#2933: Tom Grant

On April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain – lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the band Nirvana – committed suicide. Despite the fact that this is clearly what happened, conspiracy theories about murders and coverups and secret groups were, of course, bound to emerge (indeed, we’ve encountered them before ourselves), based on focusing intensely on minor discrepancies in various versions in different sources’ descriptions, gaps in the evidence that aren’t there, and rumors from untrustworthy or unidentified sources. In the case of Kurt Cobain, the conspiracy theories have largely been driven by private investigator Tom Grant, who was hired by Cobain’s widow Courtney Love to find Cobain after he went missing from a rehab facility and later to investigate Cobain’s death, and who came to believe that Love had Cobain murdered by drawing silly conclusions from various flimsy, circumstancial details, including:

 

-       a very high level of heroin in Cobain’s body that conspiracy theorists like Grant think would be too high for Cobain to pull off as a suicide but which experts say are not at all too high for habituated heroin users, especially not for those trying to kill themselves.

-       claiming that Cobain’s lawyer Rosemary Carroll told him that Cobain was planning to change his will to exclude Love, a claim that Carroll herself refuses to confirm.

 

And so on. Pretty familiar stuff.

 

Grant’s claims have nevertheless serviced as a point of departure for other conspiracy theorists, including:

 

-       Ian Halperin & Max Wallace, who wrote two books, including Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain (2004) with Grant's help.

-       The 2015 docudrama Soaked in Bleach, directed by Benjamin Statler – again with the help of Grant

-       Various QAnon promoters who claim that Cobain was killed to cover up a cabal of Satan-worshipping child traffickers on orders from the Clintons.

 

So it goes. Same as always. Courtney Love, a certified lunatic herself, thinks that Cobain was killed by the CIA because of his anti-establishment political views.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s all nonsense, and in itself probably mostly harmless. But Grant represents a certain – familiar – mindset that has turned out to be very much not harmless, so it’s worth shaming him a bit. 

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2932: Dennis Grant

Cancer quackery and cancer scams are everywhere, and we can only endeavor to scratch the surface of a huge, multifaceted and lucrative industry based on selling useless products (marketed with a glimmer of hope) to desperate people in desperate situations; after all who wouldn’t be willing to shell out some dollars on the faintest hope of surviving a death sentence? The FDA can (also as a result of regulative constraints) similarly only hope to take action against a tiny fraction of such quacks and scammers – and probably less these days than before – but at least they got around to responding to the claims made by the Florida company Amazing Sour Sop, Inc., which was pushing products like Sour Sop Capsules, Sour Sop Tea Bags, and Sour Sop Leaves with claims like “[r]esearch has proven it to be 10,000 times stronger than the chemotherapy drug Adriamycin”. If you wondered what research they are talking about or whether real researchers woulduse the word ‘proven’ you are probably not in the target group; nor would you be if you ask ‘which studies’ in response to Amazing Sour Sop’s claim that “studies suggest [Sour Sop] to be effective in helping with prostate, lung, breast, colon and pancreatic cancers. It is also said to be used in the treatment for tumor, arthritis […] bladder infections, high blood pressure, high cholesterol […] and protection of your immune system to avoid deadly infections.” They (allegedly) also have testimonials suggesting that “it helps with infertility, impotence […] etc.”

 

And really, the company didn’t even bother with any degree of subtlety to avoid legal trouble. The answer to their question “Is soursop really a cure for cancer?” was an unqualified ‘yes’: “Many would be surprised to know that soursop has miraculous cancer cell killing properties, almost 10000 times stronger than Chemo.” They would indeed be surprised. Amazing Sour Sop apparently even included some of their nonsense claims on their products. The FDA was not impressed.

 

Now, Amazing Sour Sop was not the kind of company that was particularly forthcoming about the people or organization behind its website, but FDA addressed their complaints to the author of the blog “Health Benefits Of Sour Sop amazingsoursop.com”, Dennis Grant, so we file it under him.

