The past few months have not been kind to the credulous. 

Attendees of the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival in Las Vegas last month received peptide injections at a conference booth — and found themselves hospitalized in critical condition afterwards. Investigations into the precise cause of their hospitalizations remain ongoing, but they certainly don’t appear to be any closer to immortality than they were when the conference was held.

A mother in Florida purchased raw milk from a natural food store that, “due to the requirements of Florida Law and the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance,” was labeled as “Feed for Calves — Not for Human Consumption" (never mind that farmers and ranchers can’t afford to feed calves with anything that costs $12 per gallon). The raw milk infected her toddler with highly contagious E. coli and Campylobacter bacteria, which quickly led to the toddler’s hospitalization and the mother’s loss of her pregnancy in a sepsis-induced miscarriage. She’s now suing the dairy and the store that sold her the infected milk.

On Data and Democracy published a two-part series on Mothership Strategies, a marketing firm used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other Democrat-aligned organizations. Mothership uses many of the same tactics Las Vegas’ Richard Zeitlin used to draw in small-dollar donors who thought they were supporting Republican-aligned causes before he pled guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, tactics such as incessant ALL-CAPS spam text and email messages, fake deadlines and nonexistent “phantom matches.” 

After analyzing campaign finance reports, On Data and Democracy concluded that only $11 million of the $678 million raised by Mothership Strategies ever reached a political candidate’s campaign. The remaining 98.3 percent went to consultants and operational costs incurred by Mothership. This makes Mothership only slightly more effective than Zeitlin’s criminally fraudulent operation, which raised $1.9 million to spend $10,000 supporting former U.S. Sen. Dean Heller’s (R-NV) abortive re-election campaign.

It’s tempting to adopt a cynical attitude to the above stories. As an associate of Zeitlin’s colorfully put it, “I know you are a sucker if you are giving money to a stranger on the phone.” Surely that’s every bit as true of someone who would give money to a stranger on the internet, buy bacterially infested unpasteurized milk for their toddler, or inject themselves with an experimental therapy at a conference booth.

This brings me to Melissa Dillon’s suit against Sigal Chattah and Joey Gilbert, which was exclusively reported on by The Nevada Independent a couple weeks ago.

Dillon’s father died from COVID-19 in 2021. In response, she hired Gilbert — who, in turn, brought Chattah in — to bring a wrongful death suit against Northern Nevada Medical Center. Gilbert, with assistance from his physician father, developed the theory that Remdesivir — the same antiviral medication taken by President Donald Trump when he contracted and recovered from COVID-19 in 2020 — was given to Dillon’s father and killed him.

It was the first such lawsuit in Nevada, one which Gilbert and Chattah used to continue to burnish their anti-establishment bona fides following their failed electoral campaigns for governor and attorney general, respectively. 

There was just one problem — it was filed after the statute of limitations had expired after the death of Dillon’s father. Additionally, at least according to Dillon’s new legal team, Gilbert’s team should have known that Dillon’s father never took Remdesivir (an assertion that Gilbert’s father disputes).

The argument Dillon brought to court this month is that Gilbert and Chattah were far more interested in advancing their political ambitions than in her family’s pain and suffering. Since the suit was reported on by The Nevada Independent, however, the counternarrative from the defendants has started to take shape.

According to Gilbert’s motion to dismiss, Dillon didn’t approach Gilbert by accident. She knew about Gilbert’s vocal advocacy surrounding COVID-19 and its treatment — the subject was a core part of Gilbert’s gubernatorial campaign, which Dillon actively assisted in (and attorney and fellow opinion columnist Jason Guinasso vocally opposed).

Besides, according to Chattah, Gilbert’s firm was paid on contingency. Since Dillon didn’t win anything, Gilbert’s firm never received the 33 percent (a discount from the usual 40 percent his firm apparently charges; either rate is well in excess of the 20 percent limit an Uber-backed ballot petition sought to apply to the legal profession before it was found to be unconstitutional) it would have received if the case was successful. Therefore, since Dillon didn’t lose any money, there are no damages for her to recover.

Was Dillon destined to lose the wrongful death suit she initiated on behalf of her father? Perhaps so. Did she get what she paid for? Arguably.

Given the facts of the case, it’s entirely possible that Gilbert and Chattah may prevail. By the time those two are done vociferously defending themselves — as all defendants have a moral and legal right to — it’s also possible that many people will conclude that Dillon got exactly what she deserved.

Both of those outcomes, however, would be a moral mistake, if perhaps not a legal one. 

Yes, it’s true that there will always be people who will pay handsomely to have an expert parrot back what they want to hear — this arguably defines the primary consumer market for artificial intelligence chatbots which, if suitably prompted, will tell users that they’re sexually irresistible gods. Everybody wants to believe they belong in the fictional community of Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, the children are above average, everybody’s an expert on everything and nobody’s ignorant about anything.

In other words, Dillon, the mother in Florida feeding raw milk to her toddler and the attendees getting peptide injections at a conference room in Las Vegas are not without fault. Each of them likely thought they knew something the rest of us didn’t know or refused to learn. That doesn’t mean they or anyone else deserves to get taken advantage of by people who should and do know better.

Here on planet Earth, we are all ignorant about much of the world that surrounds us. To help us navigate past our limitations, we rely on experts — such as doctors, farmers, lawyers and the like — to stop us from letting how we think the world should work interfere with our judgment of how the world actually works.

When someone hands a harebrained case to a lawyer after its statute of limitations expires, one should expect a reputable lawyer to say no, not to say yes and trumpet the case from the rooftops on social media to advance their political career.

When a marketer says they can raise money for a political campaign but they want to give the campaign a few pennies in exchange for each dollar they raise, one should expect the campaign to defend their supporters and tell the marketer to pound sand.

When someone gets the idea that pasteurization — a process adopted to reduce tuberculosis transmission more than 100 years ago — somehow diminishes the nutritive value of a glass of milk, one shouldn’t expect a farmer to slap passive-aggressive labels about their product being livestock feed and then charge more than double the retail rate for a gallon of milk while offering free home delivery. Instead, one should expect the farmer to know how to safely process, handle and store their product — and to advocate for those processes to continue.

And when someone goes to a conference on radical life extension procedures, one should at least be able to presume that their life won’t be radically shortened if they partake in one.

A society that permits the combination of a bumper sticker-deep understanding of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”) and caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) doesn’t punish the gullible. Gullibility is simply an inevitable and unavoidable by-product of ignorance and trust. Permitting such behavior instead destroys public trust while enriching those who can most convincingly lie to the desperate.

I don’t know if we live in a society where Gilbert, Chattah and all of the other opportunists profiting from human sadness and despair will be punished for their opportunism. I hope, however, we live in a society where they should be.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.