#2857: David Kyle Foster

It’s starting to get old, but David Kyle Foster is still around, so here we go: David Kyle Foster is an anti-gay activist who characterizes himself as “ex-gay” (he insists that he changed his own sexual orientation after “sleeping with 1,000 men”) and a champion of reparative therapy. He even made a movie, Such Were Some Of You, back in 2014 describing his delusions about stuff – in particular the temptations of the “homosexual lifestyle” – with backups from experts like Michael Brown and Anne Paulk, and which was featured e.g. on The 700 Club. In the movie, Foster warns that young people are especially vulnerable to such temptations because “Satan is in their little minds, planting all sorts of doubts and fears,” and that schools are under the sway of dark forces pushing the gay agenda through manipulative messages of LGBT acceptance, which, according to Foster, is “child abuse as far as I’m concerned”. He also has some notably weird views about what is actually being taught in elementary schools around the country.

 

Foster has also warned about the danger of divine punishment for gay rights; according to Foster, “sexual immorality” such as homosexuality amounts to “idolatry” because it involves “worshipping the creature rather than the creator.”

 

Foster must have been ex-gay for a while, insofar as he founded his Mastering Life Ministries back in 1987. He is also producer and co-host (with one Jayson Graves) of “Pure Passion”, a “televised outreach designed to equip the church to redemptively minister to those who are trapped in sexual sin and brokenness”. You can read more about that one if you wish here. DK Foster is however probably not identical to the David Foster who ran as an independent candidate in Virginia’s 2^nd Congressional District in 2022 on the platform “TRAITORS PEDOPHILES TO THE GALLOS...ANY QANON QUESTIONS????”

 

Diagnosis: We’re hopefully mostly done with David Kyle Foster’s brand of dingbat bigotry and delusions, but who knows what the conspiracy and religious fundie fraction of the MAGA cult may end up resurrecting?

#2856: Bill Foster

David William “Bill” Foster is an attorney and former mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, from 2010 to 2014. Foster is also a creationist. Indeed, Foster has explicitly endorsed the young-earth creationist tenet that the world was literally created in six days and that dinosaurs and humans co-existed (“dinosaurs are mentioned in Job so I don’t have any problem believing that dinosaurs roamed the earth,” says Foster, referring to a passing reference to the “behemoth” in the Bible), and he was prior to being sworn in as mayor of St. Petersburg on record heckling and complaining to school officials when his own children were exposed to facts and science incompatible with his delusions in school.

 

Indeed, Foster once wrote a letter to the Pinellas County School Board regarding their teaching of evolution, claiming, without basis in history and completely irrelevant to its scientific status, that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution helped Adolf Hitler rise to power in Nazi Germany, and also blamed the teaching of evolution for the Columbine massacre – a standard claim in Discovery Institute rants after having been promoted by Tom DeLay) – citing (of course) his spectacular failure to grasp the is–ought distinction: “[e]volution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak,” said Foster.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, even people in Florida’s Bible arc voted him out after one period, and he doesn’t seem to have enjoyed any significant political career since 2014. Still.

#2855: Francine Fosdick

It’s not like there is a shortage of hysterical fanatics in the US to cover, but Francine Fosdick (and her husband) Allen manage to stand out a bit in terms of sheer lunacy and small-minded, degenerate wickedness. The Fosdicks, self-declared healers and prophets, are the founders of People of Prophetic Power Ministries in Gettysburg, and also host a radio program called Up Front in the Prophetic, ostensibly devoted “to bring truth and solid biblical answers to the issues of our day.” They also claim to have  “Jesus as their model and a servant’s heart,” which is a spectacular failure of self-awareness and really indicative of how far off the mark their views on how reality hangs together tend to be.

