Doctor, Heal Thyself

With all the lies and fearmongering she spreads WorldNetDaily columnist Dr. Gina Loudon appears to be in need of the psychiatric help she purports to dispense.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 7/2/2014

Dr. Gina Loudon

That's the situation Dr. Gina Loudon appears to be in. She holds a doctorate in psychiatry (among other things), but she seems like she could use a little psychiatric help herself.

The first sign of this is the bio page on her website, which includes a whopping 27 quotes from right-wingers who have said nice things about her. That suggests a certain deep-down insecurity that manifests itself in grandiose self-promotion.

The second sign of this is her WorldNetDaily column, where she routinely publishes exaggerations and outright falsehoods and engages in vitriolic attacks on her perceived political enemies.

An August 2013 column by Loudon is a long screed about how she wished that President Obama would have a miserable birthday -- "I guess your day will be rather dark, like a lot of children’s birthdays around the U.S. for your policies of demise and death" -- and is chock full of misleading, if not entirely false, claims. Like this:

You blew out the lights on all babies. Around 5.6 million American babies have been aborted since you took office and will never blow out the candles on their own birthday cakes. Mr. Obama, you know around half of those aborted are female, yet you keynoted the Planned Parenthood gala this year. You gladly accepted an award in the name of the known eugenicist, Margaret Sanger, whose entire goal in founding Planned Parenthood was to “eradicate the black race.” You see more than $1 million per day of taxpayer money going to pay for killing those baby girls, Mr. President. Your war on baby women has dimmed the cake by about another 2.8 million little female lights.

There's no definitive evidence that Sanger ever said her goal in founding Planned Parenthood was to "eradicate the black race." The only people who have used that quoted term are right-wing anti-Planned Parenthood activists.

What Loudon may be referring to is the "Negro Project," an effort by Sanger to bring family-planning clinics to the deep South. FactCheck.org reports that anti-abortion activists love to take a certain Sanger quote -- "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" -- out of context. According to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University, states FactCheck, “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”

Perhaps Obama might have had a better birthday if people like Loudon weren't using it as an excuse to spread malicious lies.

Dishonest and crazy about Obamacare

It's not often that one can pull off the feat of being both dishonest and crazy over the course of two articles, but Loudon was clearly up to the challenge in an Oct. 26 WND "news" article in which she fearmongered about the purported privacy concerns about Obamacare in general and the then-faulty healthcare.gov site in particular:

The controversy already has generated a back-and-forth in Congress, where a Colorado Democrat, Diana DeGette, criticized a Republican for having concerns about privacy.

U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, had charged that the source code for the Obamacare website includes the statement that Americans will have “no reasonable expectation of privacy about communication or data stored on the system.”

The code cannot be viewed by a user on Healthcare.gov, he reported, but it is in the code and violates the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

“You know it’s not HIPAA-compliant; admit it,” Barton charged Cheryl Campbell of CGI Federal, which was contracted to work on the site. “You’re under oath. Your company is the company that put this together. We’re telling every American ... that you sign up for this or even attempt to, you have no expectation of privacy. That is a direct contradiction of HIPAA and you know it.”

Loudon failed to mention DeGette's response, even though it appeared in the same International Business Times article she cited on the Barton-DeGette exchange:

DeGette said that as she understood it, the Obamacare website doesn’t need any medical information from users who enroll other than whether they smoke or not. She said that question would not violate HIPAA.

“I’m disappointed that my friend would go down this road,” she said, referring to Barton. She accused her colleague of using the perceived privacy issue as one of the reasons to do away with the Affordable Care Act.

“I realize that in fact a lot of people don’t want the Affordable Care Act to work and they're raising all these privacy specters,” she said.

DeGette's response would seem to be relevant to the issue, but Loudon was too busy fearmongering to believe otherwise.

