#2995: Joshua Haymes

Joshua K. Haymes is a conspiracy theorist, podcaster, manosphere prophet, pastor, violently unhinged fundamentalist, and a living parody of the unholy alliance between fuming Taliban-style fundamentalism and contemporary groyperism. He currently works fulltime as a podcaster (the Reformation Red Pill podcast), but used to be co-pastor of SOMA Venice and a pastoral intern at Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a congregation in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CoREC). As such, he is most famous for being pastor for US defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a fact he doesn’t exactly tend to shut up about, and which explains a lot in the scariest possible way.

 

Indeed, the relationship between Haymes and Hegseth is a close one: Haymes’s podcast cohost is Brooks Potteiger, the pastor at Pilgrim Hill and Hegseth’s closest spiritual adviser, and Hegseth has appeared on the podcast numerous times. Haymes, meanwhile, thinks that Democrats and the media hate Pete Hegseth because he is “a straight, white, Christian man” who is preventing them from establishing their “gay race commie utopia.”

 

CoREC core tenets and Christian nationalism

CoREC (yes, we have written about Doug Wilson before but admit that his rise to prominence the last couple of years might warrant an updated entry) endorses the doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, which encompasses the idea that all aspects of human life, including government, is or should be bound by a vision of biblical law that aligns with Old Testament precepts of ‘morality’ and punishment.

 

CoREC also endorses Postmillennialism, the view that Christ will return after Christian domination of the world is achieved, an idea that is – obviously – a major motivator for Christian nationalism movements that wish to transform society through religious and political means and think that any opposition to Christian nationalism is guided by Satan. Haymes himself is officially fighting to impose Christian nationalism on the nation “because if we don’t win politically and spiritually, then my great-grandchildren will be very likely imprisoned for saying the kinds of things that we [believe].” The prediction is of course merely a projection of his own preferences for how those who have different beliefs from himself should be treated.

 

Haymes is a devoted subscriber to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and believes that e.g. Democrats (Satanists) are deliberately working to replace Americans with Muslims to prevent the return of Christ: “make no mistake,” says Haymes, “mass immigration is designed by liberal globalists to destroy, to destroy our culture … Anglo-Protestant culture. […] specifically, they want more non-Christian, non-white people to come [to] supplant and replace the white voting population.” (For note: “White People Are Native Americans”, something that is important to remember when Haymes claims that “only Native Americans should hold political office in America.”) By contrast, as Haymes sees it, “Is the Bible in favor of these Ice raids? The answer is yes.” After all, “the Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture” – curiously, Haymes neglected to cite chapter and verse, but the idea is presumably all over the place and Haymes absorbed it from the Biblical whole by Biblical osmosis. And to emphasize, the anti-ICE protesters are “the bad guys” here because they are “actively trying to replace the native-born population of America with third-world migrants.”

 

Though he sometimes appears to promote the Lost Cause of the South, lamenting e.g. that the slaveholding states simply wanted to secede but “Lincoln and the north, the federal government said: no, you may not” and used unjustified power to get their way, it is worth noting that Haymes doesn’t, as opposed to what defenders of the Lost Cause idea usually try to do to cover their tracks, denounce slavery. Indeed, Haymes has explicitly argued that “the institution of slavery is not inherently evil. It is not inherently evil to own another human being” and “it is very important that every Christian affirm what I just said;” for in fact, “Christians in America have been led astray on this topic”. Haymes has also unconditionally endorsed the views of white nationalist and founder of the American Renaissance, Jared Taylor.

 

Haymes’s views on the state and society

“Republican Platform 2032 – Abolish Abortion & IVF – Ban Pornography – Bring Back Public Executions For Violent Offenders – Outlaw No Fault Divorce – Overturn Obergefell – Ban Gay Adoption – Ban public indecency (Which would ban pride parades). What did I miss?”

-       Joshua Haymes

 

Among other things, CoREC is famous for their view on voting in rights, in particular that women should lose the vote in the US (and note that Hegseth appears to agree). After all, as Haymes puts it, “Voting is not a sacred right granted by God” and should, as such, not apply to everyone. In Haymes’s Biblical vision for society, only men take part and “to be ruled by women is, in fact, a curse”; even in the home, “the father has actual authority over his wife and children. And then the wife has authority over the children too, but ultimately it’s a patriarchal vision” (he does apparently not even pretend to advocate complementarianism). So when Joshua Haymes leads his own family in prayer, he explicitly prays “that God would give [his wife] grace to obey me.” As such, what would things look like if women were to be able to exercise power by voting?! Good grief.

