#2807: Jenna Ellis

Jenna Lynn Ellis is a lawyer, dominionism-adjacent religious fundamentalist and Christian nationalist, member of Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign’s legal team, legal advisor for Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and as such a prominent promoter of 2020 election-related conspiracy theories. During the Trump presidency, Ellis presented herself as a “constitutional law attorney”, a characterization that her background does not support. She also falsely claimed to have a history of being a “professor of constitutional law”, presumably referring to her time as assistant professor at Colorado Christian University (rather than her time as director of the public policy division at the James Dobson Family Institute), which does not have a law school. Her background instead includes being educated at the fundamentalist Bible school Cedarville University, having held a position as deputy district attorney in Weld County, Colorado, from which she was fired after six months due to “mistakes” attributed to “deficiencies in her education and experience”, as well as fellowships at Liberty University’s Falkirk Center and being a special counsel to the Thomas More Law Center.

 

Before joining the Trump team, she also self-published a book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution: A Guide for Christians to Understand America’s Constitutional Crisis, where she argued that the US Constitution must only be interpreted according to the Bible (as she reads the Bible) and (e.g.) that Obergefell v. Hodges would lead to polygamy and pedophilia becoming accepted – Ellis describes homosexuals as “sinners” whose “conduct is vile and abominable”.

 

Trump’s Elite Strike Force Team

Ellis rose to national fame after being hired as a senior legal adviser for Trump and his 2020 re-election campaign in November 2019, becoming in effect Rudy Giuliani’s protégé and an obvious pick for Trump’s legal team to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results, what Ellis called the “elite strike force team” to overturn Biden’s victory.

 

As a member of the team, Ellis made numerous claims to the effect that Trump really won the election (the “election was stolen and President Trump won by a landslide”) based on no evidence or anything recognizable as a reason – indeed, at the November 2019 press conference, she explicitly declined to present evidence of fraud when asked to do so, responding instead that asking for evidence at the press conference was “fundamentally flawed”. Of course, the complete lack of evidence proved to be an obstacle when the cases were brought before the courts: the Pennsylvania case was dismissed with prejudice given its “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that were “unsupported by evidence”; Ellis and Giuliani reacted by claiming that the ruling in fact “helps” the Trump campaign “get expeditiously to the U.S. Supreme Court” though they simultaneously accused the judge, a Federalist Society member, of being “Obama-appointed”.

 

The lawsuit was later dismissed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, on the grounds of having provided neither “specific allegations” nor “proof” and because the “claims have no merit”; this time, Giuliani and Ellis promptly condemned the “activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania” (of the three judges, one was appointed by Trump and the two others by George W. Bush), and when they, some days later, appeared in front of the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee, they urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to fix what they claimed to be a “corrupted, irredeemably compromised election” by either arranging for a new “special election” or to “direct the manner of your electors” to ensure that the electors would support Trump rather than the candidate who in fact won the election. Ellis and Giuliani subsequently made similar (and similarly quickly dismissed) baseless and silly suggestions to Arizona lawmakers, including claiming that there were 500,000 votes “that were cast illegally” in Arizona (something Ellis later admitted was a complete fabrication); to Michigan’s House Oversight Committee; and to state lawmakers in Georgia.

 

When the Trump administration’s Attorney General William Barr stated that the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security had investigated fraud but found nothing, Ellis and Giuliani reacted by accusing Barr and the DoJ of, in effect, having misunderstood what ‘investigating fraud’ means: the DoJ apparently thought it meant finding out what actually transpired when it really means finding support for what Giuliani and Ellis wanted to believe had transpired.

