#2838: Mark Finchem

Mark William Finchem is a Christian nationalist conspiracy theorist, thoroughly disturbed fascism-adjacent wingnut, member of the Arizona House of Representatives representing District 11 from 2015 to 2023, and an Arizona State Senator from 2024 (yes, he was elected). Finchem is a member of the militia group the Oath Keepers, and the Arizona coordinator for the Coalition of Western States, an organization founded by Matt Shea that opposes the activities of the Bureau of Land Management and that supported the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. He is not, however, a “legislative fellow in residence” at UA’s James E. Rogers College of Law, despite his own claims to the contrary.

 

House antics

As a member of the state House, Finchem quickly gained fame for promoting extreme wingnut and/or idiotic ideas – indeed, Arizona Republican state senator Paul Boyer described Finchem as “one of the dumbest” members of the Arizona House of Representatives, and there are plenty to choose from. Already at the beginning of his first term, Finchem would try to convince other lawmakers that Isis and other terrorist groups were pouring over the border with Mexico to invade the US, backing up his claims with fake news and various maps of mysterious origins, and one of the first measures he sponsored would reduce state taxes on gold coins on the basis that gold coins were “legal tender”. In 2016, Finchem introduced legislation that would prohibit Arizona from implementing presidential executive orders, directives issued by federal agencies, and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, and in 2019 he introduced a bill that would implement a code for ethics for teachers that was largely copy-pasted from a text published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also sponsored, in 2019, a bill that would seek to transfer management of federal lands in Arizona to the state government.

 

Stop the steal involvement

Finchem was heavily involved in the stop-the-steal conspiracy movement in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and was a participant at a November meeting with Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to outline strategies for contesting the election results. Finchem repeatedly claimed, without evidence of course (but together with a number of other Arizona legislators including Wendy Rogers, David Cook, Walt Blackman, Kelly Townsend, Sonny Borrelli and David Livingston), that the election was “stolen” from Trump and that Mike Pence had orchestrated a coup attempt against Trump. He was also among the first election denialists to promote the “independent state legislature theory”, i.e. calling for the Arizona legislature to appoint presidential electors of its own choosing to avoid having to follow the results of a democratic election. (He was, notably, paid by the Trump campaign to do so).

 

In the following months, Finchem shared numerous conspiracy theories about and repeatedly debunked “reports” of alleged voter fraud in Arizona, and even found ways to monetize his conspiracy theories (beyond the obvious ones) with his #ProveIt campaign and T-shirts – “I am starting the #ProveIt campaign right now. I am sick and tired of the liberal officials and media gaslighting us with fictitious attacks about the election,” said Finchem. When Cyber Ninja’s purported “audit” of the Arizona Election failed to come up with evidence of fraud despite trying really hard, Finchem was nevertheless quick to claim victory and conclude that the election should be decertified. Even as late as 2022, he introduced a resolution to the state legislature to “reclaim” Arizona’s electors based on his false claim that the results in three Arizona counties were “irredeemably compromised”. He has also advocated for banning mail-in voting.

 

Finchem was present in D.C. on January 6, 2021, to claim (again without evidence, of course) that “this election was a fraud”. He tweeted numerous photographs of protestors massed on the steps of the Capitol building – despite claiming never to have come within 500 yards of it – and even tried to justify the storming as “what happens when […] Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud”. He nonetheless claimed afterwards that leftists had instigated the violence, and in response to a FBI briefing bothering to point out the obvious fact that antifa groups were not involved in the attack on the Capitol, Finchem said that he did not “trust a word that comes out of the FBI’s mouth”.

 

During his 2024 Senate campaign, Finchem modified his strategy slightly from complaining about “election fraud” to using the expression “election tampering” on the grounds that “we’ve got to prove fraud. This is about election tampering”, and Finchem is the kind of guy who views requests for evidence for the shit that falls out of his mouth to be at best a nuisance.

 

2022 Secretary of State Campaign

Though he keeps getting reelected to the Arizona House of Representatives, Finchem notably failed in his 2022 bid for the position of Secretary of State, despite receiving the Trump’s endorsement and despite significant donations to his campaign from his fellow Oath Keepers. His actual campaign, however – one of several campaigns across the US that sought to put election deniers and conspiracy theorists in positions that would give them influence over future elections – consisted largely of claiming to be combatting the ”Soros machine” (i.e. windmills) and accusing his opponents of being backed by George Soros (“Soros funded opponent”); in particular, the media is supposed to be Soros-funded across the board, unless it is controlled by the CIA (not mutually exclusive options for Finchem, since Soros presumably controls the CIA and everyone who disagrees with him is ultimately really Satan anyways as well as a “Marxist” billionaire instrument of Marxist international bankers). He also claimed that criticism of him, e.g. from Jewish organizations, was proof of a Soros conspiracy.

 

Finchem also received some attention for his endorsement of openly anti-semitic Oklahoma State Senate candidate Jarrin Jackson, as well as for the endorsements he himself received from “Constitutional sheriff” Richard Mack and Andrew Torba, the antisemitic founder of the white nationalist platform Gab, which Finchem welcomed and even bragged about.

 

Insofar as he had promised not to concede if he lost the election beforehand, Finchem also refused to concede when he in fact lost the election, citing – predictably – fraud. Indeed, already in April 2022, Finchem and Kari Lake brought a suit against state officials seeking to ban electronic voting machines from being used in his 2022 election. The lawsuit was of course dismissed, insofar as Lake and Finchem “articulated only conjectural allegations of potential injuries”, and the courts also sanctioned their lawyers (including Alan Dershowitz) for making “false, misleading, and unsupported” claims, asserting that the court does not tolerate litigants “furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process”. Finchem and Lake promptly appealed in order to lose in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and get thrown out by the Supreme Court.

 

Finchem did file a lawsuit in December 2022 to have the election “nullified and redone”, which was dismissed with prejudice since it (among other things) did “not allege that any of the votes cast were actually illegal” but consisted mostly of repetitions of vague complaints about voting machines. In March 2023, the courts also sanctioned Finchem and his lawyer to pay the legal fees of his opponent’s campaign since the lawsuit was “groundless and not brought in good faith.” Finchem reacted by calling for the judge to be “removed from the bench for her abuse of judicial authority” on the grounds, apparently, that finding against him in a court case automatically counts as abuse of judicial authority. He also blamed Ukraine, because whatever.

 

General conspiracy theorist

At bottom, Mark Finchem is ultimately just a paranoid and confused (and therefore angry) conspiracy theorist of the kind that back in the days used to just troll comment sections on various news articles from their basements – the kind who rants to and bothers relatives and makes family members worried about their grasp of reality (Finchem is estranged from much of his family because he is a crazy and angry asshole) – but who has recently, to the stupefaction of anyone remotely reasonable, managed to more or less take control over the world.

 

And Finchem has promoted a range of conspiracy theories. Already in 2013, Finchem asserted that then-president Obama was seeking to establish a “totalitarian dictatorship”, and he maintained a “Treason Watch List” with photos of prominent Democrats on his Pinterest account. He also posted about stockpiling ammunition since it could allegedly come in handy against people he imagined were out to get him. Particularly relevant, perhaps, is his promotion of variants of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. And in 2017, Finchem tested his 2020-allegations by baselessly describing the Unite the Right rally as a “deep state psyop” carried out by Democrats.

 

And of course Finchem pushed Covid-related conspiracy theories. For years, his social media posts were to a large extent devoted to a barrage of dangerous misinformation and deranged conspiracy theories surrounding the virus and efforts to halt the pandemic; indeed, even as late as August 2021, Finchem suggested that Covid didn’t even exist at all, citing social media posts from conspiracy theory sites that falsely claimed that Alberta, Canada, had lifted its Covid protocols – a claim that would certainly come as a surprise to residents of Alberta (or visitors, such as yours truly in December 2021) – because “they can’t produce an isolated sample of SARS-CoV-2 to prove covid exists to back their mandates”. And his conspiracy mongering naturally extended to the vaccine; Finchem, based on things he had read on fake news sites and social media sites and against all reason and evidence, deemed the vaccine a “crime against humanity” and implied that it was a “bio-weapon”. He also linked to (and emphasized that he was JAQing off) a website promoting the laughably idiotic (but nevertheless thoroughly debunked) claim that “the life expectancy of all who have taken the [vaccine] is only 2 years,” apparently because the vaccine ostensibly alters human blood cells in some not-entirely-coherently-explained manner. Later, in July 2021, he stated that he refuses to take the vaccine because he falsely believes it is a “potentially deadly gene therapy.” We doubt that Finchem knows enough about anything to be able to reliably distinguish gene therapies from a lasso made of bananas, but no: the Covid vaccine is not a gene therapy. And of course he promoted – contrary to all evidence – the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “beneficial medication”.

