#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.