 

What is most notable, however, is that the Fosdicks have become a pair of unofficial leaders of the effort to synthesize dominionist religious fundamentalism and QAnon conspiracy theories: Their radio program has served as something of a cornucopia of conspiracy theories, and the Fosdicks – Francine, in particular – is currently a major figure in the QAnon movement. On their program, the Fosdicks have for instance claimed that then-President Joe Biden was executed and replaced by a masked imposter (based on the fact that some photos of him at a beach don’t match some – explicitly – fake images created by The Onion), and Francine Fosdick has hosted a call to pray for the exposure of former President Barack Obama’s supposed involvement in child trafficking and for the uncovering the “true identity” of Michelle Obama as a man. For some further examples:

 

-       Here is Bishop Larry Gaiters asserting, on the Fosdicks’ show, that the deaths of Joe Biden’s wife and daughter in 1972 and the death of his son Beau in 2015 were a “satanic sacrifice” to boost Biden’s political career.

-       Here is Francine Fosdick warning us that infrared thermometers are a tool for mind control and possibly the Mark of the Beast.

-       In 2022, the Fosdicks spent quite a bit of effort promoting a pillow supposedly “infused with silver technology” (whatever that is) that could ostensibly protect users’ brains from electromagnetic fields.

-       Here is Francine Fosdick once again having a conversation about whether Joe Biden has been replaced by a clone, this time with Trump lawyer Christina Bobb.

-       Here is Mark Burns declaring that Rep. Maxine Waters is “activating Satan’s pastors” to attack (then-)President Trump.

-       And here is Fosdick and the late former actress and QAnon champion Cirsten Weldon talking about how Hillary Clinton died in 2020 of kuru, a brain-wasting disease associated with cannibalism.

 

You get the drift.

 

In 2022, it was the Fosdicks who arranged the major, two-day QAnon conference Patriots Arise, which was attended by a number of candidates for office such as Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano, lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania candidate Teddy Daniels, state Senate of Maryland candidate Rick Bowers, and Maryland governor candidate Dan Cox, as well as neo-Confederate attorney general in Maryland candidate Michael Peroutka; their speaker lineup included Jenna Ellis, Scott ‘Patriot Streetfighter’ McKay (who, as usual, threatened to kill those he believes to be responsible for “child satanic trafficking and abuse of children” – i.e. everyone he disagrees with on politics), Elizabeth Eads (arguing that vaccines are “all part of turning you into an AI transhuman”), Shane Vaughn, and Trump spokesperson Liz Harrison. Francine Fosdick launched the whole event with a 6-minute promo video managing to cram in an impressive amount of QAnon imagery, symbolism and code words; later in the event, she had a sit-down with fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist Sheila Holm to discuss how the government worships Lucifer and is controlled by “The Order of Paladin,” “The Wiccan Order of Knighthood” and the New World Order. The conference ended with the Fosdicks presenting Doug Mastriano with a “Sword of David” because, as they put it, “you are fighting for our religious rights in Christ Jesus.”

 

As what might, in this context, appear as something of an afterthought, Francine Fosdick has weighed in on Covid vaccines, too. As Fosdick, true to form, sees it, COVID-19 vaccines are turning people into “zombies” and “AI fighting machines”; indeed, “those that took this shot are unfortunately no longer human.” Here is Fosdick insisting, in an attempt to straighten out some obvious sources of cognitive dissonance, that Donald Trump and Melania, despite their own claims to the contrary, never took the COVID-19 vaccine: “They never got the shot ... Come on, they’re not that stupid.”

 

Diagnosis: Good grief. The fact remains, however, that the Fosdicks wield some real and serious influence in rightwing circles.

