffer from conditions they do not suffer from, such as iodine tests.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, there are a few sensible claims sprinkled on top, but Fuhrman’s nutritarianism is rotten from below the surface and to the core. Yet his ideas easily find traction in a culture where diet has become a pseudo-religious practice, and he is not afraid to fuel the trend. His influence can hardly be overestimated.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2870: Nick Fuentes

No, we don’t really want to give him too much attention ... Nick Fuentes is a shitpost troll – indeed, Nick Fuentes is something close to a Platonic idea of a shitpost troll, and paying him attention is probably exactly the wrong thing to do. On the other hand, Fuentes is a symptom of a certain current – the boogaloo, groyper post-truth shitposting culture – in modern society that is both hard and dangerous to overlook: Fuentes, who is the de facto leader of the Groyper Army, is explicitly campaigning to move the overton window (“I wanna be the furthest Right reactionary and drag everybody over”, says Fuentes) in order to normalize the erratic, pseudofascist behavior of the MAGA crowds (and to mainstream brazen white supremacism and anti-semitism), and does so by performing militant ideological extremism and utter nihilism at the same time; Fuentes is the bastard fascist offspring of (good and proper) GenX irony and naïve Millenial sincerity, nurtured by the fear, hate and paranoia of various far-right factions (religious right, conspiracy groups, nativists) to serve as a beacon luring these groups to the altright by explicitly formulating the ideas the groups were attracted to but remained reluctant to entertain. It is unclear, however, whether Fuentes’s ultimate goal is – if anything at all – anything other than to burn it all down, but that goal is apparently appealing to many religious fundies and wingnut conspiracy theorists. You can read a basic portrait of Nick Fuentes here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nick_Fuentes and a more comprehensive one here, though this one is probably even more illuminating when it comes to Fuentes’s role and position on the right.

 

In any case, Nicholas Joseph Fuentes presents as an alt-right radical-traditionalist Catholic white supremacist neo-Nazi and self-described incel, and he operates the America First livestream podcast, hosted by his own proprietary website after having been banned from most mainstream channels like youtube. He previously co-hosted the Nationalist Review podcast with fellow neo-Nazi James Allsup.

 

Some professed views

At the core of Fuentes’s persona is a deepseated frustration at what he believes is the end of America, expressed as hate against any trait, tendency, group or idea that he could perceive (or pretend to perceive) as being a part of a cause of its decline – and since he is rarely clear about what properties of past America he favors, any agent of change or non-change for anything at any level is a target. This includes not only Muslims (“[t]he First Amendment was not written for Muslims”, nor for “immigrants”), liberals, feminists and people of color, but any non-Catholic (“I want this country to have Catholic media, Catholic Hollywood, Catholic government. I want this to be a Catholic occupied government”) – Fuentes has indeed advocated for “the death penalty” for all non-Christians, and has repeatedly called for the murder of a large range of people, in particular “globalists” and “the people behind CNN”.

 

But his primary enemy is of course zeh Jews, who control and have ruined everything, including Star Wars. “Frankly, I’m getting pretty sick of world Jewry running the show,” says Fuentes, and frequently emphasizes that “we need to eradicate Jewish stranglehold over the United States of America” and that jewish people need to “die in the holy war”. Indeed, Fuentes is an unapologetic fan of Adolf Hitler (“ ‘Hitler was a pedophile and kind of a pagan.’ It’s like, well, he was also really fucking cool. … This guy’s awesome, this guy’s cool”) and has called for “total Aryan victory”. He is also a Holocaust denier, even though he rather explicitly thinks a Holocaust would be a good thing. And his perception of Hitler is … weird at best: after allegedly seeing a Black man littering, for instance, Fuentes stated that “It’s always Black people. … This is in my neighborhood. I’m supposed to be mad at Hitler? I’m supposed to be cross with Hitler? I want this guy dead. And I wish Hitler would kill him. I wish Hitler would have killed him, you know? … That guy should be KILLED! That guy should be killed for that. That guy should be dragged from his car and beaten to death by the public. … If I was in a room with Hitler and that guy, me and Hitler would team up and fuck that guy up! We would kill that guy! … And we’d high-five at the end”. That’s … not who or what Hitler was.

