#2768: Brenden Dilley

Brenden Dilley is a MAGA “life coach”, professional asshole (“I really have a deep appreciation for pettiness”) and rightwing broadcaster on YourVoice America (a popular stop for media personalities on the MAGA clown circuit, such as Roseanne Barr), Periscope, (occasionally) YouTube and Twitter (“a shitty, disgusting, pedo-filled fucking communist organization”, according to Dilley after having been repeatedly and persistently banned), whose fame rests primarily on his promotion of QAnon conspiracy theories. According to himself, he did initially doubt the authenticity of QAnon posts until an unspecified member of the Trump family at one point confirmed to Dilley that the QAnon conspiracy theory was legit. (Dilley subsequently went on to apologize to the Trump family.)

 

Dilley, however, has managed to become a rather seriously influential figure in American political life. He is the unofficial leader of a “troll army” that is currently attacking Trump’s enemies on social media, and he has gained direct access to the Trump campaign and even Trump himself. Dilley and his Dilley Meme Team were also behind the video So God Made Trump, with AI-genereated narration in the voice of the long-dead Paul Harvey, which Trump himself posted to his social media accounts.

 

Trump

Most of all, Dilley is an unconditional sycophant of Trump and all things Trump; according to Dilley: “Part of what makes President Trump special is that we finally have somebody we can build legend around and you need that in culture”. You see, Trump is “a legitimate, high IQ genius” and his performance as president is without historical peer: “This is prime Michael Jordan, this is prime Tom Brady, this is prime Joe Montana, this is prime [Wayne] Gretzky.” He has accordingly mocked the left for not grasping the “simple science” that Trump, ”the golden-haired Adonis that he is”, has “God-tier genetics”. Indeed, the only apparent flaw of Trump’s presidency, as Dilley sees it, is that Trump was not “nearly as authoritarian as we hoped he would be” while in office: Dilley explicitly wanted Trump to be a dictator and “wanted him to rule with an iron fist”, and is accordingly sad that Trump ostensibly “would not abuse his powers” but would remain “respectful of the rule of law”. So, as a lead-up to the 2020 election, Dilley demanded that as soon as Trump won, he should immediately invoke the Insurrection Act and round up members of the press and his political enemies for prosecution and execution: Trump supporters had better “start developing a stomach for death” (or, as Dilley put it, “testicular fortitude”) when Trump and his team finally manages get in position to be “firmly imposing the law of the land”, for death is “what it’s going to take”.

 

When Trump in fact lost the election, Dilley was of course quick to call “fraud”, e.g. by challenging anyone to disprove his easily disproven claim that 130,000 fraudulent ballots were brought in for Biden in the middle of the election night in Wisconsin, or flatly asserting, without anything remotely resembling sources to back it up, that “Joe Biden probably got 10 to 15 million fraudulent votes.” He also quickly declared that Trump “is not going anywhere” because his supporters “are more than prepared to do everything – and I mean fucking everything – to preserve our constitutional republic and to protect our president.” Indeed, Dilley remained confident for a long time afterwards that “Trump is going to win”, however: “You can scream ‘illegitimate’ all the way up until 2025, when Trump will probably get reelected again because he’s going to petition for a third term because you motherfuckers kept trying to rig the first two terms.” He would just wait for the hand of God to prove that heroes and legends still exist in America. Just in case, however, Dilley had even prior to the 2020 election been lifting weights and taking testosterone to prepare himself for having to fight off “Chinese super soldiers” if Joe Biden became president. We admit that Dilley’s response to his own prediction makes one somewhat curious about what Dilley imagined such encounters were going to look like.

 

The reason Trump lost – or come across as having lost – is, of course, that Trump, despite his qualities, has powerful enemies; the reason the “most of the powerful leaders in America and around the world” wanted and want to stop Trump from assuming the presidency again is “because he cracked down on their ability to fuck and traffick children from 2016-2020.” Others were too cowardly or treasonous to step forth: In 2020, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, for instance, became “officially a traitor to the United States of America” for certifying the state’s election with Biden as the winner.

 

Weighing in on the big discussion of potential Taylor Swift endorsements in 2024, Dilley warned Swift not to endorse Biden or else it will be necessary for MAGA to “punish that bitch”: “Right now, there’s been no commitment, so for now, we are essentially courting [Swift]. There are people that you are courting; once they make the wrong choice, you punish.”

 

Biden

As for Biden himself, well: who he? During Covid times, Dilley wondered whether Biden continued to wear a mask not to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but to make it easier to hide the fact that “it’s different people playing Joe Biden” (Dilley himself refrained from wearing a mask during Covid because he was actually hoping to give the virus to “your fat, disgusting, fucking gross liberal mother”; he also claimed that his refusal to wear a mask was a hill he would “die on”, which, had it happened, would probably not have had the rhetorical effect he was aiming for). In any case, the person playing Biden is being instructed, through a covert earpiece, on what to say and how to act by “that gay, lispy fuck” former Rep. Barney Frank. In 2020, Dilley vowed not to pay taxes or obey laws if Biden became president – “I’m not fucking living under an illegitimate presidency” – but it’s unclear to what extent he’s followed up on that.

 

Post-truth

As one of the most explicit champions of a post-truth political discourse, Dilley is at least explicit about spreading fake news, however: “I don’t give a fuck about being factual,” says Dilley but rather “make shit up all the time.” He can do so because his “objective is to destroy Democrats, OK? To destroy liberals, liberalism as an idea, Democrats, and anything that opposes President Trump. That’s my goal.” Brenden made that particular comment in connection with his unconditional praise for Trump’s baseless accusation that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had something to do with the 2001 death of a woman who worked in Scarborough’s congressional office; Dilley rather urged his listeners to start “investigating” whether Scarborough may have also been involved in the 1996 death of JonBenét Ramsey because why not? Given his audience’s cognitive situations, they’d certainly be able to come up with something to convince themselves. And then again, Dilley has anyways urged his listeners to harass reporters and politicians “all the time” anyways. It’s little wonder that the Trump campaign has warmed to this fellow.

 

Fans

In 2020, Donald Trump Jr. sent Dilley an autographed copy of his book along with a personal note thanking him for his “support to #MAGA.” Donald Trump Jr. isn’t Dilley’s only significant fan, however; after Dilley declared, in 2020, that he was just waiting for the “green light” from Trump to start gunning down protesters over the murder of George Floyd (or, really, anyone he disagrees with), Republican then-congressional candidate Buzz Patterson appeared on his livestream program to tell Dilley that he loved him like a brother. As for the protestors assertion, Dilley’s position was presumably also influenced by his assumption that the killing of Floyd and the resulting protests were deep state, false flag psy-op aimed at preventing Trump’s reelection. Other fans of Dilley include the aforementioned Roseanne Barr and Aubrey Huff.

 

There’s a decent Brenden Dilley resource here.

 

Diagnosis: It’s easy to believe that you can write him off as merely a laughable clown, but although Dilley is a laughable clown, he is, like many clowns, pretty scary: Dilley’s style and content is Trump’s, just with added anger, coherence and cursing, and his brand of post-truth rhetoric – silly as it may seem to anyone minimally reasonable – has established itself as the cultural identity of a rather larger amount of people than most civilized people would like to think. Dilley’s popularity  and influence is not at all surprising, and that’s the scary part.

#2767: Adrienna DiCioccio

Adrienna DiCioccio is a conspiracy theorist and repeat InfoWars guest with ties to the Proud Boys and Roger Stone, and is perhaps most famous for organizing – or attempting to organize – a 2019 symbolic one-day boycott of social media sites to protest these sites’ alleged censorship of conservatives; together with Laura Loomer, she has also organized protests at Twitter’s headquarters in its pre-Elon-Musk days, and she has organized wingnut “free speech” rallies in DC. The campaigns gained a modicum of traction in wingnut circles who may or may not have been aware (they probably were) of the kind of views DiCioccio had in mind as being censored conservative viewpoints.

 

Notably, DiCioccio is a prominent promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories, claiming that what she perceives as US ruling elites are really covert Satan-worshipping child traffickers and cannibals, as well as a Sandy Hook truther, claiming that Sandy Hook was a false flag and that the government staged the 2012 elementary school shooting as a means for pushing gun control. DiCioccio was among the sources Alex Jones infamously promoted in his push for Sandy Hook trutherism. DiCioccio is also responsible for promoting weird QAnon-backed fake news hoaxes (subsequently a Snopes mainstay) about Oprah having been arrested for supposedly being part of a child sex-trafficking ring.

 

As you’d have expected, DiCioccio was also present in DC in connection with the January 6, 2021 insurrection, but seems not to have faced any charges.

 

Diagnosis: An angry, paranoid, minor but well-connected cogwheel in the garbled nonsense chaos machinery of contemporary wingnuttery, DiCioccio is yet another victim of the redpill epidemic. And she has, like redpill victims do, utterly forsaken the cognitive standards of accuracy, evidence and facts in favor of the familiar, paranoid conspiracies all the way down scheme of reasoning.

#2766: Tracy Diaz

Some dingbat conspiracy theorist
interviewing Beanz at CPAC 2020

A.k.a. Tracy Beanz 

 

Tracy Diaz is a youtuber and conspiracy theorist who was, at least in part, responsible for helping the QAnon conspiracy gain a broader audience back in 2017: prior to the efforts of Diaz and 4chan moderators Pamphlet Anon (Coleman Rogers) and BaruchtheScribe (South African conspiracy theorist Paul Furber), 4chan was riddled with various anonymous “anon” posters claiming to be high-level political operatives, and QAnon seems to have been rather randomly selected among these for wider dissemination; Diaz, at the time a small-time YouTuber with a background as a wingnut talkshow hosts for Liberty Movement Radio and a former Ron Paul staffer, had already achieved moderate popularity (a few thousand views) for YouTube videos with conspiracy-theory-based analyses of WikiLeaks releases and Pizzagate nonsense, apparently realized that promoting QAnon could boost her popularity, and she launched her career with the video “/POL/- Q Clearance Anon - Is it #happening???”. That one was followed by multiple sequels in which Diaz, using the familiar technique of free association, would attempt to “decipher” Q’s “cryptic” messages. Together with Rogers and Furber, Diaz also established the Reddit community CBTS_Stream (“Calm Before The Storm”), where they reached a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and from which their nonsense would begin – with substantial help from Russian accounts – to infect various other social media channels. Diaz was herself banned from various mainstream platforms like Patreon, Facebook and Twitter (later reinstated), but she continued to earn thousands of dollars from outlets like SubscribeStar.

 

Diaz’s work was apparently sufficiently well received by wingnut leaders for her to be invited as a speaker to the 2020 American Priority Conference, or “AMPFest”, at then-president Trump’s Trump National Doral Miami, together with similarly conspiracy-minded loons like leading anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, jr., leading wingnut conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, US Representative Matt Gaetz, Simone Gold, Corey Lewandowski and Roger Stone. 

 

In addition to the standard QAnon ideas – centrally, that the world is really run by a cabal of pedophiles – Diaz has also promoted conspiracy theories about Covid-19, claiming that news media exaggerated the pandemic as part of a broader conspiracy to gain “power”: apparently mainstream media deliberately “stopped the economy” in order “to damage the president [Donald Trump] in his re-election. They want people scared.” That Covid also existed outside the US is irrelevant since it doesn’t support Diaz’s narrative. Much of her nonsense, including election fraud conspiracies, is pushed by the website UncoverDC, for which Diaz is editor-in-chief. Diaz is also on the board of directors for Michael Flynn’s organization America’s Future, one of the groups that paid for the Arizona Senate’s self-styled election audit in 2021, and she recently appeared as a talking head in Flynn’s autohagiographic conspiracy flick Flynn.

 

In fact, Diaz has denied that she has promoted QAnon conspiracies at all but instead has approached the topic as “an online journalist”, and she has threatened those who accurately describe her activities otherwise with legal action.

 

In April 2021, Diaz was elected as a Republican committeewoman in South Carolina, as part of a general push from QAnon proponents to seek public office. In 2022, her Twitter account was also reinstated, something she celebrated with a barrage of misinformation about the COVID vaccine and unsupported accusations of voter fraud, mostly stuff that had already been thoroughly debunked.

 

Diagnosis: All nonsense and misinformation, of course, but Diaz doesn’t care; that is, she generally doesn’t seem to consider truth, evidence or accuracy to be relevant for whether she should promote – or even believe ­– something. And given her audience, and that what she does care about is attention and recognition, she’s presumably right about that, unfortunately.

#2765: Philippe Diaz

Philippe Diaz is the deranged CEO of Cinema Libre Studios, an LA-based movie production and distribution company, nominally “of independent narratives and social issue, documentary films” (and though Diaz is French, he lives in the US and qualifies for an entry here). In particular, Cinema Libre produced Andrew Wakefield’s “documentary” Vaxxed, which according to Diaz took up an issue that “has been suppressed for far too long”. And when the conspiracy nonsense and misinformation in Wakefield’s film started to receive the criticism it amply deserved, Diaz predictably threatened critics with legal action – indeed, Diaz wanted critics “prosecuted”, apparently under the delusion that criticizing the movie and petitioning venues not to show the film is a crime. The threats were of course intented to intimidate critics into silence so that they wouldn’t get his film canceled because the film’s critics ostensibly doesn’t value free speech like he does. So it goes. Also, “the movie [Vaxxed] is not anti-vaccine and neither is Dr. Wakefield. Rather, it promotes safe vaccine protocols,” said Philippe Diaz.

Diagnosis: Though we may not have any insight into Diaz’s personal views on vaccination, it is clear that he has established himself as one of today’s central promoter of anti-vaccine misinformation, and his legal thuggery more than indicates that he’s a piece of garbage through and through.

#2764: Heather Dexter

Heather Dexter is an anti-vaccine activist, naturopath, general quack, sometimes mommy-blogger and a general threat to the health and welfare of her surroundings, including her own children: As she proudly relates in a post for the hardcore conspiracy theory- and pseudoscience-promoting and New Age-religious extremist blog and facebook group Like-Minded Mamas, she forewent vaccines for her three children, instead letting them get deathly ill with whooping cough so that they would achieve “natural immunity”. In Dexter’s deranged excuse for a mind, immunity to whooping cough – the point of which one would think is to not get whooping cough – is better if it is natural (it isn’t). She also avoided taking her children to a real doctor or use real medicine to alleviate their suffering, which they could easily have done, because alleviating suffering is “unnatural”.

 

Illuminatingly, when she discovered that people near to her (and with more knowledge than her) didn’t immediately agree with her decision, she “felt blind-sided and hurt, unsupported and ready to blow” but came to terms with it in the manner of a true F student in a high-school philosophy course: “I have learned that my truth does not belong to all of humanity. Each person is entitled to their beliefs and logic or training”. She emphasized however, how much she had suffered through the whole ordeal: “It was a living HELL. Every day. It had an intense effect on my marriage and relationship with my husband. It caused me to question everything I knew about Natural Health.” Because the whole incident was, of course, about her and about her beliefs and her, Heather Dexter’s, self-esteem as a mother. Fuck the children. The more they suffer, the more she can show that she’s a good mother. And fortunately she made it through (the test subjects for her motherhood identity, the children, recovered): “It has been my biggest challenge to date as a mother. This mother conquered.” Children are, like purses, the accessories to motherhood against which your mettle as a mother is evaluated by your peer group.

 

Besides, she did get the support she needed when she “called my mentor and the founder of my Naturopathy school to gain yet another naturopathic perspective. She had nothing but good things to say. She once again boosted my morale.” Remember that naturopaths like these think of themselves as being capable of helping other people with health issues. If that doesn’t frighten you, you are either stupid or deeply cynical – Dexter herself is apparently “a Board Certified Naturopathic Doctor, Certified Affiliated Bradley Method Instructor, Certified Holistic Doula, Certified Usui Reiki Master Practitioner” (though it is unclear who “certified” her – presumably those who took her money in exchange of a diploma). And her naturopathic peer group (including one Sarah Mokma of Rooted Well – a deranged quack whose name is duly noted for future reference) had advice: “Turns out the best way to clear out the lungs is through the rectum … enemas.” This is, of course, utter nonsense, but it will exacerbate the suffering of the children and thus provide Heather Dexter with another notch in her motherhood belt. She also used homeopathy, “chiropractic care, probiotics, and optimum nutrition” and later “Olive Leaf Extract, Elderberry Syrup, Pau D’arco Extract, Light Therapy and Reflexology” and a whole slew of supplements – in short, she made it amply clear that neither she nor her naturopathic colleagues had the faintest clue what they were doing.

 

And just in case you didn’t yet draw the obvious conclusion that Heather Dexter is a dangerous moron for foregoing vaccines and medicine: “I just want you to ask yourself … How did people make it through for thousands of years? How did they get through the Spanish Influenza, the Black Plague, fevers and other ailments?” They didn’t, Heather. That’s the whole fucking point. Children died. The fact that some “school” (presumably a diploma mill) charged you money for what they called an “education” might actually be a crime.

 

Now, Dexter did receive some criticism for her actions, so she and her colleagues promptly shut the facebook group. As they explained it, the group and Dexter’s story were about “honoring a mother’s intuition”; but unfortunately “the story found itself in the hands of those who are out to destruct”. But don’t for a moment think that Dexter learned anything from criticism; quite the contrary: “this experience has shown us that we need to be even louder”.

 

Diagnosis: Completely delusional, and as a result of her delusions combined with her ego and self-centeredness, an immediate threat to her surroundings. Heather Dexter is, in short, a terrible person – religious conviction is no excuse – and, as she more or less explicitly admits herself, a horrible parent who won’t hesitate to torture her own children if it strokes her own ego.

 

Hat-tip: The skeptical OB

#2763: Betsy DeVos

Elisabeth Dee “Betsy” DeVos is a zealous anti-public education activist, fundie and supporter of pseudoscience who served – in a move that must be counted among his administration’s most detrimental to civilization – as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education. She previously served as Republican National Committeewoman for Michigan from 1992 to 1997 and chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000. Her family is notable as well: Betsy DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, former CEO of Amway, and the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater.

 

As for her qualifications for the position of Secretary of Education, DeVos herself had solely attended private Christian schools, Holland Christian Schools and Calvin College; she had “never taught in a public school, nor administered one, nor sent her children to one.” On the other hand, she was already before her appointment known in Michigan for her activism on behalf of the charter-school initiative and voucher programs for public funding of private schools, partly because Michigan charter schools were not accountable for student performance, not accountable financially, and, as DeVos had to admit, unable to improve student performance. They would, however, be able to circumvent regulations related to religious indoctrination or to sticking to facts when it comes to topics like evolution, climate change or history. And DeVos does herself have a background in pseudoscience, at least insofar as she is one of the primary investors in Neurocore, a “brain training” company based on undiluted pseudoscience; she has also admitted that her advocacy for charter schools is driven by a desire to “advance God’s kingdom”. Then there is this case.

 

Another important qualification was presumably her astounding ignorance about rather crucial details concerning public education. On the other hand, she does think that guns might be needed in schools because schools in Wyoming might need to allow them to protect children from “potential grizzlies”. At least the intelligent design creationism advocates at the Discovery Institute defended her appointment.

 

After her career stint at the Trump administration, DeVos has been involved in the efforts of the wingnut and occasionally neo-fascist group Moms for Liberty (a.k.a. “Klanned Karenhood”), where she has for instance advocated for the abolition of the Cabinet-level department she used to run. “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” said DeVos, who, we suspect, still has no clear idea about what the department actually does. She has also released a book, Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child, which attempts to provide things dumb people might conflate with arguments for her claims (but which, we suppose, she has never actually read). 

 

There’s a decent DeVos resource here.

 

Diagnosis: Well, the obvious word that springs to mind to generally sum up Betsy DeVos is ‘incompetence’, but it incompetence and ignorance combined with zeal and at least a willingness to use whatever means available to reach her aims, and the combination of zeal and ignorant incompetence is aptly described as lunacy.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2762: L.J. Devon

NaturalNews is one of the most highly trafficked alternative medicine websites in existence and a significant source of unhinged conspiracy theories and denialism (not only related to medicine) for a staggering number of people. L. J. Devon is one of the staff writer for NaturalNews, and has contributed pseudoscientific ranting and conspiracy mongering on a number of topics, including anti-vaccine nonsense (“Is the flu shot effective or just a big government-endorsed scam?”), but a recurring theme is fear-mongering about purported toxins, and in particular environmental toxins – Devon’s writings are, if nothing else, characterized by rabid chemophobia and almost religious-zeal-like appeals to nature.

 

Notable among the toxins Devon thinks are killing us is, unsurpringly, fluoride. “Most people today are slowly being poisoned each day through the water supply,” says Devon, and this is particularly evil since “[f]luoride calcifies the pineal gland, making it hard for the gland to regulate melatonin and DMT production, limiting one’s sleep and dreams, emotional state, and heart-brain coherence” – it’s basically a mind-control agent turning us all into sheeple. Reality begs to differ, of course, but we are not even remotely in the vicinity of caring about reality here anymore. “Many researchers [unnamed, of course] show that we are seeing incredible amounts of dementia, sleep disorders, Parkinson's, learning disabilities, depression, anxiety, and disconnection in our society today,” says Devon, “because people everywhere are being systematically poisoned – their pineal glands calcified.” And it is, of course, all a conspiracy: “The agriculture system (glyphosate) and the medical system (heavy metal injections, fluoride-based psychiatric drugs) and government fluoride mandates are literally teaming up to destroy our minds and our spiritual connection to ourselves and one another.”

 

The delusion that the government is deliberately poisoning us through the municipal water supply is a mainstay at NaturalNews, however, in part because Adams has his own laboratory that he uses (ineptly, of course) to analyze samples of municipal drinking water and finding all sorts of alleged contamination – which is unsurprising given that he is biased and fails to take precautions to avoid contamination in the sampling process. And according to Devon, “if you drink tap water, there’s a good chance you’re taking in all sorts of pharmaceutical drugs at the same time” since “[o]ur drinking water contains massive doses of prescription drugs”, which is, of course, false. Now, that tap water might contain trace amounts of drugs is indeed a concern that has been raised in legitimate fora, especially for reasons related to environmental effects, but a decade of research has found no detrimental impact on humans, which is not surprising insofar as most of these trace pharmaceuticals are present in extremely low levels. But hey: its not like NaturalNews would ever miss a chance to sow them some FUD.

 

So what should we do? “In this awakening, we must learn how to clean our blood, detoxify, and de-calcify our pineal gland [which will apparently open your chakras and make you see “the truth”] to restore our consciousness, connection, and love for one another,” suggests Devon.

 

Diagnosis: Nonsense and conspiracy theories. But it is nonsense and conspiracy theories that reach a frightening number of people inhabiting the rather large and insulated internet ecosystem of conspiracy theories and denialism Adams has managed to build.