The crazy part came in Loudon's Oct. 27 column in which she ratcheted up the fearmongering to ridiculous levels, claiming without evidence that Obamacare has caused people to commit suicide:

A 16-year-old goes to the doctor for her first gynecological exam. She wants to tell the doctor about concerns she has but she is afraid of it being disclosed and destroying her bright future. She read a story about doctors being paid tens of thousands of dollars to turn over their electronic medical records to the government, and she can’t trust that her secrets will be kept safe.

A 28-year-old divorcee stands alone in terror, in the corner of her room. She was denied a gun license because she disclosed feeling suicidal when her abusive husband beat her that last time. She has nowhere to go to be safe, and no way to keep her child safe from the man who threatened to kill them both. She doesn’t sleep, and she can’t function at work, so she is worried she will lose her job.

A 75-year-old widower sits quietly with a pistol pointed at his chest. He feels completely alone, betrayed by the country he fought for. His most private data was stolen when a laptop was taken from a cafeteria at the Department of Health and Human Services. Someone posted all of his information publicly, and now he fears his most private information will be made public. There are secrets of a man’s heart that he wants kept a secret. He regrets the day he went for counseling to gain control over a pornography addiction. How could this happen and threaten his legacy, after so many years of living responsibly? He cannot deal with that reality.

A young, gay man stands in front of a roulette table, his last hope to pay off the fines from the IRS since he disclosed his income to sign up for Obamacare, and was subsequently audited for a disparity in his tax forms. There are rumors of many gays being targeted by the current administration, though it doesn’t matter now and he can’t prove it anyway. He says a silent prayer as he lays down his last $250 in hopes that he can multiply it to stay out of jail.

[...]

Liberty has eroded to such a degree that some wonder if it can ever be restored. But personal liberty, the bright light that distinguishes us as the freest nation of all time, has been permanently dimmed.

This administration has withheld health care without ever revoking a medical device. It has taken guns and lives without overturning the Second Amendment. It has caused suicides and deaths with only the weapon of Obamacare. It has made criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens, while criminals go free. It has done all of this with the silent threat of what can happen under a system that gives more power to government than it has ever had before.

Who needs facts when fearmongering works so much better on the typical WND reader?

Gay derangement

Gina Loudon's Nov. 3 WorldNetDaily column is headlined "Let's wage war on D.C. hacks," but the only hackishness present comes from Loudon herself. She complained that "Democrats have found success in slandering conservatives as racist, women-hating homophobes." Then she wrote this:

I’ve written before about the extremes that Gov. Jerry Brown has gone to here in California. One example is the new law enabling school children to decide their gender on a whim. One day a boy can “feel like a woman” and enter the girl’s locker room. Then, the next day, when he “feels” like a boy again, he can go to go to football practice and use the boy’s locker room again. I have personally spoken to gay Californians who are very uneasy with the direction in which the Democrat supermajority and Gov. Brown have taken the state.

In the real world, the California law merely affirms already-existing protections for transgender students, and no incidents of misconduct have been reported in California.

Who's the real hack here? Loudon might want to look in the mirror for the answer.

Loudon resorts to legalistic parsing to justify her homophobia in her March 9 column:

Another disturbing contemporary lie is that most states ban gay marriage.

We hear the words, or hear that a judge “lifted a ban on gay marriage,” and we assume there are laws all across the land banning gay marriage.

This is far from the truth.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a gay couple in handcuffs hauled to the pokey for violating that “ban”?

The lie of a “gay marriage ban” has been told so often that it has become an axiomatic truth. The truth is very far from that lie.

Most states have laws banning polygamy, or marriage under a certain age, or even bans on people marrying animals. But few, if any states, make it a crime for two people of the same gender to engage in a ceremony in a church.

What proponents are calling “state bans on gay marriage” are actually various forms of refusal of states to convey state recognition to gay marriages.

If a state is not recognizing gay marriage, it typically goes hand in hand with prohibiting them. That is a ban, whether or not Loudon chooses to recognize it as such.

(Not) giving away the internet

Loudon ranted in a March 30 column:

President Obama is selling out American sovereignty at every turn. He did it with unilateral missile disarmament and his constant bent to fix our Constitution, which he believes is the problem. He does it with the constant reverence for international law, of himself, and all his judicial appointees. He did it when he canceled the space shuttle program and made America dependent on Russia for trip to the American ... err International Space Station. His most glaring violation of American sovereignty may be his agreement to simply give away American control of the Internet to the “global community.”

[...]

The travesty is that we Americans actually did build the Internet! (No, not you, Al! You only built the fraudulent green movement hysteria.) Even Bill Clinton said giving away control of the Internet was idiotic. We have the strongest tradition of free speech in the world. You can kiss that goodbye, Internet lovers!

In fact, the plan to transfer ICANN, the body that manages Internet names and addresses, to international control has been in the works since 1998, and it was always the plan that the U.S. would eventually relinquish control over ICANN.

But Loudon is in full frothing mode, and the facts just don't matter to her:

So now Obama is handing the global community the ability to control our speech, and our technological advances. The international body will have the ability to control us by controlling our speech, and we handed it to them. What are we getting in return?

This may be the most historic outrage in the history of this country, if not the world, and it happened while they entertained us with bread and circuses.

If the country doesn’t wake up and find a way to throw these colluders with terrorists – these traitors – out of office, it will be too late. It may be time for us to seriously consider our options, very seriously.

History will record the truth. The next entity to control the Internet, space and nuclear technology will not be so good as the Americans, who have controlled it since its birth. It cannot be, because no republic shares our bedrock foundations of free speech and individual liberty. America is founded on principles that are reverent, grace-filled and believe the best in people, and for people. What will the Internet look like when it is controlled by people who believe the state comes first?

If "history will record the truth," Loudon has demonstrated herself to be lacking.

Criticizing certain violent riots

Gina Loudon's April 13 column is headlined "Why the left loves a violent riot," and she's aiming at out-of-control campus celebrations, but she can't resist the urge to politicize it:

There is a political use for the mob mentality, and our founders understood that well. That is why they designed a representative republic instead of a democracy. Many in our country, including the president, continue to refer to our system of government as a democracy. It isn’t, and that matters. This is a substantive omission, and here’s why.

The difference between a republic and democracy is that a republic is far less susceptible to mob rule than a democracy. By design, democracy allows majority rule, even tyrannical rule, if it is supported by the majority.

[...]

Mob mentality plus lack of religion is the perfect recipe for tyranny.

When individualism is taken away, and replaced with groupthink, all people will become more susceptible to mob mentality. When groups are then rewarded more for being part of a group than for individual success (everyone gets a trophy mentality), that mindset deepens.

When God is taken out of schools, and now needs are met by government, the people begin to see the government as their supplier of needs. Therefore, the people are more willing to submit to the government’s requests, or even hypocrisies, because there is a sort of worship forming.

This is further consecrated when people no longer need family to help them when financial times are tough, because they have government for that. They no longer need neighbors to help them when they have needs, so they stay in their homes and wait for their government check to arrive. They no longer need local charities to help them when they are sick; they have government-controlled health-care programs for that. They no longer need church to help them in crisis, because government does. Once a society’s need for family, church, neighbors and charity are omitted, the government can move in for total control.

When religion is taken away, and moral relativity replaces religion, the mob can do anything without remorse.

By contrast, Loudon had nothing to say in her WND column about the situation that was brewing in Nevada around the same time as the above column appeared. A lawbreaker named Cliven Bundy had action taken against those holding him accountable for his lawbreaking, and not only did the website that publishes Loudon's column side with the lawbreaker, they cheered on the armed militia thugs that came to Nevada to escalate the situation and appeared all too willing to engage in a violent riot.

Perhaps Loudon should address her own psychiatric issues before passing judgment on others.