 

Most of all, however, Finchem has been a major proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories and has shared numerous debunked QAnon-themed memes (e.g. this one) and fake news stories. And QAnon conspiracies were a central theme of his 2022 secretary of state campaign, where Finchem e.g. attended the “Patriot Double Down” QAnon conference in Las Vegas promoting debunked conspiracy theoriesand antisemittism, with himself repeating standard QAnon nonsense along the lines of “We’ve got a serious problem in this nation. There’s a lot of people involved in a pedophile network in the distribution of children … And, unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of elected officials that are involved in that.” He also attended a Newport Beach fundraiser, promoted by Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, where conspiracy theorist Nicole Nogrady ranted about fetal tissue in the food supply and the September 11 attacks being a federal government plot. In August 2022, he also attended a Wisconsin gathering of the Church Militant movement.

 

Rather illustrative of his mindset is his October 2022 conspiracy theory that Google’s search algorithm was biased against his campaign because its website did not come up in searches on his name. The reason, of course, was that his campaign had added a noindex tag to the metatag of the sites HTML code, but Finchem i) is a conspiracy theorist to the core and ii) does not understand how anything works, so the outcome was completely predictable.

 

As for his over-the-top paranoia, a good example could be his response to a fundraiser for Josh Hawley being cancelled by Loews Hotels in 2021: Finchem promptly compared it to the Holocaust, claiming that “[t]his is what Hitler and Stalin did. What's next Camps? Ovens?” It is not remotely what Hitler and Stalin did. Similarly, social media deplatforming is exactly like Nazi Germany, Pol Pot, and Mao’s cultural revolution rolled into one, with Finchem adding that “the next step is eliminating people”. We would normally implore his voters to think very seriously about what Finchem thinks natural nexts steps are and what that suggests about how he himself would inclined to run things, but we fear, of course, that they already have.

 

Diagnosis: Certainly one of the stupidest and craziest people in the Arizona state legislature, and the competition is fierce. And yes, Mark Finchem is a threat to democracy, civilization and public health and welfare. Yet what is truly scary here are the people who keep getting him elected – one can, not without plausibility, try to explain away a Trump win with concerns about the economy and/or a general vibe associated with him among low-information voters, but none of those factors could realistically play any relevant role in an explanation of Mark Finchem’s continued successes.

#2837: Bruce Fife

More quackery! The technique known as oil pulling is part of traditional Ayurvedic method of oral care. The basic idea is that swishing sesame oil (or similar) in the mouth for 10–20 minutes prevents cavities and promotes gum health; evidence clearly shows that it is quite ineffective even for that purpose, but it has nevertheless, as quackery – especially quackery supported by appeals to ancient wisdom – often does, recently evolved into some sort of all-purpose detox nonsense promoted by a range of questionable practitioners, quack websites and social media posts.

 

Naturopath Bruce Fife, for instance, thinks the technique should be tried if “you suffer from asthma, diabetes, arthritis, migraine headaches, or any chronic illness”. There is, of course, no evidence that the technique has any effect against any of those conditions, nor any plausible reason to think that it should. For promoters of oil pulling, however, the vague idea of benefit is usually centered around a vague idea of never-specified toxins that are assumed (unsupported by any minimally reliable measurement of any toxin level) to be detoxed by some never-specified mechanism. For Fife, it is basically a religious creed, with oil-pulling taking on the role of some sort of purification ritual; according to Fife “All disease starts in the mouth!”, which means that Fife is a follower of the absolutely deranged New Age religion and thoroughly dangerous cult of Weston Price. Indeed, Fife is apparently deeply affiliated with the Weston A. Price Foundation, an anti-vaccine organization whose house journal Wise Traditions has received some attention not only for its dental woo but also for being a major pusher of the rather inane conspiracy theory that Covid-19 is not caused by a virus at all but by 5G network radiation and that Covid vaccines are a plot to murder you. 

 

Fife – who is ostensibly also a “certified nutritionist”, whatever that means – has also authored a series of books touting the alleged beneficial effects of coconut oil and coconut water, such as The Coconut Oil Miracle, Coconut Cures, Coconut Oil: The Worlds Most Powerful Superfood, The Coconut Ketogenic Diet, Virgin Coconut Oil: Nature’s Miracle Medicine and The Healing Miracle of Coconut Oil (one senses a certain strain of repetition), including touting coconut oil as a treatment for, well, more or less everything and anything, but in particular, perhaps, Alzheimer (“Stop Alzheimer’s Now!” claims one of the titles). There is no evidence whatsoever for those claims, of course, but Fife was never one to be overly concerned about evidence (or the lack thereof). He has also written conspiracy-oriented books e.g. on the alleged dangers of artificial sweeteners.

 

Among the more disconcerting works flowing from the deranged mind of Bruce Fife is Stop Autism Now! A Parent’s Guide to Preventing and Reversing Autism Spectrum Disorders. Naturopaths weighing in on autism is consistently bad news, and Fife is, unsurprisingly, no exception. After falsely claiming that autism is the result of gut disorders, Fife recommends a ketogenic diet with (but of course) coconut oil as a treatment, which is as useless as you’d imagine. But Fife also has … conspiracy theories. A large part of the book is devoted to an attempt to exonerate disgraced fraud Andrew Wakefield, and yes: Fife of course supports the thoroughly refuted piece of misinformation that vaccines are somehow causally connected to autism.

 

Diagnosis: This is Flat Earth-adjacent bullshit. Now, we’re sure Fife has managed to find a commercially relatively successful niche as supplier for adherents of various imagination-based health fads (in particular detox nonsense), but behind what is probably relatively innocuous nonsense (coconut oil), there is a dark chaos of deranged, pseudo-religious cult pseudoscience and conspiratorial paranoia. Dangerous.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased Medicine

#2836: David Field

Jade Erick was a woman who died from naturopathic quackery administered by naturopath Kim Kelly – specifically intravenous curcumin – in 2017. Now, naturopaths like to cosplay as responsible medical providers (they most surely are not), even going so far as trying to obtain (and sometimes getting) official recognition through legislative alchemy, but they struggle to maintain the mask when some pressure is put on them.

 

Kelly was licensed in California. David Field is (or at least was at that point) the Chair of the Naturopathic Medicine Committee for the State of California Department of Consumer Affairs, and it would thus be part of Field’s tasks to lead a committee to investigate Erick’s death. Field, of course, handled that task exactly how you would expect a dishonest quack and spin doctor to handle it: by trying to shift attention away from the fact that Erick’s death was a direct cause of a commonly recognized quack treatment among naturopaths to trying to find as much dirt as possible on real medicine to spin a marketable narrative that would take focus away from the quackery he recommends and avoid taking any responsibility whatosever: “I am in great need of statistics, with references/citations if possible, regarding iatrogenic harm from MDs/DOs, DCs, LAcs, etc. As SOON as POSSIBLE please! ANY and ALL types!” he promptly asked his naturopathic colleagues in a closed naturopathic discussion group. (He was quickly directed to the efforts of Gary Null and Carolyn Dean, of course.) It’s an obvious ploy: people die during conventional treatments, too, and if you disregard the efficacy of those treatments (curcumin is bullshit), you can probably create a compelling defense of naturopathic treatments. For context: Field was at that point scheduled to testify in front of the California legislature because law licensing naturopaths in that state would need to be renewed, and a case like Erick would definitely look bad (as would this report).

 

Otherwise, Field’s practice offers a plethora of quack modalities; his specialties include “acupuncture, botanical medicine, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, hormone replacement therapy, IV therapy, nutrition counseling, physical medicine/manipulation, supplement counseling”.

 

Diagnosis: He probably does recognize that patients dying as a direct result of your advice looks bad. We’ll grant him that. If he would also take seriously the thought that “perhaps it would be good to check, in an unbiased and accuracy-constrained way, whether my advice is actually good”, things would be fine. He won’t, though.

#2835: Kellie Fiedorek

Kellie Fiedorek is senior counsel and government affairs director for the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and a general dime-a-dozen fundie wingnut who has served on numerous panels and boards of groups defending the usual array of wingnut causes. Fiedorek is the kind of person who claims that opposing LGBT equality is doing just what Rosa Parks did and that the “agenda to expand sexual liberty and redefine marriage” puts religious liberty in “great peril”, primarily because “religious liberty” for Fiedorek means fundies having the right to violate the Establishment clause and to discriminate against those who disagree with them. Given that definition, Fiedorek predictably tries to argue that religious people are the ones being marginalized in the US today, and she is a major proponent of the Christian persecution in the US myth.

Diagnosis: More or less indistinguishable from a large number of similar wingnuts, so she doesn’t need a very substantial entry. But like those others, Fiedorek is zealous. She also wields some authority, and the ADF is a major player in current efforts to combat liberty, decency and civilization.

#2834: Joshua Feuerstein

Joshua Feuerstein is a fundie wingnut vlogger who first rose to attention for his attempts to argue for creationism (and disproving atheism), notably through various versions of design arguments; for instance, according to Feuerstein, since his 2001 Toyota Minivan is “perfectly designed” and not the product of evolution, biological organisms must be created as well. We leave it to readers to identify potential weaknesses in the argument.