#2854: Mario Fontes

Mario Fontes is a member of the State of Arizona Acupuncture Board of Examiners and clinic director of Natural Medicine & Detox in Phoenix, which offers a board-approved chemical dependency program. Fontes is, as his profession and position might indicate, somewhat famous for his defense of acupuncture, including auricular acupuncture. Now, acupuncture is theatrical placebo, but Fontes believes otherwise, and will quickly dismiss his critics as pathological naysayers: “Anytime there’s something that’s not mainstream, eventually, it becomes integrated, and there’s always going to be the people opposed to that.” And also: why should critics even care? “The people who want our help, we’re here for. The people who don’t, that’s OK.” As for efficacy, Fontes claims – falsely, as it turns out, in addition to irrelevantly – that acupuncture has been practiced for millenia; he also, like many defenders of acupuncture, like to point to troubles in conventional medicine, such as antibiotics resistance, which are of course irrelevant to the question of whether his favored woo actually works – indeed, the State of Arizona Acupuncture Board of Examiners have taken it upon themselves to combat the opioid crisis by approving chemical dependency programs for auricular acupuncture (i.e. Fontes’s own venture), predictably focusing on emphasizing that ‘opioids are bad’ and systematically neglecting the question of whether auricular acupuncture works, which it doesn’t . Then Fontes challenges the establishment: “It’s the predominant belief that the true path to health is drugs, radiation and surgery,” says Fontes, answering that “I just don’t believe that,” since who would have the audacity to challenge a sincerely held belief? (And yes, he argues both that acupuncture is mainstream and a minority of skeptics should be dismissed, and that he is a brave maverick doctor taking on the establishment; we suppose you’re not supposed to notice the tension.)

 

Now, Fontes’s interest in alternative medicine isn’t limited to acupuncture. Indeed, his interest in alternative medicine “began with homeopathy, and later he expanded into acupuncture.” Oh, yes. Fontes is a “clinical instructor” at the American Medical College of Homeopathy and the Phoenix Institute of Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture, where he will tell customers about how the “energetics” of acupuncture can be applied to the “energetics” of homeopathy and how homeopathy is safer even than herbal medicine, which is probably correct since homeopathic remedies are just water and herbal remedies may contain powerful chemicals in unknown dosages and combinations (they’re ‘natural’, after all). His center also offers – among a slew of other nonsense treatments – colon hydrotherapy, detox foot baths, “nutritional IVs”, and chelation therapy.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, more of the same, and we wish we could say ‘just stay away’, but the Arizona Acupuncture Board of Examiners might actually have some sway over policy decisions and resource allocations, so things might end badly no matter what.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased Medicine

#2853: Bruce Fong

Bruce Fong is an insane quack and the medical director of the Sierra Integrative Medical Center in Reno, Nevada, most famous for being the guy who administered nonsense treatments to Chuck Norris’s wife Gena when she and Chuck convinced themselves that she suffered from gadolinum poisoning – gadolinum being a contrast agent commonly used for MRI scans that has in recent years been championed, contrary to available evidence, as a cause of a slew of vague and unspecific symptoms that has given rise to a whole cottage industry of alternative providers (quacks) who advertise and claim to treat it by various nonsense detoxification treatments, acupuncture, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and whatever the individual quack decides is most convenient or profitable (medically, the choice of treatment probably doesn’t matter since none of them are likely to work even if gadolinum toxicity were a correct diagnosis, which is at best unclear (and vastly unlikely) given that the diagnostic tests are garbage).

 

Bruce Fong, however, is the kind of person who is willing to diagnose you, treat you and bill you for whatever you think (or he can entice you into thinking) you suffer from, regardless of whether you actually suffer from it or whether his treatments have the faintest chance of addressing it even if you did – even the Norrises emphasize that he “quickly was able to confirm our theory”, because of course he was. According to his bio, Fong was “introduced to natural medicine and homeopathic medicine as a young child and continues with that tradition today”, specializing in “immune related diseases, including special treatment plans which combine the best options from a broad array of homeopathic, internal, Chinese and traditional medicine”. Indeed, he is, according to himself, “focused on solving root causes, not treating symptoms or masking issues falsely with compounded prescriptions”. Yes, he’s a quack, and he offers the whole gamut of quackery, from chelation therapy and homeopathy to lymphatic massage and “detox” footbaths. (The Norrises, by the way, also employed the services of one Alfred Johnson, another quack who promotes e.g. homeopathy and breast thermography).

