#2574: Aaron Bollinger

The Roger Sherman Institute (RSI) is – or was (it’s a bit unclear whether it’s still running) – an American institution for, well, something that looks like education from a perspective that “is distinctly nationalist, patriotic, biblical, and constitutional;” the institution’s “moral and nationalist perspective” was ostensibly free from government censorship and “political correctness”. Founded in 2012 by former encyclopedia salesman Aaron Bollinger, the institution – named for a 18^th century Connecticut lawyer and senator – wouldn’t teach “theoretical physics, double-entry accounting, or Freudian voodoo” but focus instead on promulgating various conspiracy theories and “the sociotheosphere, where you can learn about historical battles between dominant religions and government.” Apparently “[o]ur instructors don’t follow the script written by state and federal governments or specific organized religions about education in the realms of political science, theology, or general studies” – instead, “we allow you to research down whatever rabbit-holes you choose” (unless it is Freud or theoretical physics, apparently). They would also offer courses on other stuff, like the computer class “Intro to Corel WordPerfect”. The school preferred that students pay in silver (seven troy ounces of “Pre 1965 silver coin” for undergraduate courses and nine troy ounces for graduate courses) but will accept “Federal Reserve Notes” (i.e. cash) and postal money orders as well. Bollinger signs his emails as “Disciple Aaron”.

 

Disciple Aaron has had plenty of experience as a radical-right activist with the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. He has also worked with anti-Semitic far-right organizations like the Committee to Restore the Constitution and Holocaust denier Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby (Bollinger denies being anti-Semitic: “You know, I study theology and consider myself an Israelite, so if I’m anti-Semitic then I’d be against myself. That’s just ridiculous.”), been a “researcher” for Gun Owners of America, and been involved with the Taliban- and ISIS-inspired group Christian Exodus, a theocratic organization that attempted to take control of South Carolina and, “if necessary,” declare it a sovereign republic based on Old Testament law – it might be notable that Christian Exodus’s webmaster Keith Humphrey was also manager for one of the Sherman Institute’s websites. Bollinger has also enjoyed a career as legislative director for the Patriot conspiracy group Restore the Republic, whose goals are to eliminate the Federal Reserve and the IRS, end globalization, and make it illegal to implantmicrochips in people, and has been part of the advisory board for the far-right Committees of Safety.

 

Who else has been involved with the ‘school’? At least back in 2012, its faculty included:

 

-       David Irons, an antigovernment activist and 2008 failed candidate for the Michigan House of Representatives on a platform of abolishing the income tax, is one of RSI’s co-founders. (He might be deceased as of 2022.)

-       Another co-founder is David Schied, a former movie stuntman and presumably the guy behind this one. And probably a slew of others like it.

-       Greg Evensen, a militia sympathizer and former Kansas state trooper. The dean of justice studies, Evensen is otherwise known for various radio broadcasts on endtimes and militia websites, and for claiming that “alien hybrids” pretending to be US troops led an enforced evacuation of 40 million people from the Gulf Coast area in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. (He might be deceased as of 2022.)

-       Veronica Ann Hannevig (her own spelling ‘Veronica Ann; Hannevig’) as dean of distance learning. A champion of the sovereign citizens movement, Hannevig’s personal website, The Truth Store, prominently notifies the government that she was “born in the United States of diplomatic representatives by hereditary succession of the Kingdom of Heaven” and that she has “the property, rights, privileges and immunities granted to me and my heirs by hereditary succession by Our Father, Y'hw(v)'h, the Creator and sovereign ruler of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them” (and hence she owes nothing to the government).

-       Mark Anderson, editor of the American Free Press, an anti-Semitic weekly that bills itself as “America’s Last Real Newspaper”

-       Karen Ruff, a South Carolina tea party activist whose course on conspiracies in contemporary politics would cover important things like “the well documented forgery of the birth certificate and selective service documents of Barack Obama” and why global warming is a hoax. (Bollinger himself won’t offer his take – “I’m not a meteorologist”, says Bollinger on the question of global warming, and “How can I say? I wasn’t around” on the issue of birtherism – besides, “[t]he presidency is far less important on the national level than the Vice President. What does the President do? He signs bills. What does the Vice President do? He controls what bills move. The Vice President has as much, if not more, power than the President.” You’ll learn a lot you didn’t know in RSI’s classes)

 

A couple of familiar miscreants showed up on the faculty lists, too: League of the South member Michael Peroutka was apparently teaching classes at the RSI, and David Whitney, a white supremacist pastor who advocates a second Southern secession and the creation of a “godly” nation run by “Anglo-Celtic” (white) elites, was dean of theology.

