#1161: Michael T. Snyder

Being a crank with a blog on the Internet is not particularly uncommon, and we can’t hope to document all of these. But we will cover a representative sample of the more notorious kinds, and Michael T. Snyder is definitely one of these. A raving, frothing fundamentalist and Biblical literalist, Snyder is in fact the originator of several blogs, all of them trying to back up his firmly entrenched belief that the world is about to end. The first (significant) blog was The Economic Collapse Blog in 2007, a survivalist, rapture ready, tax protesting pit of articles stating how the world is going to hell every single day since the meltdown started in 2007 – indeed, Snyder blames the government for more or less every and any conceivable ill in society, or that he imagines society to have. His track record when it comes to his predictions of collapse is abysmal; he has, as far as we can see, never been close to being right ever.

And yes, there are several of them. You see, when Snyder became dimly aware that his original blog had become an item of mockery in certain circles, he set up other blogs with different names (but the same content). There is a decent summary of his antics here, including various religious and anti-gay rants. As a matter of fact, his rants have reappeared in various places across the Internet, so they seem, curiously, to have made some impact among the denser segments of Internet users.

Diagnosis: Standard internet crank, true, but Snyder’s levels of wrong and fervor are still sufficiently remarkable to earn him a separate entry.

#1160: George Edward Smock

A.k.a. Brother Jed

Brother Jed is a wingnut Methodist evangelist who travels around the US to evangelize at college campuses. He is most famous for his anti-gay rants – including his “It’s not Ok to be gay” song (it’s here, if you must) – racism (“The only thing Mexicans contribute to society is burritos and Jewish people are only good at making bagels and running banks”), and for being extremely confrontational about it. Jed also denounces the evils of kissing, bikinis, masturbation (“a masturbator today is a homosexual tomorrow”), sex (“I don’t know how the whorehouses in this town stay open — all of you sorority girls are giving it away for free!”), feminism, liberalism, and – to make sure he stays up to date with the concerns of youths – rock n’ roll.

In short, Brother Jed stands for – and flaunts – everything that is objectionable in fundie ideology, which is why he is liked by freethinker communities and disliked by other fundie groups.

Diagnosis: Innocuous enough – at least his efforts can hardly be claimed to promote the cause of fundamentalism. Though he is definitely a loon, and hysterically so.

#1159: Van Smith

Van Smith is a computer benchmarking expert, computer industry analyst and physicist who is well known enough to readers of various batshit insane fundie conspiracy sites. Smith’s obsession is the Georgia Guidestones, and he is pretty much convinced that the Guidestones express totalitarian messages and intentionally foreshadow the arrival of the Islamic Mahdi, i.e. the Antichrist. Because he is a loon, he also believes the Guidestons are linked through encoded numerological information to the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. The Burj Khalifa is of course, in Smith’s mind, a new Tower of Babel.. His “research” on these matters is discussed here. “I'm not a conspiracy lunatic who spends all my time researching Freemasonry and things like that,” said Smith, but added that “this evidence is extremely real, and it's disturbing.”

Diagnosis: Conspiracy lunatic who seems to spend far, far too much time researching Fremasonry and things like that. (This one was really too easy.)

#1158: Robert Smith

There is more than one loon called “Robert Smith”. There is, for instance, a former editor and sysop at Conservapedia of that name (a member of the infamous Conservapedia Gang of Four, in fact). The Robert Smith we have in mind for this entry, however, is a professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and signatory to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. Given the, shal we say, subversive language of that petition, being a signatory does not on its own qualify for an entry in this Encyclopedia, and Smith has, as a matter of fact, not talked extensively about evolution in other contexts. What is noteworthy, however, is that Smith also figures on James Inhofe’s list of 650 scientists that supposedly dispute the consensus on AGW (taken apart e.g. here). Once again, being on that list isn’t evidence that you dispute the consensus on AGW – Inhofe included whoever he imagined had said things to dispute global warming – but Smith does indeed appear to be a science denialist when it comes to global warming.

Smith is, in fact, a real scientist, but he has indeed made something of a name for himself as a climate “contrarian” (and that he also appears on a list of evolution “contrarians” should kinda undermine his authority in fields he knows little about in general). And if you need more evidence that Smith is a loon, it’s worth point out that he has characterized Sarah Palin as a “rare politician … with brains”. His stance on climate is illuminatingly illustrated here.

Diagnosis: Apparently Smith seems to think that what makes his claims scientific is the fact that he has academic credentials in some field or other. It isn’t. But the attitude is a recipe for pseudoscience, and Smith falls right into it.

#1157: Jeffery Smith

Jeffery Smith is a former Iowa political candidate for the Natural Law Party. Smith has no discernible scientific or agricultural training, but he believes, very strongly, that eating GE crops causes infertility, organ damage and endocrine disruption. The scientific evidence for these claims is about as strong as for saying “that looking at carrots will give you brain tumors”. But there is no way Jeffery Smith is going to let actual evidence trump his intuitions based on what he feels is “natural” (or “evidence” such as this, which according to Smith “puts scientists to shame”), and he has managed to become something of a senior figure in a movement that looks strikingly similar to the anti-vaccine movement.

Smith, whose actual education consist of business studies at the rather spectacularly unaccredited Maharishi International University, founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and who has enjoyed a career advocating yogic flying, has even written two books on GMO foods, Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, which does not appear to be too careful about documentation (to put it diplomatically). He also runs a “think tank”, The Institute for Responsible Technology.

There is a useful resource on Smith’s claims here (“Smith has shown an amazing capacity to ignore the scientific literature on almost every topic he discusses”) and a thorough review of Genetic Roulette here. (Instead of a detailed list of the idiocy of Smith’s claims I’d rather direct readers to those resources.)

The problem is that people with real authority have actually taken Smith’s claims seriously. Famed British primatologist Jane Goodall, who has left any aspirations of respectability on these matters behind a while ago yet continues to enjoy some respect in certain circles, generously blurbed Smith’s book (“If you care about your health and that of your children, buy this book, become aware of the potential problems, and take action”) and cited Smith’s “research” extensively in her own Seeds of Hope (she also recommended a book on GM by Maharishi Institute executive vice president Steven M. Druker, who – surprisingly enough –has no scientific training either). Dr. Oz seems to be a fan as well despite being apparently aware of the problems with Smith’s claims; that is less surprising, but still sad. And these are not the only examples – even academic institutions seem to have fallen for Smith’s work on occasion. A good but scary example is here.

There is a useful intro to GMO foods here.

Diagnosis: Super-crank, denialist and conspiracy theorists, and probably one of the most dangerous ones in the US at present – the theme for his conspiracy theories has been trendy enough to endear him even to people who generally don’t fall for these kinds of things. A real and serious threat to civilization.