Monday, December 2, 2024

#2841: Dan Fisher

Dan Fisher is a former Republican member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives (representing District 60 from 2012 to 2016), a pastor and a notoriously insane religious fundamentalist; Fisher is also on the leadership team of the Oklahoma City Tea Party and serves on the boards of groups like Vision America and the hardcore fundie creationist organization Reclaiming America for Christ. He also ran for governor in 2018 on a platform of abolishing abortion (explicitly by ignoring all legal issues) and asserting state sovereignty (his positions were backed up by some curious analogies). As a state representative, Fisher was most notable for his bizarre war against teaching US history courses in public schools.

 

Unsurprisingly, Fisher is no fan of LGBT rights. He is, for instance, affiliated with the fundie extremist anti-gay umbrella organization Gone Too Far (together with people like Scott Lively, E. W. Jackson, Peter LaBarbera, Paul Blair and Brian Camenker), and his general views on the issues can be discerned from his presentation at a 2019 Gone Too Far press conference: After focusing an unnerving amount on anal sex and pedophilia, Fisher stated that if “Congress attempts to label as a civil right that which has been understood by generations as immoral [like interracial marriage?], it would not only be reversing centuries of western Judeo-Christian thought, but would be in essence, as Pastor Broden said, actually rendering historic, orthodox Christianity illegal.” He was predictably short on the details of what he thought would be made illegal.

 

Fisher is also worried about what he sees as a “direct correlation” between what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah and what is happening in America today, and therefore blamed LGBT activists in the US today for putting us on a trajectory that will likely end with angel rape (“When you read the story in Genesis about Lot and the angels who came to visit him, these men are wanting to rape these angels … That just shows you the kind of violent sexuality that this produces”).

 

Diagnosis: Insane fundie madman, and although writing about Fisher feels like a bit of a blast from the past, these people are still plentiful, and they often find themselves in positions of power.

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

#2840: Michele Fiore

Michele Ann Fiore is a former member of the Nevada Assembly (2012–2016), former member of the Las Vegas City Council and has since 2022 served as a justice of the peace for Nye County. In July 2024, she landed herself, not for the first time, in legal trouble for defrauding donors and was convicted for wire fraud and conspiracy in October (her troubles with the law is her only legal background and thus her only qualification for her current position). Otherwise, Fiore has gained attention for her vocal support of Trump and for Cliven Bundy, and in particular for her firm stance that[i]f government is going to point a gun at me, I'm going to point my gun right back” and that shooting government and law officers trying to arrest you counts as “self-defense”; she was, however, quick to clarify that such actions were justified only against government officers she didn’t agree with, such as the Bureau of Land Management, which according to Fiore is “a bureaucratic agency of terrorism that terrorized Americans, especially ranchers.

 

In fact, Fiore has a long history of wanting to shoot people, such as Syrian refugees, whom she was ready toshoot ‘em in the head myself” – elaborating, Fiore declared thatI am not OK with Syrian refugees. I’m not OK with terrorists. I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out. Just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life. I’m good with that” (though she later emphasized that she was talking about terrorists, that was not the topic she was responding to).

 

For the entry here, however, Fiore’s most notable delusion is her position on cancer and cancer treatments. Fiore is on record promoting the insane pseudoscience of none other than Tullio Simoncini; according to Fioreif you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing, let’s say, salt water, sodium cardonate [sic], through that line, and flushing out the fungus … These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.” This is, needless to say, not remotely how anything works in the reality the rest of us are inhabiting. Fiore made the comment in connection with a right-to-try bill she was introducing, commenting that Nevada is already “the capital of entertainment” and that her bill and the opportunity it would open up for trying to cure cancer with salt water and baking soda could help “make it the medical capital of the world as well.”

 

The suggestion sheds some light on the reasoning behind her 2012 proposal to arm school officials and college students as a means to combat school shootings. There is a brief portrait of Michele Fiore here.

 

Diagnosis: A complete moron. A somewhat flamboyant one, to be sure – like a clown – but definitely a moron.