 

Ellis was also responsible for drafting two memos (blatantly) falsely asserting that vice president Mike Pence could change the results (her grasp of constitutional law is tenuous). The first memo contained a detailed (and insane) plan to overturn the election results, and the second argued that certain provisions of the Electoral Count Act that restricted Pence’s authority to accept or reject selected electors were unconstitutional. As a guest on David Brody’s show, she even managed to maintain a straight face while claiming that such an act “wouldn’t be political” and would create a “clean outcome” for the election (Brody endorsed Ellis’s scheme, of course). In 2022, Ellis was subpoenaed to testify before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack (the memos would presumably figure prominently in that appearance), but pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

 

Post Strike Force Team

Despite being obviously and demonstrably wrong, Ellis continued to spread falsehoods about the 2020 election and calling for President Joe Biden to be impeached long afterwards, e.g. on her program Just the Truth and at various QAnon-themed rightwing rallies. She has also promoted conspiracy theories about e.g. the Mar-a-Lago raid. In 2022, she was hired by Doug Mastriano as a senior legal adviser for Mastriano’s 2022 campaign for governor of Pennsylvania, presumably to do the same thing she did for Trump if it became necessary.

 

In March 2023, Ellis was publicly censured by the chief disciplinary judge of the Colorado Supreme Court for recklessly making 10 public misrepresentations about the 2020 presidential election, including claims that Trump won the election and that the election was stolen from him, something Ellis admitted to. In August 2023, she was among the people indicted in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution for participating in a criminal enterprise to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and in April 2024, she was indicted in Arizona for attempts to overturn the 2020 election in the state. In October 2023, she pleaded guilty to one felony count of “knowingly, willfully and unlawfully” aiding and abetting false statements in writing during a Georgia legislative hearing in December 2020 (the blatant lies included claiming that the Georgia election had included illegal votes from over 10,000 dead people, 2,500+ felons, and 2,400+ unregistered people), and in May 2024 her Colorado law license was suspended for 3 years. (For what it’s worth, Christian nationalist Jarrin Jackson declared that by pleading guilty, Ellis was “living the feminist tragedy”, and blamed feminism – “this is how feminism lies to women” – for fooling her into thinking that she, as a woman, could build a successful career rather than a family.)

 

After the Club Q shooting in November 2022, Ellis complained that the shooting was being exploited to suggest that “Christians hate homosexual and transgender individuals and somehow that ‘hate’ led to the shooting”. Moreover, as Ellis saw it, there is “no evidence at all” that the victims were Christians, so as a consequence, the victims “are now reaping the consequences of having eternal damnation [...] Instead of just the tragedy of what happened to the body, we need to be talking about what happened to the soul and the fact that they are now in eternal separation from our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” She was adamant that she wasn’t hateful or judgmental towards the victims, however; it’s just that if you don’t share her views of things – especially on politics – you can’t be Christian, and then you deserve suffering; and since her belief that those who disagree with her deserve suffering is a genuine belief, it can’t be hateful. As for Israel and Palestine, Ellis was among the fundie wingnuts who heartily welcomed the violence as a sign of the End Times: “Biblical prophecy has been fulfilled, so that the rapture literally could happen at any moment,” said Ellis, adding that good Christians like herself “will return with [Jesus] on white horses.” Just take a moment to reflect on how much mindrot you have to entertain for something like that to fall out of your mouth.

 

It is worth pointing out, though, that by 2023, Ellis seemed to have returned to her pre-2016 views, arguing e.g. that she couldn’t support Trump “for elected office again” due to Trump’s “malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong ... And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling”. She remains a hateful conspiracy theorist, however: by 2024, Ellis was caught pushing Taylor Swift conspiracy theories on her show (which is hosted by the hate-group the American Family Association and which has featured a number of white nationalists and anti-semitic activists), suggesting, together with Auron MacIntyre and not entirely jokingly, that Swift might replace Biden on the 2024 Ticket – the Democrats are just “so completely just enamored with celebrity,” said Ellis, the former lawyer for a washed-up reality star and celebrity businessman turned president.

 

Diagnosis: Fundie conspiracy theorist – that’s all, and that’s apparently precisely the desired characteristic for the positions she’s been appointed to. 

