#441: Shawn Akers

Being somewhat ambivalent about including Roger Ailes, whose main qualification is being president of Fox News, we’ll move to another rightwing pundit whose qualitications are stellar and unquestionable. Shawn Akers is a certified Taliban fundie madman who serves as the Liberty Council’s Public Policy Analyst, adjuncts at the Liberty University’s Law School, and often appears as the sidekick of the ever insane bigot Matt Barber.

As a staunch anti-gay activist, Akers and Barber have blasted – in a manner worthy of Alex Jones – the GOProud for being liberal group masquerading as a conservative organization in order to divide the conservative movement. After all, Akers and Barber want a pull in the other direction, so obviously it is GOProud that is ruining the conservative movement, and doing so by conspiracy. Akers has even claimed, in a moment of predictable lack of self-awareness, that GOProud is a bully for disagreeing with him and defending the rights of gays (Akers accordingly finds it “ironic” that gay rights groups support anti-bullying initiatives).

Akers has claimed that the entire purpose of public education is to educate students so that they can read the Bible and learn how to live, which is probably not a good starting point for someone involved in an organization giving legal advice. He has also argued, during the 2008 election, that Obama represented the rise of “commufascism” simply because Akers got the same feeling from watching him as he got from representations of Marx and Lenin (I won’t link to townhall, though, so you have to search it out yourself). And Akers’s powers of intuition is, as we have shown, remarkable.

Akers’s big nemesis, however, is the nebulous conspiracy called the “liberal agenda”. Secular humanism is, according to Liberty Counsel, a religion, and liberals are therefore cultists. Hey, the religion of secular humanism even has its own Trinity, according to Akers, namely Darwin, Marx, and Freud. No, he doesn’t understand anything of what any of them actually said. For Akers, they are just indistinguishable, blurry parts of The Enemy, which consists of all those things that Akers don’t understand and the people who may disagree with him because they understand those things that Akers don't. 

Diagnosis: Standard fare in the American Taliban, Akers is presumably a relatively minor figure of moderate impact (that is, he wields a bit of it, but probably won't convince or reach anyone but the already converted). That doesn’t affect the fact that he’s a serious loon.