Bloomberg News has a profile up of Robert Mercer, a New York hedge fund bajillionaire who has given $11 million to a Ted Cruz super PAC and, overall, has reportedly spent more money on the 2016 election cycle than any other single donor. The article as a whole is an interesting look how the post–Citizens United campaign finance system contributes to ideological extremism and at Mercer’s background as a computer programmer. But I’d like to focus on a few particular passages about other candidates and activists to whom Mercer has given money. Such as Oregon congressional aspirant and urine scholar Arthur Robinson:
Robinson, now 73, was not your average candidate. In a lab on a sheep ranch in the Siskiyou Mountains, he’s spent the last couple of years collecting thousands of vials of human urine. Funded by private donors, he claims his work holds the key to extending the human life span and wresting control of medicine from what he calls the “medical-industrial-government complex.”
And this woman:
[Mercer] has attended and funded an annual conference organized by Jane Orient, an Arizona physician and activist who recently suggested in an opinion article that elements in the U.S. government might have taken part in the San Bernardino massacre.
Orient’s group, to which she describes Mercer as a “generous” donor, is called Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. At their meeting in August 2015, which Mercer attended, a man named Donald Miller discussed his belief that the “HIV/AIDS establishment” has suppressed evidence that HIV is “harmless” and does not cause AIDS. Another medical-conspiracy organization run by Orient (and affiliated with several Republican politicians including Rand Paul) backs the assertion that water fluoridation causes cancer; Orient’s San Bernardino column insinuates that traitorous elements within the U.S. government allowed the massacre to take place and, as an aside, suggests that Hillary Clinton may have been “running guns to ISIS from Benghazi.” A recent Doctors for Disaster Preparedness newsletter asserted that the government knows that civil war is imminent.
Again, this is a group whose president describes the biggest 2016 donor in America as a “generous” supporter. Yeesh.
