#2887: William Gaunt

William Gaunt is a retired naturopathic quack, anti-vaccine activist and contributor to the antivaccine organization Age of Autism. Gaunt is convinced, by his own gut and motivated reasoning, that vaccines are responsible for all sorts of death and destruction and, since all evidence shows they’re not, that there is a vast conspiracy among medical researchers to hide the truth; yes, those researchers know it, but “if you want to keep your job” you’d better shut up – apparently the CDC, a powerful global cabal, controls that narrative. The CDC’s motivations remain somewhat unclear – Gaunt is not the type of person who lets concerns about details get in the way of a conspiratorial narrative – but apparently he views them as having set the safeness and efficacy of vaccines as a religious tenet and real doctors and medical researchers (as opposed to naturopathic mavericks like himself and those who say things that agree with his gut) are their zealous drones. That this is how Gaunt thinks researchers operate tells you quite a bit about Gaunt and his level of familiarity with medical research.

 

For instance, Gaunt believes that “many infant deaths classified as SIDS are actually caused by vaccines”, a claim that is demonstrably false – indeed, the rate of SIDS fell dramatically in the 1990s, when antivaxxers like Gaunt like to claim that the vaccine schedule expanded dramatically, but to people like Gaunt, correlation is causation and inverse correlation is causation, too. According to Gaunt and – in his eyes – supported by some dishonest dumpster-diving into the VAERS database (and deliberate misinterpretation of the results) by anti-vaccine mainstay and psychologist Neal Z. Miller, there is, of coourse, a conspiracy afoot: You see, according to Gaunt, with the introduction of ICD-9 “vaccines were no longer one of the accepted causes of infant death and the coroner would be forced to choose another cause of death”, a claim that easily falsified by just checking with ICD-9 (or the subsequent ICD-10 – Gaunt, for obvious reasons, don’t link to them; we do), and he sees that (imaginary) change as being motivated by the rollout of the “measles vaccine” to hide the costs; never mind that the MMR vaccine isn’t scheduled for an age long past the age when SIDS would occur anyways. Further support for his claims is a Vaccine Court decision that Gaunt thinks shows a connection because “the evidence must be overwhelming and irrefutable for the petitioner to have any chance of winning the case” (false), even though the case in question was overturned because the original decision was “arbitrary and capricious”, ignored previous decisions and applied a too-low standard of proof to the case even for the low standards of the vaccine courts. He also repeats, among other standard antivaccine nonsense talking points, the lie that shaken baby syndrome is a “misdiagnosis for vaccine injury.”

 

Diagnosis: He’s old, and has not only wasted a whole life on nonsense and quackery and mindrot but actively devoted it to, presumably unwittingly, making the world a worse place. One can almost understand and empathize with a desperate need to cling to the myths and conspiracy theories that would whitewash such an ugly waste of a life. If there were any accounting to be done, he’d be in bad shape.

#2886: Tracy Gaudet

The internet offers an abundance of obviously incoherent and dangerous types of quackery and pseudoscience, but the most significant threat to health and well-being is arguably posed by the slickly marketed, seemingly legitimate and not clearly immediately harmful nonsense that is used, successfully, to infiltrate academic institutions with quackery – the kind of woo pushed by people like Tracy Gaudet.

 

Gaudet herself is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and has for a while now been a central figure in efforts to give pseudoscience and quackery a place at legitimate institutions and thereby providing it with a disconcerting sheen of legitimacy. Gaudet is Executive Director of the Doctor of Whole Health Leadership (DWHL) program at the Southern California University of Health Sciences, co-founder of the Cornerstone Collaboration for Societal Change and of the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health, and former Executive Director of the Whole Health Institute and of Duke Integrative Medicine and the University of Arizona Program in Integrative Medicine; she is also affiliated with the Institute for Functional Medicine. Tracy Gaudet is, in other words, a seminal figure in the push to legitimize integrative and holistic medical practices under the assumption that integrating non-reality based bullshit with real medicine somehow makes medicine better. And to quote from the description of the DWHL program, the program “integrates advanced whole health concepts, care models, personal self-exploration, and leadership development” that will equip students with “the skills and knowledge needed to drive system-level change, promoting the adoption of an integrative, whole-health approach to healthcare in the United States”: i.e. it is not a program that has anything to do with science or with the practice or research of medicine, but one that equips students to be effective lobbyists and marketers for the quackery people like Gaudet wants to market.

 

Not the least, Gaudet managed to do quite a bit of harm during her tenure as director of the Veterans Health Administration’s National Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation, where she was responsible for concentrated efforts to “re-envision” healthcare delivery by promoting naturopathy and integrative medicine. A typical example of those efforts is the attempt to co-opt the opioid crisis and requests for nonpharmacologic treatments for chronic pain to promote CAM modalities like auricular acupuncture as pain relief, with the help of questionable rants, a few shoddy studies (primarily this one and this one) and studies that failed to back up what their authors wanted the studies to show. They also, tellingly, offered up e.g. studies on “introducing BFA [battlefield acupuncture] into the aeromedical evacuation system” – it’s a rather typical characteristic of pseudiscientific woo to study the feasibility of integrating a technique into practice before determining whether it fucking works. They mostly succeeded.

 

Of course, Gaudet wasn’t satisfied with promoting acupuncture, which would have been bad enough; acupuncture, for Gaudet, is merely an apparently semi-legitimate Trojan horse for the real nonsense, like naturopathy, that Gaudet wished – and was somewhat successful in getting – veterans to be exposed to. Speaking at the 2015 annual DC Federal Legislative Initiative arranged by the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (naturopaths really want to be ‘physicians’), she described naturopathy as “a huge answer for the country, for practice, for patients” that is available “at a pivotal transformational moment” in healthcare, referring to naturopathic practitioners as “pioneers” who have been practicing integrative medicine “all along.”

 

Still, Tracy Gaudet, Executive Director of the DWHL program, is probably a different Tracy Gaudet than Tracy Gaudet, Practical Ascension Guide, Personal Mastery Shaman and Wayshower of Awakening who works “with powerful light workers/warriors and change makers through the ascension process, to help accelerate them into more of their Soul self and Soul level gifts” and who uses her “combined training and intuitive connection to work multidimensionally through guided journeys, energy healings and activations, coaching and more to help expand you into greater possibilities and the next level that is open and available to you now”, though there seems to be some points of intellectual connection.

 

Diagnosis: It’s a myth, but one still yearns for that time before the post-truth era, before what was considered true and correct became interchangeable with whatever could be polished slick for marketing and inserted into some fashionable narrative about transformative innovation. In any case, Tracy Gaudet’s brand of post-truth posturing is a threat to health and well-being and to civilization.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2885: Dennis Garvin

Dennis Garvin is a Virginia-based urologist (it seems) and young-earth creationist – not a big fish on the fundie anti-science scene, we suppose, but at least he’s been given the opportunity to do his reflections on things scientific in columns for the Roanoke Star. So in his column ‘Reflections of A Former Darwinist’ he assures us, like so many fundie denialists, that he used to be an atheist and Darwinist himself until he came to terms with the unsurmountable problems facing the theory of evolution – he’s lying, of course, but since he’s lying for Jesus, he’ll get a pass – in particular the existence of altruism, which, as Garvin sees it, is “nonsense in Darwinian term”. Some narrow-minded nerds might have reacted to wondering about such matters by consulting the literature on evolution and altruism; Garvin rejected all of science instead.

 

Now, he doesn’t think he rejects all of science, however. Rather, as Garvin sees it, the “six days of Genesis’ creation is easily explained by Einstein’s theory of time dilation and the application of the Common Background Radiation left over from the Big Bang”; he didn’t actually provide the ‘easy explanation’, however – the numbers for Earth’s velocity needed to sustain such insane ad-hocery would be … interesting and wouldn’t do anything to explain away even a fraction of the evidence against a recent creation anyways. Moreover, “the mystery of the Trinity has scientific logic if you apply slit lamp experiments, quantum mechanics and specifically the idea of phase entanglement”, which must be something close to a world record in handwaving.

 

Diagnosis: Not a significant threat to anything, at least not compared to some of the loons in the entries surrounding his. It is good to be able to laugh at some feeble nonsense now and then without the hints of existential dread, however.

#2884: Lakita Garth

Lakita Garth is a rapper, former beauty queen and self-proclaimed “sexpert” affiliated with Ron Luce’s militant, fundamentalist organization BattleCry. A slightly more accurate job description would be “professional slut shamer”. She is at least a tireless speaker, and has presented her ideas to large groups of youths; she has also testified before Congress about abstinence only programs – yes, we know, but you’ll hardly find anyone with relevant qualifications to defend the ideas she defends. Garth’s main project is to promote abstinence and “purity” through racist and sexist stereotypes and shameless lying. As Garth sees it, “Lies” is female, “Truth” is male, and women who engage in sex outside –strictly patriarchal – marriages can aptly be termed “flea-males”, for “if you lie down with dogs …”

 

Ostensibly, Garth is concerned about STDs. She isn’t really, but pretending to be concerned about STDs comes across as more easily marketable than Nazi-like ideas about purity based on angry religious fundamentalism. And abstinence is the only means to avoid STDs since “condoms don’t work”. This is false.

 

Garth also tends to lament the fact that things she don’t like isn’t banned for everybody, and bemoans the fact that judges in the US aren’t required to study the Mosaic books of the Bible. She has apparently also written a book, The Naked Truth: About Sex, Love And Relationships Student Guide, but we struggle to find (or to want to find) much information about it.

 

Diagnosis: Fundie moron. It is unclear whether anyone listens to her. Still.

#2883: Ben Garrison

Not Garrison, but illustrative nonetheless

Benjamin “Ben” Garrison is a wingnut and “politically incorrect” editorial cartoonist, QAnon promoter, anti-vaccine activist, champion of all things pseudoscience, and in general an all-purpose conspiracy theorist. Like many wingnuts, Garrison is a self-described libertarian, which, as you’d expect given the context, means an authoritarian (Trump) paleoconservative fundie whose criticism of tyranny and oppression is limited to the exclusively imaginary forces of tyranny and oppression that populates, supported by various conspiracy theories, his own paranoid mind (and which everyone else ostensibly lies about). Or, as he puts it himself, “as socialists, the Democrats naturally hate Christianity. It’s predictable. They want to destroy our culture, our economy, and our freedom including freedom of religion. Yes, that will be extinguished too. Communists want to be worshipped and they will permit only their own religion, the worship of the state.”

 

His cartoons seem to be somewhat effective with his intended audiences, largely due to Garrison’s penchant for using labels to explain everything in minute detail; he knows his audiences.

 

Conspiracy theories: pseudoscience & denialism

Garrison’s work is an example of crank magnetism; indeed, for any topic that comes his way, you can be sure he’ll look for the silliest take consistent with his fervent paranoia. A peculiar, recurring theme in his cartoons, by the way, is Don Quixote’s fight with windmills, a sequence Garrison consistently fails to understand, with some unintentionally hilarious results (e.g. here and here).

 

Though he claims that he is “not anti-science”, Garrison does (falsely) believe that vaccines cause autism – based primarily on the mythical autism epidemic and its perceived correlation with a mythical increase in the numbers of vaccine doses children are given – and that vaccines are a money-making conspiracy managed by Big Pharma, which is “tied in with the globalists” to ensure that “natural cures are suppressed” and to “ ‘control and regulate’ supplements,” which Garrison thinks, based on the marketing materials from big supplement producers that are under no control or oversight, are safe and effective. As Garrison sees it, vaccines are full of toxic ingredients like bribery, Guillian-Barre, mercury, formaldehyde, lobbyists, cancer, aluminum, seizures, autism, and thimerosal – in addition to the usual suspects aluminum, polysorbate 80, “aborted fetal DNA”, and “bacterial & viral DNA”. During Covid, Garrison also promoted various conspiracy theories accusing Bill Gates of trying to use vaccines as a depopulation tool. Meanwhile, his cartoons often depict central anti-vaccine activists like RFK jr., Kent Heckenlively, Del Bigtree, Polly Tommey, Andrew Wakefield (Garrison is a fan of Wakefield), Suzanne Humphries and (for good measure) Milo Yiannopoulos as superheroes. Other standard anti-vaccine PRATTs promoted by Garrison include:

 

-       “vaccine makers” have “immunity from lawsuits” (false, of course); and also, in line with his general paranoia: “Some statists would now love to see another law: One that makes criticism of vaccination abuse a crime”)

-       The Hepatitis B vaccine is a laughable scam since babies are not “in danger of being exposed to it” [dangerously false, of course]

-       “In fact, most of the diseases had already largely gone away before a vaccine was invented [they had not].

        Clean food & water & modern living standards did the trick.”

        Indeed, the “polio shot wasn't even needed”.

-       News stories about children dying from the flu are malevolent propaganda, since “people die of the flu all the time and always have”, so there is no reason to get the flu shot. Just think about it.

-       Measles is “a harmless and nuisance disease”

-       “Don’t ask what’s in the vaccines, either. Most doctors don’t even know.”

 

Garrison has also lamented the alleged suppression of Mike Adams, the “Natural News Health Ranger”, and “his valuable information”.

 

As for climate change, Garrison is a denier. Contrary to all evidence, Garrison believes (e.g.) that

 

-       “the ice caps at the poles is [sic] growing”

-       “the sun is the primary driver of climate”, but “it gets ignored” because “those running the show at the top want us to pay a carbon tax for breathing.”

-       A recurring feature of his cartoons is to claim that days with cold weather disproves global warming and proves that Al Gore is a con man.

-       Contrary to science, Garrison still thinks “the hockey stick is broken” based on talking points he’s read on denialist websites.

 

Al Gore: fooling the world since 1912

The whole idea of climate change is really a conspiracy engineered by Al Gore (presumably in the 1890s), for “[w]ho benefits from carbon taxes? Al Gore, of course” – Gore “has a vested interest to push the global warming/climate change agenda no matter what. Scientists are bought off. Data are distorted.” (Garrison lives in a very small world.). Indeed, climate change is being used to perpetuate “worldwide communism”. Part of the evidence, as Garrison for some hard-to-discern reason sees it, is that the biggest threat to the planet, Fukushima, “is completely ignored”. Greta Thunberg, meanwhile, is a puppet of Soros, who wants to usher in global socialism because he is a billionaire and that’s what billionaires want.

 

Yes, there are chemtrail and anti-GMO conspiracy theories, too, but we can’t be bothered.

 

Conspiracy theories: Grand unified ones

The Thunberg/Soros conspiracy theory points toward the somewhat nebulous grand unified conspiracy theory that ties the various paranoid strands of denialism and nonsense that constitute Garrison’s mind together. The deep state consists of a group of extremely wealthy bankers that, by the incoherence permitted by grand unified conspiracy theories, want to usher in communism. Soros himself is a puppet of the Rothschild banking family, who is (or is part of) the puppet masters that control world events (that they all happen to be Jewish is just how things are): “The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of corrupt and powerful men and women from the Deep State Swamp. They control the government, the corporate media, too much of the judicial system, and the security agencies. They use their corporate media to lie to us and control narratives. We conservatives realized they were lying to us, so we found the truth on the Internet. Now conservative voices are being censored”. The UN – which is also behind the California wildfires – is controlled by the “Satanic Illuminati.” (Garrison’s toying with anti-semitism is what led Trump to rescind his invitation to attend a “Social Media Summit” in 2019; in response to being uninvited, Garrison promptly sued the ADL for defamation, characterizing, in the court filings, the ADL as “a tool of the Democratic Party and private corporations, such as Google, to target Trump supporters, members of the Republican Party, and conservatives generally”; the suit also insisted that “the Rothschilds controlled Soros and that Soros controlled McMaster”).

 

Of course, once you’ve committed yourself to a deranged grand unified conspiracy theory, anything goes. So for Garrison, the January 6 2021 Capitol storming was apparently orchestrated not even by Antifa, as many nonsense wingnuts conveniently like to believe, but by the FBI. On January 8, 2021, Garrison was himself banned from Twitter along with several other far-right figures (including Trump himself) for incitement of violence during the January 6 attempted coup; to Garrison, the ban was of course just another example of how the “Soros-funded” globalist left is suppressing free speech.

 

Conspiracy theories: false flags & current events

As a political cartoonist, your primary role is to weigh in on current events, and Garrison weighs in with his particular blend of insight and analysis: For the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, for instance, Garrison prominently criticized the librul focus on gun control, which is “ignorant and insensitive” and “had nothing to do with it” (so there). But he also raised the possibility that “there were multiple shooters” and asked the pertinent question about the shooter “[d]he convert to Islam recently?”, though he admitted that “[i]t seems unlikely” – Garrison doesn’t like Muslims and sees the threat of Islam everywhere: “Obama (probably a Muslim himself) began forcing [Islam] upon our country and now we increasingly need to change American culture to favor the religion of Muhammad. Muslims will soon outnumber Jews in this country. Will Sharia Law replace the Constitution?” (Garrison thinks ‘yes’, because Islam and sharia law is a “George Soros vision of globalism” … there is nothing billionaire communist Jewish bankers like more than theocratic Islam unless it’s communism).

 

With regard to mass shootings, however, Garrison has more than toyed with Sandy Hook trutherism – his defense of Alex Jones, for instance, was based in part on commending Jones’s valuable information on “the Deep State, including the corrupt security agencies, the Bohemian Grove, the CFR, the Bilderbergs, fluoride in our water, the lies about 9-11, and yes, even Sandy Hook”, which, according to Garrison, “had many anomalies that should be questioned.” Even more obviously, to Garrison, as to wingnut commentators in general, Cesar Sayoc’s attempted mail-bombings of prominent Democrats and liberal public figures was obviously a false flag operation committed by liberals – there’s a desperate evolution in his takes on that one as the case unfolded, including obviously photoshopped images of Sayoc’s supposed voter registration info to show him as a Democrat and the hilariously desperate notion that Stormy Daniels and Sayoc worked at the same nightclub.

 

The liberal media machine is a powerful adversary (and ruled exclusively, like all of science and the whole Democratic party, by George Soros’s bottomless pockets) for people like Ben Garrison, however, and it is easy for the sheeple to get confused when media is employing their large stock of crisis actors to stage news events. The 2018 incident when migrants attempting to cross the US–Mexico border from Tijuana – part of “the Soros funded caravan” – were tear-gassed by border patrols, for instance, was entirely staged by the “Fake News Media”. Unfortunately, most people don’t recognize how deep and wide the Fake News Media network extends; Garrison for instance mentions an anecdote of him talking with an elderly woman who claimed to have admired Walter Cronkite, and how he had a “sad duty to inform her” that Cronkite “was a far-left globalist who prided himself as being at the right hand of Satan. He loved the U.N. and collectivist causes. He conducted ceremonies at the Bohemian Grove. […] a perfect spokesman for the Deep State”.

 

Conspiracy theories: Covid

Garrison believes that the Covid pandemic was a hoax made by the Deep State for the purpose of oppressing the people; it is “the latest crisis and the Deep State and the Fake News media are having a grand old time fanning the flames of fear.”

 

Exactly who was behind it, varies a bit, however: At one point, Garrison promoted the discredited conspiracy theory that the pathogen was a bioweapon produced by the Chinese to target Christians, since the Chinese are communists and communists are anti-religion (Garrison emphasizes that by randomly and falsely claiming that social-democrat Bernie Sanders promises action against Christians, whom he [Sanders] calls “religious bigots”). His reasoning is mostly that the Chinese communists would do so because communists are evil and lying, and as evidence that communists are evil and lying he cites the alleged fact that “[t]he current Chinese Communists are lying about the release of a bioweapon from one of their labs in Wuhan.” At least the allegation provides some clear insight into how Ben Garrison navigates the world.

 

Somewhat later, however, Garrison rather went for arguing that the virus was made by Bill Gates; Gates is, in Garrison’s mind, a eugenicist who wants to murder people, including through his promotion of GMO crops and “a handy-dandy microchip” in his vaccines (Garrison is not subtle about his accusations). The evidence is mostly that Gates had earlier warned about the possibility of a pandemic and why else would “a former computer nerd and mogul become so interested in vaccination and disease?” if it weren’t because he was harboring depopulation plans. How Garrison reasons about other people’s motivation tells you little about other people but might tell you something important about Garrison. Unfortunately, however, Gates/Soros/Rothschild have the governments and media (including Fox News) in their pockets, and “the corrupt WHO and CDC”, in turn, “have us controlled like puppets on strings. We obey without question. Citizens are not allowed to question medical ‘authorities’ without fearing censorship or ridicule. When the time comes for a mandatory vaccine, people will already have become conditioned to obey the medical ‘authorities’, and it's all going according to plan.” The illustration is here. Yes, they’re turning us into sheeple. Wake up.

 

His wife Tina, who since 2018 has occasionally submitted cartoons, too, with a ‘TinaToon’ signature and a style and substance similar to Ben’s, was at least euphoric when Trump defunded the WHO, claiming that the WHO hates America and that China “reaps all the benefits”. Tina is, of cousre, anti-vaccine, too, having produced cartoons with the slamdunk gotcha ‘if vaccines are so necessary, how did humans survive without them for millions of years’ (hint: they didn’t).

 

In September 2021, Garrison and his wife contracted COVID-19 themselves. Garrison claimed to treat it through self-medicating with nonsense woo like as ivermectin, beet root juice, and zinc, and continued to shout, loudly, that COVID-19 vaccines were “not real vaccines” but “gene therapy”, “free poison” and “foul spike protein-producing jabs which are neither safe nor effective”. He also promised never to visit a hospital since hospitals were killing COVID-19 patients for “extra money for Covid death reports, which is necessary to keep fear ramped up”.

 

Conspiracy theories: QAnon

But of course. “We are now enduring rampant lies, grift, plunder, pedophilia and satanism at the highest levels of government,” says Garrison, and that’s what the international-Jewish-banker-funded Deep State is ultimately all about. Garrison was an early (and dead serious) promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory: “A while back I drew Hillary kissing the ring of the Devil just before making her convention acceptance speech. It turned out to be a prophetic cartoon.” Garrison does not like Hillary Clinton (“she needs to be investigated, prosecuted and LOCKED UP!” the order of events seems irrelevant to Garrison.) Clinton and her campaign “are evil. They engage in Satanic practices in order to gain dominance. They want power over the populace and they have succeeded. It’s now time to expose these monsters. The Clintons are connected to a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. Both Hillary and Bill made many trips to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Pedophile Island.’No wonder the Clintons have put vast sums of money into banks in the mideast. They have their escape hatches ready.” Unfortunately, many people live in “hermetically sealed echo chambers” and are unable to recognize this dimension to Clinton and her companions, including, in particular, John Podesta, who has also featured in Garrison’s cartoons on numerous occasions and who, according to Garrison, may in fact be the son of Josef Mengele (as suggested by some YouTube video Garrison came across in an entirely non-echo-chamberly fashion). Garrison has also parroted the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” which is not at all suggestive of the sort of sheeplike attitude he otherwise criticizes.

 

Garrison has also promoted Georgia Guidestones nonsense, conspiracy theories about Satanist Illuminati-led New World Order depopulation measures, and claimed that 5G is a plot to kill people and control their minds (in some order). And yes, there is a QAnon connection between everything here: Garrison is of course anti-abortion, and if Garrison has an opinion on something, you can be sure it is backed up by some delusional conspiracy theory. So, according to Garrison:

 

“[t]he Illuminati who controls the Deep State loves abortion. The Satanists among them love to torture and kill innocent people and nobody is more innocent than a newborn baby. What’s next, the execution of children because they’re ‘unwanted’ by their parents? Before you laugh at this notion, consider the Illuminati is already trying to carry out the message on their Georgia Guide Stones. Satanists for some reason like to announce in advance what they're going to do to us, and they’re doing it right now. They put fluoride in the drinking water and chemtrails in the air. They force their GMO foods on us as well as their vaccines. Have you noticed how anxious they are for us to get jabbed with flu shots? […] The next killer will be 5G. Not only will it be used to control minds, it will also fry them. The illuminati don't want us on ‘their’ planet. They own it. They think they own us. We are their cattle to be culled. If we accept their premise that life is nothing but disconnected matter without meaning, then it will make it all the easier for them to finish us off.”

 

Garrison is also a Moon landing denialist, claiming that the Moon landing was faked by NASA and that “the CIA lied about it” because the Van Allen belts.

 

Diagnosis: As someone aptly characterized him, Ben Garrison is the Jack Chick of the wingnut conspiracy circus. Unfortunately, Garrison seems to enjoy a lot more authority and recognition than Jack Chick ever did. Like his sympathetic audiences, Garrison doesn’t understand the reality he inhabits, doesn’t understand that he doesn’t understand it, and tries to fill the gaps in his understanding and resolve his confusions with anger and paranoia. The usual stuff. We should feel sorry for him, but we don’t.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2882: Hayley Gardner

Hayley Gardner is a California-based acupuncturist and champion of acupressure, a form of popular and widely marketed theatrical placebo derived from the pseudo-religious idea of “life energy, which flows through [mythical] ‘meridians’ in the body”. The role of the acupressure practitioner is then to apply physical pressure to “acupuncture points” in order to “clear[ing] blockages in these meridians” (note the turn to metaphor at the crucial moment where a medical description would be expected) and “balance the flow of energy – called qi (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qi) – throughout the body to restore and maintain the proper function of body systems.” According to Gardner, “[o]ur bodies run on electricity, just like anything else”, which is … inaccurate and of dubious relevance to anything else she says. Yeah, this is all familiar woo moves – the appeal to metaphor and to orientalism (Gardner emphasizes the “Eastern medicine” angle), and sweeping but inaccurate claims about how the body works – but it’s useful to present a decent, middle-of-the-road example of such bullshit now and then.

 

Otherwise, there seems to be little to distinguish Gardner from a long range of similar alternative medicine practitioners – she appears to be affiliated with the Mayway consortium of traditional Chinese medicine promoters along with a slew of other quacks – and the only reason we noticed her is that Gardner was involved in the marketing of the Yogi jacket a very silly contraption that at least manifested a parody-friendly strain of L.A. culture.

 

Diagnosis: Pseudoreligious woo-babble. Probably pretty harmless, but still.

#2881: Roan Garcia-Quintana

A former Reagan administration appointee – deputy director of the National Institute of Education – Roan Garcia-Quintana is an experienced South Carolina political operative, executive director of the anti-immigration group Americans Have Had Enough, and a lifetime member and board member of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The CCC’s statement of principles state that the group opposes “all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents” as well as “all efforts” to “force the integration of the races”, and they call for the U.S. to maintain its European “composition and character.” In fairness, Garcia-Quintana denies having read those principles; he remains a central member of the group, however.

 

Primarily, Garcia-Quintana is concerned with immigration, or what he deems to be “an illegal alien invasion”, and he has been involved in organizing numerous anti-immigration protests. Himself a Cuban immigrant, Garcia-Quintana easily navigates potential cognitive dissonance by emphasizing that he doesn’t consider himself Latino but “European-American” since his ancestors allegedly came to Cuba from Spain.

 

In 2013, his CCC affiliation forced him to to resign from then-South Carolina-Governor Nikki Haley’s campaign re-election steering committee. He defended his support of Haley by pointing out that despite being the daughter of Indian immigrants, “she has the features of a Caucasian: her nose, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth. That’s really how you describe it.” Garcia-Quintana denies being a racist, however, rhetorically asking his audiences “Is it racist to want to keep your own heritage pure?”

 

Diagnosis: Sure, this kind of stuff struck us as more obviously shocking a decade ago, but that observation does nothing to rehabilitate Garcia-Quintana and his nonsense.