This is the first of a new regular column.—Eds.
Rudy Giuliani is full of bull. Whether he is promoting bogus cures for COVID-19 or spreading the Big Lie about election fraud, the disgraced former mayor seems to delight in “throwing a fake”—his preferred phrase for dishonesty in the political arena.
Giuliani seems to think that all’s fair when it comes to exploiting people’s fears and gullibility, even when our democracy is at stake and the public’s health is at risk. This makes Giuliani a full-of-bull stand-out even during a year when lies, conspiracies, and quackery were coming so fast and so thick from so many quarters that it gave those of us in the reality-based world whiplash.
But don’t just take my word for it. Ask the thousands of people who responded to the Center for Inquiry’s first Full of Bull award competition. Giuliani was the frontrunner out of the gate and ended up with a whopping 41.7 percent of the vote. He easily out-bulled his closest competitor, InfoWars founder and master of wrong Alex Jones, who received 28.7 percent of the vote.
Coming up behind Giuliani and Jones in the misinformation Olympics were Christian Right princeling Jerry Falwell Jr.; anti-vaxxer extraordinaire Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Goop crapola seller Gwyneth Paltrow; and talker to the dead for coin Thomas John.
It was quite a contest. And in my mind, each one was a winner in his or her own way.
Why did the Center for Inquiry (CFI) do this? Well, to be honest, it was a marketing effort. While CFI and its subparts—including the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry—do a massive amount of good, people don’t know who we are. To grow, we need more people aboard the skepticism train under our banner. And by holding a spotlight up to some of the worst agents of lies, deception, conspiracies, and misinformation, we hoped to generate some buzzy interest in our work.
It worked well enough that we plan to hold the Full of Bull contest annually, each year with a rogue’s gallery of nominees for the public to choose from. Just having these nominees next to one another was a way to connect the dots for CFI. What do Jerry Falwell Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow have in common? Certainly not their politics. Nothing apparent, frankly—unless you live in CFI’s world. That’s where the similarities are glaringly obvious. They both pander dangerous nonsense that gives people false hope and lures them into parting with their hard-earned money.
Before being pressured to resign as president of Liberty University due to sex scandals, Jerry Falwell Jr. offered students an expensive education in such valuable disciplines as creation science taught by a young-earth creationist professor at its Center for Creation Studies.
All I can say is it’s a good thing it doesn’t have a medical school. Imagine the required coursework: Antibiotics or Thoughts and Prayers 101. And my personal favorite: Medical Apologetics 201: Why God hates amputees? Biblical reasons HE never regenerates a limb.
Actually, I take it back, Liberty University does have a medical school of sorts: It has its own College of Osteopathic Medicine that graduated its first class in 2018. “Would you like some snake handling to go with the snake oil I’m prescribing?”
No better is Gwyneth Paltrow and the lifestyle branded absurdities she hoists on womenkind through her New Agey wellness house of Goop. There have been vaginal steams that gynecologists say could cause burns and pricey and worthless “healing” stickers (which I guess are for those burns). And, of course, those famous $66 Jade eggs. Helpfully, the Goop website tells customers to: “Clean your egg after use and before using again. Keep it in or on a space that is sacred to you or has good vibes.” What people really want to know is if it’s dishwasher safe.
The point for CFI is that Paltrow and Falwell Jr. have quite a bit in common. And they share that commonality with all the hucksters of delusion who are our Full of Bull nominees.
The nominees represent the range of nonsense that CFI combats every day: from people who claim to commune with the dead, to propagators of anti-vax hysteria, to those who feed a willing public the conspiracy du jour.
That is the message the Full of Bull campaign is trying to get across. It is all of a piece. They are all high-profile people who float information that is evidence-free, antiscience, irrational in the extreme, and demonstrably harmful. And they not only get away with it but frequently get rich in the process.
Having the public vote each year on who should be named the most Full of Bull is a way to introduce and instill the idea that a con can take many forms and can come from across the political spectrum. But at its core, each con has the same goal: to convince you of something false to serve an ulterior and usually nefarious or exploitative motive.
Rudy Giuliani calls it “throwing a fake.” We call it Full of Bull. And our job is to convince everyone else to simply call it wrong.