#3077: Jonathan Isaac

Celebrity athletes coming out as stupid and misinformed isn’t novel – we covered Kyrie Irving in our previous post – and most people won’t expect them to be any more trustworthy or worth listening to than a random TikTok video.

 

But we should emphasize ‘most people’, for celebrities like basketball star Jonathan Isaac do undeniably have some reach. Now, Isaac hasn’t, as far as we know, endorsed Irving’s flat earther nonsense, but during the early 2020s, he certainly established himself as a wingnut COVID denialist and antivaccine conspiracy theorist. While the NBA did their best to ensure that their players were vaccinated against COVID, Isaac assumed the mantle of some kind of unofficial leader for those that would not: Proudly unvaccinated, Isaac claimed to have read up on ‘antibody resistance’ – it is unclear what he was reading, but he mentioned studying Black history and watching Donald Trump’s press conferences – which led him to “distrust” Dr. Anthony Fauci, look out for people he believed might die from the vaccine, and put his faith in God. “At the end of the day, it’s people,” Isaac said about the scientists developing vaccines, “and you can’t always put your trust completely in people” – apparently apart from Trump and whatever conspiracy theorists Isaac follows on social media. Then, of course, he lamented how unvaccinated players were vilified and bullied just because they were willing to risk the life and well-being of everybody by choosing to stick with their own misinformation. Imagine that.

 

Isaac is otherwise generally famous for being a religious fundie and for being a wingnut. He refused to support Black Lives Matter, for instance, because although he supports Black lives, “I feel like Black lives are supported through the gospel, all lives are supported through the gospel.” In 2022, Isaac released his book on the topic, Why I Stand, which seems to be a book-length treatment of the kinds of insights encapsulated in the above quote, and we grudgingly admire anyone who’ve made it through even the first few pages. His stance on vaccines, politics and religion was apparently interesting enough to get him invited to Clay Clark & Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour.

 

Diagnosis: He’s famous, and he’s stupid. That means that silly nonsense will be spread, and it has. His contribution is probably soon forgotten, but Isaac will certainly have boosted this kind of nonsense, and its effects won’t go away anytime soon.

 

#3076: Kyrie Irving

Yet another cognitively impoverished celebrity, Kyrie Irving is a professional basketball player and notoriously cognitively impoverished antisemitic conspiracy theorist. 

 

Irving first came to our attention in 2017, when he endorsed flateartherism in a podcast interview – “The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat,” insisted Irving before also claiming that there are aliens (it is unclear what sort of geometrical object these aliens call home) and some unspecified cosmic cover-up of everything for unclear reasons (he did emphasize, though, that flat eartherism “is not even a conspiracy theory”, so there). Said Irving: “If you really think about it from the landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, and the fact that … can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets?”. And yes, those are words in a sequence, but they are little else. As for the aliens, Irving’s main reason for concluding that they exist and interact with us is that he has seen it in movies and can’t see any reason for making such movies (“for what? For what?”) unless aliens exist; also, it is hard to believe that the people who ostensibly manage a conspiracy to hide the flatness of the Earth could possess the creative spark needed to imagine aliens out of whole cloth; Irving doesn’t.

 

Other NBA luminaries, like Wilson Chandler and Draymond Green, supported Irving’s claims but most did not, and after some blowback, Irving claimed to have been joking and that he was misunderstood but also, with regard to the shape of the Earth, that “I don’t know. I really don’t” and suggesting that people should “do [their] own research for what [they] want to believe in” because “Our educational system is flawed”. Irving himself is a good illustration of why doing your own research is not necessarily a good idea, in particular when dumb internet memes constitute the limits of your research capacity; it is, however, hard to deny, given Irving, that the educational system may suffer from some shortcomings. He has later avoided attempts to clarify his position on the shape of the Earth.

 

Of course, once you are open to flat Earth nonsense, reason-based constraints are no longer in play, and Irving has championed a number of other conspiracy theories as well. It is perhaps little surprise that he thinks John F. Kennedy was killed because he wanted to end the “banking cartel” or that he was a channel for an impressive amount of misinformation, including anti-vaccine misinformation, during the COVID-19 pandemic – Irving was among the leaders of a rather influential group of low-information and low-reasoning-level NBA players (including Michael Porter jr., Jonathan Isaac, Bradley Beal and Andrew Wiggins) promoting anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. According to Irving, “secret societies are administering vaccines in a plot to connect Black people to a master computer for a plan of Satan” (yes, it’s dumb, and yes, it’s an idea that is popular with antivaxxers and major anti-vaccine organizations), and he would share rants by Alex Jones on how state actors representing the New World Order have been planning to oppress the public by intentionally releasing viruses.

 

Anti-semitism

The last couple of years, Irving has been an adherent of the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrine, according to which black people are the real Jews. Real Jewish people are, on the other hand, fake Jewish people, and followers of the nonsense are accordingly quick to engage in hardcore anti-semitism also beyond the anti-semitism inherent in the doctrine’s core delusion. Irving seems to have gotten his ideas from amateur conspiracy theorist Ronald Dalton Jr.’s film (and book) Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, which embellishes the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrine with Holocaust denial and quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It also claims that (real) Jewish people worship Satan, control the media, controlled the Atlantic slave trade, and currently control the media (Dalton claims to have received his info partially through divine revelation, by the way). When confronted with the misinformation promoted by the film, Irving refused to apologize: saying that deeming him antisemitic was “not justified” and that he intended to “learn from all walks of life and religions” is obviously not distancing oneself from the misinformation, and Irving also emphasized that “[h]istory is not supposed to be hidden from anybody” and that “I’m not going to stand down on anything I believe in. I’m only going to get stronger because I’m not alone. I have a whole army around me.” He added that he would be able to debunk any criticism leveled at him because of his propensity for “study[ing]”, and that he “know[s] the Oxford dictionary,” so there. To direct questions about whether he defended anti-semitism, Irving clarified that “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from.” The incident resulted in a suspension from his NBA team and a termination of his contract with Nike. He eventually issued a notpology and did not denounce the misinformation he had been promoting.

 

Diagnosis: Not operating on at very sophisticated cognitive level, this one. There is, however, a chance that some people, operating at a similarly basic cognitive level, actually listen to him.

 

#3075: Doug Irving (and really the whole RAND corporation)

We’re repeating ourselves, but it’s an important topic, so here we go: The intrusion of quackery into academic medicine under the brand name ‘integrative medicine’ continues apace. The guiding ideas, apart from the unstated fact that vague wellness-oriented alternative medicine is pretty lucrative, are often some kind of appeal to ‘the best of two worlds’ and the associated failure to understand that integrating quackery with real medicine doesn’t make medicine better, and appeal to real troubles in and shortcomings with real medicine and the associated failure to grasp that shortcomings in real medicine doesn’t mean that unproven pseudoscientific alternatives have anything going for them (i.e., as Ben Goldacre puts it, that “just because there are problems with aircraft design, that doesn’t mean that magic carpets really fly”).

 

Doug Irving struggles with getting his head around the fallaciousness of those two ideas in attempts to justify integrative medicine. And that is worrisome, given that Irving is a corporate communications officer at the RAND corporation, and the RAND corporation, a global policy think tank and research institute, is a pretty significant and authoritative player in the world of public policy. As a matter of fact, the RAND corporation has done decent work on e.g. vaccine policy; they have, unfortunately, also delved deeply into the rabbit hole of integrative medicine, having even teamed up with the deranged quack cult the Samueli Institute to form the RAND Center for Collaborative Research in Complementary and Integrative Health, chaired by Ian D. Coulter whom we have covered before, and which, despite the RAND corporation’s otherwise rather firm commitment to science and evidence, has rather explicitly advocated using a double standard: mainstream medicine should continue to use their standards for evidence, whereas alternative practices should be measured by the standards they are able to pass, such as handwaving, anecdotes and popularity.

 

Here is a discussion of Irving’s thoughts on the issue of integrative medicine, and yes, it is all there: “Modern medicine has a problem. It can fix a damaged heart, battle cancer into remission, and operate on the deepest recesses of the human brain. Yet it continues to struggle with the everyday anguish of an aching back,” says Irving, and immediately concludes that “[u]nconventional medicine, once dismissed as quackery by the medical establishment, might be the missing piece of modern health care” on the grounds that “Americans now spend billions of their own dollars seeking relief from such chronic conditions in alternative schools of health”. And so on.

 

One important detail about Irving’s rhetoric that should be highlighted – it is, after all, ubiquitous in discussions of alternative medicine – is how he talks about “different models of medicine”: there is Western medicine, but also Eastern medicine and naturopathy and whatnot. And that allows Irving to frame the discussion as concerning issues of distrust and oppression. In reality, of course, there are no different models of medicine. There is no alternative medicine. There is the medical interventions that have been shown to work, the ones that haven’t, and the ones that have been shown not to work. If an intervention is shown to work, then it is medicine. The reason acupuncture isn’t part of medicine is that it hasn’t been shown to work for anything; the reason homeopathy isn’t, is that it has been shown not to work for anything. But framing things this way – the right way to frame it – makes it a bit harder to advocate for integrative medicine, insofar as advocating for integrative medicine is really advocating for integrating interventions that work with those that don’t; and putting it that way is also a better way to describe the challenges that integrative medicine is facing than complaining about narrow-minded legislators or scientists. 

 

Diagnosis: Irving is of course not the main problem here. The whole RAND corporation seems to have bought the Integrative medicine rhetoric hook line and sinker. The conclusion really has to be that in light their demonstrated inability to see through the nonsense in the case of integrative medicine, the RAND corporation really cannot be trusted on anything.

 

#3074: Philip Irvin

An older curiosity, this one, but we feel that a brief mention is still in order. Philip Irvin used to run a website – we don’t any idea what he does these days beyond what his antics back in the day would suggest – called Imploding Gay Power: No Way Born Gay, which advises parents to tell their kids about “the absurdity of the ‘born gay’ idea” as a means to eradicating, once and for all, this belief. In fact, the most deranged thing on his website may be the mechanism by which his goal is supposed to be achieved, but the website also advises readers not to trust scientific studies or findings on sexual orientation. His fundamental tenet is the notion that homosexuality is a choice (“A choice becomes a habit, then a compulsion, and then an addiction”); his reasoning based on that premise is … not good.

 

Irvin’s influence appears admittedly to have been relatively limited, although it was at least at one point picked up by (of course) the WND.

 

Diagnosis: Can probably be relatively safely be dismissed and forgotten. It’s nice to be able to draw that conclusion with some confidence once in a while.

 

#3073: Augustus Sol Invictus

A.k.a. Austin Gillespie (probable original name)

 

Augustus Sol Invictus is a Florida-based attorney, white supremacist, conspiracy theorist (e.g. Holocaust denialist), self-proclaimed demigod, and self-described “radical philosopher and social critic”. Invictus rose to general attention in 2016, when he ran (unsuccessfully – apparently we have to state that explicitly these days) for Senate as a Libertarian and has since been a regular feature on the alt-right – he was, for instance, a headline speaker at the Unite the Right rally – and legal representative of various wingnuts and fascists (Invictus has substantial experience with the legal system himself). Since Invictus is a pagan – he has been expelled from the Thelemite fraternal organization Ordo Templi Orientis – the more recent fusion of groyperism with the religious right might have presented a bit of a career obstacle for him: he is at least somewhat less visible these days than he was in his heydays. Invictus has been an advocate of eugenics, although he officially recognizes that the practical implementation of eugenics is problematic.

 

Invictus is a staunch critic of democracy, pop culture, consumerism, mass media, secularism, psychiatry, the modern world in general, and lawyers, and in 2013, he renounced his college degrees, his US citizenship, Catholicism, and his (up to then) law firm, partially on the grounds of he had received a prophecy about a second American Civil War: “I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War I would begin it myself. Mark well: That day is fast coming upon you. On the New Moon of May, I shall disappear into the Wilderness. I will return bearing Revolution, or I will not return at all” [source: his resignation letter to his law firm, which also stated that “I am God’s gift to humankind where the English language is concerned” and that “I have a Cadillac & a poodle, multiple computers & a personal library”]. In fairness, he did carry out a substantial wilderness retreat, and returned “bearing Revolution”, something he celebrated by sacrificing a goat and starting his own law firm, Imperium Lex, which earned him some notoriety for serving on the legal defense of Marcus Faella, head of a central Florida neo-Nazi group the American Front, when Faella was accused of domestic terrorism. For his 2016 campaign he recommended his voters not to vote but rather to “take LSD and practice sorcery”, toured the American Northwest, and lost by a landslide.

