#3057: Andrew Huberman

Andrew David Huberman is an American neuroscientist and associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and he is, without doubt, a real and respected researcher in his field. But Huberman is also an extremely popular and influential podcaster (the ‘Huberman Lab’), and as an influencer he goes way beyond of his areas of expertise to offer, like so many influencers, lifestyle advice (his podcast has, for instance, won a ‘Best Wellness & Fitness Podcast’ award at the iHeartPodcast Awards) based largely on pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, denialism and a rather arrogant trust in the powers of his own intuition; as a result, Huberman the wellness guru – he is an unofficial leader and champion of the biohacking movement – “recommends activities that are more befitting a deranged shaman than a scientist”, though the recommendations are often adorned with pop neuropsychology, and his podcast has been aptly described as a “Goop for bros” wellness space.

 

In particular, Huberman has promoted a range of “poorly regulated” dietary supplements, and his podcast is of course monetized and sponsored by “companies offering questionable products from the perspective of science-based medicine”, including AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens) – indeed, his podcast functions largely as a lucrative infomercial for unnecessary and shitty supplement products. Huberman has for instance contributed massively to the largely idiotic peptide craze currently plaguing America, and yes, his claims are backed mostly by pseudoscience and handwaving dressed in scientific-sounding jargon, with Huberman’s primary gambit being to refer to his own credentials. Perhaps as importantly as using his credentials as a scientist to lend credibility to such products, Huberman uses them to lend legitimacy to his guests, who comprise a colorful array of contrarians, grifters and pseudoscientists, including notorious nutrition misinformer Robert Lustig and hormone balancing quack Sara Gottfried. It’s all shit.

 

Huberman has also explicitly endorsed a number of specific pieces of misinformation and, yes, conspiracy theories. He has, for instance, endorsed the pseudoscientific leaky gut diagnosis, a pseudo-diagnosis championed e.g. by promoters of so-called functional medicine – fake diagnoses are, of course, a central part of alternative medicine: patients themselves are, after all, somewhat disposed to recognize that a quack’s favored piece of quackery doesn’t actually help against any real disease they might suffer from; if the diagnosis is fake too, things might quickly be less clear.

 

He has also thrown his lot in with the sunscreen denialists, stating that he was “... as scared of sunscreen as I am of melanoma” on the grounds that the ingredients include chemicals and citing a study that doesn’t appear to exist (he did, in fairness, backtrack on that one). And although Huberman can’t quite be called ‘antivaccine’, he has stated that he himself doesn’t get the flu vaccine mostly because a tough bro like him ain’t scared of no flu. His claims about colds and the flu are, predictably, rife with misinformation, as documented here, here, here, here and here: Huberman “misrepresents basic immunology, undermines proven public health measures, and exaggerates unproven wellness trends”, and yes, his take on the flu is dumb enough to include nonsense hacks for boosting your immune system (he also dismissed criticism on the grounds that he had “consulted” with some MDs when preparing the relevant episodes).

 

In line with his attraction to the pseudoscientific and conspiratorial, Huberman has expressed skepticism toward water fluoridation, and has on at least one occasion stated that he believes his Bluetooth headphones are harmful, thus feeding into the Wi-Fi/microwave conspiracy theories of his buddy RFK Jr., by claiming that he is getting “swollen lymph nodes and cysts” behind his ears due, apparently, to harmful “heat effects”. Here are some data. We are confident that Huberman’s fans won’t be bothered with them.

 

Diagnosis: The biohacking bro du jour, Huberman has, perhaps unwittingly, become one of the main poster boys for MAHA and belongs in the group of people like Dr. Oz and Deepak Chopra who use their credentials to spread pseudoscience – and no, it’s not all bad, and Huberman is probably not remotely as bad as those other two loons just mentioned; on the other hand, his reach is even wider: Indeed, Huberman’s reach is wide enough that he could probably have been doing a real service to the world if he had just bothered to cut the garbage (which, unfortunately, is where the money is).

 

#3056: Don Huber

 

Don M. Huber is a former Purdue University professor and current anti-GMO activist who (at least until relatively recently) were doing extensive publicity tours sponsored by various organic, alternative health and anti-GMO interest groups to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about genetically modified organisms. Huber is particularly focused on how glyphosate and herbicide tolerant GM crops are allegedly causing health problems in people and animals, and is most famous for his claims to have discovered, years ago, a novel pathogenic microbe that has been caused by agricultural genetic engineering and which is currently wreaking havoc on humans and animals. There is, of course, no shred of evidence to back up that claim – Huber himself has no peer reviewed publications on it and he has consistently refused to make his ‘data’ available for any other scientist to assess.

 

But Huber has long claimed that glyphosate and GMO herbicide tolerant crops are linked to human and animal health risks. According to Huber and not the data, animals fed GM crops are dying in record numbers, and there is a correlation between GM soy/corn and inflammatory bowel disease in humans (he tends to point out that correlation doesn’t imply causation, before launching into wild inferences about causation from correlations that don’t exist outside his own mind). He also claims that glyphosate is linked to alzheimer’s disease, gout, diabetes, Parkinson’s, allergies and fertility issues. He cites no scientific evidence for these claims, but does cite rants and claims by Gilles-Eric Séralini and infamous Maharishi-movement yogic flying instructor Jeffrey M. Smith.

 

Huber has collaborated with familiar anti-GMO activist researchers like Judy Carman and Jack Heinemann, and appears in a prominent role in the Gary Null-produced conspiracy flick Seeds of Death.

 

Diagnosis: Another one-time scientist who has gone full pseudoscientific crackpot (and scaremonger) in his olden days. Some grow wisdom; others, we suppose, lose any concern they might have had for evidence, accuracy or accountability. He’s pretty old, but we’re sure there are plenty of others ready to fill his shoes.

 

Hat-tip: Geneticliteracyproject

#3055: Colleen Huber

Colleen Huber is a naturopath, anti-vaccine activist and promoter of all things pseudoscience and quackery. 

 

Huber likes to call herself “naturopathic medical doctor”, which is probably an effective way to market her services by suggesting that her pseudoscientific bullshit might be based on real medicine, science, honesty or accountability: Arizona has a powerful quack lobby and actually allows – after much legislative alchemy – naturopaths a wide scope of practice, including serving as primary care physicians with independent prescribing authority. Huber provides her services at the Nature Works Best Cancer Clinic in Tempe, where she is the “medical director” (despite being an ND; she does not have any real medical degree, of course), and she is the president of the non-profit charity Naturopathic Cancer Society.

 

Huber is, however, probably best known for her litigious activities, in particular her defamation suit against naturopathy critic Britt Marie Hermes in 2016. The lawsuit came about after Huber’s organization had engaged in a ridiculous cybersquatting campaign targeting Hermes, whereupon Hermes decided to take a look at Huber’s “medical” practices and how Huber’s non-profit ostensibly raised donations for patients at Huber’s own clinic. Justice prevailed in that case, and the case – some details here – has become somewhat famous as an example of how legal thuggery is being used to try to silence critics.

 

At Nature Works Best, Huber treats cancer patients with sheer quackery like intravenous baking soda, megadoses of intravenous vitamin C, and a strict sugar-free diet. She also conducts ‘research’ out of her clinic – marketing fake cures as ‘experimental’ provides a familiar legal loophole for quackery – and has allegedly gathered data that shows that her naturopathic cancer treatments are “groundbreaking” and that “no other clinic has such a high documented success rate”. Helpfully, she invites the public to “verify this data for yourself”; perhaps she just assumes that no one is going to bother, since competent analysis of the data apparently suggests that (“[p]utting aside the ethical issues of the extremely bad study design, the lack of ethics committee approval or patients’ agreement”) “patients under natural care have more than a two-fold higher risk to die” compared to state-of-the-art treatment (and that if “one removes data of questionable quality and takes into account only those with complete data and in treatment resp. died during treatment (i.e. in remission, not yet in remission, died), the odds ratio gets almost 10:1 in favour of state of the art therapy. This is really nasty”). And no: using alternative treatments for cancer is not innocuous) (Huber’s own version of her results were published in – of course – the predatory journal Cancer Science and Therapy). One might wonder how her study ever got approved, though a clue might be that Huber is also the secretary and founding member of the International Naturopathic Clinical Research Institute (NCRI) (or American Naturopathic Clinical Research Institute (ANRI), or Naturopathic Oncology Research Institute (NORI) – the organization goes by many names), which functions as an institutional review board for ‘naturopathic clinical research’, and which, of course, approved her study in 2010.

 

Despite being obviously nonsense and despite Huber being obviously a deranged quack, her claims about success rates were uncritically parroted in e.g. the quack ‘documentary’ Cancer Can Be Killed produced by conspiracy theorist and filmmaker Jeff Witzeman.

 

Even more insidiously, Huber advocates against state-of-the-art oncology, especially chemotherapy and radiation, because she delusionally thinks these therapies strengthen cancer – she cites (even misrepresents, in fact) an old and widely debunked myth that “chemotherapy has a 2.1% survival rate” (the actual debunked myth had it falsely that chemotherapy only had a 2.1% increase in survival rate). In other words, there is not even the usual “integrative” nonsense sheen here; Huber suggests cancer patients forego real medicine in favor of quackery. She also cites Mercola and even Gary Null, no less, as authorities.

 

Huber is also a serious antivaccine activist who falsely claims that “[a]bundant evidence exists that the CDC schedule, and that most vaccines used in the United States, are both dangerous and ineffective.” (Nope; but Huber cites a bogus list by Neil Z. Miller and recommends people read Suzanne Humphries’ delusional conspiracy rants instead) Her antivaccine conspiracy theories of course reached some kind of peak during COVID, when Huber was tirelessly composing anti-vaccine posts loaded with every known anti-vaccine conspiracy and gambit (yes, she did invoke the Holocaust); for some details, this post is useful. And predictably, Huber, most famous for her own legal thuggery against critics, yelled “persecution” when the Arizona Naturopathic Physicians Medical Board (yes, even a naturopathic board) felt the need to take some action against her – despite Huber’s own claims, which you by now should know not to trust, the board review doesn’t seem to have primarily concerned her COVID misinformation but concerns about wtf she was administering intravenously to her patients. When Twitter, on the other hand, suspended her account due to COVID misinformation, Huber responded by suing Joe Biden.

 

Oh, and with regard to herbal supplements, Huber defends it (with one Stephen Helms) on her website by claiming that “[e]xperienced wine drinkers can tell the difference in taste between an expensive and inexpensive wine, but chemical analysis would probably not indicate much of any difference. In the same way an herbal tincture that is well prepared from whole plants by a knowledgeable person provides a medicine that is not able to be chemically analyzed as different, but is far superior to anything standardized on the basis of an ingredient that may not even be active.” If you don’t immediately see how breathtakingly silly that claim is (it is not only that Huber and Helms try to defend herbal supplements by likening it to homeopathy), we recommend that you read it again.

 

Diagnosis: A horrible excuse for a human being, Huber is mean, evil and rotten to the core. She is also delusional and paranoid. That combination makes her a threat to anyone in her surroundings, though hopefully her bullshit and malevolence has received sufficient attention to make at least some potential victims of hers aware of the dangers.