 

It is, perhaps, worth quoting a portion of Fuentes’s response to and interpretation of a June 2022 Biden speech; as Fuentes saw it, Biden “is saying ‘Look, I’m the big gay American empire, and I’m gonna kill all the enemies of liberalism’. That’s what he's saying. Biden is there saying, ‘This is global homo and I’m the puppet face of it. I’m the puppet face of world Jewry and global homo and we’re gonna crush all these fascists.’ The whole thing is just a lie. The whole thing is a sham. Biden is a puppet. The elections are fake. The social media companies are rigged. The elections are rigged. The news couldn’t be more Jewed-up; Jewed-up, moneyed-up, corporate, under the thumb of the Illuminati, whatever. It’s all real man. The devil is in charge of the world. Satan is in charge of America. […] Satan runs the Western world. When you talk about the West, when you talk about democracy, you’re talking about the devil. […] Fuck democracy. I stand with Jesus Christ.”

 

Fuentes does claim, rather adamantly, not to be a white supremacist, however, but rather a “Christian conservative” (he consider the term ‘white supremacist’ an “anti-white slur”). But he does think that Jim Crow “was better for [Black people] too” (note the ‘too’), focuses a lot on white genocide and Great Replacement conspiracy theories (here is his take on the Great Replacement), subscribes to the view that different races are not just biologically but spiritually different – he has apparently calculated his own “spiritual whiteness” to be 91% – and denounces “race-mixing” because “people should stick with their own kind”.

 

The rot he claims to have identified in the US has ruined everything; the military, for instance, has at present degenerated to become a “mercenary army of N-words and homosexuals” who are being trained “to obediently murder whites when the time comes”.

 

He is also proud of being a “sexist man” of the kind who claims that “we need to go back to burning women alive more”, and he has advocated for repealing women’s rights to engage in politics or have a career – indeed, he has argued that women should wear veils (he has defended Iran’s hijab rules), that he “would rather get taken out and shot in the head” than be treated as a female doctor, that men have the right to beat and rape their wives because the Bible gives them authority over women (the problem with marriage today is that women are “not afraid of getting hit, she’s not afraid of being killed, she’s not afraid of violence”), and that all women will go to Hell. He is also a self-declared proud incel (which is sort of a contradiction given the ‘in’ part), since “[i]f we’re really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual because honestly, dating women is gay. [Men] having sex with women is gay” (his reasoning is related in more detail here for anyone interested).

 

His expressed views on things science are predictable. While initially supporting the Taliban’s prohibition on vaccines, he did not approve of their later change of course; Fuentes has referred to the coronavirus vaccine as “gene therapy” and linked it to the spread of AIDS. He has also vacillated a bit on his views on dinosaurs, having advocated both straight-up dino-denialsm (“I find it had to believe, about the dinosaurs”, and the idea of giant reptiles is “retarded. … Catholic Groypers are gonna come up, beat the shit out of you with a Bible”) and human–dinosaur coexistence (“it’s biblical, bro”). His views on climate change are in many ways similar; claiming that we’ll never run out of oil because “oil is infinite” and was put here by God for us to burn, Fuentes also asserted that we “need to burn oil so that we can create a stronger atmosphere to keep carbon inside the atmosphere. This is all scientific.”

 

In short, the America we according to Nick Fuentes have lost and that he is yearning for is one that is indistinguishable from ISIS’s Islamic State beyond some surface nomenclature – indeed Fuentes has explicitly said that he wishes we had “a Taliban rule in America”. His support for Trump leading up to 2024 was accordingly a bit back and forth, and he criticized Trump’s choice of running mate, for instance, because JD Vance “doesn’t value his racial identity”. When Trump won, Fuentes celebrated that “there will never, ever be a female president […] Glass ceiling? It’s a ceiling made of fucking bricks!”, and he was very happy for the actions taken by Trump and Elon Musk in the immediate wake of the inauguration, since what they are doing is “appealing to democracy as a very thin shield for oligarchy” (he’s sometimes sort of minimally perceptive on these sorts of things, which suggests that ‘loon’ is not an accurate epithet)

 

Activities and fans

Fuentes rose to prominence on the right after his participation in the alt-right Unite the Right rally in 2017 and would soon appear in all the places you’d suspect (such as InfoWars). He was of course present in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 – Fuentes declared (while giving a Nazi salute) that “I am a Trump cultist” (later: “Forget the Constitution, I swear allegiance to Donald Trump ... Long live the rightful king of America”) – and his groyper army quickly became frontplayers in the subsequent Stop the Steal coalition. In 2022, he was hosted by Trump himself at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Fuentes’s fan and recurring collaborator Kanye West.

