What Do A Killer Guru, A 1970s Homophobe, And A Gun Toting Conspiracy Theorist Have In Common?

They're dead and I really didn't want to have to write three separate obituaries.

Jan 10, 2025

You know, they say that celebrity deaths always come in threes. This is factually untrue and ridiculous, but they still say it. Human beings have an annoying habit of seeing patterns where there aren’t any.

That being said, I am not too keen on writing three separate obituaries for James Arthur Ray, Anita Bryant, and Pizzagate shooter Edgar Maddison Welch — and given the fact that they were all a bunch of delusional right-wing creeps, I think it’s probably best to just squeeze them all into one general round-up. For convenience!

Anita Bryant

Anita Bryant, a homophobic bigot best remembered as the reason (decent) people couldn’t drink orange juice from 1977 to 1980, died on December 16 of last year — though it seems no one noticed until today.

Bryant was a former Miss Oklahoma and spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice who made a career out of singing and denying rights to gay people.

In 1977, Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, which was a pretty big deal at the time! (And probably would be today, honestly.) In response, Bryant started a group called “Save the Children” to push for an end to the ordinance, as the crux of her argument in favor of anti-gay discrimination was that gay people could become teachers and use their positions to “recruit” children to the lifestyle, just as today’s conservatives and groups like “Moms For Liberty” now claim about trans people.

Indeed, she was an early adopter of many arguments used by today’s bigots to justify denying rights to people they would prefer not exist — including such well-worn hits as:

“The recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality… for since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.”
“What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life.”
“If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.”

Here she is explaining that her big problem with gay people is that they want to be allowed to come out of the closet without fear of losing their jobs, and then getting hit with a pie in the face. She subsequently bursts into tears while praying that the pie man “be delivered from his deviant lifestyle.”

Unfortunately, Bryant’s nonsense did lead to a repeal of the ordinance just a few months after it was put into place — which then led to the boycott of Florida Orange Juice. Gay bars during the boycott famously stopped selling screwdrivers and instead sold vodka and apple juice “Anita Bryant Cocktails.” This lasted until 1980 when the Florida Citrus Commission ended her contract in response to the campaign, and Bryant ultimately went bankrupt as a result of that and the fact that her divorce caused Christian fundamentalists to boycott her as a sinner.

Bryant was roundly mocked by everyone from the Dead Kennedys to Jimmy Buffett for many years after her campaign, which is interesting given the fact that today those who protested her bigotry would likely be scorned for “doing cancel culture” to her, milquetoast pundits would wring their hands over how even screeching bigots don’t deserve to get pies to the face, and she’d be invited on Bill Maher to cry about how she is a tragic and sympathetic victim of “woke.”

Bryant later had to change the name of the group to “Protect the Children,” because there was already a non-hateful non-profit called “Save the Children,” a situation that would later be echoed in our own time when QAnon people started their own “Save the Children” in hopes of rescuing the children they believed were being trafficked in Wayfair cabinets and sacrificed to Satan in non-existent pizza parlor basements.

Edgar Maddison Welch

And speaking of Satan and he shall appear! Edgar Maddison Welch, better known as the Pizzagate gunman, was shot and killed by North Carolina police during a traffic stop this past weekend.

According to the AP:

Edgar Maddison Welch was a passenger in a vehicle stopped by officers in Kannapolis on Saturday night, according to a Kannapolis Police Department news release. One of the officers recognized the SUV as one he’d seen Welch drive before, police said. The officer had arrested Welch before and knew he had an outstanding warrant for a felony probation violation at the time, according to authorities.
When the officers approached the vehicle to arrest Welch, police said the man pulled out a handgun and pointed it at one of the officers. After he was instructed to drop the weapon but didn’t, two officers shot Welch, authorities said.

To refresh your memory: In December of 2016, Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington DC in order to “investigate” Comet Ping Pong, the pizza restaurant at the center of the deeply absurd Pizzagate conspiracy. He brought an assault rifle with him, walked into the restaurant and fired multiple times (without hitting anyone), demanding to see the basement where he believed children were being held, sexually trafficked, sacrificed to Satan and eaten in Marina Abramovic’s performance art (which, to be clear, does not involve eating children). He was incorrect on many accounts, starting with the fact that Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement.

He pleaded guilty “to interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition and assault with a dangerous weapon” and was sentenced in 2017 to four years in prison by future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He also later apologized for his actions and said he had become “agitated” by things he saw online about the supposed child sex trafficking ring — a theory that we must all remember was thought up by people to explain why two Italian people (the Podesta brothers) were talking about pizza so much in their exchanges to one another.

Unlike Anita Bryant and James Arthur Ray, whom you’re about to meet, at least Welch appeared to express actual regret over his actions, so there’s that.

James Arthur Ray

James Arthur Ray may sound like the name of a serial killer, though he only met some of the criteria to qualify as one.

The wannabe spiritual guru was promoted by Oprah, The Secret author Rhonda Byrne, and other people with poor judgment for several years in the late 2000s, right up until he killed three people in a sweat lodge.

In 2009, during one of his “Spiritual Warrior” retreats in Sedona, Arizona, he directed attendees who had paid up to $10,000 to be there to fast for 36 hours (and not drink water for two days) before going into a sweat lodge and doing a fugazi “Native American sweat lodge ceremony” for several hours while he sat outside in the shade, repeatedly telling them that they had to stay inside.

“You are not going to die,” a participant quoted him as saying. “You might think you are, but you are not going to die.”

Well, three people did die. James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee and Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, New York, died that day in the lodge, and Liz Neuman, 49, of Prior Lake, Minnesota, went into a coma after the “ceremony” and died a week later. Around 20 other participants were hospitalized with heat stroke.

Despite the fact that an investigation found that he was fully aware of the dangers the sweat lodge posed, he was only sentenced to two years in prison for the crime and attempted to go right back to his career as a self-help guru.

Ray was a vile manipulator who exploited his victims’ desire for spiritual enlightenment and financial success for his own gain, largely by touting the same “Law of Attraction” and positive thinking woo promoted in The Secret (he was actually presented as an “expert” in the movie version of The Secret), along with a bunch of other New Age, quantum woo and a healthy helping (obviously) of Native American cultural appropriation.

It will probably not shock you, even remotely, to know that Ray’s Xitter feed is chock full of bird flu “skepticism,” support for January 6 insurrectionists, anti-climate change nonsense, transphobia, anti-woke hysteria, praise for Donald Trump and what have you.

For further details on what went down that day, listen to the “Free Your Inner Guru” podcast from Laura Tucker, one of the survivors of the retreat.

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