#561: Greg Caton

A.k.a. John Carr

Gregory James Caton is a peddler of a range of herbal products, some of which allegedly (but don’t) cure cancer, and the founder of Alpha Omega Labs, a manufacturer of natural health care products that at least used to distribute internationally from Ecuador. Caton used to be heavily involved with Kevin Trudeau. That should tell you something about the landscape in which Caton operates, though Caton and Trudeau have been engaged in various legal battles since the 90s.

Caton himself had his operations shut down by the FDA in 2003 (though Caton claimed it was because someone had shipped “fake” products under his trade name, which in one sense is probably true). In order to avoid the nefarious FDA and such fascist measures as consumer welfare considerations he opened Alpha Omega Labs as a front company, and – to be sure – relocated it to Ecuador in 2008 after a stint in prison and various lawsuits (apparently he violated the terms of his release from prison in the process). His Labs were the topic of a good expose by Business Week concerning people who have had their lives ruined by some of the herbal products Caton promoted (also here), in particular Cansema, which is listed by the FDA as one of 187 fake cancer cures, also described here, but is still peddled by Caton (for a warning letter from FDA to another peddler, Burt Hampton, see this).

Caton was reported as a fugitive from Justice in 2006 and was featured in Parade Magazine's “On the Run In America” article in 2009. He is reportedly under arrest again, after extradition from Ecuador in 2009 – his equally, uh, enthusiastic wife Cathryn wrote an appeal on his behalf riddled with conspiracy theories and persecution complexes (well, it is true, I suppose, that Greg Caton is persecuted, just as any ordinary regular criminal). The letter is available at (where else?) whale.to, and the conspiracy theorists on the web are still going batshit over the incident (Caton’s whale.to page is here).

Diagnosis: Dangerous, and should be avoided at all costs. He’s got some support among the more unhinged conspiracy theorists, of course, but even woo-sympathizers in general seem reluctant to endorse Caton.

#560: David Castillo

David Castillo is a member of the school board in San Marcos, Texas, and otherwise completely unimportant. In fact, Castillo’s only claim to notability stems from an occurrence in 2010, when the board had voted to do away with abstinence-only sex education and replace it with abstinence-plus sex education. Castillo was opposed to the move and offered the following quote to the local newspaper: ”I assume that the majority of students at San Marcos High School are Christian. And if that is the case, then this whole thing is anti-Christian.”

That’s quite an inference.

Diagnosis: Well, at least the Internet remembers your inanities, Castillo, and you get to be immortalized in our Encyclopedia for this astounding absence of judgment. Congratulations.

#559: Gary Cass

Gary Cass is executive director of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, and president of the gloriously insane Christian Anti-Defamation Comission (CADC), an organization devoted to nurturing martyr- and persecution complexes – their mission is to be a ”champion of Christian religious liberty”, though it has approximately as much to do with liberty as you’d probably expect. To get the idea, you can see their list of ”top 10 most egregious acts of anti-Christian defamation, discrimination and persecution in America” in 2010 here, which includes the media’s criticisms of Pat Robertson’s views on the Haiti disaster, the appointment of Elena Kagan to Supreme Court, media criticism of TonyPerkins for saying that gay teens are suicidal because they know they are ”abnormal”, and the fact that Comedy Central was considering airing a new show called ”JC” based on the life of Jesus Christ. Persecution indeed.

The target of CDAC’s efforts is primarily homosexuality, which is a ”complete rebellion against God”, and Muslims, two of the greatest threats to religious liberty at present. Here is an example of Cass’s unwavering defense of religious liberty.

Cass was also among the bigots who urged a boycott of Ford because Ford advertises and sells cars to gay people, a clear violation of Cass’s religious freedom if ever there was one. He weighs in on the “It gets Better” campaign here to assure gay people that he’s going to do all he can to ensure that it doesn’t get better.

Cass, a True Christian™, may however be most famous for his profound arguments to the effect that Obama is not a true Christian: ”Obama can talk the talk and even have secret meetings with religious leaders, but he has no credibility as a true Christian. At best Obama is a deist or a Universalist, but according to his theology and his policies, he definitely is not a Christian.” The CDAC even issued Ten “Irrefutable Proofs” that Obama is not a Christian, listing things such as his Marxism (yes, the evidence for Marxism is the inference “I don’t like Marxism; I don’t like liberals; hence liberals are Marxists” – Cass’s version of the inference is given in detail here), his appointment of Elena Kagan as Supreme Court judge, Obamacare, and the fact that he was “an unabashed supporter of special privileges for homosexuals” (more evidence here). As an apropos, Cass has very often chastised the media for attacking the faith of political candidates, i.e. those candidates that agree with Cass politically – though not Romney, whose Mormon beliefs, according to Cass, appear to be unconstitutional. 

