#2984: Steven J. Harris

Chronic Lyme is not a genuine diagnosis. People who think they suffer from chronic Lyme (but don’t) are really suffering, however, and since most medical organizations have standards and observe things like accuracy and accountability, they are often unable to come up with clear answers or help to these people. So we have a discrepancy here, ready to be filled by conmen and opportunists. Lyme-literate Doctors is a group of scammers, conspiracy theorists and confused medical providers (it is usually hard to determine to which subgroup particular members belong) who have decided, for various reasons, to grab the opportunity and dazzle people in vulnerable positions with the trappings of recognition and care, pseudoscience and expensive bullshit. They are organized in the group the International Lyme and Associated Disease (ILADS), which provide rather aggressive support, including legal support, for whatever quackery any one of their affiliated doctors might decide to engage in. And the organization has become rather powerful.

 

Steven Jeffrey Harris, a California-based physician and the son of ILADS cofounder and IgeneX founder Nick Harris, is a bit of a celebrity in chronic Lyme circles and a central member of ILADS and Lymedisease.org (formerly CALDA) as well as a “clinical consultant” for IgeneX, all organizations famous for spreading misinformation about Lyme disease. Though he is board certified in Family Medicine, Harris has no recognized advanced credentials in infectious diseases, and it is notable that he practices in California, where real Lyme disease is rather uncommon – people who think they suffer from chronic Lyme are not that rare, however, and Harris has received some attention for his work with celebrities, like Kris Kristoffersen, whom Harris treated with a.o. antibiotic intramuscular injections, which has of course no effect on a condition that doesn’t exist but may decimate the patient’s natural bacterial flora and breed resistant bacteria (as well as giving the impression that the patient is taken seriously).

 

Harris’s dubious practices haven’t quite escaped attention. In 2013, the Medical Board of California charged him with Gross Negligence and/or Repeated Negligent Acts and/or Incompetence with respect to three patients, to whom Harris had recommended a variety of quackery, including bizarre drug cocktails, lab tests, and visits to doctors and alternative practitioners. The nonsense included dozens of medications and homeopathic remedies, and at least one of the patients suffered life threatening complications from the treatments, despite no plausible evidence that any of them were suffering from what Harris claimed they were suffering from. Even so, the reprimand, probably due to California’s Lyme quack protection law, only applied to the intravenous garlic Harris had prescribed to two of them – although at least the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation refused to renew his license to practice medicine. (The complaint also listed one Y.L., presumably Harris’s long-time employee Yvonne Lin Sorenson, and C.R., presumably naturopath Claire Riendeau, whose website has listed Harris as one of her advisers.)

 

Harris has apparently also suggested, utterly ridiculously, that there might be a link between Lyme disease and autism, and he has allegedly also supplied patients to Indian predatory stem cell clinic Nutech Mediworld.

 

Diagnosis: A genuine public menace. Avoid at all cost.

 

Hat-tip: Lymescience.org

 

#2983: Steve Harris

The 2020 book America’s Secret History: How the Deep State, The Fed, The JFK, MLK, and RFK Assassinations, And Much More Led to Donald Trump's Presidency, which purports to contain “the truth behind the stories they don’t want you to know”, might perhaps be judged to be the epitome of 20^th- and early 21^st-century conspiracy thinking, and a potentially canonical text for QAnon-adjacent activists (were it not for such groups’ proclivity to suspect anything like this of being establishment psyops). The book promotes pretty much every significant and familiar politically-oriented conspiracy theory you can think of, and purports to offer e.g. conclusive proof that Sirhan B. Sirhan didn’t kill RFK, that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King, Jr. – the book instead blames (of course) the US Government, the FBI, and the city of Memphis of first conspiring to kill MLK and then cover it up – that the establishments of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were the beginning of The Deep State, and that John Hinckley, Jr., who tried to assassinate Reagan in 1981, was an agent of George Bush Sr. Also, of course, 9/11 was an inside job (controlled demolition), and so on. At least the book manages to utilize an impressive number of deranged historical sources, including paranoid anti-communist government reports from the 1950s like the Reece Report, and embellishes them with wild-eyed speculation. The book was, of course, well received by other conspiracy theory authors. We don’t have much other information on the book’s author, Steve Harris (he may or may not have written a number of other books (the name is common enough to make it hard to determine), except that he seems to be something of a veteran on the ‘alternative history’ stage, but judging his level of trustworthiness on the contents of America’s Secret History doesn’t exactly suggest any point to investigating further.

 

Diagnosis: Admittedly more of a ‘classic’ conspiracy theorist than a QAnon- or altright-related one. Still.

 

#2982: Samantha Harris

Samantha E. Harris is a “demonologist, deliverance minister, guest TV host, director of MPRA” (the “Michigan Paranormal Research Association”), “psychic, and spiritual healer” – yes, she is an adult person who fails to distinguish Poltergeist and The Conjuring franchises from real life (or, as she puts it herself: “The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Exorcist are two of the more accurate films depicting demonic possession in Hollywood productions”). Her career is devoted to removing hauntings and demons  – basically performing ‘blessings’: “[a]s of 2017, she has performed over 120 house blessings for severe hauntings and counting” – and to ‘educate’ people on how to avoid such things: it’s basically the tricks you’ll find featured in the aforementioned movies. Her work has been featured on venerable purveyors of evidence-based information like the Travel Channel and the Discovery Channel. Insofar as she is “a sensitive”, her “most personal and frequent experiences are: dream premonitions, intense empathy, and discerning spirits/energy”, or in other words: Her standard of assessment for her choices, diagnoses and assessments are largely whatever she feels about the issue at hand. She also has a book, Fighting Malevolent Spirits: A Demonologist’s Darkest Encounters, which we admit to not having read.

 

The MPRA, on its side, was “established to allow experienced paranormal groups in Michigan to unite, creating a paranormal think-tank and allowing groups to assist each other with educating, training, experience, scheduling and manpower”; its website really fulfills all your preconceptions about paranormal research, with its commitment to horror-movie aesthetics (fuzzy black-and-white pictures of old abandoned houses and so on), and thoroughly fails to dispel the suspicion that they’re not entirely serious.

 

Diagnosis: Whatever. Probably mostly harmless.

#2981: Cliff Harris

Cliff Harris is an End Times preacher, climate change denialist and general conspiracy theorist. Harris is perhaps most notable for his book Weather and Bible Prophecy, which is signed “Climatologist Cliff Harris”, although it is difficult to find any information on his credentials, education or any research background whatsoever other than him having been involved in something called Harris-Mann Climatology, which seems to be little more than a (now-defunct) website, with fellow fundie endtimes loon Randy Mann (you can find some discussion on some of their work in the comments here). His own website lists him as one of the “top 10 climatologists in the world”, but it is unclear on what that assessment is based given that he has no discernible credentials or scientific publication record.

 

In any case, his book – for which we cannot find any publisher info – putatively explores the link between weather events and biblical prophecies, in particular prophecies connected to the End Times: weather and climate events are ostensibly means God use to draw attention to himself (apparently with varying success), and play some role (we can’t manage to motivate ourselves to delve into details) in the potential emergence of “New Jerusalem”. At least Harris is clear that climate change, as understood by scientific communities, is a “hoax” being used to grow the size of government. And growing the size of government is, of course, deeply unChristian and a mark of the end times: In a discussion with Rick Wiles, for instance, Harris claimed that the mass support for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2015 is clear evidence that the second coming of Jesus is imminent.

 

In parallel with his scrapbook projects on climate, Harris has also been pushing geoengineering and chemtrail conspiracy theories, claiming for instance that chemtrails are a significant cause of allergies, chronic illnesses and ‘flu-like symptoms’ across America. His expertise in medicine roughly parallels his expertise on climate.

 

Diagnosis: Completely bonkers, but it seems that his feeble analyses have had some impact in denialist communities – and possibly even among people with actual power (there are some references to them even in government documents). And if the lunatic rants of Cliff Harris don’t fail to find traction, it's hard to hold on to the hope that there are any boundaries whatsoever.

#2980: Barbara Harper

Water-birthing, the practice of delivering a baby into a body of water, even a putatively sterile one, is inherently risky and has no benefits for anything whatsoever, something that is pretty obvious even to people with little medical experience. The practice has nevertheless had a run as a woo fad, because of course it has. There is a decent discussion of the practice here.

 

An influential and thoroughly woo-infused resource for the practice of waterbirthing is something called Waterbirth International, which is run by Barbara Harper, a nurse who is also a proponent of rebirthing-breathwork., the idea that suppressed negative emotions can be healed by ‘reliving one’s birth’ while … breathing. Harper and Waterbirth International apparently promote waterbirthing all over the world with plenty of incoherent New Age fluff (including, apparently, something about your cells having feelings) centered on the desire for a drug-free childbirth based on a fallacious appeal to nature; you don’t need to ask her what definition of ‘natural’ makes waterbirthing natural. And her response to reluctance from actual MDs and people who know things about medicine (and risk) is entirely predictable: the backlash is a result of the fact that with a waterbirth “you as the attending physician pretty much have to stand there with your hands in your pockets and let it happen without your participation. That is pretty scary to a physician-oriented institution.” She doesn’t address concerns referring to risks. She does, however, express some rather striking and frightening misconceptions about human physiology and childbirth.

 

In fact, there is some research on the practice, which also summarizes the existing evidence of benefits – which is precisely what you’d expect: “most published articles that recommend underwater births are retrospective reviews of a single center experience, observational studies using historical controls, or personal opinions and testimonials, often in publications that are not peer reviewed”. There is, as the study obviously has to point out, also a stark absence of basic science to support the proposed physiologic benefits.

 

Diagnosis: In fairness, complications from waterbirthing are probably relatively rare if conducted in the presence of a medical professional. Harper might, as such, not be more than a moderate danger to her environment. But her misconceptions and woo are certainly not benign.

 

Hat-tip: Clay Jones @ Sciencebasedmedicine

#2979: Karen Hardin

More prophets and intercessors! There’s plenty of them, and every single one really qualifies for an entry here. Karen Hardin is an an intercessor, literary agent, co-founder of the City-by-City prayer movement, and author, who, with her husband, Kevin, leads Destiny Builders and leads prayer teams in DC – and yes, she has the ears of leaders: In 2019, for instance, she met with White House staff and reported that “they expressed great concern for the increased attacks and threats against [Trump] and have called for a corporate Esther fast from Nov. 2–5” (we won’t try to assess the accuracy of her report; we are reluctant to ascribe credibility to anything she says). Her output has otherwise appeared in WND, Charisma Magazine, The Elijah List and similar deranged conspiracy outlets.

 

Politically, Hardin is MAGA, and she was no fan of the Biden administration; in 2021, for instance, she warned that a new Holocaust was “being ushered in by the Biden administration which will affect every American personally.” Meanwhile, she imagines that Trump is a proper spokesperson for God; in 2019, for instance, she reported from the National Prayer Breakfast that Trump’s “spiritual growth” was obvious: Trump “shared several scriptures and they flowed out of him not as from a speech, but from the heart. He was familiar with them. He knew them.” Her conclusion is, in other words, based exclusively on what she wishes were the case. Otherwise, Hardin is an incessant spreader of conspiracy theories, and has for instance asserted that the January 6, 2021 Capitol storming was a false flag event carried out by Antifa and BLM.

 

An although she believes in the power and accuracy of prophecies, she has an escape hatch for when they fail: many “prophetic words are contingent upon the follow-through action of the recipient. If we don’t receive the word and act upon it, then it remains unfulfilled. It’s not that the prophetic word was off. It’s that the recipient did nothing to partner with the word to bring it to pass.” In other words, if the prophecy didn’t come to pass, the blame belongs on people who didn’t do their part, so you’ll never, in fact, find an example of a false prophecy.

 

Diagnosis: Fully unmoored from reality and floating freely in a fantasy realm characterized by fundie rage and paranoia. Don’t listen to anything she says.

#2978: Bill Hardiman

William Clyde Hardiman III was the mayor of Kentwood, Michigan from 1992 to 2002, subsequently a state senator from 2003 to 2011, and an unsuccessful Congressional candidate in 2011. This is, in other words, somewhat antiquated stuff, but we deem it to be still worth mentioning, albeit briefly. Hardiman’s stint in the state senate was characterized by backing a number of bills promoting intelligent design creationism and, in particular, teaching intelligent design creationism in public schools, such as a 2008 bill that would open up for teaching “alternative views” on evolution, global warming and cloning. Hardiman, the lead sponsor of the senate version of the bill, said he was inspired by the ‘documentary’ Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which is approximately on the level of referring to a Jack Chick comic.

 

Diagnosis: Fool. At present hopefully out of any group with any power to influence these matters.