#2967: Bill Hamon

Another day, another raging fundie. Bill Hamon is a fundie, self-declared prophet and founder of the Christian International Ministry Network. Charisma’s Steve Strang has described him as “one of the fathers of the modern prophetic movement”, and Hamon could, in fact, be described as the founder, with C. Peter Wagner, of the New Apostolic Reformation: the motivation for Hamon being his conviction that Christ can’t return to Earth and bring about its end until Christians form a “militant” army led by modern apostles and prophets that will physically subdue Earth and start establishing God’s kingdom in the Earth’s governments. Hamon is also the founder of Christian International School of Theology, an international network of Bible Colleges that has ostensibly “trained and activated thousands of ministers and saints across the world”, and author of a number of books with titles like God’s Weapons of War and Seventy Reasons for Speaking in Tongues.

 

Hamon is, moreover, a promoter of the weird genre of Trump-finds-God fan fic, the idea that Donald Trump himself is some sort of deeply committed religious figurehead – indeed, Hamon has contributed to the subgenre Melania-finds-God fan fic (an example), the most famous example of which being perhaps Paul Begley’s idea – spun entirely from febrile imagination – that First Lady Melania Trump refused to move into the White House in 2017 until it had been “completely exorcised.”

 

In any case, Hamon is convinced that Trump is doing God’s work and hence is, indeed, a major success story for his movement to put secular governments under the control of militant prophets. And as Hamon sees it, Trump’s primary agenda as president is to combat the forces of darkness commanded by Satan who are trying to take down God’s own cherished and carefully crafted project, the US. Said forces of darkness are of course identical to those who disagree with Hamon on political issues or who vote in ways that are contrary to how he wants them to vote. For if you do, perhaps because you “don’t realize this is a spiritual war”, God is ready to punish you (or other random Americans – God apparently doesn’t care much about precision). Hamon has, as a prophet, a direct line to God that allows him to reveal the workings here. For instance, in 2017, Hamon could reveal that Hurricane Irma was a sign from God that President Trump’s opponents will soon be exposed (just like Q also prophecied). As Hamon sees it, Trump is “God’s man for this time and God’s going to use him to restore America back to its true destiny and purpose”, and like many other fundie Trumpists, he has compared Trump to the biblical Cyrus, an ungodly man raised up to carry out God’s will: “The fact is that God raised him up, and God didn’t ask our permission which man He would bring, but it’s God’s time,” said Hamon (meanwhile, “everyone knows that if Hillary had gotten it, we would be a socialist nation and we’d be so far from our purpose” that we’d have invited the “judgment of God” … which, through hurricane Irma, we received anyways? Who knows.)

 

At least Hamon’s views on Trump reflect his general theological views as laid out e.g. in his book Apostles, Prophets and the Coming Moves of God: God’s end-times army (the one led by Trump and himself) will achieve victory by striking God’s enemies with blindness and natural disasters, which will eventually lead entire nations to convert to Christ. And the apostles and prophets (like himself) will be so powerful that Christians who come into their presence with sin in their lives will be struck dead, and eventually achieve immortality (this is his take on the idea of the Rapture). Now, many of Hamon’s ideas and doctrines can of course not be found in, say, the Bible, but the reason is obvious: As an apostle and prophet, Hamon has, through apostolic intuition, insights into new doctrines that supplement those given by the original apostles and prophets, or, in short: if you make it up as you go, it is really information directly from God.

 

Diagnosis: He’s old, but seems to be as insane and dangerous as ever. To minimally reasonable people, it remains unfathomable that anyone could take this cartoonishly laughable drivel seriously, but they do, and possibly because it is as crazy as it is: the sort of militant Taliban-style fundamentalism, complete with prophets, apostles and superheroes, has gained serious momentum around the world lately.

