#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.

 

#3021: Peter Hinderberger

Peter Hinderberger (M.D., Ph.D., DIHom) is a Baltimore-based “integrative” practitioner whose declared mission is to “promote optimal wellbeing by providing health care through an integrated approach, combining conventional and complementary therapies, which include Anthroposophic medicine, homeopathy, and salutogenesis.” Apparently, Hinderberger in particular targets cancer patients, whom he thinks that he and his arsenal of nonsense have something to offer. As he sees it, “[i]ntegrative medicine combines the best of Western and holistic medicine” (i.e. the best of real medicine with the ‘best’ of nonsense), but whereas “Western medicine aims to cure. Holistic medicine’s goal is to heal”, which is, given any reasonable definition, also the goal of real medicine, but Hinderberger needs some snappy formulations for marketing purposes – don’t think too much about what he is actually saying. And to “demonstrate the validity of both approaches”, Hinderberger points out that whereas (real) medicine can remove cancers, “statistics show that many cancers reoccur because ‘cure’ does not address the original disposition to cancer,” which of course is pure nonsense when it comes to why cancers reoccur. Hinderberger, however, offers patients recovering from cancer means to “detox and strengthen the functions of the organs as well as restore balance between body, soul and spirit using different modalities like anthroposophic medicine, homeopathy, nutrition, counseling, movement therapy, etc.”. Needless to say, fluffy bullshit will do nothing to actually prevent the reoccurrence of cancer, but it might provide patients with a (false) sense of empowerment, especially if, as often is the case, the cancer doesn’t reoccur. We’re sure Hinderberger’s got some nice customer reviews (after all, dissatisfied customers are often no longer around to express their side).

 

Though there are many people like Hinderberger around, we took note of him for being the MD of cancer survivor Ivelisse Page, who apparently credited the fact that her cancer (rather unsurprisingly) didn’t reoccur to some bullshit she’d gotten from Hinderberger (including “daily alternating injections of mistletoe and thymus, cimetidine [a real drug with possible anti-tumor effects], homeopathic remedies and additional supplements”) and subsequently, with her husband Jim, founded Believe Big, a nonprofit aimed to ‘educate’ people on “bridging the gap between conventional and complementary medicine for fighting cancer” and which tried to raise funds for mistletoe clinical trials – apparently Hinderberger’s repertoire includes a mistletoe extract that is “not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA)” and which “falls under the category of homeopathy and is paid for out-of-pocket, at a cost of $100 to $150 per month, depending on the extract intensity and number of injections.” Page’s story is discussed here.

 

Diagnosis: Yet another one. Good grief.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

 

#3020: Sid Hill

QAnon gained momentum between 2017 and 2020, and it is not very surprising that the 2020 election saw numerous Congressional candidates endorsing the conspiracy theory or even running on a QAnon platform. Some of them are covered here. In Alaska, for instance, Sidney Hill, an independent candidate running as a “pro-Trump” write-in for the U.S. Senate, had educated himself on matters politics by investigating “massive intel drop[s]” from “Q clearance” on 4chan. Otherwise his political agenda seemed a bit unclear, but he tried again for Lisa Murkowski’s seat in 2022, gaining some 270 votes in total, and he has apparently (as of May 2026) filed the paperwork for the 2026 ballot, too. Previous political experience includes holding up signs and demanding the impeachment of President Obama (e.g. “LaRouche says Impeach Obama Now”), leading e.g. to his arrest for “assault, disorderly conduct and criminal mischief” in 2010. That wasn’t his only brush with the law. 

 

Hill was, by the way, not the only QAnon candidate from Alaska in 2020. At least Thomas “John” Nelson, who ran in Alaska’s At-Large Congressional District, had also been promoting the QAnon slogan WWG1WGA and Dave Hayes’ rantings in a number of tweets.

 

Diagnosis: Ok, so he’s primarily a colorful village clown, and some might think his cognitive situation is not the kind the kind of lunacy we like cover here. The emergence of QAnon has made it harder to draw that distinction, however, and as a general rule: if you appear on a ballot, you’re fair game.

 

#3019: Jim Hill

Jim Hill is pastor of the North Clairemont United, San Diego and author of books with titles like “Dealing with Demons”. His most famous literary contribution, however, is probably his 2014 book The Gay Emperor is Naked (an interesting choice of title – perhaps worth a thought or two but we can’t be bothered), where he expounds on the evils of homosexuality. Did you for instance know that “Statistically, it is healthier to be a chain smoker and a practicing alcoholic than an active homosexual. In fact, 2% of all active homosexuals experience 80% of all STD’s”? Neither, of course, does Jim Hill, but he’s got faith and ye doubters got none. Or did you ever wonder “Why do 75% of the people who try homosexuality go on to conclude that that is not who they are, while 98% of those who try heterosexuality find it is who they are? More people have left homosexuality than have ever remained in it, by far.” Apparently Hill is a sufficiently high-level loon to be able to cast the transmute statistics spell several times a day.

 

The Jim Hill in question is presumably different from Alabama House of Representative member Jim Hill, sponsor of the Alabama “Freedom of Religion in Marriage Protection Act”, though they seem to be in agreement on some issues.

 

Diagnosis: His books have apparently failed to make a real splash, and he seems to be pretty old. Hopefully we can just forget about him.