#2837: Bruce Fife

More quackery! The technique known as oil pulling is part of traditional Ayurvedic method of oral care. The basic idea is that swishing sesame oil (or similar) in the mouth for 10–20 minutes prevents cavities and promotes gum health; evidence clearly shows that it is quite ineffective even for that purpose, but it has nevertheless, as quackery – especially quackery supported by appeals to ancient wisdom – often does, recently evolved into some sort of all-purpose detox nonsense promoted by a range of questionable practitioners, quack websites and social media posts.

 

Naturopath Bruce Fife, for instance, thinks the technique should be tried if “you suffer from asthma, diabetes, arthritis, migraine headaches, or any chronic illness”. There is, of course, no evidence that the technique has any effect against any of those conditions, nor any plausible reason to think that it should. For promoters of oil pulling, however, the vague idea of benefit is usually centered around a vague idea of never-specified toxins that are assumed (unsupported by any minimally reliable measurement of any toxin level) to be detoxed by some never-specified mechanism. For Fife, it is basically a religious creed, with oil-pulling taking on the role of some sort of purification ritual; according to Fife “All disease starts in the mouth!”, which means that Fife is a follower of the absolutely deranged New Age religion and thoroughly dangerous cult of Weston Price. Indeed, Fife is apparently deeply affiliated with the Weston A. Price Foundation, an anti-vaccine organization whose house journal Wise Traditions has received some attention not only for its dental woo but also for being a major pusher of the rather inane conspiracy theory that Covid-19 is not caused by a virus at all but by 5G network radiation and that Covid vaccines are a plot to murder you. 

 

Fife – who is ostensibly also a “certified nutritionist”, whatever that means – has also authored a series of books touting the alleged beneficial effects of coconut oil and coconut water, such as The Coconut Oil Miracle, Coconut Cures, Coconut Oil: The Worlds Most Powerful Superfood, The Coconut Ketogenic Diet, Virgin Coconut Oil: Nature’s Miracle Medicine and The Healing Miracle of Coconut Oil (one senses a certain strain of repetition), including touting coconut oil as a treatment for, well, more or less everything and anything, but in particular, perhaps, Alzheimer (“Stop Alzheimer’s Now!” claims one of the titles). There is no evidence whatsoever for those claims, of course, but Fife was never one to be overly concerned about evidence (or the lack thereof). He has also written conspiracy-oriented books e.g. on the alleged dangers of artificial sweeteners.

 

Among the more disconcerting works flowing from the deranged mind of Bruce Fife is Stop Autism Now! A Parent’s Guide to Preventing and Reversing Autism Spectrum Disorders. Naturopaths weighing in on autism is consistently bad news, and Fife is, unsurprisingly, no exception. After falsely claiming that autism is the result of gut disorders, Fife recommends a ketogenic diet with (but of course) coconut oil as a treatment, which is as useless as you’d imagine. But Fife also has … conspiracy theories. A large part of the book is devoted to an attempt to exonerate disgraced fraud Andrew Wakefield, and yes: Fife of course supports the thoroughly refuted piece of misinformation that vaccines are somehow causally connected to autism.

 

Diagnosis: This is Flat Earth-adjacent bullshit. Now, we’re sure Fife has managed to find a commercially relatively successful niche as supplier for adherents of various imagination-based health fads (in particular detox nonsense), but behind what is probably relatively innocuous nonsense (coconut oil), there is a dark chaos of deranged, pseudo-religious cult pseudoscience and conspiratorial paranoia. Dangerous.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased Medicine

#2836: David Field

Jade Erick was a woman who died from naturopathic quackery administered by naturopath Kim Kelly – specifically intravenous curcumin – in 2017. Now, naturopaths like to cosplay as responsible medical providers (they most surely are not), even going so far as trying to obtain (and sometimes getting) official recognition through legislative alchemy, but they struggle to maintain the mask when some pressure is put on them.

