#2833: Sean Feucht

Sean Feucht is a singer, songwriter, former worship leader at Bethel Church (which promotes a distinctly weird mix of uncompromising fundamentalism and New Age nonsense and which e.g. made headlines in 2019 for a failed attempt to resurrect a dead six-year-old girl), founder of the Let Us Worship movement, affiliate and promoter of the New Apostolic Reformation (he is a self-declared mentee of Lou Engle), uncompromising dominionist, Christian nationalist, protégé of Josh Hawley, conspiracy theorist and important figure in the MAGA movement. In particular, Feucht has been pivotal in the efforts to integrate MAGA-style wingnuttery and Trump sycophancy with dominionist fundamentalism. At one point (2020), Feucht tried to run for Congress himself in California’s third congressional district, on a campaign largely focused on “the slaughter of the unborn and the newborn”, but fortunately failed – apparently the loss left him shocked and “seething with rage and anger and hurt” until God spoke to him and told him to get ready for new challenges.

 

COVID Protests

Those challenges would apparently soon materialize, and Feucht’s rise to fame in the wingnut circus really took off with his “Let us worship“ worship concerts in 2020, which protested and demonstratively violated lockdowns and COVID-related regulations and which drew crowds of thousands to protest various restrictions on people gathering (it is worth noting that Feucht and the Bethel Church simultaneously accepted the Paycheck Protection Program and other loans offered by the federal government to keep businesses alive during the pandemic). The concerts were promptly expanded to form a sort of response to Black Lives Matters protests – the groups who came for the Covid-lockdown protests apparently didn’t mind – targeting cities where such protests were being held; Feucht called his concert series “a new Jesus movement”. (In fairness, it should be noted that Feucht had earlier arranged a worship concert at the site of the murder of George Floyd where he referred to Floyd’s murder as an “injustice”). Donald Trump himself signed one of Feucht’s guitars prior to a “Let Us Worship” even at the National Mall in DC, which was apparently attended by some 35,000 people. The tour was sponsored by Feucht’s own Bethel Church, whose leader Bill Johnson is on record as a hardcore anti-vaccine activist who refers to the COVID-19 vaccine as the “mark of the beast”.

 

The concert series was the centerpiece of the ‘documentary’ Superspreader (“[d]uring the COVID-19 lockdowns, an evangelical Christian singer stands up for religious liberties by holding mass outdoor worship concert”), an insane conspiracy flick trying to argue that measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 “were part of a communist plan to take over the country”. The movie is notorious also for how it tries to portray Feucht as a victim – despite making millions off his tours – e.g. by including amateur footage of violence completely unconnected to Feucht or his tour; and when Feucht innocently says that he did not expect the “level of demonic activity” he confronted at an event Portland, which did involve violence, he conveniently neglects to mention that the violence was carried out primarily by his own paramilitary bodyguard. The movie was produced by Michael Mauldin and his company Mauldin Media – Michael being the husband of Meredith Mauldin, a.k.a. Meredith McKoy, a B-movie actress and Christian singer who performed with Feucht at his “Let Us Worship” events.

 

Source: Don't remember

The self-portrayal as a victim is of course, and as it is for most fundies, part and parcel of his identity: Sean Feucht is persecuted, as demonstrated by the fact that Congress sometimes passes legislation he disagrees with. Legislation protecting the rights of LGBTQ people for instance, is persecution of him now and will lead to even worse persecution of him and Christians like himself in the future, insofar as they will have to live with legislation they disagree with and cannot force people who disagree with them (him) to act the way they (he) want them to act. Of course, he has also claimed that Christians are on the verge of being imprisoned for their beliefs, citing as his primary evidence various dreams he has (or claims to have) had.

