#2687: Doug Cobb

Doug Cobb is a Kentucky-based wingnut fundie conspiracy theorist, entrepreneur and an elder at Louisville’s Southeast Christian Church, whom then-governor Matt Bevin appointed to the University of Louisville Board of Trustees in 2016 because Bevin dislikes facts, science and education almost as much as Cobb does. The appointment was ultimately withdrawn after criticism and then a round of support from other wingnuts conflating “freedom of speech” with “every opinion is equally valid”.

 

Cobb is a:

 

-       Climate change denialist, having argued that climate change is “a big hoax from beginning to end” because there is still snow. In particular, global warming is a hoax “[i]nvented by the progressive left” as a socialist ploy to achieve something.

-       Creationist: “Remember, the same people who are lying to you today about global warming have been lying to you for 150 years about evolution”. He has in that context claimed that science educator Bill Nye is “a total fraud” because he disagrees with Nye and everyone with a different opinion than Cobb is a fraud.

 

He has also said that being gay and being Christian are incompatible – they are “incompatible terms of identity.”

 

Diagnosis: Fundie village idiot. Now, as an angry, denialist conspiracy theory clown, Cobb would mostly be laughable; the trouble, really, is that wingnut politicians are, because it’s politically expedient, more than willing to give people like Cobb power to do genuine harm.