#2777: Paul Dorr

Paul Dorr is the director of the Iowa-based drooling fundie hate group Rescue the Perishing (Dorr calls it a “crisis center and pro-life, pro-family movement”), which fortunately seems to be a rather small affair. Dorr himself, however, managed to gain some national attention for his book-burning event in 2018, when he burned a number of LGBTQ-themed library books because the “shameful and wicked” literature should not be read to children. Dorr carried out his book-burning to protest the annual Orange City, Iowa, Pride weekend, and the event accompanied by reading from a blog post titled, “May God And The Homosexuals of OC Pride Please Forgive Us!” in which he blames feminism, Hollywood, basketball, money, and sex-ed for “destroying children.”

 

“I have checked out, from the Orange City Library, several of the books targeting 4- and 5-year olds, which the drag queens will likely be reading to children here in Orange City this evening,” explained Dorr: “These copies, owned by the city of Orange City, Iowa, will not be part of those they get to read, as I am going to do what the German church leaders should have done in 1933. I am now going to burn these copies.” Precisely what he intended to convey with his reference to 1933 is somewhat unclear, but he did at least managed convey (redundantly) that Paul Dorr’s mind is a festering piece of rot.

 

Currently (2024), his website is largely dominated by rabid anti-vaccine misinformation and wild-eyed conspiracy theories, with links to Sherri Tenpenny and America’s Frontline Doctors, though there is of course plenty of anti-gay rants as well for those who go looking.

 

Diagnosis: Dingbat moron. But he is angry, and quite possibly dangerous to his immediate surroundings.

#2776: Joel Dorfman

 

Anti-vaccine groups – usually identifiable by names including the phrases “vaccine choice” or “health freedom” – have become a political force to reckon with, and they exist everywhere in the US. Joel Dorfman, for instance, is chairman of the board of the antivaccine group Michigan for Vaccine Choice, and though he’s but one member of one of a large number of such groups, at least he’s been given the opportunity to spread antivaccine misinformation in local Michigan media outlets, such as when weighing in – and apparently being treated as some kind of authority – on a case where a local anti-vaccine mother, Rachel Bredow, wanted to defy custody-arrangements when the father wished to get their kid properly immunized: “If this child is injured as a result of being given eight immunizations, who do you think is going to take care of the child?” asked Dorfman.

 

Yes, Dorfman sees vaccine injuries everywhere, and is not afraid to use your familiar array of standard anti-vaxx tropes to support his (delusional) narrative, for instance by appealing to the “unavoidably unsafe” gambit while simultaneously claiming to be educated on the topic (a contradiction), and by recommending legislators (Dorfman has also testified before the Michigan State Legislature) to read the conspiracy theory book Vaccine Epidemic (edited by well-known and leading anti-vaccine advocates Mary Holland, Louise Kuo Habakus & Kim Mack Rosenberg). Dorfman is apparently a lawyer; he has no discernible medical training.

 

Diagnosis: Local village idiot (yeah, we realize that the name suggests as much) and conspiracy theorist, but one of a rather disconcerting number of such; they’re zealous and hard-working and tireless, and all theirs efforts, instead of being used to do something constructive, go into trying to make the world a slightly worse place to live. It’s a tragedy.

#2775: Daniel Dopps

Chiropractors receive a lot of flak, and it is consistently well deserved. And there is no shortage of dumb ideas to criticize. One such idea is the idea, formulated by Wichita-based chiropractor Daniel Dopps, CEO and President at Mensez Technologies, isthe “Mensez” adhesive “lipstick”, a “persohal hygiene product” intended to replace tampons and pads. The stick is “a natural patented compound of amino acids and oil in a lipstick applicator that is applied to the labia minora and causes them to cling together in a manner strong enough to retain menstrual fluid in the vestibule above the labia minora where the vaginal opening and urethra exit;” and the “compound is instantly washed away with urine”. Well, as opposed to Dopps, you may have some idea why such a product has not been developed before (like basic chemistry and risk of infections). Actually, Dopps has some ideas about that, too: “[Y]ou as a woman should have come up with a better solution than diapers and plugs, but you didn’t. Reason being women are focused on and distracted by your period 25% of the time, making them far less productive than they could be. Women tend to be far more creative than men, but their periods that [sic] stifle them and play with their heads.”

