#2925: Paul Gosar

Paul Anthony Gosar is a gohmert representing various Arizona districts in the US House of Representatives since 2011 and the third wheel on the Lauren Boebert–Marjorie Taylor Greene clown bike. Gosar is a white nationalist who is particularly concerned with America’s “white demographic core” and at one point formed a congressional “America First” caucus to promote “uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions”, but he doesn’t like being called a white nationalist. Officially, he is a proponent of responsible fiscal policies, as evidenced e.g. by the bill he introduced in 2020 that would force the Federal Reserve to restart issuance of $500 bills with a portrait of Donald Trump.

 

Like a striking number of wingnut candidates, the majority of his own family have warned against electing him, pointing out that he lacks “the intellect, character or maturity to be in that leadership role” and is an “incompetent” “sociopath” who has never been held accountable for his extremist bullshit, and they have paid for ads endorsing his opponents.

 

Conspiracy theories and quackery

Despite having been a dentist, Gosar currently promotes conspiracy theories about water fluoridation. As a matter of fact, Gosar himself called anti-fluoride conspiracy theorists “disturbing” back when he was practicing dentistry, but anti-fluoride conspiracy theories have been a mainstay of wingnuttery ever since the heydays of the John Birch Society, and Gosar the politician is committed to letting ideology trump facts when choosing what to believe. It’s the same commitment that showed up for instance when Gosar, after the 2022 Uvalde mass shooting, flatly and falsely claimedthat the perpetrator was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien”.

 

In 2017, he tried to portray the Unite the Right rally as a left-wing conspiracy to make Trump look bad (despite supporting the protestors’ goals) and, in particular, tried to blame it on Soros because that’s pretty much the extent of his intellectual resources. And if you’re wondering whether he, a sitting US congressman, would go where you might expect this kind of deluded conspiracy theorists to go, then yes: In 2023, Gosar pushed an article published by Russian state media decrying the influence of “Jewish warmongers” in Ukraine on Jim Fetzer’s Holocaust-denying website. In 2020, Gosar voted against a resolution to condemn QAnon, after having himself appeared at various QAnon events.

 

He is, of course, also a climate change denialist and has engaged in much silly theatrics to establish his credentials as a denialist. Back in the days, Gosar moreover supported birther conspiracy theories, because of course he did. And yes, he is, of course, an antivaxxer: In September 2024 he introduced legislation that would allow citizens to sue vaccine manufacturers for “vaccine injuries”, citing the antivaccine myth that vaccine manufacturers cannot be held liable and claiming, completely contrary to reality, that there is a lack of science concerning vaccine safety.

 

Stop the Steal

In the wake of the 2020 election, Gosar was a steadfast promoter of Stop the Steal conspiracy theories, being one of 27 Republican members of Congress to request that US Attorney General William Barr “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate irregularities in the 2020 election” – not that Gosar really cared for investigations or evidence, of course: in the joint session of Congress to formally count the votes of the Electoral College on January 6, 2021, Gosar promptly pronounced that Arizona’s election was stolen and that “[o]ver 400,000 mail-in ballots were altered, switched from President Trump to Vice President Biden or completely erased from President Trump’s total”. He did, of course, not even try to back up the claim with anything whatsoever or show any awareness that facts or evidence could matter when you make a claim like that. Together with Representative Andy Biggs, a fellow fake-news disseminator, Gosar featured as the star of a video produced by the Arizona Republican Party falsely claiming widespread voter fraud, with Gosar falsely claiming that Arizona’s voting machines were faulty, that Wisconsin intentionally paused counting votes to “dump” 100,000 votes into the count for Biden, and that electoral votes for Biden should not be counted from states that Biden won but Gosar thought Trump should have won.

 

Gosar was a frequent speaker at subsequent Stop the Steal events, claiming without basis in anything that Biden was an “illegitimate usurper” and that Trump was the victim of an attempted coup. He also likened the efforts of himself and fellow conspiracy theorists to the Battle of the Alamo, and compared his efforts to those of Japanese soldier Teruo Nakamura, who refused to recognize Japan’s surrender in WWII for decades and remained alone on an island – a comparison that is actually kind of apt. Gosar rarely thinks these things through with much care.

 

His endorsement of Stop the Steal followed the pattern laid out two years before, when Gosar promoted easily debunked conspiracy theories claiming that Martha McSally really won the 2018 Senate election over Kyrsten Sinema.

 

As expected, Gosar was part of the March for Trump/Save America rally that preceded the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot (at an Arizona rally prior to the event, he had assured his fans that “once we conquer the Hill, Donald Trump is returned to being the president”), posting a photo of the MAGA crowd in front of the Washington Monument prior to the Capitol storming with the comment “Biden should concede. I want his concession on my desk tomorrow morning. Don’t make me come over there.” Indeed, Gosar might have been among the strategists behind the storming, together with Biggs, Mo Brooks and Ali Alexander; at least Alexander tweeted, in December 2020, that these four were planning to organize a “mob” to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting” (and Gosar has been linked to similar plans in his home state). Gosar subsequently described the rioters as “peaceful patriots” who were later being “harassed” by the Department of Justice. He was also the first member of Congress to advance the false conspiracy theory that antifa was to blame for the violence. “Without accurate answers [i.e. the answers he wants], conspiracies continue to form”, lamented Gosar – and he was apparently powerless to stop spreading them. His campaign, meanwhile, sent out a fundraising email in which he accused the FBI of staging the attack.

 

Association with Nick Fuentes

In 2021, Gosar was a speaker at a white supremacist event organized by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. He subsequently held a fundraiser with Fuentes, of which he later claimed to have no knowledge despite the very real existence of a flyer featuring both of them and despite having spent plenty of time listening to Fuentes explain how the US would cease to be America without a white majority. Gosar later seems to have given up trying to deny the connection, and in 2022 he promoted a film about Fuentes that portrayed the latter as the “most canceled man in America”; “[t]he persecution against Christians and Conservatives by the Biden Regime brings great dishonor to our country,” wrote Gosar on Twitter and shared a trailer for the film. Since November 2021, Gosar has also employed Wade Searle – currently as his digital director – a self-declared “dedicated acolyte of Nick Fuentes, with the Hitler-loving white supremacist leader going as far as to call him a loyal friend and one of the ‘strongest soldiers of the movement’,” who reportedly runs the white supremacist “ChickenRight” accounts on Twitter and Gab, which posts anti-semitic conspiracy theories about “HOOK-NOSED BANKERS.” Gosar himself has, since 2021, endorsed the memes and buzzwords of the groyper movement, and has regularly retweeted Fuentes and other groyper leaders such as longtime white nationalist Vincent James Foxx. He also has ties to the neo-fascist militia organization the Oath Keepers.

 

Fuentes, on his side, thinks that Gosar is “weak”.

 

Miscellaneous

We can’t be bothered to delve much into Gosar’s feeble attempts at violent shitposting and the dizzying number of layers of idiocy they involve. In line with online altright groyper, red-pill and QAnon aesthetics and culture, Gosar is fond of weird insider gifs and memes (and of inserting random promotions of various conspiracy theories in threads about other matters), like this one. He did receive some attention in 2020 for tweeting a doctored photograph showing Obama meeting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, defending it by saying that “No one said this wasn’t photoshopped”.

 

Then there are things like this one, but there are simply too many of these, and they’re too dumb, to go through them in detail.

 

Diagnosis: It is, at least, fair to say that Gosar lacks “the intellect, character or maturity to be in that leadership role” and is an “incompetent” “sociopath”, but the descriptions doesn’t seem quite sufficient to characterize this rage-and-confusion-fuelled, groyper-affiliated blabbermouth, gohmert and fake news dispenser. We’ll accept submissions for better characterizations.

#2924: Sebastian Gorka

Sebastian Lukács Gorka is a British-Hungarian-American media host and commentator currently affiliated with Salem Radio Network and NewsMax TV, a self-declared alpha male, paranoid conspiracy theorist, and, at various points, a US government official: Gorka served as deputy assistant to the president for seven months in the first Trump administration, and is currently deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism. And though Gorka might look, on paper, to be formally qualified for his current position, his actual qualifications have been … questioned, even by his own PhD advisor. For the Trump administration, however, what mattered and matters, more than his actual expertise, is Gorka’s commitment to MAGA in general and Trump in particular: after the 2016 election, Gorka claimed that Trump’s victory was proof that God exists, pointing out e.g. that whereas Obama was a great divider of the nation, Trump is a uniter. He is also affiliated with and a supporter of various Hungarian far-right and pro-fascist organizations (his career in Hungary is recounted here).

 

Beyond his anti-Islam views (just moderate enough for John Guandolo), and speculations whether Gorka was in fact a radical Islamist plant), Gorka is perhaps most noted for his vigorous propagation of Stop the Steal-related conspiracy theories and misinformation in the wake of (and prior to) the 2020 election, which also ultimately got him permanently banned from YouTube in 2021.And during the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, Gorka used Twitter to cheer on the rioters in real time. His Twitter record would make it somewhat difficult to follow other rightwingers inpushing false-flag conspiracy theories about the insurrection attempt, for it isn’t like Gorka doesn’t have a history of trying to push false-flag conspiracy theories: He suggested, for instance, that the 2017 bombing of the Dar Al-Farooq Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, might “have been propagated by the left.” At least he has dismissed QAnon … despite having also promoted QAnon-produced conspiracy theories.

 

His views on how to deal with sexual harassment are worth noting for future reference.

 

Diagnosis: Far from the craziest loon to grace the various Trump administrations, which says very little about Gorka. Heartily deserving of an entry here.

#2923: Steve Goreham

Steve Goreham is executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America (CSCA), a group of people who try to argue there is no evidence that global warming is man-made or will be a crisis, and which is affiliated with the denialist (for money) organization the Heartland Institute. The CSCA is a fine example of an astroturf organization; it is a member of the well-funded climate change denialist Web of Deceit, and was for instance among the groups that in 2018 signed on to an open letter asking President Trump to ignore criticisms of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. There is a good resource on the group here.

 

A self-declared “researcher on energy and environmental issues”, Goreham himself is, predictably, not a climate scientist (his degree is in electrical engineering), and his audiences are, predictably, those who don’t quite recognize the difference between researcher and blogger & columnist for climate-denialist organizations. He’s regularly described as a “climate change expert”, however, by people and groups that like his conclusions (and he gets invited a lot by such people and groups). For instance, Goreham was one of the signatories to a petition organized by Richard Lindzen of the Cato Institute urging President Trump to pull the US out of the United Nations international convention on climate change (UNFCCC); according to Lindzen, “more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals from around the world have signed the petition below.” Goreham’s signature is telling enough; Lindzen’s list contained, entirely predictably, only a handful of signatories who could be considered remotely qualified or eminent on anything, and none in the field of climate science; rather, it contained plenty og individuals who, for various reasons, were “interested in climate”. Goreham is also the author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic, which baldfacedly and falsely asserts that “the science clearly shows that global warming is due to natural causes, despite the tidal wave of world belief in man-made climate change”.

 

And yes, his arguments are usually centered on familiar denialist lies and talking points (like this one), such as the eminently silly claim that there’s been no warming since 1998, that Antarctica is actually gaining ice, or that warmer weather is actually good for us. Meanwhile, he laments how SUV owners and power company officials are treated like witches were in the Middle Ages.

 

There is a decent Steve Goreham resource here. 

 

Diagnosis: Professional astroturf activist and denialist, and he seems to be good at it. His career opportunities seem endless these days.

#2922: Rebecca Gordon

Rebecca Gordon is an experienced and popular … astrologist, and the author of Your Body and the Stars: The Zodiac as Your Wellness Guide. So yes: Gordon is completely and utterly unchained by anything resembling reality, and her self-help ramblings are a chaotic mess of fuzzy New Age woo, category mistakes and pseudoscientific nonsense. However, in that mess of delusions, there is at least a discernible line of ideas that to some extent gives her work a personal touch: Gordon thinks that there is a direct link between horoscopes and health:

 

“Well, we all have seen the drawing of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci…The human body is actually shaped like a five-pointed star, with a head, two arms, two legs. And you also may have seen the drawing of the Zodiac Man, where you see Aries ruling the head, the first sign of the zodiac, Pisces ruling the feet, and all of the other body parts correlating to different zodiac signs. So the point is that your zodiac sign doesn’t just govern personality traits, and all of the zodiac signs live within you, and this is really about balancing all of the signs within your body.”

 

What it would mean for a ‘zodiac sign’ to ‘live within your body’ is probably not a question you should bother asking her. But yes, the idea is that the Vitruvian Man vaguely resembles a drawing of Zodiac Man, therefore astrological signs determine the health of various body parts. At least that’s what passes for reasoning in Gordon’s circles.

 

And apparently those circles are large enough to have drawn the attention of the producers of the show of America’s favorite charlatan and pseudoscientific grifter, Dr. Oz. So yes, back in 2018 Gordon was hosted by Dr. Oz, where she also gave a public demonstration of her insights: For instance, Oz is a Gemini, and according to Gordon, Gemini rules the hands and the arms, as well as the communication, so it makes sense that Dr. Oz is a surgeon and that he hosts a talk show. How such meaningless blather can be operationalized in a medical setting (ot what qualifies as making sense to Gordon) was of course left unexplained. Also, Tauruses, as evidenced by the “neck of the bull” can easily get too stuck in life and also “get a stiff neck literally.” Is it impressive that Oz managed to keep a straight face through the presentation?

 

Fortunately – since star signs are connected to health – you can also “strengthen your star sign”. Gordon doesn’t quite explain exactly what that means, but apparently it involves standing on one foot and using a Neti pot.

 

Diagnosis: Abysmal nonsense of the kind that would be laughed out of even the remotest hamlet in the darkest of medieval times. But a lot of people listen, even today, and those people are scary.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2921: Maurice Gordon

And just for a brief, humorous respite between all the toxic sludge (well, this one’s toxic, too, but in a rather helpless way): Rev. Maurice Gordon of Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver received some attention back in 2004 for posting a church sign saying “Jews killed the Lord Jesus” to remind his followers that … well, according to Gordon, the message wasn’t hateful: “It would be hateful if it pointed at anybody alive today. But this has been part of the record for 2,000 years.” His response raises the obvious follow-up question “what, then, was the point of putting up the sign?” According to Gordon, the point was to encourage people to read the Bible. Well, then.

 

Apparently, Gordon’s various signs condemning homosexuality, extramarital sex and abortion had been courting controversy for a while in the Denver area.

 

Diagnosis: Very possibly dead (he was elderly back in 2004). It wouldn’t make much difference to his current level of influence, as far as we can tell.

#2920: Garry Gordon

Shaini Candace Goodwin, the “Dove of Oneness”, graduate of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment and Internet Queen of the cult of NESARA, is dead, though the cult’s offspring and heir is very much alive. And though Garry Gordon is less flamboyant, he isn’t really that much less of a loon (and we just assume he’s still around – he’s been in the game for a while).

 

So Gordon, an actual MD, is former president of the American Academy of Medical Preventics (subsequently called the American College of Advancement in Medicine), a group of doctors who practice and promote chelation therapy for all sorts of ailments for which it is demonstrably useless and dangerous. He has also been medical director and board chairman of Mineralab, a large commercial hair analysis laboratory, and director of a subsidiary of that company selling useless nutritional products. Not the least, Gordon has been among the leaders of the National Health Federation (NHF), a group of promoters of quackery (like Kurt Donsbach and Bernard Jensen) and questionable methods that engage in lobbying campaigns and many other activities promoting quackery and deregulation of questionable methods. The NHF seems to have been particularly active from the 1970s through the 1990s, and was partially responsible for popularizing the idea of “health freedom” as a strategy to promote denialism and woo. Gordon is also Founder/President of the International College of Advanced Longevity (ICALM) and Board Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the National Foundation for Alternative Medicine, as well as Consultant for Longevity Plus, LLC, a nutritional supplement company based in Payson, Arizona, “where he is responsible for designing effective, natural, non-toxic alternative supplements for the treatment of every disease known to man”, a description that really should need no further comment.

 

Gordon is, in fact, one of the self-styled “fathers of the chelation therapy movement”, and has promoted chelation therapy for a range of ailments for which chelation therapy does nothing and is actively dangerous. Indeed, his 1982 book on the topic (with Morton Walker, one of the main proponents of the infamous Gerson therapy), The Chelation Answer: How to Prevent Hardening of the Arteries and Rejuvenate Your Cardiovascular System, has long been a go-to reference for proponents of chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease; needless to say, it is not a scientific study. Gordon is also the author of a couple of sequels, including the 2004 exercise in quackery and quackery-related pseudoscience and fallacies The Omega-3 Miracle: The Icelandic Longevity Secret That Offers Super Protection Against Heart Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, Arthritis, Premature Aging, and Deadly Inflammation.

 

Interestingly, Gordon has also made appearances as a member of the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners for Arizona – almost as if to emphasize how unconcerned he is with the restraints to marketing creativity provided by care for evidence and accountability – where he was e.g. making excuses for homeopathic pratictioners whose patients had died while being subjected to nonsense woo treatment regimes.

 

Diagnosis: A long career of pushing any health-related advice (and lobbying for the removal of legal barriers to pushing such advice without consequences) that can be turned into money and that he knows, or should know, are completely worthless, to people who are often in desperate situations. We don’t know … What would you call that?

 

Hat-tip: Quackwatch

#2919: Joe Gooding

Maybe too minor to bother, but Joe Gooding is an internet cesspool operator, conspiracy theorist and general troll. On his website, Gooding covers most of the standard anti-vaccine tropes, or more accurately: He posts coverage by other anti-vaccine activists of standard anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories. Otherwise, Gooding is primarily a tireless originator of smear campaigns against scientists and public health advocates – even though there is little new or original on Gooding’s site, he is somewhat notable for his commitment to the pharma shill gambit; anyone speaking out in favor of vaccines or criticizing anti-vaccine misinformation is, as Gooding sees it, necessarily on the Big Pharma payroll, and he is therefore justified in posting your (poorly manipulated) picture, start hashtags, and encourage associates and other antivaxxers to attack and harass you. (A bit like we do with loons – apart from encouraging anyone to harass anyone – but we are right and Gooding is deluded.) Gooding is also, like many antivaxxers, under the delusion that he is not anti-vaccine (“the Pro-Forced Vaccine element [who would that be, precisely?] has attempted to marginalize the Vaccine Choice supporters with the completely made up term ‘Anti-Vax’”) but fair and balanced (“In an attempt to be balanced, I have created the term “Vax Shill” (#vaxshill) and will articulate it here”)

 

Diagnosis: A minor figure, but an active and angry one. If you ever come across him in any context, you can safely ignore anything he has to say.

#2918: Jay Goodbinder

Ah, yes. Whenever a new and powerful scientific concept is introduced, in particular one that requires a bit of knowledge and expertise to fully grasp, grifters will be there to apply it in their marketing materials as a substitute for less-marketable terms like ‘magic’. So it was with proponents of quackery and ‘quantum physics’, and so it has been for a while with ‘nano’ – most reasonable people would presumably have a feeling of that’s not quite how it works but probably not enough knowledge of the topic to be able to precisely identify what’s wrong with the bullshit. ‘Epigenetics’ is another example of a scientific expression that has been mangled and misused by proponents of quackery and woo since the term was introduced to make their nonsense sound as if it had anything to do with science to the uninformed when they try to handwave how you get from their miracle treatment regimes to a state of health.

 

There are numerous examples – some are mentioned here –and the case of Jay Goodbinder is just one of many. Goodbinder – “ND, DC, DABCI” – offers his advice and recommendations at the chiropractic Epigenetics Healing Center (yeah, they’ve gone all in), where he “specializes in Epigenetic science to help you not express disease and be able to function at your best with functional medicine therapies, Epigenetics, nutrient breathing treatments [?], and lifestyle counseling”. This has, needless to say, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with epigenetics, and we can’t help but note that Goodbinder doesn’t actually say that he has any expertise in epigenetics but in “Epigenetic science”, whatever that means – it’s hard not to suspect that some legal considerations played a role in his choice.

 

Diagnosis: It would be easy to dismiss this bullshit as pure fraud, but we have to leave the possibility open that Goodbinder is also genuinely confused about epigenetics or the validity of his treatments. Those two options are not mutually exclusive, of course.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased medicine

#2917: Mike Gonzalez

Mike Gonzales is as senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, leader (former?) of the South Carolina Pastors Alliance, and member of the 1776 Commission. Beyond that, we could frankly not be bothereed to investigate Gonzalez’s CV or history of silliness in detail, but his affilitions provide ample justification for giving him an entry here. Gonzalez is the kind of person who daftly likens resisting identity politics to defecting from Hitler (in 2013, Gonzalez blamed the Boston Marathon bombings at least in part on what he perceived as a new trend in American schools of teaching “multiculturalism and diversity”), and who claims that Democrats (Obama in particular) are actively trying to use the promise of government handouts to replace freedom-loving Americans with government-worshiping Latino immigrants in a deliberate effort to combat freedom and liberty. Yes, that kind. He has also written a book, The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free, which we honestly admit that we have failed to find the time or inclination to read.

 

Gonzalez is also a member of the Victor Orbán fan club, characterizing Orbán as a “maverick” and supporting Orbán’s alleged project to “replace the shipwreck of liberal democracy by building 21st Century Christian democracy.” At least we are reasonably confident that the present Mike Gonzalez is not identical with the Michael Gonzalez who co-authored the intensely quacky book I have cancer, What should I do: Your orthomolecular guide for cancer management with MegaVitaminMan Andrew Saul.

 

Diagnosis: A powerful figure in a powerful organization. Indeed, the chaotic blend of paranoia and conspiracy theories that is the MAGA movement is largely centered on the goals and ideas that are – admittedly often somewhat more explicitly and coherently – formulated by the Heritage Foundation. Dangerous.

#2916: Mark Gonzalez

Mark Gonzales is a fundie conspiracy theorist, head of the U.S. Hispanic Action Network and pseudohistorian David Barton’s National Black Robe Regiment project, and, during Trump’s first term as president, affiliate of Frank Amedia’s dominionist preacher network POTUS Shield. Gonzalez was, like the rest of that group, pretty explicit about its commitment to Christian nationalism: “America belongs to you. America belongs to you. America belongs to you. … God, you founded us on a Judeo-Christian ethos, and we’re declaring that yes, America is and will be a Christian nation, like never before”.

 

Gonzalez is certainly not averse to engaging in rather intense historical revisionism: He has, for instance, tried to argue that it was pastors in the “Black Robe Regiment,” not the military, that won the American Revolution: “It wasn’t the American army, it was the church that did that,” asserted Gonzalez, a claim that would be hilariously stupid and false if it weren’t for the fact that none of this is funny anymore. For the record, the ‘Black Robe Regiment’ is an invention of David Barton’s as a term for whatever pastors simply declared support for independence. (Also note that it is unclear exactly how Gonzalez’s group is related to the Black Robe Regiment group of Christian nationalists founded by William Cook and boosted by Michael Flynn; at least there is a clear and signifiant overlap in ideas and ideology.) Gonzalez has also claimed that “two-thirds of our Founding Fathers were ordained ministers” who founded the Constitution and Bill of Rights “on scriptures straight out of the Bible”; neither claim has, needless to say, the remotest connection to reality, but for fans of Gonzalez, the idea of grounding your claims in facts is precisely the kind of elitist anti-American agenda they are opposing.

 

The second core tenet for the POTUS Shield, beyond Christian nationalism, was the idea that Trump is God’s representative on Earth – Gonzalez would lead prayers asking God to expose and defeat Trump's critics, and issuing warnings that those who oppose the president are really opposing God (“God, we are seeing you expose the shenanigans of Satan that are trying to hold this country down, that are trying to get in the way of us moving forward as a country, as an administration, [under] the president”). In particular, Gonzalez prayed for God to expose what he convinced himself was the rampant corruption in the FBI, the CIA, and (in particular) the Mueller investigation that “the enemy is trying to use and connive” to bring down Trump. “The deep state will be exposed,” Gonzales proclaimed, because darn all those checks and balances; Trump’s opponents are “not messing with a man, with an administration, they are not messing with a country, they are messing with the hand of Almighty God”.

 

Gonzalez is also the kind of preacher who likes to dabble in meteorology, pointing out how various storms, blizzards and droughts correlate (they don’t) with political and legal decisions he doesn’t fancy. Indeed, he is sufficiently invested in such ideas to expect e.g. the Supreme Court to lend them weight (“We fear that the judgment of Almighty God, which is designed to be merciful, and the wrath of God, will come upon the United States of America. God hates [not really, apparently] the shedding of innocent blood”) when deciding issues pertaining to the Constitution.

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, they used to be hilarious, but not really anymore. In any case, Gonzalez embodies your by now familiar combination of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism with a distinctly post-modernist conception of facts. Completely insane, of course, but these days that seems to be an advantage rather than an obstacle to gaining power and influence.

#2915: Jorge Gonzalez et al.

This is a bit of a placeholder entry. A topic of concern that received some attention (but not much) in the run-up to the 2020 election (and after) was the vast amount of conspiracy mongering, hate, denialism and QAnon nonsense – a “barrage of false, often racist and anti-Semitic, narratives” and claims that a vote for Biden would mean supporting a violent takeover of the US and giving the country away to “Jews and Blacks” – that was produced targeting Spanish-speaking residents on radio and social media; both misinformation produced by Americans and misinformation from abroad (including from the Colombia-based Informativo G24). Now, we don’t speak Spanish ourselves, and are therefore unable to assess the situation in anything resembling detail, but it would be neglectful of us not to mention the issue and how scary and destabilizing it actually is.

 

Much of the disinformation was and is anonymous and of unclear origin, but known purveors of insanity include Miami businessman Jorge Gonzalez, who in August 2020 read (without giving his name or any information about where it came from) a 16-minute unhinged script about the dangers of Black immigrants, women and Jewish people (the one claiming that a Biden victory would mean that the US would fall into a dictatorship led by “Jews and Blacks” as well as claiming that Biden was leading a political revolution “directed by racial minorities, atheists and anti-Christians” and supports killing newborn babies) on Radio Caracol – the station’s executives apologized afterwards, but the channel remains infamous for pushing wingnut conspiracy theories and hosting deranged dingbats like Colombian conspiracy theorist Omar Bula-Escobar and, in particular, his paranoid delusions about George Soros. We have no real clear idea of how influential or prominent Gonzalez really is, however.

 

Then there is Carinés Moncada, a host of Miami’s Actualidad radio, who e.g. tried to argue that the Black Lives Matter movement is inspired by “dark spirits” and warned listeners who considered voting for Biden that “If someone knocks on your door tomorrow, the way they’re knocking in other states, if they knock on your door, and they want to rob you, and they want to burn you, don’t complain. Don’t complain because that’s what you’re voting for. For anarchy, for rapes, for attacks.” Meanwhile, Puerto Rican-born pastor and QAnon-promoter Melvin Moya circulated doctored videos of Biden with titles like “Signs of pedophilia”. There are plenty of others, but as mentioned: We don’t really have anything resembling an overview.

 

Diagnosis: Terrifying, and the realization that we can’t even figure out what’s going on at any level of detail – we’re subject merely to glimpses of the horror and harm – lends the whole situation a kind of Cthuluesque quality.

#2914: Beatrice Golomb

Beatrice Golomb is professor of medicine at UC San Diego and head of the Golomb Research Group, which is “currently working with Gulf War Veterans, as well as with people experiencing side effects from fluoroquinolone antibiotics, statin cholesterol lowering medications, radiofrequency radiation (and other non-ionizing radiation) – e.g., from cell towers or smart meters, and persons affected by the toxin release following the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio”. Now, Golomb does undoubtedly have a real research background, and has received legitimate attention for her work on Gulf War illnesses and syndromes (which we don’t feel qualified to assess). She is, however, perhaps even more famous for being one of the main proponents of the mystery microwave weapon hypothesis about the cause of the “mystery illness” afflicting American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba and China (the Havana syndrome), claiming that the symptoms “strongly match known effects of pulsed radiofrequency/microwave electromagnetic (RF/MW) radiation”. That hypothesis does not have significant support in the scientific community, but it is hardly surprising that Golomb immediately plumped for that one: Golomb is a proponent of electromagnetic hypersensitivity and the discredited idea that cell phone radiation causes cancer and all sorts of illnesses – in fact, Golomb is on the “scientific advisory board” of the group Physicians for Safe Technology, one of the main proponents of that idea and associated conspiracy theories – and the mystery microwave weapon hypothesis would be a flashy way of drawing attention and motivate public support (blame China and/or Russia!) for the idea; indeed, Golomb herself is clear that “her research draws attention to a larger population of people who are affected by similar health problems” due to cell phones, smart meters and other types of radiation. She was also a signatory to a letter urging the FDA to retract their thorough report on radiofrequency radiation and cancer because they, the signatories, didn’t like the conclusions.

 

Now, we haven’t really attempted to compile any kind of comprehensive CV for Golomb. She does sometimes say reasonable-sounding things about various issues, but her name also has a remarkable tendency to pop up in different contexts where pseudoscience is promulgated. She is a go-to authority not just for Covid-is-caused-by-5G conspiracy theorists (she should, in fairness, probably not be blamed for that) but for statin denialists. And although one should be careful with assigning guilt by association, constantly being caught in the company of and carrying out joint efforts with people like David Perlmutter, Stephen Sinatra and Devra Davis is not a good look. Back in 2012, Golomb also received some media attention for her claim that eating chocolate more frequently is associated with a lower BMI – though the study authors were careful to mention “correlation”, they were nevertheless quick to emphasize that  “the association could be causal” – based on one of the most laughably shoddy studies ever conducted.

 

Diagnosis: A bit unclear, but she has been and is involved in a lot of pseudoscience- and conspiracy-theory-adjacent nonsense, and although she is hardly a star of the woo and pseudoscience circuses, her name pops up in such contexts with pretty remarkable frequency.

#2913: Stuart Goldman

Stuart Goldman is an author and journalist whose work has been wide-ranging and had quite a bit of impact. But Goldman is also a columnist for the WND, and a thoroughly silly one at that. Goldman is very paranoid about the works of demons and black magic, which he tends to see … a lot of places – America is under attack by them, everywhere and at all levels. For instance, in 2014, he concluded that Isla Vista, California, is infested with demons (“[C]an I make a case here for my statement that the little beach own of Isla Vista is, in fact, infested by demons? I think I can”) and that crime, including murder, occuring in the area is a result of the city’s “occultism” and “aura of evil that seems to fill the air so thick that I literally become sick to my stomach.” Another example is the popularity of stories about UFOs and alien abductions:

 

“... the unpleasant fact is, 50,000 people can not be lying. Something is here – probing people, inspecting them, and planting thoughts in their minds, manipulating their bodies –treating them, in a sense, like so many cattle. Is it all simply a gigantic cosmic joke, or is there a more sinister plot at hand? Are we seeing the formation of a new and highly destructive cult, one whose view posits the elimination (the New Agers call it ‘spiritual cleansing’ of people who are ‘unfit’ to exist in the coming New World? Are there really demonic entities hovering about, searching for likely candidates whose brains and minds they can invade, filling them full of fairy tales and lies – fattening them for the kill?”

 

But yeah, Goldman is in particular concerned with New Agers (so are we, but for different reasons) and Wiccans, and he has some … outré ideas about what such people believe and desire. As evidence for his claims, he cites more or less relevant passages from the Bible. So it goes.

 

Diagnosis: You can find plenty of examples of Goldman’s claims and obsessions in the WND archives, but we sort of recommend against it. Otherwise, he must be pretty old by now (there are no recents columns). Hopefully retired.