#2475: Jake Angeli

A.k.a. Q Shaman

A.k.a. Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley (real name)

A.k.a. Qanon the Barbarian

A.k.a. Vanilla the Hun

 

Ok, so this guy really needs no introduction, but Jake Angeli is in any case a conspiracy theorist and QAnon protest figure from Phoenix going by the title (?) QAnon Shaman or Q Shaman, because he is, according to himself, a “shaman”, which is obvious from his “shaman dress” consisting of a coyote-fur headdress with bovine horns, red-white-and-blue facepaint and neo-pagan far-right tattoos. His shamanic practice consists of screaming about Satan-worshipping pedophiles controlling the world (i.e. Pizzagate) while being dressed up in his naughty retro Chewbacca bikini, as well as insurrection attempts. He was promptly arrested in January 2021.

 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office memorandum charging Angeli with two felonies in the wake of the 2021 US Capitol riot, Angeli “believes that global elites are running the world, that United States leaders are part of a secret rings of child abusers who practice satanic worship, and other debunked theories. He has repeatedly demonstrated dramatic, erratic behavior, an inability to conform to societal norms, and an unwillingness to appreciate the consequences of his actions. He abides by his own belief system, acts accordingly regardless of the criminal consequences, and brings others along with him. His ability and willingness to conform his behavior to pre-trial supervision conditions appears to be virtually nil.” 

 

A fixture at far-right rallies, Angeli reportedly led his own protest rally in September 2020 at Arrowhead Mall in Glendale, in which he claimed a spiral sign close to the bathrooms in the shopping centre was “an FBI pedophile code”. At one point, Angeli was actually also in the Navy, but he was kicked out after refusing to take his anthrax vaccine.

 

Upon his arrest, prosecutors presented ample evidence of his … character, including the following transcript from one of his Youtube videos, which seems to sum up his ideas fairly well (quoted at length): 

 

“So in order to beat this evil occultic force you need a light occultic force you need an occultic force that is of the side of God of love on like almost like on the side of the Angels OK as opposed to the demons all right and so as a shaman I am like a multi-dimensional or hyper-dimensional being okay I am able to perceive multiple different frequencies of light beyond my five senses and it allows me to see into these other higher dimensions that these entities these pedophiles these rapists these murderers these really high up people that they almost like hide in the shadows in nobody can see that because the third eye ain’t open okay and that’s where things like fluoride and stuff like that comes in so the horns the horns are hey man you mess with the Buffalo you get the horns bro and if you ever tried messing with the Buffalo that doesn’t work out too well for many people this right here this is coyote skin according to the Navajo the coyote is like the trickster almost like almost like a benevolent force so I’m wearing the skin of the trickster I got two tails here okay so the trickster messed with the bull got the horns okay and the face paint is representative of the Native American tradition of like donning on warpaint of some sort only this is only this is a war that is of like a spiritual nature okay so because it’s a war of a spiritual nature you need symbolism okay in the symbolism here for me is you got the blood on the sign the bullet holes Q sent me this shows the the the secret war in the behind the scene. Hey if you don’t know who Q is Q is the highest levels of the military in the intelligence community disseminating above top secret information to pay attention to the republic so we can take our country back from globalists and communists and satanists.”

 

His motivation for participating in the 2021 insurrection might also best be summed up in his own words: “What we did on Jan. 6 in many ways was an evolution in consciousness, because as we marched down the street along these ley lines, shouting ‘USA’ or shouting things like ‘freedom’ … we were actually affecting the quantum realm.” In jail, Angeli refused to eat unless given organic food because anything else would ostensibly make him literally physically sick. 

 

After being arrested, Angeli was promptly thrown under the bus by his fellow QAnon and Trump supporters, many of whom accused him of being an Antifa agent provocateur, based for instance on (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jake-angeli-viking-capitol-blm/) pictures from a BLM protest that he was actually counterprotesting, but in which his QAnon sign was cropped out. There is a lesson here, but if you were able to learn it you would probably not have thrown your lot in with these people to begin with.

 

Diagnosis: Though we don’t usually cover … people like Angeli, he sort of launched himself into a rather public role. Indeed, he has become something of a symbol of the pro-Trump movement and idiotic conspiracy mongering in general – a rather fitting symbol, to be fair.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2474: Ruth Angela

Young-earth creationists struggle to understand the basics of the theory of evolution, and although we’ve had ample opportunity to deal with creationists, there are other groups that struggle with the fundamental ideas of evolution, too, as exemplified e.g. by the book The Guru’s Gift: A Kundalini Awakening. Presented in a press release as “Waking up to Our True Nature – Kundalini Awakening: The next phase of human evolution,” the book is published by Lotus-Blessings, which is not only a vanity press, but the website of its author, Ruth Angela. Now, even having seen some excerpts, it is hard to pin down Angela’s misunderstanding in detail – apparently, Kundalini is “the feminine aspect of God inside us comparable to active nuclear power,” whose awakening through meditation will “negate” our limitations and bring us to the “cusp of a new stage of human evolution” – given that the whole thing is a spectacular mess of incoherent New Age and self-help ramblings, but at least the book promises to take up “subjects such as: reincarnation, time and the human mind, flight in the body, visiting other planets, extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, out-of-body travel, healing by intention, healing modalities, entities, elementals, parallel universes, the third eye, the pineal gland, co-creation, time fluctuations, magic, Kumbhak breath, double vision, involution vs. evolution and so forth.” If you think this is what you need, it certainly is not what you need. Don’t listen to gurus.

 

Diagnosis: Ok, so given that her mind runs on nebulous associations of incoherent, sparkling idea fumes, it might be misleading to say that she misunderstands evolution. It’s more a matter of appropriation. Dingbat nonsense it is in any case.

 

Hat-tip: Sensuous curmudgeon

#2473: Valdas Anelauskas and the Pacifica Forum

 

The Pacifica Forum was a discussion group in Eugene, Oregon, originally hosted by retired University of Oregon professor Orval Etter (since deceased). The purpose of the forum, which met at the university but was never affiliated with it, was originally to “provide information and points of view” on “war and peace, militarism and pacifism, violence and non-violence,” but it gradually moved toward promoting rightwing extremism and Holocaust revisionism in the early-to-mid 2000s – Etter himself expressed sympathy with David Irving, and stated that “I admit that there were some bad things done to Jews during World War II, but I don’t believe that everything they claim is truthful.” The forum was listed as a hate group by the SPLC in 2009.

 

Central in the process of turning the direction of the forum was Valdas Anelauskas, a Lithuanian immigrant who describes himself as a “white separatist”, and who hosted a series of Pacifica Forum talks in 2006, 2008 and 2009 – in particular a series of lectures on “Zionism and Russia”. According to Anelauskas, Jews perpetrated a greater genocide than the Holocaust during the first half century of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union; he also claimed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was not a forgery at all, contrary to all evidence, and dedicated one of his lectures to German Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf. As Anelauskas sees it, “there are many good people and also many bad people in every nation, but after many years of my experience and research, I came to the conclusion that among the Jews, for some reason, there is a much larger percentage of bad people than among others.”

 

And Anelauskas was not alone. Another regular Pacifica Forum attendee, hardcore Nazi Jimmy Marr, gave a presentation entitled “National Socialist Movement: An Insider’s View of America’s Radical Right” during which he invited those in attendance to join him in giving the Sieg Heil salute. Marr also delivered a presentation, prepared by Anelauskas from various white supremacist Internet sources, on Martin Luther King, which portrayed Kings as a “moral leper and communist dupe”. Marr also claimed that the American Civil Rights Movement was funded by Jewish communists and the USSR in an attempt to incite violence.

 

Then, of course, the heavyweights arrived. In 2008, the forum hosted rightwing extremist, white nationalist and former Croatian diplomat Tomislav Sunic, author of Homo Americanus: Child Of The Post-Modern Age, as well as David Irving himself and Mark Weber, leader of the Institute for Historical Review.

 

Diagnosis: Some magnificently unsavory fellows here, and though the forum seems to be defunct, holocaust denialism certainly hasn’t disappeared and is arguably more prominent than ever (lots of it on display on January 6, 2021, for instance). Dangerous.

#2472: Tracy Anderson (?)

 

Tracy Anderson is a celebrity personal trainer and guru who offers staggeringly expensive training and food programs to Hollywood and other celebrities. As a fitness guru, she does what fitness gurus do: claiming to have unlocked the non-existent secret of weight loss and getting in shape, by offering standard fitness advice with some nonsense personal twists for marketing purposes (she trains “accessory muscles” (?) instead of your large muscles, offers exercises to pull skin tighter to the muscle and warns women not to lift more than three pounds (or to run) or they’ll become bulky, with lots of vague woo and nonsense fluff and bullshit nutritional advice, and plenty of opportunities to pay her by using products she endorses for kickbacks. Some of the advice she gives will probably give you results, some won’t, and if they do give results it will rarely be for the reasons she suggest. She doesn’t really have the faintest idea when it comes to physiology, fitness or nutrition, or she just doesn’t care (there is a good takedown of the nonsense of her recommendations here, here and here). Just like most fitness gurus, really. The first law marketing is to tell people what they need, and then make sure that your product is the only offering that fulfills the need. Of course, since there is no secret to weight loss and exercise, it’s all about packaging. Anderson is good at that – she’s even made it to Oprah.

 

That the diet advice of the “Tracy Anderson Method”, as highlighted for instance in books like The 30-Day Method, will lead to weight loss is hardly surprising, since it’s basically just starvation: people should restrict their calory intake to 700 calories per day. Any other bells and whistles Anderson adds to make her dietary schemes stand out really don’t matter. Of course, some of her additional claims are downright dangerous. According to Anderson, most foods are dangerous and lead to allergies (“I can’t even eat yogurt, nor can I have a tomato or a strawberry! They all cause allergies!”). Needless to say, following Anderson’s advice is not how you develop a healthy relationship with food or anything resembling long-term health, but you didn’t think she cares much about that, do you? And then there is of course the relentless view of what women should look like underlying allher advice.

 

There is a decent takedown of her particular advice here. As for the nonsense fluff bit, Anderson says things like “[i]n research, the number of muscles in our body keeps going up because [scientists are] starting to look at smooth muscle differently. We need to be connected. Everything needs to be called into action, and our brains – which remain one of the most mysterious objects in the universe to this day – have got to participate.” Yes, scientists. And research. This is prime guru talk. 

 

Anderson is perhaps most famous for being a trainer and fitness advisor for, as well as business partner of, Gwyneth Paltrow, and she has participated in Paltrow’s summit and conferences warning people for some reason to avoid cross-training and boasting about working with Microsoft to access people’s “neural pathways” so they’d connect with her online presence. She has also become known for questionable financial practices.

 

There is a decent resource on Tracy Anderson and her charlatanry here.

 

Diagnosis: We’ll designate her a loon. The alternative, which is hard not to characterize as “vastly more likely”, would make her a truly horrible person. In any case, Anderson’s got plenty of fans, since her advice works as well as anything other health and wellness guru advice and because those who fail to achieve results tend to shut up, and of course because her marketing is glitzy.

#2471: Paul Anderson

 

Paul Anderson is a naturopath and not a doctor, although many of his fans seem confused about that. And Anderson does have fans – indeed, Anderson currently seems to have established himself as a major-league quack and something of an authority in the altmed and conspiracy theory community.

 

Anderson runs something called Advanced Medical Technologies, which seems to be some kind of franchise system (apparently pseudoeducation promoter and quack authority Leanna Standish is affiliated with Anderson’s group) that offers e.g. infusion therapy (IV), hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), and infrared sauna – mild hyperthermia (IRMHT). According to Anderson, mild hyperthermia can be used for “anti-infective, cancer, toxicity and many others” – in a sense it can be used for that, but it’s not going to achieve anything. He also offers chelation therapy and “detox services”. None of his offered regimes are even remotely effective for the kinds of things quacks tend to use them for, and several of them are genuinely dangerous. In his promotional materials Anderson emphasizes that he e.g. uses “infusions that have been designed and formulated from the collective experience of over three decades from the minds of Dr. Anderson and the other physicians at AMT,” and that they are “customized and tailored” to you. Evidence for safety and efficacy seems to be less of an issue. The FDA has already cracked down on some providers of the kind of intravenous “micronutrient therapy” Anderson offers, though it seems that Anderson himself has thus far escaped their attention; chelation therapy, meanwhile, can and demonstrably does kill, and is equally demonstrably useless – pace the claims of quacks – against anything but acute metal poisoning, which you are not suffering from. Detoxification therapies, against mostly unnamed “toxins”,  are a scam that is interestingly reminiscent of religious purification rituals and far less reminicent of medicine. Intravenous ozone, high dose vitamin C, and the wide range of other infusions Anderson offers are equally medically worthless.