 

And the Sierra Integrative Medical Center is not a place to seek out if you are actually suffering from anything. Note for instance how they approach patients with MS: “[p]atients at SIMC, even those with the same ‘diagnoses’ are treated differently. For example, a patient may have a ‘diagnosis’ of Multiple Sclerosis. The cause(s) of this disease can vary from viral infections, bacterial infections, from hyper sensitivities to vaccinations, Toxoplasmosis or ParvoVirus from ones pets [nope] or even Lyme Disease from a tick bite.” Yes, their characterizations of the causes of MS are idiotically wrong, but note the quotation marks: The Sierra Institute doesn’t even really recognize the diagnosis! So much for ‘integrating’ conventional and pseudoscientific ideas about medicine – or for the willingness to identify root causes. Note, too, the reference to ‘vaccine hypersensitivity’: yes, the Sierra Center is anti-vaccine as well (and no: vaccines do not cause MS). And if someone claims your MS symptoms were the result of Lyme Disease, they would be talking about chronic Lyme disease, which is a fake diagnosis, but one for which quacks have developed a number of meaningless and fraudulent tests so it’s an easy scheme to make money off of if you have no concern for your victim’s well-being.

 

And to treat the conditions they identify Sierra offers treatment programs “assembled from various disciplines of the healing arts including but not limited to homeopathy, natural and biological medicines, behavioral medicine, nutritional therapies, orthomolecular integration and neurotherapy.” Yes, there are detox treatments and homeopathy. And what evidence does Sierra have to conclude that their nonsense works? Testimonials, of course. Hey, they even got Chuck Norris’s endorsement, and who wouldn’t take medical advice from Chuck Norris?

 

Diagnosis: Yes, we are sure that Fong genuinely thinks he helps. But at this level of insane quackery, stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. Bruce Fong is evil.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2852: Allison Folmar

Allison Folmar, JD, is a Michigan-based lawyer who’s gained some notoriety – especially in antivaccine circles – for representing parents accused of medical neglect of their children. She is also a board member for Parental Rights, an organization that works to “preserve parental rights through a Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as through state and federal legislation that will protect children by empowering parents”, including health freedom and, of course, ‘vaccine freedom’ – indeed, their suggestion would (deliberately) make it almost impossible for states to protect children from medical abuse and neglect: children are, as the organization sees it, their parents’ property to do with as they see fit, regardless of the welfare of the child.

 

But if you wonder whether Folmar herself is antivaccine – she could after all just be deeply concerned with parents’ rights, couldn’t she? – she has also been an invited speaker at a number of anti-vaccine conferences, including the 2018 Vaccine Choice Empowerment Symposium and the 2015 issue of the autism quackfest known Autism One. At the latter, she even talked about one of her cases as involving a daughter having “exhibited autistic-like symptoms immediately after vaccinations”, and you get no points for guessing where that story would be going.

 

Folmar is apparently also a scientologist and has been caught pushing scientology’s views on psychiatry. As for the ParentalRights organization, its board consists of four people, three of whom we’ve already covered: William Estrada, Rick Green, Michael Farris, as well as one J. Michael Smith. Though health freedom seems to be part of it, their main goal is to promote home schooling and ensure that parents can prevent their children from being exposed to things like the theory of evolution or non-condemnatory information about women’s rights or homosexuality.

 

Diagnosis: Dangerous

#2851: Susan Folkman

 

Susan Kleppner Folkman is an American psychologist, author, and emerita professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She is – by far – most famous for her writings on psychological stress and coping, and we don’t pretend to have the expertise needed to evaluate those contributions. But Folkman has also, for a long time, been a major champion of medical woo and quackery. Folkman was the first full-time director of UCSF’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, which offers (among other things) acupuncture, herbal medicine, manual therapies and Ayurvedic medicine, and Osher Foundation Distinguished Professor of Integrative Medicine; and from 2006, she was the chair of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine and the North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. She is, in other words, a major figure in the relentless effort to give woo and quackery a sheen of scientific and academic legitimacy without having the scientific grounding to justify that status.