 

#3054: Jeanne Hubbuch

Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrome (EMS) is a fake diagnosis, and that assessment is not controversial among those who have actually studied, measured or bothered to investigate the issue: evidence “robustly” dispels the connection between WiFi and symptoms of ‘electromagnetic hypersensitivity’. As an illustration, patients in provocation studies remains unable to tell when they are being exposed to radiofrequency emissions, and they report the same symptoms regardless of whether the electromagnetic frequency-emitting devices are turned on or off; there is also the infamous Northern Ireland case where protesters demanded the removal of an iBurst tower citing health impacts, unaware that the tower had been switched off during the period when they claimed it was causing symptoms.

 

Nevertheless, a lot of people continue to believe and claim that they suffer from EMS, and there are plenty of grifters and deluded professionals out there to affirm these people and their stories; and they do of course, have access to pseudoscientific pseudostudies claiming to find connections through flagrant methodological flaws and/or deliberately shoddy study designs. Entirely predictably, there is noise, and there are court cases. For instance, in 2013, parents of 12-year-old boy filed a lawsuit against the Fay School in Massachusetts, alleging that the school violated his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to make accommodations to protect the boy from “extremely high levels of radiofrequency/microwave radiations”; the boy, according to the parents, suffered from EMS.

 

That case was of course dismissed but in their efforts, the parents recruited the help of Jeanne Hubbuch, MD, who ‘confirmed’ the boy’s alleged diagnosis, wrote letters to the school, and submitted a declaration in support of the suit. Of course, Hubbuch’s testimony was ultimately excluded by the court because she arrived at the fake diagnosis without bothering to consider other environmental factors that might have been in play, but Hubbuch is a typical specimen of the kinds of deluded professionals we mentioned above: the kind of pseudoscience- and conspiracy-oriented crackpots with real credentials but whose misguided efforts, though probably well-meaning, contribute to making the world a worse place to be. Hubbuch claims to be “board-certified in family practice and environmental medicine,” but the “certification in environmental medicine” is from the American Board of Environmental Medicine, which is not a recognized specialty board. She also practices “integrative”, “functional”, “biologic”, as well as orthomolecular medicine, and she “deals with the underlying causes instead of symptoms of a disease”. And if that last claim comes with certain connotations, then yes: Hubbuch does indeed practice homeopathy – the treatments listed on her website include “complex homeopathy” for cancer support in addition, for good measure, to chelation therapy. She also recommends alkaline diets, and her diagnostic tools include live cell analysis. Really, if there is a treatment that smacks of hokum, quackery or pseudoscience, Hubbuch will employ it.

 

In addition to being a member of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, Hubbuch is a member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), an aggressive organization dedicated to popularizing the fake diagnosis of “chronic Lyme”, which we have also had several opportunities to cover before (yes, fake diagnoses seems to be a bit of a specialty for Hubbuch).

 

Diagnosis: There are many of these, and we tend to catch them first when their antics are starting to have easily noticeable consequences. But even we struggle to find many of examples of genuine MDs with fewer scruples with regard to the employment of quackery and pseudoscience than Jeanne Hubbuch. She has no limits, and no standards, and she has long since moved beyond the point where stupidity turns into malice. A horrible person causing real harm to her surroundings.  

 

#3053: Zachary K. Hubbard

Zachary K. Hubbard is a paranoid conspiracy theorist, blogger, denialist, YouTuber, and marvelously silly (and angry) general crank. According to Hubbard, the entire world is fake (or “scripted”) and is run by a hidden evil conspiracy involving at least Jesuits and the Illuminati. This evil conspiracy controls elections, terrorist attacks, the weather, natural disasters, sporting events, COVID (fake!), and the deaths of celebrities and politicians, the latter being sacrificed “by the numbers” on a more or less daily basis (any celebrity or politician who dies, for whatever alleged reason and at whatever age, has apparently really been sacrificed by the cabal), unless they have just faked their deaths, which is apparently also common.

 

Hubbard’s evidence for this global conspiracy is ‘proofs’ he conducts using numerology – his own new gematria) – where he picks any random number he can associate with an event (be it the day of the year, how many days are left of the year, etc. subjected to any sort of permutation) to derive any conclusion he feels like deriving. According to himself, his gematria is “more proven than anything out there. You can laugh at anything in science if you're gonna laugh at MY work! My work's a theory, I've backed it up better than any scientific theory on the planet!”, and he is apparently on a sacred mission from God to unmask the Jesuit/Illuminati conspiracy through Youtube, blog posts and his weekly show on the what he calls Truth Frequency Radio; he has also written a rather expansive book on his topics, Letters and Numbers, as well as a follow-up, Number Games: 9/11 to Coronavirus, which was self-published on Amazon even though Amazon is an agent of the hidden powers that be.

 

Apparently Hubbard’s great “awakening” was the 9/11 attacks, which provided him with “indisputable proof” that the entire world is fake and that the Jesuits are behind it all. The proof that the 9/11 attacks were faked by the Jesuits runs roughly as follows: 9/11 is just like 9-1-1 (the US emergency dial number), and the WTC began construction in 1968, the same year 9-1-1 became the US dialing code. As if that isn’t enough, Flight 77 was in the air for 77 minutes (indeed, though the correlation works … less well for the other flights involved), the Pentagon is 77 feet tall and it’s located on the 77^th meridian. Clearly, the world is fake and the Jesuits are to blame.

 

Much of Hubbard’s work goes into using his new gematria to make predictions, in particular sports predictions (after all, sports are ripe with statistics and numbers to feed into numerology). You can read about his track record with sports predictions here and here. As for politics, Hubbard has issued such commonplace predictions as Hillary Clinton being rigged to win the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Oprah Winfrey becoming president in 2020 (it was, according to Hubbard, foretold in an episode of The Boondocks), or Obama being assassinated on 8/29/2014, 3/15/2015, 10/19/2015, 4/4/2016, as well as sometimes around the 2016 election (also, the Hoover Dam would collapse during the 2015 Superbowl and the Golden Gate Bridge on August 11th 2019). There are lots of predictions; presumably no one keeps track so Hubbard can emphasize (which he does a lot) the ones that sort of fit, such as predicting, in line with most polls, Biden’s 2020 victory.

 

As for Hubbard’s particular beliefs, he has at least argued that evolution, the Big Bang and Charles Darwin are Illuminati-based frauds, that the world is on the brink of a one world currency, that no planes actually hit the WTC on 9/11 (even Alex Jones rejected that one, so Hubbard promptly concluded that Jones is working with the Illuminati) and indeed that every major terrorist attack are false flag operations, that mainstream media is normalizing homosexuality to ensure depopulation, that vaccines cause autism (and much else bad), that climate change is a hoax, that (on the other hand) astrology and hermeticism are real and/or useful (something that is, of course, covered up by the powers that be), that the entire COVID pandemic was a hoax and that wearing face masks is symbolic compliance with the Mark of the Beast, that chemtrails are real, that the Holocaust was a lie, that Jeff Bezos lives on Mars (Elon Musk lives on Venus), that all of US history is fake, that sports athletes and politicians are artificially harvested in labs and aren’t actually humans (no, it is not a joke), and that outer space is a hoax. On the other hand, he officially rejects the Flat Earth conspiracy theory, so that’s … something?

 

Unfortunately, the powers that be seem to be on to him: in 2016, Hubbard experienced a police stakeout of his house for unknown reasons, and they issued an, according to Hubbard, “unjust” restraining order for “insane reasons” and ensured that he became ineligible to own a gun. Since he also such an ardent truth-speaker, his YouTube channels also tend to be taken down out of “censorship”.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, there might of course be reasons for his behavior that are of a kind we don’t like to designate as ‘lunacy’ for our purposes or in our sense of the word. But Hubbard does seem to have some followers, although it’s unclear exactly how many of them genuinely think his wild rants have anything to them and how many are just along for the laughs. 

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

 

#3052: Jenny Hrbacek

Cancer Free University (CFU) is an online course priced at $549. CFU is not a university, and it has no affiliation with any university or anything that resembles accreditation, but it is one of several clusters of pseudoscientific conspiracy nonsense videos produced by something called the Vitality Network run by one “Bobbi Vitality” (a.k.a. Robert Sultzbaugh). The videos promote a range of dangerous and ridiculous (and sometimes infamous) alternative cancer treatments, including PolyMVA, GcMAF, RIGVIR, Gerson therapy, Sono-Photo Dynamic therapy, and Ozone therapy – marketed as “viable options to chemotherapy, aggressive treatments, invasive surgery, and options that can free you from fear” – as well as dangerous pseudoscientific organizations like The Cancer Control Society and something called the Best Answer for Cancer Foundation (so named because the surname of one of the founder’s mother was ‘Best’; note that W. Lee Cowden and David Minkoff, for instance, are affiliated both with the Best organization and with CFU. CFU also offers interview with various deranged quacks, frauds and crackpots promoting various forms of cancer quackery.

 

The videos are presented by Jenny Hrbacek, a nurse and quack previously familiar as a promoter of the bogus RGCC cancer screening test as described e.g. in her book Cancer Free! Are You SURE?. According to her bio on her website “Cancerfreeexperts”, she offers “expert advice for detecting cancer in time” (i.e. using bogus tests) so that you can “intervene with diet, detox, and healing therapies in time to prevent a full-blown diagnosis”; in other words, it follows a very familiar marketing strategy: her bogus test gives you a false positive; you follow her advice; a real test is negative; so you conclude that her advice worked (on the other hand, if you do have cancer, relying on her tests may indeed prevent a diagnosis; it won’t do shit for the cancer). Hrbacek is also “advisory board member of BeatCancer.org [they have a Quack Miranda Warning], a general advisory board member of Best Answer for Cancer Foundation, and an advisory board member of Wellness Outreach Worldwide Church,” which is a useful list of organizations to avoid at all cost if you were ever diagnosed (or not) with cancer. Hrbacek has also been associated with Ty Bollinger.

 

Diagnosis: No, you shouldn’t trust her on anything. This is garbage.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

 

#3051: Patrick Howley

Patrick Howley is a pro-Russian “racist, antisemitic, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist”; founder and former editor-in-chief of the wingnut conspiracy website Big League Politics (BLP); former reporter for a number of other wingnut media sources like Breitbart, The Washington Free Beacon, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller, The Epoch Times and so on; and popularizer of QAnon conspiracy theories. Howley has for instance hosted programs on Patriots’ Soapbox and participated at AFPAC, and he pals around with the circle around Dalton Clodfelter and Nick Fuentes. Currently, Howley is writing for the wingnut conspiracy website National File, which largely publishes propaganda for neo-nazi groups. To the general public, however, he might be most famous for the controversies that erupted in April 2022 after he complained that there were too many Black people at the CMT Music Awards (“Country music is different. It’s not Wakanda,” said Howley).

 

Conspiracy theories

Under Howley’s leadership, BLP became one of the major and early promoters of QAnon conspiracy theories; in an article from January 2018, for instance, BLP published a profile article about the “revolutionary citizens” who were trying to decode Q drops, claiming e.g. that this movement, “centered around the 17th letter of the alphabet and also the 17th letter of the ancient Greek alphabet”, in fact “dates back to 345 BC, where ‘Q’ created an underground resistance […] to study and circumevent the tactics of the Romans”, that “President Trump is aware of their movement, that the Deep State is actively trying to silence and frame and imprison truth-tellers, that a missile was witnessed fired near Singapore aimed at Air Force One, the significance of the number 17 to President Trump, and so much more.” Though BLP claimed that the article was written by “a truth-teller who chooses to remain anonymous at this time”, it was published under Howley’s byline.

 

And Howley has indeed engaged in and promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on numerous occasions, including the core tenet that “America is [at least unless Trump is in charge] a human trafficking colony for pedophilic financial elites” as well as “a Goy army for war tyrants.” (Yes, you only have to scratch the surface of most QAnon subscribers for the global Jewish conspiracy to emerge, and in the case of Howley, you don’t have to scratch at all.) Or, even more explicitly: “There is a religion called satanism and that religion, which practices witchcraft, believes – due to the teaching of Aleister Crowley – that their spells and their summoning of demons from Hell is enhanced by child molestation and child sacrifice. That is a fact [Yes, there’s that trick again]. That is a fact of our world and you can call it a conspiracy theory, but it is something that we have to confront.” And satanism is the religion of the globalist elite, including Hilary Clinton: “It’s very clear to me that she is a satanist. It’s obvious. It was very, very clear to me that she was a satanist. John Podesta is a satanist and I believe George Soros as well is a satanist.” To counter this powerful satanist movement, Howley has boldly suggested that “[a]nyone who has ever consumed the adrenochrome of children should be banned from holding public office.” Howley also wants to bring back literal witch trials for Clinton and her ilk.

 

BLP, meanwhile, had by 2018 established itself as a significant disseminator of conspiracy drivel (e.g. publishing Laura Loomer’s nonsense), and had for instance played a major role in the spread of Seth Rich Murder conspiracy theories and the notion that former President Obama was actively trying to take down President Donald Trump by forming a “shadow government” and by surveilling and targeting Trump Tower and the Supreme Court (e.g. by “hacking” Chief Justice John Roberts – which, according to Howley, is also how Obama got Roberts to vote to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in 2012). At the same time, they made influential efforts to try to downplay the role of neo-Nazi relationship to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, even trying to blame the death of Heather Heyer on an anti-racism activist and UNCA professor. BLP also supported white nationalist Paul Nehlen in his unsuccessful 2017 attempt to challenge former House Speaker Paul Ryan in his GOP primary, as well ​​the congressional campaigns of neo-Confederate candidate Corey Stewart and Roy Moore.

 

Politics – and conspiracy theories (and Jews)

“Everything in politics is about the issue of human trafficking”

-       Patrick Howley

 

Howley is of course an ardent MAGA cultist, but insofar as his views are so deeply mired in insane conspiracy theories and wild fantasies, it is a bit unclear what he actually thinks Trump is doing. In any case, according to Howley (in 2022), “the Globalist Regime that currently controls the U.S. government is a genocidal hostile authoritarian cabal operating under the auspices of fake ‘democracy’ to keep humans relegated to Third World slave status everywhere -- and they HATE White men.” Indeed, “globalists are illustrating the end of America with a mentally-vacant pedophile ‘president,’ and a nationwide borderless supply-starved masked Hunger Games-style anarcho-tyranny frenzy driven by jewish propaganda to whip up violence against Whites.” (Yes, Howley has been consistent in his contention that “Joe Biden is a tyrant war pig pedophile!”) At least Trump, Howley imagined, would put an end to such flagrant jewry, which to Howley is perhaps the most central concern: “How often does society have to go through the motions of pretending that Jews are not controlling hostile globalist institutions, lest we be cancelled by the hostile globalist institutions that Jews control?”

 

That Howley subscribes to the Great Replacement theory should come as no surprise: “everyone knows that White people are getting replaced and genocided, but the normies on both sides want to censor you if you talk about it because they support the White genocide.” And he blames not only Democrats here (whose “obsession with destroying Trump is merely a symptom of their fanatical hatred for regular White people in America”); also the GOP is “genociding” white people by welcoming conservative activists of color. For instance, Gov. DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, is a “race traitor” because “promoting minorities over Whites and bragging about it, especially when the minorities are just stooges of the malicious government agenda, is race traitor behavior.” Really, “both of America’s political parties are controlled by competing factions of pedophilic Jews who both seek to sell us to China”. And remember that when people use the terms ‘equity and inclusion’, what they are really saying is that “they want to kill whitey and forcibly rape children” (though it is perhaps not the most central concern here, some might worry about why Howley felt the need to insert the qualifier ‘forcibly’).

 

Evidence of the massive racism Howley thinks exists against white people (young white men are the most racially profiled and discriminated against people in America) is not hard to come by: for instance, “you go into a store, and they’ll follow us around.” The signs might not always be immediately obvious, however, but Howley is willing to help you see, e.g. by translating mainstream media stories to show what they are really trying to tell you: for instance, a story about child care really means “they want to rape your kids” and a story about the Super Bowl actually means “go BLM and kill whitey”.

 

Meanwhile, he reminds black people that “everything blacks hate about white people they are really just talking about Jews.” As such, he is occasionally willing to strike a conciliatory tone, for “[d]espite our differences, we are all getting poisoned by the jews.” Some of that poisoning, by the way, happens through vaccines – Howley is anti-vaccine – and some of the discrimination he faces might be due to the magic effects of vaccines: everywhere Howley goes, vaccinated “normies” who don’t even know who he is instinctively hate him because they know he’s a “pureblood” (during COVID, he called medical doctors and nurses – “Zionists” – “sick little needle dick needle cultists” who are “getting sexual stimulation” from raping children with COVID-19 vaccines). After all, he is, in his own words, “not racist” but simply concerned about the “agenda by the globalists against the white race.”

 

As for the ‘pro-Russian’ characteristic mentioned above, Howley has consistently rooted for Putin’s victory in the Ukraine: “They want me to care about Ukraine so much and I don’t that it just makes me happy to see when they’re sad. Their misery, their failure, their disappointment is funny and gratifying to me”.

 

Meanwhile, Howley’s approach to social issues is perhaps typified by his telling women who criticize the overturning of Roe v. Wade that their concerns are “trivial”: “You’re gonna hush your mouth. I hear a lot of ‘waah, waah, waah,’ not a lot of churning butter. ... We’ve heard enough from you.” Ah, the wit and intellect of Patrick Howley! Also, “leftist women should not be allowed to murder babies. They are demonically possessed.”

 

BLP

Though Howley is currently out of the BLP, he was one of the website’s cofounders and helped raise its profile, so it seems appropriate to provide a brief rundown of BLP here – they did, after all, continue along the path Howley had laid out for them after he left. BLP is currently owned by Mustard Seed Media, which is owned by North Carolina political operative Reilly O’Neal and pizzagate promoter Noel Fritsch, the latter of whom was also campaign manager for January 6 2021 rioter Derrick Evans.

 

Other conspiracy theorists associated (at various points) with BLP include

 

-       Peter D’Abrosca, who currently covers “crime and campus extremism in higher education” for Fox News Digital.

-       Cassandra Fairbanks (now MacDonald), who currently writes for the Gateway Pundit but who has also written for the Russian state-sponsored outlet Sputnik

-       Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used to be a “correspondent” for the site.

-       Jen Lawrence, who together with fellow BLP figure Dustin Stockton was a seminal figure in organizing the January 6 2021 attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

-       Sonny Joy Nelson, who joined Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign as associate director of strategic communications.

-       Luke Rohlfing, a leading member of the Proud Boys.

-       Lee Stranahan, host of the radio show Fault Lines on the Russian government-backed Sputnik Radio and a central promoter of Russian propaganda and misinformation e.g. about the Ukraine war, but also a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories concerned with the mythical deep state and Soros (e.g. that Charlottesville was a Soros-backed set-up for a violent coup to take out Trump).

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is, and has always been, primarily a shitposting troll at what delusional conspiracy theorists consider ‘media outlets’. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t the unapologetic Nazi he claims to be – and, at the very least, that’s the persona most of those who listen to him are actually listening to.