 

Anderson might, however, be most famous for championing IV curcumin as a treatment, something that has demonstrably led to deaths. When a young woman in California died from the treatment Anderson advocates, the naturopaths circled the wagons and Anderson himself issued a tellingly clueless defense, mostly focusing on the fact that turmeric and curcumin are different things, something that the press initially got it mixed up and which was … really, really not the problem here. (The woman died from intravenous curcumin, which is what Anderson promotes.) Anderson and the quack cabal the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP), of which Anderson is a prominent member, also emphasized the importance of using a licensed naturopath; Kim Kelly, the naturopath who administered the curcumin, was licensed in California, as if that matters, but it’s easy to see why naturopathic organizations might want to give an impression that she wasn’t.

 

Anderson is also a zealous and tireless campaigner against FDA attempts to rein in or create any sort of accountability system for compounding pharmacies of the kind that produced the curcumin that resulted in the aforementioned death. In 2019, for instance, Anderson testified before the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (a panel of experts advising the FDA) in support of sodium dichloroacetate, stating that his group had administered over 10,000 doses orally and IV as an adjunct treatment for cancer. Which is not evidence for the safety and efficacy of sodium dichloroacetate but should serve as a stark warning to anyone considering approaching Anderson’s group. The PCAC was not impressed.

 

He is apparently also heavily into epigenetics, since it’s very fashionable, and has even posted what he calls a “master class” in epigenetics, nutrigenomics, and cancer. It’s hard to believe that he has the faintest clue what the central terms he is using actually means (hint: “mutations” and “single-nucleotide polymorphisms” are not synonyms). But his intended audience probably doesn’t either. The “masterclass” is, or at least used to be, one of the first hits if you searched “cancer” on youtube, which suggests that Anderson’s deep misunderstandings and obfuscations are going to be many people’s first encounter with anything related to epigenetics and medicine, which is tragic.

 

And of course he has written a book: Outside the Box Cancer Therapies: Alternative Therapies That Treat and Prevent Cancer. We can’t claim to have read it, but if the excerpt on his website is an indication, it’s precisely the kind of unsupported nonsense you’d have expected from the title: mostly an alternative cancer cure testimonial with no relevant details that would allow one to assess it as even suggesting it would even be a starting point for forming a worthwhile hypothesis abourt anything. He also offers review courses for the naturopathic licensing examination, and various webinars. Indeed, Anderson apparently even teaches courses on IV infusions at Bastyr “University”, which tells you a lot more about the bullshit that passes for “education” at that institution and the opportunism that guides their course catalogues, than about Anderson. More worrisomely, some of Anderson’s deranged rants are given at conferences that real medical doctors can get continuing medical education creditsfor attending.

 

More recently, Anderson has been part of the American Association for Naturopathic Physician’s COVID-19 Task Force. Now, it is hardly very surprising that quacks and woomeisters have been using the pandemic to push their particular brands of woo and quackery hard, and the AANP is no exception. According to at least one of their press releases, the group urges physicians and hospitals to utilize IV Vitamin C as “an effective and affordable intervention” (it isn’t) for “high risk and hospitalized patients”, while also offering to be “a resource to physicians and organizations looking for clinical guidance in the proper use of this intervention”. Purely coincidentally, IV Vitamin C has been one of Anderson’s long-time sources of income; indeed, Anderson has “been using IVC safely and effectively … for over 20 years” and his review of the evidence “shows that the use of IVC in hospitalized COVID-19 patients has a high probability of reducing hospital stay, duration and improving outcomes.” We are not particularly surprised this was the outcome of Anderson’s own review; it is also completely contrary to what the evidence gained through real scientific studies actually tells us.

 

Diagnosis: One of the authorities in the naturopathic community – and living evidence of why naturopaths should not be considered authorities, licensed, or consulted for medical issues.

#2470: Marvin Anderson

Yes, he appears to be an MD, but Marvin Anderson is more than anything an antivaccine conspiracy theorist and promoter of deeply questionable treatments (MD training does, after all, not necessarily include much training in assessing scientific evidence). He runs a clinic in northern Michigan called Abba’s Place where he “treats” autistic children, and he even has a book: Autism Prevention, Care and Management, which is a deranged journey in pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and antivaccine quackery. Apparently his main “treatment for ASD and ADHD” consists of nonsense detox regimes “primarily directed to the digestive tract, including the liver” partially based on the quackery of Australian wellness loon Sandra Cabot, grand promoter of medically worthless and potentially dangerous liver flushes and colon cleanses to detoxify your body.

 

As Anderson sees it, “[a]nimal studies have shown an intriguing connection between inflammation in the intestinal tract and inflammation in the brain” and autism “can involve impairments in the body’s detoxification pathways”. And if you seek his services, he will help you identify “contaminants that are present in his patients and creating a detoxification plan for their safe and efficient removal.” Gibberish and garbage. And of course vaccines are to blame – yes, Anderson still pushes the myth that vaccines are a causal factor in autism, together with other environmental toxins.

 

And Anderson does of course not only treat autism, but a whole range of other ailments, from gluten sensitivity to “intestinal bacterial overgrowth”, and the crucial step seems precisely to cleanse your liver: “The medical profession has largely failed to recognize the important role of the liver as the body’s major filter in processing the ever-increasing onslaught of chemicals,” says Anderson – a claim that would come as a surprise to anyone with a basic understanding of medicine and makes one wonder where Anderson went to medical school – and suggests that it needs detoxification, a claim that is indeed not recognized by the medical profession, for very good reasons.

 

Diagnosis: Pseudoscientific bollocks and quackery. Maintain a safe distance, especially if you’ve actually got medical issues: the last thing you want is a loon like Anderson to come near them.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful insolence

#2469: Kevin Anderson

 

Anderson with David McNabb

Kevin Anderson is a director of the Creation Research Society and a young earth creationist. Apparently, he also has a real degree in microbiology, which makes him one of vanishingly few creationists with genuine and relevant credentials and something of a sideshow star in the creationist circus – you’ll see him make appearances e.g. in Thomas Purifoy’s “documentary” Is Genesis History? Yes, Betteridge’s law applies, though the film actually tries to answer the question unequivocally in the affirmative: after all, its crucial premise is that “[t]he gospel of Jesus Christ therefore stands or falls along with the historicity of the first chapters of Genesis,” so they didn’t have any choice: evidence or reality be damned. The main target, after all, is “theistic evolutionists” and the case for the central thesis is accordingly made on theological, not scientific, grounds. 

 

Anderson has published several papers in venues like Answer in Genesis’s vanity house journal Answers, and is a regular contributor to creationist conferences (oh, yes: young-earth creationists do the full cargo cult science routine), for instance on the (mythical) discoveries of soft tissue in dinosaur remains – creationists love those, since findings of soft tissues could be used to suggest that there is something wrong with the dating procedures used by mainstream science (and the absence of such is actually compelling evidence against recent dinosaurs, but creationists tend not to consider contrary evidence as falsifying).

 

Like many other creationists, Anderson is not particularly happy with the fact that the evolution of the beneficial mutation of lactase persistence in humans is a rather startling example of evolution in action; together with creationist mainstay Georgia Purdom, he has tried to suggest that lactase persistence “[r]ather than being an example of ‘evolution in action,’ adaptive mutation is an awesome witness to God’s design of bacteria,” because just so. The results were published in the Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, which is certainly refereed by Anderson’s and Purdom’s peers.  

 

Diagnosis: Yes, they might come across as confused, almost pitiful village idiots, but we really shouldn’t forget that creationists and religious fundies remain a major force in the US today, and Anderson is a relatively central figure.