 

Other Antics

After graduating from Oral Roberts University, Feucht founded a number of organizations, including, in 2010, Light a Candle, an ‘international outreach movement’ supposedly doing missionary work around the globe while charging volunteers thousands of dollars in fees to participate; and Hold the Line, a movement intended “to inform, educate, and inspire” young people to become politically active and oppose “the progressive agenda being forced upon America” (as he puts it, Christians must “step out and confront the demonic schemes being pushed through the schools, the media and the government. We can confront the devil and the Left”). Currently, his main operation is Sean Feucht Ministries, Inc., a nonprofit tax-exempt cash cow). In 2019, Feucht was part of the group of fundies visiting then-President Trump for a faith briefing at the White House with the goal of praying Trump out of troubles related to the first impeachment attempt in 2019: “We just laid our hands on him and prayed for him. It was like a real intense, hardcore prayer”, Feucht reported.

 

In April 2022, Feucht called for the “walls of perversion to come down in Jesus’s name” at a protest outside of “demonic” Disney’s California corporate offices. And Feucht sees the devil in most things he doesn’t fancy. For instance, Feucht unsurprisingly thinks Biden is advancing a satanic agenda; with Biden, “[t]he enemy is launching an all out attack on truth, attacking the Bible, and God’s sacred design for the family, sexuality and gender” and the Biden administration is, as political opponents of wingnuts always do, “carrying some of the most anti-Christ agenda and philosophy that maybe we have seen in the history of America” (here is, apparently, more evidence). And as with fundies in general, it is hard to figure out precisely why it matters or is a bad thing, for as Feucht sees it, “we are living in the last days”: “These are the end times … we’re living in the midst of it.”

 

During the 2022 congressional elections, Feucht performed at campaign rallies in support of Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.

 

In early 2023, Feucht launched his ‘Kingdom to the Capitol’ tour, co-sponsored by Turning Point USA, which would focus on swing states to educate people e.g. about how the LGBTQ movement is driven by demonic forces (“schemes of the devil in the political realm”); a similar theme characterized his contributions to Clay Clark and Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour. Before his events in the Pacific Northwest, Feucht had conducted “a 3-day prayer and fasting movement in preparation” because the Pacific Northwest because “is #1 for witchcraft and demonic activity”. Particularly notable among those Northwest events in his Kingdom series was his appearance in Spokane with Matt Shea.

 

Despite (or, unfortunately, because of) his fundie lunacy, Feucht is extremely well-connected, and numerous members of Congress consider themselves fans and/or friends. Indeed, Feucht has even got his own Capitol Hill townhouse, “Camp Elah”, set up for meeting with strategists and lawmakers to help his efforts to “take back territory” and, with God’s help, elevate “men and women of faith” into positions of political power; ‘Christian’ and ‘men and women of faith’ for Feucht is of course synonymous with ‘those who agree with me on politics’ – and to make that clear, Feucht points out that “the fact that there is even such a thing as ‘Evangelicals for Harris’ that pastors/influencers join shows you just how apostate much of the American church has become” (Feucht elsewhere characterizes Harris as “A RADICAL BABY KILLING MANIAC!” – and both she and Walz are backed by demonic forces) and he has described the fact that not all Christian leaders are outspoken MAGA activists like him a “leadership crisis”.

 

That said, Feucht has complained that he is being unfairly “labeled by libs as a chRiStIAn nAtIoNaList.” Of course, the dastardly liberals probably label him that way partly because Sean Feucht has in fact proudly declared himself to be a Christian nationalist.

 

Miscellaneous

Here are Feucht’s views on the Gaza situation: (“this a prophetic hour” ostensibly connected to the End Times). Recently, his Let Us Worship events have therefore morphed into “United for Israel” marches targeting universities where there have been recent student protests to profess the idea that the conflict is a harbinger of the End Times predicted in the Bible.

 

He has also expressed some artistic differences with Taylor Swift, having at one point claimed that when families have followed his recommendation to stop listening to Taylor Swift, their daughters were no longer angry all the time and stopped having nightmares. Or shorter Sean Feucht: Anyone and anything he doesn’t fancy is Satan (Swift, in particular, is apparently “the demon god Molech”).

