Sunday, December 31, 2023

#2720: Liz Crokin

Elizabeth M. Crokin is a former entertainment & celebrity reporter and writer for Townhall, where she rose to celebrity status herself for her column Trump Does the Unthinkable, which mixes a few selected facts with bizarre fiction and which became very popular with a certain segment of the population. She is currently one of the leading – and most deranged – promoters of QAnon conspiracy theories in the US. Her own fiction/self biography Malice is discussed here. Though she still writes for wingnut conspiracy outlets, Crokin’s misinformation has been banned from all major social media accounts (although Musk recently let her back on Twitter (or whatever he calls it) and even allowed her to monetize her account).

 

Pizzagate

Crokin rose to national fame through her promotion of Pizzagate conspiracies, and she continues to believe that the conspiracy theory is correct, largely because it is demonstrably false and incoherent, which to Crokin and her ilk just goes to show how deep the conspiracy goes and how good the deep state is at messing with our brains through mind control.

 

In December 2017, Crokin instigated a rather infamous episode when she claimed on Twitter that photographs posted by Chrissy Teigen with her one-year-old daughter contained concealed messages suggesting that Teigen was connected to Pizzagate: Teigen and husband John Legend “flaunt illuminati symbolism” and “run in circle with people who rape, torture & traffic kids”. After Twitter removed her verification, Crokin went on to elaborate based on what she could pull from her own ass, suggesting for instance that Teigen might be under the CIA’s long defunct Project MKUltra mind control program: Teigen would in that case not be alone as an MKUltra drone but share fates with e.g. Harvey Weinstein, the 2018 Youtube HQ shooter and Jeff Bezos; indeed, MKUltra has controlled Hollywood at least since World War II, as far as Crokin sees things.

 

Crokin later suggested that the entire spat with Teigen was orchestrated by President Trump as part of a “white hat false flag” effort aimed at preparing America for a coming wave of arrests of thousands of powerful and influential pedophile satanists: In December 2017, Crokin discovered, Teigen and Legend had been on a flight to Japan that was returned to Los Angeles after it was discovered that an unauthorized passenger had been allowed to board. According to Crokin, the flight was probably diverted back to L.A. because Teigen and Legend were under sealed indictment and were offered a deal in which they were told to attack Crokin on Twitter to create news that would help raise awareness about things like Pizzagate as a means to preparing Americans for the looming exposure of widespread ritual satanic child sexual abuse. There are holes in that conjecture, but it is certainly pointless to ask Crokin to fill them in. She also complained that Teigen and Legend were “mocking God and they’re mocking Jesus” by hosting a Christmas special, and would ultimately face divine judgment.

 

In 2017, she also asserted that a sex tape featuring Hillary Clinton would soon be released and prove once and for all that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory was true – the idea later became known is ‘the frazzledrip conspiracy’ after being expanded with the claim that the putative video would show Clinton involved in extracting adrenochrome from dead children, and it went on to became a QAnon mainstay. As evidence for the video’s existence, Crokin cited a Newsweek article about a Russian internet troll claiming to have produced a fake Clinton sex tape designed to be released during the 2016 election. Therefore, Crokin insisted, a real Clinton sex tape does exist, featuring Clinton, her top aide Huma Abedin and an underage, and it was discovered by authorities (along with similar tapes featuring more or less any politician Crokin disagrees with) when they seized the laptop of Abedin’s husband Anthony Weiner the Newsweek article was merely an effort to condition people to dismiss the video as fake once it went public (Newsweek is, as everyone knows, an arm of the “deep state”). It is only a matter of time before all of them are released, Crokin said, “and if and when this happen, let me tell you, no one will be able to deny that Pizzagate isn’t real. Nobody will be able to deny that the likes of the Clintons and John Podesta and many, many politicians and many members of Congress are involved in the satanic rape and torture of kids.” That’s as slam-dunk as evidence comes for the likes of Liz Crokin, as is this. Here she elaborates on the putative contents of the video. The elaboration tells you more than you want to know about Liz Crokin. As does this.

 

Crokin also starred in the 2020, well, YouTube video Out of Shadows, which was heavily promoted by deranged conspiracy theorists and a substantial army of (largely Russian) bots, where she explained (not the right word) how Jeffrey Epstein and the NXIVM scandal also demonstrated the continuing validity of Pizzagate. In the video, she also laid out some of her evidence, which is discussed, comprehensively, here and which consists almost exclusively of imagination. By 2021, relegated to conspiracy cesspool social media sites like Telegram, Crokin did, however, complain that “[a]ll I want for today is for some news to break exposing Pizzagate. That’s all I want everyday & there is no gift more important to me than this.” Despite appearances, it is unlikely that the statements were intended to express any modicum of doubt. Here is Crokin claiming that Trump has confirmed that Pizzagate is real. If you squint hard you might be able to discern traces of motivated reasoning at work.

 

QAnon

Liz Crokin put herself so far out in front she was mocked, she was laughed at, she was called crazy. Well let me ask you a question, for all those people that did that to Liz: Does she seem so crazy now?”

Fellow QAnon acolyte and Out of Shadows director Mike Smith in what we think was supposed to be a rhetorical question.

 

Crokin was an adherent of the QAnon theory before it went mainstream and represents QAnon in perhaps its purest form, subscribing to virtually all the (contradictory) conspiracy theories emerging under the QAnon umbrella. Crokin is actively pushing the Satanic panic-inspired paranoid delusion that liberals and the rest of the elites (anyone who disagrees with her on politics) are running worldwide child sex-trafficking rings because Satan and that Donald Trump is secretly fighting them. And she adamantly believes that the QAnon source making “intel dropson 4chan and 8chan is Trump himself or perhaps Stephen Miller. Apparently, Crokin “immediately knew [QAnon] was legit upon discovering the first “drop”: I just knew it intuitively. Everything resonated to me and everything added up”, which is not how knowledge works.

 

Q is literally the greatest story that’s ever been told. Not only is it the greatest story that has ever been told, but it unfolds in real time. That’s what’s so amazing about it.”

-       Liz Crokin

 

In relation to the QAnon conspiracy, Crokin has pushed the idea that the Mueller investigation was not about Trump at all but a cover for an investigation into the Clintons, the Obamas, George Soros, “globalists” and other elites whose crimes are “punishable by death” (evidence: Trump calls the investigation a “witch hunt”, and who but Clinton is the witch here? “Hillary Clinton literally is a witch. She practices witchcraft, she goes to witches covens, she’s been going to occult meetings in L.A. for decades.”). That cabal of child abusers would ostensibly ultimately be defeated and its members arrested en masse in the event known as “the Storm, which will take place always imminently. “What we have come up with is a possible coup,” explais fellow conspiracy theorist David Zublick, “not against Donald Trump, but by Donald Trump, working with Robert Mueller to bring down the Clintons, the Democrat Party, and the entire U.S. government involved in pedophilia and child sex trafficking.” As Crokin points out, President Trump IS a stable genius and plays 5D chess & is always 1,000 steps ahead; unfortunately “many don’t have a high enough of an IQ level to even begin to comprehend this” (most would presumably consider Crokin’s attitude toward Trump mildly disturbing). Also, the Biden presidency is “fake, whatever that means.

 

QAnon: The villains

Among the people involved in or doing work for the cabal are, in addition to Teigen & Legend (see above), Clinton, the Obamas, former President George H.W. Bush (who “didn’t die, he was executed. He was executed. So the tide has turned, you guys”) and the Democratic Party, celebrities like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, fashion designer Kate Spade (whose death from suicide was a way to escape jail time for being involved in a satanic pedophilia ring) and Lil Nas X, as shown by their fashion and music video aesthetics (and for making pizza), as well as performance artist Marina Abramović, a favorite of QAnon dimwits and whose work consists of explicit displays of witchcraft aimed to desensitize the masses to violence and mind control. The comedy Zoolander apparently serves a similar purpose. Discreet sets of magic symbols used by the cabal and its henchmen, especially those in the media, include the words “television” (tell-a-vision), “channel” (psychic communication), and “Hollywood” (named, according to QAnon but of course not reality, for its connection to druid rituals). In August 2018, Crokin was involved a surfing accident while on vacation, and she promptly speculated that Abramović (or perhaps Clinton) had engineered her accident: “All these people [I expose] dabble in witchcraft and spirit cooking. So, do these people do witchcraft against me? Of course they do. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they were casting spells on me the night before”. Then she claimed that God had injured her to help her “use my voice to draw attention to the opioid epidemic.” She also tried to sue the hotel and surf shop but lost.

 

Hello, people! Put two and two together.”

-       Liz Crokin on why the Mueller’s special counsel investigation reportedly failing to find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election proves that Pizzagate is true and Q is Trump

 

According to a set of later popular statistics pulled completely out of thin air, at least one-third of Congress and one-third of Hollywood insiders are members of the Satanic cabal of pedophilic cannibals who “drink the blood of children.” Trump knows this, but can’t tell the public, apparently because it would blow their minds and he can’t have that. “They need it in doses, they need to be conditioned,” said Crokin on Dave Hodges’s Common Sense Show (a corolloary of Badger’s Law; that is why Trump and Q drop so many hints about the upcoming “Storm”: those who learn to see these hints (and interpret Trump’s idiosyncratic ad libs, gestures and typos through the lens of motivated reasoning) are “awakened” (not “woke”). “There’s not one smoking gun,” explained Crokin in “Out of Shadows”, contradicting her earlier claims, but “many small smoking guns that you have to piece together, and you have to use critical thinking to understand this stuff is real.” In March 2018, Crokin also predicted that the conspiracy theories according to which “thousands of high-level political, business and entertainment figures are involved in cannibalistic satanic pedophilia” would be proven to be true before President Trump left office, which is also why she wasn’t worried by a potential Biden win in 2020. (Apparently Rachel Maddow has already been arrested for being “a deep state puppet.”) Crokin has enthusiastically predicted that everything has been about to be exposed in connection with an impressive number of events, including the arrest of Julian Assange and the arrest of Justin Smollett – anyone being arrested, or really anyone doing anything whatsoever, is proof that she is right and that the mass arrests are starting: “They’re happening! They’re happening! They are happening right now!cried Crokin when several people were arrested connected to the 2019 college admission bribery scandal.

 

The reason the cabal is involved in cannibalistic satanic pedophilia is of course to get hold of adrenochrome, which as Crokin and other QAnon activists see it, is “a drug that the elites love. It comes from children. The drug is extracted from the pituitary gland of tortured children. It’s sold on the black market. It’s the drug of the elites. It is their favorite drug. It is beyond evil. It is demonic. It is so sick.” In real life, of course, adrenochrome is a commercially available, easy-to-come-by and easily synthesized chemical compound that is utterly useless as a recreational drug. The QAnon version, by contrast, is a weird, pseudo-religious synthesis of elements from the movies Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Monsters Inc., movies that many QAnon followers claim are really covert documentaries – no, seriously!

 

Crokin was the original source for Roseanne Barr’s since-deleted 2018 tweet claiming that President Trump had released hundreds of children from bondage each month of his presidency. Crokin based the claim on fake figures she had devised for a 2017 blog post for Townhall called “Why the MSM Is Ignoring Trump’s Sex Trafficking Busts”, where she claimed, based on the familiar strategy of making it up out of thin air, that there had been “staggering 1,500-plus arrests” in the first 30 days of Trump’s presidency.

 

Crokin has also exposed, in a video with her friend Crystal Myers-Barber, Oprah Winfrey’s allegiance to the New World Order: In 2011, Winfrey – a full-blown demon from hell, in Crokin’s mind – launched the Oprah Winfrey Network, OWN, but as Crokin discovered, ‘OWN’ spelled backwards is NWO, which is slam-dunk proof of her ties to the New World Order. “What is her network – OWN – backwards?” asked Crokin. “New World Order. Hello! Anagrams, reverse words, symbolism.” Myers-Barber was impressed: “In the Bible, it talks about spirit of Antichrist, which we realize is already in the air. But could Oprah rise up and be the Antichrist? That’s a stretch, but, hey, you never know.” No, we are confident they’ll never know, though it’s as possible as most of the other nonsense that crosses their minds, we suppose.

 

Mainstream media, including Fox News (because they predicted that the Democrats would gain control of Congress in the 2018 elections), is of course in obvious cahoots with the deep state cabal – “lunatic” journalists like Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, and Anderson Cooper, for instance, have spent the last years committing treason and now “are all facing the death penalty”. Crokin has accordingly harassed, and asked her followers to harass, a number of journalists and reporters on the grounds that any reporter for a mainstream media outlet is “an accomplice in the rape, torture & trafficking of kids by covering up Pizzagate.” Moreover, real organizations created to fight child trafficking, “such as the Amber Alert, and the National Center of Missing Children, the foster care system, CPS”, are “actually fronts to traffic kids.” Indeed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg waspromoted to her position of power [on the Supreme Court] to legalize sex with children.”

 

Heck, anyone who disagrees with Crokin on political issues is a likely satanic pedophile and child rapist; anyone critical of how ICE operates, for instance, or all those who scream the loudest against Trump; and anyone who supports reproductive rights istrying to turn us, unwillingly, into cannibals.” She has also promised revenge on anyone who has ridiculed her: “You can spend the rest of your pathetic lives wondering when and ‘if’ I’m going to come back to haunt you … I can promise you in one way or another, I will.”

 

Mostly, however, the culprits are to be found in The Democratic Party, which according to Crokin, “is the party of child sex trafficking, Their policies –sanctuary cities, the border wall, the caravan crisis, the refugee crisis – these are all covers, people, to traffic children. Period! Tomorrow [the 2018 vote] boils down to whether you support the trafficking of children or not. Period! I cannot stress this enough. The members of Congress who are Democrats are tied into child sex trafficking in one way, shape, or form. Whether they are directly trafficking kids themselves and raping kids and torturing kids themselves, or whether they are profiting off of it, or if they’re blackmailed, it doesn’t matter.”

 

One somewhat notable target of Crokin’s attacks is actor Rainn Wilson – as well Panera Bread, which ran an ad campaign featuring Wilson. Crokin’s repeated accusation that Wilson is “involved in child sex trafficking” (evidence: “He’s involved with a charity in Haiti. Any celebrity that is involved with ‘work’ in Haiti, you had better believe they’re involved in child sex trafficking, okay?”; also, Wilson had to evacuate his home during the 2018 California wildfires) was apparently what got her banned by Twitter, something she didn’t take particularly well: She first claimed to have no idea why she was banned and declared that every person in the world should be outraged by it (it was “unfair), before predictably concluding that Twitter is in cahoots with the cabal: “I expose elite pedophiles, Twitter covers up for elite pedophiles …. Twitter actively covers up for people who promote pedophilia, people who are trafficking children on that social media platform, and people who are engaged in raping children”. In fact, Crokin reasoned, it must be a miracle that she hasn’t already been killed because of her work to expose he supposed global pedophile ring, and she promptly concluded that she must have been specially chosen and anointed by God to carry out this work. The whole thing is fairly illustrative of how Liz Crokin’s mind (possibly not the right word) works.

 

Another recurring target is Tom Hanks, who according to Crokin will “soon” be among the first high-profile figures arrested for supposed involvement in satanic pedophilia: “There is a lot of evidence and symbolism with Tom Hanks. You can go look at some of the work he’s done, you can look at some of the skits he’s done on Saturday Night Live, you can look at some of the movies he’s been in. There is a lot of symbolism in the work that he’s done. I think one of the first movies he did was [The Man With One Red Shoe] … It was a movie about red shoes; we know that red shoes are significant and symbolic to the occult because they make leather red shoes out of babies’ skin.” The reason she thinks Hanks will be “the first big name unsealed indictment” is that the person behind the Q account has frequently used the word “big” in its posts and Big is the name of one of Hanks’ most successful films: “Tom Hanks was in a movie – Big – and, of course, the movie is based off of basically pedophilia because he’s a little kid in a grown man’s body that ends up having a sexual relationship with a grown woman. So a lot of anons are theorizing that he could be the first big name unsealed indictment. I think it’s a really good theory.”

 

QAnon: Demons and Jews

Behind it all, of course, are demons. A crucial part of the QAnon narrative, like all conspiracy theories that have ultimately turned violent throughout history, is child abuse in the name of some nefarious deity; the imaginary deep-state elites are, in the minds of Crokin and her ilk, not only child traffickers and rapists, but they torture, rape and murder children in service to Satan. In addition, the cabal also traumatizes other kids and flaunts occult symbols in public as a form of mind control.

 

But the demons, which are very real, are involved in more mundane campaigns of destruction, too; they did for instance give Crokin’s dog bloody diarrhea; that’s how Crokin knows that Jesus Christ is real: “These people I’m exposing believe in Satan and they’ve garnered power from that and they’ve used that to hurt me. They’ve cast spells on me. Both of our dogs got sick and had diarrhea with blood in it within 24 hours of each other. Our dogs didn’t even hang out together! This was right after we were together and did something powerful together […] These things make me realize that not only is the devil real, but God is real and Jesus Christ is real. These people that are worshiping the devil, that I’m exposing, are just confirming for me that Jesus Christ is my savior” (Crokin also declared that a power outage at the beginning of the clip where she laid out this connection was caused by demons).

 

Meanwhile, California’s mudslides were God’s punishment for Oprah Winfrey’s anti-Trump comments at the Golden Globes (God is apparently notoriously bloodthirsty, but His righteous anger is strikingly poorly aimed). The California wildfires, however, were intentionally started by the cabal of child abusers to cover up their crimes. And in 2019, God sent millions of butterflies to California to send her, Crokin, a signthat President Trump is taking on the pedophiles”. Whatever crosses her mind.

 

Oh, and in addition to (among?) demons, there are, of course, Zeh Jews. “Pedophilia is rampant within the Jewish religion, from what I’ve researched,” said Crokin on the David Icke-associated fringe-conspiracy The Richie Allen Show in 2017 (the “from what I’ve researched”-qualifier is sort of important): “I’ve also discovered that predators prey on children at Jewish camps. Now, it is interesting how pedophilia has been exposed within the Catholic church but there hasn’t been a huge scandal about the pedophilia that goes on within the Jewish community. We do know that the Jews control most of the mainstream media and Hollywood.” Then she tried to connect the murder of Seth Rich to rampant pedophilia “within the Jewish religion”.

 

Nevertheless, it’s the Democratic Party that, in addition to being satanic pedophiles, is also nothing but an extension of the Third Reich, whatever that’s supposed to mean in this context (don’t think too much about it).

 

QAnon: The hero(es)

Crokin did, in 2019, express some disappointment that Trump – a “real life super hero! – had not yet conducted the “mass arrests” she had predicted and wished for, and worried that Trump might lose support if he waited too long. But instead of considering the possibility that she is insane, she suggested taking matters into her own hands and expressed support forcitizen’s arrests” of John Podesta and other people: “I’m ready now to physically go to John Podesta’s house and drag him out of his house.”

 

That said, she is deeply grateful for everything that Q has done for humanity, and it is not as if Trump hasn’t done anything: Dismissing the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements as distractions created by the cabal (“You have the [Creative Artists Agency], this horrific, evil company that was driving this campaign. They are actually trying to distract from the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is that these elites are involved in raping little kids, eating babies, drinking blood, sacrificing, and that kind of stuff. So they are using the #Time’sUp and the #MeToo movements as a distraction”), Crokin instead credited Trump with the widespread reckoning on sexual harassment, assault and trafficking following in the wake of these movements, and hence with the arrests of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Keith Raniere. Of course, accusations against Trump loyalists such as Brett Kavanaugh, Trump himself and Rep. Matt Gaetz are of course just deep-state distractions – anything that fits her narrative is evidence for it, and anything that conflicts with it is evidence for distractions by the cabal and hence evidence for her narrative, too. So it goes.

 

Apparently deciding (once again) that reality, reason and coherence is utterly irrelevant, Crokin also became, as she laid out in an interview with online psychic and YouTube host Jenny Moonstone, a main promoter of the idea that John F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t die in a 1999 plane crash but faked his death and is currently behind QAnon working with Trump to drain the swamp. She also insisted that mockery she receives for promoting her absurd ideas is proof that she is right. Other evidence: “it immediately resonated with me, I got goosebumps everywhere. I’m a very intuitive person and usually when that happens, that’s confirmation that there is truth to it.” And remember that, as a writer, she has an amazing ability to understand handwriting and uncover the truth by examining the things that people write, which also shows that JFK Jr. is, in fact, the force behind QAnon. So there. “The way that Q talks about JFK Sr. in the posts, it is with such love and passion, it makes me think that it is someone that is close to him. If JFK Jr. faked his death and was alive, it would make sense that he was Q.” No, it wouldn’t, but sense stopped making a difference long time ago. When Q ostensibly said that Kennedy wasn’t alive, however, Crokin responded: “I give zero f*cks that Q stated Jr allegedly isn’t alive. Don’t be so quick to toss out what Q taught us: think for yourselves & disinformation is necessary. I’m sticking to my guns on this one, sorry Q I disagree with you.” See: she’s not just a mindless Q drone. (The final piece of evidence often cited by QAnon activists that Kennedy is alive is the JFK jr. quote “If my dear friend Donald Trump ever decided to sacrifice his fabulous billionaire lifestyle to become president he would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice that Democrats and Republicans alike would celebrate,” which is, of course, laughably fake; QAnon activists don’t care about that, though, since they like to think it would support their idea (it wouldn’t) if it were true (it isn’t)).

 

In QAnon parlance, the general name for allies and supporters is “white hats” (as opposed to “black hats”, those in league with the deep state). White hat champions – at least intermittently – include, as Crokin sees it, William Barr playing the bagpipes, Melania Trump’s dress, Alex Acosta, Google, Elon Musk, who together with Trump, have “meticulously orchestrated” a plan to take down the deep state and finally “break people out of The Matrix” (and also let her back on Twitter) and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who credits Crokin with making her discover QAnon and redpilling her back in 2017. And in 2018, Crokin predicted that the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh would be the “final nail in the coffin” for the cabal and commence the mass arrests (her powers of prediction are significantly worse than chance). She is also very happy” for Kim Jong-Un, whom she thinks is actually a good guy who has been freed from deep state control by Trump.

 

Covid and other false flags

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Crokin was a central promoter of the idea that the pandemic was all fake and that there were no Covid patients in the hospitals. Under the #FilmYourHospital hashtag, she encouraged concerned dingbats to harass hospital workers and film hospital entrances and visitor areas to show that the patients, who wouldn’t be located close to those areas, didn’t exist and that the pandemic was a “lie engineered by the “cabal” and China. Indeed, the deep state created the COVID-19 pandemic as a “cover for the always imminent “mass arrests: “Since 2017, Q has been talking about these mass arrests, and Q has also been talking about how when these mass arrests happen, there will probably be many days of darkness, social media might go down, the National Guard is going to come in, and the military will be used to arrest these people. That is what I believe is happening right now.”

 

Other false flag operations operated by the deep state cabal of demonic pedophiles include the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. Evidence? President Donald Trump’s tweet that “it is a ‘miracle’ how fast” the police were able to find and stop the shooter. Besides, the perpetrator, Stephen Paddock, was obviously a deep state agent working for the CIA: Laborious investigative efforts from Crokin proved this beyond doubt: “more proof #StephenPaddock was CIA! He worked for the government (US postal system, IRS & DOD) for years!!” Moreover, the man arrested for setting a fire at Comet Ping Pong because he believed her rantings is obviously a “cabal plant, and fellow Pizzagate-promoter Mikaela “RobotInteriors” Seales is a “crisis actor and mind-control subject who has been planted in the MAGA/QAnon/Pizzgate movement in preparation for carrying out some sort of false flag operation designed to make the movement look bad. The Parkland shootings, too, were obviously a false flag, and Crokin tried to express some sympathy for the poor perpetrator: “What if you’re an innocent kid who the Deep State framed to look like a serial killer & your parents are dead so no one has your back?” which is an impressively deranged “what-if” even by wingnut clown circus standards. As for the 2018 cartoon-like MAGA wingnut who mailed explosive devices to prominent Democrats, it was certainly a false flag operation but also possibly a white hat op so they have an excuse to usher in the national guard to prepare for the mass arrests”.

 

Crokin has advocated alternative Covid narratives as well: “There’s a lot of anons [QAnon adherents] that believe the white hats tainted the elite’s adrenochrome supply with the coronavirus, and that’s why so many members of the elite are getting the coronavirus,” said Crokin: “We have seen dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of members of the cabal come out and say they’re either infected with the coronavirus or they’re sick. We know Tom Hanks and his wife [elsewhere, she has claimed that she doesn’t believe that Tom Hanks has the coronavirus; it’s rather just a cover story for when he disappears after being arrested for pedophilia], […] we have a lot of politicians and members of government who have been infected with the coronavirus, Justin Trudeau’s wife has the coronavirus, and right before I started this video I read online that someone from the fake news New York Times has this virus. All right?” That said, “I also believe that this virus was created by the cabal, specifically Bill Gates,” said Crokin. And though being quarantined is no fun, she admonished her followers to maintain the proper perspective: “The reason that you are self-quarantined right now is because of these sickos who are raping kids.”

 

She’s also appeared at anti-vaccine conferences with anti-vaxx leaders such as Sherri Tenpenny, though Crokin’s contributions tend to focus on accusing Hillary Clinton of being involved in child sex trafficking and leading chants of “Lock her up!

 

In other news, Crokin has apparently also made adocumentary” called Slave Princess about Britney Spears, in which she ostensibly applies the “expertise” she has gained as a Qanon conspiracy theorist to tell Spears’ story. We have not seen it and neither should you. But of course it’s all connected: “The situation with Britney ties directly to Pizzagate, and the exposure of what happened to her can potentially lead to the bigger exposure of the epidemic of trafficking of stars in Hollywood, the rampant pedophilia, Project Monarch & so so much more.”

 

Summary

Literally nothing would surprise me,” Crokin tells Cullen Hoback in HBO’s documentary Q: Into the Storm. “So, you know, if you tell me aliens are real and the Earth’s flat or whatever

 

“Wait,” interrupts Hoback. “The Earth’s flat wouldn’t surprise you?”

 

No.”

 

“Really?”

 

I expose people who literally rape and eat babies. To me, if that is able to exist in this world [it sort of isn’t], I think anything is possible.”

 

On December 6, 2022, Crokin was an honored guest at a fundraising event hosted by Trump at Mar-a-Lago and participated in a photo shoot with the former president after giving a speech mostly consisting of assertionsthat Pizzagate is real. At the event, she represented Michael Flynn’s organization America’s Future, which has launching a program called “Project Defend & Protect Our Children” that will be overseen by a board featuring Crokin, discredited journalist Lara Logan, and similar miscreants. Meanwhile, Ann Vandersteel maintains that Liz Crokin deserves Medal of Freedom for having saved millions of children from satanic pedophiles.

 

Diagnosis: Everything looks connected when you are unable to draw distinctions. Liz Crokin’s most striking cognitive flaw is probably not her inability to draw any distinctions, however (using “people are lying to me because they are evil and possessed by demons” as an unshakeable tenet in light of which you explain everything that happens is not in line with most critical thinking textbooks either; neither is “whatever bad I think of people is true because I don’t like them”). But still: She’s got followers – plenty of them, and not all of them are bots.

Thursday, December 28, 2023

#2719: Brandon & Heather Credeur

Brandon and Heather Credeur are a couple of chiropractors and professional grifters, who for a long time were hoodwinking hundreds of victims into paying thousands and thousands of dollars for their brand of functional endocrinology at the Functional Endocrinology Center of Colorado for treatment of diabetes and other endocrine disorders. The treatments didn’t do shit for the patients’ medical problems, of course, and things got so bad that the Colorado Medical Board finally had to step in to order the Credeurs to cease and desist the unlicensed practice of medicine. And for anyone who knows how these things work: For a medical board to actually try to step in and crack down on chiropractic woo, things have to be really bad and really blatantly so.

Brandon Credeur is himself the inventor of the nonsense known as functional endocrinology; he invented it partially to have his own brand of woo to push and partially to sell courses to other chiropractors interesting in expanding their bullshit toolbox (his seminars promised to tell other practitioners how to “Discover How to Attract More Sick Patients With Real Organic & Visceral Illnesses”). Precisely what functional endocrinology is, is of course less clear. Credeur’s promotional material rather attacks science-based medicine for simply prescribing drugs and not getting to the “root cause (false) of endocrine disorders, such as diabetes (chiropractic quacks love to claim, falsely, that they can do something about diabetes). One would think, then, that Credeur does focus on said root cause; instead, Credeur glaringly fails to tell us what this supposed root cause actually is, how he found it, or how his treatments are supposed to target it; nor does he have any data to suggest that they actually do work. He’s got testimonials, though.

For a time, his business model was to attract patients through seminars and “gourmet dinners” advertised in the newspaper, where diabetics would be advised on “how you too may be able to reverse your diabetes and put your health on a totally new trajectory” and “walk away from diabetes”: at the events, a “clinical model for successfully reversing diabetes” would ostensibly be “revealed”, though according to patients the clinical model consisted simply of “a diet outlined in a book given to all patients, supplements, [and] chiropractic adjustments”. Less explicitly announced beforehand was the fact that a six-month treatment would cost $8,600, all paid up front. Apparently, the business model worked in part by allowing victims to believe that he was, in fact, an endocrinologist. He emphatically isn’t.

Though the sanctions of the medical board (some details on the concerns here) gave the Credeurs some trouble (they quickly declared bankruptcy to circumvent a number of civil lawsuits), they remained licensed by the Colorado chiropractic board – chiropractors are licensed in the state – because the chiropractic board of Colorado is a get-rich-quick conspiracy of spineless hucksters and their licensing has nothing whatsoever with medicine, accountability or patient care but about being able to squeeze as much money as possible out of victims in difficult life situations.

Diagnosis: Absolute, spineless shit. But not only are the Credeurs a disgrace to humanity; their practices aren’t that different – except, perhaps, with regard to how blatant they are – than the practices of a large number of other alternative practitioners, and their antics enjoy the support of large and powerful organizations (chiropractic boards) committed to this and similar grifts. It’s an absolute tragedy.

Friday, December 22, 2023

#2718: Shawna Cox

We’ve already mentioned Ammon Bundy, but didn’t really pay much attention to his organization, the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (C4CF), later also known as People for Constitutional Freedom (P4CF). The C4CF is certainly what one would call a colorful lot, even if their views and opinions tend toward the predictable. Shawna Cox, for instance, is a friend of the Bundys and was a participant in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Now, Cox was certainly not the only participant under the sway of sovereign citizen cult dogma (visitor and self-proclaimed judge Bruce Doucette, for instance, announced a “citizens grand jury in true sovereign citizen style), but Cox was certainly among the more explicit among them; after having been arrested, she promptly filed a countersuit in which she explicitly claimed to be a “sovereign citizen” instead of “a subject of corporate United States of America” and accused any judge who is a member of a state bar association or the Federal Bar Association of being “Foreign Agents operating subversively within United States.” In fact, Cox had an extensive list of people she planned to subpoena (under what authority, one wonders), including ranchers in the western U.S., Oregon’s current and former governora, local and state police officers, FBI agents and “various law professors”, and she planned to ask a jury to deliver civil and criminal penalties against them on the putative reason that they have worked to subvert the constitutional government to impose “socialism, communism and imperialism types of government onto the people of the United States of America.” Her suit moreover demanded “damages from the works of the devil in excess $666,666,666,666.66.” The courts were, needless to say, not impressed.

More recently, Cox has been affiliated with Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights Militia and been a part of numerous anti-government protests. Her daughter, Sindi Brown Vetere, was also a 2021 candidate for Kanab, Utah, Mayor after participating in the January 6th Insurrection – though we have no indication her participation had any legal repercussions, Vetere is one of those people who seems to land herself systematically in legal trouble.

Diagnosis: There are lots of these around; in the US, sovereign citizen nonsense seem to be something of a go-to solution in lieu of therapy for angry, paranoid people who struggle to understand what is going on around them. We’d like to feel somewhat sorry for them, but these people are sometimes genuinely dangerous, and not always just to themselves.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

#2717: Kathy Cox (?)

Nutjobs in state governments are a dime a dozen, but we’ll do our best to mention the most egregious cases, such as Georgia’s Kathy Cox. Cox is a former superintendent of public schools for Georgia and a high school teacher who also served two terms, from 1998 to 2002, in the Georgia House of Representatives, representing Peachtree City. She also had a stint from 2010 to 2018 as CEO of the non-profit U.S. Education Delivery Institute in D.C. Cox is a creationist sympathizer, and hence a complete failure in all the positions she’s occupied.

In 2004, Cox proposed striking the word “evolution” from Georgia textbooks and replacing it with the phrase “biological changes over time”, ostensibly because the “buzzword” “evolution” created problems for teachers in conservative and rural areas. For similar reasons, she also wanted to remove the expression “Big Bang”. “I think you can do without science,” said one of her aides. Not everyone was impressed. Now, Cox ultimately backed down, claiming that her sole goal was to avoid controversy. If so, her strategy was magnificently stupid, and it still leaves her with the goal of enabling creationists and hence justifies including her in the Encyclopedia.

Diagnosis: We added a question mark to the entry just in case she is merely astonishingly naïve, but we don’t put much credence in that hypothesis. What is reasonably certain, however, is that American education doesn’t need people like Kathy Cox.