#3060: Scottie Nell Hughes

Yes, Mike Hughes is dead, but Hughes was also probably one of the most colorful, generally harmless (except to himself) and purified loons the world has ever seen, and we’d feel that an Encyclopedia like ours would be seriously incomplete if we didn’t give him a brief nod.

 

As for Scottie Nell Hughes, we don’t really know what she is up to these days, but at least she used to be a journalist, news anchor and political commentator for the Russian-government propaganda channel RT, where she would promote various pieces of Russian-backed misinformation – such as the died suddenly anti-vaccine conspiracy theory – until at least the American branch of RT folded in 2022. Prior to that she had enjoyed a stint for CNN as their (admittedly mostly dull) resident MAGA clown to defend Trump’s antics for CNN’s 2016 presidential election coverage, and she has been news director of the Tea Party News Network.

 

Hughes is perhaps most famous for her assertion, in relation to the “alternative facts” commotion in 2016 and in response to “people that say facts are facts”, that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.” Now, you might hear that statement as hyperbolic irony lamenting the current media situation, but that doesn’t seem to be how Hughes intended it: Trump’s lies “among a large part of the population, are truth”, whereas “those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up”. In other words, Hughes was profoundly confused about the rather fundamental distinction between something being a fact and people believing something to be a fact, between belief and reality. And yes, we’ve seen people with academic degrees being confused by that distinction, too (fans of Bruno Latour: we’re looking at you); it’s still a distinction so basic that failure to grasp it makes you an idiot. Her discussion of women in the army doesn’t exactly affect our verdict.

 

Diagnosis: Idiot. Yes, this is old stuff but it is still idiotic enough to pull it up again.

 

#3059: Eric Hufschmid

Eric Hufschmid is a semi-legendary anti-semitic conspiracy theorist who, according to himself, has been “avoiding Zionist traps since 2002” – ‘semi-legendary’ mostly due to his appearance on a Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Episode on conspiracy theories. Precisely what his views are is sometimes a bit difficult to determine, but Jewish people and/or Zionists are certainly at the core of them: as Hufschmid sees it, Jewish people – who may be reptilians – “use their intelligence to kill, sabotage and blackmail their competition [that’s us humans]”.

 

Further details may be superfluous at this point, but Hufschmid also believes that 9/11, the JFK assassination, and the Holocaust were Zionist false flag operations (the gas chambers used by the Nazis never existed and stories of them are a “Zionist invention”; even Michael Jackson’s death was a conspiracy to “divert attention away from Zionism, Israel, and Jews in general”, and at one point, he even suspected that his wife-to-be was a Zionist agent and that it was best to break off the relationship. Moreover, the moon landing is a hoax (the Zionist connection is unclear) and Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and replaced by an impersonator. And so on. Sometimes he also provides health advice; we couldn’t quite get ourselves to read his post “We do not need toilet paper!”, but feel free to look it up (no link provided).

 

Apparently, he has a book, too: Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (2002). That one actually seems to have caused some consternation in 9/11 denialist circles, insofar as Hufschmid harshly denounced a number of fellow truthers (Dave von Kleist, Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas, and Korey Rowe) for denying “that there is any Zionist involvement in 9/11. They are Zionist Deniers. In addition, they are Holocaust Promoters.” And “if Europe can arrest people for investigating the Holocaust, we in America should arrest Zionist Deniers.” And Hufschmid’s book does seem to have had some impact: it was for instance Hufschmid who convinced venture capitalist Jimmy Walter to launch his vast advertising campaign to contest the ‘official version’ of the 9/11 attacks.

 

Diagnosis: The internet gave him followers and the attention of venture capitalists. We don’t think that’s what he really needed.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

 

#3058: Larry Huch

No

Larry Huch is pastor at the New Beginnings Church in Bedford, Texas, a dominionist, and a MAGA cultist. 

So yes, Huch thinks his fundie brand of Christianity should control all aspects of government and culture, and yes, he believes that Trump is the right guy to ensure that such control is achieved. He previously thought that Ted Cruz was the right guy, that Cruz was anointed by God to help Christians in their effort to “go to the marketplace and occupy the land … and take dominion” over it (including ensuring an ‘end-time transfer of wealth’ that would relieve Christians of all financial woes, presumably through tax breaks exclusively for Christians, and allow true believers to assume the positions of political and cultural power from which they can build a Christian civilization). Huch was, after all, a close associate of Rafael Cruz: they used to spew the same brand of theological ideas and Cruz senior has appeared as a featured speaker at Huch’s church. These days, however, it is Trump. As Huch sees it, “President Trump is a gift from God. He is an answer to prayer not only politically, but economically and spiritually.” And given what, according to Huch, is obviously in store, he “can’t believe how impatient Americans are” about, say, the devastating impact of Trump's tariffs.

 

There are, of course, obstacles along the way. In 2025, for instance, Huch felt the need to lead a gathering of Christian nationalists in praying that “the spirit of God” will come upon Trump and Elon Musk – “these two unbelievably brilliant, wonderful men” – and reconcile them. “We bind this devil of division,” prayed Huch because that’s how you achieve reconciliation.

 

Diagnosis: So an unwavering sycophant and fanboi of all things rightwing. And though he comes across primarily as silly, he does have some influence.

 

#3057: Andrew Huberman

Andrew David Huberman is an American neuroscientist and associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and he is, without doubt, a real and respected researcher in his field. But Huberman is also an extremely popular and influential podcaster (the ‘Huberman Lab’), and as an influencer he goes way beyond of his areas of expertise to offer, like so many influencers, lifestyle advice (his podcast has, for instance, won a ‘Best Wellness & Fitness Podcast’ award at the iHeartPodcast Awards) based largely on pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, denialism and a rather arrogant trust in the powers of his own intuition; as a result, Huberman the wellness guru – he is an unofficial leader and champion of the biohacking movement – “recommends activities that are more befitting a deranged shaman than a scientist”, though the recommendations are often adorned with pop neuropsychology, and his podcast has been aptly described as a “Goop for bros” wellness space.

 

In particular, Huberman has promoted a range of “poorly regulated” dietary supplements, and his podcast is of course monetized and sponsored by “companies offering questionable products from the perspective of science-based medicine”, including AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens) – indeed, his podcast functions largely as a lucrative infomercial for unnecessary and shitty supplement products. Huberman has for instance contributed massively to the largely idiotic peptide craze currently plaguing America, and yes, his claims are backed mostly by pseudoscience and handwaving dressed in scientific-sounding jargon, with Huberman’s primary gambit being to refer to his own credentials. Perhaps as importantly as using his credentials as a scientist to lend credibility to such products, Huberman uses them to lend legitimacy to his guests, who comprise a colorful array of contrarians, grifters and pseudoscientists, including notorious nutrition misinformer Robert Lustig and hormone balancing quack Sara Gottfried. It’s all shit.

 

Huberman has also explicitly endorsed a number of specific pieces of misinformation and, yes, conspiracy theories. He has, for instance, endorsed the pseudoscientific leaky gut diagnosis, a pseudo-diagnosis championed e.g. by promoters of so-called functional medicine – fake diagnoses are, of course, a central part of alternative medicine: patients themselves are, after all, somewhat disposed to recognize that a quack’s favored piece of quackery doesn’t actually help against any real disease they might suffer from; if the diagnosis is fake too, things might quickly be less clear.

 

He has also thrown his lot in with the sunscreen denialists, stating that he was “... as scared of sunscreen as I am of melanoma” on the grounds that the ingredients include chemicals and citing a study that doesn’t appear to exist (he did, in fairness, backtrack on that one). And although Huberman can’t quite be called ‘antivaccine’, he has stated that he himself doesn’t get the flu vaccine mostly because a tough bro like him ain’t scared of no flu. His claims about colds and the flu are, predictably, rife with misinformation, as documented here, here, here, here and here: Huberman “misrepresents basic immunology, undermines proven public health measures, and exaggerates unproven wellness trends”, and yes, his take on the flu is dumb enough to include nonsense hacks for boosting your immune system (he also dismissed criticism on the grounds that he had “consulted” with some MDs when preparing the relevant episodes).

 

In line with his attraction to the pseudoscientific and conspiratorial, Huberman has expressed skepticism toward water fluoridation, and has on at least one occasion stated that he believes his Bluetooth headphones are harmful, thus feeding into the Wi-Fi/microwave conspiracy theories of his buddy RFK Jr., by claiming that he is getting “swollen lymph nodes and cysts” behind his ears due, apparently, to harmful “heat effects”. Here are some data. We are confident that Huberman’s fans won’t be bothered with them.

 

Diagnosis: The biohacking bro du jour, Huberman has, perhaps unwittingly, become one of the main poster boys for MAHA and belongs in the group of people like Dr. Oz and Deepak Chopra who use their credentials to spread pseudoscience – and no, it’s not all bad, and Huberman is probably not remotely as bad as those other two loons just mentioned; on the other hand, his reach is even wider: Indeed, Huberman’s reach is wide enough that he could probably have been doing a real service to the world if he had just bothered to cut the garbage (which, unfortunately, is where the money is).

 

#3056: Don Huber

 

Don M. Huber is a former Purdue University professor and current anti-GMO activist who (at least until relatively recently) were doing extensive publicity tours sponsored by various organic, alternative health and anti-GMO interest groups to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about genetically modified organisms. Huber is particularly focused on how glyphosate and herbicide tolerant GM crops are allegedly causing health problems in people and animals, and is most famous for his claims to have discovered, years ago, a novel pathogenic microbe that has been caused by agricultural genetic engineering and which is currently wreaking havoc on humans and animals. There is, of course, no shred of evidence to back up that claim – Huber himself has no peer reviewed publications on it and he has consistently refused to make his ‘data’ available for any other scientist to assess.

 

But Huber has long claimed that glyphosate and GMO herbicide tolerant crops are linked to human and animal health risks. According to Huber and not the data, animals fed GM crops are dying in record numbers, and there is a correlation between GM soy/corn and inflammatory bowel disease in humans (he tends to point out that correlation doesn’t imply causation, before launching into wild inferences about causation from correlations that don’t exist outside his own mind). He also claims that glyphosate is linked to alzheimer’s disease, gout, diabetes, Parkinson’s, allergies and fertility issues. He cites no scientific evidence for these claims, but does cite rants and claims by Gilles-Eric Séralini and infamous Maharishi-movement yogic flying instructor Jeffrey M. Smith.

 

Huber has collaborated with familiar anti-GMO activist researchers like Judy Carman and Jack Heinemann, and appears in a prominent role in the Gary Null-produced conspiracy flick Seeds of Death.

 

Diagnosis: Another one-time scientist who has gone full pseudoscientific crackpot (and scaremonger) in his olden days. Some grow wisdom; others, we suppose, lose any concern they might have had for evidence, accuracy or accountability. He’s pretty old, but we’re sure there are plenty of others ready to fill his shoes.

 

Hat-tip: Geneticliteracyproject

#3055: Colleen Huber

Colleen Huber is a naturopath, anti-vaccine activist and promoter of all things pseudoscience and quackery. 

 

Huber likes to call herself “naturopathic medical doctor”, which is probably an effective way to market her services by suggesting that her pseudoscientific bullshit might be based on real medicine, science, honesty or accountability: Arizona has a powerful quack lobby and actually allows – after much legislative alchemy – naturopaths a wide scope of practice, including serving as primary care physicians with independent prescribing authority. Huber provides her services at the Nature Works Best Cancer Clinic in Tempe, where she is the “medical director” (despite being an ND; she does not have any real medical degree, of course), and she is the president of the non-profit charity Naturopathic Cancer Society.

 

Huber is, however, probably best known for her litigious activities, in particular her defamation suit against naturopathy critic Britt Marie Hermes in 2016. The lawsuit came about after Huber’s organization had engaged in a ridiculous cybersquatting campaign targeting Hermes, whereupon Hermes decided to take a look at Huber’s “medical” practices and how Huber’s non-profit ostensibly raised donations for patients at Huber’s own clinic. Justice prevailed in that case, and the case – some details here – has become somewhat famous as an example of how legal thuggery is being used to try to silence critics.

 

At Nature Works Best, Huber treats cancer patients with sheer quackery like intravenous baking soda, megadoses of intravenous vitamin C, and a strict sugar-free diet. She also conducts ‘research’ out of her clinic – marketing fake cures as ‘experimental’ provides a familiar legal loophole for quackery – and has allegedly gathered data that shows that her naturopathic cancer treatments are “groundbreaking” and that “no other clinic has such a high documented success rate”. Helpfully, she invites the public to “verify this data for yourself”; perhaps she just assumes that no one is going to bother, since competent analysis of the data apparently suggests that (“[p]utting aside the ethical issues of the extremely bad study design, the lack of ethics committee approval or patients’ agreement”) “patients under natural care have more than a two-fold higher risk to die” compared to state-of-the-art treatment (and that if “one removes data of questionable quality and takes into account only those with complete data and in treatment resp. died during treatment (i.e. in remission, not yet in remission, died), the odds ratio gets almost 10:1 in favour of state of the art therapy. This is really nasty”). And no: using alternative treatments for cancer is not innocuous) (Huber’s own version of her results were published in – of course – the predatory journal Cancer Science and Therapy). One might wonder how her study ever got approved, though a clue might be that Huber is also the secretary and founding member of the International Naturopathic Clinical Research Institute (NCRI) (or American Naturopathic Clinical Research Institute (ANRI), or Naturopathic Oncology Research Institute (NORI) – the organization goes by many names), which functions as an institutional review board for ‘naturopathic clinical research’, and which, of course, approved her study in 2010.

 

Despite being obviously nonsense and despite Huber being obviously a deranged quack, her claims about success rates were uncritically parroted in e.g. the quack ‘documentary’ Cancer Can Be Killed produced by conspiracy theorist and filmmaker Jeff Witzeman.

 

Even more insidiously, Huber advocates against state-of-the-art oncology, especially chemotherapy and radiation, because she delusionally thinks these therapies strengthen cancer – she cites (even misrepresents, in fact) an old and widely debunked myth that “chemotherapy has a 2.1% survival rate” (the actual debunked myth had it falsely that chemotherapy only had a 2.1% increase in survival rate). In other words, there is not even the usual “integrative” nonsense sheen here; Huber suggests cancer patients forego real medicine in favor of quackery. She also cites Mercola and even Gary Null, no less, as authorities.

 

Huber is also a serious antivaccine activist who falsely claims that “[a]bundant evidence exists that the CDC schedule, and that most vaccines used in the United States, are both dangerous and ineffective.” (Nope; but Huber cites a bogus list by Neil Z. Miller and recommends people read Suzanne Humphries’ delusional conspiracy rants instead) Her antivaccine conspiracy theories of course reached some kind of peak during COVID, when Huber was tirelessly composing anti-vaccine posts loaded with every known anti-vaccine conspiracy and gambit (yes, she did invoke the Holocaust); for some details, this post is useful. And predictably, Huber, most famous for her own legal thuggery against critics, yelled “persecution” when the Arizona Naturopathic Physicians Medical Board (yes, even a naturopathic board) felt the need to take some action against her – despite Huber’s own claims, which you by now should know not to trust, the board review doesn’t seem to have primarily concerned her COVID misinformation but concerns about wtf she was administering intravenously to her patients. When Twitter, on the other hand, suspended her account due to COVID misinformation, Huber responded by suing Joe Biden.

 

Oh, and with regard to herbal supplements, Huber defends it (with one Stephen Helms) on her website by claiming that “[e]xperienced wine drinkers can tell the difference in taste between an expensive and inexpensive wine, but chemical analysis would probably not indicate much of any difference. In the same way an herbal tincture that is well prepared from whole plants by a knowledgeable person provides a medicine that is not able to be chemically analyzed as different, but is far superior to anything standardized on the basis of an ingredient that may not even be active.” If you don’t immediately see how breathtakingly silly that claim is (it is not only that Huber and Helms try to defend herbal supplements by likening it to homeopathy), we recommend that you read it again.

 

Diagnosis: A horrible excuse for a human being, Huber is mean, evil and rotten to the core. She is also delusional and paranoid. That combination makes her a threat to anyone in her surroundings, though hopefully her bullshit and malevolence has received sufficient attention to make at least some potential victims of hers aware of the dangers.

 

#3054: Jeanne Hubbuch

Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrome (EMS) is a fake diagnosis, and that assessment is not controversial among those who have actually studied, measured or bothered to investigate the issue: evidence “robustly” dispels the connection between WiFi and symptoms of ‘electromagnetic hypersensitivity’. As an illustration, patients in provocation studies remains unable to tell when they are being exposed to radiofrequency emissions, and they report the same symptoms regardless of whether the electromagnetic frequency-emitting devices are turned on or off; there is also the infamous Northern Ireland case where protesters demanded the removal of an iBurst tower citing health impacts, unaware that the tower had been switched off during the period when they claimed it was causing symptoms.

 

Nevertheless, a lot of people continue to believe and claim that they suffer from EMS, and there are plenty of grifters and deluded professionals out there to affirm these people and their stories; and they do of course, have access to pseudoscientific pseudostudies claiming to find connections through flagrant methodological flaws and/or deliberately shoddy study designs. Entirely predictably, there is noise, and there are court cases. For instance, in 2013, parents of 12-year-old boy filed a lawsuit against the Fay School in Massachusetts, alleging that the school violated his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to make accommodations to protect the boy from “extremely high levels of radiofrequency/microwave radiations”; the boy, according to the parents, suffered from EMS.

 

That case was of course dismissed but in their efforts, the parents recruited the help of Jeanne Hubbuch, MD, who ‘confirmed’ the boy’s alleged diagnosis, wrote letters to the school, and submitted a declaration in support of the suit. Of course, Hubbuch’s testimony was ultimately excluded by the court because she arrived at the fake diagnosis without bothering to consider other environmental factors that might have been in play, but Hubbuch is a typical specimen of the kinds of deluded professionals we mentioned above: the kind of pseudoscience- and conspiracy-oriented crackpots with real credentials but whose misguided efforts, though probably well-meaning, contribute to making the world a worse place to be. Hubbuch claims to be “board-certified in family practice and environmental medicine,” but the “certification in environmental medicine” is from the American Board of Environmental Medicine, which is not a recognized specialty board. She also practices “integrative”, “functional”, “biologic”, as well as orthomolecular medicine, and she “deals with the underlying causes instead of symptoms of a disease”. And if that last claim comes with certain connotations, then yes: Hubbuch does indeed practice homeopathy – the treatments listed on her website include “complex homeopathy” for cancer support in addition, for good measure, to chelation therapy. She also recommends alkaline diets, and her diagnostic tools include live cell analysis. Really, if there is a treatment that smacks of hokum, quackery or pseudoscience, Hubbuch will employ it.

 

In addition to being a member of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, Hubbuch is a member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), an aggressive organization dedicated to popularizing the fake diagnosis of “chronic Lyme”, which we have also had several opportunities to cover before (yes, fake diagnoses seems to be a bit of a specialty for Hubbuch).

 

Diagnosis: There are many of these, and we tend to catch them first when their antics are starting to have easily noticeable consequences. But even we struggle to find many of examples of genuine MDs with fewer scruples with regard to the employment of quackery and pseudoscience than Jeanne Hubbuch. She has no limits, and no standards, and she has long since moved beyond the point where stupidity turns into malice. A horrible person causing real harm to her surroundings.