#2795: Jacob-Franz Dyck

The distinction between sovereign citizen activists and common crooks and frauds is a fuzzy one. Jacob-Franz Dyck – insofar as he is still around (we’re not sure) – is a case in point. Dyck, who (ostensibly) believes that U.S. laws don’t apply to him, is a serial harasser and felon who has been defrauding his way across Florida for a while with flamboyant and complicated schemes; in particular, Dyck has been filing sovereign deeds on houses he does not own and allegedly setting up trusts that would ostensibly protect other people’s property from foreclosure or seizure, as well as simulating legal processes by setting up various grand juries and sending lengthy pretend legal letters around – Dyck’s letters are template-constructed stuff that open with invoking the Messiah and a slew of Bible quotes before launching into an incoherent mess of arcane laws and imaginative nonsense, e.g. that banks cannot bring foreclosure actions in state courts that fly an American flag with yellow and gold fringes or that properties are protected from foreclosure by “pure trusts” and “land patents” that can never be broken: “With pure trusts you don’t have to pay taxes and the government can’t tell you what to do with your property”, Dyck tells his clients, who often go on to discover the hard way that such claims are based exclusively on Dyck’s imagination. Dyck is also a former dentist who was stripped of his dental license in 1988 and later spent some years as a self-professed “holistic healer” – as well as some years in prison around the turn of the century for grand theft.

 

Several of his accomplices, such as Gary Chenot and Khamma Inthavong (unlawful use of notary commission and a “simulated legal process” charge), have landed themselves in real and serious legal trouble as a result of buying into Dyck’s incoherent nonsense.

 

Diagnosis: Dingbat insanity, of course, but like those marketing alternative cancer cures, Dyck tends to target people who have landed themselves in real, difficult situations, and desperation is a powerful motivator. Dyck is ruining people’s lives, and insofar as he’s still around, he’s unlikely to have gotten any better. Take note of the name if you live in the relevant areas.

#2794: Claire Dwoskin

The Dwoskin Family Foundation has for a long time served as a generous source of a substantial part of the funding for various anti-vaccine organizations and anti-vaccine activist efforts. Indeed, the foundation has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations like the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and Generation Rescue, provided substantial funding for Leslie Manookian, Kendall Nelson and Chris Pillard’s antivaccine propaganda movie The Greater Good, and generously supported antivaccine activist Chris Shaw’s group at the University of British Columbia – including 125 000 dollars to cover lab costs for the “Aluminum Toxicity Project” to enable it to reach the conclusions the Dwoskins wanted it to reach. There are more details about the foundation’s funding of anti-vaccine efforts here.

 

In 2013, the Dwoskins – Albert and Claire – also founded the organization Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI) to streamline their anti-vaccine efforts: the organization governed the Childrens’ Medical Safety Research Institute Endowment Fund, which was set up to provide “research grants” to groups and individuals willing to coordinate their results with what the Dwoskins thought the results should be, in particular research on what the Dwoskins determined, prior to research, to be “vaccine induced brain and immune dysfunction”; the CMSRI was founded because “[a]s a private foundation, the Dwoskin Family Foundation was limited to how it could raise and use donated funds. Laws governing tax-exempt organizations made it difficult to dedicate 100% of all donations to philanthropic [i.e. antivaccine] causes. In many situations, especially when dealing with international research organizations, donations were heavily taxed.” And the list of people who have received funding from the CMSRI is long, and includes most of the usual suspects involved in anti-vaccine junk research and misinformation, such as Yehuda Shoenfeld (Israel), who invented the made-up, allegedly vaccine-associated autoimmune disease ASIA, Christopher Shaw (Canada), Lucija Tomljenovic (Canada) (more on Dwoskin’s funding and Shaw & Tomljenovic’s research here), Christopher “no government funded this research [because the Dwoskins did]” Exley (UK), Anthony Mawson, Martha Herbert, glyphosate loon and conspiracy theorist Stephanie Seneff, David & Mark Geier (no less) and Brian Hooker, who have used to funds to produce a string of strikingly flawed and later retracted papers and articles in predatory journals, such as this one by Anthony Mawson (and funding from the CMSRI). There is more information on CMSRI and their efforts here, as well as here – that the Dwoskins have also been substantial contributors to political campaigns (e.g. Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid) at least ensured that their preferred semi-anonymity as antivaccine activsts became hard to maintain. The institute also ran its own blog, where people like conspiracy theorist Celeste McGovern could write about how there is a “conspiracy” to “suppress” anti-vaccine studies by retracting them due to obvious and demonstrable methodological flaws and dishonesty. Fortunately, the CMSRI closed down a couple of years ago after Claire and Albert got divorced.

 

Claire Dwoskin has herself served on the board of the NVIC. And according to her, she is, like most antivaxxers, officially “not antivaccine but pro-safe vaccines”, as illustrated e.g. by her comment to a segment John Stossel aired on his daughter’s struggle with pertussis: “What his daughter went through is NOTHING compared to what the families of autistic children go through every day of their lives. No disease can match this record of human devastation. Vaccines are a holocaust of poison on our children’s brains and immune systems. Shame on you all” (our emphasis). Spoken like a true advocate for safe vaccines (and for the record: vaccines demonstrably do not cause autism) … heck, Claire Dwoskin’s email address is “novaccine4me@XXXXX.com”.

 

Notably, throughout its existence, the CMSRI and the Dwoskin Family Foundation provided substantial funding for efforts to paint vaccines as unsafe and no funding whatsoever for the development of safe vaccines. Rather, the CMSRI “firmly believes”, falsely, that vaccines are “significant causal factors in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, autism, autoimmune diseases and other serious chronic health conditions”. In 2011, the Dwoskins did arrange what they called a “Vaccine Safety Conference” at a luxury resort in Jamaica, where the talks included  “Rethinking the germ theory” and Andrew Wakefield himself speaking about “Autism & Vaccines: a Research Strategy Focused on Cause”; there was nothing about safe vaccines.

 

And CMSRI had a long history of promoting demonstrably false antivaccine misinformation. With regard to the largely mythical increase in the prevalence of ASD based on an increase in ASD diagnoses, the center – presumably Claire Dwoskin herself – falsely stated that “[t]he reason for this increase may be linked to certain ingredients found in vaccines, specifically aluminum formulated vaccines” (nope) and that “current research is suggesting that the use of vaccines are [sic] playing a role in its development.” “current research”, of course, means antivaxx rants; real research unambigously shows that vaccines play no such role. Then there are the toxins gambits, of course; according to CMSRI, but (predictably) not reality, “[c]ertain toxic ingredients in vaccines have not been individually tested for safety such as aluminum adjuvants, polysorbate 80 and Thimerosal”.

 

Now, the CMSRI fortunately closed down when the Albert and Claire started their divorce proceedings, and among the Dwoskins, we have focused on Claire insofar as Albert has apparently come to his senses: “After seeing a great deal of evidence, I have concluded that concerns about the safety of vaccination are unfounded. The best way to protect children is to make sure they have all their vaccinations as recommended by scientists, doctors and other healthcare professionals. […] I regret my participation in the CMSRI’s work and disagree with her [Claire’s] views on the dangers of vaccination.” Good for him. Claire Dwoskin, however, appears unrepentant and proud of her antivaccine efforts, while marketing herself as “a child health advocate, philanthropist and leader of an international effort to address the increasing incidence of chronic illness and disability, including autoimmune diseases, and age related neurological diseases”.

 

Diagnosis: Although she has hopefully lost access to nearly endless funding for her conspiracy theory-fuelled anti-wellbeing projects, Claire Dwoskin remains a deranged conspiracy theorist and a major danger to everything that is nice and good in the world.

#2793: Daniel DuSoleil

Daniel DuSoleil is pastor of the Christian Center of Elko and a creationist. DuSoleil is, however, particularly concerned with how teachers, as he sees it, uses science to bully Christians, and has plenty of hearsay and implausible anecdotes to make his case, such as the story of an anonymous student of his who said she had been called “stupid” in front of a class “because she would not accept the fraudulent evolutionary evidence of Haeckel’s embryos” (which, if at all based on reality, suggests a student trying to use Haeckel’s embryos to discredit evolution, with understandably dismal results): yes, it’s the familiar creationist argument by appeal to persecution. DuSoleil also points out how arrogant and bullyish atheists/proponents of science (DuSoleil doesn’t really distinguish them) are: Indeed some people, to DuSoleil’s consternation, actually openly endorse atheism and put up posters to that effect: “What an offensive way to denigrate Christian students”. Sheer persecution!

In favor of his position on scientific matters, DuSoleil has some well-mined quotes and PIDOOMAs. Did you know that “Einstein believed the universe demonstrated intelligent design”? Neither did we, (nor did Einstein, for that matter), though as a creationist talking point it’s admittedly not particularly original.

 

Diagnosis: Yet another local village fundie denialist. There are lots and lots of them, and many – like DuSoleil – have ready access to audiences that may be likely to consider him an authority. Which is depressing.

 

Hat-tip: The Sensuous Curmugeon

#2792: Kirk Durston

According to the Discovery Institute, who tends to publish his rants, Kirk Durston is a “scientist, philosopher, and clergyman”. Most importantly, Durston is a proponent of intelligent design creationism, and like most proponents of intelligent design, he focuses his efforts on criticizing the theory of evolution or theories of the origin of life or the universe that don’t invoke supernatural forces because he makes the fundamental mistake of confusing (hypothetical) evidence against the theory of evolution with evidence for intelligent design. Not that his criticisms have much merit either. A favorite trick is, predictably, to misleadingly portray real scientific claims and debates.

Much of his writing concerns the alleged “corruption of science”, for instance the fact that scientists sometimes entertain theories that are hard to test (like the multiverse): modern science is, according to Durston, plagued by “ ‘fantasy science,’ where science fiction is often confused with science”; instead, scientists should, as Durston sees it, accept the role of God. He does not try to apply the testability criterion to that one. On other occasions he does claim that intelligent design is “testable and verifiable” because it predicts “functional information” but is predictably stingy about details (like what the hypothesis actually is, what the predicted observation – “functional information” – actually is, and how and why the unspecified hypothesis predicts the particular and specific functional information it supposedly predicts).

 

Diagnosis: Yes, they are still chugging along, even though the intelligent design movement stopped having much impact on anything a while ago, with people like Durston appealing to the same PRATTs intelligent creationists were appealing to twenty years ago. Boring.

#2791: Patrocel Duque

 

Local village idiots self-publishing insane screeds promising to revolutionize everything is hardly news, and we cannot claim to have actually read Patrocel N. Duque’s vanity press-issued book Mathematical Proofs that God Exists, but we feel confident about including him here on the basis of his own description of its contents. Apparently, Duque’s book employs “the infinity equation”, which  is ostensibly “used today in physics and mathematics”, and Duque helpfully “deciphered and correlated it in terms of divinity”. People with any mathematics background might wonder what on Earth he’s talking about, but it’s reasonable to suspect that we’re entering the venerable field of numerology here.

 

And what precisely does he claim to achieve? “Significantly, my book refutes the Big Bang theory of Stephen Hawking, that the world came from nothing and there’s no relevance of God in the world’s creation, even if there is an organizer and designer as espoused by intelligent design proponents”. That is not an entirely precise rendition of ‘the Big Bang theory of Stephen Hawking’, but Duque’s is a branch of mathematics that eschews accuracy and precision. But oh, the book “also refutes Charles Darwin’s evolution of man theory – that man came from the apes”, a theory that Duque speculates might “contribute to the rising incidence of violence in schools and our society” insofar as it’s taught in schools. Indeed, some “verses in the Bible could be proven mathematically,” as well (whatever that means given that they’re not supposed to mathematical theorems), and “the miracle of Jesus feeding 5,000 followers from five loaves of bread and two fish was also proven to be mathematically feasible” (in which case it would, presumably, not be a miracle). So there.

 

Duque himself is apparently based in the US territory of Guam and his publisher is Infinity Publishing, a company that promises to provide you “with the easiest and most comprehensive self-publishing experience”.

 

Diagnosis: Pretty obscure and unlikely to make any significant impact on anything; he might still be counted as a symptom of some slightly disturbing undercurrent of civilization, though, so worth a mention. 

 

Hat-tip: Sensuous Curmudgeon

#2790: Margaret Dunkle

Margaret Dunkle is a Lead Research Scientist at the George Washington School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy, author and a Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame laureate for her work as “an author, activist, and unsung heroine of Title IX”.

 

More importantly, Dunkle is a completely unhinged conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist, who, according to herself, has “a family member who is vaccine-injured”. Given her public status, however, she gets to publish her conspiracy theories in outlets that have the potential to reach a rather large number of people, and her 2011 piece in the Baltimore Sun, “We don’t know enough about childhood vaccines [we really do]: Are 36 doses of vaccine by age 2 too much [it isn’t], too little, or just right?”, is telling enough. In the piece, Dunkle regurgitates a range of anti-vaccine talking points you could instead locate on the websites of familiar anti-vaccine conspiracy cults such as NVIC or SafeMinds. After complaining that “debates” over vaccines are often “fact-free” because most people fail to know even “[h]ow many immunizations does the federal government recommend for every child during the first two years of life,” Dunkle says that the number is “36”, which is false unless you engage in some deliberately deceptive anti-vaccine counting exercise. Then she cites GayleDeLong’s execrable pseudoscientific data-mining to claim that there is a correlation between vaccine uptake and the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders. There really, really isn’t.

 

Apart from references to garbage pseudo-studies, Dunkle employs a range of standard anti-vaccine tropes, including “too many, too soon” nonsense and complaints about vaccine ingredients, in particular aluminum, which, contrary to anti-vaccine mythology, is safe. Indeed, Dunkle is not afraid of using toxins gambits, especially with regard to thimerosal and formaldehyde, a normal byproduct of human metabolism. Dunkle points out that thimerosal “is 49.6 percent mercury”, but being chemically illiterate (and/or dishonest), she fails to note some rather crucial distinctions.

 

Diagnosis: Unhinged conspiracy theorist and denialist, and regardless of her social standing and position: her nonsense and lunacy on vaccines demonstrates that she is unlikely to be trustworthy or worth listening to about anything whatsoever.

 

Hat-tip: David Gorski @ SciencebasedMedicine

#2789: Robert Charles Dumont

[yes, we’ve mentioned him before, but he deserves a separate entry]

 

In 2014, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation finally took action against DAN! doctor and general quack Anju Usman, director of True Health Medical Center in Naperville and owner of Pure Compounding Pharmacy, for (a long history of) subjecting autistic children to “unwarranted, dangerous therapies”. Usman was fined, ordered to take additional medical education classes, placed on probation and forced to have her work reviewed. Unfortunately, Usman also got to influence the decision on which doctor was to review her work, and the task was assigned to Robert C. Dumont, with the likely consequence that Illinois children will continue to suffer from dangerous quackery for years to come.

 

Dumont is indeed a pediatrician, but pediatrics in the US has long been plagued by quackery, and Dumont is also member of the Raby Institute for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern and an acupuncturist. In fact, Dumont offers an array of “integrative” approaches, including homeopathy, no less. One would conclude that Dumont would not be an ideal candidate for the position of supervising someone with a tendency to offer quackery, but Dumont has, nefariously, also been involved in multiple efforts to whitewash quackery; in 2015, for instance, he testified at an FDA hearing in Bethesda on the regulation of homeopathic remedies, and he has been caught shilling for Boiron, a leading manufacturer of homeopathic remedies and quackery, as an expert witness. At the FDA hearing, Dumont testified, falsely, that homeopathic remedies are “exceptionally versatile and efficacious for many medical problems” and that he has “prescribed homeopathic medicines in the hospital for premature infants”, as well as used it for “nausea, vomiting and losing weight” for a patient undergoing chemotherapy. A poster he wrote with Youngran Chung (apparently his wife), ‘Homeopathy, an Effective, Practical, and Safe Therapeutic Approach: Principles, Evidence and Examples of Practical Application’, similarly gives you an idea of his aptitude for research (and honesty): the poster does emphasize, a number of times, that “homeopathy is an extremely safe modality” (which, even though it’s water, is only partially correct) but doesn’t, despite the promise in the title, even try to indicate that it is effective for anything, since it so obviously isn’t.

 

Dumont is, in particular, using homeopathy for autism quackery – precisely what Usman above was sanctioned for – as demonstrated for instance by his presentation on “Use of Clinical Homeopathy in Autism Spectrum Disorder” at the International Conference of Clinical Homeopathy in Los Angeles.

 

Diagnosis: Utterly delusional and at least a potential danger to people around him. That he is allowed to offer advice to people with medical conditions, including children, is a travesty.

#2788: Gary Dull

Gary Dull is a fundie wingnut affiliated with the Faith and Freedom Institute and co-host of American Pastors Network founder Sam Rohrer’s Stand in the Gap podcast, a fundamentalist collection of rants featuring an assortment of dingbat conspiracy theorists. Dull, who has promised to rid America of its “satanic wickedness”, is predictably the kind of boring fundie SPAGer who thinks that God will withhold blessing and bring forth judgment if political decisions don’t go the way he (Dull) would like them to go, be it about abortion, marijuana legalization, people electing Muslims (or women) to state congress or what have you. Nor does God (that is, Dull) approve of Christian leaders who criticize Trump.

 

So, Dull is opposed to restrictions on religious indoctrination in public school, and to LGBT rights (the “philosophy of the ‘LBGT’ group comes right out of the pit of hell”). And as for marijuana legislation, Dull thinks that the Word of God makes a clear connection between drugs and the occult: recreational drugs can lead to opening your mind to wickedness and demonic activity.

 

In particular, however, Dull is opposed to women having political power (or any power, really); during the 2016 election campaigns, Dull pointed out that we shouldn’t elect the woman: “In God’s line of authority, it seems very clear in the scripture that a woman should not be in authority over men, which would limit a woman from being the president of the United States of America or even a queen of some other particular nation.” Women serving in positions of political leadership is a sign that a society is “spiritually rotten” and – of course – under the judgment of God.

 

Otherwise, Dull is heavily invested in the myth of Christian persecution in the US, a myth he subscribes to because he interprets any decision he disagrees with or event he dislikes as being really a matter of  “God’s truth and God’s law that is under attack.” He has also been a major proponent of Trump-finds-God fan fiction.

 

In 2020, Dull (and co-host Dave Kistler) asserted that God allowed Rep. Louie Gohmert to get COVID-19 in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. Given the unambiguous evidence that hydroxychloroquine is not effective, one is excused for wondering what kind of god Dull is really trying to worship.

 

Diagnosis: Mostly boring, though Dull arguably belong to the more insane fringe of the crazy wing of the already lunatic and dangerous religious right – he’s got nothing novel, but he’s got plenty of anger, hate and delusions.

#2787: Lee Duigon

 

Lee Duigon is the author of the Bell Mountain Series of novels, contributing editor for Our Faith for All of Life magazine, sometimes contributor to the BarbWire website, fanatic wingnut, affiliate of R.J. Rushdoony’s Chalcedon foundation, theocrat and conspiracy theorist.

 

An unconditional fan of Trump, Duigon was very happy that it was Trump and not Obama (“Barack Hussein Ebola, who looks black”, as Duigon calls him) who got to fill the vacant SCOTUS seat left by the death of Anthony Scalia: “one more Obama judge on the Supreme Court, and it would’ve been ‘All children under 16 are now over 16,’ ‘Our national language is now Arabic’,” because Duigon perceived Obama as someone he disagreed with on political issues and if you disagree with Duigon on some political issue you automatically support whatever else Duigon doesn’t like and you’re a Muslim and a pedophile. Of course, Duigon is also convinced that leftists “really are the servants of Satan. What you say and do can be explained in no other way” because to Duigon, explanations that appeal to facts and evidence are attempts to appeal to something Duigon won’t recognize as relevant. “Are Liberals Retarded?” asks Duigon and apparently answers in the negative: no, they’re just serving Satan. The TV show The Mick also left him without “doubt that the whole project of the Left, the secular humanist whoopee crowd, is satanic to the core.”

 

And to counter the influence of demons and Satan and general dangers posed by the left – “leftist schemes for Utopia inevitably involve lots of barbed wire, machine gun towers, re-education –they like to call it ‘sensitivity training’ – and piles of dead bodies” – we need to engage in spiritual warfare: “the time has come to take our country back. And, because there can be nothing worthwhile accomplished without it, to re-Christianize America.” Indeed, as Duigon sees it, “America needs an exorcism.” And the pushback is (possibly) working: Today’s liberals are unhappy because “Satan is unhappy”: “When the devil is angry and unhappy, his servants are angry and unhappy.” So there.

 

No fan of LGBT rights, Duigon has lamented that “I was born in a country inhabited by men and women. Now I live in one dominated by freaks.” America is currently under threat of “wicked officials in thrall to Big Sodomy” who will “force churches to perform same-sex ‘marriage’ exercises” and make sure “pastors and priests will be punished if they speak against it” (religious freedom and free speech will also be banned due to “insatiable and unappeasable” gay rights advocates). Indeed, people supporting LGBT rights “put our country in danger of God’s judgement – as when a few lawyers on the Supreme Court ‘legalize’ the same-sex parody of marriage, without benefit of any law being passed by the legislature, and the, er, president orders the White House lit up with ‘rainbow’ lights to celebrate this evil.” Here is Duigon’s response to the 2015 SCOTUS ruling legalizing same-sex marriage: the “antichrists” celebrating the court’s decision, which will destroy freedom, will go to Hell. And remember that “the militant ‘gays’” pushing their “gaydeology” (Duigon compares them to super-plants from outer space that eat people) are “only the street muscle for a ‘progressive’ project to beat down church, family, and anything else that competes with the secular, God-denying state;” The real enemy consists of “t]he teachers’ unions”, “the atheist militants, the abortion fans who chant ‘Hail, Satan,’ “ and “the statist schmucks who staff ‘human rights’.”

 

Duigon is also a hardcore young-earth creationist and has published creationist screeds e.g. for the Chalcedon foundation. As for the theory of evolution (“a false religion”), Duigon claims that “the more I study the matter, the less sense it makes”. We do not doubt that evolution doesn’t make sense to Duigon, but we do suspect him of lying when he suggests that he has tried to study it. He does claim that the theory of evolution “is the source of all the rot-runaway statism, institutionalized atheism, eugenics, 'gay pride' parades, 'transgender' restrooms, the destruction of 'inferior races, and all the rest. If it stinks, Darwinism is at the root of it."

 

And, oh: What do you think Lee Duigon thinks about vaccines? Lee Duigon thinks vaccines, at least Covid vaccines, are “experimental drugs” that can easily wind up “making you sterile, or killing you”. Because of course he does.

 

Diagnosis: At least he’s trustworthy in the sense that if Lee Duigon claims p, you have good reason to think not-p. Otherwise, he is dingbat insane, angry and hateful. Some people do read what he writes, though, without immediately recognizing it as laughable drivel.

#2786: Ralph Drollinger

Ralph Kim Drollinger is a wild-eyed fundie extremist, Christian nationalist, former professional basketball player, president of the organization Capitol Ministries (which aims to “evangelize elected officials and lead them toward maturity in Christ”) and leader of the White House Bible Study Group during Trump’s presidency. The WHBSG was an insane Taliban offshoot group that was sponsored by people like Mike Pence, Ben Carson and Betsy DeVos and which held weekly meetings with the Trump administration. Though Drollinger nominally accepts what he calls an “institutional” separation of Church and State, he believes that the Church should still “influence” the State, or in other words: Drollinger rejects the separation of church and state. It is, however, crucial that the church exerting influence on the state is the right type of church; Drollinger has denounced Catholicism as “one of the primary false religions of the world”; stated that the Social Gospel, a major strain of 20^th century American Christianity, is a “perversion” or “corruption” of the Bible and “not Christianity whatsoever”; claimed that Islam is “enemy territory, spiritually speaking”; and emphasized that God only hears the prayers of “righteous” Christians (indeed, he has explicitly said that prayers from Jewish people are “worthless and go unheard”). And it is, according to Drollinger, crucial for righteous Christians to work to ensure that people in power – be it government, Congress or the judiciary – are “righteous”; i.e. shares his (Drollinger’s) faith (elections are a “spiritual battle”), and that those in power have an obligation to hire only “righteous” employees, so as not to “compromise biblical absolutes in his policies or interactions with others.” Here is a commentary on one of his ‘guides’ to lawmakers.

 

He is also, like so many fundies, on record as anti-LGBTQ, anti-women's rights and anti-immigration. As for women, Drollinger is an advocate for the Separate Spheres ideology and is in particular opposed to women preachers: “There is a prohibition of female leadership in marriage, and female leadership in the church. And those are clear in Scripture… it doesn't mean, in an egalitarian sense, that a woman is of lesser importance”.

 

Gay people, on the other hand, are “illegitimate”; “Homosexuality and same-sex ceremonies are illegitimate in God’s eyes”; and “not only is homosexuality and same sex marriage voided by God in His Word, but biology as well castigates homosexuality and same sex marriage: The ultimate outcome is the discontinuation of the species since homosexuals cannot procreate. For sure one cannot be a homosexual and an evolutionist at the same time.” Drollinger, of course, is a creationist, and as such pathologically unable to distinguish a descriptive scientific theory of how things are from a normative moral theory of how we should act. In general, though, there really isn’t, as Drollinger sees it, any debate to be had over marriage equality, and no arguments are necessary: scripture “crushes the same-sex marriage debate” and pro-LGBTQ Christian leaders are “Satan’s pawns.” Elected officials should accordingly not debate marriage based on “personal happiness” [or reason or ethics, we presume, but reason and ethics don’t really ever figure anywhere in Drollinger’s mind] but on “theology.”

 

As for scientific issues other than biological ones, Drollinger is a staunch climate change denier, as anything else would be somewhat trickier to integrate with his political views – according to Drollinger, “God is a capitalist” and as such opposed to environmental regulations that have had the consequence that “the economic benefits God intends from private property ownership have been greatly diminished” (God is opposed to economic relief provisions, too). More importantly, it is unbiblical to “think that man can alter the Earth’s ecosystem – when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind” (yep, God both can and will protect us from the environmental consequences of our actions, just like He has consistently done in the past): Because the Bible promises that God would not again destroy the Earth in a great flood, says Drollinger (more local droughts, hurricanes, floods or forest fires are … well, it’s unclear), “we can all rest assured and wholly rely on God’s aforementioned promises pertaining to His ability and willingness to sustain our world’s ecosystem”. Moreover, “to allow fish to govern the construction of dams, endangered species to govern power plants, flies to govern hospitals, or kangaroo rats, homes, is to miss the clear proclamation of God in Genesis.” Drollinger was also influential in warning Scott Pruitt of the danger of the shift from Christianity to the “false religion of Radical Environmentalism.”

 

Indeed, according to Drollinger, “environmentalists” and other people with “depraved minds” are igniting "God’s wrath." So in March 2020, for instance, Drollinger linked the COVID-19 pandemic with God’s wrath over such groups, including, of course, those who have “a proclivity toward lesbianism and homosexuality” (so much for man’s inability to cause damage, we suppose). When that didn’t go over particularly well with the public, he backtracked; i.e. claimed that he was misinterpreted: when it comes to God, Drollinger imagined, there is a “panoply of wraths”, so although homosexuality causes one type of Godly wrath (wrath of abandonment), it’s a different type than that which gave rise to the coronavirus (sowing and reaping wrath). Drollinger’s theological stances seem eminently malleable (not surprising given that they are nothing more than depraved nonsense used to channel his own hate and anger), insofar as in the original post, he stated that “those individuals who are rebuked by God’s forsaking wrath are largely responsible for God’s consequential wrath on our nation” and those susceptible to “forsaking wrath” are explicitly gays and lesbians, who are “given over” by God to “degrading passions”, as well as environmentalists, since “clearly indicative of God’s forsaking wrath is when the abandoned serve the creature rather than the creator”.

 

And it’s not like it was the first time Drollinger linked gay people to God’s wrath; he has earlier proclaimed that “OUR NATION’S OBEDIENCE OR DISOBEDIENCE TO GOD’S LAWS IN TERMS OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE REPRESENTS A TIPPING POINT WITH ENORMOUS, ENORMOUS CONSEQUENCES”, although he was careful to add that he didn’t advocate executing gay men by stoning (if you feel that you need to point that out, you should probably take the hint).

 

But for being such a drooling madman, Drollinger’s influence is immense. Not only did the vice president and a number of member’s of Trump’s cabinet attend his weekly meetings to listen to his deranged theocratic rants, those cabinet members would also actively provide support for his organizations: for instance, in February 2018, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and several members of Congress appeared as featured speakers at a fundraising dinner for Capitol Ministries, and a slew of representatives and senators have endorsed or sponsored the organization or even actively helped it expand. His groups also have international branches and projects (often targeting LGBT rights) in e.g. (but not limited to) Romania, Ukraine, Nicaragua and Honduras.

 

Diagnosis: Raging, hateful fundie. Extremely influential, and extremely dangerous.

#2785: Rick Driver

Rick Driver is a wingnut conspiracy theorist and talk show host for the Anderson, South Carolina, talk station WAIM-AM’s Rick Driver Show. Yeah, Driver’s reach is probably rather limited, and there isn’t really much to distinguish him from a very large group of similar deranged wingnut conspiracy theorists, but here you go. So when several explosive devices sent to Democratic Party figures and people who had criticized then-President Donald Trump in 2018, Driver was quick to conclude that “these bombs” are “nothing more than false flag” and that “folks on the left are extremely desperate -- anything to disrupt the ship. Anything to get rid of the president. Anything” because that’s the conclusion that sat best with how he likes to view the world; it had nothing to do with facts or evidence or such parameters, of course, but Driver isn’t big on facts and evidence. He was similarly quick to dismiss Covid-19 when it first hit South Carolina in 2020: “It’s a hoax," said Driver, before trying to modify himself a little (“The hoax isn’t the virus itself – it’s real – but those people trying to build this thing up as something it isn’t is, I believe, the hoax”)

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, you know the kind. Relatively minor, but there is a lot of these conspiracy drones on American airwaves.

#2784: Sylvia Driskell

Sylvia Driskell is a Nebraska-based self-declared ambassador of “God, And His, Son Jesus Christ [sic]” who received some attention back in 2015 when she sued every gay person on Earth, asking a federal judge to rule on whether homosexuality is a sin. In Driskell v. Homosexuals (yes, that’s the name), Driskell served as her own lawyer, and although her seven-page petition (written entirely in cursive) – officially against “Homosexuals, Their Given Name Homosexuals Their Alis Gay [sic]” – failed to reference any relevant or irrelevant case laws, it liberally quoted the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary. The goal was to make the District Court in Omaha decide, once and for all, whether being gay is a sin: “Why are judges passing laws, so sinners can break religious, and moral laws,” stated the complaint, and “[w]ill all the judges of this Nation, judge God to be a lier [sic]”? Given her role as ambassador, Driskell saw it as her responsibility to take on the case,  and to “start standing up for the moral principles on which our great nation, our great states, and our great cities were founded on.” The District court promptly refused to take a stance on Driskell’s theological hypotheses and tossed the case.

 

“I never thought that I would see a day in which our great nation or our own great state of Nebraska would become so compliant to the complicity of some people[’s] lewd behavior,” explained Driskell in the complaint, before emphasizing “that homosexuality is a sin and that they the homosexuals know it is a sin to live a life of homosexuality. Why else would they have been hiding in the closet.” Why indeed. And although “homosexuals say that it’s not a sin to be homosexual, and they have the right to marry, to be parents,” children raised by these “liars, deceivers, and thieves” will necessarily “grow up to be one of the three, or all three.”

 

Diagnosis: A local clown, and the immediate response to her antics is of course hilarity. But it is also somewhat important not to forget how much hate, anger and fear are driving people like Driskell. And although Driskell is dumb and powerless, others with similar views might not be.