Recently the excellent Facebook page “Bring Evidence” shared a story from Ohio about Trumper, anti-vax grifter, and Darwinian one-way cul-de-sac Sherri Tenpenny, who recently had her medical license suspended for refusing to cooperate with an ethics investigation regarding various fraudulent assertions made from behind her professional status.
Those claims include that the covid vaccine makes you “magnetic,” that it “interfaces with 5G,” and that major metropolitan areas are “liquefying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.”
This isn’t a questioning skeptic who didn’t pay enough attention in biology class. She knows she’s lying. Her refusal to cooperate with the investigation proves that.
What struck me in reading this story is Tenpenny’s reaction to being called out on her deadly disinformation for profit behavior.
“After Tenpenny made the comments that sparked her regulatory problems, she showed no signs of regret. Despite lampooning media coverage, Tenpenny emailed Gross to thank her for being “strong and brave” in allowing her to testify, according to The Ohio Capital Journal. Tenpenny doubled down on her theories.
“Don’t let them bully you or disparage me,” she wrote. “We’re on to something here… and the LOUDER they scream, the more they are trying to hide. I stand by everything I said today. I put out FACTS and HYPOTHESIS [sic -jh] (points to ponder),” she wrote. “God Wins.””
– Cleveland.Com article linked inline above
This person knows they’re doing something bad and wrong, and intends to continue doing it by conning and manipulating other people into helping her do it.
This is what a world of Trump supporters would look like, everywhere. These are people who understand that stupidity is more socially acceptable than evil, so they perpetrate evil under the pretense of stupidity.
And they get away with it.
You don’t get to “magnetic vaccines” while holding ANY degree, without being in on the con on some level. If nothing else, you definitely didn’t earn your degree because you’re not smart enough to pass the classes.
This is one of the reasons we have to stop explaining the basics to people over and over. Some people go through their whole lives being respected, secure, and evil simply by pretending they don’t understand that they’re wrong.
This is someone who is playing a whole stack of silly games so she can feel like she’s superior to, better than, and a winner. It looks like her whole life is based on this behavior.
It’s the same behavior as any other autocratic, power-mongering, demagogue. Say and do the most egregious and outrageous things you can, and someone will believe it and pay you. All you have to do is pretend you really do believe it, and you’re a hero. Don’t break kayfabe(*) and the show will sell every time.
(*) “kayfabe” is a word used in the professional wrestling business to refer to the artistic subterfuge maintaining the “reality” of in-ring/on-screen storytelling. To admit that match outcomes are predetermined or that two “enemies” may not actually hate each other is called “breaking kayfabe.” Think of it as a bit like letting it slip that Santa’s not real. These days the pretense pro wrestling is an athletic competition as described has almost entirely disappeared from the business, but that’s a thing that’s happened within my lifetime. Forty years ago, most people still believed that it was “real” to some degree. The substance of that belief and all the pretenses needed to maintain it in the public eye are part of “kayfabe.” Dr. D. David Schultz slapping the snot out of John Stossel back in the 80’s was part of maintaining “kayfabe” – Stossel asked “the big question” (“is it fake?”) and Schultz could not, in character, let that slide…and back then you were always in character, or you’d soon be an ex-pro-wrestler.
It’s not that these people don’t understand the ethics, they just don’t care. They divert attention away from it with emotionally provocative agitprop to avoid probing questions.
“Bullying” and “disparagement” aren’t the tools of facts and reason, they just feel that way to emotionally and intellectually stunted narcissists lying through their teeth to rip people off while bullying and disparaging all critics into silence, when they’re finally caught. It is a common tactic of narcissists to accuse those they’re hurting of being the true aggressors.
It’s hard enough to get lay people to understand specialized information like medicine and law; it’s much harder when they’ve been given every good reason to distrust the entire field because they’ve been lied to so many times by “experts” like this. That the self-policing mechanisms of so many key professions like law and medicine are so clearly broken adds immeasurably to the problem; it’s outrageous this woman was ever allowed IN a hospital, let alone allowed to run anything. Someone’s responsible for that, too.
We need to start standing up and saying no to these people.
No you may not hide behind your profession (or “free speech!”) to hurt people for profit.
No you may not perpetrate a fraud on the country because you wanna be president.
No you may not spend hours rambling at the family holiday table about whatever random group of people you blame everything on because nobody’s got the heart to tell you to shut up.
Shut up. You’re wrong, you’re a jerk, and you need to sit down and shut up until you learn how to act among reasonable people.
Sherri Tenpenny’s words killed people, and she knew she was doing it, and she did it for profit. That merits more than a mere license suspension in my book. She should be imprisoned for the rest of her life and her entire personal holdings should be turned over to the state for distribution to or benefit of the many victims of her snake-oil game, and the same goes for the Sidney Powells and Rudy Giulianis and Andrew Wakefields of the world. Put ’em on the dole and don’t ever let them near a platform again without a giant standard disclaimer.
Then let’s talk about whoever let her get away with this for the last couple of decades.