 

Diagnosis: It’s so difficult for ordinary people to imagine such radical confusion about how things work and such struggles to distinguish reality from fevered wishful thinking that it is also hard to empathize with the paranoia and anger such confusion obviously creates in struggling, confused people like Aaron Bollinger. But there are many like him, and apparently some view him as some sort of leader. Dangerous.

 

Hat-tip: Splcenter

#2573: Eric Bolling

Eric Thomas Bolling is a television personality, wingnut political commentator, staunch misogynist, and author who, for some reason, seems to have a bit of a fan base. He used to be a Fox News mainstay (providing financial advice until 2017, when he turned out to be too shitty even for them. He has later been involved with TheBlaze and Newsmax TV.

 

An ardent fan of Trump – even his Fox News colleagues called him ‘an apologist for Trump’ – Bolling has also published the books Wake Up America (2016) and The Swamp: Washington’s Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It (2017) (he couldn’t; Trump was the swamp, in all possible ways, but that wasn’t Bolling’s conclusion). Trump apparently considered Bolling for an appointment in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Bolling, meanwhile, has also promoted the candidacy of pizzagate conspiracy theorist Kelli Ward.

 

Racism and misogynism

Bolling has a long history of making misogynistic and racist remarks. One recurring theme is his objection to allowing girls to play football, something that, as he sees it, is somehow part of “the wussification of American men.” Reacting to a story of a 9-year-old girl playing football, Bolling concluded with “Let the boys be boys, let the girls be girls,” because it’s not like girls would ever choose to play football unless liberal moonbats brainwashed them.

 

Bolling has also, in all his wisdom, lectured “rappers”, arguing that they should be happy because white people are “financing their lifestyles” by buying their music. And when the president of Gabon visited Obama in the White House, Bolling characterized it as “a hoodlum in the hizzouse.” According to Bolling, though, racism doesn’t exist anymore because there are “black entertainment channels.”

 

Conspiracy theories

A hardcore conspiracy theorist (what do you expect from someone who writes a book with ‘WAKE UP’ in the title?), Bolling has pushed a number of classic but idiotic conspiracy delusions, including birtherism: Bolling was a latecomer to the movement but managed to establish himself as one of its main proponents. When Obama released his long-form birth certificate, Bolling didn’t buy it, asserting that “there is a legitimate question as to whether or not the president of the United States is allowed to be president of the United States” and taking it upon himself to examine the certificate on air, speculating that it was photoshopped. (He emphasized that he was JAQing off.) He has also pushed conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich, and dismissed out of hand the police conclusion that Rich’s death was the result of a botched robbery: “It’s clearly not a robbery. There wasn’t a robbery. … This was a hit.” You’d look in vain for reasoning or evidence, but Bolling doesn’t work that way; instead, he concluded that there’s “lots of smoke right now”, being apparently confused by the smoke produced by the dumpster fire that is the mind of Bolling.

 

Bolling has also accused Obama of trying to “bring people closer to the cities” to keep an eye on them, suggested that Obama “let” an oil rig leak so he “could renege on his promise” to “allow some offshore drilling,” and suggested that “the Russians were colluding with Hillary Clinton to get information on Donald Trump.” Nor does he claim to know whether “the climate’s getting warmer or colder.” He could check. Reasonable people would check if there is something they are unsure of, especially if it’s something that would make them look like fools if they were wrong about. Bolling has little affinity with reasonable people.