Monday, November 25, 2024

#2839: Patricia Finn

Patricia Finn, P.C., is “a Vaccine Injury and Exemption litigation firm” run by Patricia Finn, Esq., a delusional anti-vaccine activist and lawyer who has built a legal career out of helping anti-vaccine loons and parents obtain exemptions from vaccine requirements – she did, for instance, represent anti-vaccine nurse Suzanne Field in the latter’s 2009 case challenging New York’s regulation requiring health care workers to be vaccinated – and in cases concerning alleged “vaccine injuries. She at least used to be a minor celebrity on the anti-vaccine conspiracy circuit, landing interviews and feature articles with InfoWars and Mike Adams, conspiracy theory institutions that were quick to rush to Finn’s defense when she landed herself in legal troublesin 2012, presumably due to violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct for New York regarding advertising, crying – predictably – persecution; according to Adams, for instance, the real reason the State of New York was going after Finn was to get her client list so that CPS workers (agents of “Communist Pedophile Services”, as Adams sees it) could identify unvaccinated children, kidnap them and sell them into sex slavery.

 

Yes, that’s the scene at which Finn is performing and offering her services. According to herself (and we find it worthwhile to quote her at some length):

 

The practice of vaccinating is dangerous. People are being deluged with vaccines because of fear mongering and profit. Mobilizing a global community to line up and inject should not be taken lightly, after all what if it is indeed weird science out of control, terrorism or maybe just a dose of bad shots because the contractors making and transporting the vaccines were skimming [sic] on ingredients, safety controls or refrigeration because it simply cost too much to adhere to pesky safety standards and formulas. Cutting corners might save a few bucks also. And what if the Pharma factory workers simply don’t like Americans and could care less if the shot is safe? The ProVax Choice community is not saying you can’t get the shot if you want it, but it is saying do so with caution because others could be affected”.

 

Yep; not only are vaccines unsafe, as Finn delusionally sees it, but everyone involved in developing, producing, transporting, offering and defending vaccines are evil, greedy and corrupt.

 

Whatever her legal troubles back in 2012 were about, Finn seems to be still going strong, offering her services to various anti-vaccine litigations (such as the case of Anthony Marciano). In 2014, for instance, Finn represented Dina Check, who claimed that her child had been improperly denied a religious vaccine exemption in a New York suit. (Check, in fact, rejects all of modern medicine, including vaccines, because of a religious revelation she had telling her that “disease is pestilence, and pestilence is from the devil. The devil is germs and disease, which is cancer and any of those things that can take you down. But if you trust in the Lord, these things cannot come near you.”) The suit was dismissed, and Finn couldn’t resist dismissing media commenting on the story as “pharma trolls because everyone who disagrees with her must be dishonest and do so on behalf of a nefarious conspiracy.

 

In 2019, Finn was a vocal opponent of a push to end religious vaccine exemptions in New York after a number of measles outbreaks. Finn, ever the conspiracy theorists, saw the push to end religious exemptions as part of a “scheme” to benefit the pharmaceutical industry, and complained that opponents of such exemptions have embraced the “herd immunity” premise that outbreaks can be prevented from occurring if at least some 97 percent of the population has been vaccinated. “They want to eliminate exemptions to achieve herd immunity but herd immunity doesn’t exist [yes, it most certainly does],” claimed Finn because just asserting it can make a perfectly false claim true. Moreoever, “vaccines can actually spread measles and that is probably [most certainly not] what is happening.” As a lawyer, her lack of understanding of the role and function of evidence is sort of striking.

 

When the city did impose more stringent vaccination requirements, Finn, who is apparently also affiliated with Robert Kennedy jr.’s anti-vaccine organization The Children’s Health Defense, was part of a team, together with Robert Krakow and Kennedy, representing five parents of unvaccinated children protesting the requirements; they lost, and in his ruling on the case, Judge Lawrence Knipel correctly pointed out that the arguments presented by the plaintiffs amounted to little more than “unsupported, bald faced opinion”.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, even anti-vaccine activists deserve legal representation and has the right to challenge vaccine-related laws, and it is, of course, entirely legitimate for Finn to represent them. But Finn is also not only an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist herself, but one that is completely unfettered by reason and reality; one would think it wouldn’t usually help the case of her clients that Finn’s own conspiracy and pseudoscience commitments are even more insane than their own.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence, sciencebased medicine

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

#2838: Mark Finchem

Mark William Finchem is a Christian nationalist conspiracy theorist, thoroughly disturbed fascism-adjacent wingnut, member of the Arizona House of Representatives representing District 11 from 2015 to 2023, and an Arizona State Senator from 2024 (yes, he was elected). Finchem is a member of the militia group the Oath Keepers, and the Arizona coordinator for the Coalition of Western States, an organization founded by Matt Shea that opposes the activities of the Bureau of Land Management and that supported the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. He is not, however, a “legislative fellow in residence” at UA’s James E. Rogers College of Law, despite his own claims to the contrary.

