#2882: Hayley Gardner

Hayley Gardner is a California-based acupuncturist and champion of acupressure, a form of popular and widely marketed theatrical placebo derived from the pseudo-religious idea of “life energy, which flows through [mythical] ‘meridians’ in the body”. The role of the acupressure practitioner is then to apply physical pressure to “acupuncture points” in order to “clear[ing] blockages in these meridians” (note the turn to metaphor at the crucial moment where a medical description would be expected) and “balance the flow of energy – called qi (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qi) – throughout the body to restore and maintain the proper function of body systems.” According to Gardner, “[o]ur bodies run on electricity, just like anything else”, which is … inaccurate and of dubious relevance to anything else she says. Yeah, this is all familiar woo moves – the appeal to metaphor and to orientalism (Gardner emphasizes the “Eastern medicine” angle), and sweeping but inaccurate claims about how the body works – but it’s useful to present a decent, middle-of-the-road example of such bullshit now and then.

 

Otherwise, there seems to be little to distinguish Gardner from a long range of similar alternative medicine practitioners – she appears to be affiliated with the Mayway consortium of traditional Chinese medicine promoters along with a slew of other quacks – and the only reason we noticed her is that Gardner was involved in the marketing of the Yogi jacket a very silly contraption that at least manifested a parody-friendly strain of L.A. culture.

 

Diagnosis: Pseudoreligious woo-babble. Probably pretty harmless, but still.

#2881: Roan Garcia-Quintana

A former Reagan administration appointee – deputy director of the National Institute of Education – Roan Garcia-Quintana is an experienced South Carolina political operative, executive director of the anti-immigration group Americans Have Had Enough, and a lifetime member and board member of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The CCC’s statement of principles state that the group opposes “all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents” as well as “all efforts” to “force the integration of the races”, and they call for the U.S. to maintain its European “composition and character.” In fairness, Garcia-Quintana denies having read those principles; he remains a central member of the group, however.

 

Primarily, Garcia-Quintana is concerned with immigration, or what he deems to be “an illegal alien invasion”, and he has been involved in organizing numerous anti-immigration protests. Himself a Cuban immigrant, Garcia-Quintana easily navigates potential cognitive dissonance by emphasizing that he doesn’t consider himself Latino but “European-American” since his ancestors allegedly came to Cuba from Spain.

 

In 2013, his CCC affiliation forced him to to resign from then-South Carolina-Governor Nikki Haley’s campaign re-election steering committee. He defended his support of Haley by pointing out that despite being the daughter of Indian immigrants, “she has the features of a Caucasian: her nose, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth. That’s really how you describe it.” Garcia-Quintana denies being a racist, however, rhetorically asking his audiences “Is it racist to want to keep your own heritage pure?”

 

Diagnosis: Sure, this kind of stuff struck us as more obviously shocking a decade ago, but that observation does nothing to rehabilitate Garcia-Quintana and his nonsense.

#2880: Rodney Garcia

Rodney Garcia was a member of the Montana House of Representatives from 2019 to 2021, representing the 52nd district, and a good, old-fashioned paranoid redbaiter who – in the fashion of good old-fashioned paranoid redbaiters – had a history of domestic dispute-related convictions and thought that Child Protective Services are “kidnappers” (we haven’t bothered to delve into his prehistory in any detail, but he does undeniably promote a certain stereotype). Still, it was his paranoid delusions about socialists infiltrating the government that was his most definable trait: In 2020, for instance, he described socialists as “enemies of the free state” and claimed that “So actually in the Constitution of the United States (if) they are found guilty of being a socialist member you either go to prison or are shot,” which is a very typically American defense of the authority of the Constitution. “I agree with my Constitution,” insisted Garcia: “That’s what makes us free. We’re not a democracy, we’re a Republic Constitution.” So it goes.

 

Though asked by The Montana Republican Party to resign, Garcia refused, saying that the “only way I would give my resignation is if God asked me to.” He lost his subsequent bid for the Montana Senate, though we strongly suspect he didn’t explicitly attribute his loss to divine intervention. Garcia is not the kind of guy who puts two and two together.

 

Diagnosis: Idiot. Hopefully gone.

#2879: Debra Gambrell

Debra Gambrell, DO, is an Anthroposophical Medicine Specialist, which means that she is not merely batshit insane but actively dangerous. Gambrell is nevertheless one of the people presented as “experts” in Ty Bollinger’s antivaccine conspiracy propaganda series The Truth About Vaccines. So yes, Gambrell is antivaccine (according to herself, she managed to heal her own son’s autism); but Gambrell, in fact, has delusional views on a wide range of issues.

 

EMFs, for instance. Gambrell not only touts such (comparatively) mainstream myths as the idea that 5G may cause cancer; Gambrell is also worried that 5G might make us into “automatons”, or “human beings who give up their free will in exchange for information and convenience” … and by that description she is not only expressing some metaphorical existential worry about modern life but about how such radiation is, literally, “‘digested’ and processed by the body” (hint: it isn’t). And the problem, as Gambrell sees it, is that 5G and EMF radiation, as opposed to other “natural” waves in our surroundings, is “highly processed” (the degree to which energy is safe is, to Gambrell, a question of “[h]ow much has nature been processed and altered from its original state? In general, the more highly processed the energy source is, the harder it is for the body to utilize”) and that, given that they are unnatural, EMFs  will work “as a stimulus or irritant to the nervous system and can over-tax our metabolic system”. She bases the observation on “[c]ommon sense and clinical observation” – mostly the former (which, in her case, has nothing to do with sense), but she also falsely believes that unidentified “[s]tudies” have shown that EMF exposure is associated with a range of negative health outcomes. She is, of course, mostly concerned about children, but her attempts to connect her pseudoscientific gobbledygook on EMF to the literature on child development does of course not involve reality-based literature but anthroposophical, pseudoreligious nonsense about the development of the “consciousness soul” and suchlike.

 

As for vaccines, Gambrell claims to base her conclusions on her own experiences from anaesthesiology, when she ostensibly “saw that the children that weren’t vaccinated […] did better under anaesthesia”. More importantly, and in line with principles of anthroposophic medicine, Gambrell is worried that vaccines prevent today’s children from being sufficiently sick – kids should be seriously sick “every six to twelve months” to properly detox, and things like measles, mumps and rubella are “normal things that our body has been evolutionarily designed to take in” (no, she doesn’t understand evolution either). And as Gambrell sees it, it is the absence of these detoxing diseases that is the source of today’s increases in “asthma, ADHD, sensory disorder”. Indeed, Gambrell observes this every day: “You can see this when you go out in the grocery store. You can see children that are not able to walk down the grocery aisle and be aware of where they are in space. One out of two children is what I see are affected,” and it is a consequence of the vaccines and, in general, our ‘unnatural’ lifestyles with painkillers and synthetic clothing materials that “[t]he children are not in their body” anymore. At least Gambrell is trying to make a difference herself by fooling parents to forego Tylenol in favor of homeopathic alternatives. Otherwise, although she tends to avoid relying on science, she will freely refer to bullshit that looks scientific, such as the efforts of Christopher Exley, Yehuda Shoenfeld and Stephanie Seneff.

 

Gambrell is affiliated with The Language of the Heart, which is “a branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America serving Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake Counties”, where she offers “pediatric specialty services including evaluation and treatment for asthma, ADHD, sensory disorder, autism, and food sensitivities, using pediatric integrative”.

 

Diagnosis: A major threat to health and well-being. A truly dangerous, frothingly insane and utterly disgusting person, and that she is in a position to influence the treatments of and health choices on behalf of children is an absolute tragedy.

#2878: Foster Gamble

Foster Gamble is the bank heir to the multinational and pharmaceutical company Procter & Gamble, a deranged conspiracy theorist, and a sovereign citizen-adjacent libertarian. Foster and his wife Kimberly laid out their worldview, to the extent that such a chaotic mess of delusions can be deemed a view of anything, in their 2011 pseudo-documentary Thrive, which basically put a good selection of conspiracy theories of the kind featured at whale and Red Ice Creations (up until that time) in a blender, including but certainly not limited to free energy suppression, UFO nonsense, New World Order conspiracies, anti-vaccine delusions and 9/11 trutherism, together with a lot of feel-good-style political critique, to produce what Gamble deems to be a “Global Domination Agenda” that the Gambles think control most of the world; then they topped it all with some self-help ramblings. According to its own tagline, “THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what’s REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream – uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.” (The solutions, as expected, consist mostly standard paranoid libertarian-moronic nonsense like eliminating the Federal Reserve, public schools, and taxes.) In real life, THRIVE is one of the most obvious reference points for discussions about the emergence of the conspirituality movement.

 

One key to Gamble’s rubbish is his take on crop circles. So, yes: according to Gamble, crop circles are indeed made by extraterrestrials visiting Earth (they are not), and the circles do contain mathematical, engineering and New Age-style waffly spiritual messages from the aliens. In particular, as Gamble sees it, aliens are trying to inform us about the “torus” shape, which is apparently the key to everything because it will give us free energy – we just have to defeat the evil Global Domination Agenda, who for some reason is opposed to free energy, first. Among the tools used by the Global Domination Agenda are, of course, vaccines, which are used “to hide toxins and endocrine disruptors, like mercury, squalene and more, and used to sicken and sterilize covertly”; climate change, which is a cover for introducing global taxation; and HAARP, which is used to cause earthquakes e.g. in Haiti or Chile for somewhat unclear reasons.

 

The movie also featured a number of celebrities from the New Age conspirituality and pseudoscience circuit such as David Icke, Steven Greer, Nassim Haramein and Vandana Shiva. In fact, several of the people interviewed for the film distanced themselves from the ideas it ended up pushing (here is John Robbins’s take) – even Deepak Chopra, no less, agreed that the ideas were “dangerously misguided”, and it is difficult to imagine a more damning condemnation of bullshit than Deepak Chopra recognizing it as bullshit.

 

The product has been summarized as “basically Zeitgeist 2.0 ... when you align all of the claims that this movie purports to be true, it is hard not to think it is some kind of joke.” Foster Gamble himself defended his views (and expanded upon them) in his paper Solutions / Liberty, which leaned heavily on quotes from Stefan Molyneux, supplemented with some quotes from Ayn Rand and Ron Paul. For more information and discussion of the ludicrous nonsense that is THRIVE, this is a decent resource.

 

Diagnosis: Lunatic nonsense, and yes it matters – superficially, THRIVE may look like it is genuinely motivated to address real-world problems, but it isn’t: Gamble’s focus isn’t the real world, but to battle the windmills of imaginary conspiracies he has deluded himself into thinking are the real sources of those problems. As such, nonsense like THRIVE doesn’t merely not help but actively harm any real effort to solve any of the issues facing us by diverting attention. Gamble is accordingly not only a moron, but a somewhat dangerous one.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2877: Sid Galloway

 

An old one, but still perhaps worth mentioning: Sid Galloway is a Louisiana-based retired education counselor and former zookeeper and a creationist lecturer with something called the Good Shepherd Initiative – he has also written articles for Answers in Genesis.

 

According to himself, he is merely “seeking to train my students to scientifically challenge all hypotheses, theories, and laws”, but that would, given what he is actually doing, be a misrepresentation: He does indeed try to challenge scientific hypotheses and theories, but the challenges themselves are certainly not scientific, as his six-hour lecture at the chapel at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge campus on why ‘the Bible is more rational than evolution’ amply illustrates. He quickly dismisses the “atheistic science” of the Big Bang, for instance, by pointing out that the “theory is that nothing somehow became something”, and “zero plus zero equals zero” (no, he hasn’t actually tried to grasp anything, of course). Evolution is just as easily dismissed, since mutations, the mechanism he argues “drives” evolution, don’t actually lead to evolution, but to devolution: “Mutations don’t add,” says Galloway: “Mutations take away.” (Again, bothering to try to understand how anything works – or even take a cursory look at basic biology – is not really Galloway’s schtick). And as evidence that mutations are slowly eroding humanity’s gene pool, Galloway just needs to point to the lengthy life-spans of people in the Old Testament. So there. And also evolution is racist: “If you read ‘Descent of Man’ [which we are willing to bet Galloway has not] it’s obscenely racist,” Galloway says: “At the core of Hitler’s belief was evolution.” It most certainly was not.

 

There is much more (six hours and 200 slides worth at least), but there is no point.

 

Diagnosis: Gibbering moron and fanatic who struggle to apprehend even the basic features of reality around him and don’t seem to care all that much about getting it right (as opposed to getting it Jesus the way he wants Jesus to be). The frightening thing, though, is that there is some evidence that Galloway has at some point been involved in teaching or advising students. We know that standards tend to be lax in Louisiana, but come on!

#2876: Matt Gaetz

We feel some pressure to provide an entry to this character, although Matt Gaetz isn’t clearly so much a loon, in our use of that category, as he is a disgusting abomination – a derangedly corrupt collection of character flaws. There is a brief and even-handed portrait of him here (and another one here, if one is needed). But we do need to at least mention him: Although his political career should be over (even Mat Staver thought Gaetz was morally “disqualified” for being Attorney General, though Todd Coconato and Mario Murillo praised him as “God’s choice”), we have been mistaken on that issue before. He is currently a pundit over at OAAN.

 

So, although it is easily overshadowed, underneath Gaetz’s repugnant actions and proclivities there is certainly something of a loon as well. In 2022, for instance, Gaetz suggested that Republicans should use their House majority to redeploy the Jan. 6 Committee – with Marjorie Taylor Greene as leader – to prove that the FBI and Antifa were behind the January 6 2021 riots. And in 2018, he went on Infowars to complain about being called a conspiracy theorist just for pushing conspiracy theories about the Obama administration – conspiracy theories aren’t conspiracy theories when they’re conspiracy theories about the mythical deep state. Here is a report on his rather unhinged rant about the 2023 Louisville shootings. (There’s a number of these kinds of things in Gaetz’s background, and we don’t attempt to be comprehensive.)

 

Diagnosis: We probably needed an entry for him even though most of his antics are more accurately described by other terms than ‘lunacy’. Gaetz is most notably for his complete lack of moral character, and we suspect that his supporters pay less attention to exactly what he says than they do to his character.