#3022: Pat Hines

The League of the South is a Neo-Confederate, white supremacist, patriarchal, largely anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant organization founded to protect and promote “Anglo-Celtic” Southern culture; they are not officially racist because, according to the organization’s Board of Directors, “the term ‘racism’ has its origins in Communism and that movement’s sordid attempt to undermine Western Christendom”. Their big cause is the Lost Cause of the South, and they advocate for various Southern States to secede from the US, partially, as some members put it, because secession is the only way for the South to avoid the Muslim invasion. Articles they host on their webpages are, as you’d expect, the usual mess of pseudohistory, conspiracy theories and paranoia.

 

We’ve covered their former leader Michael Hill before, but their roster provide a rich source of materials for entries as well. Pat Hines, for instance. Hines was, at least as of 2020 (we can’t really be bothered to keep track), the leader of the group’s South Carolina chapter. A retired military nurse, Hines stepped into the role in 2015 after the exodus of members uncomfortable with the radicalization of the group in the wake of Dylann Roof’s massacre in Charleston, and he is the kind of person you’t expect to be on record feeling the need, in discussions of slavery, to remind people that “without slavery, all the black people in the United States wouldn’t be here” (defending slavery is a central task for League of the South members, and their attempts do come far more colorful than Hines’s as well) and referring to the removal of Confederate monuments as “cultural genocide on the Southern people”; to elaborate: “The opposition to the pro-south groups are Judeo-Marxts [sic] working themselves up to be as deadly as their genetic grandfathers, the Bolsheviks. They support the murders of all southern whites and the destruction of our monuments.”

 

Pertaining to the Lost Cause of the South, Hines has also defended celebrating the murder of Abraham Lincoln, “the most murderous, treasonous president that ever existed,” though he was reluctant to praise John Wilkes Booth too highly given the latter’s tardiness when it came to getting the matters done. More interesting was Hines’s justification for the assassination of Lincoln: “Well, he was a United States President. Well, he was commander-in-chief, which makes him a legitimate target immediately.” And if you wonder whether he thinks any commander-in-chief is a legitimate target, “Well, they are.” Well, then.

 

Diagnosis: President Trump has called Hines and his fellows “some very fine people”, but the president’s judgment sometimes arguably seems a bit off on these matters. Things suggest that Pat Hines isn’t a very fine person.

 

#3021: Peter Hinderberger

Peter Hinderberger (M.D., Ph.D., DIHom) is a Baltimore-based “integrative” practitioner whose declared mission is to “promote optimal wellbeing by providing health care through an integrated approach, combining conventional and complementary therapies, which include Anthroposophic medicine, homeopathy, and salutogenesis.” Apparently, Hinderberger in particular targets cancer patients, whom he thinks that he and his arsenal of nonsense have something to offer. As he sees it, “[i]ntegrative medicine combines the best of Western and holistic medicine” (i.e. the best of real medicine with the ‘best’ of nonsense), but whereas “Western medicine aims to cure. Holistic medicine’s goal is to heal”, which is, given any reasonable definition, also the goal of real medicine, but Hinderberger needs some snappy formulations for marketing purposes – don’t think too much about what he is actually saying. And to “demonstrate the validity of both approaches”, Hinderberger points out that whereas (real) medicine can remove cancers, “statistics show that many cancers reoccur because ‘cure’ does not address the original disposition to cancer,” which of course is pure nonsense when it comes to why cancers reoccur. Hinderberger, however, offers patients recovering from cancer means to “detox and strengthen the functions of the organs as well as restore balance between body, soul and spirit using different modalities like anthroposophic medicine, homeopathy, nutrition, counseling, movement therapy, etc.”. Needless to say, fluffy bullshit will do nothing to actually prevent the reoccurrence of cancer, but it might provide patients with a (false) sense of empowerment, especially if, as often is the case, the cancer doesn’t reoccur. We’re sure Hinderberger’s got some nice customer reviews (after all, dissatisfied customers are often no longer around to express their side).