 

Kelly was licensed in California. David Field is (or at least was at that point) the Chair of the Naturopathic Medicine Committee for the State of California Department of Consumer Affairs, and it would thus be part of Field’s tasks to lead a committee to investigate Erick’s death. Field, of course, handled that task exactly how you would expect a dishonest quack and spin doctor to handle it: by trying to shift attention away from the fact that Erick’s death was a direct cause of a commonly recognized quack treatment among naturopaths to trying to find as much dirt as possible on real medicine to spin a marketable narrative that would take focus away from the quackery he recommends and avoid taking any responsibility whatosever: “I am in great need of statistics, with references/citations if possible, regarding iatrogenic harm from MDs/DOs, DCs, LAcs, etc. As SOON as POSSIBLE please! ANY and ALL types!” he promptly asked his naturopathic colleagues in a closed naturopathic discussion group. (He was quickly directed to the efforts of Gary Null and Carolyn Dean, of course.) It’s an obvious ploy: people die during conventional treatments, too, and if you disregard the efficacy of those treatments (curcumin is bullshit), you can probably create a compelling defense of naturopathic treatments. For context: Field was at that point scheduled to testify in front of the California legislature because law licensing naturopaths in that state would need to be renewed, and a case like Erick would definitely look bad (as would this report).

 

Otherwise, Field’s practice offers a plethora of quack modalities; his specialties include “acupuncture, botanical medicine, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, hormone replacement therapy, IV therapy, nutrition counseling, physical medicine/manipulation, supplement counseling”.

 

Diagnosis: He probably does recognize that patients dying as a direct result of your advice looks bad. We’ll grant him that. If he would also take seriously the thought that “perhaps it would be good to check, in an unbiased and accuracy-constrained way, whether my advice is actually good”, things would be fine. He won’t, though.

#2835: Kellie Fiedorek

Kellie Fiedorek is senior counsel and government affairs director for the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and a general dime-a-dozen fundie wingnut who has served on numerous panels and boards of groups defending the usual array of wingnut causes. Fiedorek is the kind of person who claims that opposing LGBT equality is doing just what Rosa Parks did and that the “agenda to expand sexual liberty and redefine marriage” puts religious liberty in “great peril”, primarily because “religious liberty” for Fiedorek means fundies having the right to violate the Establishment clause and to discriminate against those who disagree with them. Given that definition, Fiedorek predictably tries to argue that religious people are the ones being marginalized in the US today, and she is a major proponent of the Christian persecution in the US myth.

Diagnosis: More or less indistinguishable from a large number of similar wingnuts, so she doesn’t need a very substantial entry. But like those others, Fiedorek is zealous. She also wields some authority, and the ADF is a major player in current efforts to combat liberty, decency and civilization.

#2834: Joshua Feuerstein

Joshua Feuerstein is a fundie wingnut vlogger who first rose to attention for his attempts to argue for creationism (and disproving atheism), notably through various versions of design arguments; for instance, according to Feuerstein, since his 2001 Toyota Minivan is “perfectly designed” and not the product of evolution, biological organisms must be created as well. We leave it to readers to identify potential weaknesses in the argument.

 

Feuerstein is probably most familiar for his general wingnuttery, however, and in particular for his calls to violence in support of bigotry (“in order to be peaceful, you must first be capable of extreme violence. Otherwise, you’re just weak” is one of his nuggets of alleged wisdom; just think about it). As an anti-gay activist, Feuerstein for instance responded to the legalization of same-sex marriage by taking out a gun and asserting thatChristians should consider using their “Second Amendment right” to stop the government from forcing them to recognize marriage equality – as Feuerstein erroneously sees it, marriage equality is “not about equal rights” but “about reconstitutionalizing a term so that now it opens up the door for the left and the liberals to come after Christianity”. It really isn’t. (He also seems to interpret the Second Amendment as an unalienable right to shoot people whose politics he doesn’t fancy.) Similarly, he has called for his followers to “punish Planned Parenthood” and “make abortion doctors fear for their life”, called for civil war, and of course, in response to Trump’s 2024 conviction, rhetorically asked “at what point do we take up arms?”

 

Weighing in on transgender issues, Feuerstein has a piece of advice to concerned parents: Feuerstein doesn’t know “one child that was spanked … that turned out transgender.”

 

And he has predictably recruited himself as a foot soldier in the imaginary War on Christmas. His tactical operations are … counfounding (though in order to make sense of them it helps to to remember that Feuerstein is deeply paranoid and views anything or anyone that fails to actively support his political and/or religious views as a persecution of him).

 

On January 5, 2001, Feuerstein spoke at a  D.C. rally in support of Trump’s false claims of election fraud; Feuestein admitted that then-Vice President Pence wouldn’t refuse to certify the election “like the little coward, the little swamp monster, the little slimeball he is”, and accused Pence and other Republican politicians for allowing the alleged “steal” to happen, concluding that “It is time for war! And let us stop the steal!” Some people evidently took his conspiratorial nonsense seriously, though Feuerstein didn’t ultimately get in trouble for anything, it seems.

 

During Covid, Feuerstein was a significant spreader of nonsense, mostly along the lines of “you don’t have to wear the mask! You got Jesus! You don’t need the vaccine! You got Jesus!” since relying on faith alone has always worked so well in the past; he subsequently had to cancel events when he came down with Covid himself. As for vaccines, however, Feuerstein asserted that men of God with “big orange pumpkins hanging between their legs” must resist vaccine mandates instead of being “sissies” who “would have bent over and taken it from Hitler right up the backside.”

 

In the 2024 election, Feuerstein ran for the Texas House of Representatives in the 4th district, stating that he was personally recruited by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to run. If you elected him, he offered to “lead an armed civilian militia to the border.” (He failed in the primaries.)

 

Diagnosis: As mentioned, Feuerstein is deeply paranoid and views anything or anyone that fails to actively support his political and/or religious views as actively persecuting him. Unfortunately, a lot of people share his fear, anger, ignorance and paranoia; we wouldn’t really have been surprised if he had won his district in the 2024 election.

#2833: Sean Feucht

Sean Feucht is a singer, songwriter, former worship leader at Bethel Church (which promotes a distinctly weird mix of uncompromising fundamentalism and New Age nonsense and which e.g. made headlines in 2019 for a failed attempt to resurrect a dead six-year-old girl), founder of the Let Us Worship movement, affiliate and promoter of the New Apostolic Reformation (he is a self-declared mentee of Lou Engle), uncompromising dominionist, Christian nationalist, protégé of Josh Hawley, conspiracy theorist and important figure in the MAGA movement. In particular, Feucht has been pivotal in the efforts to integrate MAGA-style wingnuttery and Trump sycophancy with dominionist fundamentalism. At one point (2020), Feucht tried to run for Congress himself in California’s third congressional district, on a campaign largely focused on “the slaughter of the unborn and the newborn”, but fortunately failed – apparently the loss left him shocked and “seething with rage and anger and hurt” until God spoke to him and told him to get ready for new challenges.

 

COVID Protests

Those challenges would apparently soon materialize, and Feucht’s rise to fame in the wingnut circus really took off with his “Let us worship“ worship concerts in 2020, which protested and demonstratively violated lockdowns and COVID-related regulations and which drew crowds of thousands to protest various restrictions on people gathering (it is worth noting that Feucht and the Bethel Church simultaneously accepted the Paycheck Protection Program and other loans offered by the federal government to keep businesses alive during the pandemic). The concerts were promptly expanded to form a sort of response to Black Lives Matters protests – the groups who came for the Covid-lockdown protests apparently didn’t mind – targeting cities where such protests were being held; Feucht called his concert series “a new Jesus movement”. (In fairness, it should be noted that Feucht had earlier arranged a worship concert at the site of the murder of George Floyd where he referred to Floyd’s murder as an “injustice”). Donald Trump himself signed one of Feucht’s guitars prior to a “Let Us Worship” even at the National Mall in DC, which was apparently attended by some 35,000 people. The tour was sponsored by Feucht’s own Bethel Church, whose leader Bill Johnson is on record as a hardcore anti-vaccine activist who refers to the COVID-19 vaccine as the “mark of the beast”.

 

The concert series was the centerpiece of the ‘documentary’ Superspreader (“[d]uring the COVID-19 lockdowns, an evangelical Christian singer stands up for religious liberties by holding mass outdoor worship concert”), an insane conspiracy flick trying to argue that measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 “were part of a communist plan to take over the country”. The movie is notorious also for how it tries to portray Feucht as a victim – despite making millions off his tours – e.g. by including amateur footage of violence completely unconnected to Feucht or his tour; and when Feucht innocently says that he did not expect the “level of demonic activity” he confronted at an event Portland, which did involve violence, he conveniently neglects to mention that the violence was carried out primarily by his own paramilitary bodyguard. The movie was produced by Michael Mauldin and his company Mauldin Media – Michael being the husband of Meredith Mauldin, a.k.a. Meredith McKoy, a B-movie actress and Christian singer who performed with Feucht at his “Let Us Worship” events.