At this point you may of course wonder what it takes to be Christian, on Cass’s view? Well, according to Cass, at least you can’t be a Christian unless you own a gun.

In his review of “proofs” of discrimination like these Cass urged parents not to let their children watch Obama’s 2008 inauguration, the “most perverted [inauguration] in our nation’s history,” and he warned that God might destroy the nation’s capital because of it (apparently Ellen DeGeneres’s Christmas Special in 2010 was predicted to cause Armageddon as well). In a spirit of bipartisanship, Cass also attacked Glenn Beck for his Mormon faith, since Beck's religious commitment is clearly and unambiguously a violation of Cass’s religious freedom as well.

Cass was also a signatory to the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance’s campaign to show that global warming is a hoax.

He is featured in a useful roundup of wingnut reactions to the repeal of DADT here, and there is a fine Gary Cass resource here.

Diagnosis: A mind-bogglingly evil person whose rank insanity is just barely matched by his hypocrisy. Dangerous.

#558: Rebecca Lee Carley

Honorable mention to Orson Scott Card for his not entirely scholarly understanding of evolution and his call for armed revolution if gay marriage were to be legalized (though in fairness some commentators failed to explain the context of the screed).

Rebecca Lee Carley is fortunately less famous and influential. She makes up for that in terms of levels of sheer crazy. Carley is a former MD and anti-vaccination activist whose licence to practise medicine in the state of New York was revoked in March 2004 as a result of general unhingedness (in fact, she was found ”guilty of practicing while impaired by a mental disability and having a psychiatric condition which impairs her ability to practice medicine;” more here and here) – though she is still cited as an authority among the more batshit antivaxxers. According to herself, Carley doesn’t need that license anyways, and the whole system of licenses and doctors and Big Pharmas is just a conspiracy against her ability to treat cancer.

Her claims about vaccines are the usual ones; vaccines cause autism, cancer, autoimmune diseases, and shaken baby syndrome (and Carley gives you ”personal stories of vaccine damage” to back up her claims). You can read her essay ”The True Weapons Of Mass Destruction Causing VIDS (Vaccine Induced Diseases) An Epidemic Of Genocide” on whale.to (no link). It is spectacularly insane, and includes (plenty of) deranged claims such as ”Bechamp proved that Louis Pasteur's ’germ theory’ of disease was incorrect due to this ability of organisms to transform and mutate based on the body's internal terrain (as Pasteur admitted on his deathbed).” Interestingly, on her website Carley also offers a phone number that you can call to get advice on how to reverse your disease with natural remedies, and she doesn’t even ”need to see you in person,” an admission that suggests that Carley may be semi-aware of the quality of her advice. Discussed here, with some interesting highlights from her problems with the Medical Board. One supporter, Arnold Gore, has his own take on that medical license thing on whale.to.

Diagnosis: The scary thing is that she still got plenty of people willing to listen to here, despite the incoherent insanity and combination of megalomania and paranoia being rather obvious.

#557: Leonso Canales jr.

Leonso Canales, Jr., a flea market owner of Kingsville, Texas, is immortalized through his campaign to replace the greeting ”hello” with the more friendly and God-fearing ”heavenO”. As he writes on his website ”The ’O’ is not enough to hide the most negative word (Hell) printed in every dictionary,” while the ”Universal greeting ’HeavenO’ is a symbol of Peace, Friendship and Welcome.” He achieved a measure of success in 1997 when the dingbats of Kleberg County (also Texas) were convinced to adopt ”HeavenO” as the county’s preferred form of greeting. According to Canales, his campaigns have led to the decline of “hello”, even where “HeavenO” has not been officially adopted, but his documentation for the claim is a little weak.

Of course, there were trouble ahead. Carl Matthews of North Carolina claimed to have been the real originator of this remarkable idea, and that “[t]he copyright means the property belongs to me and cannot be commercialized on,” though the officials didn’t agree.

Diagnosis: Completely harmless village idiots add color to life; the slightly ominous part of the story is the Kleberg County officials’ decision to adopt his ideas, suggesting a certain susceptibility to the kinds of ideas officials would ideally not be susceptible to.