 

And if you thought he hates women, he will tell you that the target here is not really women, but Satan: “Satan loves androgyny” [?], so “Christian women would do well to make a concerted effort to dress in a distinctly feminine manner in today’s gender confused clown world.” Importantly, though, ‘feminine manner’ does not include bikinis, which should be banned. “By the grace of God We WILL pass laws that legislate women’s bodies,” says Haymes.

 

Haymes has also advocated for capital punishment for adultery and abortion (though he qualified his endorsement of the former a little: “I am not in favor of rushing to capital punishment for adultery. Though in principle I am not against it. I am certainly in favor of completely overturning no-fault divorce and outlawing adultery, and enforcing serious penalties for it”). In fact, Haymes is particularly concerned that such executions should be public: “Public executions are Biblical. Therefore public executions are good. Therefore we should bring back public executions.” That said, he is apparently “not yet sold on the idea that all capitol [sic] punishment must be a public stoning where the community partakes” and might prefer “death by a public firing squad wherein the accuser and witnesses partake in the firing”.

 

The focus on punishment is actually pretty central to Haymes’ (and CoREC’s) view of how the state should be organized (and it’s important to note that Hegseth, again, appears to agree). You see, “The state’s role is not to do good,” such as providing education or healthcare or welfare; that’s for the family and for the church. The state’s role is “primarily punishment, capital punishment and [other] punishments.” And of course, the state, as well as the family, is bound to operate within the confines of biblical law where the Bible is understood as a unity, and in which Old Testament law – including proscriptions on homosexuality and adultery – is still binding.

 

As for gay rights in particular, Haymes has called for the drowning of LGBTQ+ Pride marchers. He tried to clarify that one a bit: “I do not believe that anyone should be drowning anyone in this scenario. I am simply stating the fact that Christ says that drowning is better than causing little ones to sin” but also that we need to take responsibility to ensure that Christ’s words determine our actions and our laws. Keep in mind that homosexuality is “uniquely evil”, and that “the dystopian LGBT nightmare” (Hegseth) is “one of Satan’s greatest tools for excising Christ from not just our classrooms but our country”. At the very least, it is “indefensible” for any Christian to believe that “gay couples should have the right to adopt children”; rather, “we should be looking to BOTH legislate and stigmatize this wickedness into oblivion.” After all, “modern LGBT is likely worse than Sodom”, since “modern LGBT cultists target kids” – though fortunately, homosexuality can be cured!

 

Meanwhile, people who post social media content that he dislikes should be jailed (see: no executions called for): “I’m in favor of using political power to tamp down on evil, degenerate, anti-social behavior,” or really, anything that doesn’t align with his views on things.

 

According to Haymes, liberalism is currently a greater threat to the US than neo-Nazism, and the only hope for America is “total defeat of leftist liberal ideology”; as he sees it, “it’s Christ or chaos.” The left consists of “evil, hateful demons” who have “declared war” (some might be struck by the notion that it is Haymes who seems to be trying to declare war, but you probably shouldn’t apply concerns for accuracy or details here). Also, Martin Luther King Jr. was apparently “worse than Stalin”.

 

Haymes on religious freedom

Like most wingnuts of his kind, Haymes engages in free historical revisionism to back up his view of how society should be organized. According to Haymes, “America was founded as a Christian nation”, even though it is currently “an apostate nation.” The current focus on religious freedom, for instance, is as such not only in conflict with the Bible but with the US’s own founding principles –that is, Haymes elaborates: “the First amendment was designed to ensure that every American can be any kind of CHRISTIAN he wants […] It was not designed to ensure every American has the right to publicly worship demons. False religion can and should be banned from public life.” The scholarship that went into this conclusion is of the same kind that has gone into most of his other conclusions (he really doesn’t care about truth or accuracy on these issues), but one upshot is of course that “every single politician should be giving special treatment to Christianity.” Not that Haymes particularly fancies the Constitution anyways: what he really wants is to take America “back to 1750”, before the Constitution, “to a time when we were 99 percent Christian.”

 

Anyways, with regard to other religions, Haymes is a “Christian supremacist” who thinks that “every other religion worships dumb idols and demons,” and he is adamant that non-Christian religions should not be allowed in America: “We should absolutely ban public displays of demon worship, and require our political leaders to be Christian.” In particular, he wants it known that he “hate[s] Islam with a perfect hatred” (theologians might note that Haymes views hatred as a perfection) and “want it be completely obliterated” (at the very least, they should be legally prevented from holding office.) And he unequivocally supported “the Muhammadan travel ban from Trump 1? That was awesome.”

 

Hinduism is not much better. Reacting to a statue of a Hindu deity in Mississauga, Ontario, Haymes lamented that “This is what a conquered [i.e. ‘greatly replaced’] nations [sic] looks like”. Indeed, his views on other religions seem to give rise to his main gripe with the Trump administration, which doesn’t always realize that America was founded exclusively for Christians and therefore, as he has repeatedly pointed out, that Hindus like Vivek Ramaswamy “should not hold public office” – “We must not permit demon worshipers to hold public office in our nation.” He is also “pretty positive yoga is demonic” (like birth control) because of yoga’s perceived origin in Hinduism (he is, by the way, on collision course with many of his followers on that one).

 

Other views conspiracy theories

Haymes has also toyed with straight-up QAnon content, and he is for instance confident that “Pizzagate is real.”

 

As for science, Haymes is of course a creationist, primarily on the grounds that “Darwinian evolution is fake and gay.”

 

Diagnosis: Primarily a horror movie clown with murderous tendencies; a deeply fundamentalist, raging conspiracy theorist groyper whose concern for truth, accuracy or decency is non-existent. Now, there are many such people out there, but Haymes has a direct line to the loftiest circles of power in the US and seems to wield genuine influence over those circles.

 

#2994: Dave Hayes

A.k.a. Praying Medic

 

There are run-of-the-mill QAnon proponents, and then there is Dave Hayes. Hayes has been among the leading proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory – the idea that insiders within the Trump administration have been dropping hints for years about a supposed plan to take down the “deep state” and its worldwide satanic pedophilia network consisting of Democrats, celebrities and anyone they disagree with on politics – from its early beginnings, and his videos promoting and explaining QAnon’s cryptic postings have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Specifically, Hayes perceives his role as “red-pilling you [the QAnon movement] about God” and to serve as a prophetic messenger for the Lord to whoever is behind the QAnon account(s) – or in other words: Not only has Hayes deluded himself into thinking that there is a group of heroes working covertly within the administration to provide hints about Trump’s heavenly battle with the deep state to the public; he has deluded himself into thinking he is on the supply side of QAnon information, which must surely count as something close to a world record in delusion.

 

Let’s allow him to explain himself: “Sometimes I will post things on Twitter and it is cryptic and you don't understand it,” says Hayes. “If you don’t understand the stuff I post on Twitter, that’s fine; it’s not for you,” or in other words: what he posts is more or less random strings of nonsense that he nonetheless accepts as infallible truths (and note how God and Q, according to Hayes, operate in more or less exactly the same way – indeed, Q is, according to Hayes, a “PSYOP” orchestrated by Trump and the military just like “Jesus was a PSYOP from God”). And yeah, “sometimes I put out cryptic, weird messages,” but “that’s just kind of how prophetic people are. God gives you a message, you deliver the message. It is up to the receiver to understand it. You’re just the messenger. My job is not always to explain the message, my job is to give the message and somebody else is going to have to figure out what it means.” He likens his role to that of a postal carrier who simply delivers messages to people’s homes but isn’t supposed to stick around to explain the messages to their recipients. “Sometimes I get message for Q and his team”, in which case he interprets it as: “God shows me, ‘Hey, this is what Q is doing, this is where it’s going, this is what’s happening down the road.’ And I will post things on Twitter and those messages are for Q.” So, he doesn’t really even need to bother with the Q middleman – whatever falls into his deranged imagination is automatically a deep truth to be shared widely and guide future policy; the ideas of reason and evidence and coherence as constraints on what to believe is so far from Hayes’ mode of thinking that it can just as well be dismissed as a leftist conspiracy. “And I will say this, delivering messages for the God of the universe, there isn’t a job that is much cooler than that,” says Hayes. And people listen; lots of people, apparently.

 

Apparently God thinks that Hayes is “the bee’s knees” and has accordingly been speaking to him for a while: “God has been speaking to me in dreams for about eight years and I have a long history of God revealing things to me about the future in dreams. And I’ve come to rely heavily on the revelation that I receive from God in dreams. It’s proven to be pretty darn accurate, as long as I interpret it correctly” (a lot hinges on the latter qualification, apparently). It was also God who confirmed the legitimacy of QAnon to him through a prophetic dream: “God started speaking to me about Q in dreams in December [2017]” in an attempt to help open his eyes to the hidden connections between seemingly unrelated incidents. “Since then, I’ve probably had well over 75 or 80 dreams about Q”, including dreams about “people that I think are going to be arrested pretty soon, that Q has been alluding to arrests coming” (God also told him that it is all “about the children”, i.e. “saving children that are being trafficked” for procurement of adrenochrome through ritual Satanic sacrifices).

