#2125: Bobby Powell

The Truth Is Viral is a Michigan-based, far-right, ultraparanoid conspiracy theory group whose Publisher and Editor-in-Chief is one Bobby Powell, a frighteningly paranoid wingnut tinfoil hatter if there ever was one. Powell is primarily afraid of the powers-that-be, such as the UN, whose vehicles Powell reports having seen (third-hand) driving to army bases in Michigan as part of some undisclosed, nefarious ploy to take over Michigan and enslave its citizens on behalf of the UN: the vehicles in question, which were delivered to Camp Grayling – “long suspected of being a major FEMA camp” – were “clearly marked with United Nations insignia,” reported Powell, which sounds like a surprising strategic choice if UN troops (which don’t exist) were really plotting to secretly overtake Michigan.

Apparently the expressed purpose of TTiV (which seems to be mostly a blog and youtube channel) is to “Save Lives and Win Souls for Jesus Christ  in these very last days.” And the website has more or less everything except truth (and virality), at least by way of deranged wingnut conspiracy theories: FBI and the deep state working to overthrow Trump, how (not content with wingnut stock Benghazi nonsense) “Hillary Clinton ordered the murder of Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens in order to cover up her own treasonous weapons deals with Syrian al-Qaeda/ISIS forces”, and how Andrew McCabe planned a “subversive coup” with “FBI agent Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page” – the evidence of the existence of such a plot being Strzok’s and Page’s dislike of Trump and the general law that anyone who dislikes someone plans to assassinate them. That kind.

Diagnosis: Minor figure and probably harmless, but this level of paranoia is surely not good for one’s character, reasoning abilities and the general atmosphere and tone of seasonal family gatherings.

#2124: Bill Posey

William Joseph Posey is the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 8th congressional district, member of the Freedom Caucus and Congress’s resident (main) anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist after the departure of Dan Burton.

Together with Carolyn Maloney, Posey – who has received significant donations from the anti-vaccine movement – sponsored “The Vaccine Safety Study Act”, which would direct the National Institutes of Health to conduct a retrospective study of health outcomes, including autism, of vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated children, and to determine whether exposure to vaccines or vaccine components are associated with autism spectrum disorders, chronic illnesses, or other neurological conditions. The bill should, according to Posey, “bring an answer to this decades-long question.” Of course it won’t, and of course Posey knows that it couldn’t. For, of course, the “decades-long question” has long been settled; there is accordingly no scientific rationale for the suggested studies, in particular since there is no evidence suggesting that the problem exists (but plenty showing it doesn’t) – antivaxx delusions really don’t count. The purpose of the bill was, in other words, not to settle anything but to legitimize antivaxx conspiracy theories by suggesting otherwise. Posey has been pushing similar resolutions for a long time.

He is, however, particularly famous for pushing the utterly debunked CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory (still popular in antivaxx circles) in Congress, attempting to initiate apparently formal investigations, without providing any documentation whatsoever of any wrongdoing to be investigated, for obvious reasons; he claimed to have a bunch of documents, but it quickly became clear that there was nothing interesting in any of them – no whistle to blow, in other words. Posey also suggested that there is – despite near-conclusive evidence to the contrary – a link between vaccines and autism (it is worth pointing out that Posey doesn’t care one whit about autism, however). He has also pushed the Poul Thorsen gambit, which is pretty ridiculous (a Danish coauthor on one of numerous studies showing that vaccines are safe once misused grant money to cover personal expenses; therefore all research showing that vaccines are safe is invalidated). Posey denies being anti-vaccine, however; he just pushes antivaxx conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine legislation.

Now, pseudoscience and conspiracy theorizing rarely come in isolation, and Posey is also a climate change denialist. At a 2018 hearing in the Science, Space and Technology Committee, Posey claimed that climate scientists in the 1970s believed that the Earth was cooling, which is a myth but at least shows what kinds of sources Posey is using to inform his policy decisions. At the hearing Posey expressed skepticism that humans contributed to climate change, asked whether climate change was occurring because carbon dioxide captured in permafrost was now leaking out, and suggested that global warming would be being beneficial (it won’t). “I don’t think anybody disputes that the Earth is getting warmer,” said Posey, but “I think what’s not clear is the exact amount of who caused what, and getting to that is, I think, where we’re trying to go with this committee.” God forbid that the question is left to scientists, who, unlike Posey, have some ineffable agenda. It really isn’t not clear.