 

Indeed, Fuentes enjoys massive popularity – at the time of his 2021 Twitter ban (later reinstated), he had more than 125,000 followers, and the number of fans have grown exponentially since then – and frequently collaborates with influential wingnut and groyper-adjacent influencers, such as Pearl (who felt compelled to denounce him after the first time, claiming ignorance, but nevertheless continued to work with him afterwards). Fuentes and his groypers have also managed to largely take over college Republican spaces.

 

An indication of his popularity might be discerned through the attention given to his America First Political Action Conference, established as an alternative to a CPAC, which is – of course – not extreme enough for Fuentes and his ilk. The purpose of the conference is to normalize white nationalism, antisemitism and misogyny into the conservative movement. In addition to Fuentes himself e.g. praising Putin for his unprompted invasion of the Ukraine (while it was happening in 2022 – Fuentes has repeatedly praised “the Russian heroes of the special military operation”) and comparing Putin to Hitler (intended as praise), the 2022 version of the event attracted guests like Jared Taylor, Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, Jaden McNeil, VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, and long-time Fuentes supporter Michelle Malkin; and speakers included people like Paul Gosar (who repeated the America First mantra “America First is inevitable” in his speech and who has enjoyed a long but occasionally shaky relationship with Fuentes, including planning fundraisers with him), Steve King, Idaho Lt. Gov Janice McGeachin, Andrew Torba, Vincent James Foxx, Joe Arpaio, Stew Peters, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer and Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers, who had earlier, in response to Fuentes’s compliments (any reasonable person would react to compliments from Fuentes with some serious self evaluation) tweeted “Thank you, Nick Fuentes. We love you” and in her speech praised the groypers for standing up to tyranny, and then advocated for executing her political opponents. There is a report from the 2024 version here; though somewhat more sparsely attended, the list of guests and speakers included natural allies like David Duke, white supremacist Kevin DeAnna, Jared Taylor (again), white supremacist Angelo John Gage (a.k.a. Lucas Gage), Irish neo-Nazi Keith Woods, Elijah Schaffer, Danish antivaccine activist and anti-semitic conspiracy theorist Anastasia Loupis, wingnut talkshow host Anthony Cumia, InfoWars foreign correspondent Dan Lyman, and former Turning Point USA leaders Evan Kilgore and Morgan Ariel.

 

Another Fuentes follower is Texas GOP ex-politician Jonathan Stickland, head of the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, a Christian nationalist group bankrolled by the Dominionist oil tycoons Tim Dunn and Dan & Farris Wilks; Stickland also owns a consulting firm for wingnut candidates called Pale Horse Strategies, whose social media coordinator Ella Maulding has praised Fuentes as “the greatest civil rights leader in history”. Stickland’s Fuentes association led to some rather tumultuous splits in the Texas GOP, with a large group of them refusing to disassociate themselves from Defend Texas Liberty (or from antisemitism for that matter). 

 

In 2022, Fuentes also launched Cozy TV, a streaming network that would be explicitly “anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Black, antisemitic”. It was quickly joined by several familiar wingnut figures, such as Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, Laura Loomer (who, by the way, is Jewish, something that had previously led to some clashes with Fuentes) and Roger Stone with his show The Stone Zone. Some other declared supporters and/or close allies (beyond the ones mentioned above) include:

 

-       Canadian white supremacist Faith Goldy

-       “Kent State gun girl” Kaitlin Bennett

-       Pizzagate provocateur-turned conservative commentator Jack Posobiec

-       Lauren Witzke, who has referred to Fuentes as “our great and merciful leader” (one longs for the days when crackpot fundies would see Jesus merely in floorboards or pieces of toast, doesn’t one?)

-       The Catholic extremist Church Militant network, in particular its activist wing, the Resistance network; though the association has caused some discontent in the ChurchMilitant, leaders like Michael Voris and Joe Gallagher have vigorously defended the association, and central members like anti-semitic and white nationalist reporter/producer Joseph Enders (“I support [Fuentes’s] efforts to put America First”) are committed groypers; indeed, the groypers have made significant inroads among younger Catholics in general, and are largely the force behind e.g. the emergence of a slew of self-declared “Charles Coughlin Roman Catholics”.

-       former host of BlazeTV’s “The White House Brief” Jon Miller

-       MAGA rapper Bryson Gray, the originator of the viral anti-Biden “Let’s Go Brandon” song

-       professional rightwing troll Jonathan Lee Riches

-       Chris Russo, founder and president of Texans for Strong Borders

-       Wade Searle, Congressman Gosar’s digital director, and though it might be natural to suspect that Searle has been instrumental in maintaining a connection between Fuentes and Gosar, Searle was appointed after Gosar’s participation at Fuentes events

-       Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler

-       Chris Nelson, leader of the Florida People’s Rights network

-       American Greatness editor Pedro Gonzalez, who praises the groypers as having “chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world” (Gonzalez isn’t widely praised for his cognitive capabilities or powers of discernment).

-       Much of the group Young Republicans of Texas, such as their state level secretary Noah Coffee, President of the Parker County YR chapter and social media coordinator for the New Future Caucus Konner Earnest, and unapologetic Adolf Hitler fan Rylie Rae Ferguson

-       Michigan political activist and 2023 St. Clair precinct GOP delegate Alex Roncelli

-       Wrongthink Primetime show conspiracy theorist Anna Perez

 

For the 2022 midterms, the groypers felt powerful enough to launch their own political candidates, including Maryland House of Delegates candidate Shekinah Hollingsworth, West Virginia Congressional candidate Michael Sisco, and California Congressional candidate Nick Taurus; they were fortunately not at that time yet within anything resembling striking distance of success.

 

Lieutenants

Given the somewhat loose organizational structure of his groyper army, it is tricky to distinguish henchmen and fans, but among those you could reasonably be describe as the former, you’ll find at least (probably, and as per July 2024 – it’s hard to keep track since internal conflicts keep leading to substantial changes of guard):

 

-       Dalton Clodfelter

-       Rumble content creator, antivaccine activist and Andrew Tate associate Sneako, who claims to have had more than a million YouTube followers before his channel there was shut down.

-       former MMA fighter Jake Shields

-       white supremacist Lyndon Perry

-       white nationalist Kai Schwemmer

-       Social media performer John Doyle

-       January 6 2021 Capitol stormer Christian Secour

-       Canadian rightwing nationalist Tyler Russell

 

Several people have come and gone, and many have, over the years, distanced themselves from Fuentes, including Patrick Casey a longtime member and leader of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa and possibly something like a cofounder of the Groyper army; Jaden McNeil; and Simon Dickerman, who helped build America First’s online structure (Dickerman described America First as “a homosexual death cult”). It’s important to note that these people have distanced themselves from the person Fuentes and his inability to foment a real political movement, and not from his ideas.

 

Though he has been immensely influential, the defections are part of a general indication that Fuentes’s reach has contracted a bit over the last year or two. That would be because he has become sufficiently famous that elected politicians, candidates for office and people in power, like Donald Trump, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, can no longer pretend never to have heard about him when confronted with having shared a stage with him (though Gosar tried for years to promote Fuentes and his antics under that pretense). It is important to be aware that ignorance was always pretense here: these people – Trump, Gosar, Greene, and so on – supported and/or hosted Fuentes while being completely aware who he was and what he was standing for (no one in their right mind would reasonably suggest for instance that Trump would host a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with two people, Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, without knowing who they were); what matters at present is that plausible deniability is less of an option these days.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is a shitposting troll and little else. The instructive point is that Nick Fuentes is, in several ways, one of the most influential and powerful thinkers on the far right today.

#2869: Anita Fuentes

Legendary quack and imminent threat to health and welfare everywhere Viola Frymann died a few years ago, but her deranged legacy unfortunately seems to live on. Internet evangelist Anita Fuentes seems somewhat lost to the world the rest of us live in, too, though in a somewhat different way; hopefully her influence is more limited.

 

Fuentes is best known from her end-times podcast Open Your Eyes People, which is devoted to “bringing Breaking News World Headlines MATCHING Bible Prophecy, worship, praise and preaching the Gospel of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ”, where – well, you probably see where this is going – she rants about current events through the lens of radical fundamentalism and extreme paranoia. Back in 2014, for instance, other extremists too picked up Fuentes’s analysis of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which she judged to be a sacrilegious, cultic Satanic Ritual – a twisted parody of a baptism replete with occult symbolism that only utterly deranged people like Fuentes are able to see; apparently the fact that Oprah took it is significant, too.

 

Usually, the news she discusses signals the end times; she has the uncanny ability to discern such signs of the endtimes virtually anywhere, and Fuentes is, unlike most self-declared prophets, not above being specific. For instance, in 2016 she predicted that the end of humanity would occur on March 8, as shown by the occurrence of an eclipse, a freak supermoon and asteroid TX68 – though some observers noticed that she had, at the time of the prediction, nevertheless scheduled programs the days following March 8.

 

Then there is the grift, of course. Fuentes’s show is financed by donations, and she is hard on solicitation. Since she has a special line to God, people who listen to her and send her money will also receive special blessings; they will for instance have their marriages automatically blessed. On the other hand, not donating to her is exactly like “starving a child”. During Covid, she also solicited some criticism by offering religious exemptions for COVID vaccines in return for donations. 

 

Diagnosis: Our experience of shock and/or amusement over these kinds of lunatics has faded over time, but we still feel dutybound to cover them. Hopefully, Fuentes’s influence is limited, but she seems able to keep her podcast running and there’s a lot of fundie loon preachers like her out there.

#2868: David Friedman

David Friedman is an all-purpose quack and snakeoil salesman who has polluted the internet and various airwaves with scam enterprises, woo and quackery for some time. Friedman calls himself “Dr. David Friedman”, but he has no medical background; rather he has a “a doctorate degree in chiropractic, neurology and naturopathy” (note that even when he admits what his ‘degree’ is actually in, he doesn’t tell us where it’s from) and according to himself he is “post-doctorate certified from Harvard School of Medicine [which is … not a thing] and the Southeastern Back Institute [for which Google yields exactly five hits, all associated with Friedman]”. The ‘neurology’ part of his ‘credentials’, by the way, means chiropractic neurology, which is, of course, hideous quackery.

 

In fact, Friedman presents himself as “a leading Functional Medicine expert” and he is currently practising in Wilmington, NC, where his “dedication to wellness includes providing world-class treatment to patients, wellness coaching, and an emphasis on the importance of exercise, nutrition, meditation, yoga, and acupuncture”. According to his website, “his list of patients have included top celebrities and movie stars” and he is apparently also working as a “health expert for Lifetime Television’s morning show and syndicated radio host”. His dingbat conspiracy book, Food Sanity, how to eat in a world of fads and fiction (largely concerned with “hidden toxins” in your food) has apparently sold well, and Friedman has written numerous rants on nutrition for health and fitness magazines, pseudojournals and infomercial magazines such as The American Naturopathic Journal and Chiropractic Economics.

 

Friedman is probably – or at least should be – most familiar as a medical advisory board member of the infamous quack company Seasilver, which we have encountered before. Their product, Seasilver, is an expensive supplement that will putatively “balance your body chemistry”, “cleanse your vital organs”, “purify your blood and lymphatic system,” “oxygenate your body’s cells”, “protect your tissues and cells against challenges” and “strengthen your immune system”. In other words, the claims are precisely as imprecise, metaphorical and ambiguous as they need to be to ensure untestability and thus protect the company from accountability (apart perhaps from the “oxygenate your body’s cells” claim, which is, fortunately for any users of the product, false). To ‘support’ such claims, Friedman’s got an anecdote: himself. You see, “[d]uring my naturopathic studies, we were taught that a giant handful of vitamin/mineral pills was the answer”, which, since vitamin and supplement pills are superfluous nonsense moneymakers for big and cynical industries, is an inadvertently damning indictment of naturopathic education; Friedman, however, though he agrees (at least for Seasilver marketing purposes) that supplements in general are ineffective, concludes that Seasilver is different: “Unlike minerals from the ground, like those sold in health food stores, nutrients from the sea are recognized by our cell receptors and are allowed access into our cells,” says Friedman, since his target group is precisely those who won’t read that sentence and think ‘wait …’. Friedman even tries to explain (or whatever you call it): “Unlike other nutritional supplements on the market, sea vegetation offers ionic minerals, which experts [who?] consider to be assimilated better than any other form” (if you master basic biochemistry, you are not in his target group), before concluding that “[t]his MEDICAL EVIDENCE proves that for every hundred dollars people are spending on vitamin pills, they are flushing $90 down the toilet. Seasilver offers a 98% absorption rate .... meaning you get what you pay for!”; note the delectable use of capitalization.