#2806: Ann Eller

Ann Eller is a nurse, new age religious fundie and conspiracy theorist. Eller has, according to herself and as laid out in her book Dragon in the Sky: Prophecy from the Stars, had numerous encounters with “other-worldly beings” and views it as her mission to spread what is usually rather fluffy and insubstantial messages to humanity she has received during these encounters; her book has been kindly described as a “fruit salad of vague, warmed-over new age claptrap, peppered with rambling musings about dreams, Eastern mysticism, folk theology, encounters with celestial beings, and fringe urban mythology”.

 

In particular, Eller claims to have met with the Anunnaki, and a recurrent message from those is that humans have to change their ways if they are to have any hopes of surviving the Earth changes that will come when planet Nibiru approaches. Apparently, the Anunnaki has done this warning thing before: Last time Nibiru approached, they warned a guy called Noah so that he’d build an ark to survive the subsequent cataclysm. A major source of evidence for Eller is her dreams – “In a recent dream, I was shown the exact location of Planet X” (her dreams are, of course, IM’s from angels) – but she has apparently also, unlike anyone else, seen Nibiru with her own eyes. And of course, the fact that the government isn’t talking about this shows that there is a conspiracy afoot: instead of telling us what Eller perceives to be the truth, the government serves us nonsense about “man-made ‘global warming’ ” to hide what’s happening.

 

Coast to Coast AM has of course featured her work.

 

Diagnosis: Pretty obscure, and we frankly have no idea how we came by the name. Interviews and podcasts from her occasionally pop up at the fringes of the Internet, but we honestly have no idea whether her current rants align with her previous ones (in light of the 2012 disappointment) or whether she’s received the help and support she needs in the meantime (doubtful).

#2805: Linda Elkins

Anti-vaccine activists have long tried to argue, with no basis in fact, that unvaccinated children are healthier than children who has been vaccinated according to schedule. And since, according to them, no such study has been carried out by the establishemt (that claim is abundantly false; real studies just don’t yield the conclusions antivaxxers would have liked them to yield), they do their own, so that they can violate any methodological constraint and contort the data as they like. An infamous example is the hilariously inept 2016 Anthony Mawson study (co-authors Brian D. Ray, Azad R. Bhuiyan and Binu Jacob should also be noted as untrustworthy pseudoscientists if their names ever come up in other contexts), which was so incompetent, dishonest and bad that it was formally “unpublished”, after having been provisionally accepted, even by the bottom-feeding journal Frontiers in Public Health (which is published by Frontiers Media, which is on Beall’s list of predatory publishers and which has also published – before retracting – e.g. a study on chemtrails).

 

But how did that “study” get provisionally accepted by Frontiers in the first place? It turns out that Frontiers was using a too-literal interpretation of ‘peer-review’ for such a piece of shoddy pseudoscience and sent it to Linda Mullin Elkins. And Elkins is far from being a reputable scientific authority on anything but a chiropractor at Life University, a non-accredited pseudo-educational business billing itself as a “Holistic Health University”; Life University offers studies “within the fields of Chiropractic, Functional Kinesiology, Vitalistic Nutrition, Positive Psychology, Functional Neurology and Positive Business” . Indeed, Elkins is not only a doctor of chiropractic (DC), but “DACFP, DGSS, FGCSS, FICPA, CACFP”, and there is little that signals dingbat pseudoscience more immediately than altmed alphabet soups; even more worrisomely, Elkins has apparently focused on pediatric chiropractic care.

 

Diagnosis: No, we haven’t determined what Linda Elkins’s personal views on vaccines may be, but regardless of that, she’s i) a woo-practitioner affiliated with a quack institution, and ii) partially responsible for promulgating antivaccine conspiracy theories, and that’s enough for us.

#2804: Fouad ElBayly

This is some old bullshit, but we feel compelled to mention him in case he should crawl out of the woodwork again in the future: Fouad ElBayly is the former president of the Islamic Center in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a position from which he was forced to step down after he issued a fatwa, a death sentence, against activist and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2007: “She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith,” said ElBayly, and if you have “defamed the faith” by leaving Islam or not agreeing with ElBayly on theological issues, the sentence is death: “If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.” The context for the fatwa was that Ali was scheduled to speak at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown. ElBayly’s and Islamic Center of Johnstown founder Mahmood Qazi’s attempts to pressure the university to cancel Ali’s appearance failed miserably, however.