 

After being cancelled by Fox News, Bolling made visits to Alex Jones’s show, and for a while hosted the show America This Week for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. At Sinclair, Bolling made conspiracy theories his mainstay, in particular promoting Stop the Steal nonsense and Trump’s campaign to discredit voting by mail and baseless claims that mail-in voting was prone to fraud. He also interviewed conspiracy theorist Judy Mikovits of the video Plandemic, which e.g. claims that Dr. Fauci “manufactured” COVID-19, as well as wingnut conspiracy nut (and Mikovits’s lawyer) Larry Klayman. Bolling did, needless to say, fail to challenge any of the incoherent garbage that fell out of the mouths of either guest. Sinclair responded by cancelling Bolling’s show.

 

Paranoia

Conspiracy theories are naturally accompanied by paranoia, and Bolling is paranoid about mostly everything, in particular communism. For instance, “liberal Hollywood was using class warfare” in a typical communist fashion in a 2011 muppets movie “to brainwash our kids”. Apparently, teaching kids distributive algebra is “pushing the liberal agenda”, too, and standard economic language is “Obama math”.

 

Like many wingnut conspiracy theorists, Bolling was outraged over Big Bird promoting vaccines, declaring that “Sesame Street are a bunch of communists” for “hawking the jab to five-year-olds.” That level of understanding of communism explains a bit about his take on financial issues, but is not the main problem with Bolling’s statement. Bolling has, in fact, had issues with Sesame Street for a while (lots of his persecution fantasies seem to involve puppets), imploring the children’s show to “move away from the left-wing communist diatribe they put out every single day.” Then he took a swipe at Fox for implementing a vaccine policy “months before they had to,” comparing their protocols to the network’s early – and accurate – Arizona call for Biden during the 2020 election. If there is a lesson to be made from that comparison, it was definitely lost on Eric Bolling himself.

 

According to Bolling, “Every terrorist on American soil has been a Muslim”. That’s because he uses the Family Guy test as part of his definition of “terrorism”. He also defended Trump’s false claim that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered on 9/11 as the twin towers came down.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, yet another one of those. Not as loud or colorful as Alex Jones, but in his own way promoting the same nonsense. It’s not entirely clear how many fans he’s got left – and we cannot really imagine any real person being turned to the lunatic side by Eric Bolling – but there seems to be some of them.

#2572: Sue Bohlin

Sue Bohlin is associate speaker and Web Site Administrator with Probe Ministries and married to Ray Bohlin, whom we have already covered. Sue is herself a fundie and a wingnut, and predictably hateful and bigoted – her views on homosexuality, for instance, are precisely what you’d expect (“homosexuality is no more right, holy or acceptable today than it ever was in Bible times”). She has written a number of publication for Probe ministries, including ‘Homosexuality Q&A’, ‘Homosexual Myths’, ‘Ten Lies of Feminism’, ‘The Value of Suffering’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Can Homosexuals Change?’, ‘5 Lies the Church Tells Women’, ‘A Short Look At Six World Religions’, ‘Worldproofing Our Kids’ [no kidding] and, of course, ‘Creation & Evolution Q&A for Kids’. Now, we haven’t bothered to look at, much less read, any of this, but we think we can reasonably infer a number of things from their titles and a general knowledge of Bohlin’s stances on things – she has for instance written quite a bit on evolution with her husband, Raymond, and we do know his views, e.g. on ‘The Grand Canyon and the Age of the Earth’.

 

Now, what should kids know about evolution, according to Bohlin? Well, they should apparently know that there are gaps in the fossil record, that there are no vestigial structures (we just don’t know what the functions are), that there are no genetic mechanisms for gradual evolution over cosmic time, and that there are things scientists can’t completely explain yet, so you are free to reject it all in favor of whatever you like.

 

A large part of her work consists of responding to questions from readers (or at least questions described as being from readers), and those answers are one reason she warrants an entry here. Telling her readers sternly that they cannot attend their neighbour’s gay wedding is just an example. We can’t be bothered to go through much of it but yes, that’s the standard.

 

Perhaps the main reason for including her, however, is her career as a speaker at various gay conversion camps, both in the US and internationally – indeed, Bohlin is on the Board of Directors for Living Hope Ministries, a deranged conversion therapy cult. According to Bohlin, the latest research shows 80 to 85 per cent of lesbians were sexually abused in the past. She does, of course, not provide any references. Moreover, women who weren’t nurtured or breastfed by their mothers end up sexually attracted to females because: “they want to rest in another woman’s arms; they want to suckle at a breast. They want to gaze into the eyes of another woman like a baby would a mother” (po-mo pseudo-Freudan pseudo-psychology is a major strand of fundie wingnut thought). Part of the blame lies also with popular culture, in particular a “disgusting” new generation of US TV shows and movies that glamorize same-sex relationships.

 

Diagnosis: An abomination, through and through. Undiluted evil, hate and bigotry, augmented by stupidity, ignorance and conspiracy theories.

#2571: Christian Bogner

Christian Bogner is a board-certified OB/GYN and until recently medical director of the Oxford Recovery Center, a dangerous quack institution where he ostensibly specializes in autism, autoimmune disease, and gastrointestinal issues – something that would strike a careful reader as being rather far removed from his area of specialization. The Oxford Recovery Center’s autism services’ ARTS programs, an integrative approach the center claims can lead to recovery, was created and run by Casey Diskin, a convicted felon with fake credentials stolen from a certified behavioral analyst – something the the center was aware of for a long time but did not do anything about since that’s the kind of organization we are talking about (“As an organization founded by Christians, we believe in forgiveness and redemption”, said ORC’s CEO Tami Peterson, obviously failing to recognize the lack of credentials issue). Bogner, in fairness, resigned from his position there in 2021. Currently, he seems to be promoting the nebulous quackery known as functional medicine.

 

Bogner has his own ideas about autism, and they are not based on reality, evidence or reason. Believing that autism is a neuroinflammatory condition, Bogner is opposed to any pharmaceutical intervention, championing instead a plant-based diet, hyberbaric oxygen chambers and unproven and dangerous stem cell therapies. And Bogner doesn’t treat just autism; he treats almost everything that his customers are willing to pay him to treat, including chronic Lyme disease. He is also antivaccine (an advocate for ‘vaccine choice’), being a regular speaker at the antivaccine quackfest AutismOne and author of antivaccine Letters to the Editor like ‘Vaccines are a choice not a mandate’. In particular, Bogner claims that adjuvants (like aluminum) plus heavy metals in vaccines activate the microglia, which purportedly causes inflammation and autism. It doesn’t, if reality is your standard, but it isn’t Bogner’s. Apparently glyphosate is involved, too, as is “aborted fetal cells in vaccines”. Yes, Bogner is that kind of practitioner.

 

Bogner is most famous, however, for his pseudoscientific ramblings in favor of phytocannabinoid (marijuana)  therapies for autism. Now, medical marijuana has become something of a new herbalism, a complete and largely (though not fully) pseudoscientific edifice with little root in actual evidence (for a good discussion, see this). The evidence for marijuana therapies for autism is more or less nil (there is evidence for using medical marijuana for spasticity and pain, which is largely irrelevant but which advocates of cannabis for autism often refer to since some children with autism also suffer from seizures). Advocates have claimed “peer reviewed evidence that cannabis not only has the potential to provide palliative relief of symptoms related to autism, but may also have the potential to target the underlying causes of autism itself,” but the “peer reviewed” evidence in question in that quote is merely a blog post, ‘The Endocannabinoid System as it Relates to Autism’, published on the Cannabis for Autism blog written by Bogner and Joe Stone. And the reason it is not a peer-reviewed published article is rather obvious if one looks at it: Apart from some amazing cherry-picking forays, they’ve got anecdotes (mostly about epilepsy), some potential correlations and lots of imaginative extrapolations from preclinical cell culture and animal studies and studies that address other conditions, to conclude that cannabinoids are efficacious treating autism. They do not address the lack of actual clinical trial evidence. The current state of evidence on marijuana for neurological disorders is discussed here (from 2015, but the situation remains generally sordid, and on autism there’s still really nothing that rises above the level of shoddy-borderlining-on-scientific-misconduct).

 

And no, Bogner did not attend medical school at Cornell, but in Poznan.

 

Diagnosis: Pseudoscience and crackpottery, yes, and with the usual yet remarkable opportunism and cynicism associated with the kind of business in which Bogner is involved. A shitty person. Avoid.

#2570: Lauren Boebert

Lauren Opal Boebert is a high-school dropout, conspiracy theorist and Representative for Colorado’s 3rd district in the US House of Representatives, where she represents the QAnon & stupidity faction together with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert.

 

Like so many candidates who run on an ostensible “law and order” platform, Boebert has a long criminal record, in addition to an even longer record of morally questionable behavior, having been court summoned and fined a rather impressive number of times for an interestingly variegated set of crimes. She also sports a long record of payments to and cooperation with terrorist groups, including hiring representatives of the Three Percenters group as security for her campaign events.

 

QAnon and other conspiracy groups

“thank God for you guys and the Proud Boys”

-       Boebert’s campaign manager Sherrona Bishop (“you guys” refers to some self-declared members of the group)

 

Boebert’s official position on the QAnon conspiracy theories vary according to the principle of opportunism. In a May 2020 interview on Ann Vandersteel’s QAnon web show SteelTruth, she claimed to be “very familiar with” the claims, and asserting that “everything I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better.” She was also a follower of a number of QAnon-connected YouTube channels at the time. When her affiliation with the movement later faced some scrutiny, she deleted her YouTube account and denied everything.

 

During a March 2021 town hall in Montrose, however, Boebert responded to an interlocutor wondering when Hillary Clinton and other former officials would be arrested (a recurring delusional dream among QAnon loons) by claiming that she knew someone involved with documents declassified by Trump during the closing days of his presidency, and that the documents would reveal corruption to trigger resignations that would allow Republicans to retake the House and Senate before 2022. That particular piece of Trump fan fiction is familiar e.g. from the ridiculous conspiracy theory outlet The Epoch Times. Boebert, however, urged people to just overlook the outlet’s status as a fake news purveyor (a status earned by fact checks establishing its systematic lack of reliability about anything whatsoever), claiming instead that they were using information from “very good sources” (the sources being, of course, not further specified). For the most part, however, Boebert prefers to ignite the Qanon crowd with the help of dogwhistles her critics tend to miss.

 

Stop the steal and Capitol storming

Boebert has been a staunch supporter of Trump’s false and baseless claims that 2020 election was stolen from him, and she voted to overturn the results of the Electoral College vote count.

 

She has, in particular, tirelessly spread misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories about Arizona’s election results, alleging widespread voter fraud and accusing everyone who intended to accept the “results of this concentrated, coordinated, partisan effort by Democrats” of having allied themselves with the extremist left. In December 2021, Boebert reiterated the claim that hundreds of thousands of ballots were illegally mailed to voters. Did she provide evidence? What do you think?

 

She also supported the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (“Today is 1776”) and was herself an invited speaker at the March for Trump/Save America rally directly preceding the riot. During the riot itself, Boebert tweeted the location of Nancy Pelosi, which resulted in widespread calls for resignation. At least, her communications director had sufficient integrity to leave the clown ship over Boebert’s January 6 behavior.

 

In June 2021, Boebert voted against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol. She also rejects the term ‘insurrection’ for the January 6 events, calling the House inquiry into the attack a “sham witch hunt” and equating the riot with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests – which she anyways thinks should be prosecuted en masse and is linked to terrorism, which makes it unclear what her defense of the January 6 riots is really supposed to be. Boebert’s fans don’t seem to notice the tension, and neither does she. She freely used fear of another insurrection when applying for a concealed gun permit in DC, but ranted against the metal detectors in the Capitol designed to prevent attacks on Congress because the detectors made it challenging for her to bring a gun to Congress.

 

Here is her reasoning for why Kamala Harris should be impeached, and it would have been sort of noteworthy if it hadn’t been so daft. (Biden should of course be ‘imeached’, too).

 

Education

Boebert supports eliminating the US Department of Education because “critical race theory”, which is not taught in schools but which should be banned from schools nonetheless.

 

Bigotry

A full-time bigot, Boebert is of course opposed to marriage equality and any measure to ease the life of transgender people. She freaked mightily out over the 2021 Equality Act, alleging that it aimed to establish the “supremacy of gays, lesbians and transvestites,” which she probably genuinely believes, and it is very telling.

 

She has also gotten some attention for her altercations with Ilhan Omar, whom Boebert has described as “a full-time propagandist for Hamas” and an “honorary member of Hamas”, referred to as “the Jihad Squad member from Minnesota”, and implied to be a terrorist. According to Boebert, she herself would put “America first, never sympathizing with terrorists. Unfortunately, Ilhan can’t say the same thing.” Of course, as opposed to Omar, Boebert has associated with terrorists, even financed them. The Denver Post apologized on Boebert’s behalf for her remarks, saying that it was embarrassing that a Colorado representative engaged in such behavior.

 

COVID denialism

As expected, Boebert is a COVID denialist with a lengthy record of attempts to downplay the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, and her 2020 campaign was largely based on opposition to official COVID restrictions. She kept the restaurant she runs in Colorado open despite a cease-and-desist letter from the sheriff's office and a later suspension of her restaurant license – apparently, you only need to follow the laws you agree with, a principle she struggles to apply to others than herself, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. (Her restaurant, the Shooters Grill, was, before Boebert landed a seat in Congress, mostly famous for causing 80 people to contract food poisoning at a 2017 event due to unsafe food handling. Currently, it operates more likea Trump shrine employing a number of hardcore Qanon adherents, having for instance hired Mona and Bud Demicell as accountant and general manager, respectively.)

 

In Congress, Boebert has consistently opposed measures intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and has on several occasions posted misinformation and conspiracy theories related to face masks and COVID-19 vaccines (which she keeps falsely calling “experimental” because she doesn’t know what ‘experimental’ means). For instance, she falsely claimed that during the two months that followed the end of the Texas mask mandate, the state did not record any COVID-19-related deaths – a claim that is easily fact-checked, of course, but Boebert, playing by Trump’s book, doesn’t really care. She subsequently introduced a bill that would ban all mask mandates on federal property and during travel in interstate commerce, which failed to garner sympathy even with her sometimes Congressional allies.

 

And yes, of course she is antivaccine. Boebert has even employed the familiar antivaccine nonsense gambit of comparing vaccines to the Holocaust (e.g. when comparing the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts to “Biden [deploying] his Needle Nazis”). Meanwhile, the COVID-19 virus is just like communism. And no, she really doesn’t know how vaccines – or contagious diseases – work: attempting to mock the point of herd immunity, Boebert wrote: “I woke up with a headache this morning. I took some Tylenol. Now if everyone else could take some Tylenol too so mine would start working, that would be great,” which must be one of the feeblest attempts at a gotcha since Chuck Missler’s peanut butter argument against evolution.

 

Boebert has also accused Anthony Fauci, who told people to get the COVID-19 vaccine, of bullying, because encouraging people to do something they don’t want to do is just what bullying is and Boebert and her fans are apparently some really fragile flowers.

 

In June 2021, Boebert advised her constituents in Mesa County, who were experiencing an uptick of Delta variant cases, that the “easiest way to make the Delta variant go away is to turn off CNN [and] vote Republican” (she quickly deleted that particular tweet).

 

Diagnosis: Stupidity is an interest well served in Congress, but Boebert is among its most systematic champions (though we grudgingly admit that she often seems to be cleverer than her opponents tend to realize). A serious gohmert and a major threat to civilization.

#2569: Jack Blood

Jack Blood is a radio show host, conspiracy theorist and sometimes Alex Jones associate – not one of the big guns in that flock of paranoids, but since he is, indeed, on the herder side of the stampede down the rabbit hole (I mean “Where we go one, we go all” … you really accuse others of being “sheep”?), he is worth a mention. And no: we don’t know whether the name is an alias. Nor is it entirely clear whether his show, Deadlinelive, is still operative.

 

Blood is in any case a 9/11-truther. In fact, Blood doesn’t think Bush was behind the attacks; according to Blood “it was a black op that was above his pay grade. Cheney was in the loop for sure.” The 2008 financial crisis, too, was – just like 9/11 – “engineered to bring about more centralization”. Centralization seems to be the general goal of several og Blood’s conspiracy theories, and is apparently a threat to Blood’s freedoms.

 

His main focus is in general on the shadow government – the Bildeberger group and the Trilateral Commission and suchlike, the ones that are really pulling the strings. Most American presidents have been mere puppets – perhaps apart from Bill Clinton, who was “likely the illegitimate son of Winthrop Rockefeller” and was ultimately really behind “the 1993 WTC Bombings, the OKC Bombings, Waco, and TWA 800”. Blood does engage in what he considers research for his claims, but it seems mostly to consist of reading other conspiracy theorists’ (like Jim Fetzer’s) rants; and then they read him, and so it goes, completely independent of reality.

 

And the shadow government is assassinating those that come to close to the truth – like Don Harkin, editor of the Idaho Observer, a famous conspiracy rag popular among the “patriot/survivalists”; Harkin was apparently murdered by “NSA and associated intelligence groups who utilized extremely powerful ‘Psychotronic,’ Electronic Warfare on him.”

 

Diagnosis: A minor but colorful figure. We have no idea what, exactly, he’s up to these days, but we don’t exactly trust it to be to the benefit of humanity.

#2568: Jennifer Block & Elisa Albert

‘Nourish the Inner Aspect’ is the slogan of Goop, and it really captures the nature of that organization – utterly contentless, but with a vague air of feel-good deepity about it. Goop is of course Gwyneth Paltrow’s brand, and although it is huge business, it is pseudoscientific drivel to the core – Paltrow is wrong about everything, has no standards that bear any resemblance to truth or accuracy, and really, really doesn’t care. Her project is big enough, however, that Paltrow was given a series on Netflix, which she used to promote the most bullshit of nonsense and woo. Naturally, some reasonable people reacted to that, such as Dr. Jen Gunter, given that much of Paltrow’s randomly insane advice is not always mere harmless drivel but potentially dangerous.

 

And predictably enough, the criticism from the side of reason received some pushback from Paltrow’s dingbat fans. And of course, some of them couldn’t help but employ the ‘we’re-oppressed’ gambit – criticism of Paltrow by people like Jen Gunter just because Paltrow is lying is misogyny and patriarchal oppression. That was the line deployed e.g. by Jennifer Block and (successful author) Elisa Albert, in a piece in the NY Times, where they dismissed criticism of Goop by people like Jen Gunter as “classic patriarchal devaluation”, or shorter Block and Albert: “if you don’t lay off the pseudoscience promoted by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, you’re treating women and their concerns about their bodies, emotional landscapes, and physiology with disrespect and a lack of humility”.

 

Mostly, their screed was a long exercise in whataboutism, referring to historical and misogynist practices in medicine. But they really didn’t shy away from describing the stuff Paltrow recommends, including psychics and energy healing, as “none of which lack actually lack sound evidence of benefit.” Oh, but it most certainly does; many of the claims Paltrow makes don’t rise to the level of meaningful, but those that do are almost invariably false (Block and Albert try to back up their claim with a link to a press release by a reiki practitioner before quickly moving their focus to the few Paltrow claims that are defensible). And of course, because Block and at least Albert were semi-celebrities, they did get their nonsense screed published – and deservedly attacked.

 

The more general and important point here, though, is this: Falling for this kind of response is to walk right into the Goop trap, line, hook and sinker. Paltrow’s whole marketing strategy is to use references to empowerment and feminist language (not content) to make a huge amount of money selling fraudulent bullshit. She’s a parasite on the feminist movement and every fight for empowerment, a leech who uses the slogans and spirit of those movements in the most cynical way to promote pseudoscientific crackpottery. She is exploiting women (knowledge is empowerment; misinformation isn’t). And useful idiots like Block and Albert prop it up by mistaking slick marketing ploys with genuine emancipatory efforts. This one provides a good summery. Ultimately, it is important to keep in mind what is overwhelmingly likely going on here: It is not that Block and Albert support feminism and mistake Paltrow’s efforts as a means to empowerment; it is that Block and Albert support wellness woo, and use whatever means they can to promote it or at least to justify it to themselves.

 

Diagnosis: It was probably inevitable that someone would endorse this kind of gambit. But it is stupid, and those who use it are genuine shitfucks.