 

After his loss, Invictus founded the completely-indistinguishable-from-other-wingnut-conspiracy-sites The Revolutionary Conservative, was a member of and then ejected from American Guard, and was briefly second-in-command of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, Kyle Chapman’s militant splinter of the Proud Boys. He has also been running for various political positions, without garnering the same level of attention as his 2016 run (the competition for attention due to idiocy and extremism has stiffened) on platforms encompassing eclectic and wide-ranging political views, although he might be particularly notable for proposing to repeal the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments and insisting that only white male citizens should have the right to vote or own real estate. As for his Charlottesville involvement, Richard Spencer actually credited Invictus with writing the first draft of the Charlottesville Statement, a white nationalist manifesto that contained copious amounts of anti-semitism, misogyny and racism.

 

Notable (or curious) Invictus fans include Anthony Macias, California Republican Party delegate for Santa Clara County, and neo-Nazi event planner Jovanni Valle.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s Florida Man. Florida Man is a very diverse species, but its members are immediately recognizable when you encounter one.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

 

#3072: Cass Ingram

A.k.a. Cassim K., A.k.a. Dr. K., A.k.a. Kaasem Khaleel, A.k.a. Cass Igram

 

Cass Ingram is a disgraced former osteopath who lost his Illinois medical license in 1999 for “unprofessional, unethical and dishonourable conduct” – apparently charging a patient inappropriately for nutritional supplements – and has gone on to become a semi-recognized purveyor of nutrition-related woo and pseudoscience, and for making wild and unsubstantiated claims about alleged near-miraculous health benefits of various ‘natural cures’.

 

Cass Ingram

Ingram, sometimes addressed as a “nutritional physician” (which means nothing) or a “doctor who has given answers and hope to millions through lectures on thousands of radio and TV shows”, has written a number of books like The Cure Is in the Cupboard, which makes a long series of unsubstantiated claims about supposed benefits of oregano oil to treat, well, more or less everything from allergies to the flu. And yes, extracts of oregano oil do have antimicrobial effects in a test tube (as do a number of things), which means nothing, but Ingram predictably tries to run a couple of complete courses with the claim. And of course Ingram would promote products sold by North American Herb & Spice Co. LLC, a company run by … Ingram himself and one Judy Kay Gray; the company was eventually sued by the FTC for its bogus claims. Elsewhere, Ingram has praised e.g. “black seed oil” as a miracle cure and raw hemp oil as a wonder product. Other titles from his hand include The Black Seed Miracle; The Body Shape Diet: What your hands, face and figure say about your metabolism, nutrition and hormonal status (even experienced health morons should pause a bit over that title, but they probably don’t: morons!) and The Cure Is in the Forest: The Healing Powers of Wild Chaga Mushroom, Birch Bark, and Poplar Buds – The Forest’s Most Powerful Natural Medicines. There are other titles, too; he is somewhat prolific.

 

And if you wondered whether Cass Ingram is anti-vaccine, why, yes: of course he is anti-vaccine. During COVID, for instance, Ingram produced a somewhat popular video (discussed here) claiming that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines can “cause death and disease through GMO shedding” (oh, yes) and that also unvaccinated people are being exposed to “toxins” that cause sudden deaths, miscarriages, placenta dysfunctionality, “fist-sized blood clots” and menstrual cycle disorders just by “being around vaccinated people”: “There had been some fatalities from contact with the vaccinated,” alleged Ingram, and “this does not mean hugging and kissing, necessarily. It means being in the same room, in the same elevator.”

 

Kaasem Khaleel

You might have thought Cass Ingram was just yet another scam-adjacent pusher of faddish woo and pseudoscience. But when duty calls, Cass Ingram logs out of his woo channels to become Kaasem Khaleel, host of the (now defunct) website nodisinfo.com and author of books like Wrongly Blamed, The Real Facts Behind 9/11 and the London Bombings, which, as the title suggests, does not trade in facts about the 2005 London Bombings or about 9/11 but rather the most egregiously insane conspiracy theories. Khaleel is the kind of conspiracy monger who travels the neo-nazi and Holocaust denialist website circuit to argue that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax and that the Boston Marathon bombers were framed by Mossad, whereas the victims – there were a substantial amount of injured but surviving witnesses, remember – are liars, Satanists and Zionists for refusing to go along with his conspiracy theory.