 

The incident received renewed attention in 2015, when the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Bureau of Prisons contracted ElBayly to provide “leadership and guidance” to Muslim inmates at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. And although the Islamic Center in Johnstown officially had distanced themselves from his 2007 antics, it turned out that ElBayly was – of course – still on their payroll in 2015.

 

In 2016, ElBayly was also behind a petition in Somerset County challenging the results of the presidential and U.S. Senate races. The petition, which was quickly quashed, asked for “a forensic analysis of the software and media inside the (voting) machines” based on ElBayly disliking the results and no evidence whatsoever but non-specific rumors of hacking and cyberattacks – basically the same sort of nonsense that would define the Stop the Steal conspiracy theories and antics four years later from the other camp.

 

Diagnosis: A repugnant piece of garbage. His influence is limited, but he has also been given opportunities to use that limited influence to sow garbage, and he does seem to have some followers.

#2803: David Eisenberg

Truly one of the grand old men in the efforts to mainstream quackery, few individuals have done more than David Eisenberg to undermine public health services’ foundation in evidence and accountability. Eisenberg’s power comes partially from his credentials: He has been the Director of the Osher Institute at Harvard Medical School and the Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies, and Bernard Osher Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, positions that have certainly helped him sustain the illusion of being someone to trust on medical issues: he’s served as medical advisor to (among other things) to the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Public Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federation of State Medical Boards with regard to complementary and alternative medicine research, education and policy, and been consultant to TV series and participated in a large number of high-profile events (like chairing the Scientific Review Committee for the International Research Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health). In 2003, he was also appointed to the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) committee to identify scientific and policy issues in “complementary and alternative medicine” (“CAM”) research, regulation, training, credentialing and “integration with conventional medicine” – which could, on the face of it, sound like a good thing, were the committee not crammed with quacks and hucksters of various kinds. As a representative for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health at the Mass. Special Commission to Study Complementary and Alternative Health Practitioners, he and Michael Cohen recommended that the Commonwealth license “naturopathic physicians” as health care providers to give them an official stamp of approval and legitimacy through legislative alchemy (Eisenberg conveniently neglected to disclose that he had accepted funds from the group).

 

Eisenberg’s annual CME conference at Harvard was designed to allow quack advocates to promote whatever they do, including spinal manipulation and acupuncture, without facing critics, so that they could bolster their CVs with entries that might, on the face of it, sound impressive and build trust. Indeed, Eisenberg must be credited with being largely responsible for Harvard Medical School’s descent into pseudoscience (here, here, here, here and here) as illustrated e.g. by the Harvard Complementary and Integrative Medicine Course he directed and which according to (more reason-oriented) participants “was more like a political rally or a religious revival than a scientific conference”. Here is Eisenberg waxing lyrical about chiropractic, inadvertently giving almost perfect descriptions and illustrations of how quackery works in the process – such as praising chiropractors for “never failing to find a problem” and thereby validating the concerns of their patients while being eminently billable.

 

Eisenberg has also written a large number of articles on complementary and integrative medical therapies. His 1993 article on “Unconventional Medicine in the United States”, for instance, has for a long time been widely cited since ‘quack treatments are very popular’ is a commonly used defense of the legitimacy of quackery among those who promote ‘alternative’ techniques – and even for that study, Eisenberg’s research design was abhorrently shoddy: for instance, to reach the conclusion that “[o]ne in three respondents (34%) reported using at least one unconventional therapy in the past year”, he and his coauthors defined ‘unconventional therapies’ as “medical intervention not taught widely at U.S. medical schools or generally available at U.S. hospitals”, thus including self-help groups and commercial relaxation and/or weight-loss programs. Later surveys conducted and promoted by Eisenberg similarly inflate (in a manner very popular by alternative medicine proponents) the numbers by rebranding all sorts of standard, medically justified methods as ‘alternative’. And whether the alternative therapies included are effective or even plausible is of less concern to Eisenberg; although he is careful to avoid making significant positive claims, his list of techniques that “warrant further investigation” and funding includes homeopathy (including “homeopathy as distinct from placebo”), distant healing and intercessory prayer. What matters to Eisenberg and requires a response from clinicians, is that “[t]he market for complementary and integrative medicine is vast and shows no sign of diminishing” – yes, the market; not medical needs.

 

Here is a discussion of an article by Eisenberg and Ted Kaptchuk on “Establishing an Integrative Medicine Program Within an Academic Health Center: Essential Considerations”. It is … revealing: there is much about how to develop an optimal product delivery model; the question of whether the product works, however, are at best an afterthought. Here is a discussion of an article by Eisenberg with naturopaths Patricia Herman and Beth L. Poindexter on the alleged “cost-effectiveness” of CAM treatments that completely misses the point by strenuously avoiding the awkward point that the fact that the CAM therapies under discussion are not effective matters to discussions of how ‘cost-effective’ they are.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, Eisenberg is all about how to solve practical obstacles to market and deliver alternative medicine, in an effective manner, to as many people as possible. And he’s admittedly good at it. What he seems clinically unable to recognize, however, is the importance of the rather basic question: does it work? We really don’t think he means harm; he just genuinely doesn’t recognize that there might be a gap between believing that something works and whether it actually works that ought to be bridged by evidence.

#2802: David Eisen

David Eisen is executive director of something called the Quest Center and board-certified in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Eisen is among a significant number of alternative medicine practitioners who have tried to coopt the opioid crisis to market their services; as Eisen puts it, doctors should stop thinking of opioids as a first-line defense against pain and rather recognize that “there should be an array of things for people to choose from, whether it be chiropractic care, or naturopathic care, or acupuncture, nutrition, massage.” The false dichotomy involved is striking – limiting opioid use is no reason to promote bullshit – but it has a disconcerting tendency to go unnoticed by media outlets.

Indeed, Eisen even served on the Oregon Chronic Pain Task Force, a group tasked with coming up with measures to combat the opioid crisis, which resulted e.g. in a proposal to force people who truly suffer to cut opioids in favor of bullshit that does not help by limiting their health plan coverage so that it didn’t cover stuff that would actually help! And of course: the goal was also to get the health plans to cover the quackery Eisen and his colleagues are offering. In addition to Eisen, the task force included acupuncturists Ben Marx, affiliated with the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, and Laura Ocker, former president of the Oregon Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.

 

Diagnosis: Not a loud and incoherent quack; indeed, we suspect that David Eisen comes across as eminently reasonable if you meet him in person. Which is presumably precisely why he’s managed to get himself into a position to deal some serious harm to people who are really suffering.

#2801: James Edwards

The Political Cesspool is a Tennessee-based wingnut, neo-Confederate, Christian nationalist and white supremacist (“pro-white”) talkshow that has been polluting airwaves since 2004 (or at least used to do so; it’s been a bit on-and-off and we can’t be bothered to try to tune in). Its sponsors include the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and the Holocaust denialist group the Institute for Historical Review. According to the SPLC, the nexus and founder of the cesspool, James Edwards, has over the years probably done more than anyone else in the US to bring neo-Nazi ideology and Holocaust Denialism to wider audiences.

 

The show describes itself as “pro-White” and “against political centralization”, and promises to give you the “other side of the news” (i.e. the false one). Among its guiding principles, you’ll find commitment e.g. to the following:

 

-       “The United States government should be independent of any international organization of governments”.

-       “America would not be as prosperous, ruggedly individualistic, and a land of opportunity if the founding stock were not Europeans”.

-       “Since family is the foundation of any strong society, we are against feminism, abortion, and primitivism.”

-       “We wish to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races.” [According to Edwards, “interracial sex is white genocide”.]

-       “Secession is a right of all people and individuals. It was successful in 1776 and this show honors those who tried to make it successful in 1865.”

-       “We are against homosexuality, vulgarity, loveless sex, and masochism.”