 

Given her positions, Folkman was also selected to serve on an Institute of Medicine committee to identify major scientific and policy issues in “complementary and alternative medicine” research, regulation, training, credentialing and “integration with conventional medicine” in 2003, and she’s been a firm defender of, say, the practices of NCCAM, employing the standard misdirection techniques of CAM advocates of rebranding conventional therapies as somehow “alternative” (to make CAM seem more popular and legitimate than it in fact is), appealing to the popularity of CAM to justify spending money on it, and pointing out that although trials of CAM tend to be (when properly carried out) disappointing, that’s the situation with science-based medicine, too (i.e. neglecting the importance of starting with plausible hypotheses or the issue of how you adjust your confidence in the hypotheses when they don't pan out).

 

Diagnosis: A significant and powerful promoter of bullshit, and although we haven’t assessed her contributions to psychology on their own terms, her penchant for bullshit and garbage thinking on other issues might leave one wary of errors and blind spots there, too. That said, Folkman is fortunately retired and probably won’t do much more harm, at least not directly.

#2850: Avery Foley

Avery Foley is a prolific writer for the young-Earth-creationist and general pseudoscience organization Answers in Genesis (AiG). As such, she has promoted most of the creationist nonsense talking points associated with young-Earth creationism, such as the silly creationist distinction between micro- and macro-evolution (complete with vague handwavings about ‘information’, which Foley predictably doesn’t attempt to define) and the mythical distinction between “observational and historical science” (where the former is legitimate and the latter is not; i.e. scientists do science when they restrict themselves to counting, weighing and measuring; testing hypotheses against predictions derived from those hypotheses is pseudoscience); indeed Foley, whose scientific background is a masters of arts in theological studies from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, has written pretty extensively and thoroughly confusedly about that putative distinction. Now, Foley is adamant that she and creationists in general “love science”, but that means real science, like engineering and accountancy (as long as those disciplines “seek to study and research to honor God and uphold the authority of his Word”) not those disciplines that deal in tests of hypotheses about things that aren’t directly observable, like astronomy or physics or medicine or – in particular – evolutionary biology or climate science. 

 

One somewhat curious contribution from Foley, together with one Frost Smith, is their 2015 defense (“Celebrate Einstein’s Birthday with Pi on 3.14.15”) of what creationists call ‘uniformitarianism’, the idea that the laws of science are constant, e.g. so that the future is in principle predictable. For such constancy (including the reliability of mathematics, which is not based on empirical testing, but Foley & Smith are not the kind of writers to notice such details) is only possible, as they see it, if it were created by God: “an orderly and consistent universe because there is a consistent God who upholds the universe”, whereas “in a naturalistic worldview” any assumption of such order has to be given up. Hence, evolution is false and the Bible is right and the Earth was created in six (literal) days and so forth.

 

The curious dimension to that argument is of course that AiG rejects uniformitarianism because uniformitarianism is thoroughly incompatible with young-Earth creationism – in their own words, “a uniformitarian worldview maintains that all things have continued at the same rate without any supernatural or catastrophic events to alter them. Namely, uniformitarianism excludes the Creation by God and the global Flood”. Indeed, Foley and Smith themselves, in ‘AIG: All Scientific Dating Methods Are Wrong’, maintain that “all the dating techniques used in geology, cosmology, and physics are wrong” – not because they are able to identify any errors or mistakes but because the dating techniques yield results they don’t like, such as the universe and the Earth being billions of years old – and their (desperate) argument is precisely that “the dating techniques are based on assumptions, and the main assumption is the constancy of the process rates used to calculate those ages” and “[a]ccording to God’s Word that assumption of constancy of process rates is wrong”. Of course – we conjecture here – Foley and Smith are free to point out that the obvious contradiction between their claims is a criticism only if we assume that consitency is a virtue, and that would probably be naturalism and Satan speaking. Who knows.