 

The FTC and FDA were apparently not impressed with Friedman’s standards of proof, ordering, back in 2004, him and his Seasilver colleagues Jason & Bela Berkes and Brett Rademacher to be prohibited from:

 

-       “Making or helping others to make, false or misleading claims about the health benefits, efficacy, or safety of Seasilver or any covered product.

-       Misrepresenting that Seasilver is effective in the treatment of multiple myeloma; non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; lung, breast, and prostate cancer; brain tumors; diabetes; AIDS; typhoid; and anthrax, among other ailments.

-       Representing that Seasilver or any other product causes rapid, substantial, or permanent weight loss without reducing caloric intake.

-       Making any representation about the health benefits, efficacy, or safety of any covered product without reliable scientific evidence to support the representation.”

 

Friedman was also ordered to pay $1 million in restitution to settle charges. Note that their FTC and FDA troubles occurred a while ago, when Seasilver was making more precise and testable health claims (i.e. claims that could be evaluated for truth or falsity); the untestable nonsense and meaningless New Age bullshit Seasilver is currently using in their marketing is precisely tailored to avoid ending up in a similar situation.

 

Like so many other quacks and grifters, Friedman also weighed in on Covid, drawing some attention to himself for his bonkers suggestion that the virus could be destroyed by sunlight – “[i]nstead of staying quarantined inside your house, go outside on your back deck and soak up some virus destroying sunshine!”, said Friedman; at least his previous experiences seem to have made him wary of claiming that his own products would have any beneficial effects. The claim received some attention partially because it was repeated by Congressman Greg Murphy.

 

Diagnosis: Spineless quack, and because he knows how to market his nonsense, he apparently wields a frightening amount of influence.

#2867: Heshi Fried

Heshi Fried is primarily known, if known at all, as the owner of the world’s mostoffensive car. The ‘offensiveness’ pertains to Fried’s home-made bumper stickers, and the whole contraption is really more laughably wrong and a demonstration that Heshi Fried is an incorrigible idiot than offensive. Among the stickers reported by witnesses are:

 

-       “A good woman is a subservient frum housewife”

-       “G-d sent AIDS to punish male gays”

-       “Modern Girls: Forget Minchal Dress Modestly”

-       “Hurricane Sandy is G-d’s response to gay marriage”

-       “Atheism is a mental disorder. Evolution is science FICTION” [Heshi Fried might know something about mental disorders; he knows nothing about science]

-       “Mothers with short skirts shorten child’s life 4 inches below knee is Torah law”

-       “Shul talkers cause CANCER TNT Torah Novel Talk”

-       “Boston MASSacre G-d’s reponse to America’s 1^st gay marriage state”

-       “The universe is 5773 years old Evolution is science FICTION”

 

And so on.

 

Fried himself is a Hardei, i.e. subscribes to the most conservative form of Orthodox Judaism. Even so, Fried thinks that “most people are very much with me, the people who are religious are basically all giving me a thumbs up. Except secular Jews, who usually like, express shock. They feel like I’m causing anti-Semitism or something.” Of course, that ‘most people’ agree with him tells you nothing about the quality of his positions but rather a bit about what kind of people Fried hangs out with. He also used to be a member of the fringe Hasidic group Jewish Political Action Committee, which apparently went under as a consequence of a big “Jews against the internet” protest at Citi Field a decade or so ago after which even deranged Hasidic extremists felt the need to distance themselves from the unhinged and murderous fanatics that made up that group. Fried also claims that the bumper stickers are part of his goal to make as many people as possible more observant, in which case they don’t seem to have the effect he was going for. His grasp of how other people work is as tenuous as his grasp of anything else.

 

Diagnosis: Possibly the most hateful, bigoted, monstrous and evil person in the world. Fortunately he has little means (or guts) to put his deranged hate into any kind of action – probably harmless, in other words.