 

Part of the motivation for developing the product also seems to stem from his rejection of the difference between a urethra and a vagina – “we’re using the vagina like a bladder just like tampons do,” says Dopps. Though he received some criticism, Dopps dismissed his critics as being lesbians – though he also emphasized that he was in no way bigoted against the LGBT community: “My receptionist is lesbian”, said Dopps. So there.

 

Diagnosis: There’s been some years, and we’ve at least still to see Dopps’s product hit the stores. He’s probably still a chiropractor with weird ideas, though. Just stay away.

 

Hat-tip: Kavin Senapathy @ forbes

#2774: Byron Donalds

Byron Lowell Donalds is the U.S. representative for Florida’s 19th congressional district since 2021 (when he ran on being a “Trump supporting, gun owning, liberty loving, pro-life, politically incorrect Black man”), member of the Freedom Caucus, and a serious wingnut and conspiracy theorist. In January 2021, Donalds voted to deny certification of electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election, and he has repeatedly claimed that Biden is not the legitimate president of the United States. As a staunch ally of Moms for Liberty (his wife Erika Donalds is apparently a central figure in the movement), Donalds has also become something of a nonsensical centerpiece in wingnut bookbanning efforts.

 

Before going to Congress, Donalds was a member of the Florida House of Representatives (from 2016), where he quickly made a name for himself as a tireless champion of wrong. As a state legislator, Donalds was for instance responsible for a series of efforts to make it easier for creationists and climate change denialists to remove materials they don’t like from public school curricula. In 2017, he introduced bills HB989 and HB827, whose corresponding Senate Bill, 1644 (co-sponsored by e.g. Dennis Baxley), was approved by the Senate Education Committee before dying, both of which were carefully tailored to undermine science education. Like many wingnuts, Donalds is no fan of science, and no fan of schools teaching kids science, like climate change: “I don’t believe in man-made climate change”. So there.

 

Diagnosis: A rising star in conspiracy-minded wingnut circles, Donalds has become something of a star in the rightwing’a bookban and anti-education efforts. And he’s unfortunately unlikely to go away anytime soon.

#2773: Ben Domenech

Benjamin Domenech is a blogger, editor, publisher, and television commentator: he is co-founder and publisher of The Federalist and host of The Federalist Radio Hour, writes The Transom (a daily subscription newsletter), co-founded the RedState group blog and is a Fox News as a commentator in 2021. He was briefly (three days) a blogger for Washington Post as well in 2013, but lost the gig over numerous instances of plagiarism. (By contrast, he lost his relationship with The Washington Examiner and The Huffington Post due to corruption.)

 

The Federalist, after launching in 2013, was quickly recognized as “a leading disseminator of pro-Trump conspiracies and up-is-down, funhouse-mirror distortions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling and potential Trump involvement.” During Covid, they were a major disseminator of fake news, denialism and conspiracy theories about the pandemic, with many articles in these categories being written by Domenech himself. federalist co-founder Sean Davis, for instance, accused the Democrats of intentionally trying to “destroy the economy” as a “last-ditch 2020 play”), and Domenech published an absolutely demented piece, “How Medical 'Chickenpox Parties' Could Turn The Tide Of The Wuhan Virus” (penned by someone identified as “a physician in Oregon” – presumably Douglas Perednia), recommending that people hold “chickenpox”-style parties for the coronavirus to build herd immunity, leading to The Federalist being temporarily suspended from Twitter. The publication is also notoriously cagey about where it’s funding comes from.

 

Otherwise, Domenech promotes most of the kind of wingnut dreck you’d expect. He’s of course anti-abortion, and because he’s an intellectual midget, he likes to make the case easy for himself by, instead of engaging with reality, arguing from premises such as “Progressives hate babies because they’re crying, drooling, pooping refutations of everything woke leftists believe.”