#2966: Jeremy R. Hammond

Jeremy R. Hammond (not Jeremy Hammond, hacker and anarchist) is a wingnut conspiracy theorist writing for the “alternative” news website Personal Liberty and an antivaxxer. Hammond endorses the thoroughly debunked idea that vaccines cause autism (they don’t) and supports his position by refusing to acknowledge existing science or dismissing it as biased while promoting antivax anecdotes (case studies) and ‘studies’ published in predatory journals. So, can anyone “point to any studies in the medical literature that have shown that the HPV vaccine reduces the risk of developing cervical cancer”, asks Hammond, and yes, sure: we certainly can, but does anyone think Hammond will listen? Then he employs the antivaxx appeal to package inserts, and so on.

 

Diagnosis: No, we can’t be bothered to do much more. Hammond is presumably a relatively minor player, though you never know who might show up at a federal vaccine panel or as an official responsible for public health efforts these days, so best to record the name for future reference.

 

Hat-tip: Skeptical Raptor

#2965: Leon Hammer

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a presientific system of vitalistic myths, and TCM’s ways of diagnosing disease are nonsense based on vagueness, fluff and imagination. Among the diagnostic methods employed by TCM practitioners is pulse diagnosis: using palpation of the pulse at the wrist and inspection of the tongue to try evaluate the patient’s state of health and make diagnoses. The idea is, of course, complete bullshit, and it is based on the notion that the radial artery represents the health of the person and can be used to measure non-existent phenomena like qi – the technique even comes with maps that assigns points on the wrist and tongue to various parts of the body in a seemingly random manner familiar from (other versions of) reflexology.

 

Leon Hammer and John Shen don’t think it is bullshit. According to Hammer, who is the founder of the Shen-Hammer system, aka Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis (CCPD), the pulse can in fact “give us the most precise picture of even the most subtle and complex deviation from this standard of health” because “[t]he pulse record is an instant picture of the current status of a person’s voyage from birth to death”. For a practitioner who approach the issue “with dedication, quiet patience and consistency, becoming attuned to pulse qualities is an ongoing meditation, a training ground for awakening and awareness into total focus and concentration. As such, pulse diagnosis is an opportunity for practitioners to obtain the ultimate satisfaction of being one with their patients, one with themselves, one with the diagnostic process, and perhaps one with the universal forces that are expressed through the pulse.” In other words, it’s utter bullshit, with a sprinkling of helpless deepity. That said, Hammer also appeals to experiments set ut by the Chinese government in the 1950s in which “many well known masters of Chinese pulse diagnosis were asked to examine a patient”. Not surprisingly, “[t[heir findings varied widely”, and pulse diagnosis was accordingly judged to be an unreliable diagnostic tool – Hammer disagrees, however: the variations just shows that “each different pulse system is correct, providing not contradictory information, but different information.” And if your reaction is something in the vicinity of “wait …”, Hammer is ready to admit that it “is difficult to contemplate and absorb”. Indeed. You are just close-minded. Anything goes.

 

Hammer is also the creator of Contemporary Oriental Medicine (COM), which includes “over 100 unique concepts not included in TCM”, including “birth traumas and Heart shock, toxicity, Liver qi and yang deficiency, the separation of yin and yang as precursors to significant and debilitating illnesses, etc.” In other words, Hammer takes TCM and adds whatever woo he fancies to comprise what he views as “the true embodiment of tradition, seamlessly blended with modern insight and wisdom”. None of it has anything to do with reality, of course. Hammer is very clear that he really believes that it works, but doesn’t seem to recognize the need to actually test it.

 

In fact, there is a test of his pulse diagnosis. Sort of. Hammer’s own disciple Karen Bilton submitted “Investigating the reliability of Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis as a diagnostic tool in Oriental medicine” as partial requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Technology in Sydney. In the study, Bilton carefully tested inter-tester reliability among Hammer’s own acolytes and found decent levels of agreement of intra-rater comparisons and (somewhat less) of inter-rater comparisons for certain conditions. Of course, she admits that “reliability … was the exclusive interest of the study, and not validity.” In other words, she found some agreement among students of Hammer’s when it came to setting diagnosis, and carefully avoided judging whether any of those diagnoses had anything whatsoever to do with reality! It is, in other words, an absolutely glorious example of tooth fairy science, and utterly laughable as such. That Bilton was apparently not immediately forcibly removed from the University of Sydney’s premises is a disgrace to that institution.

 

Diagnosis: Batshit stupidity with delusions of grandeur. And this one, too, seems to have achieved some popularity, at least to the extent that the nonsense has drifted into and mixed with the general fog of fads and quackery that is the modern wellness movement.

 

Note: Hammer seems to have passed away, but since we’d already written this entry we decided to publish it anyways. His work presumably lives on.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased medicine

#2964: Rachel Hamm

Rachel Hamm is an author (Life Beginning, some kind of biography/fundie self-help combo book), speaker, notable fan of Robin Bullock, creator of something called ‘The Miracle Mind Mastery’ – “where she helps people become the best version of themselves” – and unsuccessful 2022 wingnut candidate for the position of secretary of state in California. According to herself, she ran for secretary of state because Jesus appeared to her youngest son, who “is a seer” and an authority on spiritual issues for Hamm, in a closet – apparently Hamm thought at first it was an angel, but no: it was Jesus himself. And she would ostensibly make a great secretary of state insofar as she is a Christian (anointed by God, in fact) and therefore honest, fair, and honorable: “Someone who is ... godless very likely would not have those values.” The Jesus closet manifestation was apparently expected, though: “I’ve been a prophetic dreamer so I had spent a lot of 2019 and 20 having a lot of political dreams that I was in office”, said Hamm. Indeed, she is, according to herself, “kind of a forerunner,” meaning that whatever she experiences in her personal life is “whatever God is getting ready to do” on a national or global scale.

 

Her prophetic dreams and fundie commitments weren’t her only qualifications for secretary of state, though. Hamm also has substantial experience combatting Satan and satanists: apparently the neighborhood surrounding her local community college is “known for having a lot of Satanic activity,” and she’s had a number of hostile encounters with Satanists trying to take over her house. In fact, according to her book, Hamm has been battling these forces her whole life, ever since she attended a daycare as a child that was later revealed, at least in her imagination, to be a front for Satan worshippers (“this was a Satanic coven claiming to be a preschool so they could train children in Satanic rituals,” says Hamm), just like in the fictional accounts that launched the Satanic panic of the 1980s. Her apparently biggest victory against her neighbors, however, came when she putatively managed to kill a witch through prayer: apparently this witch – a neighbor “who live two doors down” – was trying to kill her, something Hamm realized on the basis of “a dream that someone has tried to break into my home, murder me and light my house on fire;” she responded by praying hard, and the next morning her mother told her that someone had broken into the home of the witch, “murdered her and lit the house on fire.” With a CV like this, no wonder she thought you should vote for her as secretary of state. Apparently she received the backing of people like Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn.

 

Her campaign was predictably characterized by delusional rantings and conspiracy theories, in particular concerning the 2020 presidential election – according to Hamm, Trump actually won all 50 states in 2020 and would apparently soon (in 2021) be returned to the White House to serve a full 10 years in office, and she’s got proof: she (of course) dreamt it, and accordingly “feel fairly certain that that is what happened and that it’s only fraud that made it look otherwise.” (That said, God also told her that Trump “sacrificed greatly” by leaving office after losing the 2020 election because he is “a good father” who knows that “sometimes their children do not learn lessons unless they learn it the hard way.”) And the nefarious forces that be (libruls) were after her, too, but she refused to bend: although she and her family knew “they might kills us ... there are some things worth dying for;” for instance, Hamm “would rather be dead than live in a communist country.” Here is Hamm and Delora O’Brien weighing in on the War on Christmas. And here is Hamm declaring that Black Lives Matter “is really evil at its core” and “a completely evil, corrupt organization that has harmed our country;” also, “two of the main leaders are witches.”

 

Of course, she perceived that massive voter fraud would be a central challenge to her campaign, and as a means to forestall such challenges she deployed prayer. So Hamm prayed that if anyone tries to steal votes from her, “God will send the angels to steal the vote back” and she also asked her fans to join her in praying that “if they create fraudulent ballots” to steal the California election, “they’re incinerated”. “Let’s ask the angels to go burn ‘em up. No fake ballots!”. (If she did get elected, she promised that she would fight to “make it hard” for people to vote so that “people who are not educated” on the issues – like knowledgeable about which side is backed by Satan and which side is not – are prevented from voting.) When she failed to clear the GOP primary, she predictably insisted that the election had, in fact, been stolen, sort of neglecting to notice that given her framing of the issue during her campaign, it sort of follows that God Himself must be to blame for the result.