 

Feuerstein is probably most familiar for his general wingnuttery, however, and in particular for his calls to violence in support of bigotry (“in order to be peaceful, you must first be capable of extreme violence. Otherwise, you’re just weak” is one of his nuggets of alleged wisdom; just think about it). As an anti-gay activist, Feuerstein for instance responded to the legalization of same-sex marriage by taking out a gun and asserting thatChristians should consider using their “Second Amendment right” to stop the government from forcing them to recognize marriage equality – as Feuerstein erroneously sees it, marriage equality is “not about equal rights” but “about reconstitutionalizing a term so that now it opens up the door for the left and the liberals to come after Christianity”. It really isn’t. (He also seems to interpret the Second Amendment as an unalienable right to shoot people whose politics he doesn’t fancy.) Similarly, he has called for his followers to “punish Planned Parenthood” and “make abortion doctors fear for their life”, called for civil war, and of course, in response to Trump’s 2024 conviction, rhetorically asked “at what point do we take up arms?”

 

Weighing in on transgender issues, Feuerstein has a piece of advice to concerned parents: Feuerstein doesn’t know “one child that was spanked … that turned out transgender.”

 

And he has predictably recruited himself as a foot soldier in the imaginary War on Christmas. His tactical operations are … counfounding (though in order to make sense of them it helps to to remember that Feuerstein is deeply paranoid and views anything or anyone that fails to actively support his political and/or religious views as a persecution of him).

 

On January 5, 2001, Feuerstein spoke at a  D.C. rally in support of Trump’s false claims of election fraud; Feuestein admitted that then-Vice President Pence wouldn’t refuse to certify the election “like the little coward, the little swamp monster, the little slimeball he is”, and accused Pence and other Republican politicians for allowing the alleged “steal” to happen, concluding that “It is time for war! And let us stop the steal!” Some people evidently took his conspiratorial nonsense seriously, though Feuerstein didn’t ultimately get in trouble for anything, it seems.

 

During Covid, Feuerstein was a significant spreader of nonsense, mostly along the lines of “you don’t have to wear the mask! You got Jesus! You don’t need the vaccine! You got Jesus!” since relying on faith alone has always worked so well in the past; he subsequently had to cancel events when he came down with Covid himself. As for vaccines, however, Feuerstein asserted that men of God with “big orange pumpkins hanging between their legs” must resist vaccine mandates instead of being “sissies” who “would have bent over and taken it from Hitler right up the backside.”

 

In the 2024 election, Feuerstein ran for the Texas House of Representatives in the 4th district, stating that he was personally recruited by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to run. If you elected him, he offered to “lead an armed civilian militia to the border.” (He failed in the primaries.)

 

Diagnosis: As mentioned, Feuerstein is deeply paranoid and views anything or anyone that fails to actively support his political and/or religious views as actively persecuting him. Unfortunately, a lot of people share his fear, anger, ignorance and paranoia; we wouldn’t really have been surprised if he had won his district in the 2024 election.

#2833: Sean Feucht

Sean Feucht is a singer, songwriter, former worship leader at Bethel Church (which promotes a distinctly weird mix of uncompromising fundamentalism and New Age nonsense and which e.g. made headlines in 2019 for a failed attempt to resurrect a dead six-year-old girl), founder of the Let Us Worship movement, affiliate and promoter of the New Apostolic Reformation (he is a self-declared mentee of Lou Engle), uncompromising dominionist, Christian nationalist, protégé of Josh Hawley, conspiracy theorist and important figure in the MAGA movement. In particular, Feucht has been pivotal in the efforts to integrate MAGA-style wingnuttery and Trump sycophancy with dominionist fundamentalism. At one point (2020), Feucht tried to run for Congress himself in California’s third congressional district, on a campaign largely focused on “the slaughter of the unborn and the newborn”, but fortunately failed – apparently the loss left him shocked and “seething with rage and anger and hurt” until God spoke to him and told him to get ready for new challenges.

 

COVID Protests

Those challenges would apparently soon materialize, and Feucht’s rise to fame in the wingnut circus really took off with his “Let us worship“ worship concerts in 2020, which protested and demonstratively violated lockdowns and COVID-related regulations and which drew crowds of thousands to protest various restrictions on people gathering (it is worth noting that Feucht and the Bethel Church simultaneously accepted the Paycheck Protection Program and other loans offered by the federal government to keep businesses alive during the pandemic). The concerts were promptly expanded to form a sort of response to Black Lives Matters protests – the groups who came for the Covid-lockdown protests apparently didn’t mind – targeting cities where such protests were being held; Feucht called his concert series “a new Jesus movement”. (In fairness, it should be noted that Feucht had earlier arranged a worship concert at the site of the murder of George Floyd where he referred to Floyd’s murder as an “injustice”). Donald Trump himself signed one of Feucht’s guitars prior to a “Let Us Worship” even at the National Mall in DC, which was apparently attended by some 35,000 people. The tour was sponsored by Feucht’s own Bethel Church, whose leader Bill Johnson is on record as a hardcore anti-vaccine activist who refers to the COVID-19 vaccine as the “mark of the beast”.