 

Foley has, in fact, written quite a bit on Noah’s flood, dealing e.g. with the rather obvious question of where did all the water go together with one Troy Lacey, apparently “correspondence representative”, whatever that means. Indeed, Foley’s writings cover a wide range of topics, with the common characteristic being that it is all astonishingly inane, that she (unsurprisingly) tends to see creation everywhere – e.g. in the taste of water – and a commitment to the delusion that creationists and scientists are equally sensitive to the evidence but come to different conclusions because they come in with different presuppositions; her commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible, which isn’t a presupposition anyways because the Bible the word of God and the word of God is true, then allows here to just reject that evidence). Here is Foley’s critique of Santa Claus; note that her problem isn’t just the traditional one that children, upon discoverying that Santa isn’t real, could end up questioning the reality of other figures whose reality they shouldn’t question, but that Santa Claus’s behavior and characteristics are unchristian and contrary to scripture. And here is Foley working herself into weird knots trying to explain miracles, which she tries to claim don’t violate the laws of nature, in which case they would, of course, not be miracles.

 

Together with Ken Ham himself and Bodie Hodge, Foley is also the editor of the AiG book The Gender and Marriage War, which we haven’t looked at and neither should you.

 

Diagnosis: As inane as they come. That there may actually be people who think the laughable results of Avery Foley’s quixotic attempts to challenge science, reality, reason and consistency contain some insights to cherish is a damning indictment of Western structures of education.

#2849: Edward 'Ted' Fogarty

And back to the anti-vaccine activists! Ted Fogarty is a radiologist – indeed, he is former Chairman of Radiology at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Assistant Professor at the Heart of America Medical Center – who has deluded himself and perhaps some fellow anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists into thinking that he understands and knows something about vaccines, all to the embarrassment of his profession. And it doesn’t help that he is vocal about expressing his misunderstandings, too, having for instance composed a silly antivaccine rant, posted to the website of the anti-vaccine organization Informed Choice Washington (yet another corollary of Badger’s Law; they do want choice but are excruciatingly resistant to the informed part) in the format of an open letter to the Washington State legislature. And the letter, Philosophical Exemptions as Behavioral Economic Signals of Fraud: An Open Letter is a textbook pseudoscience rant in which Fogarty for instance

 

-       highlights radiologists’ role in diagnosing ASIA, which is a fake disease invented by anti-vaccine activist Yehuda Schoenfield that Fogarty characterizes as a “well described” vaccine injury that he, as a radiologist, is well positioned to diagnose.

-       not only characterizes influenza vaccines as “covert biological warfare” due to what he wrongly perceives as “lack of any safety studies”, but the flu vaccine program as something that can be used to covertly spread slow viruses or prions in the population.

-       posits that many cases of traumatic brain injury are really due to aluminum from vaccines; Fogarty has no evidence for his false claim, but does have Gish gallops, technobabble and findings that have nothing to do with his hypothesis but may sound like they do if you don’t look closely.

 

Fogarty has also tried to argue that mRNA vaccines are “manipulating genomics at a ribosomal level,” which anyone passingly familiar with molecular biology will immediately recognize as meaningless but which his target audience (not people with passing familiarity with molecular biology) will not.

 

As for background, Fogarty has an autistic son whose autism he has wrongly convinced himself is a vaccine injury; more specifically, his son “has an epigenetic risk of neuroimmunologic and neurodevelopmental problems related to metals handling in his body due to Methylene Tetrahydrofolate Reductase genes.” And yes, that is MTHFR pseudoscience in its most crackpot fashion.

 

Nevertheless, Fogarty has, because he does have credentials that might initially sound relevant to those not in the know, been a somewhat sought-after figure in antivaxx circles. He has apparently been able to serve as expert witness for parents bringing action for “vaccine injury”, and serves on the editorial board of James Lyons-Weiler’s antivaccine pseudojournal Science, Public Health Policy & the Law.

 

And of course, Fogarty’s pseudoscience and denialism doesn’t limit itself to vaccines. Fogarty has long been familiar in alternative health circles for his advocacy of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for more or less any condition, including Alzheimer’s and advanced COVID-19, at his business, MoPlatte Hyperbarics. He is also anti-mask, of course.

 

Diagnosis: More antivaxx brainrot, and unlike what Fogarty claims, hyperbaric oxygen therapy doesn’t help. But Fogarty is far from a no-one in antivaccine conspiray circles insofar as he has, in addition to a penchant for conspiracy thinking and not being afraid to proclaim loudly on issues he doesn’t understand, has some largely irrelevant credentials.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence