#1927: John Mangopoulos

John Mangopoulos is a rightwing extremist and alt-right activist from Lansing, Michigan, who currently hosts the show “Battle of Ideas” and once ran for U.S. Congress against Debbie Stabenow and Susan Grimes Munsell; Mangopoulos was endorsed by the Reform Party.

He is probably most famous as a men’s rights activist who claims that divorce is the “number one” problem facing America, a problem he blames on women and the government – divorce is “government subsidizing women to break up families”. He dismisses accusations of “domestic violence” as a legal tool routinely used by corrupt lawyers and social workers to ensure that custody is awarded to women; with regard to domestic violence, women lie about 97 percent of the time, says Mangopoulos, relying primarily on his own ass as source for the figure. By contrast, women are apparently safest when they are married with a family, and single mothers are committing child abuse, partially because “9 out every 10 single American women are sluts.” According to Mangopoulos, the definition of “date rape” is “whore’s remorse.”

Another group that commits child abuse is the gays, and Mangopoulos claims that homosexuals account for nearly half of all molestations even though homosexuals themselves make up roughly 2 percent of the population. This is … not correct. He has even coined a word, “homonausia”, which expresses the “true feelings of normal people toward homosexuality and homosexualism,” since to bigoted lunatics like Mangopoulos it is inconceivable that other people may be less bigoted than himself without having mental health problems. Here is Mangopoulos thanking God for sending Katrina to New Orleans to get rid of the gays, and claiming that the people of New Orleans are lucky he’s not God, since he would have done far more than sending a simple hurricane.

Mangopoulos has also long been firmly opposed to public schools, which he claims are nothing but anti-christian liberal propaganda factories – he refers, for instance, to Michigan State University as “Michigan State Perversity.”

He also brags about having been engaged with imaginary bogeymen in the imaginary war on Christmas long before “O’Reilly made it fashionable”. Mangopoulos likes to emphasize the inclusivity of Christmas celebrations as compared to the exclusivity of Kwanzaa, which he calls a phony, made up, “holiday” and the antithesis to Christmas. The main reason Christmas celebrations are more inclusive is because he likes Christmas celebrations and has no interest in any alternatives, therefore they exclude him. He has offered Merry Christmas greetings to Jews, Muslims, and others to make his point, which surely offends them very deeply (even beyond the rather obvious fact that Mangopoulos isn’t really wishing them merry anything, of course).

Trivia: On his youtube videos, commenters regularly mistake him for Stephen Colbert’s impersonation of rightwing crazies (Mangopoulos sort of does look a bit like Colbert), making the comment sections mildly amusing. Indeed, since the idea was raised, I am not completely sure myself that Mangopoulos isn’t just a Colbert persona.

Diagnosis: With the small caveat that he might be a poe, Mangopoulos is definitely one of the most furiously confused, bigoted religious extremists in the US. He seems to be pretty obscure, however.

#1926: Neil Mammen

Neil Mammen is a wingnut and author of the elegantly titled Jesus is involved in politics!: Why aren’t you? Why isn’t your church? The Only Way to a Happier, Healthier, Safer and Mutually Prosperous America and 40 Days Toward a More Godly Nation: Why Only Churches Can Lead Us to a Happier, Healthier, Safer and Mutually Prosperous America (both published by the hate group the American Family Association). Mammen is the kind of guy who thinks people with political power ought to be religious fundamentalists, and is very concerned about politicians he perceives not to be true Christians™, such as Obama (so, the definition of “true Christian” is someone who agrees with Mammen on politics, in which case it follows by definition that only true Christians can govern the way Mammen would like): “… anytime you get somebody who disdains law [like Obama], doesn’t care for the law, who hates the Lawgiver and doesn’t think he deserves his sceptre, doesn’t think that the law giver knows what’s good for you, for us, then naturally you’re going to get pain, suffering, disease and death.” Note that, according to Mammen, only Christianity™ is based on reason and rationality; all other religions are based on faith.

He has also written about how to protect your kids in college, where they may be exposed to facts that contradict what their pastors taught them and discover that people of different faiths and political convictions aren’t necessary pawns of Satan.

Diagnosis: Wingnut fundie; not one of the central characters in the crazy movement, but probably not anyone you should listen to nonetheless.

#1925: Steve Malzberg

We can’t be bothered with more than a brief note on this one. Steve Malzberg is the host of The Steve Malzberg Show, a cable news and opinion show on Newsmax TV, and a standard wingnut of the kind who claims that Obama was disturbingly like a tyrant for implementing Obamacare, and speculates that Hillary was gravely ill during her campaign because she wore “a long coat with black pants” while addressing an event in Nantucket. For the most part, however, Malzberg’s contribution to lunacy consists of giving opportunities for other wingnuts, including truthers, racists, conspiracy theorists and rambling lunatics to say crazy things. As a good wingnut himself, Malzberg has little time for science, and is, of course, a climate change denialist (that Obama is not, is further evidence that he was in danger of becoming a tyrant). In 2014, Malzberg himself argued that Honeymaid was in danger of incurring the wrath of 95% of the population in virtue of an ad featuring a homosexual couple, and in 2013 that the show “Everybody Loves Raymond” is a tool of the feminists.

Malzberg has also urged wingnuts to create conservative alternatives to popular websites that he thinks have a liberal bias: “We need a conservative Facebook, a conservative Google, a conservative Twitter,” said Malzberg; presumably he had in mind something like this.

He has also toyed with anti-vaccine ideas (for instance when defending Rand Paul’s anti-vaccine comments, and proudly described his reluctance to get his teenage son an HPV vaccine because he had bought into conspiracy theories to the effect that the HPV vaccine is dangerous (thoroughly debunked). Said Malzberg, “I’m not going to vaccinate my kid so that some female won’t get cervical cancer maybe when she’s 60 years old.”

Here Malzberg ties the Ferguson protests to Islamic extremism in the Middle East, accusing the Obama administration of sympathizing with the “grievances” of both Hamas and the Ferguson protestors, creating, as Malzberg put it, “a bizarre world of sorts.” The word “bizarre” is certainly appropriate.

Diagnosis: Wingnut and conspiracy theorist, though his primary role is to broadcast batshit insanity dropping from the mouths of other lunatics. As such, he must – as an enabler of intellectual shit shoveling – be counted as a significant threat to society and civilization.