 

The concert series was the centerpiece of the ‘documentary’ Superspreader (“[d]uring the COVID-19 lockdowns, an evangelical Christian singer stands up for religious liberties by holding mass outdoor worship concert”), an insane conspiracy flick trying to argue that measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 “were part of a communist plan to take over the country”. The movie is notorious also for how it tries to portray Feucht as a victim – despite making millions off his tours – e.g. by including amateur footage of violence completely unconnected to Feucht or his tour; and when Feucht innocently says that he did not expect the “level of demonic activity” he confronted at an event Portland, which did involve violence, he conveniently neglects to mention that the violence was carried out primarily by his own paramilitary bodyguard. The movie was produced by Michael Mauldin and his company Mauldin Media – Michael being the husband of Meredith Mauldin, a.k.a. Meredith McKoy, a B-movie actress and Christian singer who performed with Feucht at his “Let Us Worship” events.

 

Source: Don't remember

The self-portrayal as a victim is of course, and as it is for most fundies, part and parcel of his identity: Sean Feucht is persecuted, as demonstrated by the fact that Congress sometimes passes legislation he disagrees with. Legislation protecting the rights of LGBTQ people for instance, is persecution of him now and will lead to even worse persecution of him and Christians like himself in the future, insofar as they will have to live with legislation they disagree with and cannot force people who disagree with them (him) to act the way they (he) want them to act. Of course, he has also claimed that Christians are on the verge of being imprisoned for their beliefs, citing as his primary evidence various dreams he has (or claims to have) had.

 

Other Antics

After graduating from Oral Roberts University, Feucht founded a number of organizations, including, in 2010, Light a Candle, an ‘international outreach movement’ supposedly doing missionary work around the globe while charging volunteers thousands of dollars in fees to participate; and Hold the Line, a movement intended “to inform, educate, and inspire” young people to become politically active and oppose “the progressive agenda being forced upon America” (as he puts it, Christians must “step out and confront the demonic schemes being pushed through the schools, the media and the government. We can confront the devil and the Left”). Currently, his main operation is Sean Feucht Ministries, Inc., a nonprofit tax-exempt cash cow). In 2019, Feucht was part of the group of fundies visiting then-President Trump for a faith briefing at the White House with the goal of praying Trump out of troubles related to the first impeachment attempt in 2019: “We just laid our hands on him and prayed for him. It was like a real intense, hardcore prayer”, Feucht reported.

 

In April 2022, Feucht called for the “walls of perversion to come down in Jesus’s name” at a protest outside of “demonic” Disney’s California corporate offices. And Feucht sees the devil in most things he doesn’t fancy. For instance, Feucht unsurprisingly thinks Biden is advancing a satanic agenda; with Biden, “[t]he enemy is launching an all out attack on truth, attacking the Bible, and God’s sacred design for the family, sexuality and gender” and the Biden administration is, as political opponents of wingnuts always do, “carrying some of the most anti-Christ agenda and philosophy that maybe we have seen in the history of America” (here is, apparently, more evidence). And as with fundies in general, it is hard to figure out precisely why it matters or is a bad thing, for as Feucht sees it, “we are living in the last days”: “These are the end times … we’re living in the midst of it.”

 

During the 2022 congressional elections, Feucht performed at campaign rallies in support of Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.

 

In early 2023, Feucht launched his ‘Kingdom to the Capitol’ tour, co-sponsored by Turning Point USA, which would focus on swing states to educate people e.g. about how the LGBTQ movement is driven by demonic forces (“schemes of the devil in the political realm”); a similar theme characterized his contributions to Clay Clark and Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour. Before his events in the Pacific Northwest, Feucht had conducted “a 3-day prayer and fasting movement in preparation” because the Pacific Northwest because “is #1 for witchcraft and demonic activity”. Particularly notable among those Northwest events in his Kingdom series was his appearance in Spokane with Matt Shea.

 

Despite (or, unfortunately, because of) his fundie lunacy, Feucht is extremely well-connected, and numerous members of Congress consider themselves fans and/or friends. Indeed, Feucht has even got his own Capitol Hill townhouse, “Camp Elah”, set up for meeting with strategists and lawmakers to help his efforts to “take back territory” and, with God’s help, elevate “men and women of faith” into positions of political power; ‘Christian’ and ‘men and women of faith’ for Feucht is of course synonymous with ‘those who agree with me on politics’ – and to make that clear, Feucht points out that “the fact that there is even such a thing as ‘Evangelicals for Harris’ that pastors/influencers join shows you just how apostate much of the American church has become” (Feucht elsewhere characterizes Harris as “A RADICAL BABY KILLING MANIAC!” – and both she and Walz are backed by demonic forces) and he has described the fact that not all Christian leaders are outspoken MAGA activists like him a “leadership crisis”.

 

That said, Feucht has complained that he is being unfairly “labeled by libs as a chRiStIAn nAtIoNaList.” Of course, the dastardly liberals probably label him that way partly because Sean Feucht has in fact proudly declared himself to be a Christian nationalist.

 

Miscellaneous

Here are Feucht’s views on the Gaza situation: (“this a prophetic hour” ostensibly connected to the End Times). Recently, his Let Us Worship events have therefore morphed into “United for Israel” marches targeting universities where there have been recent student protests to profess the idea that the conflict is a harbinger of the End Times predicted in the Bible.

 

He has also expressed some artistic differences with Taylor Swift, having at one point claimed that when families have followed his recommendation to stop listening to Taylor Swift, their daughters were no longer angry all the time and stopped having nightmares. Or shorter Sean Feucht: Anyone and anything he doesn’t fancy is Satan (Swift, in particular, is apparently “the demon god Molech”).

 

There is a decent Sean Feucht resource here.

 

Diagnosis: Though explicitly a Christian nationalist, explicitly a dominionist, and quite obviously insane, Sean Feucht has become something of a central figure on the religious right, and in particular when it comes to efforts to integrate fundie rightwing views with MAGA-style conspiracy theories. But despite having become immensely influential and despite milking millions and millions off his audiences, Feucht has no problem viewing himself as a poor victim of religious persecution on the grounds that there are still people who disagree with him and even dare to criticize his views. So it goes. One of the most dangerous people in the world.

#2832: Jorge Fernandez

To be fair, we don’t have an extensive overview of the background or career of Jorge Fernandez, or where he is currently located, but a decade or so ago, Fernandez, a young-earth creationist, was a staple at creationist “scientific” conferences (such as the 2011 Symposium Cornell University, which was, emphatically, not organized by Cornell University), and online debates, providing standard PRATT talking points against evolution as well as appeals to Expelled-style conspiracy theories. Fernandez has also published rants in the Journal of Creation, the magazine published by Creation Ministries International. As Fernandez saw (or sees) it, creationists have been unfairly silenced by scientific organizations and journals just because they cannot back up their claims by evidence (not, admittedly, how Fernandez himself put it), and such organizations and journals have neglected to take creationist attacks on evolution seriously just because the attacks are silly and already thoroughly refuted. Fernandez would for instance try to argue that the second law of thermodynamics is incompatible with evolution (it obviously isn’t – Fernandez’s use rather entail the prediction that snowflakes are impossible) and quote-mine Francis Crick to suggest that Crick rejected the theory of evolution (he most certainly did not).

 

At some point, however, Jorge Fernandez was also the president of the Citizens for Objective Public Education, a Kansas-based creationist group that in 2013 (under the subsequent leadership of Robert Lattimer) filed a federal civil rights suit that sought to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas public schools on the grounds that science is a religion. That the group doesn’t get the difference is telling enough.

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, it seems like a blast from the past, but these people are still out there, and they are unlikely to have gotten much more reasonable since the heydays of intelligent design. And there is still quite a number of them, unfortunately.

#2831: Bill Ferguson

A.k.a. Terran Cognito

A.k.a. Obi-Wan Kabuki

 

We’ve read through quite a lot of incoherent all-caps rambles on various conspiracy blogs over the years, and one is often left with the impression that it isn’t just difficult to identify the view being promoted, but that there isn’t really anything resembling a view that can be put in coherent sentences underneath it all. And so it is the case with William “Bill” Ferguson III, whose blogs devoted to various conspiracies carry the blurb “Unidynamic frequency inquiry by exploring cutting edge science, awareness and high technology. Expanding the knowledge of unidynomic principle”. Well, we haven’t attempted to make sense of Cognito’s unidynomic principle, but recurring themes in his writings are auras and energy bullshit he has allegedly received by telepathic message from outer cosmos.