 

Domenech is also a creationist. “I personally don’t have a problem with evolution being taught in public schools,” says Domenech, but “I occasionally have a problem with the way it is taught – as a final, solid, unquestioned truth, as opposed to a still-changing theoretical approach that many scientists think best explains the way things came to be […] An academic survey a couple of years ago [which?] found that nearly a third of hard scientists believed in theories other than the typical evolutionary construct – either something involving genetic mutation, or intelligent design, or something inspired by Stephen Jay Gould, or the like”. Given that Gould (and genetic mutation) is very much evolutionary biology mainstream, one can safely conclude that Domenech, as usual, doesn’t have the faintest clue what he is talking about. That doesn’t prevent him from engaging in dishonest and stupid reasoning, claiming falsely that “no less prominent an evolutionist than Stephen Jay Gould has lent weight to the theories of Michael Behe and his brethren” (he really, really hasn’t; Domenech just made that up.) and that “biological evolution in the macro remains a theory”. “I do take Genesis literally. And I believe the commonly taught theory of evolution is a total crock,” concludes Domenech.

 

Diagnosis: Apparently, Domenech is what passes for an intellectual in wingnut circles. Domenech is not an intellectual in any sense of the word, however, any more than any random QAnon conspiracy theorist on social media. But since the image somehow sticks, he’s managed to gain a not insignificant amount of influence in wingnut circles.

#2772: Baxter Dmitry (?)

The website NewsPunch (formerly The People’s Voice and Your News Wire has for a while been one of the most prolific and influential producers of fake news in the US and one of the main promulgators of QAnon-related conspiracy theories, in particular during that conspiracy theory complex’s early cycles. The website was founded by Sean Adl-Tabatabai, his husband, Sinclair Treadway, and his mother Carol, but many of its most popular stories are penned by one Baxter Dmitry.

 

Now, “Baxter Dmitry” is presumably a pseudonym, and at least the photograph that used to appear next to the author’s name on the website turned out to be a picture stolen from a random Latvian computer programmer. Whoever he is, however, Dmitry is the source of a rather dizzying array of conspiracy theories about virtually anything you could create conspiracy theories about, and his articles are enthusiastically picked up and shared by a wide array of typical conspiracy theory outlets (like the WND), confused and frightened grandparents, groypers, bots and MAGA fans. Indeed, Dmitry has a large number of followers e.g. on Twitter willing to share his articles and comment on them as if they had the faintest trace of a relationship to reality. A brief set of sample headlines:

 

-       “Bill Gates Vows To Pump mRNA Into Food Supply To ‘Force-Jab’ the Unvaccinated”, discussed here

-       “German government leaked document declares COVID-19 is ‘a global false alarm’ ”, discussed here

-       “Retired MI5 Agent Confesses On Deathbed: ‘I Killed Princess Diana’ ”

-       “Pope Francis: ‘Relationships With Jesus Are Dangerous And Harmful’”

-       “The 1918 Influenza Epidemic Was Caused By Vaccines”,

-       “[It] is nearly impossible to categorize post-vaccine deaths as vaccine-related” – which is really an accurate summary of a piece of misinformation from Robert F. Kennedy, jr.

-       “Father of Global Warming’ Scientist Finally Admits Theory Is Wrong”, a climate change denialist conspiracy theory article that simply invents quotes and attributes them to climate scientist James Hansen

-       “Cuba Claims Justin Trudeau Is Fidel Castro’s Son,” discussed here

-       “CDC Doctor, Who Claimed Flu Shot Caused Outbreak, Missing Feared Dead”, discussed here and quickly picked up by deranged lunatics like Erin Elizabeth

-       “Sweden Bans Mandatory Vaccinations Over 'Serious Heath [sic] Concerns' ”, another out-of-thin-air fabrication

 

Or among recent ones:

 

-       “EU Vows To Ban ‘Gendered Language’ In Everyday Speech”

-       “WEF Unveils ‘Flying Microchips’ That Can Detect ‘Thought Crimes’ and ‘Disable Your Brain’”

-       “Federal Troops, Armored Vehicles Moving En Masse to Texas As Biden Regime Prepares To ‘Clear Out’ National Guard”

-       “FDA Says School Children Must Be Indoctrinated With Pro-Vaxx Messaging To Ensure Compliance”

-       “Top Doctor Blows The Whistle, Admits Vaccinated People Are Developing Full Blown AIDS” (even the “top doctor” in question, antivaccine crank Peter McCullough, would be surprised by that attribution).