 

Following her loss, Hamm became convinced that she was destined to serve as press secretary for then-former President Donald Trump when he would be reelected in 2024. She regularly travelled to Mar-a-Lago and urged her viewers to give daily prayers for Trump and against the Democrats, whom she claimed were partnering with Satan to keep Trump from getting elected again. Part of what she would bring to the table in a role as press secretary would be prophetic warnings for Trump. In March 2023, for instance, she released a video in which she claimed to have learned (apparently through her usual sources of information) that “globalists” were planning to kill most of humanity, and she had asked God how to respond; apparently God ordered her to “decree” that He would send a “death angel” to the Capitol in May 2023 to kill a swath of elected leaders: “I’m here to tell you that an angel came to our house and told us that the death angel is visiting the Capitol in the month of May,” Hamm announced. Well, May came and passed with no large-scale slaughter of legislators, so Hamm (“super frustrated”) followed up with another video in which she prayed for God not to change his mind and still send the “death angel” to “kill these globalists” as He had promised (apparently keeping promises is not God’s strong suit): “Lord, please don’t change your mind,” prayed Hamm. “Lord, even now we do agree in Jesus’ name, please send this death angel to kill these globalists who have told us they want to kill 85 percent of us. And so, Lord, we need you to intervene. We need you. […] We need you to step in and send the death angel, in Jesus’ name.”

 

Diagnosis: Wheeee! Apparently even the most wild-eyed fundies in the MAGA movement seem to tend to be wary of this one, but she still has some followers. Completely bonkers at every possible level.

#2963: Julie Hamilton

Discussions of conversion therapy might have faded a bit from public consciousness in recent years, but it still exists and it is still dangerous nonsense. And as far as we know, Julie Hamilton remains one of the leaders of the group committed to the propagation of such therapies. Hamilton is former president of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (shades of Badger’s Law in that name), a group that describes itself as “principled advocates for persons experiencing unwanted homosexual attractions”, and of its mother organization, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH); she is also editor of the 2009 book Handbook of Therapy for Unwanted Homosexual Attractions: A Guide to Treatment, in the preface of which she suggests that conversion therapy can prevent murder. A serial spreader of misinformation, Hamilton’s official position is, in fact, that “there is actually no such thing as conversion therapy” and that bans of such therapies would ban “free speech in the counseling office.” Hamilton was a central feature of the documentary Such Were Some of You, a pro-conversion therapy tool that encourages people to consider “leaving homosexuality” and rejecting the “gay lifestyle” intended for Sunday school children.

 

Diagnosis: We would probably have given her more space 10 years ago, but she is apparently still around and still a hateful and crazy promoter of dangerous pseudoscience; indeed, she might be in a position to cause more harm than ever these days.

#2962: Jeremy Hambly

Jeremy Hambly is an influencer, altright troll and incel guru who runs (or has run) YouTube/Rumble/Gab channels like ClawStruck, Unsleeved Media, and – most famously –  TheQuartering. Now, we cannot claim to have followed these channels particularly closely, but they come across as, more than anything else, ragebaiting shitshows targeted at confused wannabe trolls, and Hambly produces and/or helps spread a not insignificant portion of the kind conspiracy-adjacent garbage that currently clogs up the internet.

 

Unsleeved Media appears to have been focused mostly on themes related to Magic: The Gathering; it was also various examples of silly behaviors related to that theme that originally got Hambly’s career going, insofar as these behaviors resulted in bans from Magic events and later Gen Con (we don’t have the details and don’t really care). Currently, his most popular channel is TheQuartering, which features Hambly’s critical rants against various institutions from a conspiracy-theory-oriented point of view – like accusing Disney (and politicians) of attempting to brainwash children through various forms of woke theory. The channel is absolutely committed to the MAGA cult and toys with (though doesn’t seem to explicitly endorse) various versions of The Great Replacement theory, white nationalism and anti-semitism; likewise, the channel has promoted a number of Alex Jones-land conspiracy theories, including 9/11 conspiracy theories. His twitter/X archive can be accessed here, though it doesn’t seem to be quite up to date. Of course, Hambly is primarily an (unapologetic) grifter and has even pushed Goldco scams on his channel. 

