#3081: Andrew Isker

Many Christian Nationalists shy away from the label. Pastor, speaker at various wingnut events, author and podcaster (the Contra Mundum podcast) Andrew Isker does not.

 

As far as Isker is concerned, “America belongs to Jesus Christ”, and that means that it belongs to white people who share his views on various matters. Isker considers white nationalist activist Sam Francis a “prophet of our time” and thinks that the US ought to deport everyimmigrant (“[f]oreigners out, foreigners out, America for Americans, foreigners out”); to clarify what “immigrant” means this context, Isker suggested that people granted citizenship after 1965 should be “subject to review,” including on whether they have worked “for Left causes.” The claim that America belongs to Jesus Christ means, moreover, that Jewish people shouldn’t have “a seat at the table” and that Judaism should have no place in the US (here is a report of an Isker podcast interview with holocaust denier Ron Unz for context) – Isker is even annoyed by the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ insofar as it implies rejecting “the exclusivity of Christ”. Note that ‘Christian’ for Isker doesn’t mean just anyone who calls themselves ‘Christian’ but people who shares his views on both political and theological issues: mainstream Christianity has, by contrast, been corrupted by “an epidemic of spiritual homosexuality”. He does, of course, not fancy Muslims either: complaining about mosques calling Muslims prayer, Isker asserted that “[t]hat stuff cannot be happening in your country, right? — they [in particular Rep. Ilhan Omar] have to go back.”

 

As for other groups, Isker has pointed out that the practice of slavery in America was not a sin: “I’m not going to call something a sin that the Bible does not condemn as a sin” (in fairness, there is a degree of consistency there that you might think other fundies should take note of; we fear, however, that many of them secretly do), and he likes to point out the violence and evil of Black people in the US, such as “sadistic, violent criminals” like The Central Park 5; of course, the Central Park 5 were exonerated, but to Isker they obviously “were guilty as sin” because they were Black, sadistic, violent criminals. During the run-up to the 2024 election, Isker defended the rumor that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, mostly because it’s what he wanted to believe but officially on the grounds that city officials denied the rumor and Isker doesn’t trust city offocials. And people from India are definitely not welcome in America: “People are what they worship, and they worship poop demons.”

 

As Isker and his podcast cohost C. Jay Engel see it, the only people who have a legitimate right to a homeland in the US are “Heritage Americans”, which is apparently a concept that “affirms the domination and pre-eminence of European derived peoples, their institutions and their way of life.” When pressed, they admitted that “the blacks of the Old South” would be allowed to stay, at least as long as they did not try to “leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt;” that said, Isker also thinks that “WE SHOULD TURN CIVIL RIGHTS BACK TO THE STATES” and that “the 1960s ruined everything”. Of course, Isker and Engel deny that their views are racist; they also claim that “the very concept of ‘racism’ was literally a creation of communists.”

 

It is not only immigrants, Jewish people and Black people that are problematic: women are problematic, too. According to Isker, “[y]ou can have either women’s liberation or civilization, not both”; besides, “no one can give me an argument why universal suffrage is good.” And it is notable that Isker is vehemently opposed to Riley Gaines' campaign against trans athletes competing in women’s sports, insofar as the campaign ignores the fact that women shouldn’t even be able to play sports to begin with.

 

Politics

A big fan of Donald Trump and Trump’s administration, Isker has characterized Trump’s second term as “the Nixon second term we never got to have” and hoped that the administration would “replace Earth Day with Nixon Day” (here, for context, is Isker’s take on American history). Indeed, as Isker sees it, “in order to restore the original constitutional order and the rights therein, it requires a unitary executive” and “I would like to dissolve Congress and the judiciary and vest all power into a sovereign ruler named Donald J. Trump.” Both Isker and Engel have explicitly stated that they “hate democracy.”

 

Meanwhile, everyone who is in any way “obstructing” Trump’s agenda, e.g. by disagreeing with it, are “domestic enemies” and “need to go to jail”, meaning that also “U.S. senators need to go to jail ... This is war time.”

 

Here is Isker praising Trump and JD Vance for (what he thinks is) lying about their position on abortion during the 2024 campaign: “they flat out lied and I'm like, ‘yeah, they should’;” firstly, pro-choice people “do not deserve the truth” and not “tell[ing] the truth on that issue [is] the kind of Machiavellianism [we need]. People maybe will be mad at me for saying this but I think like we should support that.” Regarding the 2024 election, Isker was of course adamant that Kamala Harris was Biblically unqualified to be president.

 

Isker and Engel will of course weigh in on current politics relatively often (e.g. here), although their views on various issues are presented through such a distorting clown mirror that it is sometimes unclear what they think their consistently deranged views are views on; at least with regard to foreign policy, Isker maintains that any country that receives U.S. foreign aid “should be colonies of America” and that the US “should be able to exploit all their natural resources as much as we want.” When weighing in on the murder of Charlie Kirk, Isker was of course aware that he had a lot of extreme silliness to outsilly, so he wanted to see “a maximum amount of force is wielded against the left in this country to such an extent that even I might get uncomfortable”. Isker doesn’t easily feel uncomfortable, but “if I start to be uncomfortable, then it’s like, okay, we are on the right track.” Of course, like most deranged and bloodthirsty people, Isker tends to project his own feelings onto his critics, which he then uses to justify kicking everything up a couple of notches.

 

Magic and Witchcraft

Among people outside of his immediate audience, Isker might be most famous for being the guy who refuses to walk through advanced airport security scanners out of fear that they act as ‘gay beam’ machines that will alter his sexuality (Isker’s sexuality is a fickle thing). Indeed, Isker is worried about magic in general, although he does think that witchcraft “stopped working” in the Americas after the arrival of European Christians – though it seems to have required an adjustment period: He defended the Salem witch trials on the grounds that “weird stuff” happened at the time that had “no rational explanation whatsoever.” (Not that Isker would have the faintest idea what ‘rational’ means.) He also likened the conquest of witchcraft by Christian Americans in the US to the the “miraculous” conquest of the Aztec Empire by Spanish conquistadors, which, as he views it, literally put an end to the Aztec gods; “the Americas was a very dark place, very evil place that Christianity helped to mostly eradicate.”

 

Projects

Currently residing in Gainesboro, Tennessee, Isker – who interned under Douglas Wilson, no less, meaning that his Pete Hegseth number is 1 – is the founder of the Whitleyville Reformation Church and, more importantly, a central figure in the Ridgerunner real estate project (described here), a 448-acre affinity-based residential community designed as a rural refuge for pugnacious theocracy-oriented racist fundies; as Isker points out, “[i]f you have towns that we're going to be building – where there are a lot of people that are very politically motivated and very well organized and are out-punching, you know, their weight class in terms of influence – you can have as much influence as one of the big cities in Tennessee.”

 

The project is led by two companies: New Founding, whose CEO Nate Fischer has declared the principles of the U.S. Constitution are “long gone” and that Christian nationalism “represents a positive Christian vision for government”, and Ridgerunner, led by Josh Abbotoy, who thinks that “America is going to need a Protestant Franco”; Isker and Engel are official ambassadors of the project. The goal of the effort is to create a community that returns to the America that existed before the civil rights movement “ruined everything,” which is free of immigrants, and which puts women back where Isker and his companions think women belong. To achieve those goals, Isker, Engel, Fischer and Abbotoy are prepared to accept Abbotoy’s idea of Protestant dictator who will rule according to their own (i.e. Isker’s, Engel’s, Fischer’s and/or Abbotoy’s) interpretation of what it means to be a Christian.

 

Isker is also the author of a number of a couple of books, like Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations (with Gab-founder Andrew Torba) and The Boniface Option: A Strategy for Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation.

 

Diagnosis: It is important to note that when they are criticized, Isker and Engel often laugh and accuse people of taking them “too seriously”. And in one sense, we do: Isker and Engel are ultimately proponents of groyper bugaloo nihilist shit, the bastard child of Gen X irony and nazi-style frustration with norms that require decency and respect. But, as e.g. their Tennessee project shows, that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to see the evil they promote put into action; Isker and Engel do destructive things very seriously while laughing, using the idea of ironic distance as both a defensive and offensive weapon; they belong to the same faction of American extremism as Nick Fuentes and his ilk, and it’s a dangerous faction.

 

#3080: Tom & Jennifer Ish

Creation Illustrated Magazine (CI) is marketed as a Biblical alternative to National Geographic, since some people find the latter problematic due to its reliance on science rather than scripture for the explanations of phenomena described in its articles. CI, by contrast, is staunchly young-Earth creationist, and embellishes their articles with (admittedly often beautiful) photographs, Bible quotes and those (selected and curated) parts of science that won’t ruffle the feathers of Biblical literalists. The magazine is published quarterly “as a private, nonprofit, non-denominationally owned ministry dedicated to the eternal impact of sharing Biblical truth through the blessings of God’s creation”, and they are apparently big on articles and “educational activities” to supplement home school curricula for parents who wish to protect their children from the kind of science- and evidence-based information that still infects public schools. The venture is operated by Tom & Jennifer Ish, who are apparently otherwise frequent features at various creationist and homeschooling conferences and conventions.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, there is a whole ecosystem of these kinds of things around, and Creation Illustrated is just one node among many. On their own, the harm is probably limited, but it is nevertheless part of a substantial, rotting stain on civilization.

 

#3079: Linda Isaacs

It is 2026, and there are still people around who genuinely believe that shooting coffee up their behinds – coffee enemas – have some sort of health benefit. But yes, coffee enemas have been a staple of ‘detox’ therapies for a while, base on the idea that you can somehow remove unnamed ‘toxins’ (which are, by handwaving, posited as the causes of various diseases) from your body by magic and nonsense techniques. It’s as dumb as thinking that exposing water to duck liver and then ritually purifying the water to rid it of any remnant of the duck liver through magical ceremonies can give you a flu medicine, but people believe that, too. Coffee enemas are a central part for instance of the deranged cancer quackery known as the Gerson therapy (and no: even if you bracketed the insane rationale, the evidence is crystal clear that Gerson therapy doesn’t work). You can read more about coffee enemas and the silliness surrounding them here.

 

Linda Isaacs believes in coffee enemas. But then, Isaacs is a “holistic” quack who has a background as partner, for two decades, of legendary quack Nicholas Gonzalez, a central promoter of the idea that “detoxification” with coffee enemas should be part of the protocol for cancer treatment. Isaacs justifies coffee enemas by citing case reports from the 19^th century (1866, late 1800s, 1896 and an outlier from 1941 published in the Uruguayan Medical, Surgical and Specialization Archives). Embarrassingly, Isaacs is, apparently, also an MD, though she has thoroughly left real medicine by the wayside to instead offer “individualized nutritional programs for patients with cancer and other illnesses” by continuing Gonzalez’s work. And yes, she recommends a lot of supplements (“cancer patients will take 150-200 capsules a day, including nutrients as well as pancreas product”). Detoxification is then necessary because “some patients develop muscle aches and pains or other ‘flu-like’ symptoms, which may be caused by release of waste materials and stored toxins as the body’s repair processes work.” You will look in vain for a specification of what ‘toxins’ she is talking about. You will, however, find a Quack Miranda Warning, even though she tries to hide it as much as she (legally) can.

 

Diagnosis: No. She might sound balanced and reasonable. After all, customers like people who sound balanced and reasonable. She is not balanced and reasonable.

 

#3078: Ken Isaacs

Ken Isaacs is an executive with Christian humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse, anti-Islam activist, science denialist, conspiracy theorist and Trump I nominee for Director General of the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM); that nomination was rejected by the UN presumably on the grounds that Isaacs, despite having done some real humanitarian work, is a dangerous lunatic. 

 

Isaacs is most famous for his anti-Islam sentiments and his fear of creeping Sharia, but he is also a climate change denialist who claims that climate change is “a big hoax.” As Isaacs sees it, climate science can be dismissed because “scientists can’t predict path of a visible storm yet but certain of manmade climate change. A nutty run on nature.” Yes, of course the distinction between climate and weather eludes him (as does science in general) – basic literacy, especially scientific literacy, was always a big red flag for the Trump I administration.

 

To really nail his status as a deranged conspiracy theorist, Isaacs has also engaged in Clinton body count conspiracy theories, in particular Seth Rich murder conspiracies. Citing Alex Jones, no less, Isaacs claimed in 2016 that Google is hiding the “Clinton Body Count” as well as the typically wingnut and typically ridiculously false piece of fake news that a UN official died the same day he was set to testify against Hillary Clinton.

 

Diagnosis: Yes: he seems to have actually done some good in his life. Even so, and although he seems to recognize that it is not always a good look, Isaacs struggle to hide his nature as a raging, raving conspiracy theorist and membership of the core audience for fake news produced by Russian bots. Idiot.

 

#3077: Jonathan Isaac

Celebrity athletes coming out as stupid and misinformed isn’t novel – we covered Kyrie Irving in our previous post – and most people won’t expect them to be any more trustworthy or worth listening to than a random TikTok video.

 

But we should emphasize ‘most people’, for celebrities like basketball star Jonathan Isaac do undeniably have some reach. Now, Isaac hasn’t, as far as we know, endorsed Irving’s flat earther nonsense, but during the early 2020s, he certainly established himself as a wingnut COVID denialist and antivaccine conspiracy theorist. While the NBA did their best to ensure that their players were vaccinated against COVID, Isaac assumed the mantle of some kind of unofficial leader for those that would not: Proudly unvaccinated, Isaac claimed to have read up on ‘antibody resistance’ – it is unclear what he was reading, but he mentioned studying Black history and watching Donald Trump’s press conferences – which led him to “distrust” Dr. Anthony Fauci, look out for people he believed might die from the vaccine, and put his faith in God. “At the end of the day, it’s people,” Isaac said about the scientists developing vaccines, “and you can’t always put your trust completely in people” – apparently apart from Trump and whatever conspiracy theorists Isaac follows on social media. Then, of course, he lamented how unvaccinated players were vilified and bullied just because they were willing to risk the life and well-being of everybody by choosing to stick with their own misinformation. Imagine that.

 

Isaac is otherwise generally famous for being a religious fundie and for being a wingnut. He refused to support Black Lives Matter, for instance, because although he supports Black lives, “I feel like Black lives are supported through the gospel, all lives are supported through the gospel.” In 2022, Isaac released his book on the topic, Why I Stand, which seems to be a book-length treatment of the kinds of insights encapsulated in the above quote, and we grudgingly admire anyone who’ve made it through even the first few pages. His stance on vaccines, politics and religion was apparently interesting enough to get him invited to Clay Clark & Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour.

 

Diagnosis: He’s famous, and he’s stupid. That means that silly nonsense will be spread, and it has. His contribution is probably soon forgotten, but Isaac will certainly have boosted this kind of nonsense, and its effects won’t go away anytime soon.

 

#3076: Kyrie Irving

Yet another cognitively impoverished celebrity, Kyrie Irving is a professional basketball player and notoriously cognitively impoverished antisemitic conspiracy theorist. 

 

Irving first came to our attention in 2017, when he endorsed flateartherism in a podcast interview – “The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat,” insisted Irving before also claiming that there are aliens (it is unclear what sort of geometrical object these aliens call home) and some unspecified cosmic cover-up of everything for unclear reasons (he did emphasize, though, that flat eartherism “is not even a conspiracy theory”, so there). Said Irving: “If you really think about it from the landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, and the fact that … can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets?”. And yes, those are words in a sequence, but they are little else. As for the aliens, Irving’s main reason for concluding that they exist and interact with us is that he has seen it in movies and can’t see any reason for making such movies (“for what? For what?”) unless aliens exist; also, it is hard to believe that the people who ostensibly manage a conspiracy to hide the flatness of the Earth could possess the creative spark needed to imagine aliens out of whole cloth; Irving doesn’t.

 

Other NBA luminaries, like Wilson Chandler and Draymond Green, supported Irving’s claims but most did not, and after some blowback, Irving claimed to have been joking and that he was misunderstood but also, with regard to the shape of the Earth, that “I don’t know. I really don’t” and suggesting that people should “do [their] own research for what [they] want to believe in” because “Our educational system is flawed”. Irving himself is a good illustration of why doing your own research is not necessarily a good idea, in particular when dumb internet memes constitute the limits of your research capacity; it is, however, hard to deny, given Irving, that the educational system may suffer from some shortcomings. He has later avoided attempts to clarify his position on the shape of the Earth.

 

Of course, once you are open to flat Earth nonsense, reason-based constraints are no longer in play, and Irving has championed a number of other conspiracy theories as well. It is perhaps little surprise that he thinks John F. Kennedy was killed because he wanted to end the “banking cartel” or that he was a channel for an impressive amount of misinformation, including anti-vaccine misinformation, during the COVID-19 pandemic – Irving was among the leaders of a rather influential group of low-information and low-reasoning-level NBA players (including Michael Porter jr., Jonathan Isaac, Bradley Beal and Andrew Wiggins) promoting anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. According to Irving, “secret societies are administering vaccines in a plot to connect Black people to a master computer for a plan of Satan” (yes, it’s dumb, and yes, it’s an idea that is popular with antivaxxers and major anti-vaccine organizations), and he would share rants by Alex Jones on how state actors representing the New World Order have been planning to oppress the public by intentionally releasing viruses.

 

Anti-semitism

The last couple of years, Irving has been an adherent of the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrine, according to which black people are the real Jews. Real Jewish people are, on the other hand, fake Jewish people, and followers of the nonsense are accordingly quick to engage in hardcore anti-semitism also beyond the anti-semitism inherent in the doctrine’s core delusion. Irving seems to have gotten his ideas from amateur conspiracy theorist Ronald Dalton Jr.’s film (and book) Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, which embellishes the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrine with Holocaust denial and quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It also claims that (real) Jewish people worship Satan, control the media, controlled the Atlantic slave trade, and currently control the media (Dalton claims to have received his info partially through divine revelation, by the way). When confronted with the misinformation promoted by the film, Irving refused to apologize: saying that deeming him antisemitic was “not justified” and that he intended to “learn from all walks of life and religions” is obviously not distancing oneself from the misinformation, and Irving also emphasized that “[h]istory is not supposed to be hidden from anybody” and that “I’m not going to stand down on anything I believe in. I’m only going to get stronger because I’m not alone. I have a whole army around me.” He added that he would be able to debunk any criticism leveled at him because of his propensity for “study[ing]”, and that he “know[s] the Oxford dictionary,” so there. To direct questions about whether he defended anti-semitism, Irving clarified that “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from.” The incident resulted in a suspension from his NBA team and a termination of his contract with Nike. He eventually issued a notpology and did not denounce the misinformation he had been promoting.

 

Diagnosis: Not operating on at very sophisticated cognitive level, this one. There is, however, a chance that some people, operating at a similarly basic cognitive level, actually listen to him.

 

#3075: Doug Irving (and really the whole RAND corporation)

We’re repeating ourselves, but it’s an important topic, so here we go: The intrusion of quackery into academic medicine under the brand name ‘integrative medicine’ continues apace. The guiding ideas, apart from the unstated fact that vague wellness-oriented alternative medicine is pretty lucrative, are often some kind of appeal to ‘the best of two worlds’ and the associated failure to understand that integrating quackery with real medicine doesn’t make medicine better, and appeal to real troubles in and shortcomings with real medicine and the associated failure to grasp that shortcomings in real medicine doesn’t mean that unproven pseudoscientific alternatives have anything going for them (i.e., as Ben Goldacre puts it, that “just because there are problems with aircraft design, that doesn’t mean that magic carpets really fly”).

 

Doug Irving struggles with getting his head around the fallaciousness of those two ideas in attempts to justify integrative medicine. And that is worrisome, given that Irving is a corporate communications officer at the RAND corporation, and the RAND corporation, a global policy think tank and research institute, is a pretty significant and authoritative player in the world of public policy. As a matter of fact, the RAND corporation has done decent work on e.g. vaccine policy; they have, unfortunately, also delved deeply into the rabbit hole of integrative medicine, having even teamed up with the deranged quack cult the Samueli Institute to form the RAND Center for Collaborative Research in Complementary and Integrative Health, chaired by Ian D. Coulter whom we have covered before, and which, despite the RAND corporation’s otherwise rather firm commitment to science and evidence, has rather explicitly advocated using a double standard: mainstream medicine should continue to use their standards for evidence, whereas alternative practices should be measured by the standards they are able to pass, such as handwaving, anecdotes and popularity.

 

Here is a discussion of Irving’s thoughts on the issue of integrative medicine, and yes, it is all there: “Modern medicine has a problem. It can fix a damaged heart, battle cancer into remission, and operate on the deepest recesses of the human brain. Yet it continues to struggle with the everyday anguish of an aching back,” says Irving, and immediately concludes that “[u]nconventional medicine, once dismissed as quackery by the medical establishment, might be the missing piece of modern health care” on the grounds that “Americans now spend billions of their own dollars seeking relief from such chronic conditions in alternative schools of health”. And so on.

 

One important detail about Irving’s rhetoric that should be highlighted – it is, after all, ubiquitous in discussions of alternative medicine – is how he talks about “different models of medicine”: there is Western medicine, but also Eastern medicine and naturopathy and whatnot. And that allows Irving to frame the discussion as concerning issues of distrust and oppression. In reality, of course, there are no different models of medicine. There is no alternative medicine. There is the medical interventions that have been shown to work, the ones that haven’t, and the ones that have been shown not to work. If an intervention is shown to work, then it is medicine. The reason acupuncture isn’t part of medicine is that it hasn’t been shown to work for anything; the reason homeopathy isn’t, is that it has been shown not to work for anything. But framing things this way – the right way to frame it – makes it a bit harder to advocate for integrative medicine, insofar as advocating for integrative medicine is really advocating for integrating interventions that work with those that don’t; and putting it that way is also a better way to describe the challenges that integrative medicine is facing than complaining about narrow-minded legislators or scientists. 

 

Diagnosis: Irving is of course not the main problem here. The whole RAND corporation seems to have bought the Integrative medicine rhetoric hook line and sinker. The conclusion really has to be that in light their demonstrated inability to see through the nonsense in the case of integrative medicine, the RAND corporation really cannot be trusted on anything.