#168: Sean Hannity

Hannity needs little introduction. But in any case he is a famous Fox News talk show host discovered by Rush Limbaugh who seems to think that “peace” means “blowing the shit out of dirty foreigners”.

Compared to the insane bozo (or perhaps fraud) Glenn Beck, Hannity is a slick liar who may be more intelligent than he appears to be, but who has a background of palling around with neo-nazis like Hal Turner (see Sullivan’s comparison of Beck and Hannity). He has recently been involved in a charity scam as well.

Now Hannity may be more a paid PR agent for the extreme right than a genuine believer, and as such he may be completely devoid of intellectual honesty and completely uninterested in truth, rather than a true loon. But his real beliefs could be very far away from those he actually espouses and still make him a loon. His sole argument against global warming was “doesn’t exist”, for instance. And his interview with con man John Edward … well, you cannot fake this; seriously.

He isn’t very good at reading material that doesn’t conform to his ideology either.

Bonus: see Hannity squirm when his own dirty tricks are used against him.

He is described in some more detail here.

Diagnosis: Another important motivator for ignorance and idiocy, Hannity may not quite be the inane nitwit he portrays himself as (he may instead be completely intellectually dishonest). Some things seem too hard to fake, however, and I think it is safe to say that he is moronic (or delusional) enough to qualify for an entry.

#167: J.B. Handley

J.B. Handley is the founder of Generation Rescue (GR), an organization advocating the view that autism (and related disorders) are primarily caused by environmental factors, and in particular by vaccines (shifting goalposts for the previous “autism is misdiagnosis of mercury poisoning”). For anyone in doubt, these claims are biologically implausible and lack scientific evidence. But evidence hardly matters. GR may be the most famous of the anti-vaxx groups, and certainly among the most aggressive, gaining widespread attention from aggressive media campaigns (including sponsoring full page ads in the New York Times and USA Today). Today, Generation Rescue is known as a platform for Jenny McCarthy's autism advocacy, but Handley is still pulling most of the strings. The wikipedia article is actually fairly balanced. He is generally known for supporting discredited researcher Andrew Wakefield and offering arguments of dubious coherence.

He also founded and has an editorial role (but denies that) in the Age of Autism community (AoA), which basically does the same as GR (it’s a blog/news community) at a broader scale, but with the same level of reason and accountability.

The AoA has repeatedly called for a civil debate on vaccination. Some of Handley’s contributions on behalf of AoA to the civil, reasonable debate are covered here (a good illustration of how denialist movements actually work). See also this, or for the truly bizarre, this.

He has absolutely no understanding of science either, and has confirmed that if scientists say something that contradicts his belief that vaccines cause autism, then they must be corrupt and lying.
Diagnosis: Dangerous, zealous crackpot – more precisely a hysterical pinhead unable to distinguish scientific evidence from emotional reactions. Unfortunately he is rather influential and a real danger to civilization.

#166: Ken Ham

Arguably the successor of Kent Hovind to the title of mackerel baron of the biblical creationist movement, Ken Ham is the well-known founder of Answers in Genesis (a pertinent description of which is found here, and also here). He originally hails from Australia (where all the kangaroos apparently floated after the Ark stranded in Turkey; see here). He is very diligent and shovels a lot of shit every day, completely delusional and utterly unable to distinguish fact from fantasy.

Also generally recognized as a human spambot that generates sentences with no regard for their truth or justification, their cogency with previous statements or any conceivable rules for good critical thinking, but in a completely predictable manner, such as in this case where the input cue is the term “atheist”. See this, and also this.

His favorite debate technique is a version of the Gish gallop known as the “Ham Hightail” which consists of jumping from point to point, ignoring all contrary evidence, and quoting the Bible whenever proof is required. Since the purpose is to retain the hold of those who already believe creationism is backed by science, if all else fails the hightail prescribes the “different worldviews” (i.e. atheist vs. moral) gambit.

Ken Ham and AIG also run the world-famous creation museum in Kentucky, a monument to ignorance, fundamentalism and denialism. The main purpose of the museum is to promote the idea that humans and dinosaurs coexisted peacefully before the Flood. The T Rex ate coconuts, and the reason animals ended up on different continents was that plate tectonics happened really, really fast after the flood. It “says quite a lot about Ham and his followers that they find a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth wildly implausible next to the notion of a tyrannosaur calmly grazing in a meadow.” Ken Ham and AiG seem to have failed to realize that the Flintstones is not a documentary. This is also pertinent, as is this.

Absolutely clueless and ignorant about science, Ham is also fond of dismissing any evidence on the grounds that the presenter is (purportedly) an atheist – a standard conspiracy theory trick, really.

He does, however, realize that Dembski’s old earth, intelligent design creationism is “bizarre", though not obviously for the right reasons.

Ham is also constantly complaining that scientists are unwilling to take him seriously. Go figure (He really, really doesn’t get it, though).

A couple of other examples: Ken Ham (feebly) claims that his Noah’s Ark claims are misrepresented.

Ken Ham on the Virginia Tech shootings (predictably).

Ken Ham on Tiktaalik.

Ken Ham applies double standards for Jesus.

Ken Ham fails to stay classy.

Ken Ham goes insane.

Oh, and Hitler.

And so on, and so forth. You get the gist.

Diagnosis: A clod, crackpot and (unintentional) con artist; seriously deluded and influential in the manner of Kent Hovind; Ken Ham is perhaps the leading advocate of traditional creationism and naïve biblical literalism. A threat to reason, sanity, intelligence and rationality everywhere.

#165: Wilfred Hahn

We may have entertained some doubts concerning Ted Haggard eligibility for our encyclopedia. No such doubts concerning Wilfred Hahn. For a taste, you may wish to read this. Here he asks the inevitable question I am sure many readers have pondered: “Does government debt have an endtime role?” By even asking the question, you kinda know what Hahn’s answer is going to be. “Taken together with several other trends and a literal scriptural perspective, in our view, it leads to an irrefutable diagnosis. These developments do align with endtime Bible prophecy.” (I think “irrefutable” means “non-falsifiable”). Really, this article is a study in equivocations (you can see them coming from far away in these claims): “The world has agreed to endorse humanist materialism”, “To begin, it is crucial to understand that economics is not a science. It is a philosophy … really, a religion”

Wilfred Hahn is a prolific writer, it seems (a collection is here), which I guess is easy when you don’t have to consider coherence, truth or justification. Much of it is interesting, though. His attacks on anti-Semitism are downright bizarre. His endtime signs for the secularists are amusing, though.

He is also a global warming denialist, interestingly starting from (rather than ending at) the premise that science is a secular conspiracy. I haven’t read anything on evolution from him, but I don’t think I need to. I wasn’t completely able to figure out his argument against China’s one-child-per-couple policy, but the conclusion was “With so many single, non-family-rooted men soon coming of military age in the future, events and trends could move into rapid alignment with events prophesied in Revelation 9:14".

Hahn may be Canadian, but has at least operated from the US for a while.

Diagnosis: Delusional dimwit. Probably relatively harmless.

#164: Ted Haggard (?)

Ted Haggard, who is not gay and known for saying that “evangelicals have the best sex life of any group”, is best known for being exposed as a methamphetamine user and a regular customer of Denver's male prostitutes in 2007 (of course not using money donated to his church by his flock). That does not make him a loon. What could perhaps make him a loon is the aftermath and rationalization (in addition to certain wacky beliefs he had beforehand). After a month of, well, therapy, however, he was pronounced “100% heterosexual” (which he asserted the whole time anyway) by his colleague Tim Ralph and followed his ministry’s advice of pursuing a secular career. Prior to his downfall, Haggard had immense influence reaching all the way to the White House; the scandal (and other scandals following in its trail) has led to a quick fall from grace of his New Life Church. Haggard was originally exposed since his masseur got tired of Haggard’s hypocrisy (Haggard was simultaneously campaigning for a law to ban gay marriage).

The reason Haggard did what he did was because Satan was present in his Church. If Satan can enter a church and provide the flock with impure thoughts, one wonders who wrote the Bible, but that is another matter. He has given his name to Haggard’s law. It got Haggard’s name since Haggard beat Larry Craig to it by a few months (along with an almost endless row of other conservative fundamentalist unnaturally preoccupied with other people’s sexual behavior). Haggard hasn’t tackled the episode very well (though he has, of course, made money off of it – separating people from their money is a skill that he had long before honed to excellence).

Contrary to popular belief, Haggard is relatively moderate (for an evangelical) in his religious views, and had never prior to the scandal been making any strong condemnations of homosexuality.

Thus, little of what’s mentioned qualifies him a loon (his reactions might in part be ascribed to the deleterious effect the incident had on his career). This one, though, will probably do the trick.

On the other hand, Haggard was also an ally in the fight against global warming, rather rare for radical wingnuts.
Diagnosis: The jury is still out on this one. If Ted Haggard is a loon, it would be in virtue of being a leader of an evangelical megachurch, possible, undisclosed beliefs about reality that may have come with that, and his sympathy for creationism. He doesn’t have much power anymore, however.

#163: Louise Kuo Habakus

We follow one anti-vaccine crank with another. Louise Kuo Habakus is less powerful than Grossman, but quite a bit more unhinged. Habakus won the crackpot-and-lunacy organization Age of Autism’s “person of the year” award in 2009. She won it for “rallying vaccine advocates and concerned citizens in numbers that made the difference in the New Jersey governor's race, defeating Jon Corzine and carrying Chris Christie, the first candidate to go on record for vaccine choice, to victory” (AoA obviously entertains some delusions of grandeur). “Vaccine choice” means “vaccine denialism”, and Habakus’s stance is well covered here. She likes to talk about the vaccine gestapo.

Her own website “Life Health Choices” is crammed with woo, strawmen and links to pseudoscience and conspiracy theories (she links to Mercola, for crying out loud). It is pretty transparently bad and would never have risen to notice were it not for the fact that certain news outlets sometimes seem to entertain an almost pathologic need to cover “both sides” of an issue regardless of whether that issue in fact has two legitimate sides.

Apart from her blog, Habakus gives lectures and talks on vaccines and other woo.

A good, concise primer on the Habakus-style anti-vaxxer is here.

Diagnosis: Not particularly original, but nevertheless scary peddler of disturbing woo and dangerous myths. Her influence is presumably a function of the influence of the despiccable Age of Autism organization, but she is notable enough nonetheless.

#162: Lee Grossman

Originally, I meant to cover Herb Grossman, who runs the website trashevolution and whose arguments are more inane than Christine O’Donnell’s and Kent Hovind’s. The problem is that the stupendous Herb Grossman is powerless and in fact merely pitiful – he is a guy with a website and an issue, so I think I’ll just leave him alone.

Lee Grossman, on the other hand (probably unrelated), deserves exposure. He belongs to that other favorite group of nuts of ourse, the anti-vaccinationists. Grossman is not the loudest or most vocieferous among them, but he is president of the Autism Society of America (ASA), and a firm believer in the scientifically completely unsupported claim that vaccines may cause autism. That belief and that position together make a very bad combination. Again, he may not be one of the most radically delusional (he’s no JB Handley, David Kirby or Jenny McCarthy), but the belief is so dangerous that any person in a position of power with respect to this matter, is somewhat obliged to try to follow the evidence, and Grossman simply doesn’t, as shown by this screed.

In a way, the ASA is far more moderate than the horrible Autism Speaks. Still it is listed on Quackwatch’s list of untrustworthy organizations.

More scary stuff here.

Diagnosis: Crank, and a dangerous one; he might still, perhaps, be stopped by reason and evidence (i.e. he may, for all I know, not have succumbed completely to insanity) – but he should be stopped.