#3028: Angela Hock

The insanity known as free-birthing and the cultlike behavior of free-birthing groups have fortunately received some long-needed attention and exposure recently, but it has been around and caused tragedies for a while. The Nebraska Birth Keepers (NBK), for instance, was one group affiliated with the radical free birth movement, espousing the idea that women do not need medical intervention to deliver babies. Of course, Birth Keepers do not have medical training nor do they hold licenses to practice midwifery; they nevertheless attempted to help women have a “natural” birth experience with as limited assistance as possible. Their services were not cheap. 

According to Angela Hock, founder of the NBK, “[t]hough I possess knowledge in many birthing techniques, I am a natural undisturbed home birth advocate. I believe that we were created to birth without invention and that women possess the God-given wisdom and intuition to birth their babies free from regulation.” After all, women have given birth without medical assistance for thousands of years, so why start now? Given the deranged delusional fantasies of its members, it is perhaps little surprise that NBK was also a member of the Private Membership Association, a group that thinks any government regulations and laws do not bind them – Hock herself encouraged potential clients to join the association (for a fee) because it promised members “immunity from the law.”

Well, it didn’t. Hock herself got in trouble in 2019 when she was charged with negligent child abuse resulting in death after an infant died during a home birth where she served as “midwife”: Hock apparently knew for several hours that the baby was in a breech position but continued with the home birth and did not call for medical help. Predictably, Hock tried to cast herself (rather than e.g. the dead infant) as the victim in her GoFundMe to raise legal funds for her case: “The state of Nebraska is waging a war on the birthing women’s right to choose,” said Hock, citing a putative “relentless move to harass [crazy conspiracy theorists who want to provide midwife services but who are not Certified Nurse Midwifes], prosecute them and drive them out of existence”. After all, “Death of babies happens in the hospitals”, too, “and when it does, nobody is criminally charged” – which is false while also omitting the rather relevant fact that deaths of babies in hospitals tend to be the result of doctors doing everything they can to save a baby and mother rather than refusing to call for help when it is obviously needed and would have saved the baby if it had arrived in time. Following the legal proceedings, Hock was apparently acquitted of the charges but was at least restricted from practicing midwifery.

Diagnosis: Yes, parents may have the legal right to choose her services rather than safe and effective procedures, but do not suggest that there isn’t deception involved in how Hock and her fellow dingbat New Age fundies market their services: deception born of wild-eyed self-deception but deception nonetheless. Although barred from practicing midwifery, we have no doubt that the rank lunacy of Angela Hock continues to pose a major threat to the health and well-being of her surroundings.

 

#3027: Gene Ho

Eugene Ho was a campaign photographer for Donald Trump in 2016 who later has become a central figure in the propagation of QAnon-related conspiracy theories and related types of incoherent, paranoid wingnut nonsense. Part of the reason for his success is obviously his perceived access to Trump himself in virtue of being a campaign photographer (the perceivers in this case don’t assess such things in reasonable manners), and has led, for instance, to being a speaker at Michael Flynn & Clay Clark’s Reawaken America tour in 2021.  That same year, Ho tried his hand at politics himself by unsuccessfully running for mayor of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on an anti-vaccine, Christian nationalist platform. Ho is also the author of TRUMPography: How Biblical Principles Paved the Way to the American Presidency.

 

As mentioned, Ho is probably among the more widely recognized champions of QAnon conspiracy theories, and he has been something of a mainstay at QAnon events. He was for instance a speaker at Alysia & Brian Gamble’s “family-friendly” grassroots rally The Great Awakening, which gathered somewhat less than 100 pro-QAnon adherents at the National Mall in September 2021. At the event, Ho stressed to attendees that he believed that the Q movement “is all about blood” – which is about as coherent a summary as any – having in mind both the blood that QAnon adherents think elite Democratic pedophiles drink for its adrenochrome and the blood of Jesus Christ: “This whole thing of what we’re doing is all about blood. Q says constantly, ‘Check the bloodlines.’ We know they’ve been misusing blood with their adrenochrome and all of this stuff. But ultimately, what this is about, it’s about blood and it’s about blood from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Indeed, the Q movement is apparently about all sorts of things Ho has warm feelings for: “Q is about all of us together and all of us not being scared, because that’s what happened to us in America,” said Ho (one is excused for being a bit unsure whether Ho quite understands the word ‘about’), adding that “Q has wakened us up. Q has made us alive again and Q has taught us to think for ourselves” (no, it doesn’t seem to be the right word, especially for a group whose slogan is “where we go one, we go all”). Unfortunately, there is a conspiracy afoot to smear those who have seen the light, and Ho laments how “they take us Q believers and they make us into tinfoil hat wearing people. That’s not the truth. We here in the Q community, we are the ones with the beautiful families. We’re the ones here with the businesses.” Photos of the putatively family-friendly event show him perched on a stage in front of a giant “Q” and hashtags like MKUltra and Pedogate.

 

Ho was also part of the lineup e.g. at the Gambles’ 2020 QAnon event in Jacksonville to complement the nearby Republican National Convention, as well as at the December 2020 “stop the steal” prayer rally in DC and the 2021 Qanon event For God & Country Patriot Roundup in Dallas.

 

A curious and rather famous part of QAnon mythology is the idea that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his 1999 death in a plane crash in order to be able to team up with Donald Trump to take on the Satanic cabal that currently forms the deep state (QAnon followers’ evidence for the claim seems, for all practical purposes, to be that it is completely random and incoherent, which suits their reasoning patterns – apparently, the full baroque but notoriously gappy narrative involves time travel as well). As such, Ho’s cred among QAnon conspiracy theories got a significant boost when he and one Dave Blaze helped revive (well, reanimate might be more accurate) JFK, jr.’s long-defunct magazine George with Ho as editor-in-chief – note also that he was himself photographed with a “Trump / JFK Jr. 2020” T-shirt during the 2020 campaign. The current George-titled zombie magazine targets audiences interested in “spirituality” and “MAGA/Patriotism” and has offered “sit downs” with “Patriot Streetfighter” Scott McKay and the illustrator going by the name “The Commander’s Artist”, familiar for his portraits of Trump allies such as Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn as Revolutionary War heroes. As far as we can tell, it remains unclear whether Ho actually has the legal rights to use the George logo.

 

It is, we suppose, hardly surprising that Ho is firmly antivaccine as well. Together with his wife Nadean, Ho has e.g. hosted a podcast episode titled “Are Vaccines the Mark of the Beast?”, and no, that wasn’t just a question. During COVID, Ho was a reliable source of misinformation, both to downplay the virus and to warn the public against the vaccines, e.g. during his participation in the Health and Freedom tour.

 

Diagnosis: We will just modestly submit that it isn’t they who are primarily responsible for the image of Ho as a tinfoil hat wearing person. Those who listen to him – and there are, apparently, some – don’t need any further help to cultivate that image either. Good grief.

 

#3026: Mark Hitchock

A.k.a. Mark Hitchcock (sources seem unsure about how to spell his name)

 

Mark Hitchock is an End Times preacher, Senior Pastor of Faith Bible Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, and author of dozens of End Times-related books, including Blood Moons Rising: Bible Prophecy, Israel, and the Four Blood Moons; The Late Great United States: What Bible Prophecy Reveals About America's Last Days (potential signs of the end times include “the rising cost of foreign oil” and “a tidal wave of illegal immigrants”); Can We Still Believe in the Rapture (with the late Ed Hindson); and The End: A Complete Overview of Bible Prophecy and the End of Days.

 

Yes, Hitchock takes a ‘Biblical approach’ to a range phenomena. He thinks for instance that UFO sightings are “demonic forces that are passing themselves off as some kind of extraterrestrial beings to draw and distract people’s [whose?] attention away from God.” Indeed, “I think it’s very possible that these kinds of things also could be setting people up for various kinds of delusion in the End Times” – just think about it – Hitchock said (he seems to be intimately familiar with such kinds delusions), and UFOs are “just another one of Satan’s tactics, especially as we draw nearer to the End Times”.

 

Diagnosis: Probably mostly harmless. People do buy his books, apparently, but those people would buy anything anyways.

 

#3025: Laura Hirsch

A.k.a. Oracle (online moniker)

 

The Thinking Moms’ Revolution (TMR) is a group of anti-vaccine activists and insufferable mommybloggers whose mommy instincts are so powerful that they trump all evidence or advice from people who know anything about the topics they have opinions about, especially when it comes to health-related issues and vaccines. The hallmark of the group is, in other words, particularly severe Dunning-Kruger coinstantiated with motivated reasoning, and it leads to the dumbest examples of ridiculous pseudoscience and conspiracy theories you can think of: For a good example of their style, check out their Thinking Moms’ Manifesto, some four thousand words of the most concentrated, weaponized Dunning-Kruger, arrogance, and motivated reasoning you’ll ever stumble across.

 

Laura Hirsch, handle Oracle, is a at least a sometimes associate of the group, and an excellent illustration of how a overwhelming urge to think for herself and to do her own research tends to lead, when combined with an utter lack of ability to actually research, reflect or think at anything but the most superficial (but highly motivated) level, to simply parroting the latest fads and talking points from the silliest online sources that tells her what she already wanted to hear. Hirsch is, in particular, a champion of energy healing – “these incredible healing modalities” – for treating children she diagnoses with (vaccine-induced) autism. Ostensibly, Hirsch “learned Reconnective Healing and Quantum Touch, used homeopathy, essential oils, and flower essences, used EAV (electroacupuncture) and muscle testing for diagnosing” her own son’s autism, and “consulted with mediums to get answers from the spirit world” to help cure him (or, as she also puts it, “working with a psychic medium and his wife [Michael and Marti Parry], a spirit artist, they extended an open invitation to the spirit world to help solve the autism puzzle”; ‘spirit art’, for those not in the know, is apparently the ability to “draw friends and loved ones that have passed away without ever having seen them, personally or through pictures, or even a description!”). Her freethinking is at least strong on the free part – she employs few discernible constraints– but there is also preciously little of what we’d normally consider thinking. She is apparently also a Reiki master. Oh, and she has apparently dabbled in mediumship herself.

 

Apparently, her experiences with the dumbest of woo formed the basis for her book The Other Side of Autism: Famous Spirits Unveil Regressive Autism’s Causes and Remedies. Now, we can’t claim to have actually read this … thing, but in interviews, Hirsch has revealed that she learned from her psychic medium that her autistic son is allergic to a variety of things, including wheat, and that she received wisdom from a number of “very famous scientists and politicians” who taught her that, although vaccines are a contributing factor to autism, it is “not just vaccines” (indeed) but also diet, particularly GMOs (yes, Hirsch is also a “Non-GMO advocate” because there is no pseudoscience or New Age fluff she won’t devour), and radiation – after all, since radiation can cause cancer and damage DNA, it must be able to cause autism as well. And yes, the spirits also told her how to cure her son by eliminating the evil (i.e. GMOs), using iodine and supplements to “pull radiation out of his body” and employing hyperbaric oxygen. And of course “it helped” since, after all, autism is a condition involving developmental delay, not stasis, and many autistic children tend to grow out of many symptoms through normal development over the years, and if you observe this process through the lens of sufficient confirmation bias, even mediums might come to look effective. She has later written a follow-up, More than Meets the Eye: A Nonspeaker’s Journey through Music, Spelling 2 Communicate, and Becoming a Divine Messenger, a title that makes one doubt how much her previous efforts “helped” after all.

 

She also promotes the Autism Healing Intention Program, a “remote energetic healing intention program for autism” developed by “Autism Pioneer” Suzy Miller and legendary crackpot William Tiller, which uses “the most cutting edge remote healing techniques to offer a service for parents and autistic children” and which is – importantly – also “all natural”.

 

Hirsch was, together with one Helen Conroy, editor of Evolution of a Revolution, Autism and the Path from Hope to Healing, in which the TMR members shared their stories about autism and what they intuit to be the causes. According to reviewer, TMR fan and essential oils distributor (Young Living) Mel at the Holistically Whole blog, the book “is NOT an ‘anti-vaccine’ book” since “the very first chapter of the book says ‘vaccines are not the only evil contributing to this epidemic’ ”. Well, then.

 

Diagnosis: Oh, yes, it is all there: vaccines cause autism because intuition trumps evidence but the secret cure can be gleaned from dead politicians by a well-positioned medium who is also able to tap into the energies of the New Age. Several MLM distributors of essential oils support this message. The rest of us, meanwhile, should probably maintain a healthy distance.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

 

#3024: Sonja Hintz

We note, in passing, that Greg Hinkle, Montana State Senator from 2009 to 2012, returned to the Senate for a brief stint in 2024-25. During his first period, Hinkle became famous for a string of insane clown bills, including the wildly unconstitutional 2011 Sheriffs First bill, which sought to declare sheriffs the supreme authority in their counties, would require federal employees to obtain permission from sheriffs prior to entering said counties, and permitted the sheriffs to arrest federal employees at will. Although he seems to be gone, his recent brief reappearance should make us all worried.

 

By contrast, Sonja Hintz is apparently still practicing as a registered nurse at Rogers Behavioral Health, Wisconsin. And although Hintz has long experience working with children with disabilities – and is officially qualified for such work – she has some disconcerting ideas about health and wellbeing. According to herself, Hintz managed to cure her own son of autism “through the use of a therapeutic diet, homeopathy, herbs, vitamins, essential oils, and chelation in addition to many other therapies” – yes, chelation therapy. And homeopathy. Subsequently, she has gone on to use “functional medicine to improve the lives of her patients”, apparently with a focus on identifying and treating non-existent parasites. Her approach to health and medicine was surely an asset in her work “at True Health Medical Center with Dr. Anju Usman”, no less.

 

Hintz is also a coauthor, with her son Alexander, of a chapter in the book Vaccine Epidemic edited by Louise Kuo Habakus, Mary Holland, and Kim Mack Rosenberg – so yes, she is, of course, anti-vaccine as well, and yes: she did blame vaccines for her son’s autism because of course she did. She has also given several presentations at various Autism One conferences.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, Hintz is a registered nurse, and she does work with children. She is also a dingbat conspiracy theorist, anti-vaccine activist and promoter of the most ridiculous types of pseudoscientific quackery. This is not a benevolent combination. Hintz is genuinely dangerous.

 

#3023: Steve Hines

We’ll admit that we at one point recorded the name ‘Steve Hines’ without any accompanying information. As such, we’re not entirely sure this entry’s Steve Hines is the one we originally intended, but Steve Hines, Naturopathic Doctor and Naturopathic Endocrinologist affiliated with the Hope Wellness Center in Mexico (he “does not practice in America”, for reasons that are presumably obvious), certainly qualifies for an entry. According to himself, Hines’s earlier years as an “electronics technician at Xerox” helped him develop “a deep understanding of digital systems and electromagnetism”, which he claims “later translated into his expertise in cellular communication and bioenergetics”. Oh, yes! Elitist academic naysayers and their hoary med schools be damned. Currently, Hines focuses, like all good alternative practitioners, on “identifying root causes rather than masking symptoms”, using “a science-driven, naturopathic approach”. In more detail, Hines uses his “experience to deeply dive into analyzing terrain, microbiome, toxic origins to ailments, and hormonal dysregulation” and collating together these data, Hines and his colleagues “are precisely able decipher and recover complicated health conditions relative to their fundamental causations. Steve is especially concerned with (A) insidious dental pathogen foci as well as the (B) dramatic rise in Lyme’s disease and their combined ever presence in the plethora autoimmune disorders his clinic sees every day”. Yes, he combines dental quackery with Lyme woo.

 

In addition to his Mexican practice, Hines is apparently also a founding board member of something called Ministry of Intelligent Design, whose mission “is to spearhead, through Scripture & Science, the maturation of your soul and usher you into a thriving longevity” (the name of its president, John Apsley, will need to be recorded for future reference). Their website features an impressive mix of religious fundamentalism, pseudohistory, myth – in particular concerning the mythical longevity of various peoples (e.g. Abkhasians) without the aid of “modern medicine of any kind”, and pseudoscience (the insane gibberish of Weston Price features prominently).

 

Apparently, according to himself, although “highly respected in his field”, Hies “prefers a down-to-earth connection with clients and encourages them to call him by his first name rather than ‘Dr. Hines’ ”. Maybe there is an ounce of self-awareness involved, but there probably isn’t.

 

Diagnosis: Nope. Avoid.

 

#3022: Pat Hines

The League of the South is a Neo-Confederate, white supremacist, patriarchal, largely anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant organization founded to protect and promote “Anglo-Celtic” Southern culture; they are not officially racist because, according to the organization’s Board of Directors, “the term ‘racism’ has its origins in Communism and that movement’s sordid attempt to undermine Western Christendom”. Their big cause is the Lost Cause of the South, and they advocate for various Southern States to secede from the US, partially, as some members put it, because secession is the only way for the South to avoid the Muslim invasion. Articles they host on their webpages are, as you’d expect, the usual mess of pseudohistory, conspiracy theories and paranoia.

 

We’ve covered their former leader Michael Hill before, but their roster provide a rich source of materials for entries as well. Pat Hines, for instance. Hines was, at least as of 2020 (we can’t really be bothered to keep track), the leader of the group’s South Carolina chapter. A retired military nurse, Hines stepped into the role in 2015 after the exodus of members uncomfortable with the radicalization of the group in the wake of Dylann Roof’s massacre in Charleston, and he is the kind of person you’t expect to be on record feeling the need, in discussions of slavery, to remind people that “without slavery, all the black people in the United States wouldn’t be here” (defending slavery is a central task for League of the South members, and their attempts do come far more colorful than Hines’s as well) and referring to the removal of Confederate monuments as “cultural genocide on the Southern people”; to elaborate: “The opposition to the pro-south groups are Judeo-Marxts [sic] working themselves up to be as deadly as their genetic grandfathers, the Bolsheviks. They support the murders of all southern whites and the destruction of our monuments.”

 

Pertaining to the Lost Cause of the South, Hines has also defended celebrating the murder of Abraham Lincoln, “the most murderous, treasonous president that ever existed,” though he was reluctant to praise John Wilkes Booth too highly given the latter’s tardiness when it came to getting the matters done. More interesting was Hines’s justification for the assassination of Lincoln: “Well, he was a United States President. Well, he was commander-in-chief, which makes him a legitimate target immediately.” And if you wonder whether he thinks any commander-in-chief is a legitimate target, “Well, they are.” Well, then.

 

Diagnosis: President Trump has called Hines and his fellows “some very fine people”, but the president’s judgment sometimes arguably seems a bit off on these matters. Things suggest that Pat Hines isn’t a very fine person.