Trump's New Covid Expert

Just like my post the other day about Christians protesting dishwasher detergent, the whole religious conservative universe seems determined to degenerate into self-parody. Stella Immanuel is apparently a new "coronavirus expert" supported by Tea Party conservatives and the Trump administration.

Also a relevant point: if these really are the sorts of experts Trump is listening to, the executive branch response to COVID-19 is likely doomed. At the very least it's going to involve somebody stepping up and making a point of ignoring these yahoos. I have to say, this development makes me even happier that Minnesota's governor is a former science teacher who has been handling the pandemic reasonably well.

And look, I know full well that I'm a political lefty and don't like Trump, so I'm biased. But I dare anybody of whatever political persuasion to read this and still stand by Immanuel's claims.

I'm going to quote pretty liberally - no pun intended - from the original article, because, well... it's a whole lot of crazy to unpack. And understand that even with that, I'm going to gloss over some of it.

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

Immanuel gave her viral speech on the steps of the Supreme Court at the “White Coat Summit,” a gathering of a handful of doctors who call themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and dispute the medical consensus on the novel coronavirus. The event was organized by the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots, which is backed by wealthy Republican donors.

In her speech, Immanuel alleges that she has successfully treated hundreds of patients with hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment Trump has promoted and says he has taken himself. Studies have failed to find proof that the drug has any benefit in treating COVID-19, and the Food and Drug Administration in June revoked its emergency authorization to use it to treat the deadly virus, saying it hadn’t demonstrated any effect on patients’ mortality prospects.

“Nobody needs to get sick,” Immanuel said. “This virus has a cure.” Immanuel said in her speech that the supposed potency of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment means that protective face masks aren’t necessary, claiming that she and her staff had avoided contracting COVID-19 despite wearing medical masks instead of the more secure N95 masks.

There was early evidence from one Chinese study that hydroxychloroquine appeared to be effective as a COVID-19 treatment when combined with azithromycin, a common antibiotic. But a number of groups tried to replicate the study and failed to do so. Because this is science, that means there's no proof that it works. And it is known to have some serious potential side effects, so it's not like taking it is risk-free.


For younger people COVID-19 is nowhere near as deadly as it is for older folks. It is possible that she's treated hundreds of people with hydroxychloroquine at her clinic and they all got better, but that could have happened whether or not the drug was doing anything - especially if, as a pediatrician, she was treating mostly younger patients and children.

Not understanding that, though, is some really sloppy thinking. You'd like to think someone with a medical license would understand science and wouldn't fall for anecdotes over data, but keep reading.

Toward the end of Immanuel’s speech, the event’s organizer and other participants can be seen trying to get her away from the microphone. But footage of the speech captured by Breitbart was a hit online, becoming a top video on Facebook and amassing roughly 13 million views—significantly more than “Plandemic,” another coronavirus disinformation video that became a viral hit online in May, when it amassed roughly 8 million Facebook views.

“Hydroxychloroquine” trended on Twitter, as Immanuel’s video was embraced by the Trumps, conservative student group Turning Point USA, and pro-Trump personalities like Diamond & Silk. But both Facebook and Twitter eventually deleted videos of Immanuel’s speech from their sites, citing rules against COVID-19 disinformation. The deletions set off yet another round of complaints by conservatives of bias at the social-media platforms.

Immanuel responded in her own way, declaring that Jesus Christ would destroy Facebook’s servers if her videos weren’t restored to the platform. “Hello Facebook put back my profile page and videos up or your computers with start crashing till you do,” she tweeted. “You are not bigger that God. I promise you. If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus name.”

Facebook's servers aren't down. Where is your God now? Seriously, though, this is a prediction and it hasn't come to pass. According to the scripture Immanuel supposedly follows, if a religious leader makes a prediction that doesn't come true, they are a false prophet and no one should follow them. But I doubt her flock will get the message.

In sermons posted on YouTube and articles on her website, Immanuel claims that medical issues like endometriosis, cysts, infertility, and impotence are caused by sex with “spirit husbands” and “spirit wives”—a phenomenon Immanuel describes essentially as witches and demons having sex with people in a dreamworld.

“They are responsible for serious gynecological problems,” Immanuel said. “We call them all kinds of names—endometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband,” Immanuel said of the medical issues in a 2013 sermon. “They are responsible for miscarriages, impotence—men that can’t get it up.”

I'm going to answer this one as an honest-to-goodness wizard. Most of the time, "the dreamworld" isn't actually a world. It's your brain reshuffling and reorganizing memories, which get combined in novel ways when you recall the process. It is possible to engage your psychic senses while dreaming and experience something from outside your sphere of sensation, but it's not that common for anybody with an average level of psychic talent who hasn't worked at developing those abilities.

It also is possible to use a technique like spirit vision or astral projection to "have sex" with spirits, though since they're spirits the experience is pretty different than having sex with a person. It also is true that most sexual dreams don't have any sort of spiritual component, and nobody I know of who claims to have engaged in spirit sex has ever reported any medical issues associated with it.

In her sermon, Immanuel offers a sort of demonology of “nephilim,” the biblical characters she claims exist as demonic spirits and lust after dream sex with humans, causing all matter of real health problems and financial ruin. Immanuel claims real-life ailments such as fibroid tumors and cysts stem from the demonic sperm after demon dream sex, an activity she claims affects “many women.”

“They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm,” Immanuel said in her sermon. “Then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves.”

And this is just wrong from a scriptural standpoint. The nephilim in Genesis were the offspring of humans and angels, and were the ancient "men of reknown," clearly flesh-and-blood creatures. What Immanuel is talking about are incubi and succubi, which come from Roman Catholic mythology made up by celibate priests and theologians in the Middle Ages. They are a class of demons, NOT nephilim.

As I wrote in my article published in the Holy Guardian Angel anthology, I'm convinced that the reality of the nephilim myth is more like the "mystic marriage" of the human magician and the Holy Guardian Angel that "gives birth" to an Adept. So this story is really about people with the ability to use magick and the prejudice against us from time immemorial.

According to Immanuel, people can tell if they have taken a demonic spirit husband or spirit wife if they have a sex dream about someone they know or a celebrity, wake up aroused, stop getting along with their real-world spouse, lose money, or generally experience any hardship.

Alternately, they could just be having dream-sex with a human witch instead of a demon, she posits. “There are those that are called astral sex,” Immanuel said in the sermon. “That means this person is not really a demon being or a nephilim. It’s just a human being that’s a witch, and they astral project and sleep with people.”

Or it could be just a dream, a relationship issue, financial trouble, or bad luck. All of those things are much more common than attracting "spirit spouses" unwittingly. And again, speaking as an honest-to-goodness wizard, there are magical practices that can be used to unite with a spirit spouse or lover. But it's very hard to do by accident - unlike all those other possibilities.

Immanuel’s bizarre medical ideas don’t stop with demon sex in dreams. In a 2015 sermon that laid out a supposed Illuminati plan hatched by “a witch” to destroy the world using abortion, gay marriage, and children’s toys, among other things, Immanuel claimed that DNA from space aliens is currently being used in medicine. “They’re using all kinds of DNA, even alien DNA, to treat people,” Immanuel said.

Immanuel’s website offers a prayer to remove a generational curse originally received from an ancestor but transmitted, in Immanuel’s telling, through placenta. Immanuel claimed in another 2015 sermon posted that scientists had plans to install microchips in people, and develop a “vaccine” to make it impossible to become religious. “They found the gene in somebody’s mind that makes you religious, so they can vaccinate against it,” Immanuel said.

There's no real "Illuminati" any more, so there's no "Illuminati plot," unless she's talking about something being hatched by The Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Nigeria, which you can join by sending all of your banking information to a random phone number with the +234 country code. I have to say, though, I've heard of no plots from those folks besides scamming us out of all our money. We also have never come across actual alien DNA.

Generational curses can be real, but they are transmitted down the ancestral line and aren't related to placentas in any meaningful way. There are no plans to microchip people, and those supposed "nanochips" don't even exist. Finally, I'm aware of the study that I think she's referencing, which identified two human phenotypes. One tended towards religious and spiritual experiences, and the other tended to not have those experiences.

But it's not a gene, it's a phenotype. The authors of the study hypothesized that there might be a genetic component, but for something so complex it likely is related to hundreds of genes at the very least. Oh, and you can't vaccinate for a gene. If you could, we would have cures for all sorts of genetic diseases that are caused by single mutations already, like sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis just to name two.

Immanuel elaborated on her fascination with witchcraft in her 2015 Illuminati sermon, claiming that witches were intent on seizing control of children.

In her 2015 sermon on the Illuminati’s supposed agenda to bring down the United States, Immanuel argues that a wide variety of toys, books, and TV shows, from Pokémon—which she declares “Eastern demons”—to Harry Potter and the Disney Channel shows Wizards of Waverly Place and That’s So Raven were all part of a scheme to introduce children to spirits and witches. Immanuel warned that the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana was a gateway to evil, because its character had an “alter ego.” She has claimed that schools teach children to meditate so they can “meet with demons.”

Let's see - so she thinks all fantasy that involves magick or spirits is evil. Having an alias is evil. I suppose her followers are prohibited from changing their names? And meditation has absolutely nothing to do with "meeting with demons." In fact, demon evocation is an entirely separate magical discipline.

Now this is the bit I absolutely love:

In the sermon, Immanuel preserved special vitriol for the Magic 8-Ball, a toy that can be shaken up to “reveal” any answer. Immanuel claims the otherwise innocuous Magic 8-Ball was in fact a scheme to get children used to witchcraft. “The 8-Ball was a psychic,” she said.

Really? The Magic 8-Ball??? There's no way that a hunk of plastic is "a psychic." I can't even bind a spirit into one that would make it work that way, and that's with decades of magical practice.

I suppose it's also no surprise that she's a fan of David Icke's oddball reptilian hypothesis that seems to be made up of elements from the V miniseries broadcast in the 1980s.

Immanuel’s oddball claims about the world extend to politics. She didn’t bring up this allegation publicly in Washington, but she has claimed that the American government is run in part by non-human reptilians.

“There are people that are ruling this nation that are not even human,” Immanuel said in her 2015 Illuminati sermon, before launching into a conversation she had with a “reptilian spirit” she described as “half-human, half-ET.”

The article goes on about how she's homophobic and transphobic, and supports corporal punishment for children, but compared to all of the above that's not unexpected or even interesting. Pretty much all religious conservatives are like that, since as far as I can tell for them the only sins worth mentioning revolve around sex, gender, and reproduction - and they have no problem with hitting kids.

So no sexy dreams. No gays. No trans people. No abortion rights. But no Magic 8-Balls is a new one. I'll have to make a note of that for posterity!

Finally, there's this:

Immanuel has seized on her newfound celebrity, tweeting a video demanding that CNN hosts and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci give her jars of their urine so she can test if they’re secretly taking hydroxychloroquine even as they caution against its use. “I double dog dare y’all give me a urine sample,” Immanuel tweeted in her challenge.

Because, seriously, there's no better way to wrap up an article like this than "give me your pee." This is the Trump administration we're talking about, after all.