 

Diagnosis: Primarily a ragebaiting shitshow, and as such not the kind of thing we can be bothered to put much effort into investigating. Hambly might, for all we know, not even put much credence in the stuff he produces (or anything else for that matter).

#2961: John Haller

John Haller is a deranged fundie and self-declared prophet affiliated with Ohio’s Fellowship Bible Chapel. Haller thinks that the LGBT “agenda” is a sign of the End Times on par with “actual wars.” As he reads the Bible, before the End Times people will “lose the ability to reason and they think like morons. And I think that we are exactly at that time” in the case of people supporting LGBT rights. To back up his view, Haller points to what he thinks is history: “Both the days of Noah and the days of Lot existed in the historical context”, and the sort of “wickedness and violence” that “filled the earth” in those days are “exactly what we’re seeing” in the present day (people of his ilk tend to have an idiosyncratic understanding of words like ‘exactly’ and ‘literally’). And it “is happening all over the world”. So, the fact that LGBT rights have some degree of mainstream support indicates the Second Coming of Jesus is neigh. “I talk every week about the convergence of all these different lines of Bible prophecy, from Israel to morality to one-world government, one-world religion”, says Haller. We’re sure he does. Currently, he seems to be very concerned with the Israel situation and in particular the idea of a two-state solution, for as he points out, God is only “renting the land to the nation of Israel,” and they do not “have the right to ‘sublease’ it” because that might interfere with the return of Christ and the End of Days, or whatever.

 

Diagnosis: Person who has lost the ability to reason and who thinks like a moron. We guess we’ll see if that leads to anything.

#2960: Kathleen Hallal

Kathleen Hallal is a California-based “mother of three boys with autoimmune issues and food allergies”, something she blames partially on GMO foods and pesticides like RoundUp (and which she also claims to have cured with diet interventions), as well as cofounder of a group called Non Toxic Communities (and coordinator of the group Non Toxic Irvine) and co-founder of Zen Honeycutt’s woo and conspiracy group Moms Across America (MAA). Hallal’s stated goal is “spreading awareness about helping children with chronic health issues” although she predictably appears to have no remotely relevant background in medicine or any other relevant scientific discipline – instead, Hallal is a conspiracy theorist and anti-GMO activist who bases everything she believes on google and fellow conspiracy theorists. 

Now, Moms Across America (MAA) has become familiar for their promotion of scare tactics, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and bad science (some good examples here) disguised as means to empower moms fighting for kids’ health. Their primary objective is a general ban on GMOs and glyphosate, and some examples of the lies and pseudoscience they employ in the name of that goal are discussed here and here; they’ve also, predictably, toyed with anti-vaccine rhetoric. And of course, although MAA classifies itself as a non-profit, it is also an e-commerce company that pushes supplements and ridiculous products like “hydrogen water” through its Health Solution Store, collects and sells consumer data, and gets a commission on sales of supplements from other affiliates.

 

And when real scientists point out that MAM’s scaremongering is based on nonsense and pseudoscience, such as when real scientists debunked their informal test that purportedly found minute traces of glyphosate in breast milk and urine (completely false), Hallal and the MAM had a very predictable response: the shill gambit. Indeed, Hallal seems clinicially unable to entertain the possibility that anyone could disagree with her without ulterior motives, even going so far as to try to doubt whether the real scientists criticizing them are even real people. Never mind that she cannot even remotely back up her shill accusations, that the accusations are false (or at best based on ridiculous n-degrees of separation speculations) or that – ironically – actual shilling has been shown to happen only a few times, and consistently among anti-GMO activists shilling for Big Organic. So it goes.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, her tactics might tell you quite a bit about herself and certainly tell you very little about the people her false and unsupported accusations are directed at. A professional, glitzy pseudoscience promoter, scaremonger and conspiracy theorist, and although Zen Honeycutt is the big star of her movement, Hallal is certainly a significant part of the machinery that gives the Honeycutt bullshit an actual impact. 

#2959: Tommy Hall

Just a very brief note on this one should suffice. Tommy Hall is a random creationist with a youtube channel. Hall rejects the theory of evolution, based mostly on standard creationist PRATTs, and, like most creationists, he fails to understand even the basics of the theory he is rejecting, biology, and of science in general. You can read a discussion of a silly video he made in 2016 – with a laugh track – here where he tries to list “failed predictions” of evolution that are either not failed, not predictions, or based on such deep misunderstanding of the original hypothesis (and current state of affairs) that the claim makes no sense in the context of the field he is trying to criticize. And no, Tommy Hall: horizontal gene transfer is not Lamarckianism; epigenetics is not a vindication of Lamarckianism; yes: there is junk DNA; and we don’t think “vestigial” means what you think it means. Here is a discussion of his response to critics.

 

Diagnosis: Proud and loud minor grinch inhabiting Mount Stupid. Unlikely to sway anyone who has a minimal understanding of things scientific.  

 

Hat-tip: PZ Myers 

#2958: Bob Hall

Dingbat morons in state legislatures is nothing new, and Texas has been riddled with them for a long time; these days, however, state legislative dingbattery seems to be a potential pathway to the national political scene. Now, we don’t really think Robert Lee Hall III, a feeble Tea Party candidate who has been serving in the Texas state legislature since 2015, is in any way bound for Washington, but his ideas have travelled. Bob Hall is primarily associated with promotion of misinformation and debunked conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, including pushing the nonsense idea that COVID-19 vaccines skipped animal testing, and encouraging people to forego the vaccine. Instead of protecting yourself by taking the vaccine, Hall predictably recommended worthless bullshit such as hydroxychloroquine.

 

Indeed, Hall – who of course has no medical background – introduced a proposal to ban any entity, public or private, from requiring vaccination of their employees (the proposal would prohibit “discrimination” based on a person’s vaccine choices). According to Hall, and completely contrary to reality, “the mere fact that a person has not received a specific vaccine does not make them a threat to others’ health and safety”; moreover, “in contrast, vaccines they have elected not to have may very well be a threat to their own health and safety” – as Hall, like many other anti-vaccine activists saw it, because he and they are confused morons, the COVID vaccines were “experimental” treatments. Hall supported his proposal with testimonies from people like legendary pseudoscientist and quack Ben Edwards.

 

But Hall was antivaccine before COVID, too. In 2019, for instance, Hall sponsored Texas Senate Bill 2350 (SB2350), which sought to prohibit the administration of vaccines that did not meet criteria Hall had copypasted from various anti-vaccine websites; the bill tried for instance to tell the FDA what criteria they should use for approving new vaccines, it perpetuated standard antivaccine falsehoods about vaccines potentially causing cancer and infertility, and it tried to parrot false antivaccine myths to the effect that vaccines aren’t sufficiently tested for safety. The bill died in committee, but only after it had been widely championed by various anti-vaccine groups in Texas and beyond.

 

Part of the popularity of Hall’s efforts among Texan antivaccine activists was due to the (alleged) fact that it was (purportedly) “rejecting the federal narrative” (Davis Taylor of the conspiracy theory hub Tenth Amendment Center). And indeed, Hall is very much worried about federal narratives and federal other things: in response to the disastrous winter storm that left millions of Texans without power or water for days in 2021, for instance, Hall was quick to declare that “the absolute worst [mistake] that we could make would be to join in with the national grid. That would put us back underneath federal control. And the last thing we need is additional federal government messing with Texas.”

 

In 2021, he tried again, with a bill that “would require physicians to disclose the excipients contained in a vaccine” in order to scare as many as possible from getting the vaccine by the familiar antivaccine gambit of listing alien-sounding chemicals (the bill would not require physicians to mention risks associated with foregoing vaccines). Among the ingredients Hall mistakenly believes vaccines contain are, in addition to aluminum and MSG, “fetal parts […] that people for religious reasons might not want to take that vaccine”. According to Hall, the motivation for the bill was “just a matter of making an informed consent knowing what is being done to them”; Hall is apparently so practised at anti-vaccine talking point parroting that he can’t even construct meaningful sentences, but he does, strikingly and unintentionally, reveal a bit about what these kinds of people mean by 'informed' (it’s not informed). In his presentation of the bill, Hall notoriously also kept repeating the myth that vaccine manufacturers have no liability; based on that piece of misinformation, the extra level of ‘informed consent’ is needed because “we are doing something so dangerous that the federal government has put up a barrier relieving the pharmaceuticals and doctors of any responsibility for any adverse affect [sic].”

 

For his efforts on behalf of wingnuttery and conspiracy theories, Hall was invited to speak at Michael Flynn & Clay Clark’s Reawaken America Tour. Hall was also a speaker at Richard Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s training event for Texas law enforcement officials in Houston in February 2021.

 

Diagnosis: Dingbat moron with little or no grasp of what goes on in reality, but with strong feelings about it based on paranoia, fanaticism and conspiracy theories. Still very dangerous, though.

#2957: Wolfgang Halbig

One of the craziest conspiracy theorists and most despicable pieces of garbage currently in operation in the US, Wolfgang Halbig is primarily famous for his relentless promotion of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, for his harassment of parents of victims of the massacre, and for his contributions to Infowars on the topic. He was finally arrested in 2020 and charged with unlawful possession of the personal ID of one of the fathers he had tormented and for releasing the father’s social security number “to hundreds of people via email” to enable and encourage other deranged conspiracy theorist to harass the families of the victims as well.

 

According to Halbig, the Sandy Hook massacre was a government-perpetrated hoax to give authorities an excuse to take away Americans’ right to bear firearms (how exactly that was supposed to work is unclear in light of the aftermaths of earler mass shootings) employing crisis actors as purported victims. And in the wake of the event, he quickly became a leader of the ragtag mass of insane clowns pushing ludicrous conspiracy theories through his website. In particular, Halbig had a set of 16 questions that he claimed that the authorities could not answer and that he therefore argued proved that the event was staged. Of course, answers to his questions, like why paramedics and EMTs weren’t allowed to enter the school (they were) and why victims weren’t transported by helicopter (because the few wounded individuals could be more effectively transported by ambulance and the rest of the victims were dead), were readily available e.g. in the Connecticut State Police report on the shooting, but Halbig and his followers claimed that those answers were fictions because after all people who commit such hoaxes can’t be trusted. So it goes. The website also touted Halbig’s “credentials” as a former security director for schools in Seminole County, a position from which he claimed to have worked on the official investigation into the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 (a claim for which there is not a shred of evidence), something helped him solicit tens of thousands of dollars to his GoFundMe account.

 

Of course, Alex Jones presented Halbig as a “leading expert” on Sandy Hook on his show. Indeed, Halbig was largely responsible for concocting the Sandy Hook conspiracies that was pushed by Alex Jones, and he was thus, unintentionally, instrumental in Jones’s downfall. That, of course, does not mitigate our assessment of him as pollution incarnate.

 

In 2019, Halbig’s efforts paid some dividends when he was approached by the National Rifle Association – specifically NRA training coordinator Mark Richardson – to help sow doubt about the Parkland shooting.

 

Diagnosis: A disgusting piece of filth and a disgrace to humanity, Halbig has turned being evil and being a moron into his retirement hobby; the nasty clowns and groups of trash morons that follow him presumably provide him with the attention and feeling of doing something meaningful that this otherwise pitiful abomination presumably feels he needs and deserves. And keep in mind that the NRA is even worse rot than Halbig since they don’t even have the lunacy card to play.

#2956: Paul Hair

Paul Hair is a fundie wingnut conspiracy theorist and a reasonably prolific writer for Matt Barber’s website Barbwire while that one was still running. We don’t know what he’s up to these days, but it’s unlikely to be anything good. 

 

Like most fundie wingnuts, Hair was deeply concerned with LGBT rights, and issued a fair number of dire warnings about the way America was going (“That people still don’t fully grasp how important sodomy is to autotheists, and how they have damaged society with their promotion of it, shows how successful they have been in their manipulation. It also shows why America is doomed”). And like most fundie wingnuts who don’t get their will, Hair would see Christian persecution everywhere. When Sonny Hernandez of Reforming America Ministries was criticized for claiming that Christians should stop defending the rights of people to practice other faiths, for instance, Hair portrayed him as a victim of anti-Christian persecution – and no, he didn’t see the irony. And in Hair’s case, like in so many other cases, his persecution complex is of course fuelled by conspiracy theories. So, when Obama (an “authotheist” and “Satanist” – Hair didn’t like Hillary Clinton either) met with leaders of other faiths, as was his job, Hair would straightaway assert that the agenda of the meeting was to coordinate attacks on Christians.

 

Upon Trump’s election in 2016, Hair immediately called upon him to “nominate Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore to be the next secretary of state.”

 

Diagnosis: Whatever

#2955: Noel Hadley

Noel Hadley is a rabid fundie and a flat-earther with a number of self-published books to his name, perhaps most notably AVOID SCIENCE FALSELY SO-CALLED: Flat Earth, the Reformation, and the Science Delusion. We haven’t read it but wager a guess that the title tells you a lot about the book also beyond the case he is trying to make and how (nor have we read any of his other titles, such as Milennial Kingdom + Mud Flood). Hadley, who apparently used to be a professional wedding photographer, seems to be something of a mainstay at various flat-earth gatherings, and his presentations appear to make numerous fascinating and largely unintelligible claims also about other science-echoing issues. Did you know that Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA was informed by ancient Egyptians because “did Pharaoh not wear a cobra on his crown as a symbol of the divine word and third eye – the pineal gland – by which true hidden knowledge might be discovered to the devoted initiate?” and cobras look a bit like DNA. Sort of. Also other cultures, like the Aztecs had ideas about DNA, since they talked about ladders going between heaven and Earth so gods could go up and down – yeah, we don’t quite follow the thread here but neither, we suspect, does Hadley; coherent chains of reasoning is not his style. Even young-earth creationist Danny Faulkner seems to have been somewhat baffled by Hadley’s presentation at a flat-earth conference he attended.

 

Hadley also appears to be a recurring feature on the youtube channel The Earth is NOT a globe, which purportedly offers “A Flat Earth versus the globe debate whether it be biblical or scientific or hopefully a little bit of both”. The adverb ‘hopefully’ seems to be doing some work there.

 

Diagnosis: As if all the nuts and bolts that hold ordinary reasoning together got unscrewed and the disparate elements rather got stuck together randomly with glue. His rants are somewhat fascinating at first, but one tires quickly. We wish we could dismiss him as harmless, but in these times …

#2954: Michelle Guppy

Michelle Guppy was at least at one point coordinator of the Houston Autism Disability Network and has spent some years tirelessly promoting anti-vaccine nonsense in Texas. Guppy is in particular notable for her defense of and advocacy for the work of discredited fraud Andrew Wakefield; Guppy, who believes that her own son is vaccine injured (her list includes PANDAS, which is, needless to say, not a vaccine injury) because he is autistic, something Guppy falsely attributes to vaccines, also thinks that her own son har benefited from Wakefield’s fraudulent nonsense. In 2011, for instance, Guppy received some attention for organizing conference at the Baptist Church in Tomball, Texas, with Wakefield as a keynote speaker; for security, Guppy hired armed guards to intimidate critics, and to journalists there to write about Wakefield, she had some admirably clear instructions: “Be nice to him, or we will hurt you.” So there.

 

Diagnosis: Antivaxxer with an average antivaxxer ability to identify and evaluate causal relationships, and she fails with precisely the kind of zeal and paranoia that so characterizes her movement. Somewhat dangerous, perhaps, but it is unclear whether her influence extends much beyond the Houston area.