 

Source: Don't remember

The self-portrayal as a victim is of course, and as it is for most fundies, part and parcel of his identity: Sean Feucht is persecuted, as demonstrated by the fact that Congress sometimes passes legislation he disagrees with. Legislation protecting the rights of LGBTQ people for instance, is persecution of him now and will lead to even worse persecution of him and Christians like himself in the future, insofar as they will have to live with legislation they disagree with and cannot force people who disagree with them (him) to act the way they (he) want them to act. Of course, he has also claimed that Christians are on the verge of being imprisoned for their beliefs, citing as his primary evidence various dreams he has (or claims to have) had.

 

Other Antics

After graduating from Oral Roberts University, Feucht founded a number of organizations, including, in 2010, Light a Candle, an ‘international outreach movement’ supposedly doing missionary work around the globe while charging volunteers thousands of dollars in fees to participate; and Hold the Line, a movement intended “to inform, educate, and inspire” young people to become politically active and oppose “the progressive agenda being forced upon America” (as he puts it, Christians must “step out and confront the demonic schemes being pushed through the schools, the media and the government. We can confront the devil and the Left”). Currently, his main operation is Sean Feucht Ministries, Inc., a nonprofit tax-exempt cash cow). In 2019, Feucht was part of the group of fundies visiting then-President Trump for a faith briefing at the White House with the goal of praying Trump out of troubles related to the first impeachment attempt in 2019: “We just laid our hands on him and prayed for him. It was like a real intense, hardcore prayer”, Feucht reported.

 

In April 2022, Feucht called for the “walls of perversion to come down in Jesus’s name” at a protest outside of “demonic” Disney’s California corporate offices. And Feucht sees the devil in most things he doesn’t fancy. For instance, Feucht unsurprisingly thinks Biden is advancing a satanic agenda; with Biden, “[t]he enemy is launching an all out attack on truth, attacking the Bible, and God’s sacred design for the family, sexuality and gender” and the Biden administration is, as political opponents of wingnuts always do, “carrying some of the most anti-Christ agenda and philosophy that maybe we have seen in the history of America” (here is, apparently, more evidence). And as with fundies in general, it is hard to figure out precisely why it matters or is a bad thing, for as Feucht sees it, “we are living in the last days”: “These are the end times … we’re living in the midst of it.”

 

During the 2022 congressional elections, Feucht performed at campaign rallies in support of Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.

 

In early 2023, Feucht launched his ‘Kingdom to the Capitol’ tour, co-sponsored by Turning Point USA, which would focus on swing states to educate people e.g. about how the LGBTQ movement is driven by demonic forces (“schemes of the devil in the political realm”); a similar theme characterized his contributions to Clay Clark and Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour. Before his events in the Pacific Northwest, Feucht had conducted “a 3-day prayer and fasting movement in preparation” because the Pacific Northwest because “is #1 for witchcraft and demonic activity”. Particularly notable among those Northwest events in his Kingdom series was his appearance in Spokane with Matt Shea.

 

Despite (or, unfortunately, because of) his fundie lunacy, Feucht is extremely well-connected, and numerous members of Congress consider themselves fans and/or friends. Indeed, Feucht has even got his own Capitol Hill townhouse, “Camp Elah”, set up for meeting with strategists and lawmakers to help his efforts to “take back territory” and, with God’s help, elevate “men and women of faith” into positions of political power; ‘Christian’ and ‘men and women of faith’ for Feucht is of course synonymous with ‘those who agree with me on politics’ – and to make that clear, Feucht points out that “the fact that there is even such a thing as ‘Evangelicals for Harris’ that pastors/influencers join shows you just how apostate much of the American church has become” (Feucht elsewhere characterizes Harris as “A RADICAL BABY KILLING MANIAC!” – and both she and Walz are backed by demonic forces) and he has described the fact that not all Christian leaders are outspoken MAGA activists like him a “leadership crisis”.

 

That said, Feucht has complained that he is being unfairly “labeled by libs as a chRiStIAn nAtIoNaList.” Of course, the dastardly liberals probably label him that way partly because Sean Feucht has in fact proudly declared himself to be a Christian nationalist.

 

Miscellaneous

Here are Feucht’s views on the Gaza situation: (“this a prophetic hour” ostensibly connected to the End Times). Recently, his Let Us Worship events have therefore morphed into “United for Israel” marches targeting universities where there have been recent student protests to profess the idea that the conflict is a harbinger of the End Times predicted in the Bible.

 

He has also expressed some artistic differences with Taylor Swift, having at one point claimed that when families have followed his recommendation to stop listening to Taylor Swift, their daughters were no longer angry all the time and stopped having nightmares. Or shorter Sean Feucht: Anyone and anything he doesn’t fancy is Satan (Swift, in particular, is apparently “the demon god Molech”).

 

There is a decent Sean Feucht resource here.

 

Diagnosis: Though explicitly a Christian nationalist, explicitly a dominionist, and quite obviously insane, Sean Feucht has become something of a central figure on the religious right, and in particular when it comes to efforts to integrate fundie rightwing views with MAGA-style conspiracy theories. But despite having become immensely influential and despite milking millions and millions off his audiences, Feucht has no problem viewing himself as a poor victim of religious persecution on the grounds that there are still people who disagree with him and even dare to criticize his views. So it goes. One of the most dangerous people in the world.

#2832: Jorge Fernandez

To be fair, we don’t have an extensive overview of the background or career of Jorge Fernandez, or where he is currently located, but a decade or so ago, Fernandez, a young-earth creationist, was a staple at creationist “scientific” conferences (such as the 2011 Symposium Cornell University, which was, emphatically, not organized by Cornell University), and online debates, providing standard PRATT talking points against evolution as well as appeals to Expelled-style conspiracy theories. Fernandez has also published rants in the Journal of Creation, the magazine published by Creation Ministries International. As Fernandez saw (or sees) it, creationists have been unfairly silenced by scientific organizations and journals just because they cannot back up their claims by evidence (not, admittedly, how Fernandez himself put it), and such organizations and journals have neglected to take creationist attacks on evolution seriously just because the attacks are silly and already thoroughly refuted. Fernandez would for instance try to argue that the second law of thermodynamics is incompatible with evolution (it obviously isn’t – Fernandez’s use rather entail the prediction that snowflakes are impossible) and quote-mine Francis Crick to suggest that Crick rejected the theory of evolution (he most certainly did not).

 

At some point, however, Jorge Fernandez was also the president of the Citizens for Objective Public Education, a Kansas-based creationist group that in 2013 (under the subsequent leadership of Robert Lattimer) filed a federal civil rights suit that sought to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas public schools on the grounds that science is a religion. That the group doesn’t get the difference is telling enough.

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, it seems like a blast from the past, but these people are still out there, and they are unlikely to have gotten much more reasonable since the heydays of intelligent design. And there is still quite a number of them, unfortunately.

#2831: Bill Ferguson

A.k.a. Terran Cognito

A.k.a. Obi-Wan Kabuki

 

We’ve read through quite a lot of incoherent all-caps rambles on various conspiracy blogs over the years, and one is often left with the impression that it isn’t just difficult to identify the view being promoted, but that there isn’t really anything resembling a view that can be put in coherent sentences underneath it all. And so it is the case with William “Bill” Ferguson III, whose blogs devoted to various conspiracies carry the blurb “Unidynamic frequency inquiry by exploring cutting edge science, awareness and high technology. Expanding the knowledge of unidynomic principle”. Well, we haven’t attempted to make sense of Cognito’s unidynomic principle, but recurring themes in his writings are auras and energy bullshit he has allegedly received by telepathic message from outer cosmos.

 

Aliens and/or alien energy is apparently behind a lot of stuff Cognito imagines is happening on Earth. For instance, “THE METEOR THAT STRUC AND YES WE DO SAY STRUCK IRAN WAS MORE THAN A METEOR. IT WAS AN ENERGETIC SIGNATURE. NOT A WEAPON […] IT WAS AN ENERGETIC SIGNATURE DEVICE THAT ALLOWS FOR CONTINUED INTERFACE WITH OUR AWAKE FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND OPERATIVES IN THE REGION. THERE IS SO MUCH MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE. OUR AWAKE FRIENDS ARE PREPARING THE GROUND SO TO SPEAK. END”. Yeah, that kind of stuff. There is talk of dragons and pyramids in Antarctica built by survivors from Atlantis, too. Also, cats are apparently alien magical beings that “transmutes energies, offers protections, erases magical constructs, and so much more”.

 

Cognito is apparently connected with Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf and often comments on her legal woes and asks for donations to assist her. Cognito might even possibly have influenced the argumentation in one of Tucci-Jarraf’s (large) documents filed in her criminal case in which she alleges to have taken part in secret meetings with world leaders in Antarctica.

 

Diagnosis: Cognito offers a weird, funhouse mirror version of the garbled conspiracy theories you’d get from Alex Jones or RedIce Creations, completely devoid of anything resembling coherence or orientation toward reality. Probably harmless, though he seems to have some followers.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki