I never heard of him before, but suddenly my email is flooded with crap from him — some troll probably signed me up. What I’m seeing is flyers portraying stark raving madness, like this one.
WTF? Straight-up MAGA Jesus, with some of the more outrageous hate-ranters available, like Greg Locke. Oh, look, they got “comedian” Jim Breuer making funny faces, which is pretty much the entirety of his act (oh, wait, there are also obnoxious noises.) This tent-revival-style shrieking looks like my personal vision of Hell, but the impresario isn’t Satan, it’s some asshole named Clay Clark. So I looked him up on Wikipedia.
The ReAwaken America tour was founded by Clay Clark, a business coach and entrepreneur and former mayoral candidate in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In August 2020, Clark initiated a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa for its mask mandate to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The lawsuit alleged that wearing masks caused oxygen deprivation, leading to “migraine headaches, shortness of breath and dizziness.” The lawsuit was dropped in March 2021.
Clark has publicly espoused his belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. When he spoke at the January 5, 2021 rally held at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. in support of Donald Trump’s protest of the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Clark told attendees that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax and instructed them to “turn to the person next to you and give them a hug, someone you don’t know. Go hug somebody. Go ahead and spread it out, mass spreader. It’s a mass-spreader event!”
On a June 2021 episode of the Stew Peters Show, he argued that the COVID-19 vaccine contained luciferase, which he believed was a cryptocurrency technology associated with the Mark of the Beast prophesied in Revelation 13:16-18. This conspiracy theory, according to Clark, included Bill Gates (under the influence of performance artist and alleged Satanist Marina Abramović), and Jeffrey Epstein. Clark accused Gates and Epstein of attempting to create a new race of humans by combining luciferase and Epstein’s DNA into the COVID-19 vaccine.
At an October 2021 rally in Salt Lake City, Utah, Clark made the unproven claim that “COVID-19 is 100 percent treatable using budesonide, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.” He also accused George Soros of funding remdesivir, a drug used to treat severe cases of COVID-19 but which Clark said was “killing COVID-19 patients in the hospital because it causes renal failure”.
Oh. So he’s like the stupid version of Satan, then. He seems to believe that COVID, a disease that killed over a million Americans over the last few years, is a hoax…and that wearing a mask, which I still do for hours every day, causes oxygen deprivation. I’ve used luciferase, it’s just an enzyme. Epstein’s DNA isn’t in any vaccine. Ivermectin doesn’t work. But he has turned these loony beliefs into a big money-maker for himself.
There is also a nice Rolling Stone expose, which mainly reveals what a colossal asshole the man is. At least I was happy to learn that devout Christians are waking up and protesting these MAGA megachurch vermin as enemies of their faith.
Each stop on the tour now draws protests, of varying size, and the show is sometimes booted from venues — as it was in upstate New York this summer — leaving Clark scrambling. In Virginia, a lone van sent by the liberal clergy group Faithful America, which has been organizing against the tour since early this year, putters past the location with a rented billboard denouncing the speakers. (No one from that group is in attendance, citing safety concerns.) Reached by phone, Nathan Empsall, Faithful America’s director, says, “This tour is the face of unholy Christian Nationalism and they are bringing this deadly message to many churches.”
We atheists despise him, too. This sounds like the kind of thing where atheists and theists can find common cause. At least on agreeing that Jim Breuer is not funny at all.
nightmare blunt rotation: fundagelical wingnut edition
I’m going to take that to mean he’s a failed businessman and losing mayoral candidate.
Also, I see they have an itinerary. Is that anything like an agenda? Because those are bad, I hear.
If you look closer, these fundie xian/MAGAts lead lives that reflect their values, ability to reason, and decision making skills.
Which is saying, their lives are dismal, chaotic, and full of failures.
To take one recent example.
I was reading an entry on an old social media site left over from decades ago. Some old guy was complaining that he was old, sick, and his life hadn’t gone the way he expected.
Both his daughter and his granddaughter had gotten pregnant at age 16. No one had ever told them about birth control or what responsible adults did.
He had been married many times.
Two of his ex-wives had committed suicide.
I recognized the nym.
He was a right wingnut prayer warrior from the central south USA who had spent a lot of time stalking and attacking me decades ago. He never outright threatened to kill me but it was implied in what he said.
A nobody really, but someone with one skill, stalking and attacking people who weren’t members of his dysfunctional tribe.
This is how his self chosen karma caught up with him.
Ada Cristine @ 1
Well, we are in the period described in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. This dude sounds like an avatar for Nyarlahotep.
Gives anti-Davos a bad name. Is anyone pro-Davos?
Who the heck is everyone else?
I know of Breuer and Locke, but the rest???.
I looked up the “doctor”. He’s a Naturopathic Doctor (ND). I think some ducks are flying over, I hear a bunch of quacks.
which is contradicted by…
So, the Covid-19 virus doesn’t exist but is treatable with Ivermectin.
This guy is just a fundie xian conperson throwing crap against the wall and hoping some of it sticks. It’s not that he doesn’t believe his own nonsense so much as that he completely doesn’t care.
This is another recent example of the broken and dysfunctional systems that the fundie xians/GOP live in.
In the real world, 330,000 US antivaxxers caught the Covid-19 virus and died from it.
The Covid-19 virus vaccines saved the lives of 3.2 million Americans.
If you look closer at the antivaxxers that died from a preventable viral disease, they usually had other medical problems.
Commonly, COPD, diabetes usually type 2, kidney disease, heart problems, organ transplant recipients, autoimmune diseases, old age, and so on.
The type of person in poor health with major risk factors that should have taken every precaution possible to not get the Covid-19 virus and end up dead.
Wait…luciferase is a real thing? Did they name it that on purpose?
The Great Reset was basically a bunch of PR about using the COVID pandemic as an excuse to do capitalism “better.” But some actual critics of the ideas presented, as opposed to the “Wah, they’re gonna force us to eat bugs!” crowd, noted that it sounded like a lot of the same old, same old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset
Clay Clark is something Superman once made to fool Jimmy Olsen.
“Two of his ex-wives had committed suicide”. BIG red flag.
.
“Anti-Davos”
So, a depression beneath sea level, or maybe the antipode (which would be in the Southern Pacific).
I see Breuer has caught the zombie virus. But the guy standing next to him has had more time to decompose.
Fortunately I’ve never heard of any of these nutjobs. I’m afraid to look them up. I’ll need a complete brain wash afterwards.
Breuer looks like he’s mimicking the attendees at one of these farces. Couldn’t be zombies a la Walking Dead because they never had brains to begin with.
I remember Immanuel now, PZ has written about her.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/07/28/quacks-are-thriving-nowadays/
Luciferase is the enzyme used by, for instance, fireflies, to produce bioluminescence. It oxidizes a substrate called luciferin, naturally, to produce light with nearly 90% efficiency. So…it’s a light-bringer, and yeah, it was named that intentionally.
It’s useful stuff. Make a transgenic organism with the gene coupled to a particular promoter, and you can see the organism glow when that particular promoter is active. We had a guy here at UMM (he has since retired) who plugged the luciferase gene into a construct that coupled it to circadian rhythm genes, so you could see daily oscillations in gene activity.
As opposed to naming it by mistake? Doesn’t “Lucifer” mean “light-bearer” in Latin? I’m not sure what the enzyme does though.
Oh, thanks for the explanation, PZ. Right on time!
Maybe lucifer could use luciferase to shed some light on this deathly dark world they want to create.
Covid is surging again and these loons will kill more people with their quackery.
PZ they are pushing an entire circus of destructive ignorant clowns at you.
The Bulwark warns us: they may be clowns, but, they’re clowns with flamethrowers.
@7 raven pointed out: So, the Covid-19 virus doesn’t exist but is treatable with Ivermectin.
I reply: Good catch. Logic eludes them. Yes, they are throwing crap at the wall. Just like demented children, it’s all just to get attention, that’s all these imbeciles know how to do.
I just found the name amusing. It’s no wonder a religious nut latched onto it
Had me going there for a minute. Cayle Clark is the central character of A.E. van Vogt’s science fiction classic The Weapon Shops of Isher
PZ Myers @ # 15: Make a transgenic organism with the gene coupled to a particular promoter, and you can see the organism glow when that particular promoter is active.
Back in the ’80s, I read about a plan to splice luciferase into tobacco (with other major crops to come next), set up so that the plants would glow under heat/drought stress. Then, decades without any follow-up – so I figured that either (a) it didn’t work; (b) growers realized the public would freak out; or (c) somebody figured out that soil testing would give better and cheaper results.
It does seem a better lab tool than a mass agronomy strategy.
raven@#7, shermanj@#19:
As a number of others have pointed out in the past, when you get right down to it, the common conspiracy theory is driven by ‘the official story is wrong’. The conspiracy theory itself doesn’t have to be consistent. (And I believe there was a survey which showed that people who believed that Princess Diana had been assassinated by the British Royal Family were actually more likely to also believe that Diana had arranged the accident to fake her own death and was still living somewhere with her boyfriend.) The point is all about ‘you people may be taken in by what the official story says, but I’m special and I’m smart and I know the Truth with a capital T’. The official story is wrong, and anything and everything no matter how inconsistent can and will be used to push that idea.
For all the insistence on knowing the ‘truth’, this is a viewpoint that doesn’t really accept anything as being ‘right’, only that everybody else is ‘wrong’.
From Encyclopedia of American Loons. http://americanloons.blogspot.com/
The green corpse standing next to Breuer looks a lot like Rupert Murdoch.
Breuer and Chappelle were half-baked.
@11- birgerjohansson
Davos is a synecdoche for something allegedly nefarious or sinister. Bunch of neoliberal rich folks converging upon global issues. What could be so wrong with that? Sure leftists view the World Economic Forum with some level of concern.
I assume the name is in reference to “The Great Awakening” that occurred in the 1800s. I will remind everyone that in Central and Western NY state, it was particularly strong, and the region became known as “The Burned Over District” due to all of the fire and brimstone being cast about. As I live in the middle of it, I will add that the region still suffers from the legacy of this lunacy. (Some of which was shared/exported to other parts of the country, most notably Mormonism which has its roots in Palmyra, just outside of Rochester.) In all fairness, the area also had a strong abolitionist movement and support for women’s suffrage (although you’d be hard pressed to see the same spirit today in that same countryside).
I watch quite a few comedians. I never heard of Bauer so I looked him up and watched maybe 1 minute of a video of his standup shtick. He started off making a rude noise, and then got rude with two women in the audience. Importantly, he seemed drunk. In fact, the clip was titled “Drunks”. Maybe he was making fun drunks by acting drunk…or may be he was drunk. Now drunk comedians is nothing new, and sober comedians doing drunks is nothing new but drunk comedians going to a Bible thumping session at Clay Clark’s Lions Den in Tulsa, Oklahoma? I wouldn’t think those two things would mix well at all. I know all about the preacher’s secret booze stash (see below), but I can’t imagine they would tolerate any one in the pulpit seeming to be drunk.
Note: My mother once worked for the head of the Florida Southern Baptist Convention who confessed to her once that he sometimes liked to have a little nip. I’ve known some other preachers who admitted to having a “taste” now and again.
@28 jimf
I think it has taken on a new meaning as in “awake” not “woke”.
@7:Raven, et al
This is standard operating procedure for conspiracy theorists. Research into conspiracy theorists has long established that they routinely believe multiple conspiracy theories that contradict each other. It’s a natural state of being for them, because as others have alluded to, the variety gives them even more excuses for denying reality and absolves them from having to do anything about it.
That’s another contradiction common with conspiracy theorists. They complain endlessly about the terrible things the government is doing to them — if only the public knew…. — but they do it in a way that makes the antagonists so powerful — the WEF, NWO, elites, shape-shifting reptilian aliens, etc. — there is absolutely nothing that can be done to stop them anyway…
“Who is Clay Clarke?”
A virus symbiont.
I admit I thought Breuer was cool before now, cuz he tells crazy stories and likes Metallica. Now I discover on Wikipedia he’s a conspiracy theorist after all. Dammit, Jim. Why can’t everybody act like human beings
I marvel at the number of wingnuts that have simultaneously claimed that masks cannot block the virus because it’s too small, yet prevent O2 from entering and CO2 from exiting.
Did the end days of the Roman Empire see tours like this?
People with a scientific epistemology use contradictions to identify that there is an error in the claims presented. Its a key tool in falsifying.
Conspiracy theorists do not have that strategy and, in the ones I know personally, look confused when you try to suggest it to them. The leaders may be cynical but the rank and file really seem to have a problem.
@4 Should we be checking his followers tongues?
@31- tacitus
The smorgasbord of contradictory ideas can turn into a tedious and tiring Gish Gallop. Whack a mole is an apt metaphor. For the couple minutes each point takes in making there’s hours rebutting it. Who has that stamina?
There’s kernels of truth or concern behind the conspiracy mindset thought. I mean Davos seems kinda off IMO. The Bohemian Grove is just plain cray cray. I can actually wrap my head around Trilats and their Bilderberg predecessors having access to actual scholarly treatments of both. They are technocratic elitists. Maybe don’t have anywhere near the pull they are credited with. Hard to get any agenda through the stuck gears of DC though the so called Washington Consensus leftists often call out seems to have wreaked havoc upon the Global South (a different Us/Them polarity). Why does the US laugh off debt yet other nations are over a neoliberal barrel. Frolicking in the California Redwoods every summer?
Oh and MKUltra seemed pretty fucked up as did the Phoenix Program. The Tuskegee and Guatemala experiments with STIs on “lesser than” people were pretty fucked up. There have been terrible things the government has done in the past. Not enough to make me a priori antigovernment but provides plenty of fodder for budding conspiracy theorists.
I got captured for a while in the early 90s. I felt unique and more knowledgable than the hoi polloi. Quite alluring that. I am now instead quite familiar with the bogeys Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Soros. I enjoy reading their books critically though think they are brilliant and wise. Maybe my early conspiracy mindset around 30 years ago inoculated me to the BS rampant now.
@33- crocswsocks
I kinda recall Goat Boy on SNL. Breuer was rough around the edges but have no idea what’s up with him now. It’s like with Chappelle. His Comedy Central show had some good aspects like featuring up and coming rappers from that time. The episode Wayne Brady took over will always be classic IMO. Breuer and Chappelle did a drug comedy movie together back in the day. But cringy stuff later happened. I’m at a loss.
nomdeplume @ #35 — “Did the end days of the Roman Empire see tours like this?” Don’t know about tours but it saw the emergence of a new con game that has proven to be amazingly successful. It’s still conning the masses every day.
Since this will probably be the only time PZ talks about Clay Clark…
He missed the opportunity to post that one thumbnail where Clay Clark is steepling his fingers and looking like a ridiculous parody of a card-carrying villain. Look it up, it’s one of the first few image search results.
@38 – hemidactylus
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the rich and powerful didn’t have an oversized and self-interested role in driving world events. They certainly do, to the detriment of all in the end. But the conspiracy theorists take it to the next level, believing there’s a plan behind it all that the world elites have been executing with precision for over a century and soon to culminate in the depopulation of the planet, leaving a remnant behind in servitude to their elite masters who will live forever after revealing their secret life-extension technology (or something like that).
If true, the situation is completely hopeless, and there is nothing anyone can do about it because the people are defeated at every turn. Even if a part of the secret plan is revealed, the conspiracy theorists quickly conclude it must be by design, to demoralize, or to deflect, or deter. Hence they are simultaneously raising the alarm that something terrible is happen and abdicating all responsibility for doing anything to stop it. It’s the perfect conspiracy theory scenario that allows them compartmentalize the crazy and simply get on with their lives like any normal person.
I used to wonder how people with such crazy beliefs could function in the real world, but this is how. It’s only when someone like Trump comes along and deliberately blurs the lines between conspiracy and reality for his own ends that things start getting dangerous.
tacitus, thing have been thus since time immemorial.
There’s always a subset of the population that engages in such beliefs, whether they are normative in their milieu or not.
The specific beliefs and outcomes (call it the eschatology) varies over time and culture, but the phenomenon remains. Because people are people.
If the plunge into fascism wasn’t so terrifying it would be funny that evangelicals are starting to find Jesus too “woke” and soft and liberal.
From the list of speakers at these rallies wikipage :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReAwaken_America_Tour#List_of_speakers
As well as many familar name slike Alex Jones, No-longer Dr Wakefield, the MyPillow Boss nutter, ERic Trump and others include the less well known lara Logan who was too extreme for Faux
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Logan
& even dropped by NewsMax
Source : https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/oct/21/newsmax-lara-logan-qanon-conspiracy-theory
Plus seems its sponered /organised by Charisma News which has posted articles justiofying and calling for Islamophobia and said Pete Buttigieg deserves death for being gay.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charisma_(magazine)#Controversy
Obi-wan / Ben Kenobi’s “you will never find a more wretched hive of scum of villainy”</i<> line seems apt here
@41. beholder :
This one? :
https://www.executivespeakers.com/speaker/clay-clark
Or this one? : https://www.thelancasterpatriot.com/clay-clark-on-the-reawaken-america-tour-and-the-great-reset/
Or this one : https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Business-Playbook-Proven-Success/dp/0998443522
On a bookcover doing a full on Joker impression by the looks of it?
Gijoel @ 37
Yes, that is a good start but I think this might be more like the lady in Australia that had a living roundworm in her brain (she is recovering, BTW).
Carl Sagan’s “bullshit detection kit” has never been more needed. But these people will not have heard of him.
Clay Clark:
(steepling his fingers) “E-eexcellent” .
@2. feralboy12 :
He ran for Tulsa Mayor in 2009. See :
http://www.newson6.com/story/5e3672a62f69d76f62083553/clay-clark-running-for-tulsa-mayor
Published Thurs May 28th 2009
With wikipedia having the results of the 2009 Nov 10th Mayoral election here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Tulsa_mayoral_election
where Clay Clark’s name does NOT appear at all – not Repug or Democrat or Independent so I presume he dropped out extremely early or was disqualified from the ballot or something with this not even being recorded as a footnote..
After more google searching & running into paywalls which should be bloody well illegal in my view – yeah he dropped out early :
Source : https://www.newson6.com/story/5e3671fd2f69d76f620827c2/clark-throws-his-support-behind-chris-medlock
That was published on Saturday, July 11th 2009
So, yeah, a drop out early fail with the guy he dropped out for finishing 2nd out of the Repugs. Nothing to boast about there.
As for his companies :
Source : https://eitrlounge.com/meet-clay-clark/ (Oddly apparently not the parody site I expected after reading that..)
PS. Can’t read the Rolling Stones article on this klown due to paywall annoyingly.
Reginald Selkirk@21,
I recall being puzzled on reading one of A.E. van Vogt’s “Weapons Shops” stories as an adolescent. Later realised it was simple pro-gun propaganda as exemplified in the slogan repeated at your link: “The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free”. Van Vogt was also stupid enough to be an early proponent of L. Ron Hubbard’s proto-Scientology scam, “Dianetics”, although he couldn’t swallow the even greater idiocy of Scientology and went back to writing crap fascistic science fiction.
Very well put! Covid conspiracism, 9-11 “truth”, UFO-coverup claims, Jesus mythicism, all exemplify this. Climate denialism perhaps less so, because there’s a much more powerful and coherent interest group behind it, and all the variants share the same aim – protecting the profits of that group.
There’s a further contradiction there: if “THEY” are so powerful, malignant, and scared of the “TRUTH” coming out, how is it that the conspiracist is allowed to “expose” the TRUTH in this way?
Well, one of them is called the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204 and was given a religious justification by the schism between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.. The Roman Empire did recapture it some decades later, and lasted until 1453, but it was never the same. (If you meant the fall of the Western Empire in the 5th century CE, not AFAIK, but that event was dewfinitely not the end of the Empire.)
robro@40,
As I noted @52, the Roman Empire didn’t end until 1453 – the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks (and a fragment or two lasted a few decades longer IIRC). So it lasted over a millennium after Christianity became the official religion. Identifying the 5th-century fall of the Western Empire as the end of the Roman Empire is a massive error of historical-geographical perspective, resulting from the fact that the historical tradition most of us are familar with was developed almost entirely within the bounds of the Western Empire (although Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire does take the story up to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks). By the 5th century, the economic, miltary and political centre of the Empire was in the East, and the Roman Empire (it never called itself Byzantine, nor did its contemporaries) remained far more important than any western state at least up to the 11th century.
Aha! That’s what THEY want you to think!!! Some “people” are actually transdimensional shape-shifting lizards!