 

His website was, for a while, a not entirely insignificant source of conspiracy theories and misinformation about all sorts of things, from JFK to celebrity death hoaxes. However, it was shuttered after his Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy theories drew some attention also outside of conspiracy theory circles for posting pictures of the children killed in the Sandy Hook tragedy to promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

 

Diagnosis: Sometimes we encounter people who, although they promote woo and pseudoscience, actually do quite a bit of good in other areas. Cass Ingram is not one of those people.

 

#3071: Laura Ingraham

No, we have in fact not given her an entry before, and yes, we should probably feel a bit ashamed. Anyways, Laura Ingraham is an Ann Coulter-knockoff and wingnut star who is currently hosting The Ingraham Angle on Fox News. She started her career as editor of the rightwing Dartmouth Review and as a Reagan administration speechwriter in the 1980s, before launching her TV career and radio show in 2001; she has also published a series of books we haven’t read and hope you haven’t either. As for positions on current issues, well, you can more or less guess pretty accurately yourself, but in any case:

 

Ingraham is deeply and fanatically anti-science. She is on record as a vehement global warming denier who has characterized climate change as a religion (Obama, for instance, had a “maniacal adherence” to “the church of the global warming”), and she subscribes to the Climategate conspiracy theory.

 

More recently, Ingraham has also gone full-blown anti-vaccine activist and RFK Jr. fan. During COVID, she repeatedly questioned the effectiveness and safety of the COVID vaccines, based on conspiracy theories, and instead pushed for hydroxychloroquine as an all-round COVID treatment – Ingraham characterized it as a miracle drug and a “game changer”, and hosted a number of guests (like deranged conspiracy theorist and Minnesota state senator Scott Jensen, Dr. Phil and America’s Frontline Doctors’ Richard Urso) to promote it. When studies showed that hydroxychloroquine was associated with an increased risk of death, she dismissed them as “shoddy”, “shockingly irresponsible” and “agenda-driven” on the grounds that the results didn’t match what she had decided that they ought to show; she even suggested that such results were part of a conspiracy against … herself, Fox and Trump (they were “triggered by pure hatred of Trump? Of Fox? Of me?”). Ingraham was of course also an early proponent of ivermectin and promoted the conspiracy theory that doctors and officials “vilify and dismiss and demean, and, frankly, lie about it, the effectiveness of these drugs” because the doctors and scientists based their conclusions on consulting reality rather than her. Indeed, Ingraham managed to gain international fame as a source of misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories about COVID.

 

Following the January 6 2021 attack on the Capitol, Ingraham was one of the most prominent promoters of false flags conspiracy theories (that the largely mythical antifa was responsible). Her support for these conspiracy theories was probably guided by strategic considerations rather than conviction, insofar as her own text messages seem to contradict her official views. Ingraham had earlier been an important champion of Clinton body count conspiracy theories, in particular Seth Rich murder conspiracy theories; Ingraham at one point had to suggest, instead of admitting that the conspiracy theory was bonkers ridiculous, that Rich’s parents had to be involved in the conspiracy as well. She was likewise an early promoter of conspiracy theories about the 2017 Las Vegas massacre.

 

As for social issues, Ingraham is worried about the “pornification of our culture” and subscribes to The Great Replacement conspiracy theory (Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants”), often propping up her rhetoric with misinformation and fake news. As for gun control, Ingraham was heavily involved in the targeting of Parkland survivor David Hogg by wingnut cyberbullies, and her stance on mass shootings is that they should be blamed on marijuana rather than guns. (She is not reasonable about marijuana legislation.) At least she claims to have been opposed to Trump’s Iran war from the start.

 

Even Bill O’Reilly characterized Ingraham as a “rabid ideologue” and “Kool-Aid drinker.”

 

Diagnosis: Yes, she might appear almost milquetoast compared to the lineup of grimly paranoid delusionists currently being served wingnut audiences, but her influence is certainly non-negligible. And she is, indeed, a grimly paranoid and delusional conspiracy theorist, too, even if much of what she says is primarily motivated by cynical market capture strategies.