 

There is a decent Sean Feucht resource here.

 

Diagnosis: Though explicitly a Christian nationalist, explicitly a dominionist, and quite obviously insane, Sean Feucht has become something of a central figure on the religious right, and in particular when it comes to efforts to integrate fundie rightwing views with MAGA-style conspiracy theories. But despite having become immensely influential and despite milking millions and millions off his audiences, Feucht has no problem viewing himself as a poor victim of religious persecution on the grounds that there are still people who disagree with him and even dare to criticize his views. So it goes. One of the most dangerous people in the world.

#2832: Jorge Fernandez

To be fair, we don’t have an extensive overview of the background or career of Jorge Fernandez, or where he is currently located, but a decade or so ago, Fernandez, a young-earth creationist, was a staple at creationist “scientific” conferences (such as the 2011 Symposium Cornell University, which was, emphatically, not organized by Cornell University), and online debates, providing standard PRATT talking points against evolution as well as appeals to Expelled-style conspiracy theories. Fernandez has also published rants in the Journal of Creation, the magazine published by Creation Ministries International. As Fernandez saw (or sees) it, creationists have been unfairly silenced by scientific organizations and journals just because they cannot back up their claims by evidence (not, admittedly, how Fernandez himself put it), and such organizations and journals have neglected to take creationist attacks on evolution seriously just because the attacks are silly and already thoroughly refuted. Fernandez would for instance try to argue that the second law of thermodynamics is incompatible with evolution (it obviously isn’t – Fernandez’s use rather entail the prediction that snowflakes are impossible) and quote-mine Francis Crick to suggest that Crick rejected the theory of evolution (he most certainly did not).

 

At some point, however, Jorge Fernandez was also the president of the Citizens for Objective Public Education, a Kansas-based creationist group that in 2013 (under the subsequent leadership of Robert Lattimer) filed a federal civil rights suit that sought to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas public schools on the grounds that science is a religion. That the group doesn’t get the difference is telling enough.

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, it seems like a blast from the past, but these people are still out there, and they are unlikely to have gotten much more reasonable since the heydays of intelligent design. And there is still quite a number of them, unfortunately.

#2831: Bill Ferguson

A.k.a. Terran Cognito

A.k.a. Obi-Wan Kabuki

 

We’ve read through quite a lot of incoherent all-caps rambles on various conspiracy blogs over the years, and one is often left with the impression that it isn’t just difficult to identify the view being promoted, but that there isn’t really anything resembling a view that can be put in coherent sentences underneath it all. And so it is the case with William “Bill” Ferguson III, whose blogs devoted to various conspiracies carry the blurb “Unidynamic frequency inquiry by exploring cutting edge science, awareness and high technology. Expanding the knowledge of unidynomic principle”. Well, we haven’t attempted to make sense of Cognito’s unidynomic principle, but recurring themes in his writings are auras and energy bullshit he has allegedly received by telepathic message from outer cosmos.

 

Aliens and/or alien energy is apparently behind a lot of stuff Cognito imagines is happening on Earth. For instance, “THE METEOR THAT STRUC AND YES WE DO SAY STRUCK IRAN WAS MORE THAN A METEOR. IT WAS AN ENERGETIC SIGNATURE. NOT A WEAPON […] IT WAS AN ENERGETIC SIGNATURE DEVICE THAT ALLOWS FOR CONTINUED INTERFACE WITH OUR AWAKE FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND OPERATIVES IN THE REGION. THERE IS SO MUCH MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE. OUR AWAKE FRIENDS ARE PREPARING THE GROUND SO TO SPEAK. END”. Yeah, that kind of stuff. There is talk of dragons and pyramids in Antarctica built by survivors from Atlantis, too. Also, cats are apparently alien magical beings that “transmutes energies, offers protections, erases magical constructs, and so much more”.

 

Cognito is apparently connected with Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf and often comments on her legal woes and asks for donations to assist her. Cognito might even possibly have influenced the argumentation in one of Tucci-Jarraf’s (large) documents filed in her criminal case in which she alleges to have taken part in secret meetings with world leaders in Antarctica.

 

Diagnosis: Cognito offers a weird, funhouse mirror version of the garbled conspiracy theories you’d get from Alex Jones or RedIce Creations, completely devoid of anything resembling coherence or orientation toward reality. Probably harmless, though he seems to have some followers.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2830: David Feinstein

Emotional Freedom Technique is an infamous but relatively widespread pseudopsychiatric therapy that claims to heal the mind and a range of psychological (and physical) problems using, in a handwavy manner, the ideas of acupuncture. Specifically, EFT therapists claim to manipulate the body’s ‘energy field’ through acupressure and to access meridians while focusing on a specific traumatic memory. Needless to say, it is pure pseudoscience, and doesn’t remotely work; indeed, the idea – like the ideas behind energy medicine in general – is not only raging bullshit but fractally wrong.

 

Now, we’ve encountered EFT before, since – despite its desperate lack of plausibility, evidence or coherent underpinnings – the nonsense is, as mentioned, quite popular (though in fairness: most psychologists easily recognize it as absolute bullshit).

 

And despite the implausibility of the ideas, proponents of EFT have long been engaged in some serious pseudoscience to try to lend the technique a sheen of scientific legitimacy. Central to that strategy is the work of energy psychology proponents like Dawson Church and David Feinstein. In a 2008 review, Feinstein concluded that energy psychology (EFT in particular) was a “rapid and potent treatment for a range of psychological conditions” based on systematically ignoring all the evidence demonstrating that EFT doesn’t work; like so many other pseudoscientists, Feinstein also failed to disclose his conflict of interest as an owner of an online shop for energy psychology products. Unfazed, Feinstein published another review in 2012, according to which energy psychology techniques “consistently demonstrated strong effect sizes and other positive statistical results that far exceed chance after relatively few treatment sessions” based on employing the exact same technique as last time: systematically dismissing or ignoring high-quality studies (which consistently show no positive effect) in favor of methodologically worthless small studies that did suggest an effect.

 

Indeed, over the years, Feinstein has published a number of pseudoscientific papers and reviews based on shoddy pseudostudies, including for instance “Manual Stimulation of Acupuncture Points” (in Journal of Psychotherapy Integration). In the very same journal issue, real scientists with intellectual integrity and deploying real methodological techniques (like the AMSTAR2 analysis criteria) on the same material, concluded that the studies Feinstein relied on were of “critically low” quality and poorly carried out, concluding (since they actually deployed methodological rigor and, unlike Feinstein, were concerned with accuracy and accountability) that EFT was pseudoscience and an “unsinkable rubber duck”.

 

Feinstein has written a number of books and done a number of podcasts (e.g. for the aptly named Sounds True with New-Age-woo promoter Donna Eden), and is also on the board of editors of the journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, and Treatment, ostensibly “a peer-reviewed professional journal dedicated to reporting developments in the field of energy psychology”; unfortunately, this is the kind of pseudoscientific journal that takes the notion of “peer review” way to literally. It’s board of editors also include the other central leaders of the EFT cult: Dawson Church, Larry Dossey, Charles Tart, Norman Shealy, James Oschman, orthomolecular medicine champion Hyla Cass and Stanley Krippner, the parapsychologist whose parody-friendly work was a crucial part of the foundation for The Men Who Stare at Goats.

 

Diagnosis: Militant pseudoscience. And once again, it is fascinating (but also, of course, frightening) to see the complex but likely completely unconscious strategies proponents of pseudoscience use to avoid reality and the evidence that unambiguously demonstrate that what they advocate is bullshit: Yes, we do think Feinstein is a true believer, and when he systematically champions shoddy nonsense studies and desperately dismiss (or simply ignore) the actual evidence, we suspect he is doing so in good faith – unbelievable as it might sound.

#2829: Burton Feinerman

 

We’ve covered dubious stem cell clinics several times already; it’s lucrative business since people in desperate straits are easy targets and willing to pay whatever it takes for a glimmer of (false) hope. Burton Feinerman is the owner of one such business, the Stem Cell Genetic Med Clinic. Now, Feinerman claims that “I don’t do this for money but to give hope to these people and try to help them, to give them treatments that are scientifically good,” because refraining from lying would be poor marketing; but Feinerman has also claimed to be able to treat virtually any “incurable” condition, from “advanced cancer” to “transverse myelitis” (“and more”, to cover anything he might have forgotten that a potential client might turn up suffering from) with his quackery, and there is still absolutely no convincing evidence that a stem cell treatment is able to cure or treat any of these things.

 

Feinerman is also into autism quackery; as Feinerman claims to see it, most people “now feel that some types of chemicals, toxins and vaccines are the causative agents” for autism (which would be incorrect, of course), and that people are exposed to these agent through “aluminum ingestion or absorption, lead exposure, chemicals in foods such as MSG and aspartane, mercury preservative in vaccines, reaction to measles, or pertussis in vaccines.” Oh, yes – the antivaccine crowd are sitting ducks in this game; we have no evidence that Feinerman actually believes any of this nonsense, or whether he really distinguishes what there is evidence for or (epistemic) reasons to believe from whatever can be turned into a marketing ploy. And what does he offer for autism? “Stem Cell Genetic Med approaches the treatment as a chronic inflammatory condition of the brain with immunological dysfunction” (it isn’t; and note that Feinerman doesn’t actually explicitly claim that it is), and his protocol consists of pure quackery, including “[c]helation intravenous or oral”, “[i]ntravenous infusion of glutathione and neurological supplements” and numerous expensive and unnecessary lab tests.

 

Feinerman is also the founder of something called “the Lung Institute”, which makes dubious claims of being able to treat a range of chronic lung diseases – you can read about a real scientist attending one of their infomercial seminars here. The institute claims to fix damaged lungs by (simply) injecting stem cells into your blood, which is parallel to “claiming that I could fix your broken iPhone by just injecting some metal into it” – and Feinerman is predictably careful not to use the word “cure” in his infomercials but rather relies on words like “help”. But hey: they’ve got testimonials.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is fully indistinguishable from a stereotypical parody of a used-car salesman. Does he believe his own bullshit? Well, it’s unclear, but natural to suspect that Burton Feinerman believes whatever could help fill his pockets if it were true; and there are plenty of potential victims out there. A horrible, horrible person.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2828: Danny Faulkner

 

Creationism, as a pseudoscience movement with legislative bite, seems to have receded into the background of political discourse in the US the last few years, but from that background it is still heavily promoted by religious fundies and wingnuts. Few of these promoters have any relevant scientific background, of course, so Danny Faulkner stands as a rather lonely figure who actually does have credentials to brandish when flouting his young earth creationism. Faulkner is an astronomer who at one point did some actual research related to binary stars and worked at a real university, before retiring to work for Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research (he is the ‘dean’ of the Astro/Geophysics department at the ICR Graduate ‘school’), where he could pretend to teach and do research without the constraints of rigor, truth, accuracy and sensitivity to reality put upon him by his previous associations and his discipline.

 

His post-science output has been published e.g. by the cargo-cult journal Answers Research Journal, and has included a.o.

 

-       ‘Interpreting Craters in Terms of the Day Four Cratering Hypothesis’ (for volume 7). Creationists have different hypotheses on when craters appeared in the universe; Faulkner distinguishes craters created on day four of the creation week from later ones by the time-honored method of assertion.

-       ‘Did the Moon Appear as Blood on the Night of the Crucifixion?’ (for volume 7)

-       ‘A Further Examination of the Gospel in the Stars’ (for volume 6): Faulkner wades into the creationist discussion of how the stars and constellations got their names.

-       ‘Astronomical Distance Determination Methods and the Light Travel Time Problem’, (for volume 6) where Faulkner admits that astronomers measure distances correctly, which refutes young Earth creationism; but astronomers overlook the versatility of the Goddidit hypothesis. Indeed, in the very same volume, Faulkner also published his own take; in ‘A Proposal for a New Solution to the Light Travel Time Problem’, he suggests that “light from the astronomical bodies was miraculously made to ‘shoot’ its way to the earth at an abnormally accelerated rate in order to fulfill their function of serving to indicate signs, seasons, days, and years. I emphasize that my proposal differs from cdk in that no physical mechanism is invoked”.

-       ‘How Long Did the Flood Last’, for volume 8

 

Faulkner seems not only to have forgotten some parts of his education but to never actually have quite understood science. Recounting his own personal history, he has expressed significant concern “with people who put that much faith in the big bang. It is the overwhelmingly dominant model, and they’ve had a few impressive predictions, like the background radiation. But it has many problems – they keep changing the model to make it fit the data we have,” which is what science does: adjusting one’s theories in light of evidence is a strength of science; it’s the feature that shows that a theory is sensitive to the facts and what distinguishes science from dogmatism. Of course, Faulkner is also honest about what his real issue is: “my biggest concern is that it doesn’t agree at all with the Genesis account of how the world came to be”. It certainly doesn’t.

 

At least he is clear about his presuppositions. Scientific work also require background knowledge, so if the results “contradict Scripture, we need to reexamine the assumptions” (Faulkner neglects to mention the uncomfortable fact that the background theories used in scientific investigation are themselves testable and well-established by evidence), and although even creationists don’t know everything, by “starting with the key eyewitness to world history, the Bible, we take a crucial step in the right direction that others ignore.” Faulkner was also among creationist critics of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s revival of the show Cosmos, on the grounds that the show lacks scientific balance because it fails to provide airtime for evolution deniers.

 

A commitment to Biblical literalism raises some obvious questions, and much of Faulkner’s ouput the last decade has consisted not only of trying to counter inconvenient scientific results (such as trying to figure out how he can argue that radiocarbon dating doesn’t work) or desperately trying to argue (well, assert) that the results really support creationism, but of countering challenges from more consistent literalists, including in particular the flat earth movement. Faulkner has even attented some flat Earth conferences, where he encounters some absolutely fantastic pieces of irony that he unwaveringly refuses to recognize.

 

Diagnosis: Given that he can flaunt some genuine credentials, Faulkner has indeed become one of the most significant authorities within the creationist movement today. His background also puts him in a position to entertain some awareness of the insanity of what he’s doing; and he sometimes seems on the verge of being aware – to the extent that one almost starts suspecting it’s all a hoax – but blind faith is an amazing insulator.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2827: Dave Farnsworth

David Christian Farnsworth is an Arizona state senator serving since 2013 (with a break between 2021 and 2023), representing District 10. Farnsworth is a creationist. When Arizona was considering a Darwin Day resolution in 2016, Farnsworth was dismayed: he would, he said, have supported an Arizona Science Day (like many creationists, Farnsworth pretends to love science), but a Darwin Day would be a very different matter: “When I was growing up in Mesa, I was taught in school the evolution theory that my ancestors came from monkeys. Personally, I was offended by that theory, especially when you consider that I hold a deep-seated belief in creationism.” Science might be cool, but doesn’t trump Farnsworth sensibilities as an arbiter of truth, especially when it comes to issues Farnsworth doesn’t begin tounderstand. He also pointed out that it would be fairer to teach both evolution and creationism, both as theories, in public schools, since again, science should be held to no more rigorous standard than the standard of what Farnsworth feels is fair.

 

Of course, Farnsworth is an across-the-board loon. As a Mormon, Farnsworth is a firm defender of that characteristically Mormon piece of deranged pseudohistory idea that Mormonism was founded by followers of Jesus who settled in the US right after Jesus’s death (the Nephites) but who were killed off by heretics whom God subsequently punished by darkening their skin (the Lamanites). But more generally, Farnsworth is an all-in religious-fanaticism-fuelled conspiracy theorist ranting about “secret combinations” (Mormon for conspiracies) that “will seek to destroy the freedom of all lands,” which are currently “the insiders, One World Government people, the socialists” of the modern world – Farnsworth is fond of quoting John Birch-society affiliate Ezra Taft Benson (“If you want to know what I believe, and how I feel, just Google Ezra Taft Benson. Because I don’t disagree with anything he ever said”) that “there is no conspiracy theory in the Book of Mormon – it is a conspiracy fact”. So there. Benson, who believed that Black people were “the seed of Cain” and therefore couldn’t have positions in the church, and that the civil rights movement was “a Communist program for revolution in America”, famously wrote the foreword to this book.

 

Farnsworth has also claimed that QAnon is a “credible group”. Indeed, he received some attention in 2019 for his claims that the Arizona Department of Child Safety is involved in sex trafficking, specifically that the DCS would arrange for the children to be abducted and sold into a global sex trafficking ring: “After several months of digging, I am quite confident that there is a connection,” Farnsworth told the QAnon-promoting website Epoch Times. He did not cite any evidence, of course. He also affirmed that “I think most knowledgeable adults believe that there is a sex trafficking ring all across the world.” He did of course not cite any evidence for that claim either, for obvious reasons. When his fellow state senator Kate Brophy McGee told him to stop holding meetings at the Capitol with “unbalanced” people (Farnsworth’s QAnon friends), Farnsworth promptly called the police and claimed that she had threatened him.

 

Farnsworth returned from retirement in 2023 (with Trump’s endorsement) after his primary opponent (Rusty Bowers) had decided to testify before the January 6 committee and had also strayed from what Farnsworth considers church doctrine by holding a hearing on an LGBTQ nondiscrimination bill (Farnsworth judges homosexuality to be a “lifestyle choice”). Even more importantly, Bowers hadn’t, in Farnsworth opinion, done enough to “ensure faith” in Arizona’s electoral processes after they failed to ensure that Trump emerged as the state’s official candidate: Farnsworth doesn’t only believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump through fraud, but that it was a Satanic conspiracy, that the “devil himself” was behind it. His evidence is (exclusively) that “in the book of Mormon in Ether Chapter 8, the synopsis of the chapter says … modern gentiles are warned of a secret combination which seeks to destroy the freedom of our lands”, adding that “this is larger than any of us, because every tyrant that ever lived has been inspired by Satan to take control over the hearts and minds and souls and bodies and lives of mankind.” When pressed, he did add that “I felt that the election was stolen” and that Dinesh D’Souza’s laughably fact-challenged conspiracy movie 2000 Mules “reinforces how I already felt”. And the conspiracy is wide-ranging; Farnsworth liberally accuses political operatives working for his opponents or media coverage he feels is favorable to his opponents of being part of the conspiracy and “working for Satan”. His candidacy was promptly endorsed by a sufficient number of frothingly insane Arizona wingnuts (like Kelly Townsend, Andy Biggs and Kelli Ward).

 

As for Covid, Farnsworth was very frustrated with government efforts to halt the pandemic, in particular its effects on churches: “If this is a real epidemic, why wouldn’t we be fasting and praying that the Lord would turn it aside, rather than going after the solutions of men? Which is a shot that probably does more harm than good.” Yes, you can be confident that if it has been uttered by Dave Farnsworth, it is not only wrong but fractally so.

 

Diagnosis: As Rusty Bowers put it, Farnsworth “doesn’t invest intellectual capital” – and that’s a … generous characterization. Possibly one of the most deranged loons in the US today.

 

Hat-tip: Business Insider