 

Hayes has written at least one book on Q, Calm Before the Storm, which is ostensibly the first in what he says could easily be a lengthy series of Q Chronicles that possibly includes a screenplay. Earler books from his hand include Hearing God’s Voice Made Simple; Defeating Your Adversary in the Court of Heaven; and American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare. To monetize his conspiracy ramblings, Hayes registered Praying Medic as a religious nonprofit in Washington State in 2018.

 

What God told Dave

Hayes allegedly had a dream in 2016 in which God showed him a world “where there was no poverty, there was no sickness, there was no homelessness” – “everywhere I went, there was lavish abundance” – for those who voted for Trump; accepting Trump, by voting for him, is apparently the path to salvation; for everyone else, however, there was suffering. One day, says Hayes, “our grandchildren are going to look excitedly into our eyes, and beg us to tell them, once more, their favorite story; how Q and the Patriots saved the world.” Even religious fanatics need to rethink their view of the end times, according to Hayes given that Trump is creating a Utopia:

 

“Now we have Trump. If Trump manages to get rid of the deep state, if Trump manages to get rid of the Rothschilds, George Soros, and all of the people that are funding wars, then if Trump manages to destroy this globalist agenda, he is going to destroy the New World Order. The rule of the banksters is coming to an end, the deep state is being gutted, and I believe Trump is going to defund all of them, destroy the New World Order, destroy the globalist agenda and he is going to be very successful in destroying and eliminating all that stuff that has been built over the last 100 years. Trump’s presidency and what he is doing on a geo-political scale should make every one of you go back to the Bible and look again at your understanding of the End Times, the Last Days.”

 

Heck, even “the cures for diseases that they have hidden from us are going to be revealed” by the Trump administration.

 

In 2019, Hayes predicted that mass arrests of prominent Democrats and thousands of business, media, and entertainment leaders would happen within the next year and destroy the Democratic Party for a generation: “likely hundreds of members of Congress – most of them Democrats, some Republicans – they’re going to be arrested and they’re going to be prosecuted for corruption. It’s going to happen. We’re going to see a lot of people in Hollywood rolled up and prosecuted for corruption.” After all, the Trump administration had, according to Hayes, already before the 2018 midterms warned members of Congress that they were going to be prosecuted if they remained in office, and by refusing to resign they’ve sort of brought this upon themselves: “some of them are probably going to go to Gitmo, and some of them may be executed”. The actual charges Hayes thinks will be brought against these people remain somewhat unclear and are probably unimportant anyways.

 

Among obvious candidates for (public) execution were John Kerry and Barack Obama, on the grounds that they (and other members of the deep state) were actively and covertly working to thwart Trump’s efforts to broker a peace deal with Iran because they want to create a global conflagration that will destroy the United States and create a one-world government. Like Democrats in general, Obama and Kerry hate the US and patriotism; the Biden administration even – and apparently unbeknownst to sheep-like observers – “declared war on patriotism, and the FBI is leading the charge” (the January 6 insurrectionists were “prisoners of war”). Among Republican candidates for execution you might find Sebastian Gorka, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists at one point tended to like but who also called QAnon activists ‘garbage’, whereupon they promptly placed him in the category deep state agents.

 

According to Hayes, these events will take place imminently – “the storm is coming and there is nothing anyone is gonna do to stop it” – and have been imminent since at least 2018.

 

Hayes’s predictions between 2020 and 2024 were, of course, framed in terms of stop-the-steal conspiracy theories, though he would usually not bother with fake or silly evidence for these ideas, preferring instead to appeal straight to God told him. Just days before the Biden inauguration, for instance, Hayes claimed that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was sending out coded messages on Twitter revealing that Trump had a secret plan to stay in office, a conclusion based on perceived correspondence with what Hayes imagines was exactly what God was telling him personally. Accordingly, he consistenly predicted that various wingnut efforts, like the Arizona election audit, would uncover massive voter fraud across the board.

 

Of course, Q’s predictions have consistently failed, but Hayes has an explanation for that, too, in order to counter Q’s detractors (or “the doubtfags”, as he calls them): Q has to lie “for the purposes of psychological operations.” Remember that “Q did warn us on the front end of the conversation that a lot of what he was going to put out was going to be disinformation”; in other words, the failed predictions are all part of the plan and contrary to appearances, the miserable track record of Q predictions is, in fact, evidence of Q’s infallibility. So it goes. Meanwhile, Q followers shouldn’t worry about “globalists” trying to “starve us to death and destroy our economies” because God will miraculously “multiply the food we have” and allow cars to run without gas (you can trust this prediction since it’s based not merely on Q’s messages but on a dream).

 

Means

After the 2020 election, when naïve people wondered whether QAnon would go away, Hayes was among those (repeatedly) calling for a military coup against Biden (probably “an illegitimate president” and “the representative of a foreign government inserted into our political system”), saying that the military was “​​the last line of defense against tyranny, and I think they’re going to be forced to step in” on the model of what had recently happened in Myanmar, where the military overthrew the civilian government and imprisoned its leaders over claims of voter fraud (many QAnon followers had already applauded Myanmar’s military, calling it a model for what should happen in the United States). It is, however, important to remember that the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, was not an attempt at anything like this but a deep state false flag operation carried out by Black Lives Matter and antifa to cover up the fraud that stole the election from Trump. There is a fine example of the analytical tools Hayes’ uses to arrive at these sorts of conclusions on display here.

 

Indeed, Hayes warned against Trump running in 2024, since it might just lead to “a redo of the 2020 election” with all its perceived (and soon to be exposed) election fraud and claimed that it would be better if “the military takes over” (though he did, of course, simultaneously warn his listeners about how the Biden administration, as he saw it, was shockingly trying to impose martial law). And signs that this was how it was all set up were everywhere, in Hayes’ mind; for instance, Trump obviously “set up the withdrawal from Afghanistan” with the intention that Biden would “botch it” and be removed via the 25th Amendment, at which point the military would step in (before then-Vice President Kamala Harris could be sworn in), “make mass arrests, and restore Trump to the White House” (observation of the 25^th amendment evidently disappeared at some point in Hayes’s train of thought).

 

Keep in mind that QAnon is, as Hayes sees it, not a conspiracy theory but “the end of all conspiracies”, since Q is, eventually, going to “expose the truth on most of those historical events,” including “the sinking of the Titanic, what the Federal Reserve is all about, 9/11, a lot of things that we don’t even think about. Q has occasionally talked about aliens and UFOs, and I think that at some point down the road, Q is going to have shined a light on a lot of subjects of interest to a lot of people.” Hayes’s list also includes “the JFK assassination, Sandy Hook, whatever”.

 

The Deep State

Trump’s fight is a hard one, of course: it’s a “zero-sum game” (Hayes had apparently not quite learned a new expression) to the death. The mythical deep state, run by the Democrats and their allies in Hollywood and the media, are as powerful as they are scrupulous. For instance, in 2020, the Democrats knew that the COVID-19 pandemic (a “plandemic”, according to Hayes) “was coming from China” and they intentionally timed the impeachment case against President Donald Trump to distract him in hopes of crashing the stock markets, ensuring “100 million people losing their jobs”, and maybe “killing 5 or 10 million people” because, well, that’s what the deep state is for.

 

In an interview with fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist Sean Morgan in 2020, Hayes claimed that Q had also exposed a “deep state” plan to use the George Floyd protests as cover to “take down Trump’s Twitter account, take down communications in North America, and then try to possibly storm the White House and physically remove President Trump from office” (something, remember, that Hayes explicitly supports doing if the president was Biden and the stormers MAGA cultists). Citing a typically incoherent “Q drop”, Hayes also said that the reason nothing ever happened was not that Q was wrong but that by revealing the plans in a cryptic fashion and “telling hundreds of millions of people around the world what the deep state was going to do”, Q had foiled the plan by revealing it (the rest of us sheeple really fail to grasp how important and influential Q is). And as Hayes sees it, the George Floyd protests were really a carefully choreographed affair: “The deep state works in secret. The riots in the protests, that is meant to look organic, but it was actually orchestrated and carefully planned ... You can’t risk having the public know that you had planned this whole thing all along”.

 

As for media, at least conventional media is a mouthpiece for Satan (“They’re corrupt. They’re evil”), and God has shown Hayes that President Trump is waging “a battle to the death” against the media. “Trump is going to destroy the mainstream media, and there is going to be a media that comes and replaces the mainstream media and that media is us”, where ‘us’ refers to  MAGA’s “army of digital soldiers”. Frighteningly, Hayes doesn’t seem to be completely off about this prediction.

 

As for political violence, Hayes thinks that it is important for the MAGA movement to have extremists who are advocating violence because that forces the establishment to “negotiate with rational people like us” (he obviously complained that HBO’s documentary about the conspiracy theory portrayed QAnon followers as a bunch of “oddballs and outcasts”, which they emphatically aren’t: they’re rational people dammit).

 

Hayes’ views on medicine

Hayes has of course parroted anti-vaccine nonsense as well, in particular in relation to the Covid vaccine, which he thinks is, at best, unsafe (it isn’t). Now, how does Hayes square this assumption with his belief that Trump is infallible and that Trump not only recommended but took credit for the development of Covid vaccines? As opposed to most antivaxxers and antivaccine-adjacent dingbats in the MAGA crowd, Hayes has actually (repeatedly) tried to address this particular instance of glaring cognitive dissonance; according to Hayes “Trump allowed vaccine makers to ignore all safety protocols [utter bullshit] in order to rush dangerous COVID-19 vaccines to market so pharmaceutical companies would be sued out of existence: ‘What if this whole thing is a freakin’ set-up to take down Big Pharma?’” asks Hayes. Do not let the glaring stupidity of the suggestion make you overlook what the hypothesis reveals about the ethics Hayes thinks God has taught him.

 

The suggestion, however, does fit with Hayes’s general view of medicine. Hayes wants to dismantle the whole current health-care system in favor of a God-ordained health-care system based on faith healing: “God gave me a dream back in 2013 or 2014. And in that dream, He showed me that He has a health care system that He wants to implement that is going replace our current health care system. And, uh, let’s see… No appointments necessary, no deductibles, no side effects… It’s not like we’re going to take out the wrong kidney if we pray for you. No iatrogenic damages. No lawsuits, no liability.” As he sees it (in a chat with MAGA cultist and antivaccine activist Patrick Gunnels), these days “people are becoming awakened to the fact that, if we partner with God, we could get to a point – literally get to a point one day where we really don’t need a health care system.” To support his claim, Hayes tells the story about a faith-healing hospital in Spokane, Washington, run by a man named John G. Lake between 1915 and 1920, which was so successful that the medical establishment had it shut down to maintain their income base. It really should be needless to point out that Hayes retelling of the John G. Lake story is a complete fabrication. Note also that Hayes has tried his hand at faith healing himself.

 

Diagnosis: He’s risen to something akin to stardom in the QAnon movement, presumably primarily because he is, unlike many QAnon subscribers, somehow able to hold a thought for two sentences without lapsing into a tangent about how his family is in cahoots with Santa Claus to poison him through his medications. We do, however, suspect that he actually believes at least some of the stuff he produces and that, among his readers and viewers, there are (in fact plenty of) people who actually think he is onto something and not only cynics watching a cognitive trainwreck for laughs.

 

#2993: Josh Hawley

Joshua David Hawley is the current junior Senator from Missouri since 2019, having risen to prominence as Attorney General of Missouri from 2016 to 2019. A self-declared Christian nationalist, Hawley is one of the staunchest defenders of Trump and whatever Trump might claim or think, including Stop the Steal-related lies and conspiracy theories, and he is arguably a theocrat. On most issues, including e.g. gay marriage, Hawley – who has been described by more sensible conservatives as “the most dangerous man in America” – takes the positions you’d expect from a conspiracy-curious wingnut on the Religious Right (his wife, Erin, is a senior attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom); for our purposes here, however, Hawley’s most prominent characteristics are his conspiracy mongering and his toyings with theocracy, though it is worth noting that Hawley was a contributor to the Project 2025 (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Project_2025) Trump “presidential transition plan”. He also likes to accuse his critics of being smug, rich elitists; as the son of a wealthy banker who went to a private Jesuit prep school and then to Yale Law School as president of the school’s Federalist Society chapter, he is at least well-positioned to know what ‘elitist’ means.

 

According to Hawley, “Scripture teaches that political government is mandated by God for his service and is one means by which the enthroned Christ carries out his rule … Government serves Christ’s kingdom rule; this is its purpose. And Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God – to make it more real, more tangible, more present” – and remember that “this nation was founded on the principles of the Bible” and that “America as we know it cannot survive without biblical Christianity”. Meanwhile, the idea that people should be free to “choose your own meaning, define your own values, emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self” is a “heresy”. And make no mistake: the victims here are him and those who agree with him; it’s the libruls who are waging war on a “Christian culture that they don’t like”: “They want the religion of the Pride flag. We want the religion of the Bible. Instead of Christmas, they want Pride month. Instead of prayer in schools, they venerate the trans flag.”

 

His 2025 convocation speech at Liberty University is an illustrative example of how he views the ongoing persecution of Christians (the unnamed because non-existent groups that claim that “Christians should have no place in law or in business, or in academia or in government” that his audiences are afraid of) and the real role of religion in civilizations (“Every civilization is founded on a set of religious convictions and the United States of America, I firmly believe, is the greatest nation in the history of the world because our spiritual convictions are the convictions of the Bible”), while calling on the students to help combat “secularism” and the “forces of secularism” that “seeks to destroy” our nation and to free it from its secular “spiritual oppression.” And the secular oppression is not only coming from politicians and academics, but also from big corporations that are pushing “a Marxist agenda” and “religion of woke.” The fear that the US is under the sway by Marxist big corporations is a rather good illustration of the kind of minds we are dealing with here.

 

Hawley was among the senators who refused to certify Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and he led the Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count. He has on several occasions lent his support to Stop the Steal conspiracy theories (as well as the January 6th riot) and tends to back his paranoia up with straightforward lies. And once again, he tried to spin it all as if he was the victim.

 

Diagnosis: Honestly, though, he just wants attention. Hawley’s got ambitions, and we sincerely doubt that he believes that most the stuff he says is accurate (but he is a Christian nationalist, so there are no questions about whether he qualifies for an entry here), or that he cares one whit whether it is, as long as it brings him donations and voters. And it does, so yes: Josh Hawley is probably one of the most dangerous people in the US at present.

 

#2992: Shane Hawkins

A.k.a. Shane Broussard (original name)

 

We’ve had some opportunities to cover the depraved insanity known as the Miracle Mineral Supplement and the organization promoting it, the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing – as well as the product’s inventor, the unfathomably delusional and Jim Humble – before. But the product remains somewhat popular in certain circles (after all, Trump arguably endorsed it at one point). What kinds of cartoonish huckster or cartoonishly reality-deprived dingbats are pushing it?

 

Well, at least some of those reality-depraved dingbats are people like Shane Hawkins. Hawkins is a “Genesis II Church Reverend” who arranges “sacramental classes” where people can learn, for a fee (a $500 cash “donation” to the church), the “chemistry of chlorine dioxide solution.” Said fee also includes a one-year church membership, a “Reverend Certificate” (yes, the whole thing seems to be some kind of MLM scheme), the ability to “restore health from 95% of the diseases of mankind,” plus drinks and snacks. Health authorities have tended to be less than impressed, and such sacramental classes have a certain tendency to run into trouble with the venues in which they are supposed to be held when owners of the venues learn what is actually going to take place. Proponents like Hawkins of course chalk such cancellations up to “religious persecution” (though officially “non-religious” the church consistently use religious titles and terminology to make the ‘religious persecution’ gambit available and to avoid troubles with authorities reluctant to engage with anything religious). So when Hawkins learned about how the Harris County Attorney was trying to prohibit sales of MMS after one of his events at the Ramada Houston Intercontinental Airport East, Hawkins was clear: “You mean trying to violate my religious freedoms? That’s all I’m going to say about it. We don’t do interviews – the Archbishop has told us not to do interviews with the press because you guys have always twisted our words and made us look in a negative light, no matter what we say.” Yes, quoting anything Hawkins says verbatim does indeed make him come across as a loon.

 

That quote was for the media. Hawkins’s official response to the County Attorney was “i:man, Shane, accept for value your complaint…i:man, Shane, will settle the matter, on the private side, with any man or woman who verifies that I have done wrong, injury or harm to said man or woman.” There’s a bit to unpack there but nothing is anything but clinically insane. And no, it didn’t work.

 

Hawkins’s background is also colorful. Prior to establishing “Chapter 119” of the Genesis II Church, Hawkins – originally Broussard – was a member of the polygamous cult the House of Yahweh, which was founded in a West Texas trailer park by ex-Abilene police officer Bill Hawkins (later “Yisrayl Hawkins”), and which we have, indeed, covered before. Among Yisrayl Hawkins’s numerous whims was ordering all his followers to change their surnames to ‘Hawkins’, hence ‘Shane Hawkins’. As member of the cult, Shane Hawkins was living meagerly in tenements on his leader’s 44-acre property for years, before switching to Humble’s cult instead – which is easy: all you need to do to become a “consecrated” bishop or health minister, and qualify to teach others how to use MMS, is to attend a seminar, usually held in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Vallarta.

 

A central tenet of the church is to drill it into the heads of their bishops that the Miracle Mineral Solution is not bleach (it is), and that MMS being bleach is just what the government wants sheeple to believe. Also members are “exempt” from “vaccinations, medications, X-rays, scans, mandatory voting, and health insurance mandated by a human government or authority.” So there.

 

Diagnosis: Nothing that falls out of his mouth is anything but unhinged at any level. Even among the set of people covered here, Hawkins stands out – and his House of Yahweh background strongly suggests that he is not primarily a fraud.

 

#2991: Kelly Hassberger

Over the years, we’ve provided quite a bit of coverage of the attempts of groups of loons and quacks to gain a sheen of legitimacy for themselves through the process knows as legislative alchemy; i.e., the process of obtaining official stamps of approval for their professions through political decisions about licensure rather than through evidence of safety or efficacy. The benefits for the quacks are (at least) two-fold: first, licenses provide them with an official stamp of approval they can use in their marketing materials (their professions does, after all, receive no support from science or evidence, so they’ve got little else to back their claims to authority with any substance), as well as – sometimes – material gains; second: it provides them with a financially beneficial means of gatekeeping: Being able to determine which practitioners deserve licenses, enable them to guard their territories as they like (since their own advice is not reality-based or assessed for efficacy or safety, it’s not that the people who don’t receive a license provide advice that is any less safe and effective: that is. evidence of safety and efficacy will, as opposed to licensing boards, do shit to protect their turfs for them).

 

Naturopaths have for a long time fought – thus far unsuccessfully, fortunately – to be licensed in Michigan. Now, it would perhaps be inaccurate to call Kelly Hassberger a leader of those efforts, but she was at least one of several naturopaths working “with The Michigan Association of Naturopathic Physicians and state legislators to get practitioners who graduated from accredited doctorate programs in naturopathic medicine to practice as primary care physicians in the state”. Hassberger runs a Naturopathic Health Clinic in Grand Rapids, where she offers customers a wide range of quackery, including but not limited to “homeopathic medicine”. The licensing bills presented before the Michigan legislature (such as the 2013 Michigan House Bill 4152 sponsored by Lisa Posthumus Lyons, who was responsible not only for the 2013 bill but also for the 2016 HB 4531 and whom we have covered before, Ellen Lipton and Joseph Haveman), would, however, provide her with further opportunities to milk her customers – people who genuinely suffer and are desperate, for instance – for cash, “including IV therapy among others, as well as give us the right to accept insurance, run lab testing, diagnose and prescribe prescription drugs when needed.” It might be of note that Hassberger also seems to be running a clinic in Puerto Rico that you should probably stay well away from.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, yet another one of these. There are lots of them and they’re ready to prey on you if you ever find yourself in health-related trouble. But Hassberger also seems to wield some outsize political influence, so she is even scarier than most. She is not a doctor, however.

 

#2990: Jan Harzan

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is among the largest UFO-chasing organizations in the USA. Ostensibly committed to “the scientific method”, they have their own interpretation of what that entails: “Data is collected through online reports …” (which is an interesting take on what counts as data), and a “MUFON Field Investigator then interviews the witnesses who made the report”; in short, they collect anecdotes based on credulous witness interviews. Now, they do rule out a few of these reports as hoaxes; according to “MUFON statistician” David C. Korts, MUFON ends up clearing out about half the reports that people submit, so “I work with a highly filtered, highly clean data set.” So there. They also produce TV shows, like Hangar 1: The UFO Files, aired on that classic go-to source for pseudoscience the History Channel.

 

Jan Harzan, colloquially known as “the Indiana Jones of extraterrestrials”, was director of MUFON for a while. His tenure ended abruptly in 2020 as a consequence of this incident), and the current director appears to be one Douglas Wilson. However, since his name still pops up in connection with UFO conspiracies, Harzan remains deserving of an entry here: Not only a promoter of all sorts of UFO nonsense and conspiracy theories, Harzan also had first-hand UFO experiences on his CV, having at one point been “visited by a real UFO, no more than thirty feet from [his brother and him], with no visible means of propulsion other than making a humming noise, before shooting off over the horizon.”

 

Before his fall from grace, Harzan was one of the most central and sought-after figures in UFO conspiracy circles, and he made numerous TV appearances. He was, for instance, a central character in the ‘documentary’ Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact has Begun (2020), a piece of “fantasy propaganda ... a conspiracy documentary built around the thesis that the ‘national security state’ has concealed it from all of us”, directed and written by Michael Mazzola and which featured a range of prominent UFO conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists (in addition to Harzan), like Steven M. Greer, Daniel Sheehan, and Russell Targ.

 

As for his relationship with scientific methodology, Harzan’s approach is telling enough. Why, for instance, are so many UFO photos blurry? Well, explains Harzan, “UFOs are basically manipulating space-time. And when they do that, it requires a high electromagnetic field. That distorts the images.” So there. Make no mockery of good adhockery. And how should you go about seeing a UFO yourself? “Just being outdoors, being in a quiet place, and thinking about it tends to be one way you could attract these crafts,” said Harzan. “There appears to be some kind of a consciousness connection.” Yes, Harzan believes in ESP, too, of course, as well as, well, most paranormal phenomena you can dream up, apparently, including near-death experiences and even Bigfoot. (“There’s something out there. What creature it is, I have no idea.”)

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is out of MUFON and others have taken his place. Still.