 

Even Snopes is only able to cover a fraction of Dmitry’s bullshit.

 

Dmitry was for instance instrumental in popularizing both pizzagate conspiracy theories (e.g. his “Pizzagate: BBC Cover Up Another Huge Pedophile Scandal”) and the core QAnon claim that leading librul elites are really a Satanic ring engaged in ritual sacrifice of children for the procurement of adrenochrome and that Trump is covertly leading a secret battle to bring them down (including the Frazzledrip conspiracy, e.g. in his “‘Horrific’ Hillary Clinton Snuff Film Circulating On Dark Web”).

 

Diagnosis: To what extent Dmitry himself believes the nonsense he spends most of his time inventing is unclear and unlikely (hence the question mark); spreading FUD is potentially a lucrative career, however, and he has certainly achieved a noticeable detrimental impact on civilization.

#2771: Russ Dizdar

 

Image for Dizdar's radio show.
The image seems to provide a
decently exhaustive visual
representation of Dizdar's thought
processes.

Russ Dizdar is a former police chaplain, incoherent fundie maniac and promoter of quaintly 1980s-style Satanic Panic nonsense. Through his websites, in particular Shatterthedarkness, Dizdar has made a bit of a name for himself in conspiratorial fringe circles that were doing QAnon-related conspiracy nonsense long before such theories went mainstream and that even today’s wild-eyed QAnon-adjacent wingnuts hesitate to enter.

 

Dizdar is very concerned about something he calls the  “Black Awakening”, which is the point at which the “satanic chosen ones … will be activated to unleash chaos and anarchy into the USA and other countries […] to cause collapse and pave the way for a ‘new world order’ and  the rise of the antichrist.” The chosen ones appear (Dizdar is not particularly coherent, so it’s hard to determine exactly who he is afraid of) to consist of (hypothetical) victims of ritual abuse, who have all received psychic powers such as remote viewing: “A long history of the placement of the demons and the training … for the drawing out the ‘powers in the blood’ of the chosen ones. They have done many rituals and received transferred down powers from others who were old and dying.” And there’s lots of them: “There are over 4 million diagnosed cases of MPD/SRA … and 4+million more who are still out there. Someone has orchestrated this. There is a vast underground at work. These satanic super soldiers as I call them are placed everywhere as sleepers waiting for the call. The secret power of lawlessness ... and the great 'rebellion'(chaos-anarchy-coo) spoken about in 2 Thessalonians is directly connected to this event.”

 

A central piece to what’s going on, is (possibly) Project Monarch: “Most tell me it was the carry over plan that began with the Nazis. They wanted an army of loyal super soldiers to help conquer the world. The monarch project is the OSS to CIA black underground project.” And yes – if you wondered – it has something to do with monarch butterflies: “Monarch butterflies are an insect that have migrated to every content of the earth, thus the plan was to place these monarch satanic super soldiers in every part of the world, before they unleash them for chaos, death and anarchy.”

 

As for the fact that Satanic ritual abuse is a myth, Dizdar has an easy response: Those who debunk stories of ritual abuse are involved with the CIA and NAMBLA, and perhaps even zeh government: Oh yes, the US government is apparently really just a branch of the Nazi regime, which took control over the US when Joseph Mengele and leading Nazis were, as Dizdar sees it, brought over to America after World War II (note that Dizdar is in line with the myths of a relatively substantial US-based cult here); the US military leaders “were unprepared and unable to discern the real demonic intent and the powers” (the powers really behind the Nazis and the current “agenda are EDB's (Extra Dimensional Beings). .. all of them in all of their forms are demonic”), and accordingly “the US were infiltrated with an occult ideology and embraced it as an idol of demonic technology for military superiority.We, the US have sold our soul to the devils plan --- the devils plan was to give the ‘secret’ ‘'superior’ military demonic/technology to Christless/ Godless military and political dupes only to grab control of them in the end for his own evil purpose.” The Nazis also control the Catholic church and the Mormon church, of course.

