Ten Most Wanted Celebrities Who Promote Harmful Pseudoscience

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#10 - Montel Williams

He's all the way down at the bottom of the list because his daytime talk
show is no longer on the air and he doesn't have much influence anymore,
but when he did, he was best known for promoting psychics as the best
way to solve almost any crisis. You can quarrel with psychic predators like
Sylvia Browne, but her career was created by Montel Williams. Montel's
worst offense was to use psychics to provide made-up information to the
parents of missing children, which he did on many occasions, not just the
one or two high profile cases that made headlines. Without exception, this
information has always been either uselessly general or flat-out wrong. All
the while, Montel Williams unapologetically promoted psychic powers to his
millions of viewers. Read Dr. Hal Bidlack's Open Letter to Lt. Commander
Montel Williams from one military officer to another, in which he asks
"Have you lost your honor?"

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#9 - Chuck Norris

He deserves to be on the list anyway for making nothing but stupid
movies, but Chuck Norris' main offense is his frequent public appeals to
teach a Biblical "alternative" to science in public schools. In a series of
public service announcements (here and here), Chuck and his wife
advocate the mission of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public
Schools, a nonprofit organization with its own 300 page textbook
advocating Young Earth fundamentalism, The Bible in History and
Literature. Although Chuck and the Council state that it's legal and has
never been legally challenged, this is patently untrue, its having failed
every Constitutional challenge brought forth against it. Chuck, become a
Sunday School teacher in the church of your choice. You should not use
your celebrity status to wage war against religious freedom, or to further
erode the quality of science education in the United States.

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#8 - Joe Rogan

Comedian Joe Rogan does what he can to promote virtually any
conspiracy theory that he stumbles onto, apparently accepting them all
uncritically with a wholesale embrace. He believes the Apollo astronauts
did not land on the moon. He believes the U.S. government was behind
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He believes the Oliver Stone version of the
Kennedy assassination. He believes aliens crashed at Roswell in 1947
and the government is covering it up. He thinks Men in Black from Project
Blue Book stole his friend's camera, even though Project Blue Book ended
over 38 years ago. The worst part is that he promotes these ideas to the
public at every interview opportunity, but gives himself the intellectual
"Get out of jail free" card of not needing any evidence by hiding behind
the childish debate technique of saying "Hey, I'm just the guy asking
questions." Joe, if you're going to put so much effort into promoting
conspiracy theories and eroding what little rationality the public has left,
at least have the courage to come forward with a cogent argument and
well-sourced evidence, instead of the lameness of "I'm just the guy
asking questions." Take the responsibility.

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#7 - Ben Stein

There's nothing wrong with being a religious person, but actor Ben Stein
takes it many steps further, employing fallacious logic to claim that
everything bad in the world is caused by non-Christian ideas. His favorite is
that the study of science caused the Holocaust. He's now infamous for his
quote "the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to
do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that's
where science leads you." Ben's open hostility toward scientific literacy is
aptly described by Scientific American's John Rennie, who wrote: "Ben Stein
wants you to stop thinking of evolution as an actual science supported by
verifiable facts and logical arguments and to start thinking of it as a
dogmatic, atheistic ideology akin to Marxism." Science is, quite properly,
independent of politics and religion. A celebrity who argues that science
should be subservient to either, especially one who exploits the Holocaust
to do so, is an intellectual felon.

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#6 - Pamela Anderson

Although we here at Skeptoid endorse their annual "Running of the Nudes"
in Pamplona, Spain, we don't like anything else about PETA, People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals. Pamela Anderson lends her celebrity tothem
and serves as one of their primary spokespeople, as do many other
celebrities. Senator James Inhofe has criticized PETA for its support of
self-described domestic terrorist groups Earth Liberation Front and Animal
Liberation Front. Groups like PETA do far more harm than good to the
animal rights movement by exploiting the Holocaust for its advertising or
for complaining only about the death of a donkey in a Jerusalem bomb
attack that killed dozens of people. And Pamela, you might want to think
twice before donating money to PETA. The Better Business Bureau's Wise
Giving Alliance has noted that PETA fails to meet several Charity
Accountability standards, and a Senate committee has questioned its tax
exempt status for funding organizations later designated as terrorist.

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#5 - Larry King

Larry King's job as a professional interviewer is to bring on a huge
number of people from all backgrounds and let them speak their minds,
and this is a good thing. We hear from people doing good, people doing
bad, people we agree with, and people we disagree with. But Larry's
show is supposed to be better than all the other interview shows. Only
Larry gets to talk to heads of state, U.S. Presidents, the top movers and
shakers. He hits them hard, asks them the tough questions, puts them on
the spot. Unless — and that's a very big unless — they are on the show
to promote some pseudoscience or paranormal claim. Of these guests,
Larry asks no tough questions. He gives them an unchallenged platform
to promote their harmful claim. He gives their web addresses and shows
their books and DVDs. He acts as their top salesman for the hour. Larry
King gives every indication that CNN fully endorses celebrity psychics,
conspiracy theorists, ghost hunters, UFO advocates, and promoters of
non-scientific alternatives to healthcare.

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#4 - Bill Maher

While we love Bill Maher's movie Religulous and appreciate that his is one of
the very few public voices opposing the 9/11 conspiracy myths, we can't
deny that he has a darker side. Bill Maher is a board member of PETA — one
of the people actually approving their payments to people like convicted
arsonist Rod Coronado — but his ongoing act that's most harmful to the
world is his outspoken denial of evidence-based medicine. Yes, Bill is correct
that a good diet and exercise are good for you, but he seems to think that
doctors deny this. Not any doctor I've ever spoken to. Bill made it clear on a
four-minute speech on his show that he believes government and Big
Pharma conspire to keep everyone sick by prescribing drugs. If even a single
person takes Bill's claims to heart and avoids needed medical treatment as a
result, Bill Maher is guilty of a terrible moral crime. Considering the huge size
of his audience, this seems all too likely.

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#3 - Prince Charles

What's even worse than a comedian denying modern medicine is when the
future King of England does the same thing. This is the kind of medieval
superstition we expect from witch doctors like South Africa's former health
minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, not from the royal family of one of the
world's most advanced nations (well, it would be, except that royal families
are kind of a medieval thing too). Through The Prince's Foundation for
Integrated Health, Prince Charles attempts to legitimize and promote the
use of untested, unapproved, and implausible alternative therapies of all
sorts instead of using modern evidence-based medicine. He has a
"collaborative agreement" with Bravewell, the United States' largest
fundraising organization dedicated to the promotion of non-scientific
alternatives to healthcare. As perhaps the most influential man in the United
Kingdom, Prince Charles displays gross irresponsibility that directly results in
untreated disease and death.

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#2 - Jenny McCarthy

The most outspoken anti-vaccine advocate is, by definition, the person
responsible for the most disease and suffering in our future generation.
Jenny McCarthy's activism has been directly blamed for the current rise in
measles. She also blames vaccines for autism, against all the well
established evidence that shows autism is genetic, and she spreads this
misinformation tirelessly. She believes autism can be treated with a
special diet, and that her own son has been "healed" of his autism
through her efforts. Since one of the things we do know about autism is
that it's incurable, it seems likely that her son probably never even had
autism in the first place. So Jenny now promotes the claim that her son is
an "Indigo child" — a child with a blue aura who represents the next
stage in human evolution. If you take your family's medical advice from
Jenny McCarthy, this is the kind of foolishness you're in for. Instead, get
your medical advice from someone with a plausible likelihood of knowing
something about it, like say, oh, a doctor, and not a doctor who belongs
to the anti-vaccine Autism Research Institute or its Defeat Autism Now!
project. Go to StopJenny.com for more information.

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#1 - Oprah Winfrey

The only person who can sit at the top of this pyramid is the one widely
considered the most influential woman in the world and who promotes every
pseudoscience: Oprah Winfrey. To her estimated total audience of 100
million, many of whom uncritically accept every word the world's wealthiest
celebrity says, she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age
spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack celebrity diets, past life regression,
angels, ghosts, alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy,
anti-vaccination, detoxification, vitamin megadosing, and virtually everything
that will distract a human being from making useful progress and informed
decisions in life. Although much of what she promotes is not directly harmful,
she offers no distinction between the two, leaving the gullible public
increasingly and incrementally injured with virtually every episode.