 

Diagnosis: We tend to go for the conclusion that promoters of ridiculous pseudoscience and quackery are themselves true believers. It’s not always obviously the most accurate conclusion to draw.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2931: Diane Gramley

A bit outdated, perhaps, but Diane Gramley, president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association (AFA), was for a decade or so around Obergefell one of the more central figures in the anti-gay movement. And yes, she promoted all the familiar nonsense, such as claiming that the “real goal” of Pride celebrations “is to indoctrinate and they are seeking to promote their deviant sexual behavior” and that America’s future depends on Obergefell being overturned. She did not react well to the legal dismantling of gay marriage bans back in the 2010s either. And she would support much of her hostility toward (and silliness related to) gay people with QAnon-like conspiracy theories; she has, for instance, tried to argue that the police officers who infamously raided the Stonewall Inn in 1969 were really “trying to rescue a young boy who identified as transgender,” and who “was being used sexually and the police were trying to rescue him”.

 

According to herself, Gramley cares a lot about the welfare of kids, though she does so from a perspective typical of her ilk: Gramley is an “authentic Christian” and, according to her, “authentic Christians” recognize that although bullying is bad, being gay is worse. As such, school boards “aid child corruption and insult faithful families when they allow ‘gay-straight alliances’” and “homosexual indoctrination”. She has also said that “promoting a ‘smoking club’ would be safer than promoting a ‘homosexual club’” – at least she would support any measure necessary to ensure that being gay in school would be as unsafe as possible.

 

Gramley has also promoted election fraud conspiracy theories – indeed, she was an early promoter of such theories, warning already before the 2016 election that if Trump lost Pennsylvania, it would be due to voter fraud: “There is a lot of support in Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. So for him to lose, I would attribute that to voter fraud”, said Gramley.

 

Diagnosis: Even in today’s climate, Gramley comes across as something of a relic from the past. But she is definitely insane, stupid and hateful, and we can’t rule out that certain powerful groups might still find a use for her.

#2930: Lauren Grace

Yeah, functional medicine again. And let us just quote David Gorski on this one: Functional medicine “is a form of quackery that combines the worst aspects of conventional medicine and alternative medicine. Specifically, it combines massive over-testing with a lack of science and a ‘make it up as you go along’ ethic, all purportedly in the service of the ‘biochemical individuality’ of each patient. Don’t believe the hype. It’s mostly quackery.” But it is lucrative quackery: functional medicine is usually based on ordering a number of meaningless, useless or fake tests, and then making up a treatment regime as they go based on the results of said tests (which are of course designed to give positive results for something lucrative). And to really illustrate that description, look at the first of the “seven principles” of functional medicine: “Acknowledging the biochemical individuality of each human being, based on concepts of genetic and environmental uniqueness” [the other principles are similar]. It’s a principle that legitimizes anything and everything any practitioner might feel like they want to do: any treatment, quack or otherwise, can be tied to the “biochemical individuality” of the person being treated: it’s a rejection of anything resembling standards of care (or standards altogether).

 

Lauren Grace isn’t even a physician but one of a number of altmed promoters and quacks who has, predictably, latched onto the woo and pseudoscience trailing (or endorsed by) the functional medicine movement. She terms herself a functional medicine practitioner, which in her case means that she is a licensed acupuncturist and “doctor of oriental medicine” who has done “additional study” in naturopathy, which she appeals to in order to justify expanding her nonsense with mesotherapy, homeopathy, and something called the Maxim Life Health System, which purports to “take patients through a series of detoxes to eliminate any disease or disorder” – apparently the system has a “95% success rate”, whatever that means (it’s a scam). Yes, Grace is all about detox, in particular “mini-cleanses” and her two-week digestive cleanse (which she sells) and three-day “cleanses” to get rid of “all those toxins” – she does of course, in line with most pushers of detox scams, not bother to name the toxins her suggestions ostensibly target. As Grace sees it (wrongly), since the gut matters to your immune system, cleansing the gut to make it “healthy” (she doesn’t specify what that would mean) will boost your immune system and fix a range of medical conditions, including eczema, autoimmune diseases, and digestive troubles. The cleanse itself consists of some very special magic smoothies, a couple of supplements, and a meal plan for the meager cost $175. And yes, her website does have a quack Miranda warning.

 

Like other functional medicine practitioners, Grace’s “integrative medicine” clinic offers useless “advanced lab testing” and some rather typical quackery like acupuncture and thermography to help deal with the results she thinks she receives from the tests. And her tests are, as Grace emphasizes, “not typical lab tests,” like the CBC. Indeed, they’re not. Rather, she’ll subject her customers to tests like the infamous Doctors Data Heavy Metal Test ($100) and Spectracell Micronutrient Testing, an “innovative assessment of nutritional status” that measures whether your are “taking too many [worthless] supplements” or “not enough” (hint: not enough; after all, those who order and pay for the test have supplements to sell and would prefer the tests to support their marketing efforts). As Grace sees it, her tests are “much more preventative” and “much more advanced” than standard tests, which means – in line with the standard functional medicine use of “preventative” – that she’ll identify something (whatever) that seems unusual but doesn’t need treatment, and then sell you something expensive to address it that often doesn’t work but can still be counted as a success because what it was intended to target didn’t need treatment anyways.

 

Though Lauren Grace is no physician, her collaborator, Michael Carter, apparently is – on her website, he only goes by “Dr. Carter”, possibly to remain somewhat anonymous, but it is, in fact, Michael Carter, “former owner, Cosmetic Surgeon and Functional Medical Physician at Atlanta Liposuction” who claimed to deal “not only” with cosmetic improvement but to apply “a naturopathic, holistic view” to support the “overall health of the patient”. Right. Anyways, the support of Carter is the reason Grace can provide medical services without a degree in medicine.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s the same as so many others; hopefully we are not to dulled by the repetivity to recognize how shockingly stupid and cynical this kind of thing really is.

 

Hat-tip: David Gorski @ Sciencebasedmedicine

#2929: Amanda Grace

For those already among the zealously delusional conspiracy theorists forming the Christian nationalist center of gravity in the MAGA universe, the unfettered insanity of Amanda Grace, of the Ark of Grace Ministries, might just come across as a rather typical specimen, but for anyone looking in, the black hole of fervent idiocy that is Amanda Grace still has the power to shock. Grace is a former accountant and self-described prophet who offers prophecies related to current events on her Charisma-affiliated podcast and who ostensibly ministers QAnon conspiracy theories and fundamentalism to “both people and animals”. And her take on “God’s plan for America” apparently has enough of a sympathetic audience for her to have become something of a household name in fundie wingnut circles; she was a central component of Michael Flynn and Clay Clark’s ReAwaken America Tour, for instance.

 

Grace has ideas about the kinds of cultural ills that has, at least until Trump 2.0, brought America down, and the list is substansial and reveals the active participation of Satan – for instance, Grace warns us that “the goal of yoga is to get you into a demonic trance.” And the devil’s efforts go way back: Grace has claimed, with a straight face, that already “Aaron Burr was a deep state operative” intent on delivering the US from Trump to Satan. And some of Satan’s tools might strike you as surprising: at a ReAwaken America event in 2023, Grace spent some effort warning people about the dangers posed by technologically advanced “mermaids and water people”.

 

And of course Trump is God’s chosen champion to lead this battle against Satan and his forces (including the mermaids). According to Grace, God has been preparing President Donald Trump to lead the US for a long time, for instance by delivering him the Covid crisis: “For such a time as this is why President Trump has been raised up into this position. This type of leadership is needed. […] This is the reason he has gone through everything he has gone through in his life. It all intersects at this point, right now.” After all, “it takes a brilliant mind to attempt to orchestrate all of this and lead a nation through an entire epidemic and crisis. It takes a certain caliber of leadership, and the Lord saw ahead when the Lord [rather than the people, through democracy] caused an unprecedented election to happen.” Keep in mind that Trump, according to Grace, uses all his private time to commune with God and receive advice and guidance.

 

Though Trump’s loss in 2020 might have looked like a major blow to her combat with Satan, that conclusion would be erroneous. According to Grace, Trump didn’t lose at all! On Eric Metaxas’s show in February 2021, Grace explained that Trump’s apparent loss is part of God’s plan to make it look as if Joe Biden is president so that everyone will recognize it as a miracle of God when Trump is put back into office – “There’s been a delay because I believe God is trying to get people’s eyes on him,” said Grace, for “God’s ways are much higher when he sees how to make a path when people don't think there is a way” (whatever God she thinks she’s praying to seems to have some disturbing personality traits). Evidence? Well, the then-ongoing impeachment trial was clear evidence that Trump is still the president, for otherwise it wouldn’t be an impeachment trial. More importantly, “[t]he Lord has never said to me [Trump is] not going to serve a second term,” and “sometimes what the Lord doesn’t say is as important as what he says”; also she “prophesied from the Lord in October about the media suffering the biggest crisis they ever had in 2021 for their crimes, so I’m watching for that to unfold”; i.e. God fooling the media to think Trump isn’t president would fit her prophesy, therefore that must be what’s going on. The impeachment process, meanwhile, is just an example of how “the actions of the wicked will give them away” (“the Lord is going to deal severely with the wicked people right now in Congress, by the way”). She had previous asked God to send “an angelic army” of “warring angels with flaming swords” to protect Trump from the impeachment process, proclaiming, on behalf of God (she seems to find the distinction between herself and God to be rather insignificant), that “the den of lions will not touch him, for I have marked him and positioned him for such a time as this. I will give him vision and I will expose to him what is being plotted behind closed doors. Revelation will come forth and he will emerge an incredible witness and mouthpiece for my glory. For I, the Lord, have already ruled in the courts, the gavel has dropped.” At least she doesn’t seem to think Trump lost due to election fraud – but then, Grace doesn’t think presidents get elected through democratic means but through the intervention of God (which would presumably be election fraud) in any case.

 

But not only does Grace speak on behalf of God, she can also call on Him by blowing on her shofar, a “spiritual weapon” that unleashes God’s power (“Demons tremble at the sound of the shofar”). God is, in other words, more like Grace’s pet attack dog.

 

A few days after Trump’s 2024 election win, Grace assured notable fan of hers Eric Trump – who, with his wife Lara and Trump lawyer Alina Habba, were Grace’s guests of honor at her 2024 Night of Prayer for the Trump Family and the Nation livestream – that within the next 24 hours, God would hand down divine “verdicts” against the Trump family's enemies. As evidence, she offered the same she tends to offer for all of her claims: “I don’t say anything unless I know it’s coming from the Lord.”

 

Diagnosis: She struggles to distinguish herself from God, thinks of God as her pet, and claims that technologically advanced mermaids and water people are among the greatest threats the US is facing. There really isn’t much you could add to that, except that Eric Trump is a fan, and given Eric Trump’s mental capacities that is a pretty damning indictment in itself.

#2928: Crockett Grabbe

A.k.a. SeaLane Gray

 

Crockett Grabbe is a physicist (PhD, Applied Physics from Caltech in 1978) formerly affiliated with the University of Iowa and founder of the business SeaLane Research and Consulting in Austin, Texas. Now, Grabbe has, in fact, been engaged in real scientific research. To the general public, however, he is presumably best known for being a central figure in the 9/11 truther movement, for which he has authored a number of books such as National Swindle of the World Trade Center (2011), Anatomy of Mass Murder (2013) and How the WTC Was REALLY Demolished On 9/11 (2015, which seems to be more of a leaflet). Now, we can’t be bothered to actually read any of Grabbe’s books, and they seem to have made little headway beyond insane conspiracy fringe circles, so we have little information on precisely how they try to present things, but his own comments on 9/11 elsewhere don’t exactly inspire confidence that they’re worth engaging with. 

 

Specifically, Grabbe, who is also a member of the conspiracy theory organization Scientists for 9/11 Truth, is a proponent of the controlled demolition variant of 9/11 conspiracy theories. According to Grabbe, the behavior of the debris and the fires, as well as the tower collapses, “clearly indicate extraordinary force beyond the capability of fires (or gravity) to bring the towers down”. That, of course, contradicts the official conclusions, so Grabbe needs to invoke a conspiracy to ensure that the 9/11 Commission disregarded what Grabbe takes to be damning evidence, such as the much-used conspiracy idea of molten steel at Ground Zero. That the commission overlooked this piece of evidence because it doesn’t exist – there is no evidence of actually-melted steel at Ground Zero – is presumbably further evidence of a conspiracy, and so on.

 

Diagnosis: We don’t know precisely what he is up to these days, and interest in 9/11 conspiracy theories among the public have waned a bit. Still.

#2927: Sara Gottfried

We’ve had plenty of opportunity to cover Gwyneth Paltrow’s disgusting lifestyle brand Goop. Now, Sara Gottfried is, in fact, an OB/GYN, but she is also one of Paltrow’s partners in crime, and keep in mind: that she is affiliated with Goop is enough to award her an entry her, but the fact that she is an OB/GYN affiliated with Goop also means that she is the kind deeply dishonest, malicious scammer that gives a great fuck off to anything resembling professional ethics.

 

Gottfried’s grift is a combination of questionable supplements, “detox” plans and “hormone balancing”; her self-proclaimed “expertise includes natural hormone balancing, the brain/body connection, and how to optimize the gene/environment interface”, and if you don’t see “meaningless drivel” in that description, you might be in her target audience. Her website offers a range of personally formulated supplements and shakes, and she does claim that her products have worked  “gloriously well on the 10,000+ people” she’s seen in the past 10 years, which is presumably precisely the kind of  “evidence” that is valued by the kind of people whose attention she wants to grab. Gottfried designed the GOOP  “High School Genes” supplement, which is at best harmless (it has of course been tested for neither safety or efficacy), and she even pushes a protocol she has named for herself, the Gottfried Protocol (needless to say, naming a protocol for yourself is not a good look), which, in true CAM style, rebrands some simple, uncontroversial interventions as “alternative” (or, indeed, “revolutionary”) and mixes it with nonsense; the protocol is described in her book Energized Naturally with the Gottfried Protocol.

 

As for hormone balancing, it’s of course a scam, and Gottfried has for a while been one of the most central promoters of it. She has written at least two books,  The Hormone Cure: Reclaim Balance, Sleep and Sex Drive; Lose Weight; Feel Focused, Vital and The Hormone Reset Diet: Heal Your Metabolism to Lose Up to 15 Pounds in 21 Days, on the issue. As David Gorski points out you’ll get the best view of the contents of those books if you replace every instance of “hormone” with “humor”. As for “detox” recommendations, Gottfried seems to be a true believer; as she puts it: “Detoxing means cleaning out the body, removing toxins, clearing out your jammed hormone receptors, and resetting key hormones [notice the critical use of unexplained metaphors]. Most simply, detox is a tool of functional medicine: remove the obstacles to radical health, and add in the factors that support you. We accumulate junk mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually on a daily basis”. Now, as opposed to many proponents of detox regimes, Gottfried does actually mention some specific chemicals (mercury, perchlorate, and so on), but note that she refrains from claiming that her detox regimes will help you get rid of those specific chemicals (she doesn’t get any more specific than “toxing can help our bodies get rid of the inevitable buildup of heavy metals and toxic chemicals that happens in modern life”). That, of course, is because her detox regimes cannot help get rid of any of those chemicals. Detoxing is nothing but a form of ritual purification described with scientific-sounding and pseudoscientific language. Doctors promoting “detox” are quacks.

 

And as for the “gene/environment interface” thing, yes: she’s alluding to epigenetics, which is not even remotely what she claims it is, but her customers have heard the term and it sounds sophisticated. Her book, Younger: The Breakthrough Programme To Reset Our Genes And Reverse Ageing, assumes that epigenetics means that wishing something makes it so and that we can easily “reprogram our genes” with whatever woo she happens to be selling. As Gottfried puts it “I believe it’s all about finding the genetic switches that control metabolism, weight, disease and ageing and am convinced that by turning your good genes on and your bad genes off, you can prevent ageing no matter how old you are”. This is …not the case. Now, it has to be admitted that Gottfried does allude to some real research: preclinical findings from in vitro and animal experiments with unclear results on aspects of something complex concerning genes whose roles are not fully understood (details here). And then she does what quacks do with such results: extrapolate beyond ridiculousness to write a self-help book; doing research is much less fun than earning money and when the actual science is in, it will be too late to capitalize on it and the research is unlikely to yield the results you need to make money anyways. After all, her books have earned her not only an affiliation with Goop, but appearances on Andrew Huberman’s podcast and endorsements by flat-earther David Avocado Wolfe.

 

There is a nice report of Gottfried’s (and others’) presentations at a 2018 Goop Health Event in New York here.

 

Diagnosis: Quack. Run.