 

According entirely to himself, however, Dizdar has already done much to foil the nefarious plans of the government demons, and has for instance “helped” victims by hiding them “from covens and handlers, engaged the demonic in verbal battles, staked out ritual sites, confiscated ritual robes tools etc.”, which, if you think about it, is mildly disturbing information, at least insofar as what Dizdar imagines he has been doing has any relationship whatsoever with what he has actually been doing. Disturbing, too, is his claim that “[w]e were permitted to teach in the UAPD police academy and assist in cult crime field work”.

 

Dizdar has also written books, including “THE BLACK AWAKENING: Rise of the satanic super soldier”, “ONCE BLIND: but now I see” and possibly (his website is a bit confusing and the following might just be parts of garbled outbursts in incoherent rants rather than book titles) Book of Acts: Field Manual for the End of Days (“an intensive training manual with over 100 audio mp3s”) and the amazingly confusingly titled Becoming the Powerhouse God Intended You to Be: Dead or Alive?, which apparently deals with, among other things, the perennially seminal question “how do we know if we are ALIVE OR DEAD?”.

 

Paul Begley thinks that Dizdar is “the leading demonologist in the world”, and was mightily impressed with Dizdar’s disconnected rants concerning the 2018 Parkland shootings: Dizdar suggested a number of evil forces as being behind the shootings, including, in particular, government agents using “astral projection and psychic assassination” to gain control of the shooter and carry out the attack using his body. “Remote viewers can do this from the military side of things,” explained (or whatever you call it) Dizdar. “It’s a term among dark covert dark ops, off-the-grid ops kind of people, psychic warrior type people, they all talk about this ability to get out of body, maybe two or three of them at the same time, triangulate in the ether … They’re empowered, of course, demonically and they go out and they actually can get into the head of another individual.”

 

Diagnosis: Unusually incoherent, even compared to his usual associates. Dizdar seems to consistently mistake catastrophic breakdowns in his own chaotic and bizarre trains of thought for profound insights, and he experiences a lot of such breakdowns. Yet he does have audiences and admirers, even though what he really needs, one suspects, is someone to really talk to and perhaps to give him a hug.

#2770: Josh Disbrow et al.

It is hardly a surprise that something like Covid would bring an army of quacks, grifters and pseudoscientists out of the woodworks to try to sell you silly, costly and ineffective treatments for the virus. Some of them even got a boost (deliberately or inadvertently) by confused and bullshit-prone public authorities, like when then-president Trump suggested using internal light to treat COVID-19. Whether Trump knew it or not (he certainly didn’t care), that idea was already being pushed by a company called Aytu Bioscience, which had developed a device called Healight, a catheter with an LED emitting UV-A light. According to Aytu’s CEO Josh Disbrow (who owns the company with his brother Jarrett) and the company’s scientists Mark Pimentel, Ruchi Mathur, Gil Melmed, and Ali Rezaie, working with Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Healight “has the potential to significantly impact the high morbidity and mortality of coronavirus-infected patients and patients infected with other respiratory pathogens.” It doesn’t, a conclusion not affected by the fact that Aytu did have a glitzy promotional video advertising the product, Tweets of which were promptly but temporarily deleted by Twitter along with the company’s Twitter account, after they started getting pushed by a horde of Trump fans and bots eager and/or desperate to edit reality to make it look as if there were (laughable) support for the president’s (dumb) claim. Wingnuts like Breitbart promptly yelled “censorship”. So it goes.

 

Healight’s claims and the evidence for them are comprehensively assessed here. Now, the developers had, in fact, been working on the Healight device even before Covid, and in an abstract published in the United European Gastroenterology Journal in 2019, they claimed to have evidence that intracolonic UVA light exhibits significant in vitro bactericidal effects in an array of bacteria. Of course, that bactericidal effects doesn’t translate into antiviral effects was a detail quickly brushed over when Covid arrived to present its marketing opportunities, but an even more obvious obstacle elegantly brushed over is the rather important in vitro qualifier: Even if the device actually had impressive in vitro antiviral effects, how would that apply to, say, the type 1 and 2 pneumocytes in the alveoli of the lungs typically affected by Covid and which no device (regardless of whether it was developed for intracolonic application, like Healight, or not) could conceivably reach? Then again, it’s probably a good thing that the device couldn’t actually do what the developers suggested (but were careful not to outright assert) that it could: even if the treatment could actually be delivered, which it can’t, and were able to selectively target virally infected cells and not other cells, which it isn’t (so it would probably kill you if it worked as claimed), it would, if it could kill virally infected cells (which no evidence suggests it can), cause a wave of cell death – rather than killing infected cells over time, as your immune system does – that would severely increase the inflammatory response, something patients already severely affected by Covid might … want to avoid, for obvious reasons.

 

No, from the point of view of basic anatomy and medicine, the device makes no sense. But then, neither did hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, and lack of sense didn’t halt those products from gaining widespread popularity among those whose epitsemic processes are governed by treating Trump is right as axiomatic. Ivermectin, at least, has genuine uses for other kinds of livestock.

 

Now, Aytu did in fact ultimately conduct a small clinical study. The study did suggest that Healight, fortunately (and contrary to how Aytu tried to spin the study), didn’t do shit and was accordingly probably safe.

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, they did conduct a study they shouldn’t have bothered to conduct, and the product seems to have faded from view afterwards as a crank treatment for Covid. Disbrow et al.’s hyping, for commercial purposes, something that couldn’t work still qualifies them all for an entry here and may hopefully help you make safe decisions if you ever encounter their names in the future.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence; For Better Science

#2769: Tania Dilmani

Tania Dilmani is a California-based grifter and quack. Her website (“mommyhomeopathy”) promotes an impressive array of quackery, but the central component of it all is, of course, the quackiest one of them all: homeopathy. And since her medical advice is already completely and utterly untethered to anything resembling reality anyways, Dilmani is, of course, an anti-vaccine activist as well: Indeed, according to Dilmani, the fact that vaccines are safe, effective and necessary is a myth (so there), and instead of anything reality-based, she recommends “homeoprophylaxis for immune boosting” as a viable alternative to vaccines. Needless to say, her recommendation is bonkers and Tania Dilmani is lunatic to the extent that her nonsense becomes hard to distinguish from malice.

Dilmani isn’t quite as obscure as she ought to be, however, insofar as she received a boost from other anti-vaccine activists during the (fortunately successful) California fight to eliminate non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates around 2015. Dilmani even appeared at seminars with people like anti-vaccine MD Bob Sears, which should really serve to emphasize how little concern Sears has for facts, evidence and accountability, but which was, we suspect, also entirely audience appropriate.

 

Diagnosis: At this level of crazy nonsense, it’s malice. Tania Dilmani is evil.

#2768: Brenden Dilley

Brenden Dilley is a MAGA “life coach”, professional asshole (“I really have a deep appreciation for pettiness”) and rightwing broadcaster on YourVoice America (a popular stop for media personalities on the MAGA clown circuit, such as Roseanne Barr), Periscope, (occasionally) YouTube and Twitter (“a shitty, disgusting, pedo-filled fucking communist organization”, according to Dilley after having been repeatedly and persistently banned), whose fame rests primarily on his promotion of QAnon conspiracy theories. According to himself, he did initially doubt the authenticity of QAnon posts until an unspecified member of the Trump family at one point confirmed to Dilley that the QAnon conspiracy theory was legit. (Dilley subsequently went on to apologize to the Trump family.)

 

Dilley, however, has managed to become a rather seriously influential figure in American political life. He is the unofficial leader of a “troll army” that is currently attacking Trump’s enemies on social media, and he has gained direct access to the Trump campaign and even Trump himself. Dilley and his Dilley Meme Team were also behind the video So God Made Trump, with AI-genereated narration in the voice of the long-dead Paul Harvey, which Trump himself posted to his social media accounts.

 

Trump

Most of all, Dilley is an unconditional sycophant of Trump and all things Trump; according to Dilley: “Part of what makes President Trump special is that we finally have somebody we can build legend around and you need that in culture”. You see, Trump is “a legitimate, high IQ genius” and his performance as president is without historical peer: “This is prime Michael Jordan, this is prime Tom Brady, this is prime Joe Montana, this is prime [Wayne] Gretzky.” He has accordingly mocked the left for not grasping the “simple science” that Trump, ”the golden-haired Adonis that he is”, has “God-tier genetics”. Indeed, the only apparent flaw of Trump’s presidency, as Dilley sees it, is that Trump was not “nearly as authoritarian as we hoped he would be” while in office: Dilley explicitly wanted Trump to be a dictator and “wanted him to rule with an iron fist”, and is accordingly sad that Trump ostensibly “would not abuse his powers” but would remain “respectful of the rule of law”. So, as a lead-up to the 2020 election, Dilley demanded that as soon as Trump won, he should immediately invoke the Insurrection Act and round up members of the press and his political enemies for prosecution and execution: Trump supporters had better “start developing a stomach for death” (or, as Dilley put it, “testicular fortitude”) when Trump and his team finally manages get in position to be “firmly imposing the law of the land”, for death is “what it’s going to take”.

 

When Trump in fact lost the election, Dilley was of course quick to call “fraud”, e.g. by challenging anyone to disprove his easily disproven claim that 130,000 fraudulent ballots were brought in for Biden in the middle of the election night in Wisconsin, or flatly asserting, without anything remotely resembling sources to back it up, that “Joe Biden probably got 10 to 15 million fraudulent votes.” He also quickly declared that Trump “is not going anywhere” because his supporters “are more than prepared to do everything – and I mean fucking everything – to preserve our constitutional republic and to protect our president.” Indeed, Dilley remained confident for a long time afterwards that “Trump is going to win”, however: “You can scream ‘illegitimate’ all the way up until 2025, when Trump will probably get reelected again because he’s going to petition for a third term because you motherfuckers kept trying to rig the first two terms.” He would just wait for the hand of God to prove that heroes and legends still exist in America. Just in case, however, Dilley had even prior to the 2020 election been lifting weights and taking testosterone to prepare himself for having to fight off “Chinese super soldiers” if Joe Biden became president. We admit that Dilley’s response to his own prediction makes one somewhat curious about what Dilley imagined such encounters were going to look like.

 

The reason Trump lost – or come across as having lost – is, of course, that Trump, despite his qualities, has powerful enemies; the reason the “most of the powerful leaders in America and around the world” wanted and want to stop Trump from assuming the presidency again is “because he cracked down on their ability to fuck and traffick children from 2016-2020.” Others were too cowardly or treasonous to step forth: In 2020, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, for instance, became “officially a traitor to the United States of America” for certifying the state’s election with Biden as the winner.

 

Weighing in on the big discussion of potential Taylor Swift endorsements in 2024, Dilley warned Swift not to endorse Biden or else it will be necessary for MAGA to “punish that bitch”: “Right now, there’s been no commitment, so for now, we are essentially courting [Swift]. There are people that you are courting; once they make the wrong choice, you punish.”

 

Biden

As for Biden himself, well: who he? During Covid times, Dilley wondered whether Biden continued to wear a mask not to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but to make it easier to hide the fact that “it’s different people playing Joe Biden” (Dilley himself refrained from wearing a mask during Covid because he was actually hoping to give the virus to “your fat, disgusting, fucking gross liberal mother”; he also claimed that his refusal to wear a mask was a hill he would “die on”, which, had it happened, would probably not have had the rhetorical effect he was aiming for). In any case, the person playing Biden is being instructed, through a covert earpiece, on what to say and how to act by “that gay, lispy fuck” former Rep. Barney Frank. In 2020, Dilley vowed not to pay taxes or obey laws if Biden became president – “I’m not fucking living under an illegitimate presidency” – but it’s unclear to what extent he’s followed up on that.

 

Post-truth

As one of the most explicit champions of a post-truth political discourse, Dilley is at least explicit about spreading fake news, however: “I don’t give a fuck about being factual,” says Dilley but rather “make shit up all the time.” He can do so because his “objective is to destroy Democrats, OK? To destroy liberals, liberalism as an idea, Democrats, and anything that opposes President Trump. That’s my goal.” Brenden made that particular comment in connection with his unconditional praise for Trump’s baseless accusation that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had something to do with the 2001 death of a woman who worked in Scarborough’s congressional office; Dilley rather urged his listeners to start “investigating” whether Scarborough may have also been involved in the 1996 death of JonBenét Ramsey because why not? Given his audience’s cognitive situations, they’d certainly be able to come up with something to convince themselves. And then again, Dilley has anyways urged his listeners to harass reporters and politicians “all the time” anyways. It’s little wonder that the Trump campaign has warmed to this fellow.

 

Fans

In 2020, Donald Trump Jr. sent Dilley an autographed copy of his book along with a personal note thanking him for his “support to #MAGA.” Donald Trump Jr. isn’t Dilley’s only significant fan, however; after Dilley declared, in 2020, that he was just waiting for the “green light” from Trump to start gunning down protesters over the murder of George Floyd (or, really, anyone he disagrees with), Republican then-congressional candidate Buzz Patterson appeared on his livestream program to tell Dilley that he loved him like a brother. As for the protestors assertion, Dilley’s position was presumably also influenced by his assumption that the killing of Floyd and the resulting protests were deep state, false flag psy-op aimed at preventing Trump’s reelection. Other fans of Dilley include the aforementioned Roseanne Barr and Aubrey Huff.

 

There’s a decent Brenden Dilley resource here.

 

Diagnosis: It’s easy to believe that you can write him off as merely a laughable clown, but although Dilley is a laughable clown, he is, like many clowns, pretty scary: Dilley’s style and content is Trump’s, just with added anger, coherence and cursing, and his brand of post-truth rhetoric – silly as it may seem to anyone minimally reasonable – has established itself as the cultural identity of a rather larger amount of people than most civilized people would like to think. Dilley’s popularity  and influence is not at all surprising, and that’s the scary part.

#2767: Adrienna DiCioccio

Adrienna DiCioccio is a conspiracy theorist and repeat InfoWars guest with ties to the Proud Boys and Roger Stone, and is perhaps most famous for organizing – or attempting to organize – a 2019 symbolic one-day boycott of social media sites to protest these sites’ alleged censorship of conservatives; together with Laura Loomer, she has also organized protests at Twitter’s headquarters in its pre-Elon-Musk days, and she has organized wingnut “free speech” rallies in DC. The campaigns gained a modicum of traction in wingnut circles who may or may not have been aware (they probably were) of the kind of views DiCioccio had in mind as being censored conservative viewpoints.

 

Notably, DiCioccio is a prominent promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories, claiming that what she perceives as US ruling elites are really covert Satan-worshipping child traffickers and cannibals, as well as a Sandy Hook truther, claiming that Sandy Hook was a false flag and that the government staged the 2012 elementary school shooting as a means for pushing gun control. DiCioccio was among the sources Alex Jones infamously promoted in his push for Sandy Hook trutherism. DiCioccio is also responsible for promoting weird QAnon-backed fake news hoaxes (subsequently a Snopes mainstay) about Oprah having been arrested for supposedly being part of a child sex-trafficking ring.

 

As you’d have expected, DiCioccio was also present in DC in connection with the January 6, 2021 insurrection, but seems not to have faced any charges.

 

Diagnosis: An angry, paranoid, minor but well-connected cogwheel in the garbled nonsense chaos machinery of contemporary wingnuttery, DiCioccio is yet another victim of the redpill epidemic. And she has, like redpill victims do, utterly forsaken the cognitive standards of accuracy, evidence and facts in favor of the familiar, paranoid conspiracies all the way down scheme of reasoning.