 

Though there are many people like Hinderberger around, we took note of him for being the MD of cancer survivor Ivelisse Page, who apparently credited the fact that her cancer (rather unsurprisingly) didn’t reoccur to some bullshit she’d gotten from Hinderberger (including “daily alternating injections of mistletoe and thymus, cimetidine [a real drug with possible anti-tumor effects], homeopathic remedies and additional supplements”) and subsequently, with her husband Jim, founded Believe Big, a nonprofit aimed to ‘educate’ people on “bridging the gap between conventional and complementary medicine for fighting cancer” and which tried to raise funds for mistletoe clinical trials – apparently Hinderberger’s repertoire includes a mistletoe extract that is “not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA)” and which “falls under the category of homeopathy and is paid for out-of-pocket, at a cost of $100 to $150 per month, depending on the extract intensity and number of injections.” Page’s story is discussed here.

 

Diagnosis: Yet another one. Good grief.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

 

#3020: Sid Hill

QAnon gained momentum between 2017 and 2020, and it is not very surprising that the 2020 election saw numerous Congressional candidates endorsing the conspiracy theory or even running on a QAnon platform. Some of them are covered here. In Alaska, for instance, Sidney Hill, an independent candidate running as a “pro-Trump” write-in for the U.S. Senate, had educated himself on matters politics by investigating “massive intel drop[s]” from “Q clearance” on 4chan. Otherwise his political agenda seemed a bit unclear, but he tried again for Lisa Murkowski’s seat in 2022, gaining some 270 votes in total, and he has apparently (as of May 2026) filed the paperwork for the 2026 ballot, too. Previous political experience includes holding up signs and demanding the impeachment of President Obama (e.g. “LaRouche says Impeach Obama Now”), leading e.g. to his arrest for “assault, disorderly conduct and criminal mischief” in 2010. That wasn’t his only brush with the law. 

 

Hill was, by the way, not the only QAnon candidate from Alaska in 2020. At least Thomas “John” Nelson, who ran in Alaska’s At-Large Congressional District, had also been promoting the QAnon slogan WWG1WGA and Dave Hayes’ rantings in a number of tweets.

 

Diagnosis: Ok, so he’s primarily a colorful village clown, and some might think his cognitive situation is not the kind the kind of lunacy we like cover here. The emergence of QAnon has made it harder to draw that distinction, however, and as a general rule: if you appear on a ballot, you’re fair game.

 

#3019: Jim Hill

Jim Hill is pastor of the North Clairemont United, San Diego and author of books with titles like “Dealing with Demons”. His most famous literary contribution, however, is probably his 2014 book The Gay Emperor is Naked (an interesting choice of title – perhaps worth a thought or two but we can’t be bothered), where he expounds on the evils of homosexuality. Did you for instance know that “Statistically, it is healthier to be a chain smoker and a practicing alcoholic than an active homosexual. In fact, 2% of all active homosexuals experience 80% of all STD’s”? Neither, of course, does Jim Hill, but he’s got faith and ye doubters got none. Or did you ever wonder “Why do 75% of the people who try homosexuality go on to conclude that that is not who they are, while 98% of those who try heterosexuality find it is who they are? More people have left homosexuality than have ever remained in it, by far.” Apparently Hill is a sufficiently high-level loon to be able to cast the transmute statistics spell several times a day.

 

The Jim Hill in question is presumably different from Alabama House of Representative member Jim Hill, sponsor of the Alabama “Freedom of Religion in Marriage Protection Act”, though they seem to be in agreement on some issues.

 

Diagnosis: His books have apparently failed to make a real splash, and he seems to be pretty old. Hopefully we can just forget about him.

