I should distinguish between "supporting him as an activist" and "supporting him as a legitimate scientific researcher"

If his core impact would be by standing in the lab then his beard wouldn't matter. He did publish a paper with 36 citations in the last century but that's not where his main impact is.

This sounds like Dark Arts, which would make it deserve the label pseudoscience. If your argument is that there's a legitimate place for "marketing" like that, I see your point but I'm reluctant to agree.

Dark arts would be if he wouldn't believe in his own ideas and just pretends to. I don't think that's true.

If you would label all grant proposal that are misleading about the likely applicability of the research results to real world issues as pseudoscience I doubt that much science is left at the end.

In a perfect world grant committies might hand out money based on evidence-based methods for handing out grant money. We don't live in that world. In our world grant committies might not be better than monkey's that pick randomly.

But as long as the funded research at least produces publishable papers that replicate, that's fine. In the current state of academic biology replicability itself is even a pretty high standard.