#1940: Noreen Martin

Few denialists are crazier – or more aggressively lunatic – than the HIV denialists, those who don’t think HIV is the cause of AIDS, a notion roughly as insane and illustrative of serious delusion as the notion that bacteria and viruses are not causative agents of infectious disease (indeed, and not surprisingly, the proponents of these two ideas overlap).

Noreen Martin is an HIV denialist. She is also AIDS positive, but insists that her AIDS is not viral: “My own experience with AIDS was due to a lifetime of negative health issues. When extremely sick, I took the medicines, ate healthy, took over 50 supplements a day, and had a good attitude. So, within a few months I was as good as new.” Indeed, Martin used ARVs (antiretrovirals) to get back to health, and admits that when she stopped using them, her health deteriorated: “my fatigue slowly came back, my CD4s dipped and my viral load increased to over 3 million. Nevertheless, I never placed much stock in either of these numbers because after extensive research, I realized that neither were related to health. It was other conditions that caused the problems and the ARVs were powerful enough to keep them at bay.”

Of course, reading testimonials like this, I suspect most readers would be somewhat concerned: Martin’s state of mind is not of the sort we ought to ridicule and call out in an Encyclopedia like this. Thing is, though, that Martin is pretty vocal about her denialism, and may potentially cause real harm; she’s even gotten her bullshit published on the website Opposing Views (which is admittedly denialist friendly insofar as it is premised on the balance fallacy). In fact, her OV piece, “Other Ways to Treat Cancer Besides Chemotherapy & Radiation”, is primarily focused on cancer quackery. According to Martin, “[c]ancer is a most unnecessary disease that is not created by Nature but by man.” Martin apparently knows preciously little about cancer – and nature – but nevertheless goes on to claim that “[s]ince modern medicine does not offer much hope for incurable diseases [which, you may note, is true by the definition of “incurable”], it is time that we take back our power over disease, chart our own course, and take responsibility for our destiny.” Ah, yes – this is an important premise for any quackery: the get-out-of-jail-card premise that allow promoters of quackery to blame the victim when their advice fails and say that you just didn’t try hard enough. In any case, Martin goes on to blame cancer on – you guessed it – The Toxins. Evidence? “A century ago, 1 in 33 developed cancer. Now, 1 in 3 persons will develop cancer in one’s lifetime. What has changed to cause this significant increase? The main answer can be stated in one word, toxins, pure and simple.” Of course, the real reason for the increase is – demonstrably – that people live longer and don’t die of the diseases they did in 1900. Nor does Martin – entirely unsurprisingly – specify which toxins she is talking about.

You can read a deconstruction of the rest of her misinformation here; most of it is pretty standard cancer quackery fare, from the “Ulrich Abel gambit” to the “two percent gambit” about chemotherapy to quoting Hardin Jones about how cancer “patients are as well or better off untreated” – from 1950(!).

Martin is also the proud author of two self-published books: AIDS: They Suckered Us and Get A Life – Free From Toxins and Disease. She has amply demonstrated that she has no clue about either topic, but plenty of misinformation to spread.

Diagnosis: Completely delusional and utterly crazy conspiracy theorist and quackery promoter. Avoid at all costs.

#1938: Barry Martin

Barry Martin is the owner of the blog jfkspeaks.blogspot.com, where he channels the spirit of former president J.F. Kennedy: “The information on this blog was given to me by a spirit, President John F. Kennedy,” says Martin. Apparently post-demise Kennedy has taken a keen interest in New Age woo, and freely relates to mr. Martin, through automatic writing, information for instance “concerning our friends, the Pleiadians and dolphins.” The Pleiadians  – we’ve had ample opportunity to deal with them already – are humanoid aliens that come from the stellar systems surrounding the Pleiades stars. Dolphins, according to Kennedy/Martin, are “a gift from the Pleiadians”. Sayeth Kennedy: “The Pleiadian realms, the planets are roughly about 90 to 95 percent water. Their atmosphere is the same type as on earth, although the light there is a bit hazier. The sky is a bit hazier in some places. They brought dolphins to our world. Dolphins are Pleiadians. Man will communicate and interact freely with dolphins much more one day. Just as dogs inhabit the earth as pets, dolphins will be the new pet of man, as the world after the Shift will be about 87 percent water with many inlets and waterways and much sea water.” One may lament that JFK seems to have lost some of his eloquence after passing over to the spirit realm, but death generally tends affect people’s ability to come up with memorable turns of the phrase.

Apparently JFK was no fan of Clinton. Regarding the 2016 election, JFK said that “Mrs. Clinton will most likely win the 2016 Election. This is not something that makes us happy. She is a member of the New World Order.” There is also plenty of stuff about Atlantis and aliens and ancient technology and suchlike, and Kennedy helpfully tells us that under some ranch in the American southwest, “one would find the remains of crystal generators that powered whole cities, whole continents, nations and civilizations. With the power of crystals, this would enable mankind to power cities with a smaller output of electricity than mankind uses. This is a different type of electricity and is truly peaceful. It’s a form of clean fusion.” Kennedy’s grasp of the concepts electricity and fusion seems somewhat tenuous. Perhaps this was Robert Kennedy. It seems that Martin occasionally channels Bobby Kennedy as well.

In any case, everything will ostensibly culminate in “the Revelation of life everywhere in the universes,” which “is going to happen in 2018 we believe.” (It is not entirely clear who “we” refers to.) Also, there will be a major Shift that “will include major seismic and weather events, starting in about 2018 and lasting well into the 2020’s. The world will survive these events, but look much different geographically. The planet will be about 83% water and the population will be much lower.” It’s a poor prophet who can’t give us a proper Armageddon. Apparently the Shift will bring back Martin Luther King, only in this reincarnation he “will be a white man”. So it goes.

We assume that our Barry Martin is a different character – and way less hateful – than Monroe School District superintendent Barry Martin, who thinks books featuring gay characters are unsuitable for children.

Diagnosis: Mostly harmless, and one of the characters that frankly provide some color (mostly teal and pastels) to the Internet. (The other Barry Martin, superintendent, is a different matter.)

#1937: Abby Martin

Abigail Suzanne “Abby” Martin is an “investigative journalist”, presenter of The Empire Files, and formerly host of Breaking the Set on the Russian network RT America. A relatively well-known figure, Martin has been heavily involved in various foundations and “documentaries”. She also claims to have grown weary of viewing politics on a Left–Right axis, but what she offers is nevertheless more or less a liberal version of Breitbart-style conspiracy mongering.

She was long a 9/11 truther who labeled the official story as government “propaganda”, saying of the attacks that “I’ve researched it for three years and every single thing that I uncover solidifies my belief that it was an inside job and that our government was complicit in what happened,” where “research” in this context means trawling conspiracy theory websites guided by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.

In fairness, she has said that she “no longer subscribes” to the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, but even if she doesn’t there are plenty of conspiracy theories she does subscribe to. For instance, Martin is an important promoter of conspiracies surrounding water fluoridation, and devoted at least one Breaking the Set show to the topic. Like so many fluoridation conspiracy loons, Martin invoked studies showing the dangers of fluoridation, neglecting completely the fact that those studies employed dosages many times as high as would be physically possible for humans to get exposed to through water. But as most chemically illiterate people, the rather fundamental idea that the dose makes the poison remains beyond Martin’s grasp. She also ran various conspiracy theories targeted at Monsanto, the big bogeyman of liberal conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Diagnosis: Often described as a spokesperson for the Millenial generation, Martin is probably at best a specimen of Millenial conspiracy mongerers. Addle-brained fop. Don’t listen to her.