 

Aliens and/or alien energy is apparently behind a lot of stuff Cognito imagines is happening on Earth. For instance, “THE METEOR THAT STRUC AND YES WE DO SAY STRUCK IRAN WAS MORE THAN A METEOR. IT WAS AN ENERGETIC SIGNATURE. NOT A WEAPON […] IT WAS AN ENERGETIC SIGNATURE DEVICE THAT ALLOWS FOR CONTINUED INTERFACE WITH OUR AWAKE FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND OPERATIVES IN THE REGION. THERE IS SO MUCH MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE. OUR AWAKE FRIENDS ARE PREPARING THE GROUND SO TO SPEAK. END”. Yeah, that kind of stuff. There is talk of dragons and pyramids in Antarctica built by survivors from Atlantis, too. Also, cats are apparently alien magical beings that “transmutes energies, offers protections, erases magical constructs, and so much more”.

 

Cognito is apparently connected with Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf and often comments on her legal woes and asks for donations to assist her. Cognito might even possibly have influenced the argumentation in one of Tucci-Jarraf’s (large) documents filed in her criminal case in which she alleges to have taken part in secret meetings with world leaders in Antarctica.

 

Diagnosis: Cognito offers a weird, funhouse mirror version of the garbled conspiracy theories you’d get from Alex Jones or RedIce Creations, completely devoid of anything resembling coherence or orientation toward reality. Probably harmless, though he seems to have some followers.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2830: David Feinstein

Emotional Freedom Technique is an infamous but relatively widespread pseudopsychiatric therapy that claims to heal the mind and a range of psychological (and physical) problems using, in a handwavy manner, the ideas of acupuncture. Specifically, EFT therapists claim to manipulate the body’s ‘energy field’ through acupressure and to access meridians while focusing on a specific traumatic memory. Needless to say, it is pure pseudoscience, and doesn’t remotely work; indeed, the idea – like the ideas behind energy medicine in general – is not only raging bullshit but fractally wrong.

 

Now, we’ve encountered EFT before, since – despite its desperate lack of plausibility, evidence or coherent underpinnings – the nonsense is, as mentioned, quite popular (though in fairness: most psychologists easily recognize it as absolute bullshit).

 

And despite the implausibility of the ideas, proponents of EFT have long been engaged in some serious pseudoscience to try to lend the technique a sheen of scientific legitimacy. Central to that strategy is the work of energy psychology proponents like Dawson Church and David Feinstein. In a 2008 review, Feinstein concluded that energy psychology (EFT in particular) was a “rapid and potent treatment for a range of psychological conditions” based on systematically ignoring all the evidence demonstrating that EFT doesn’t work; like so many other pseudoscientists, Feinstein also failed to disclose his conflict of interest as an owner of an online shop for energy psychology products. Unfazed, Feinstein published another review in 2012, according to which energy psychology techniques “consistently demonstrated strong effect sizes and other positive statistical results that far exceed chance after relatively few treatment sessions” based on employing the exact same technique as last time: systematically dismissing or ignoring high-quality studies (which consistently show no positive effect) in favor of methodologically worthless small studies that did suggest an effect.

 

Indeed, over the years, Feinstein has published a number of pseudoscientific papers and reviews based on shoddy pseudostudies, including for instance “Manual Stimulation of Acupuncture Points” (in Journal of Psychotherapy Integration). In the very same journal issue, real scientists with intellectual integrity and deploying real methodological techniques (like the AMSTAR2 analysis criteria) on the same material, concluded that the studies Feinstein relied on were of “critically low” quality and poorly carried out, concluding (since they actually deployed methodological rigor and, unlike Feinstein, were concerned with accuracy and accountability) that EFT was pseudoscience and an “unsinkable rubber duck”.

 

Feinstein has written a number of books and done a number of podcasts (e.g. for the aptly named Sounds True with New-Age-woo promoter Donna Eden), and is also on the board of editors of the journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, and Treatment, ostensibly “a peer-reviewed professional journal dedicated to reporting developments in the field of energy psychology”; unfortunately, this is the kind of pseudoscientific journal that takes the notion of “peer review” way to literally. It’s board of editors also include the other central leaders of the EFT cult: Dawson Church, Larry Dossey, Charles Tart, Norman Shealy, James Oschman, orthomolecular medicine champion Hyla Cass and Stanley Krippner, the parapsychologist whose parody-friendly work was a crucial part of the foundation for The Men Who Stare at Goats.

 

Diagnosis: Militant pseudoscience. And once again, it is fascinating (but also, of course, frightening) to see the complex but likely completely unconscious strategies proponents of pseudoscience use to avoid reality and the evidence that unambiguously demonstrate that what they advocate is bullshit: Yes, we do think Feinstein is a true believer, and when he systematically champions shoddy nonsense studies and desperately dismiss (or simply ignore) the actual evidence, we suspect he is doing so in good faith – unbelievable as it might sound.