He is also consistently opposed to gay rights or legal protection from discrimination. And to top it all, Posey was the sponsor of H.R. 1503 to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 requiring the campaign committee to give documents proving that a candidate for president is actually eligible for the office – yes, if not a birther himself, Posey was one of the major birther conspiracy theory enablers in Congress. He declined to provide documents to disprove rumors about his own past, however.

Diagnosis: Perhaps the leading conspiracy theorist in Congress at the moment, and that says quite a bit. Posey is anti-science and pro-pseudoscience to the core, and if you scratch any denialist position even superficially, a deranged conspiracy theory appears. But Posey also wields quite a lot of influence and power, and though his wild-eyed conspiracy rants still appear to be mostly ignored, he may cause serious damage to civilization. 

#2123: Jim Porter

President of the NRA from 2013 to 2015, James W. Porter II is a charicature of a gun-toting, racist Alabaman landowner, of the kind who refers to the American Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression.

A conspiracy theorist (of course), Porter received some attention for calling President Obama a “fake President” who, according to Porter, planned to use Medicare to create a gun registry. (Conspiracies related to the threat of a federal gun registry have been a scare pushed by the NRA for decades, of course.) In particular, Porter claimed that Medicare enrollees are asked to disclose household gun ownership, which is easily demonstrably false. He also claimed, relying on a wingnut conspiracy theory circulating at the time, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seeking to “kill the Second Amendment at the United Nations” in reference to the US supporting a proposed measure placed before the UN that would regulate global trade in conventional arms, a measure otherwise opposed only by North Korea, Syria and Iran (for obvious reasons). It is worth mentioning that Porter and the NRA were, at the time, consorting with Russian agents, in particular the Russian group Right to Bear Arms, a group deliberately created to get access to influential conservative figures. Porter also called Eric Holder “rabidly anti-American,” accusing him of trying to brainwash the American people into giving up their gun.

As president of the NRA, Porter advocated that civilians should be trained in the use of military weapons for both international and domestic war. 

Diagnosis: Deranged conspiracy theorist, and hence an obvious candidate for leadership positions in the NRA. Reading the above description, I am sure many would think that “hey, these views are pretty mainstream and nothing out of the ordinary,” so it is worth stopping for a moment to think about how deranged they really are.

#2122: Sarah Pope

A.k.a. The healthy home economist

Sarah Pope is a Weston-Price Foundation board member with training in economics and financial management, who offers dangerous health advice and insane conspiracy theories under the description “the healthy home economist”. Pope is an antivaxxer, and recommends that parents avoid all vaccines in favor of homeoprophylaxis and immune boosting diets (it is hard to exaggerate how stupid this is) and that they also avoid the newborn vitamin K shot. Moreover, she is on record telling parents to lie to their pediatricians about giving babies raw milk, since pediatricians have a tendency to be sensible and take a reality-based view on such things and may therefore not support the choice, which goes against Pope’s religious view of the benevolence of all things natural (where “natural” is somewhat nebulously defined to include e.g. raw milk).

She has also argued against anti-D immunoglobulin for the prevention of hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn. The condition is caused by a mismatch in mother-fetal blood type, and the treatment is a safe medical therapy that has saved countless lives (Pope acknowledges a “small risk” – thousands and thousands of dead babies pale in comparison to what really matters for Pope, namely the spiritual purity of your bodily fluids). To make her case, Pope relies on fear-mongering and links to conspiracy websites like whale.to (oh yes, she does). There is a good discussion of her article on the issue and some rather strikingly basic errors here (including things like Pope’s claims that the “shot does work, but only if the immunoglobulin is administered within 72 hours of the trauma that caused the blood mixing in the first place” and “[t]he Rh antibodies from the RhoGam shot hang around in the mother’s bloodstream for up to 12 weeks following the shot” – choose whichever claim sounds scarier; yes, they blatantly contradict each other.) As you’d expect, Pope appeals to Big Pharma conspiracies to explain why doctors and science are wrong on issues like this, as well as outright lying (“anti-D is never given during pregnancy in Europe, only after delivery,” says Pope, since it seems to serve her argument if the claim had any basis in reality, which it doesn’t). Instead of the evils of science and reality, Pope recommends being natural and use semi-randomly selected nutritional supplements to help “tone the uterus”. To ensure that she touches all bases, she aslo manages to end up blaming fluoride.

