#2921: Maurice Gordon

And just for a brief, humorous respite between all the toxic sludge (well, this one’s toxic, too, but in a rather helpless way): Rev. Maurice Gordon of Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver received some attention back in 2004 for posting a church sign saying “Jews killed the Lord Jesus” to remind his followers that … well, according to Gordon, the message wasn’t hateful: “It would be hateful if it pointed at anybody alive today. But this has been part of the record for 2,000 years.” His response raises the obvious follow-up question “what, then, was the point of putting up the sign?” According to Gordon, the point was to encourage people to read the Bible. Well, then.

 

Apparently, Gordon’s various signs condemning homosexuality, extramarital sex and abortion had been courting controversy for a while in the Denver area.

 

Diagnosis: Very possibly dead (he was elderly back in 2004). It wouldn’t make much difference to his current level of influence, as far as we can tell.

#2920: Garry Gordon

Shaini Candace Goodwin, the “Dove of Oneness”, graduate of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment and Internet Queen of the cult of NESARA, is dead, though the cult’s offspring and heir is very much alive. And though Garry Gordon is less flamboyant, he isn’t really that much less of a loon (and we just assume he’s still around – he’s been in the game for a while).

 

So Gordon, an actual MD, is former president of the American Academy of Medical Preventics (subsequently called the American College of Advancement in Medicine), a group of doctors who practice and promote chelation therapy for all sorts of ailments for which it is demonstrably useless and dangerous. He has also been medical director and board chairman of Mineralab, a large commercial hair analysis laboratory, and director of a subsidiary of that company selling useless nutritional products. Not the least, Gordon has been among the leaders of the National Health Federation (NHF), a group of promoters of quackery (like Kurt Donsbach and Bernard Jensen) and questionable methods that engage in lobbying campaigns and many other activities promoting quackery and deregulation of questionable methods. The NHF seems to have been particularly active from the 1970s through the 1990s, and was partially responsible for popularizing the idea of “health freedom” as a strategy to promote denialism and woo. Gordon is also Founder/President of the International College of Advanced Longevity (ICALM) and Board Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the National Foundation for Alternative Medicine, as well as Consultant for Longevity Plus, LLC, a nutritional supplement company based in Payson, Arizona, “where he is responsible for designing effective, natural, non-toxic alternative supplements for the treatment of every disease known to man”, a description that really should need no further comment.

 

Gordon is, in fact, one of the self-styled “fathers of the chelation therapy movement”, and has promoted chelation therapy for a range of ailments for which chelation therapy does nothing and is actively dangerous. Indeed, his 1982 book on the topic (with Morton Walker, one of the main proponents of the infamous Gerson therapy), The Chelation Answer: How to Prevent Hardening of the Arteries and Rejuvenate Your Cardiovascular System, has long been a go-to reference for proponents of chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease; needless to say, it is not a scientific study. Gordon is also the author of a couple of sequels, including the 2004 exercise in quackery and quackery-related pseudoscience and fallacies The Omega-3 Miracle: The Icelandic Longevity Secret That Offers Super Protection Against Heart Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, Arthritis, Premature Aging, and Deadly Inflammation.

 

Interestingly, Gordon has also made appearances as a member of the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners for Arizona – almost as if to emphasize how unconcerned he is with the restraints to marketing creativity provided by care for evidence and accountability – where he was e.g. making excuses for homeopathic pratictioners whose patients had died while being subjected to nonsense woo treatment regimes.

 

Diagnosis: A long career of pushing any health-related advice (and lobbying for the removal of legal barriers to pushing such advice without consequences) that can be turned into money and that he knows, or should know, are completely worthless, to people who are often in desperate situations. We don’t know … What would you call that?

 

Hat-tip: Quackwatch

#2919: Joe Gooding

Maybe too minor to bother, but Joe Gooding is an internet cesspool operator, conspiracy theorist and general troll. On his website, Gooding covers most of the standard anti-vaccine tropes, or more accurately: He posts coverage by other anti-vaccine activists of standard anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories. Otherwise, Gooding is primarily a tireless originator of smear campaigns against scientists and public health advocates – even though there is little new or original on Gooding’s site, he is somewhat notable for his commitment to the pharma shill gambit; anyone speaking out in favor of vaccines or criticizing anti-vaccine misinformation is, as Gooding sees it, necessarily on the Big Pharma payroll, and he is therefore justified in posting your (poorly manipulated) picture, start hashtags, and encourage associates and other antivaxxers to attack and harass you. (A bit like we do with loons – apart from encouraging anyone to harass anyone – but we are right and Gooding is deluded.) Gooding is also, like many antivaxxers, under the delusion that he is not anti-vaccine (“the Pro-Forced Vaccine element [who would that be, precisely?] has attempted to marginalize the Vaccine Choice supporters with the completely made up term ‘Anti-Vax’”) but fair and balanced (“In an attempt to be balanced, I have created the term “Vax Shill” (#vaxshill) and will articulate it here”)

 

Diagnosis: A minor figure, but an active and angry one. If you ever come across him in any context, you can safely ignore anything he has to say.

#2918: Jay Goodbinder

Ah, yes. Whenever a new and powerful scientific concept is introduced, in particular one that requires a bit of knowledge and expertise to fully grasp, grifters will be there to apply it in their marketing materials as a substitute for less-marketable terms like ‘magic’. So it was with proponents of quackery and ‘quantum physics’, and so it has been for a while with ‘nano’ – most reasonable people would presumably have a feeling of that’s not quite how it works but probably not enough knowledge of the topic to be able to precisely identify what’s wrong with the bullshit. ‘Epigenetics’ is another example of a scientific expression that has been mangled and misused by proponents of quackery and woo since the term was introduced to make their nonsense sound as if it had anything to do with science to the uninformed when they try to handwave how you get from their miracle treatment regimes to a state of health.

 

There are numerous examples – some are mentioned here –and the case of Jay Goodbinder is just one of many. Goodbinder – “ND, DC, DABCI” – offers his advice and recommendations at the chiropractic Epigenetics Healing Center (yeah, they’ve gone all in), where he “specializes in Epigenetic science to help you not express disease and be able to function at your best with functional medicine therapies, Epigenetics, nutrient breathing treatments [?], and lifestyle counseling”. This has, needless to say, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with epigenetics, and we can’t help but note that Goodbinder doesn’t actually say that he has any expertise in epigenetics but in “Epigenetic science”, whatever that means – it’s hard not to suspect that some legal considerations played a role in his choice.

 

Diagnosis: It would be easy to dismiss this bullshit as pure fraud, but we have to leave the possibility open that Goodbinder is also genuinely confused about epigenetics or the validity of his treatments. Those two options are not mutually exclusive, of course.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased medicine

#2917: Mike Gonzalez

Mike Gonzales is as senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, leader (former?) of the South Carolina Pastors Alliance, and member of the 1776 Commission. Beyond that, we could frankly not be bothereed to investigate Gonzalez’s CV or history of silliness in detail, but his affilitions provide ample justification for giving him an entry here. Gonzalez is the kind of person who daftly likens resisting identity politics to defecting from Hitler (in 2013, Gonzalez blamed the Boston Marathon bombings at least in part on what he perceived as a new trend in American schools of teaching “multiculturalism and diversity”), and who claims that Democrats (Obama in particular) are actively trying to use the promise of government handouts to replace freedom-loving Americans with government-worshiping Latino immigrants in a deliberate effort to combat freedom and liberty. Yes, that kind. He has also written a book, The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free, which we honestly admit that we have failed to find the time or inclination to read.

 

Gonzalez is also a member of the Victor Orbán fan club, characterizing Orbán as a “maverick” and supporting Orbán’s alleged project to “replace the shipwreck of liberal democracy by building 21st Century Christian democracy.” At least we are reasonably confident that the present Mike Gonzalez is not identical with the Michael Gonzalez who co-authored the intensely quacky book I have cancer, What should I do: Your orthomolecular guide for cancer management with MegaVitaminMan Andrew Saul.

 

Diagnosis: A powerful figure in a powerful organization. Indeed, the chaotic blend of paranoia and conspiracy theories that is the MAGA movement is largely centered on the goals and ideas that are – admittedly often somewhat more explicitly and coherently – formulated by the Heritage Foundation. Dangerous.

#2916: Mark Gonzalez

Mark Gonzales is a fundie conspiracy theorist, head of the U.S. Hispanic Action Network and pseudohistorian David Barton’s National Black Robe Regiment project, and, during Trump’s first term as president, affiliate of Frank Amedia’s dominionist preacher network POTUS Shield. Gonzalez was, like the rest of that group, pretty explicit about its commitment to Christian nationalism: “America belongs to you. America belongs to you. America belongs to you. … God, you founded us on a Judeo-Christian ethos, and we’re declaring that yes, America is and will be a Christian nation, like never before”.

 

Gonzalez is certainly not averse to engaging in rather intense historical revisionism: He has, for instance, tried to argue that it was pastors in the “Black Robe Regiment,” not the military, that won the American Revolution: “It wasn’t the American army, it was the church that did that,” asserted Gonzalez, a claim that would be hilariously stupid and false if it weren’t for the fact that none of this is funny anymore. For the record, the ‘Black Robe Regiment’ is an invention of David Barton’s as a term for whatever pastors simply declared support for independence. (Also note that it is unclear exactly how Gonzalez’s group is related to the Black Robe Regiment group of Christian nationalists founded by William Cook and boosted by Michael Flynn; at least there is a clear and signifiant overlap in ideas and ideology.) Gonzalez has also claimed that “two-thirds of our Founding Fathers were ordained ministers” who founded the Constitution and Bill of Rights “on scriptures straight out of the Bible”; neither claim has, needless to say, the remotest connection to reality, but for fans of Gonzalez, the idea of grounding your claims in facts is precisely the kind of elitist anti-American agenda they are opposing.

 

The second core tenet for the POTUS Shield, beyond Christian nationalism, was the idea that Trump is God’s representative on Earth – Gonzalez would lead prayers asking God to expose and defeat Trump's critics, and issuing warnings that those who oppose the president are really opposing God (“God, we are seeing you expose the shenanigans of Satan that are trying to hold this country down, that are trying to get in the way of us moving forward as a country, as an administration, [under] the president”). In particular, Gonzalez prayed for God to expose what he convinced himself was the rampant corruption in the FBI, the CIA, and (in particular) the Mueller investigation that “the enemy is trying to use and connive” to bring down Trump. “The deep state will be exposed,” Gonzales proclaimed, because darn all those checks and balances; Trump’s opponents are “not messing with a man, with an administration, they are not messing with a country, they are messing with the hand of Almighty God”.

 

Gonzalez is also the kind of preacher who likes to dabble in meteorology, pointing out how various storms, blizzards and droughts correlate (they don’t) with political and legal decisions he doesn’t fancy. Indeed, he is sufficiently invested in such ideas to expect e.g. the Supreme Court to lend them weight (“We fear that the judgment of Almighty God, which is designed to be merciful, and the wrath of God, will come upon the United States of America. God hates [not really, apparently] the shedding of innocent blood”) when deciding issues pertaining to the Constitution.

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, they used to be hilarious, but not really anymore. In any case, Gonzalez embodies your by now familiar combination of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism with a distinctly post-modernist conception of facts. Completely insane, of course, but these days that seems to be an advantage rather than an obstacle to gaining power and influence.

#2915: Jorge Gonzalez et al.

This is a bit of a placeholder entry. A topic of concern that received some attention (but not much) in the run-up to the 2020 election (and after) was the vast amount of conspiracy mongering, hate, denialism and QAnon nonsense – a “barrage of false, often racist and anti-Semitic, narratives” and claims that a vote for Biden would mean supporting a violent takeover of the US and giving the country away to “Jews and Blacks” – that was produced targeting Spanish-speaking residents on radio and social media; both misinformation produced by Americans and misinformation from abroad (including from the Colombia-based Informativo G24). Now, we don’t speak Spanish ourselves, and are therefore unable to assess the situation in anything resembling detail, but it would be neglectful of us not to mention the issue and how scary and destabilizing it actually is.

 

Much of the disinformation was and is anonymous and of unclear origin, but known purveors of insanity include Miami businessman Jorge Gonzalez, who in August 2020 read (without giving his name or any information about where it came from) a 16-minute unhinged script about the dangers of Black immigrants, women and Jewish people (the one claiming that a Biden victory would mean that the US would fall into a dictatorship led by “Jews and Blacks” as well as claiming that Biden was leading a political revolution “directed by racial minorities, atheists and anti-Christians” and supports killing newborn babies) on Radio Caracol – the station’s executives apologized afterwards, but the channel remains infamous for pushing wingnut conspiracy theories and hosting deranged dingbats like Colombian conspiracy theorist Omar Bula-Escobar and, in particular, his paranoid delusions about George Soros. We have no real clear idea of how influential or prominent Gonzalez really is, however.

 

Then there is Carinés Moncada, a host of Miami’s Actualidad radio, who e.g. tried to argue that the Black Lives Matter movement is inspired by “dark spirits” and warned listeners who considered voting for Biden that “If someone knocks on your door tomorrow, the way they’re knocking in other states, if they knock on your door, and they want to rob you, and they want to burn you, don’t complain. Don’t complain because that’s what you’re voting for. For anarchy, for rapes, for attacks.” Meanwhile, Puerto Rican-born pastor and QAnon-promoter Melvin Moya circulated doctored videos of Biden with titles like “Signs of pedophilia”. There are plenty of others, but as mentioned: We don’t really have anything resembling an overview.

 

Diagnosis: Terrifying, and the realization that we can’t even figure out what’s going on at any level of detail – we’re subject merely to glimpses of the horror and harm – lends the whole situation a kind of Cthuluesque quality.