 

House antics

As a member of the state House, Finchem quickly gained fame for promoting extreme wingnut and/or idiotic ideas – indeed, Arizona Republican state senator Paul Boyer described Finchem asone of the dumbest” members of the Arizona House of Representatives, and there are plenty to choose from. Already at the beginning of his first term, Finchem would try to convince other lawmakers that Isis and other terrorist groups were pouring over the border with Mexico to invade the US, backing up his claims with fake news and various maps of mysterious origins, and one of the first measures he sponsored would reduce state taxes on gold coins on the basis that gold coins were “legal tender”. In 2016, Finchem introduced legislation that would prohibit Arizona from implementing presidential executive orders, directives issued by federal agencies, and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, and in 2019 he introduced a bill that would implement a code for ethics for teachers that was largely copy-pasted from a text published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also sponsored, in 2019, a bill that would seek to transfer management of federal lands in Arizona to the state government.

 

Stop the steal involvement

Finchem was heavily involved in the stop-the-steal conspiracy movement in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and was a participant at a November meeting with Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to outline strategies for contesting the election results. Finchem repeatedly claimed, without evidence of course (but together with a number of other Arizona legislators including Wendy Rogers, David Cook, Walt Blackman, Kelly Townsend, Sonny Borrelli and David Livingston), that the election was “stolen” from Trump and that Mike Pence had orchestrated a coup attempt against Trump. He was also among the first election denialists to promote the “independent state legislature theory”, i.e. calling for the Arizona legislature to appoint presidential electors of its own choosing to avoid having to follow the results of a democratic election. (He was, notably, paid by the Trump campaign to do so).

 

In the following months, Finchem shared numerous conspiracy theories about and repeatedly debunkedreports” of alleged voter fraud in Arizona, and even found ways to monetize his conspiracy theories (beyond the obvious ones) with his #ProveIt campaign and T-shirts – “I am starting the #ProveIt campaign right now. I am sick and tired of the liberal officials and media gaslighting us with fictitious attacks about the election,” said Finchem. When Cyber Ninja’s purported “audit” of the Arizona Election failed to come up with evidence of fraud despite trying really hard, Finchem was nevertheless quick to claim victory and conclude that the election should be decertified. Even as late as 2022, he introduced a resolution to the state legislature to “reclaim” Arizona’s electors based on his false claim that the results in three Arizona counties were “irredeemably compromised”. He has also advocated for banning mail-in voting.

 

Finchem was present in D.C. on January 6, 2021, to claim (again without evidence, of course) that “this election was a fraud”. He tweeted numerous photographs of protestors massed on the steps of the Capitol building – despite claiming never to have come within 500 yards of it – and even tried to justify the storming as “what happens when […] Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud”. He nonetheless claimed afterwards that leftists had instigated the violence, and in response to a FBI briefing bothering to point out the obvious fact that antifa groups were not involved in the attack on the Capitol, Finchem said that he did not “trust a word that comes out of the FBI’s mouth”.

 

During his 2024 Senate campaign, Finchem modified his strategy slightly from complaining about “election fraud” to using the expression “election tampering” on the grounds that “we’ve got to prove fraud. This is about election tampering”, and Finchem is the kind of guy who views requests for evidence for the shit that falls out of his mouth to be at best a nuisance.

 

2022 Secretary of State Campaign

Though he keeps getting reelected to the Arizona House of Representatives, Finchem notably failed in his 2022 bid for the position of Secretary of State, despite receiving the Trump’s endorsement and despite significant donations to his campaign from his fellow Oath Keepers. His actual campaign, however – one of several campaigns across the US that sought to put election deniers and conspiracy theorists in positions that would give them influence over future elections – consisted largely of claiming to be combatting the ”Soros machine” (i.e. windmills) and accusing his opponents of being backed by George Soros (“Soros funded opponent”); in particular, the media is supposed to be Soros-funded across the board, unless it is controlled by the CIA (not mutually exclusive options for Finchem, since Soros presumably controls the CIA and everyone who disagrees with him is ultimately really Satan anyways as well as a Marxist billionaire instrument of Marxist international bankers). He also claimed that criticism of him, e.g. from Jewish organizations, was proof of a Soros conspiracy.

 

Finchem also received some attention for his endorsement of openly anti-semitic Oklahoma State Senate candidate Jarrin Jackson, as well as for the endorsements he himself received from “Constitutional sheriffRichard Mack and Andrew Torba, the antisemitic founder of the white nationalist platform Gab, which Finchem welcomed and even bragged about.

 

Insofar as he had promised not to concede if he lost the election beforehand, Finchem also refused to concede when he in fact lost the election, citing – predictably – fraud. Indeed, already in April 2022, Finchem and Kari Lake brought a suit against state officials seeking to ban electronic voting machines from being used in his 2022 election. The lawsuit was of course dismissed, insofar as Lake and Finchem “articulated only conjectural allegations of potential injuries”, and the courts also sanctioned their lawyers (including Alan Dershowitz) for making “false, misleading, and unsupported” claims, asserting that the court does not tolerate litigants “furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process”. Finchem and Lake promptly appealed in order to lose in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and get thrown out by the Supreme Court.

 

Finchem did file a lawsuit in December 2022 to have the election “nullified and redone”, which was dismissed with prejudice since it (among other things) did “not allege that any of the votes cast were actually illegal” but consisted mostly of repetitions of vague complaints about voting machines. In March 2023, the courts also sanctioned Finchem and his lawyer to pay the legal fees of his opponent’s campaign since the lawsuit was “groundless and not brought in good faith.” Finchem reacted by calling for the judge to be “removed from the bench for her abuse of judicial authority” on the grounds, apparently, that finding against him in a court case automatically counts as abuse of judicial authority. He also blamed Ukraine, because whatever.

 

General conspiracy theorist

At bottom, Mark Finchem is ultimately just a paranoid and confused (and therefore angry) conspiracy theorist of the kind that back in the days used to just troll comment sections on various news articles from their basements – the kind who rants to and bothers relatives and makes family members worried about their grasp of reality (Finchem is estranged from much of his family because he is a crazy and angry asshole) – but who has recently, to the stupefaction of anyone remotely reasonable, managed to more or less take control over the world.

 

And Finchem has promoted a range of conspiracy theories. Already in 2013, Finchem asserted that then-president Obama was seeking to establish a “totalitarian dictatorship”, and he maintained a Treason Watch List with photos of prominent Democrats on his Pinterest account. He also posted about stockpiling ammunition since it could allegedly come in handy against people he imagined were out to get him. Particularly relevant, perhaps, is his promotion of variants of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. And in 2017, Finchem tested his 2020-allegations by baselessly describing the Unite the Right rally as a “deep state psyop” carried out by Democrats.

 

And of course Finchem pushed Covid-related conspiracy theories. For years, his social media posts were to a large extent devoted to a barrage of dangerous misinformation and deranged conspiracy theories surrounding the virus and efforts to halt the pandemic; indeed, even as late as August 2021, Finchem suggested that Covid didn’t even exist at all, citing social media posts from conspiracy theory sites that falsely claimed that Alberta, Canada, had lifted its Covid protocols – a claim that would certainly come as a surprise to residents of Alberta (or visitors, such as yours truly in December 2021) – because “they can’t produce an isolated sample of SARS-CoV-2 to prove covid exists to back their mandates”. And his conspiracy mongering naturally extended to the vaccine; Finchem, based on things he had read on fake news sites and social media sites and against all reason and evidence, deemed the vaccine a “crime against humanity” and implied that it was a “bio-weapon”. He also linked to (and emphasized that he was JAQing off) a website promoting the laughably idiotic (but nevertheless thoroughly debunked) claim that “the life expectancy of all who have taken the [vaccine] is only 2 years,” apparently because the vaccine ostensibly alters human blood cells in some not-entirely-coherently-explained manner. Later, in July 2021, he stated that he refuses to take the vaccine because he falsely believes it is a “potentially deadly gene therapy.” We doubt that Finchem knows enough about anything to be able to reliably distinguish gene therapies from a lasso made of bananas, but no: the Covid vaccine is not a gene therapy. And of course he promoted – contrary to all evidence – the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “beneficial medication”.

 

Most of all, however, Finchem has been a major proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories and has shared numerous debunked QAnon-themed memes (e.g. this one) and fake news stories. And QAnon conspiracies were a central theme of his 2022 secretary of state campaign, where Finchem e.g. attended the “Patriot Double Down” QAnon conference in Las Vegas promoting debunked conspiracy theoriesand antisemittism, with himself repeating standard QAnon nonsense along the lines of “We’ve got a serious problem in this nation. There’s a lot of people involved in a pedophile network in the distribution of children … And, unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of elected officials that are involved in that.” He also attended a Newport Beach fundraiser, promoted by Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, where conspiracy theorist Nicole Nogrady ranted about fetal tissue in the food supply and the September 11 attacks being a federal government plot. In August 2022, he also attended a Wisconsin gathering of the Church Militant movement.

 

Rather illustrative of his mindset is his October 2022 conspiracy theory that Google’s search algorithm was biased against his campaign because its website did not come up in searches on his name. The reason, of course, was that his campaign had added a noindex tag to the metatag of the sites HTML code, but Finchem i) is a conspiracy theorist to the core and ii) does not understand how anything works, so the outcome was completely predictable.

 

As for his over-the-top paranoia, a good example could be his response to a fundraiser for Josh Hawley being cancelled by Loews Hotels in 2021: Finchem promptly compared it to the Holocaust, claiming that[t]his is what Hitler and Stalin did. What's next Camps? Ovens?” It is not remotely what Hitler and Stalin did. Similarly, social media deplatforming is exactly like Nazi Germany, Pol Pot, and Mao’s cultural revolution rolled into one, with Finchem adding thatthe next step is eliminating people”. We would normally implore his voters to think very seriously about what Finchem thinks natural nexts steps are and what that suggests about how he himself would inclined to run things, but we fear, of course, that they already have.

 

Diagnosis: Certainly one of the stupidest and craziest people in the Arizona state legislature, and the competition is fierce. And yes, Mark Finchem is a threat to democracy, civilization and public health and welfare. Yet what is truly scary here are the people who keep getting him elected – one can, not without plausibility, try to explain away a Trump win with concerns about the economy and/or a general vibe associated with him among low-information voters, but none of those factors could realistically play any relevant role in an explanation of Mark Finchem’s continued successes.

Monday, November 18, 2024

#2837: Bruce Fife

More quackery! The technique known as oil pulling is part of traditional Ayurvedic method of oral care. The basic idea is that swishing sesame oil (or similar) in the mouth for 10–20 minutes prevents cavities and promotes gum health; evidence clearly shows that it is quite ineffective even for that purpose, but it has nevertheless, as quackery – especially quackery supported by appeals to ancient wisdom – often does, recently evolved into some sort of all-purpose detox nonsense promoted by a range of questionable practitioners, quack websites and social media posts.

 

Naturopath Bruce Fife, for instance, thinks the technique should be tried if “you suffer from asthma, diabetes, arthritis, migraine headaches, or any chronic illness”. There is, of course, no evidence that the technique has any effect against any of those conditions, nor any plausible reason to think that it should. For promoters of oil pulling, however, the vague idea of benefit is usually centered around a vague idea of never-specified toxins that are assumed (unsupported by any minimally reliable measurement of any toxin level) to be detoxed by some never-specified mechanism. For Fife, it is basically a religious creed, with oil-pulling taking on the role of some sort of purification ritual; according to Fife “All disease starts in the mouth!”, which means that Fife is a follower of the absolutely deranged New Age religion and thoroughly dangerous cult of Weston Price. Indeed, Fife is apparently deeply affiliated with the Weston A. Price Foundation, an anti-vaccine organization whose house journal Wise Traditions has received some attention not only for its dental woo but also for being a major pusher of the rather inane conspiracy theory that Covid-19 is not caused by a virus at all but by 5G network radiation and that Covid vaccines are a plot to murder you. 

 

Fife – who is ostensibly also a “certified nutritionist”, whatever that means has also authored a series of books touting the alleged beneficial effects of coconut oil and coconut water, such as The Coconut Oil Miracle, Coconut Cures, Coconut Oil: The Worlds Most Powerful Superfood, The Coconut Ketogenic Diet, Virgin Coconut Oil: Nature’s Miracle Medicine and The Healing Miracle of Coconut Oil (one senses a certain strain of repetition), including touting coconut oil as a treatment for, well, more or less everything and anything, but in particular, perhaps, Alzheimer (“Stop Alzheimer’s Now!” claims one of the titles). There is no evidence whatsoever for those claims, of course, but Fife was never one to be overly concerned about evidence (or the lack thereof). He has also written conspiracy-oriented books e.g. on the alleged dangers of artificial sweeteners.

 

Among the more disconcerting works flowing from the deranged mind of Bruce Fife is Stop Autism Now! A Parent’s Guide to Preventing and Reversing Autism Spectrum Disorders. Naturopaths weighing in on autism is consistently bad news, and Fife is, unsurprisingly, no exception. After falsely claiming that autism is the result of gut disorders, Fife recommends a ketogenic diet with (but of course) coconut oil as a treatment, which is as useless as you’d imagine. But Fife also has … conspiracy theories. A large part of the book is devoted to an attempt to exonerate disgraced fraud Andrew Wakefield, and yes: Fife of course supports the thoroughly refuted piece of misinformation that vaccines are somehow causally connected to autism.

 

Diagnosis: This is Flat Earth-adjacent bullshit. Now, we’re sure Fife has managed to find a commercially relatively successful niche as supplier for adherents of various imagination-based health fads (in particular detox nonsense), but behind what is probably relatively innocuous nonsense (coconut oil), there is a dark chaos of deranged, pseudo-religious cult pseudoscience and conspiratorial paranoia. Dangerous.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased Medicine

Friday, November 15, 2024

#2836: David Field

Jade Erick was a woman who died from naturopathic quackery administered by naturopath Kim Kelly – specifically intravenous curcumin – in 2017. Now, naturopaths like to cosplay as responsible medical providers (they most surely are not), even going so far as trying to obtain (and sometimes getting) official recognition through legislative alchemy, but they struggle to maintain the mask when some pressure is put on them.

 

Kelly was licensed in California. David Field is (or at least was at that point) the Chair of the Naturopathic Medicine Committee for the State of California Department of Consumer Affairs, and it would thus be part of Field’s tasks to lead a committee to investigate Erick’s death. Field, of course, handled that task exactly how you would expect a dishonest quack and spin doctor to handle it: by trying to shift attention away from the fact that Erick’s death was a direct cause of a commonly recognized quack treatment among naturopaths to trying to find as much dirt as possible on real medicine to spin a marketable narrative that would take focus away from the quackery he recommends and avoid taking any responsibility whatosever: “I am in great need of statistics, with references/citations if possible, regarding iatrogenic harm from MDs/DOs, DCs, LAcs, etc. As SOON as POSSIBLE please! ANY and ALL types!he promptly asked his naturopathic colleagues in a closed naturopathic discussion group. (He was quickly directed to the efforts of Gary Null and Carolyn Dean, of course.) It’s an obvious ploy: people die during conventional treatments, too, and if you disregard the efficacy of those treatments (curcumin is bullshit), you can probably create a compelling defense of naturopathic treatments. For context: Field was at that point scheduled to testify in front of the California legislature because law licensing naturopaths in that state would need to be renewed, and a case like Erick would definitely look bad (as would this report).

 

Otherwise, Field’s practice offers a plethora of quack modalities; his specialties include “acupuncture, botanical medicine, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, hormone replacement therapy, IV therapy, nutrition counseling, physical medicine/manipulation, supplement counseling”.

 

Diagnosis: He probably does recognize that patients dying as a direct result of your advice looks bad. We’ll grant him that. If he would also take seriously the thought that “perhaps it would be good to check, in an unbiased and accuracy-constrained way, whether my advice is actually good”, things would be fine. He won’t, though.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

#2835: Kellie Fiedorek

Kellie Fiedorek is senior counsel and government affairs director for the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and a general dime-a-dozen fundie wingnut who has served on numerous panels and boards of groups defending the usual array of wingnut causes. Fiedorek is the kind of person who claims that opposing LGBT equality is doing just what Rosa Parks did and that the “agenda to expand sexual liberty and redefine marriage” puts religious liberty in “great peril”, primarily because “religious liberty” for Fiedorek means fundies having the right to violate the Establishment clause and to discriminate against those who disagree with them. Given that definition, Fiedorek predictably tries to argue that religious people are the ones being marginalized in the US today, and she is a major proponent of the Christian persecution in the US myth.

Diagnosis: More or less indistinguishable from a large number of similar wingnuts, so she doesn’t need a very substantial entry. But like those others, Fiedorek is zealous. She also wields some authority, and the ADF is a major player in current efforts to combat liberty, decency and civilization.