 

The show’s many guests have included more or less a who’s who on the conspiracy theory and white supremacist wingnut circuit, including Jerome Corsi, Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist, Michael Peroutka, Sonny Landham, Jared Taylor (multiple times), British National Party leader Nick Griffin, David Duke, Richard Spencer, Thomas Naylor, Holocaust denier Mark Weber and Pat Buchanan. Edwards has also interviewed Donald Trump jr. for Sam Bushman’s Liberty News Radio (LNR), which syndicates the Political Cesspool.

 

Though Edwards has, at least in recent years, deliberately tried to avoid using racial slurs and inflammatory language – letting his guests do that part – he has asserted that he is “firmly of the belief that race relations were better during Jim Crow, and even better in the antebellum south, than they are now.” Also according to Edwards, white children in the US should seek out those who share “the same values and traditions and heroes”, that “forced integration” is a “march toward totalitarianism” and that “I think Martin Luther King really represents about the lowest common denominator of an American that you could get”; also “crime and violence follow African-Americans wherever they go”. Indeed, the situation is urgent: “whites are in for the fight of their lives. America is becoming balkanized. We are being robbed of having a future in the very nation our ancestors carved from the wilderness.” Part of the problem, as Edwards sees it, is the fact that liberals and liberalism “don’t respect the authority of scripture,” and he has traced liberalism’s ostensible contempt for the Bible back to the “infamous” 1954 desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Part of the problem is also policies such as no-fault divorce, which “is as much of a liberal initiative as the Civil Rights Movement and radical feminism.”

 

Himself a former unsuccessful candidate for the Tennessee House of Representatives and volunteer for Pat Buchanan’s 2000 presidential campaign, Edwards was also involved in the creation of the American Party, which advocates white nationalism, in 2010. More recently, Edwards has, predictably, thrown his support in for Donald Trump, and the Trump campaign has responded by giving him full press credentials at a Tennessee Trump rally and generally helping to mainstream his show. During the 2016 campaign cycle, Edwards denounced Hillary Clinton’s campaign because women can’t even be “the ruler of the house under God’s law” (moreoever Clinton is undoubtedly lesbian); he also criticized policies that allowed women to vote. On the other hand, he credited Trump with empowering the “pro-White” movement and called Trump’s presidency an “awakening happening within the spirit of our people” that was beyond his “wildest dreams” when he started his radio program.

 

But his hatred extends not only to Black people; Edwards is also an ardent promoter of anti-semitism: “A lot of their [Jewish people’s] motivation is that they hate Christianity. They hate what we call the WASP establishment […] and they’re using pornography as a subversive tool against us. Jews are by and large dominant in the porn industry. […] You know, connect the dots and look at the names of people controlling our media, and you find out what the common denominator is. […] These Zionist Jews are more interested in subverting the dominant culture, which would be the European culture here in America”.

 

Edwards is also the author of the 2010 book Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals use the ‘R’ Word to Push the Obama Agenda.

 

In addition to Edwards, the show’s co-hosts have included people like

 

-       Keith Alexander, a 2014 and 2018 candidate for the position of Shelby County Assessor.

-       Winston Smith

-       Eddie “Bombardier” Miller, a former Oath Keepers member currently running Blood River Radio, a white genocide and holocaust denialist radioshow where people like Canadian Holocaust denier Monika Schaefer are co-hosts.

-       Austin Farley, the show’s co-founder

 

Diagnosis: Over the years – at least until 2016 – Edwards has probably done more than anyone else in the US to bring neo-Nazi ideology and Holocaust Denialism to wider audiences. And any diagnosis beyond that should be superfluous.

#2800: Myron Ebell

“Nobody has done more damage to efforts to address the climate crisis before it’s too late than Ebell. He has devoted his career to mortgaging the planet for future generations through his paid promotion of denial, delay and dissembling”

-       Michael Mann

 

If anyone can be called “leader” of the climate change denialist movement in the US today, it might be Myron Ebell. Ebell is former Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and (until 2024) chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group devoted to what they perceive as “dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis”. What Ebell is not, is a scientist, and he has no background in science. And although he of course claims to advocate “for sensible energy policies that benefit everyone. Instead of policies that simply reacts [sic] to alarmism,” Ebell has tirelessly used his positions and organization to promote climate change denialism. In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

 

Ebell rose to prominence as a climate change denialist in the 1990s, after making a name for himself as a staunch critic of what he saw as Newt Gingrich’s radical environmentalism. In 1998, he and a group of PR experts and wingnut think-tank representatives (such as David Rothbard and Steve Milloy)  produced a “Global Climate Science Communications” plan aimed to convince “a majority of the American public” and policymakers that “significant uncertainties exist in climate science” – yes, the plan was explicitly to manufacture uncertainty – and that the science was inaccurate and should be ignored. Though CEI was funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the Dow Chemical Company and the Murray Energy Corporation coal mining group, Ebell has reassured everyone that “We’re not beholden to our donors”. Ebell was, however, instrumental in getting then-president George W. Bush to drop any pledge to curb emisions, withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, and to push out people at the EPA who were willing to actually use facts as an important element in their decision making (some more details about Ebell and the CEI’s involvement with the Bush administration here).

 

For the last two decades, Ebell has been a favorite go-to person for media outlets seeking to achieve a false balance between scientific consensus and layperson Ebell’s scientific denialism, a position Ebell (and CEI colleagues like Marlo Lewis, Iain Murray or Christopher Horner, author of the wingnut conspiracy theory piece of disinformation The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming) has used e.g. to dismiss UK’s then-Chief Scientist David King (a real scientist) as “an alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change.” Ebell has also criticized climate scientist James Hansen's by claiming that “James Hansen was not trained as a climate scientist. He was trained as an astronomer. He’s a physicist” and climate scientist and Arctic expert Robert Corell as “not a climate scientist” and “not an Arctic expert”. As for his own complete lack of scientific training, Ebell maintins that “people other than scientists [should] be allowed to participate” because “that [is] what a representative democracy is” (we can’t help but wonder why Ebell put ‘representative’ in there, even though that’s hardly the most glaring problem with his reasoning).

 

Ebell and the CEI have affirmed their opinion that global warming is a hoax (so much for “uncertainties”), that the data predicting climate change are false, and that the scientific consensus is “phony”, and they have weighed in on most significant events and findings with predictable denialist talking points and conspiracy theories, such as when a Climatic Research Unit computer server at the University of East Anglia was hacked and thousands of emails leaked in 2009: quick to attempt to muddy the waters, Ebell claimed – without any basis in reality – that the hacked emails “make it clear that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an organized conspiracy dedicated to tricking the world into believing that global warming is a crisis that requires a drastic response.” Ebell also falsely thinks (or at least: claims) that “the rate of warming according to the data is much slower than the models used by the IPCC,” which is not supported by anything, though remember that Ebell’s goal is not to get it right but to convince you that the science is unclear and can be ignored – “if he deserves credit for anything – I would call it a black mark – it would be taking the tobacco playbook and applying it to climate change,” said Jeremy Symons, the assistant vice president for climate political affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, of Myron Ebell. Ebell is at least abundantly clear that science, knowledge, evidence and research should be ignored when coming to conclusions about facts.

 

In 2006, CEI did a TV commercial about carbon dioxide with the slogan “They call it pollution; we call it life.” Ebell, meanwhile wrote a Forbes article called “Love Global Warming”, pointing out that “More people die from blizzards and cold spells than from heat waves.”

 

And of course he is the underdog here: Ebell has compared his efforts to fight science with funding from the oil industry and politicians as a “David versus Goliath struggle” against “corrupt environmentalism and big government”; the “environmental movement is not an objective, well-intentioned movement that cares about saving the planet” but a ploy instigated by Marxist and the radical left to ensure “lower material standards of living, more government control, and more power for the technocratic elite.”

 

In 2024, Ebell retired from CEI, citing (a.o.) alleged side effects from COVID-19 vaccines. Yes, if you’re career has been devoted to science denialism and conspiracy theories in one area, why not go for ideologically motivated denialism and conspiracy theories everywhere? Current CEI president CEI President Kent Lassman at least said he was “tremendously grateful” for Ebell’s work: “As a result, we enjoy an enviable position as a leader on crucial issues to the future of America and the economy.”

 

Ebell was also a signatory to a 2021 letter, authored by Cleta Mitchell, urging Senate Republicans to “protect the republic” by contesting electors from battleground states won by Joe Biden in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

 

There is a decent Myron Ebell portrait here.

 

Diagnosis: According to the Sierra Club, Myron Ebell is “One of the single greatest threats our planet has ever faced”. He is, without doubt, one of the most influential climate change denialists in the US, and one of the least principled ones when it comes to willingness to subvert facts to serve ideology. We have no doubt, however, that one of the first victims of Ebell’s disinformation campaigns was himself – the distinction between spineless fraud and true believer is messy here.

#2799: Richard Eaton (?)

AlphaBioCentrix is a Nevada-based “biotech” company that bills itself as providing “Software for the Human Body” (if you think that sounds interesting, I have a bridge to sell you), and which sells various pseudoscientific nonsense such as “Quantum Energy Bracelets” and “Health Pendants”. They’re also behind the “Body Vibes” stickers sold and promoted by Gwyneth Paltrow’s insane pseudoscience and bullshit company Goop. The stickers were ostensibly supposed to “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies,” and if you wonder what on Earth that could possibly mean, Goop is there to supply you with a string of nonsense technobabble augmented with pseudo-religious New Age fog: “Human bodies operate at an ideal energetic frequency, but everyday stresses and anxiety can throw off our internal balance, depleting our energy reserves and weakening our immune systems,” said the promotional material, and the stickers “come pre-programmed to an ideal frequency, allowing them to target imbalances”. They also claimed, at some point, that the stickers were made using “NASA space suit material”, but that’s a meaningful and falsifiable claim, so they quickly had to remove it to avoid trouble with consumer protection laws.

 

The stickers featured at $120 for a 24-pack, and were ostensibly worth it given their alleged ability to assuage anxiety and vague and unspecific pains, based on something called “Bio Energy Synthesis Technology.” Apparently AlphaBioCentrix’s founder Richard Eaton developed the technology after getting “engineers” to divulge to him the secrets THEY don’t want you to know about. “Without going into a long explanation about the research and development of this technology,” says Eaton (because, of course, neither the explanation nor the research exists), “it comes down to this; I found a way to tap into the human body’s bio-frequency, which the body is receptive to outside energy signatures.” He did not.

 

As for the aforementioned “health pendants”, they ostensibly contain an “energy chip” that is “programmed with specific subharmonic frequencies that assist in [list of vague terms like “environmental”, “mood swings” and “promotes healing”]. […] Programming the energy chips is a unique process that utilizes our patented Bio Energy Synthesis Technology; an infusion process, which when functional will hold bio frequencies to the substrate material. When the health pendant is worn around the neck, the energy from the energy chip taps into your chakras [oh, yeah]. Balancing between the chakras promotes health and a sense of wellbeing. ─ Long known by the ancient healers, healing is a three-way arrangement between, body, mind and spirit. Today’s science has shown the human body has an ‘electrical frequency’ and that much about a person’s health can be determined by it.” No, today’s science has not shown that. Note too how e.g. the “blue chip” (they’ve got several of them in different colors) is supposed to do “diabetic”. It doesn’t specify what it will do for diabetis. Thus AlphaBioCentrix plans to avoid legal trouble if you ever deluded yourself into thinking it could have any actual health benefit.

 

You can read more about their “Digestive Solution™ Energy Card” that will supposedly “boost your ‘Body’s Energy Signature’” and the “Gravity Balance” chips that will “encourage proper cell reproduction while sleeping” here.

 

Diagnosis: Usually, it seems to us, people who have been pushing what they know is fraudulent pseudoscience will gradually come to believe their own claims. We cannot for the life of us think that Richard Eaton does; surely there’s a limit to how much bullshit even Eaton’s brain is able to process.

 

Hat-tip: Gizmodo, Oracknows