 

#3018: Steven Higgs

Steven Higgs is a photographer, author, former editor and publisher at The Bloomington Alternative and journalist for a variety of outlets, including Counterpunch. Higgs is also an antivaccine activist, and many of his articles have, over the years, been pushing antivaccine propaganda, usually in the form of reports on complaints from antivaccine organizations, like SafeMinds, and portraits of various leaders in the antivaccine movement, like JB Handley. The Handley portraits and Higgs’ angle is discussed in some detail here. In particular, Higgs has been pushing the myth that vaccines cause autism, and he makes sure to cover all the standard gambits, like blaming thimerosal and pushing Generation Rescue’s idea that nations with higher vaccination rates have higher autism rates (and that vaccination does not correlate with lower childhood mortality) based on one of the most incompetent “studies” ever done.

 

Higgs describes his approach to the issue rather well himself: “I’ve spent most of the past 28 years journalistically investigating conflicts between environmental victims and experts in the relevant fields. And, I can say without qualification, the victims have been right and the experts wrong in every significant story I’ve covered. I can’t think of a single exception,” and he is apparently going to make damn sure vaccines ain’t gonna be an exception either: or, in other words, since medical scientists clearly agree that vaccines don’t cause autism, they must be wrong. At least it is hard to argue with something like that. This one at least tries to pick apart some of the layers of anger, nonsense and motivated reasoning that grounds Higgs’s efforts.

 

Diagnosis: Though pretty dumb, most of the antivaccine content from Steven Higgs’ hand seems to be pretty old, and his current stuff seems to be mostly concerned with travelling and photography. Maybe he has come to his senses?

 

#3017: Lee Hieb

A.k.a. Lee Merritt (current name, though we file her under ‘Hieb’ partially to distinguish her from other famous people called ‘Lee Merritt’)

 

Lee Hieb – currently Merritt – is, without doubt, one of the craziest, angriest and most paranoid anti-vaccine activists, medicine denialists and pseudoscience promoters out there. Hieb is also a wingnut, and has served as one of the main purveyors of antivaccine conspiracy theories for the WND. And yes, Hieb is, in fact, an MD – an orthopedic surgeon who currently runs a Nebraska clinic that offers e.g. tattoo removal – which means that readers of the WND might consider her something of an authority on medical issues (but then readers of the WND would largely take advice from a monkey playing a drum if it wore a MAGA hat). Hieb is also former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), which is generally known as a John Birch Society for MDs disguised as a medical professional society (many of its members – which include e.g. Tom Price, Trump’s first Secretary of Health and Human Services – are certified brave maverick doctors; indeed, Hieb herself has adopted the moniker “The Medical Rebel”) and which is familiar for endorsing the ridiculous and dangerous nonsense that shaken baby syndrome is a “misdiagnosis” for vaccine injury, COVID-19 misinformation, Andrew Wakefield’s claim that the measles vaccine will result in a mass extinction of humans, climate science denialism, and the spurious abortion-breast cancer link based on idiotic excuses for scientific research. The AAPS even gone to court to protect their “right” to promote antivaccine misinformation. The WND, meanwhile, consistenly pushes anti-vaccine information except when they can use the low rates of vaccine uptake in certain immigrant communities to portray immigrants as stupid.

 

Hieb on Vaccines and COVID-19

Hieb’s (official) main schtick is, of course, medical freedom (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Health_freedom). And articles from her hand tend to carry titles and taglines like “The feds’ plan to force vaccines on adults” (complete with some desperate red-baiting), “Public health does not trump individual liberty” or “vaccine hysteria could spark totalitarian nightmare”. Of course, those titles could immediately be taken to signal a disagreement in values – and level of paranoia – more than a denial of medical facts. The titles of articles like “Big Pharma’s vaccines: Naked profit over safety”, “Feds attempt to squash homeopathic medicine” and “Government medicine is evil” (complete with plenty of references to Nazis and eugenics) are somewhat harder to explain away in that maner. But yes, Hieb employs a range of standard anti-vaccine tropes – called “scientific concerns over vaccination” because that sounds better than ‘unscientific concerns movitated by paranoia’, which is far more accurate – including variants of the “vaccines didn’t save us” trope. And yes, Hieb also suggests, falsely, that vaccines cause autism and SIDS, and that not only did the vaccine not save us but that the diseases vaccinated against were benign anyways. They were … not.

 

As for health freedom, we’ll leave it to readers to identify the face-palm moments in her gotcha argument against defenders of vaccine mandates: “I have made the point that the pro-forced vaccination crowd are generally also the pro Roe v. Wade crowd – and you can’t have both. You cannot scream for a ‘woman’s right to choose’ when it applies to abortion but give her no right to choose what gets administered to her in a syringe”. And yes, she even does the “If you believe absolutely in the benefit and protective value of vaccination, why does it matter what others do? Or don’t do?”.

 

Of course, paranoia got ramped up exponentially during Covid, which allowed Hieb to truly don the mantle of a civil rights activist on behalf of medical freedom and become one of the more influential antivaxxers and champions of COVID-related misinformation on the internet. She also became member of America’s Frontline Doctors, the infamous organizations of crackpots and wingnuts devoted to COVID-19 minimizing, pushing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, antivaccine conspiracy theories and that dreams about sex with demons explains many gynecological problems, but which is today recognized primarily for their unprecedented levels of cynical grifting. As for her own misinformation, Hieb was, among much else, a staunch promoter of the casedemic conspiracy theory, but she also suspected that the whole pandemic was a ploy by the powers that be to cause us to believe in a “virus that’s never been proven to exist”. In fact, Hieb has even invoked 5G conspiracy theories at various points and called COVID-19 mitigation methods a “satanic ritual.”

 

Elsewhere, e.g. when helping Liberty Counsel spread conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and COVID vaccines (which they seem to have done pretty effectively), she claimed that there was a conspiracy to keep hydroxychloroquine and “other effective COVID-19 treatments” hidden from the medical community and the public – “we are being sold a whole matrix narrative of information” – and the conspiracy goes beyond Big Pharma protecting the market for vaccines: “You cannot terrorize a world with designer viruses if you have a treatment in your back pocket,” said Hieb: “I think this is a big psychologic operation that’s designed not to make us healthier but for control.”

 

As for the vaccine – Hieb has spread numerous silly conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine – you should ostensibly “think of it like a computer chip;” also COVID-19 vaccines are “experimental biologic agent” and “experimental gene therapy.” They aren’t, but what does reality or accuracy matter at this point? She of also suggested that the vaccine could “spread” from vaccinated people to unvaccinated people – and by that, she doesn’t merely mean the myth that vaccines might “shed” but that “they” may have weaponized spike proteins by turning them into self-replicating proteins that also transmit to others for some nefarious purposes – and pointed out that if she were pregnant, she wouldn’t work around vaccinated people. To support her case, she pointed out that “I myself had the experience of touching a recently vaccinated patient, and almost a week later, developed significant nose bleeding that stopped only after dosing with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Many would say that this was a coincidence, but at age 68, this was the first nosebleed of my life.” It’s hard to argue with that. She also predicted that doctors’ offices would, as a consequence, soon begin turning away vaccinated people rather than unvaccinated ones.

 

Hieb on Cancer

So Hieb’s denialism, conspiracy mongering and predilection for pseudoscientific rather than science- and reality-based explanations goes far beyond vaccines (and why not: if your standards admit antivaccine nonsense, they’ll admit anything). Hieb has for instance also been “Fellowship Certified by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine”, which is, to put it mildly, not a good look if you don’t want to be associated with the quack label. Most strikingly, perhaps, Hieb, “The Medical Rebel” – who is very much not an oncologist – has done her own research (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Do_your_own_research) and discovered the true cause of cancer; according to Hieb, and something she “stumbled across during COVID”, all cancer is caused by parasites. The idea, of course, isn’t really that new – it’s been around in the fringiest fringe germ theory denialist corners of quackery for decades (it was, for instance, the basis for Hulda Clark’s legendary bullshit). so it’s not surprising that Hieb encountered it in her frequent forays into the rabbit hole. In particular, Hieb stumbled across pictures on the Internet of “cancer cells containing micro-parasites” and drew upon her own memories of biopsy of spine tumors, which she in retrospect “knows” contained parasites. And not only are doctors (and the government) hiding this knowledge: although “the government” has 70,000 codes for diseases, these might really be 70,000 presentations of just a “few root causes”. And yes, this is one of the central moves of quacks everywhere: medicine and disease is, contrary to what scientists say, not complex, but simple, with one or a very few “root causes” that can be treated by their favorite panacea. So Hieb believes that not only are parasites the cause of cancer, but of multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and acne rosacea and probably a lot of other things as well. For what is the accumulated evidence of countless, carefully conducted studies by people who know what they are doing compared to the speculation and imagination of a wingnut conspiracy theorist? Apparently Stew Peters, who also thinks Nazi gas chambers is a “fairy tale”, was impressed by Hieb’s ideas in the interview he did with her.

 

As for why we don’t know any of this, Hieb claims that MI-6, the CIA, and the Mossad own all the medical publications in the world, so they control all scientific information and control the narrative – Hieb (with Peters) even likens it all to The Truman Show. The proximal reason for hiding the information is less obvious to the rest of us, but we are confident it’s stunningly clear to Peters’ listeners.

 

Diagnosis: A thoroughly dangerous lunatic. Everything she believes, and everything she says, is completely bonkers – this is Hulda Clark-level woo and conspiracy nonsense – at all possible levels.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

 

#3016: John Hicks

John Hicks is a California-based MD who has decided, instead of practicing medicine, to dedicate “himself to the art and science of integrated holistic medicine. Using a cooperative medical, nutritional, emotional and energetic approach.” Yes, Hicks offers “holistic medicine”, including “energy medicine”. Perhaps we should let him try to explain it himself?

 

“Cutting edge quantum physics and ancient mystic traditions tell us the same thing: The universe and everything in it, including the human body, is made up of energy. Pure energy is unmanifested potential. When that energy is manifested, it takes on physical form. Our bodies, therefore, are manifested energy. Each of us has our own unique energetic vibration and energy field that is connected to the energy of the universe. Energy flows from us, through us and to us every minute of every day.”

 

Needless to say, this is not what cutting edge quantum physics tells us. It is baldfaced quantum woo, of course, and it touches on an impressive array to technobabble mainstays in just a few sentences. Oh, but Hicks isn’t done:

 

“Energy Medicine works with this energetic footprint and uses the innate wisdom of the body to shift negative energy, release blockages and restore balance and energy flow. The body always wants to heal itself. As energy medicine healers, we engage and facilitate the body’s own healing capacity. Because we believe that human beings are an energetic matrix of mind/body/spirit, energy medicine plays a role in all of our work.”

 

There are, to put it mildly, some metaphors in there that effectively insulates his choprawoo from pesky scientific testing or accountability. Indeed, this is rarefied pseudoscience.

 

Hicks also uses modalities like the raindrop technique and various fad-sensitive nutrition nonsense. Indeed, Hicks also appears to be the author of The Medicinal Power of Cannabis: Using a Natural Herb to Heal Arthritis, Nausea, Pain, and Other Ailments, which we are sure had the potential to become a commercial success and equally sure is completely bonkers. It is probably noteworthy that Hicks was a speaker at the 2014 version of the annual autism quackfest known as AutismOne together with antivaccine luminaries like Kerri Rivera and Andrew Wakefield.

 

Note that our John Hicks appears to be a different guy from John Hicks, author and cofounder of the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine (CICM) in Reading, UK, which “integrates Five Element and TCM theory and involves an integrated treatment”, and who apparently trained in Chinese herbal medicine with Ted Kaptchuk.

 

Diagnosis: Amazing bullshit, and although Hicks is genuinely an MD, he has completely gone over to the dark side – his bullshit is probably lucrative, and notice that he rarely says anything that is close enough to being meaningful that it could risk landing him in any kind of legal trouble. 

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence