#1458: Dean Chambers

Dean Chambers is, to some people at least, familiar as the self-appointed nemesis of Nate Silver. Silver, of course, (somehow) attained celebrity status for his predictions of the 2012 presidential election based on statistical analyses. Chambers, who didn’t fancy the results Silver predicted, argued that they were wrong, partially because Silver (who is openly gay) is nothing more than an “effeminate,” “soft-sounding” “Castrat[o],” and by rejecting sound statistical methods in favor of vain, wishful thinking. In particular, Chambers claimed the polls were skewed and that Romney was going to win in a landslide, something that endeared him to the rabid right, who rarely seems to ask people they agree with to provide anything resembling evidence (which Chambers couldn’t have given them). You can see an example of Chambers trying to “unskew” the polls (by, really, disregarding the results in favor of the results he’d like to see) here. Here: is Chambers preemptively declaring voter fraud in the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial election; he simply wrote up the results in advance, claimed voter fraud, and admitted that this would be the story to publish after the election, no matter what happened – conclusive evidence, if any was needed, that Chambers’s positions are utterly unconnected to what’s actually the case. Here is another prediction that is so unimaginably stupid that one wonders why even wingnut media is giving him attention.

And yes, Chambers really is your standard wingnut conspiracy theorist. He has, for instance, promoted the idea that the Affordable Care Act requires American citizens to have microchips implanted in their hands, which will contain all health data and bank account information and will allow the government to monitor you, control you, and turn you into a slave. He is also dishonest. And don’t get him started on fluoridation unless you want to hear some truly old-school John Birch society-style crazy.

He is also a fan of the lunacy of wingnut conspiracy theorist Kevin DuJan (of “during-the-night-of-Benghazi-Obama-was-high-on-cocaine-and-having-gay-sex” fame). It should give you an idea about what Chambers thinks about using evidence to form beliefs and back up claims. And yeah, the gays is an ever-present force of destruction. When General Mills added a rainbow marshmallow to their Lucky Charms cereal, Chambers was among those who screamed “gay conspiracy”, pointing out that “[w]e don’t make this stuff up. The hard left does. I can understand Justice Antonin Scalia’s frustration with seeing our country turn rotten and corrupt with all this political correctness, as he saw with the putrid arguments he had to hear justifying same-sex marriage. Rush Limbaugh is right, everything that made this country great, when it was, and helped establish American Exceptionalism, is under assault from the far left.” Yes, that’s the workings of the mind of Dean Chambers. Same sex marriage, according to Dean Chambers, is really a matter of inequality – it is granting homosexuals special rights, which is precisely the argument wingnuts made in the 50s about interracial marriage, of course. He also predicted that gay marriage will be exploited for fraudulent purposes: “a father and son could exploit gay marriage ‘rights’ by getting married and the father passes real estate to the son without paying inheritance taxes on it. This is just one of many not yet thought of unintended consequences that will come from the far left’s ‘marriage equality’ agenda.” Just think about it. Apparently Chambers is unaware that girls can inherit real estate, too – at least that’s the charitable interpretation of how he was thinking about the matter.

Diagnosis: Yes, Dean Chambers appears to be genuinely inhofely crazy – and stupid, in the sense that wingnut paranoia makes you stupid. How influential he is, is another matter: His voice resounds in the wingnut echo chamber, but it’s unclear to what extent it is, at least at present, heard outside of that.