As an antivaxxer, Pope has promoted pretty much every antivaccine gambit, piece of misinformation and pseudoscience in the antivaccine playbook, including herd immunity denialism, claiming that vaccines cause autism, that vaccines don’t work, the idiotic aborted fetal tissue nonsense (in “How to Resist Pediatrician Pro Vaccination Tactics”; links in the foregoing will, as usual, take you to succinct explanations for why the claims are nonsense). Indeed, Pope is so much the image of a loony antivaxxer that she even got to serve as model antivaxxer for the Daily Show antivaxxer parody (she didn’t respond particularly intelligently to that. Pope has also for instance pushed the myth that vaccines still contain thimerosal, a “neurotoxin”. Thimerosal is not a neurotoxin, and was nevertheless removed from vaccines in 2001, despite being completely safe, due to antivaccine fearmongering trying to link it to autism. Of course, removing it from vaccines did not affect the rate of autism, since vaccines never caused autism; some among the crazier fringes of the anti-vaccine movement accordingly try to claim that everything is a conspiracy and that thimerosal is still present in the vaccine. Like Pope: “Studies performed by Health Advocacy in the Public Interest (HAPI) in 2004 found that despite vaccine manufacturers’ claims that thimerosal was no longer being used … All vaccine vials tested by HAPI that were labeled ‘mercury free’ did, in fact, contain this neurotoxin.” HAPI is an anti-vaccine group. Their study consisted of sending 4 samples of anti-D to Doctor’s Data, a crank lab famous for giving any crackpot sending anything there precisely the results they want to obtain. Pope also pushes the aluminum scare, of course. 

And as for the fact that children die from vaccine preventable diseases? Well, her children didn’t, therefore vaccines are unnecessary.

Diagnosis: Yes, she does a good job as an unintentional parody of the antivaccine movement, but there is nothing funny about it. A truly terrible person. Whatever you do, do not take health advice from this person.

Hat-tip: Science-based medicine

#2121: Scott Pollack

Scott Pollack is the self-declared chief editor of something called the Critical Post, where he constructs sentences like this (concerning socialists): “Your leadership, which springs from post graduate degree, liberal feminist chauvinists, brought about by a usurpatious lawyer class, and the Edward Bernays school of PR, artfully used by all of America’s large corporations, as well as, the Rockefeller Foundation’s various think tank initiatives, and now adopted by a greed filled Bolshevik-minded, Hungarian by the name of Soros, sadly and ironically, a misguided Jew no less, and we all suffer by comparison to him…this leadership again…female or male, has no clue of Austrian economics, among other things, and therefore, the rest of the dogmas they preach, have no effect except that of degenerated natures and malevolent, commercial – political manifestations, which is what prevails, and only tenuously, presently, in the fabric of the American Collective Conscience.” But fear not; Pollack is no anti-semite. After all, the cited sentence comes from a tribute to Pam Geller, “a beautiful, (soul and otherwise) and glamorous siren songstress of reason in a sea of Muslim, as well as, liberal confounded argument,” who is Jewish. Like Jesus, in fact. You can read the rest of it here.

Diagnosis: Yeah, pretty obscure. Pollack’s got his defenders, though, which is absolutely insane.

#2120: Ted Poe

Lloyd Theodore Poe represented Texas’s 2nd congressional district in the US House of Representatives since the redistricting efforts in 2005 –though he did not seek reelection in 2018 – representing a number of eastern and northern Houston suburbs. Poe is famous for sponsoring – with genuinely stupid representative Steve King – one of “the stupidest bills” ever introduced to US legislation.

Poe is also well-known for his support for birther causes, and he was co-sponsor of the H.R. 1503, a bill introduced to appease the birther movement. In 2009, Poe also tried to argue that Obama’s birth certificate was of questionable provenance, given that Certifications of Live Birth issued by Hawaii State Department of Health cannot be used to obtain a U.S. passport, which is false and apparently a claim pulled out of thin air in a desperate attempt to defend his idiotic flirtings with birtherism. It is not the only time Poe has used ridiculous conspiracy theories to justify political action; far from it.

Poe is probably best known, however, for (well, apart from being dangerously clueless) his attempts to impose his religious views on those who might disagree under the deceptive (and delusional) cover of “persecution”. In 2011, for instance, he was part of an attempt (with John Culberson – an ally also in Poe’s birther theory promotion – and Michael McCaul) to remove the right of deceased soldiers’ families to choose which prayers, if any, were to be read at a soldier’s funeral, in favor of prayers chosen according to Poe’s religious convictions. Poe et al. claimed that their demands were a response to Veterans Affairs (VA) banning Christian prayers at military funerals, an allegation that was as blatantly false as allegations come. At the same time, Poe accused President Obama and his administration of promoting policies that are “anti-religious,” referring in particular to a manufactroversy over a Texas veteran’s cemetery that prohibits a volunteer group from holding religious services at a funeral unless the family requests it, a policy created by the Bush administration in 2007. To Poe, however, it is all part of the Obama administrations effort to persecute Christians by restricting their powers to force others to bend to their religious decrees and wishes. Indeed, Poe has actively tried to subvert the courts’ abilities to use the Constitution to defend religious freedom, and was for instance a cosponsor of the We the People Act.

During the 2016 election, Poe criticized Clinton for attempting to get African Americans on “government dependence” in order to control them and, not the least, to “get their vote.” The claim is admittedly so common in rightwing circles that it has become easy to forget that it is a delusional conspiracy theory. Similarly, accepting Syrian refuges into the US was apparently part of the same strategy. Poe is also on record denying that far-right extremism is a threat to the US, because Muslims. (The Obama administration taking extremist threats seriously, as they should, just shows that they hate conservatives and Christians, which at the very least tells you a bit about what Poe thinks defines “conservative” and “Christian”).

More recently, Poe has opposed Facebook and YouTube’s policy of using third-party entities to combat misinformation because “what one person may think is fake news, somebody else believes is the gospel truth,” displaying a remarkable but telling inability to distinguish fact from opinion.

Diagnosis: A rather typical specimen, we admit. Religious extremist, dumb, paranoid and prone to accept whatever conspiracy theory fits with what he has already decided to believe. That it’s pretty typical doesn’t make it less idiotic, and certainly not less frightening.

#2119: Joseph Pizzorno

Not as market-aggressive as Joe Mercola or as high-profile as Andrew Weil, Joseph Pizzorno is nevertheless one of the most influential pseudoscientists affiliated with the world of woo (and associated conspiracy mongering) working today. Pizzorno is the founding President and currently President Emeritus of Bastyr University, arguably the most influential “schools” of naturopathic “medicine” in North America, and is still involved in the institution where he, right from the beginning and until 2000, was running its day-to-day operations. Now, Pizzorno’s style is a far cry from the paranoia-driven delusions of someone like, say, Mike Adams – he did, for instance, recognize Hulda Clark’s quackery for what it was (not exactly a major cognitive feat, though) – but his own brand of naturopathy is hardly more evidence-based or health-promoting; it just sounds less deranged to the uninitiated. Bastyr embraces homeopathy without criticism, for instance; indeed, Bastyr’s students are required to study homeopathy together with all the other nonsense suggested to be beneficial by naturopaths, from myofascial analysis and vega testing to traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda and even distant healing and germ theory denialism. Make no mistake; Pizzorno, his university, and naturopathy in general, are anti-science to the core.

Pizzorno is the co-author of the Textbook of Natural Medicine(with Michael T. Murray, who is also former faculty at Bastyr University and currently on its Board of Regents), which is widely used even in accredited education programs – despite being demonstrably a piece of unscientific junk. The book is described in some detail here. It is advertised as “the gold standard in natural medicine,” and as a scientific presentation that “includes the science behind concepts and treatments, and discusses Western medical treatments and how they can work with natural medicine in a comprehensive treatment plan;” more than “10,000 research literature citations show that the content is based on science rather than opinions or anecdotes.” It is interesting that they felt the need to point it out. Of course, as most critics would also point out, more important than what they included is what they did not include (i.e. all the well-designed tests, real scientific literature, and the parts of the texts they cited that do not support the conclusions they wish to draw); besides, the authors are fully prepared to drop any pretense of scientific support when it suits them, and the chapters on therapeutic modalitis baldly admits that “[a]lthough this textbook is strongly oriented to the scientific method and the use of the peer-review literature for documentation of the efficacy of a therapy, these modalities’ widespread clinical use and long history of patient satisfaction demand that they be given a place here even though the mechanisms of action of several have yet to be elicited.” Or in short: when scientific evidence shows that what they wish would work doesn’t work, disregard the science and rely on anecdotes and appeals to popularity or tradition instead. Among the most obvious and damning things that should strike anyone opening the book is naturopathy’s wholesale endorsement of medieval-style and thoroughly refuted vitalism; Pizzorno and Murray are unfazed by refutation, however, and claim against all evidence, knowledge and reality that homeostasis, entropy, and even evolution require vitalistic rather than mechanistic explanations. This is, of course, not simply false but a testament to the authors’ poor judgment and equally poor understanding of science. There is a good review of the second edition of the textbook here.

Pizzorno is also co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods and The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, the Bible of Woo, in which more or less every piece of quackery is described as efficacious and studies that might seem to support those types of quackery if you don’t look closely enough to see the flaws, are carefully selected to provide a sheen of legitimacy while the many high-quality studies that don’t “fit the narrative” are just not mentioned. Like the textbook, the Encyclopedia (e.g.) recommends a range of questionable dietary measures, vitamins, minerals, and/or herbs for more than 70 health problems ranging from acne to AIDS – in many cases daily administration of ten or more products is recommended, often in dosages high enough to cause toxicity. 

Pizzorno is also the author of Total Wellness: Improve Your Health By Understanding Your Body’s Healing Systems, which even contains a chapter titled “Strengthen Your Immune System” arguing (assuming) that “immune suppression” as an underlying cause of most disease. Total Wellness book is also antivaccine, of course. “Quackery” simply isn’t strong enough to describe the nature of Pizzorno’s advice. And things are barely better in his How to Prevent and Treat Cancer with Natural Medicine (with Murray, Tim Birdsall, and Paul Riley), one of many cancer quack books providing a whole “arsenal” of advice that range from the admittedly sensible to the useless, and since the latter is hard to distinguish from the former in the authors’ presentation, the book is one to avoid completely and with prejudice if you ever need information about cancer.

From the very founding of Bastyr, Pizzorno’s main concern seems to have been how to make naturopathic quackery look respectable. An important part of that process was of course to get their naturopathic program accredited, and to achieve this goal, Pizzorno helped write the CNME standards for naturopathic programs that would eventually be used to accredit Bastyr’s naturopathic program in 1987. Yes, accredidation is a mess; what Pizzorno and his allies achieved, was establishing a separate accrediting agency for naturopathic schools, effectively shielding them from effective oversight of their pseudoscience-filled curricula. Pizzorno is also on the board of AAFP’s Board on Functional Medicine; “functional medicine” being one of the ultimate misnomers in the world of woo.

Pizzorno has worked tirelessly to achieve more widespread acceptance of quackery through other venues as well, including offering courses for the American Council for Continuing Medical Education, where he for instance teaches about “Detoxification” and “Assessing Body Burden” – the latter presumably related to his Encyclopedia’s nonsensical claim that 25% of the US population suffers from heavy metal poisoning, which can ostensibly be assessed by provoked urine testing. That is a myth, of course, but tests almost ensuring false positives are useful for people pushing fraudulent detox regimes – you won’t have toxic levels of heavy metals in your body after completing the detox regimes, of course, and what more do you want? More on his efforts here.

As for his own background, Pizzorno has a B.S. in Chemistry and an N.D. (Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine) degree in 1975 from National College of Naturopathic Medicine. He does, in other words, not have a background in medicine.

Diagnosis: Quackery galore. But Pizzorno isn’t just a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist with a website, and his efforts to give naturopathy a sheen of legitimacy – marketing is everything, since most people don’t have the resources or background knowledge to assess the contents – have proved scarily successful. Definitely one of the most dangerous loons alive today.