#608: Avi Davis

Donnie Davies is a spoof, but frighteningly similar to a bunch of completely serious loons you’ll encounter on the wingnut phalanx.

Someone like Avi Davis would at least come close. Davis is executive director of the American Freedom Alliance, which – of course – has nothing to do with freedom, but everything to do with reality denial (though Davis calls it “a non-partisan and non-political organization”). It is, for instance, heavy into global warming denialism. The Alliance is even better known, though, for their promotion of Intelligent Design Creationism, and in particular their ongoing legal struggle with the California Science Center after the latter cancelled a vigorously anti-science event to be held at the center in 2009 (if anyone has any updates, let us know). The plan had been to show Lad Allen’s movie “Darwin’s Dilemma”, which supposedly explores the “Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion in Fossil Records,” and about which Davis said that “[n]ew scientific evidence makes it vital that we take a close look at the numerous inherent scientific problems of the Darwinian theory of evolution,” which is undermined by the fact that Davis had absolutely no new scientific evidence and wouldn’t be able to distinguish scientific evidence from bullshit in any case.

In fact, the AFA is probably best known for their stance on Islam (Robert Spencer is a prominent member). Davis combines his stance on Islam with promoting the kind of support of Israel that only end-time American fundamentalists can provide, and you don’t even want to go there.

Diagnosis: Yup, yet another moron whose criminal lack of critical thinking skills has not prevented him from earning a certain amount of recognition in admittedly already severelly reality-challenged circles.