#2673: Ralph Cinque

The movie My Stretch of Texas Ground is a low-budget action movie featuring the government (and agents of the government) as main villains (remember Waco), and views, according to critics, “like an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger written by Ron Paul”. It wasn’t written by Paul, however, but by one Ralph Cinque.

 

Now, Cinque is not primarily known as a movie writer. Cinque is rather most famous for being a prominent JFK conspiracy theorist and figure in the Oswald Innocence Campaign (OIC), a group that pushes the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot the president mostly because they have a blurry picture of a guy who is not Oswald in the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository at the crucial moment. Cinque cites James Fetzer. And his association with JFK conspiracy theories – of course government agents, not Oswald, assassinated JFK – gives you a clue to Cinque’s distaste for the gub’mint. There is a short step from his JFK views to thinking that the government was behind 9/11 too, and Cinque doesn’t hesitate to walk that distance; yes, Cinque is of course a 9/11 truther as well.

 

But that’s not his day job either. Cinque is a (retired) chiropractor and director of Dr. Cinque’s Health Retreat in Buda, TX, a quack retreat that offers detox regimes and other woo. Cinque is a quack’s quack, and as a quack, of course the gub’mint is the enemy – the gub’mint’s got rules and regulations concerning the extent to which you can sell nonsense snakeskin oil to people using false claims about health benefits, and such rules and regulations are of course anathema to the practices of people like Cinque.

 

And no, Cinque doesn’t like school medicine, and he will readily advice his victims customers to eschew their associations with science-based medicine and commit to his advice instead. In his post “One World Government: It’s Already Here” (no link; google if you must) he lays out his case: Modern medicine is “a cult”, and the problem is largely its entanglement with science. For instance, says Cinque, “[t]ake he guiding principle of Medicine and Biology, which is Darwinian Evolution” – the theory of evolution is, according to Cinque, “preposterous”, “absurd”, and he cites the Discovery Institute’s laughable petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism as support his judgments, as well as appeals to incredulity and an anecdote about the time he ostensibly debated a biology professor and didn’t understand the answer. Deniers of evolution are actively oppressed.

 

But it’s not only science’s commitment to the theory of evolution that is the problem, here. The same oppressive mechanisms are at work in “the whole realm of ‘vaccination science’,” which, as Cinque sees it, is a field that is “very autocratic, hierarchical, and dogmatic”. And the doctors who follow the advice of the scientists don’t know anything about vaccines, according to Cinque, but follow the scientists’ advice blindly and based on faith. Has he ever talked to a doctor, you might wonder? Bah, that would be checking whether your claims are correct, and Cinque is not in the business of doing that; why would he, when he is already in possession of the tools of conspiracy theories and idle speculation?

 

And the scientists are lying to you about the coronavirus, too: You think they have isolated the corona virus? Well, Cinque is here to tell you that they haven’t, and cites Canadian germ theory denialist David Crowe (“whom I greatly respect”) as his source. Oh, yes, he is! According to Cinque, the “whole paradigm of viral infections is fraught with uncertainty and inconsistency.” An example? “Why is it that having Corona antibodies is good while having AIDS antibodies is bad?” asks Cinque – you don’t need medical education to answer that one, but to Cinque it “just doesn’t make sense”.

 

Oh, and the one-world government thing? “I see a lot written online about the new world order and the coming one-world government,” says Cinque, which tells you quite a bit about his what kind of sources he tends to use. But his point is that, regardless of what the situation might be on other arenas, “[m]edical globalism is already a reality. Medicine is a global cartel.” And “that to me is truly the scariest thing of all.” Yes: the fact that there are international efforts to prevent the spread of viruses is one thing, but the truly horribly point, to Cinque, is that scientists across the globe agrees on the facts, and make similar recommendations everywhere. The horror! Different places should have their own, national sciences, that come to vastly different conclusions. That’s freedom.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he covers all the bases, often in a single post. It’s almost impressive, or would perhaps have been impressive if he had made at least attempted to back any of his claims up with anything but the most basic of the familiar, named fallacies.