#2314: Carol Swain

Carol Swain is a deranged fundie wingnut, author and wingnut television analyst. What sets her apart from most fundie wingnut conspiracy theorists is that Swain was, in fact, once upon a time a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, a position she resigned from in 2017 partly, it seems, as a result of being exhausted by admittedly rather misdirected and silly student protests and petitions. She has more recently appeared in promotional materials for Prager University, which itself shows that Vanderbilt should be happy to have gotten rid of her.

Possibly a turning point in her career (Swain’s strange journey from scholar to deranged lunatic is discussed here) was her 2002 book The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration, in which she explicitly chose to disregard data, evidence, methods and established results (“[I] have reserved for myself the right to explore hunches and draw upon personal intuitions as I interpret and evaluate data”) to come to conclusions largely siding with the white nationalists. Her 2011 book Be the People: A Call to Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise, meanwhile, was written as a response to “the ungodly direction” of the United States – Swain slams the Supreme Court’s rulings on separation of church and state, for instance, saying that “[t]he expulsion of God from public schools was a blow to civil religion and a clear repudiation of what Jesus proclaimed to be the greatest commandment” – though it didn’t even attempted to pretend to be a scholarly affair. Neither did she aim for truth or accountability in her subsequent books Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children’s Hearts and Minds – which aimed to explore “the aggressive secular agenda to indoctrinate children with a worldview that rejects the traditional morality associated with the Judeo-Christian worldview” but didn’t really do any exploration – and Who’s Stealing Our Kids?: Revealing the Hidden Agenda to Secularize Our Children, both co-authored with Steven Feazel. Over the last decade, she has also participated in numerous conferences and radio programs organized by the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation.

Her own political career consists of two unsuccessful runs for the position of mayor of Nashville and speaking at the Values Voter Summit. She supported Trump in 2016 (and backed Mark Harris and Cynthia Dunbar in 2019), and appeared in Dinesh D’Souza’s feverishly delusional pseudohistory flick Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. She also appeared in Christian-nation activist David Barton’s “Foundations of Freedom” series, where she told Barton that what she sees as problems in the judiciary result from judges being “educated at institutions where they come out as secular humanists, and so there’s no fear of God.”

Red-baiting

In 2016 Swain criticized Black Lives Matter for being “a Marxist organization” – even “pure Marxism” – and “a very destructive force in America”, concluding that it “needs to go”. For someone with an education in political science she currently seems remarkably unable to draw rather fundamental distinctions on foundational issues in her own putative field of expertise. In 2017, she also defended Trump’s “both sides” response to Charlottesville and claimed that the Southern Strategy had nothing to do with race.

Meanwhile, in Swain’s world President Obama “did everything to start a race war,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center – which has criticized some of the hate groups Swain pals around with – has, according to Swain, “declared itself an enemy of Christians loyal to biblical teaching, and it fights a no-holds-barred propaganda war against them” due, of course, to the SPLC’s ungodly opposition to bigotry and hate. She also, for good measure, falsely blamed the SPLC for inspiring violence.

As for the Marxist connection, Swain has adopted what is best characterized as a throwback to the red scare tactics of the 50s – she quotes liberally from W. Cleon Skousen – according to which Marxism is the sinister explanation for many of (what Swain views as being) the nation’s ills, including current “resistance to the president” (i.e. Trump), which she said is “like a playbook out of this Marxist agenda.” Indeed, the Communists have control of one U.S. political party and are working on another; “[w]e are at war,” Swain claims, and need “wartime strategies” to counter liberals who have learned from the writings of Saul Alinsky. You don’t get much deeper into redbaiting conspiracy territory than Carol Swain.

Swain on meteorology and climate

In 2017, apparently as a response to the agreement on the debt ceiling and relief funding for victims of Hurricane Harvey, Swain claimed to see “spiritual significance” in hurricanes and wildfires. “I hang out in the Old Testament,” said Swain, and there’s “consequence for sin” (we doubt that she intended to refer to the Donald’s). 

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s a very sad story. Of course, academia could probably never have matched the level of attention or recognition she has enjoyed once she threw facts, truth and accountability to the wind, and we are sure she feels happy with where her journey to crankhood took her. She is crazy, though. 

#2313: Kelly Sutton

Kelly Sutton is a California-based MD who practices anthroposophic medicine, a branch of woo pretty much as quacky as it gets. According to her website, she “bases her diagnosis in part on conventional medicine,” but also asserts that “[s]ignificant understanding arises from listening to aspects of an individual’s biography, life purpose, the emotional context of illness and health, and understanding the level of vitality and strength of the life forces.” She then “treats acute and chronic illness using the least toxic effective treatment for the condition. Anthroposophic remedies (low potency homeopathic preparations and herbs), diet, nutritional supplements, healthy rhythm, warmth are some of the foundational principles she employs.” Not a doctor to consult if you suffer from acute illness, in other words, and yes: there will be homeopathy.

However, Sutton is probably more notable for having made a bit of a career as an ally of the antivaccine movement, for instance by offering webinars on how conspiracy-minded antivaccine parents can circumvent the requirements of California’s SB277 by seeking medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. For instance, her seminar “Step-by-step Program to Help Protect Your Child from the ‘One Size Fits All’ California Vaccine Mandate!” promises you the “tools and knowledge you need to protect your rights as a parent [yes: it’s all about the parents’ rights; the rights of children not to be medically neglected or protected from potentially life-threatening diseases rarely even cross these people’s minds] to choose the healthcare of your child” and to take you “from cornered to confident” for the meager sum of  $27 if you take advantage of the early bird special. She does claim that she is neither antivaccine nor pro-vaccine – her claim to take you from “cornered to confident” sort of suggests otherwise – but “pro-parent”: again, the child isn’t even on the radar. She also tells parents to trust themselves and that no one cares more or knows more, which is, of course, false, but an effective marketing gambit. The webinars are otherwise full of standard antivaccine misinformation and gambits, including “vaccines didn’t save us” and “Pasteur was wrong”. Kelly Sutton’s practices are, in other words, hardcore antivaccine; indeed, she even says that she sees “daily in my practice evidence of vaccine injury and I hear stories almost every day of families that vaccinate children and then decide not to vaccinate and the unvaccinated children within the same family are healthier, more socially adjusted and more capable academically even though their parents are older than the siblings who were born first and were fully vaccinated.” Which is what is otherwise known as confirmation bias – unless it’s lying, of course; perhaps her claim that she’s neither here nor there should be interpreted as not caring too much about whether she actually believes the claims she is making.

Fortunately the Medical Board of California was not impressed, and placed Sutton, together with fellow antivaccine-promoting doctors Bob Sears, Michael Fielding Allen, Ron Kennedy and Kenneth Stoller – yes, there is a whole cottage industry here – under investigation in 2019 (“We feel this doctor and perhaps her colleagues … are making easy money on these exemptions that are not based on true medical need and are actually putting children and other people in the community at risk for contracting and spreading serious infectious diseases,” stated the complaint, and a physician review of the exemptions found Sutton’s exemptions “either of questionable validity or patently without medical basis”). The court petition is here.

Diagnosis: Hard to tell whether she is insane or just spineless, but the two are not mutually exclusive. And the exemptions written by Sutton, Sears and some of their colleagues are actually increasing the likelihood of disease outbreaks that are likely to lead to deaths, which makes Sutton a genuine threat to public health and life. And just think about it: Sutton had the skills and perseverance needed to learn a trade where she could actually make the world a better place, yet this is what she ended up doing. What a waste of life and talent! It’s actually deeply tragic.

Hat-tip: Science-based medicine

#2312: Murray Susser

The Alliance for Natural Health USA, formerly the American Association for Health Freedom, is a lobbying organization founded by Julian Whitaker whose goal is to convince government of the validity of various types of quackery and dubious health claims through political influence (“health freedom”) rather than science. In particular, the group has lobbied energetically for passing the serially defeated federal Access to Medical Treatment act, which would allow quacks to prey freely on consumers, in particular people in difficult or desperate situations, and they have prepared several statements in favor of free marketing of fraudulent health products and methods, including emergency petitions to block the FDA from regulating or supporting regulations of dietary supplements (e.g. arguing against regulations of ephedra products such as ma huang, which contain dangerous drugs and have been associated with thousands of adverse events, including many deaths). The organization has also filed an amicus curiae brief supporting a California lawsuit in which parents of a child with brain cancer sought damages from an oncologist because he failed to recommend antineoplastons, Stanislaw Burzynski’s alternative cancer treatment supported by neither biology nor experimental evidence. Sponsors and contributors to the organization’s efforts, meanwhile, are primarily dietary supplement companies and commercial labs that market fraudulent tests such as hair analysis. The group’s board of directors include (or at least has included) such characters as Woodson Merrell, Jonathan Wright, Shari Lieberman, Al Czap, Bernie Siegel, John Robbins and Robert Rowen; none other than Sherri Tenpenny has been its vice president. 

The main target of the present entry, however, is the organization’s former president, Murray Susser. Now Susser is – or at least used to be – an MD. He also used to be chairman of the medical advisory board of Gero Vita International, an infamous supplement company whose claims were subject to a series of investigations by an impressive range of government bodies, including congressional hearings. His own practice, the Longevity Medical Center in Los Angeles, claimed to use “use Acupuncture, Homeopathy, Nutrition, Chelation Therapy, Heavy Metal Detoxification, Physical Therapy, Stress Management, Weight Management, Oxidative Therapies, and Detoxification Therapy.” Moreover, Susser’s ads more than suggest that he is a keeper of the secrets to halting the aging process and that he has “solved the mystery of chronic fatigue syndrome.” His website does not mention the fact that he has been disciplined several times by the California state medical board (1997 – Susser had e.g. failed to diagnose gallstones in one patient and colon cancer in two others, and had instead ordered inappropriate tests, failed to order appropriate tests, and prescribed vitamins and other inappropriate treatments – 2000, 2005, 2010, 2016, 2017 and 2018) e.g. for “unprofessional conduct, gross negligence, incompetence, repeated negligent acts, and excessive use of diagnostic procedures” and for “negligence and improper prescribing”, as well as by the Pennsylvania Board of Medicine and the New York Board for Professional Misconduct. Indeed, Susser seems to have finally lost his license in 2018. It is unclear whether that will stop him. (After all, he surrendered his New York license back in 1997, and that did not stop him.)

Susser’s primary target victims are (or were) people with complex or diffuse conditions – his website mentions “[l]yme disease, chronic fatigue” in particular – that will allow him to prescribe a number of expensive and completely ineffective treatment regimes and unsupported (and unsupportable) diagnoses. 

Susser is also a past-president of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), the primary promoter of chelation therapy (which, given that it is as dangerous as it is useless, is a particular concern of medical boards). He has also been associated with the pseudoscience group ILADS.

Diagnosis: What is really instructive about Murray Susser is the position of authority he has managed to retain on the altmed scene, despite his obvious dishonesty (or incompetence). Hopefully neutralized, but you never know with this kind of people.

Hat-tip: Science-based medicine

#2311: Dennis M. Sullivan

Yes, another one: Dennis M. Sullivan is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s inane petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, and a fairly typical specimen. Now, Sullivan is indeed nominally a Professor of Biology and Bioethics, but at Cedarville University, a fundamentalist Bible school that takes a literal reading of the Bible as a premise not to be disputed and where young-earth creationism (and complementarianism) is taught not only as fact but as something that is not open to discussion. Sullivan is not a biologist. Indeed, Sullivan has no background in science, but is an MD whose main qualification for his post at Cedarville seems to be having worked as a missionary for twelve years. Cedarville is, needless to say, not an institution where students actually learn anything remotely resembling science, critical thinking or facts, and a diploma should be regarded as the rough equivalent of any diploma you can purchase by following a link in a spam email. 

Sullivan is also signatory to the CMI list of scientists alive today who accept the biblical account of creation. He also runs a blog, Cedarethics, devoted to bioethics from a fundamentalist perspective, and has published extensively on such issues, primarily in religious magazines, and given numerous talks in churches and similar venues. Nothing indicates that he is involved in anything resembling science or scientific research, but no one interested in science or scientific research (and having even a cursory idea of what that involves) would ever consider having anything to do with Cedarville anyways.

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s fairly typical of the signatories on the Discovery Institute list, and that people like Sullivan appear on it is rather telling. 

#2310: David Stussy & Zena Xanders

The Big Brain Radio Show is (or was – we have no idea) a weekly broadcast on local radio stations in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area hosted by two chiropractors, David Stussy and Zena Xanders, who seemed to fancy themselves as “Big Brains” – and yes, it’s Dunning Kruger: Stussy’s and Sanders’s lack of understanding of even elementary critical thinking or science was embarrassing to the level of physical pain. The show tried for the most part to cram as much woo and bullshit as possible into its time slot, typically peppering the nonsense with apparently random insertions of words like “quantum” and “healing”. As chiropractors Stussy and Xanders are definitely on the quackiest end possible, the types who think that chiropractic can heal everything – and yes, they call themselves “Dr. Stussy” and “Dr. Xanders”, but their degrees are from the Northwestern Chiropractic College and the Northwestern Health Sciences University, respectively and as such not something to be proud of. On their show, Stussy and Xanders would for instance promote The law of manifestation (yes: that one), The law of balance, and The law of appreciation.

According to Stussy and Xanders, the BBR show “is meant to be a catalog for large/small scale observers of the organized complexities of the universe, which express the natural laws of authentic interacting of energies, radiation, and light. And how the human mind, discovering these – the interaction between the physical and metaphysical – creates higher and higher possibilities for the survival and expansion of the human species, or what other form we may take.” They also offer insights like “[t]he universe is a training center. It just depends on what we want to learn. When you pay attention, you create intention. The future will be based on knowledge and know-how and energy.” Indeed.

As for science, it “is only science when it’s on the leading edge ... Scientists are really kinda the people that prove the points. Somebody will come up with an idea or a theory, it’s not really proven yet, and then scientists will go about proving it …”, according to Stussy and Xanders. No, they don’t have the most tenuous grasp on anything. 

But science isn’t everything. The world also operates on other principles, inaccessible to science, reason or coherence: “The universe and the brain operate on the physical and metaphysical principles. Metaphysical principles are those that have always been there and always work, such as electricity. Man didn’t discover that, it was already there [?]. But it is metaphysical in the sense that it doesn’t have weight or form, but it has affect. These metaphysical insights are discovered by the metaphysical brain; some might call it the mind – we call it the BigBrain. Everybody is a BigBrain and our purpose for being in existence is to discover the metaphysical principles and have them be physically manifested.” Yeah: those are the intellectual standards here. You might think Stussy and Xanders would be in for a shock if they took a philosophy class on metaphysics at a legitimate educational institution (or an elementary school class on electricity), but we suspect they lack the cognitive capacity to even recognize their own intellectual shortcomings in such scenarios. 

Diagnosis: Complete nonsense, and the idea that people like Stussy and Xanders are allowed near people with real health problems is profoundly frightening.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2309: Christopher Earl Strunk

Birtherism might be getting old, but since the central players are unlikely to be up to anything good these days either, we think it’s worth reminding people of who they were. Christopher Earl Strunk is a guy who files a lot of lawsuits (there is an interesting list here), including suing the New York State Board of Elections and others in 2011 to prevent President Obama from appearing on the 2012 presidential ballot. Strunk apparently alleged that Obama was connected to a massive conspiracy involving hundreds of people at behest of the Roman Catholic Church and especially the Jesuits. Judge Arthur Schack said of the case that “if the complaint in this action was a movie script, it would be entitled ‘The Manchurian Candidate Meets The Da Vinci Code.’” Strunk was fined some $177,000 in costs and penalties for filing “a frivolous” suit and wasting the court’s time. There are some absolutely fascinating details here.

Perhaps Strunk’s most recent suit is a 2019 lawsuit challenging New York’s new abortion law. To get a sense of where it is coming from – and possibly its likelihood of winning (update: it didn’t) – you can consult the part of the suit that contains Strunk’s thoughts on how fluoride lowers IQ. 

Apart from filing lawsuits, Strunk also writes books, including Soul Envy: SCOTUS in between the I.R.S. and Antioch Ministries (apparently a deranged take on some court case, written with Ronald Dean Joling and Eric Jon Phelps, whom we have encountered before), Jesuit Social Justice versus Le droit des Gens: The Global Estate versus Nation States, and Loose Nukes: The Kursk’s Unregistered Missiles (with Phelps, one Anatoly Miranovsky and Michael Shrimpton, the former British barrister and conspiracy theorist who was convicted in 2014 for falsely reporting that Germany was planning a nuclear attack on the 2012 Summer Olympics.) In 2016 he apparently also tried to run for President. It is unclear if anyone noticed.

Diagnosis: Colorful nuisance, mostly. But it remains staggering how many of these people there are, and how many fans they’ve actually got.

#2308: Kimberlie Struiksma

Kimberlie Struiksma is a Washington-based wingnut. Now, we don’t know much else about her, but in 2009 she proposed an initiative to be voted on by referendum in that state, namely the Washington State Defense of Liberty and the Existence of a Higher Power Act. Though Struiksma has apparently heard about the First Amendment, her suggested act reveals, well, we’ll give you the text itself: “Respecting no establishment of religion, yet with respect to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, whose existence has been declared in the preamble to the Constitution of the state of Washington, the state shall make no appropriation for nor apply any public moneys or property in support of anything, specifically including but not limited to, any display, exercise, instruction, scientific endeavor, circulated document, or research project which denies or attempts to refute the existence of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.” Or, in short, though government should respect no establishment of religion, if we allow contradictions, it still could, and we could then effectively prevent religion from being criticized. The whole proposal is here. By “scientific endeavor”, Struiksma “means any act, idea, theory, intervention, conference, organization, or individual having to do with science.” In short, no university would be allowed to pay a salary to, say, any employee who criticized or questioned religion, or engaged in scientific investigations that could be used to question aspects of religion.

Diagnosis: Of course, Struiksma enjoyed little success with her proposal, and both it and her have apparently receded from view after 2009. Still.