#2918: 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.

#2917: 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.

#2916: 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.

#2915: Beatrice Golomb

Beatrice Golomb is professor of medicine at UC San Diego and head of the Golomb Research Group, which is “currently working with Gulf War Veterans, as well as with people experiencing side effects from fluoroquinolone antibiotics, statin cholesterol lowering medications, radiofrequency radiation (and other non-ionizing radiation) – e.g., from cell towers or smart meters, and persons affected by the toxin release following the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio”. Now, Golomb does undoubtedly have a real research background, and has received legitimate attention for her work on Gulf War illnesses and syndromes (which we don’t feel qualified to assess). She is, however, perhaps even more famous for being one of the main proponents of the mystery microwave weapon hypothesis about the cause of the “mystery illness” afflicting American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba and China (the Havana syndrome), claiming that the symptoms “strongly match known effects of pulsed radiofrequency/microwave electromagnetic (RF/MW) radiation”. That hypothesis does not have significant support in the scientific community, but it is hardly surprising that Golomb immediately plumped for that one: Golomb is a proponent of electromagnetic hypersensitivity and the discredited idea that cell phone radiation causes cancer and all sorts of illnesses – in fact, Golomb is on the “scientific advisory board” of the group Physicians for Safe Technology, one of the main proponents of that idea and associated conspiracy theories – and the mystery microwave weapon hypothesis would be a flashy way of drawing attention and motivate public support (blame China and/or Russia!) for the idea; indeed, Golomb herself is clear that “her research draws attention to a larger population of people who are affected by similar health problems” due to cell phones, smart meters and other types of radiation. She was also a signatory to a letter urging the FDA to retract their thorough report on radiofrequency radiation and cancer because they, the signatories, didn’t like the conclusions.

 

Now, we haven’t really attempted to compile any kind of comprehensive CV for Golomb. She does sometimes say reasonable-sounding things about various issues, but her name also has a remarkable tendency to pop up in different contexts where pseudoscience is promulgated. She is a go-to authority not just for Covid-is-caused-by-5G conspiracy theorists (she should, in fairness, probably not be blamed for that) but for statin denialists. And although one should be careful with assigning guilt by association, constantly being caught in the company of and carrying out joint efforts with people like David Perlmutter, Stephen Sinatra and Devra Davis is not a good look. Back in 2012, Golomb also received some media attention for her claim that eating chocolate more frequently is associated with a lower BMI – though the study authors were careful to mention “correlation”, they were nevertheless quick to emphasize that  “the association could be causal” – based on one of the most laughably shoddy studies ever conducted.

 

Diagnosis: A bit unclear, but she has been and is involved in a lot of pseudoscience- and conspiracy-theory-adjacent nonsense, and although she is hardly a star of the woo and pseudoscience circuses, her name pops up in such contexts with pretty remarkable frequency.

#2914: Stuart Goldman

Stuart Goldman is an author and journalist whose work has been wide-ranging and had quite a bit of impact. But Goldman is also a columnist for the WND, and a thoroughly silly one at that. Goldman is very paranoid about the works of demons and black magic, which he tends to see … a lot of places – America is under attack by them, everywhere and at all levels. For instance, in 2014, he concluded that Isla Vista, California, is infested with demons (“[C]an I make a case here for my statement that the little beach own of Isla Vista is, in fact, infested by demons? I think I can”) and that crime, including murder, occuring in the area is a result of the city’s “occultism” and “aura of evil that seems to fill the air so thick that I literally become sick to my stomach.” Another example is the popularity of stories about UFOs and alien abductions:

 

“... the unpleasant fact is, 50,000 people can not be lying. Something is here – probing people, inspecting them, and planting thoughts in their minds, manipulating their bodies –treating them, in a sense, like so many cattle. Is it all simply a gigantic cosmic joke, or is there a more sinister plot at hand? Are we seeing the formation of a new and highly destructive cult, one whose view posits the elimination (the New Agers call it ‘spiritual cleansing’ of people who are ‘unfit’ to exist in the coming New World? Are there really demonic entities hovering about, searching for likely candidates whose brains and minds they can invade, filling them full of fairy tales and lies – fattening them for the kill?”

 

But yeah, Goldman is in particular concerned with New Agers (so are we, but for different reasons) and Wiccans, and he has some … outré ideas about what such people believe and desire. As evidence for his claims, he cites more or less relevant passages from the Bible. So it goes.

 

Diagnosis: You can find plenty of examples of Goldman’s claims and obsessions in the WND archives, but we sort of recommend against it. Otherwise, he must be pretty old by now (there are no recents columns). Hopefully retired.

#2913: Arthur Goldberg

Arthur Abba Goldberg is a businessman, JD (former professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law), convicted fraudster, and longtime leader in the anti-gay-rights movement and the ex-gay movement. Goldberg is co-founder (with Elaine Berk) and co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) and president of Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality (PATH) – basically Jewish alternatives to what tend to be rabidly fundamentalist evangelical organizations – which are organizations relative to which you want your Erdös number to be as high as possible. According to himself, Goldberg “uses Jewish law texts and scientific study to get to the individual root causes of same sex attraction and help those who are unhappy with their lifestyle reassert their gender identity and change their life”; it is hopefully easy to see some ways in which things are bound to go wrong here.

 

His 2008 book Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change argues (a.o.) that homosexual orientation can be changed through reparative therapy. He used to claim that 65 percent to 75 percent of JONAH clients “are substantially healed after two to five years using JONAH’s ‘gender-affirming processes’,” but when asked in court where his numbers come from, Goldberg of course had to admit that JONAH performed no research and did not keep track of clients’ success rates. He also claims that gay rights activists are only pretending to claim that sexual orientation cannot be changed as part of a “pre-planned agenda,” and that people who failed at conversion therapy simply didn’t try hard enough.

 

In 2012, former clients of JONAH sued JONAH and its founders for consumer fraud; after drawn-out court proceedings, the former clients won, and the New Jersey Superior court ordered JONAH to close and liquidate its assets; Goldberg responded with various attempts at legal trickery (such as essentially just renaming his organiziation the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA)). One suspects it didn’t help their case that they were represented by certified loon Charles LiMandri. It’s worth noting that Goldberg has had troubles in court before; during his career as a businessman in the 1980s, Goldberg orchestrated a massive fraud from 1984 to 1986 in which his firm sold over $2 billion of fraudulent municipal bonds for several cities; he was indicted on numerous counts of bribery, conspiracy and fraud, plead guilty, and spent a bit of time in jail.

 

Despite being demonstrably morally corrupt to the core, Goldberg still seems to think he is in a position to lecture others about morality, publishing screeds like “The Urgency of Restoring the Biblical Values of America’s Founders.”

 

Diagnosis: Old, dumb and utterly corrupt at all possible levels. Hopefully he’s been ushered off the stage for good, but you never know these days.

#2912: Simone Gold

America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) is a wingnut political organization founded to spread conspiracy theories, denialism and pseudoscience about COVID-19. The group rose to fame with their July 27, 2020, media event where the members advocated for the use of repurposed drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine, as treatments for COVID-19 based on no support from research, evidence or good reason; rather, they accompanied the recommendations by accusing the pharmaceutical industry of intentionally sponsoring studies showing the drugs to be ineffective based solely on the fact that the existing serious, peer-reviewed studies didn’t support their claims. Instead of being laughed off stage as the brainrot conspiracy crazies they are, their claims were distributed and promoted by a number of wingnut websites and social media, as well as by then-president Trump and (in particular) Trump jr – heck, remember that Joseph Ladapo rose to prominence as a member of the group. There is a discussion of some of their early antics and claims here. 

 

In 2021, AFLDS pivoted to anti-vaccine activism, making consistenly false claims about the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, including falsely referring to the vaccines as “experimental biological agents”, falsely claiming that they were “not effective in treating or preventing” COVID-19, and falsely claiming that the vaccines were responsible for 45,000 deaths based on utterly incompetent and dishonest dumpster diving in the VAERS database – the latter claim was even used for a lawsuit seeking a temporary ban on vaccinations (so much for “health freedom”) in a case so incompetent and dumb that it was most likely motivated by its potential for fundraising (i.e. grifting) rather than by any genuine hope that it would achieve anything in the courts.

 

On the other hand, they also promoted paid telehealth consultations with “AFLDS-trained” physicians that would prescribe fake medications they claimed were COVID-19 treatments – the grift was so obvious and in your face that it never even registered with many of their fans. The service in question was provided by SpeakWithAnMD, a telehealth website run by legendary conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi for the purpose of distributing various drugs that had been claimed by right-wing figures to be therapeutic for COVID-19. The Intercept estimated that AFLDS and its partners had made $6.7 million in revenue from these consultations between July 16 and September 12, 2021. You can read more about the grift here (it’s even shabbier than it sounds).

 

It’s worth emphasizing that the self-proclaimed frontline doctors have never been at the actual frontline of anything; the group’s members are notable for never having been close neither to doing serious research on nor to treating patients suffering from Covid, despite prominent member Stella Immanuel claiming that she herself had treated and cured 350 COVID-19 patients using a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, and zinc (and also that sexual visitations by demons and alien DNA are at the root of Americans’ common health concerns).

 

AFLDS was founded by Simone Gold and Tea Party Patriots-cofounder Jenny Beth Martin, though Gold’s relationship with the group has become somewhat chaotic over the years: In early November 2022, AFLDS sued Gold for using – entirely predictably given the kind of person we’re talking about – the group’s charitable funds to buy multi-million-dollar mansions and cars for her and her boyfriend’s (that would be ALFDS’s former Communications Director John Strand) personal use (more here); apparently AFLDS hired a “forensic auditor” to do a thorough exploration of the organization’s financials while Gold was in prison.

 

Because of course she was in prison. On January 5, 2021, Gold spoke in D.C. to people gathering to participate in the “Stop the Steal” rally, in which she said that COVID-19 was non-fatal and spread misinformation and insane conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines, e.g. saying that “if you don’t want to take an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine, you must not allow yourself to be coerced!” Then, on January 6, Gold joined the insurrectionists and illegally entered the Capitol building, pushing law enforcement officials to get inside, along with John Strand, where she gave another speech. She later said that she “regret being there” because she was obviously concerned that ‘controversies’ about her actions could detract from her work with AFLDS, and in February 2022, she pleaded guilty to and was sentenced to 90 days in jail for a Class A misdemeanor. Always a grifter, Gold used the trial to fundraise $430 000 for her legal defense, which even her lawyer more or less admitted was pure grifting.

 

The claims she made on January 5, 2021, were in line with the claims she has tended to make elsewhere. Gold is most famous for her promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a “safe” alternative to COVID vaccines, in direct conflict with reality. Equally out of touch with reality, of course, is her persistent promotion of ivermectin. She is also opposed to face masks, of course. And Gold has been willing to use all available means to market her conspiracy theories, such as claiming that the US government experimented on Black people to test the general safety of vaccines in a desperate attempt to gain traction with Black communities. And like with so many of the conspiracy theorists associated with AFLDS, Gold’s background in research or patient care, despite being an MD, is … at best unclear – in 2020, for instance, she made a video trying to convince people she was affiliated with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA, which she was certainly not.

 

She has been quite successful among wingnut groups, however. Her “White Coat Summit” press conference was co-sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots and was broadcast by Breitbart, and she was a speaker at the 2020 AMPFest, as well as at an event for donors to the Council for National Policy in November the same year (both Gold and AFLDS colleague James Todaro are part of that group); in December, she was part of a summit hosted by Turning Point USA. In 2021, she was part of the “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible Church in Oklahoma with regular allies like Jim Caviezel, Mike Lindell, and Lin Wood (evangelicals have consistently been an important demographic for AFLDS’s disinformation efforts). In May, 2021, she arranged an RV tour across the US named the “Uncensored Truth Tour”. And so on.

 

She currently (or at least relatively recently) runs GoldCare, a telemedicine service that charges $1,000 per year for individual memberships, and – needless to say – does not accept insurance.

 

Diagnosis: One of the most brazen grifters alive in the US (and the competition is fierce). Yes, she probably honestly believes at least some of the claims and conspiracy theories she and her group have been producing, but successful grifters tend to do just that (when you tell a lie often enough you start to believe it yourself and so on). That she is still perceived as an authority by anyone at this point, is flabbergasting, but she is. A piece of utter garbage masquerading as a human.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki