#2850: Avery Foley

Avery Foley is a prolific writer for the young-Earth-creationist and general pseudoscience organization Answers in Genesis (AiG). As such, she has promoted most of the creationist nonsense talking points associated with young-Earth creationism, such as the silly creationist distinction between micro- and macro-evolution (complete with vague handwavings about ‘information’, which Foley predictably doesn’t attempt to define) and the mythical distinction between “observational and historical science” (where the former is legitimate and the latter is not; i.e. scientists do science when they restrict themselves to counting, weighing and measuring; testing hypotheses against predictions derived from those hypotheses is pseudoscience); indeed Foley, whose scientific background is a masters of arts in theological studies from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, has written pretty extensively and thoroughly confusedly about that putative distinction. Now, Foley is adamant that she and creationists in general “love science”, but that means real science, like engineering and accountancy (as long as those disciplines “seek to study and research to honor God and uphold the authority of his Word”) not those disciplines that deal in tests of hypotheses about things that aren’t directly observable, like astronomy or physics or medicine or – in particular – evolutionary biology or climate science. 

 

One somewhat curious contribution from Foley, together with one Frost Smith, is their 2015 defense (“Celebrate Einstein’s Birthday with Pi on 3.14.15”) of what creationists call ‘uniformitarianism’, the idea that the laws of science are constant, e.g. so that the future is in principle predictable. For such constancy (including the reliability of mathematics, which is not based on empirical testing, but Foley & Smith are not the kind of writers to notice such details) is only possible, as they see it, if it were created by God: “an orderly and consistent universe because there is a consistent God who upholds the universe”, whereas “in a naturalistic worldview” any assumption of such order has to be given up. Hence, evolution is false and the Bible is right and the Earth was created in six (literal) days and so forth.

 

The curious dimension to that argument is of course that AiG rejects uniformitarianism because uniformitarianism is thoroughly incompatible with young-Earth creationism – in their own words, “a uniformitarian worldview maintains that all things have continued at the same rate without any supernatural or catastrophic events to alter them. Namely, uniformitarianism excludes the Creation by God and the global Flood”. Indeed, Foley and Smith themselves, in ‘AIG: All Scientific Dating Methods Are Wrong’, maintain that “all the dating techniques used in geology, cosmology, and physics are wrong” – not because they are able to identify any errors or mistakes but because the dating techniques yield results they don’t like, such as the universe and the Earth being billions of years old – and their (desperate) argument is precisely that “the dating techniques are based on assumptions, and the main assumption is the constancy of the process rates used to calculate those ages” and “[a]ccording to God’s Word that assumption of constancy of process rates is wrong”. Of course – we conjecture here – Foley and Smith are free to point out that the obvious contradiction between their claims is a criticism only if we assume that consitency is a virtue, and that would probably be naturalism and Satan speaking. Who knows.

 

Foley has, in fact, written quite a bit on Noah’s flood, dealing e.g. with the rather obvious question of where did all the water go together with one Troy Lacey, apparently “correspondence representative”, whatever that means. Indeed, Foley’s writings cover a wide range of topics, with the common characteristic being that it is all astonishingly inane, that she (unsurprisingly) tends to see creation everywhere – e.g. in the taste of water – and a commitment to the delusion that creationists and scientists are equally sensitive to the evidence but come to different conclusions because they come in with different presuppositions; her commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible, which isn’t a presupposition anyways because the Bible the word of God and the word of God is true, then allows here to just reject that evidence). Here is Foley’s critique of Santa Claus; note that her problem isn’t just the traditional one that children, upon discoverying that Santa isn’t real, could end up questioning the reality of other figures whose reality they shouldn’t question, but that Santa Claus’s behavior and characteristics are unchristian and contrary to scripture. And here is Foley working herself into weird knots trying to explain miracles, which she tries to claim don’t violate the laws of nature, in which case they would, of course, not be miracles.

 

Together with Ken Ham himself and Bodie Hodge, Foley is also the editor of the AiG book The Gender and Marriage War, which we haven’t looked at and neither should you.

 

Diagnosis: As inane as they come. That there may actually be people who think the laughable results of Avery Foley’s quixotic attempts to challenge science, reality, reason and consistency contain some insights to cherish is a damning indictment of Western structures of education.

#2756: Joseph Delimater

Minor and forgotten, perhaps, but worth a brief note: Joseph Delimater III is a resident of Anne Arundel and associate of gibberingly insane theocrat Michael Peroutka, the radical Christian Reconstructionist and southern secessionist 2004 presidential nominee for the U.S. Constitution Party and later county council member of Anne Arundel, Maryland, where he ran partially on the platform that the Maryland General Assembly is “no longer a valid legislative body” because it has passed laws that, according to Peroutka, is in violation of “God’s law.” (Peroutka, just to remind people, is also an ally of the League of the South and once donated a dinosaur fossil to Ken Ham’s Creation Museum to keep it out of the hands of zeh evolutionists.) Delimater, on his side, won the 2014 primary for county sheriff on the promise to resist implementation of any law that violates God’s law (in particular, of course, marriage equality-related stuff); according to Peroutka’s communication director, John “teaching children about MLK is child abuse” Lofton, Delimater “would evaluate each piece of legislation to be sure it was authorized by God in the Bible, the U.S. Constitution and the Anne Arundel County Charter.” Delimater himself claimed that his best quality as a candidate is “knowing what the law is,” having taken a twelve-week course on both the state and federal constitutions at Peroutka’s explicitly theocratic Institute of the Constitution.

 

Delimater didn’t win. Still.

 

Diagnosis: Obscure, perhaps, but nevertheless a wild-eyed ISIS sycophant and a genuine danger to his surroundings.

#2701: James Comer

James Comer is a US congressman representing Kentucky’s 1st congressional district in the US House of Representatives, and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Kentucky in 2015. And though Comer is for the most part what you’d expect from a conservative representative from Kentucky (repeal Obamacare, opposition to gay marriage), we have to take a special look at Kentucky gubernatorial candidates given that Kentucky is also home to Ken Ham’s Creation Museum and Ark Park, and Kentucky gubernatorial candidates tend to have views on that. And Comer has views on that, for instance supporting tax rebates for the ‘museum’ despite the museum’s declared intention to use religious discrimination in their hiring processes.

 

To most people, however, Comer is probably best known for his explicitly partisan work as chair of the Oversight Committee from 2023, which has been controversial. He is also known for pushing various bogus accusations of voter fraud and election integrity violations in connection with the 2020 election, and for criticizing investigations into the January 6^th insurrection as “illegitimate”, trying to suggest that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was really responsible. But Comer is also a climate change denialist of the densest kind; as he put it, “I do not believe in global warming. I'm the one person whose business and livelihood depends on Mother Nature, so I understand weather patterns. We've had a very severe winter this year with 12-inch snows, so there is no global warming.” Yeah, that weather-climate distinction: it’s not a particularly sophisticated distinction, but Comer is not a particularly sophisticated thinker; fortunately for him, neither are a large part of Kentucky voters.

 

Diagnosis: Conspiracy theorist and ardent science denialist. In the current political climate, there is perhaps nothing unusual or unexpected about Comer and his views, but you should really stop and think for a moment about how insane they are.

#2551: Matt Bevin

Matthew Griswold Bevin is a fundie wingnut madman and the 62nd governor of Kentucky, representing the Tea Party, from 2015 to 2019. A lot of positions taken by Bevin on issues are exactly what you’d expect – including opposition to marriage equality – and we won’t cover his antics in any detail.

 

We can’t, however, quite overlook Bevin’s claims that government employees refusing to do their job (while demanding to keep them) is a “free speech” issue – yes, Bevin was a firm supporter of the antics of Kim Davis. In fact, Bevin thinks Davis is an inspiration “to the children of America”.

 

Bevin is also a creationist and climate change denier who supports. creationist attempts to “teach the controversy” on issues like evolution and global warming – issues on which there is no relevant scientific controversy but on which fundies don’t like the facts and want others (school students) to be confused about the facts, too. Bevin was an ardent defender of Ken Ham’s attempts to obtain tax breaks for his Ark park while simultaneously adhering to hiring practices that discrimate on religious issues. Indeed, Bevin ensured that the Ham’s deranged creationist roadside show would get substantial state funds instead. Bevin also declared both 2016 and 2017 “Year of the Bible” in Kentucky. He has, on numerous occasions, voted to authorize Bible classes in public schools.

 

Of course, as you would think given his views on facts, Bevin is no fan of public education or teachers. In 2018, he angrily “guaranteed” that teachers’ labor stoppage resulted in unsupervised children being sexually assaulted, physically harmed, or exposed to poison and drugs. But then, Bevin has a curious understanding of things that cause other things to happen – in the wake of the Parkland school shooting and the Marshall County High School shooting in Kentucky, Bevin declared that it was time to address what he falsely thought of as causes, namely video games (“it’s the same as pornography. They have desensitized people to the value of human life, to the dignity of women, to the dignity of human decency”) and zombie television shows. In 2017, he linked the violence at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville to the Bible no longer being used as a textbook in public schools. He has also suggested roving prayer patrols as a solution to violence (and suggested that critics of the idea would go to hell). On the other hand, he has also suggested that violence might be needed to protect the biblical values he protects.

 

When he lost the election in 2019, Bevin did a Trump and claimed massive election fraud, referring for instance – of course without a shred of evidence – to “thousands of absentee ballots that were illegally counted”, people allegedly being “incorrectly turned away” at the polls, “a number of [voting] machines that didn’t work properly”, and ballots being stored in open boxes. He seems to have gotten his info mostly from his “good friend” Erika Calihan, a random woman whom Bevin appointed to a state government position and who appears to have found the conspiracy theories on facebook.

 

Bevin has also admitted to exposing his kids to chickenpox to give them immunity – which is … not a good idea and reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the point (as well as of the efficacy and safety of vaccines).

 

Diagnosis: A dreadful character, and too much even for Kentucky, apparently, who at least had sense enough to vote him out. He is, unfortunately, probably not completely out of the game yet, however.

#2411: Jay Wile

Jay Wile is a young-earth creationist who holds a PhD in nuclear chemistry from the University of Rochester. Though his credentials have nothing to do with evolutionary biology, you may rest assured that he nevertheless uses them for all they’re worth, given the dearth of people with legitimate credentials in any field of science on the creationist clown circuit.

Wile is probably best known as an author of the Exploring Creation with … books published by Apologia Educational Ministries, a series of “science” textbooks aimed at junior high/high school-level home-school and private-school students that promote flood geology and creationism, but he also claims for instance that “environmentalists” are hysterical, lying alarmists because they listen to mainstream science rather than his own, Bible-based attempts to explain away the data (a core strategy is to claim that science, too, must engage in some speculation, and since young-earth creationists also speculate and base things on faith, creationism is genuinely scientific). Wile himself sold the Apologia textbook business in 2006 to homeschoolers affiliated with Focus on the Family, which offers online classes for homeschool students such as “Introductory and Advanced Sciences” and “Bible, Apologetics and Worldview”. The general idea behind the series can be summed up in a quote from Wile’s Exploring Creation with General Science (that one is thoroughly reviewed here): “… the Christian worldview is a perfect fit with science. Science is based on the notion that the world works according to rational laws that do not change. Since Christians believe in a rational Creator whose laws do not change, science and Christianity work very well together.” The observation is of course as relevant to the conclusion as the observation that the words “Christianity” and “science” share a number of letters.

Though Wile has stated that Ken Ham’s Creation Museum contained inaccuracies – apparently he disagreed over whether or not animals died at all before the fall of man – Wile nevertheless found the Creation Museum “to be significantly more scientifically accurate than most museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.” (Keep in mind that Wile defines “scientific” as “Biblical”.)

Here is Wile praising the work of Mark Armitage while unwittingly undermining the whole thing. (Here is a discussion of his response to critics.)

Diagnosis: Belligerently nonsensical, of course, but it is instructive to note how Wile is apparently willing to use any strategy accessible to dismiss the data he doesn’t like (particularly by overlooking them) – it really is an instructive case study of confirmation bias in action. Keep in mind, though, that as an author of popular instructional materials for fundamentalist-oriented home schools, Wile is actually strikingly influential.

#2407: David Whitney

A full-fledged, self-declared wingnut theocrat, David Whitney is the Pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church of Pasadena, Maryland. He is also affiliated with Michael Peroutka's Institute on the Constitution (yes, they had to put “Constitution” in the name –  otherwise, you’d never guess that this was the document they were trying to interpret; there are some good articles on the group here), where he serves as Senior Instructor, Liberty Forum editor and radio show host. He is also chaplain of the Maryland chapter of the neo-confederate League of the South and Chairman of the Maryland State Delegation to the Southern National Congress. In 2014 both he and Peroutka ran for spots on a county commission and on the party committees of both Democrats and Republicans, respectively, in Anne Arundel County. Peroutka won his spot, because Anne Arundel Republicans are overwhelmingly hateful, stupid and insane; Whitney also seems to have tried to use his attempt to return the Democrats to its Civil War positions. There is an interesting backstory to that attempt, by the way.

Whitney’s sermons are generally filled with ideas that have been tactfully described as “theocratic and revolutionary.” After addressing a Tea Party rally on July 4, 2010, he declared for instance that we have “the God-given right to secede.” In a sermon in 2013 Whitney declared: “When you talk to people about God’s Law being restored in America, they say, ‘Awww, you’re some ayatollah. Awww, you want a theocracy’,” he complained, explaining that, “well yes, I want obedience to God’s Law because that is where liberty comes from. Liberty comes from God’s Law. Tyranny comes when God’s law is rejected by a society as it has been rejected in our day. Indeed, any law made that contradicts God’s Law, what is it? It’s not law at all. You could call it unlaw or you could call it, as our founders did, pretended law. But it is not law if it violates God’s Law.” Fortunately for him, he wasn’t asked to explain what he meant by “liberty” and “tyranny” (Remember also that Whitney also teaches people about what is ostensibly the Constitution). In particular, theocracy means, for Whitney, not only that government positions should be reserved for Christians (i.e. those who agree with him), but that we should “restrict citizenship” to Christians who, whether serving as jurors, government officials or “in the Militia”, operate according to “God’s Law.” The militia reference is worth highlighting: Whitney believes that the Bible supports no restrictions on the Second Amendment (“never should we disarm the citizens in this land who must protect themselves daily against the murderous products of our state-run school systems”), and has claimed that there is not only a Constitutional mandate for state militias but that opponents of militias are the enemies of God (his attempts to justify the claim by Bible verses are remarkably feeble, even for someone of Whitney’s caliber). 

 

Whitney is, of course, also aggressively opposed to gay rights and marriage equality, because he is, in his own words, “God’s Holy institution of marriage by testifying before the State Legislature.” (He is not happy about surveys showing that almost half of evangelicals support marriage equality, which he refers to as “sodomite unmarriage”). Transgender rights are even worse, of course; in 2016 Whitney said that “new neckwear is being prepared for Obama in light of his administration’s actions” on transgender rights, citing Matthew 18. Meanwhile, he has also tried to justify the murder of abortion providers, declaring in a 2013 sermon that “… we need to understand that there is such a thing as Biblically justifiable homicide.”

 

Whitney was, in general, no fan of Obama, saying that “those who know God’s Word, know that Satan is a destroyer. He never creates anything, he only destroys that which God creates. So it is clear that Obama is of his father, his father the Devil.” Nor of Democrats in general, who “hate God” (even though he ran as one in 2014); indeed, Democrats are “so devoted to this Satanic vision they intend to force every nation in the world to comply with it through the means of bribery of those other governments with U.S. Foreign aid and Foreign policy to promote sodomy.” He is, however, a staunch supporter of Trump, for marvelously deranged reasons.

 

When a racist University of Maryland student committed a racist murder in 2017, Whitney blamed it on the fact that the university were teaching of evolution. Whitney, who has no idea what the theory of evolution actually is, claims that “evolution is essentially racist.” Given that Whitney is a prominent member of the League of the South and a defender of white supremacism, we hesitate to infer anything about whether he accepts the theory based on that assessment or not. Then again, they did get Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis to headline an event for the Institute on the Constitution in 2014.

 

After the assassination of five police officers in Dallas in 2016, Whitney claimed that the sniper attack was likely a government-orchestrated false flag operation, one that the government orchestrated in order to “establish the New World Order, another name for the kingdom of Satan”. Or, if it wasn’t a false flag, it was the result of teaching evolution in schools.

 

As for school shootings, Whitney predictably blames “Engel v. Vitale in 1962 that prohibited public prayer to the One True God in government run schools” (it didn’t) and that schools don’t prominently display the Ten Commandments – if students reflected on the fact that the Ten Commandments prohibited murder, Whitney thinks, then the issue would have been resolved right away. Now, those Commandments also prohibit lying, but Whitney has apparently never reflected on that part. As for the 2017 Las Vegas shootings, Whitney blamed Antifa: “Antifa hates Christians, Antifa wants to kill Christians” because “their souls were dead, they were moral nihilist, they were and are human monsters” who “now says they are prepared to begin killing people in mass in a race war” (the idea of citing sources is a liberal conspiracy). He also blamed Antifa for Charlottesville. And the same year (2017) he blamed Ariana Grande for the terrorist attack on her concert because Grande “is promoting every form of immorality and indeed she is promoting satanism by her music and by her lyrics and by her gyrations.” The terrorist attack was, in other words, justified and Godly – as were the 2017 California wildfires that killed dozens.

 

It is worth emphasizing that Whitney and his groups are not as far out on the fringes of the religious right as you would have hoped. Not only was Peroutka elected to office; Liberty Counsel has also promoted them, and in 2012 the Carroll County Board of Commissioners in Maryland decided to encourage, and in some cases require, employees to attend a seminar on the Christian foundations of the state’s constitution arranged by Whitney and the Institute on the Constitution: Commissioner Richard Rothschild, who has himself obviously bought into David Barton-style America as a Christian nation pseudohistory, said that it makes sense to require public officials to attend “a course which factually explains the role God plays in our constitution.”

 

Diagnosis: Hateful conspiracy theorist and remorseless theocrat who explicitly wants a Taliban-style government based on the Bible – and Whitney does seem to focus mostly on the violent parts.

#2370: Barret Vanlandingham

Rev. Barret Vanlandingham of the Fort Gibson Church of Christ is a fundamentalist and a young-earth creationist, who is unafraid to parrot all the standard creationist canards or to display his utter lack of grasp of science or how science works. Commenting on the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, for instance, Vanlandingham pretended to be startled that Nye dismisses the Genesis Flood as the myth it is, for as Vanlandingham sees it, there is “vast amounts of evidence in favor of a worldwide flood”, mostly because he doesn’t seem to understand what evidence is (here is Vanlandingham further discussing what he thinks about evidence, brilliantly supporting our assessment). Among his purported evidence is the claim that “every major culture around the world has reported a worldwide flood” (utter nonsense) and the fact that trilobite fossils have been discovered all sorts of places, something that science, apparently, is not able to explain but the Bible is (it really isn’t). Equally importantly, for Vanlandingham, is the absence of evidence for evolution; for instance, “there is no fossil evidence that one species or animal ever became a different species” because Vanlandingham simply dismisses that massive amount of evidence. The conclusion, of course, is that Big Bang and evolution are just as much articles of faith as the Biblical account, since there is no evidence and “[s]cience says that for something to be believable, you have to be able to measure it and repeat the experiment,” which is a completely expected misunderstanding from your typical creationist who has no idea how science is supposed to work.* Vanlandingham’s conclusion, of course, is that “the Bible has never been proven wrong, on anything” (here’s a brief list) but actually “been very helpful in discoveries related to all areas of science” (here is a list). That’s the conclusion you will be able to draw when you can, by assertion, just dismiss the evidence you don’t like, and use your own imagination and wishful thinking to generate the evidence you want to have. “Delusion” is the common term for the process. 

Diagnosis: Creationist with a creationist’s standard complete and utter lack of understanding of what science is and what the point of science could possible be. Not a big player in the religious fundie anti-science brigade, perhaps, but nonsensical enough to merit an entry.

 

*Short explanation: The whole point of science is to gain knowledge of that which goes beyond direct observation because it is e.g. too far away in time or space, too general (laws are universal; what’s observable are particular instances) or has to do with cause and effect (correlations are directly observable; causality is not). But the crucial characteristic of science is that we test these hypothesis about the unobserved against their observable conseqeunces! The Big Bang is unobservable, but its effects are not, and by observing whether the predictions we derive from the Big Bang hypothesis hold or not, we confirm or disconfirm that hypothesis. And it is of course a standard requirement on scientific experiments and observations that they be repeatable. But now the fundamental and utterly idiotic misunderstanding systematically made by creationist morons like Ken Ham and Barret Vanlandingham should be obvious: It is the observations – the ones we test our hypotheses against – that need to be repeatable and measurable, not the state of affairs described by the hypotheses! Failure to recognize this point reveals not only a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method (distinguishing hypotheses from observations) but a fundamental misunderstanding of the very point of science (to gain knowledge about the unobservable). 

#2363: Bob Unruh

Being a journalist for the WND is – as we have had ample opportunities to demonstrate – not exactly a sign of intellectual or epistemic virtues, but Bob Unruh is one. As you’d expect, Unruch is also a religious fundamentalist, conspiracy theorist and all-purpose science denialist. Since he doesn’t know or understand anything and doesn’t care (here is a commentary on Unruh’s coverage of the David Coppedge trial as an illustration of his standards), he is also rather versatile in his journalistic efforts. All his efforts are characterized by his trademark level of demagoguery and dishonesty, however.

Unruh is, for instance, an indefatigable apologist for creationism. An illustrative example of his work on behalf of creationism is his 2016 article, reported on here, on how Ark-Park and Creation Museum host Ken Ham mopped the floor with scientist Bill Nye in the debates between them, with Nye coming across to Unruh as a close-minded nihilist with an agenda compared to the humble and agenda-less Ham. Unruh has also brought Ham onboard as an expert witness for instance to comment on some 2015 Congressional “Darwin day” proposal (it is unclear which); Democrats ostensibly make such proposals “because they’re intolerant of Christianity and want to replace it with their own religion,” and “the resolution is a sign of the nation’s current move to suppress Christianity and promote beliefs such as evolution. While America was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic and worldview, secularists are becoming more and more intolerant.” Yes, we are aware that those are quotes from Ken Ham. Unruh is just unbiasedly reporting them. Come on. 

Another authority Unruh has appealed to is Ray Comfort; writing about Comfort’s remarkably silly introduction to his (Comfort’s) own edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species entitled “Nothing Created Everything”, Unruh claims that Comfort “debunks evolution” – indeed, the very subtitle of his article is: “Failure of natural selection logic documented in ‘Nothing Created Everything’.” But then, as Unruh “understands” it, the theory of evolution is the theory that life “randomly erupted from a puddle of sludge on some prehistoric landscape.” This is, hopefully needless to say, not the theory of evolution. (By contrast, according to Unruh, intelligent design is “the theory that the universe and life are too complex to have randomly erupted.” This is, hopefully needless to say, not an intelligent design theory – indeed, it isn’t a theory at all but just a denial of evolution.)

Unruh is also a global warming denialist, of the kind who thinks that short periods of cold weather and snow are devastating evidence against global warming. After all, why wouldn’t he think that, given his general level of understanding of facts, evidence and science amply illustrated above? 

Otherwise, Unruh is also central in the Clinton body count conspiracy movement, tirelessly connecting imaginary dots in incoherent ways (no, we won’t directly link to any of his many articles on the topic). He is also a birther.

And how surprised would you be if you are told that Unruh is vehemently opposed to marriage equality? He has, among other things (more detailed, though older, tally here):

-       Complained that dictionaries often include the word “homophobia” but never the word “homofascism”

-       Promoted the work and ideas of Scott Lively

-       Lied about Lively’s involvement in developing Uganda’s anti-gay laws, saying that Lively was merely doing “biblical preaching ... against homosexual behavior.” He has, for the WND, extensively mischaracterized other people’s criticism of Lively’s involvement, tellingly neglecting to link to what the people he criticizes were actually saying to ensure that you wouldn’t check.

-       Attributed fake quotes to Houston’s mayor after a Houston anti-discrimination ordinance was passed in 2014. 

Diagnosis: Liar for Jesus, propagandist and conspiracy theorist masquerading as a journalist. Insofar as we are talking about a journalist for the WND, it is unlikely that he will fool anyone but those already far down the rabbit hole. Still. 

#2315: Kevin Swanson

Hat-tip: Rightwingwatch

Kevin Swanson is arguably the most demented fundie in the US that is still, also arguably, part of something resembling the mainstream of the Religious Right. Hence, Swanson functions as something like a limiting test for other Taliban-style fundamentalist views and is, in short, the kind of guy who would make ISIS look tame if he got to put his ideas for America, such as the death penalty for gays and readers of Harry Potter, into action. On his radio show, “Generations with Vision”, he otherwise exhibits all the traits commonly associated with the religious right: science denialism, post-truth mongering with references to a mythical “good old days”, bigotry and a very tenuous grasp of American history and domestic and foreign politics, combined with deranged conspiracy theories (often involving demons) and finding scapegoats for current events, especially natural events, he believes are ultimately the effects of divine wrath (so: not the obvious scapegoat, if one were needed). Swanson is otherwise pastor of Reformation Church in Elizabeth, Colorado, and a writer for The World View in 5 Minutes, an online fundie newscast.

As for his position oamongn the religious right, Swanson hosted the Freedom 2015: National Religious Liberties Conference in Des Moines (Swanson is of course no fan of religious liberty though he is an ardent fan of what he calls “religious liberty”: giving him the necessary means to have the views of those who disagree with him on religious issues suppressed or banned), which was attended e.g. by then-presidential candidates Ted Cruz, who afterwards tried to distance himself from the event, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal. At the conference, Swanson spoke about a Biblical mandate of the death penalty for homosexuality, pointing out that both the Old and New Testament discuss “the sin of homosexuality” and that Romans 1 affirms that homosexuality merits capital punishment. 

Swanson is, in other words, an explicit theocrat, and advocates a return to the theocracy of the pilgrims, though he relies on a radically revisionist idea about what that would involve.

Swanson on weather phenomena, climate

During the 2013 Colorado wildfires, Swanson and his usual sidekick, Dave Buehner, wondered why God was punishing Colorado with wildfires, which mostly affected more conservative areas of the state. Avoiding both the obviously correct and the obvious but incorrect explanations, they went with the gays. In fact, they didn’t merely blame gay people but also women in “masculine” clothing (hats and pants, apparently – “It’s just such an oppressive, horrible, horrible world and so many of our young girls in our Christian churches are running down to Wal-Mart and buying the same clothes”), abortion and a photo in the Denver Post of State House Majority Leader Mark Ferrandino kissing his partner. “Judgement begins in the House of God,” said Swanson and Buehner, as if that somehow made anything resembling sense in the context. Swanson went on to compare Ferrandino and his partner to Ahab and Nero, and concluded that the “Colorado government is the worst in the world” and “probably even worse than the North Korean government.”

During the 2013 Colorado flooding, however, Swanson claimed that it was all the fault not only of gays, but also pro-choice advocates and the legalization of pot: “So here we have the very worst year in Colorado’s year in terms of let’s kill as many babies as possible, let’s make sure we encourage as much decadent homosexual activity as possible, let’s break God’s law with impudence at every single level, at every single level let’s make sure that we offend whoever wrote the Bible, so we have the worst year possible politically in the state of Colorado and it happens to be the worst year ever in terms of flood and fire damage in Colorado’s history. That is a weird coincidence; interesting to say the least.” It really isn’t.

In 2017, Swanson urged SCOTUS to “reverse Roe v. Wade and Obergefell” before Hurricane Irma made landfall: “the wrath of God against this nation is intense,” and the winds are “going to blow in the direction that God ordains them to go,” said Swanson. Hurricane Harvey, on the other hand, was God’s judgment on Houston for having a “very aggressively pro-homosexual mayor.” Apparently God will punish Australia, too. Indeed, Swanson finds it hard to believe that God hasn’t judged and destroyed the US yet – yes, he struggles to take a hint. (Though in fairness, he did predict, in 2016, that God was going to make Trump president in order to destroy America, which is a bit uncanny.)

Swanson on literature, art and film 

Swanson is no fan of popular culture (or any culture) – he has even written a book on the topic, The Tattooed Jesus: What Would the Real Jesus Do with Pop Culture? – but has nevertheless tried his hand at movie and TV criticism. For instance, he accused Star Trek: Into Darkness of promoting bestiality by showing “the good guy in the film as mating with the wrong color species,” suggesting that it was due to the alleged fact that “evolution has no basic problem with bestiality or cross-species mating.” In a similar vein, Swanson argued that God might destroy the US over the film The Shape of Water for bestiality, and also claimed it represents “the end of civilization as we know it” (Swanson has not known civilization for a while, if ever), citing Leviticus 18:23-29. He also blasted Beauty and the Beast for supposedly promoting “inter-species breeding”, saying that the movie was an “insidious” effort to “homosexualize the next generation of eight and ten-year-old kids,” ensure that they are “indoctrinated into the homosexual lifestyle” and fomenting a cultural revolution “a bit more insidious” than “the cultural revolution that Mao Tse-tung brought to China.” As Swanson sees it, Hollywood has been promoting inter-species breeding for decades. It is very unclear what he thinks will come of it. Meanwhile the show Shezow, which featured a boy dressing up as a female superhero to fight evil, was anti-Christian propaganda. Maybe he should just stop going to the movies.

Swanson has also argued that God will destroy the US for the British novels about Harry Potter (parents who let their kids read Harry Potter should drown, says Swanson), adding, for good measure, that country music, the computer-animated film How to Train Your Dragon and the Disney cartoon Frozen are Satanic, too. With regard to HtTYD, Swanson was shocked to learn that the character Gobber the Belch is gay, warning listeners that Gobber – like Dumbledore – effectively encourages pedophilia, because homosexuality and pedophilia are the same. With regard to Frozen, Swanson has argued (or whatever you call it) that the movie is a Disney conspiracy to turn children gay and that Satan is using the movie “to indoctrinate my 5-year-old to be a lesbian,” emphasizing that it would be the “worst nightmare” of parents to have their child “turn into a sodomite.” Moreover, Frozen (among other movies) “are the means that children are led into witchcraft” and part of Hollywood’s attempt to turn children away from God. And Swanson dutifully emphasized that he is most certainly “not a tinfoil hat conspiratorialist,” so there. Swanson’s cohost Steve Vaughn added that Frozen character Anna considers herself to be God – not unlike Swanson and Vaughn themselves, in fact. “If God does not exist and we are ourselves God, then we make up the rules and we can let ourselves go, we can let ourselves by, we save ourselves,” said Vaughn in something that only superficially bears any resemblance to reasoning. 

Elsewhere, Swanson has criticized Taylor Swift for her support of LGBTQ rights, predicting that “God will cut her down” (the suggestion of stereotypical kindergarten bickering style is downright disconcerting). “‘You Need to Calm Down’ is the name of the song, and she’s apparently telling God to calm down about all of his ethical concerns. I don’t think it’s going to be effective, but that’s what she’s doing,” said Swanson, adding that the Equality Act, which Swift supports, is “intended to persecute Christians if they don’t want to celebrate homosexual, heathen rites and rituals.” We don’t think the title of Swift’s song was aimed at God; Swanson has a tendency to overlook the obvious in his search for a deranged pattern that simply isn’t there while screaming “found it”. Meanwhile, Katy Perry’s promotion of lesbianism will drive her fans (and herself) to suicide, the 2014 Grammy Awards were a “satanic pagan orgy” and Highlights magazine is just as bad as ISIS for acknowledging that gay parents exist.

The Hunger games movies, meanwhile, are designed to prepare Americans for a new Holocaust against Christians and homeschoolers that will happen in the next few decades. Nor is Swanson a fan of “Avengers: Infinity War,” a film designed to lead viewers into polytheism. And the “feminist” movie The Last Jedi is what “movies produced by a dying civilization looks like,” said Swanson, citing its fundamental “violation of the biblical ordinance that the husband is head of the wife.” Swanson has even suggested that the Twilight Saga might turn kids into vampires, and unsurprisingly warned parents “not to give our children books that are written by homosexuals.”

Swanson is no fan of classic works of literature either. Having claimed that Mark Twain was (literally) possessed by demons (see below), his book Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West also denounces William Shakespeare for planting “seedbeds for homosexual themes and homosexual behavior” in his plays. He also rages against Nathaniel Hawthorne for his “psychotic” critique of the Puritans when he dared suggest that the Puritans weren’t particularly puritan, and refers to Shakespeare and Hawthorne, together with the rest of their “shadowy cabal”, Charles Darwin, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rosseau (“utterly ruinous”) Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey, for instance, as the “Nephilim”. Meanwhile, an online ad for Swanson’s book, which was promoted by the WND, portrays Swanson in prison for quoting Leviticus – yes, it’s your idiotic myth that speaking out against the “homosexual lifestyle” will get you in jail, just because that’s what you’d like to do to anyone who disagrees with you. 

Demonic possession

Swanson thinks that Mark Twain was possessed by demons. Not only was Letters from the Earth “one of the most acidic, horrific, evil books I think ever, ever written by any human being in the history of mankind” and obvious evidence for demon possession; also Huckleberry Finn is an “attack on the Christian church” by exposing Christian hypocrisy on issues like slavery; Twain “mocks Christianity throughout and Huckleberry Finn is an atheist himself” and “his book is extremely, powerfully, cynically against the Christian faith”, and that is because Twain was possessed by demons.

Twain was not the only one: also Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were possessed. Charles Darwin was apparently not, but instead suffered from multiple forms of insanity and produced ideas that became the foundation for any ill, including Nazism, Swanson can think of (he has, however, later added Darwin to the list of people possessed by demons). Steven Spielberg and Lady Gaga, however, are definitely “possessed by Satan” or “under the sway of the devil.” Beyonce, too, is demon possessed because she created a persona named Sasha Fierce and people who do that are either demon-possessed or mentally ill and therefore demon-possessed (Fierce is probably, according to Swanson, the demon that brought the pop star into Satanism). Elsewhere Swanson has claimed that Karl Marx “was a Satanist” who has won adherents among “most of the world” and “most of the universities,” concluding, in a piece of reasoning so circular it ought to be dizzying even for people of Swanson’s caliber, that it is “interesting how the most evil people in the world who bring about the Marxist, Communist, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agendas typically revert back to the worship of Satan.” 

Demons were also behind for the push for the Boy Scouts of America to allow gay members in order to accelerate the nation’s demise – allowing gay members is just like letting serial killers teach preschool, as Swanson sees it, and he wondered when the Boy Scouts would introduce a badge for incest or even a “cannibal merit badge.”

Some demonic stuff is definitely going on at Halloween as well, with Halloween really being a way to ignore God by celebrating “the departed souls and spirits of those who had vanquished in the Flood.” Just like the real goal of the Burning Man festival is to bring back human sacrifice because Burning Man is all about “radical inclusion”, which is just another name for “radical polytheism [and] radical human sacrifice. This is what they’re headed for. They want to bring human sacrifice back.” That the demented mass of rot that is the mind of Kevin Swanson still manages to produce grammatical sentences is something of a miracle.

Swanson on American history

According to Swanson, fueled by the ideas Neo-Confederate ideologue Walter Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln introduced Marxism and Communism to America – not only as political ideologies, but as actual governmental policies that are still in force today. Yes, you read it right: The US is already a communist nation. And Lincoln used “The War Against the South” to impose socialism everywhere.

According to Swanson the abolition of slavery was only a move “from decentralized forms of fiefdom slavery to a big federal state that enslaves hundreds of millions of people unlike any time in all of human history. Thanks a lot, Karl Marx; thanks a lot, Abe Lincoln; thanks a lot, whoever you were that centralized power in Washington, D.C., and enslaved an entire nation since 1865.” Speaking of slavery, Swanson later turned to various passages in the Old Testament in which God commands soldiers to kill all the men but treat women, particularly virgins, as plunder, saying that this was not slavery but actually a good thing for women. The Canaanites, for instance: they “were extraordinarily wicked, we know that, and God wanted to wipe out all remnants of them off the earth. Part of the reason is they […] were big on abortion and homosexuality. […] That’s the way he treated the Canaanites and that’s probably what’s going to happen to America as well.” Ok, but what about women being treated as spoils of war? Well, Swanson thinks that such a fate was better than having them go on government welfare, at least! With defenders like Swanson, the Bible doesn’t need detractors, and it’s fascinating to ponder what kind of mind would come up with the kinds of ideas expressed in those statements.

As mentioned above, Swanson advocates a return to the theocratic governments of the pilgrims. His understanding of what that involves is, however, somewhat revisionist – according to Swanson, relying on his most trusted source, the pilgrims had a society “with a divorce rate of .01%, fornication rate of 1%, and a homosexuality rate of .0005%, if we’re going to have a stable society, we’re going to have to get back to biblical law.” 

Swanson’s trouble with facts and accuracy is of course not limited to history. According to Swanson, there is “almost a perfect correlation between degree of faithfulness to God’s Word and the piece of the pie they get out of the gross world product,” which is why secular Protestant nations that allow gay marriage are doing well and Italy, where “the faith has faded” is struggling. It would seem that a lot hinges on “almost” here. Here is another commentary on some current affairs.

Swanson is, of course, also a creationist, and though most of his attempted arguments of creationism consist of standard creationist PRATTs, such as Hoyle’s fallacy, he does have some novel ones, such as the claim that “punctuated equilibrium is where a prince kisses a frog” and that “Richard Dawkins isn’t a scientist,” topping it with a bit of wishful thinking: “Honest scientists are abandoning the theory left and right, because there is no evidence. They have no data.” No, Swanson has, ironically, no data to back up that assertion.

Gays and similar undesirables

Swanson has elsewhere claimed that gays love each other the way “cannibals love their victims” (gay people are, in fact, exactly like both axe murderers and cannibals, so promoting [i.e. recognizing] homosexuality is just like encouraging axe murder.). God also hates men who do “the metrosexual thing with the skinny pants and the little fairy shoes” because “God ... hates it when men are not manly in their approach” and “does not want men to be androgynous and feminine like in their approach;” after all, “He gave them facial hair for a reason”. On the other hand, God sent AIDS as a punishment on gay people because he just loves them so very much.

Now, Swanson thinks it’s OK to attend a same-sex wedding, but only if you carry a sign calling for the couple to be put to death, like a good Christian. After all, gay marriages will inevitably also lead to laptop marriages and pet rock marriages; allowing gays to marry, in short, “drags feces” over the institution of marriage.

He blamed the Orlando shooting on gays as well, of course, citing Luke 13, where Jesus responds to a mass killing with “unless you repent you will likewise perish”, adding that “humble homosexuals that fall on their faces and plead for God’s mercy as the publican did in the parable will go to heaven” and “proud gays will go to hell.” In fact, Swanson is very upset that he is not allowed to kill gay people himself anymore.

According to Swanson homosexuality has always “been important to humanism, and whenever you get a humanist, classical approach to education, you’re probably going to get the gymnasium. The gymnasiums were all built around the idea of pederasty and pedophilia. Now, I don’t want to get into a lot of the details on this, because it’s very very very gross, but they trained young boys in homosexuality. This is part and parcel of the homosexual vision, still is, by the way, to this day. This is the goal, this is where they’re headed, if you read the homosexual literature, which I encourage you not to do, but this is the direction that they’re headed. This is the goal of humanism. The goal of humanism is to make it to Sandusky. The problem is Sandusky was prosecuted and that’s an indication that we’ve got 2,000 years of Christianity, and these guys are not going to get away with it.” Yes, Swanson making things up as he goes along provides a fascinating glimpse into an utterly deranged mind.

The purpose of recognizing gay marriage is of course partially political: Democrats are deviously working to “strip back” government control (an unusual accusation from this kind of source) over marijuana and homosexuality “in order to maximize the immorality of the people” and “increase the size of government;” the “Democratic vision in a nutshell,” is “to make sure everybody is committing homosexual acts and they’re high on drugs, and then they vote for Democrats to increase the size of government and provide pretend security for the people high on drugs.” To underscore his vision, Swanson predicted, in 2013, that if Colorado were to pass a bill allowing civil unions for same-sex couples, then as soon as 2022 the government will snatch kids from homeschooling families and deliver them to members of NAMBLA. You can probably all see how homosexuality “destroys nations” and why it must be punished. (His predictions for 2013 also included “the Muslims and the liberal Presbyterians getting together to form Chrislam,” which might not be as big of a deal as it sounds since “chances are, at the end of the day they’re all Muslims anyway.”)

Taking a page out of Scott Lively’s writings, Swanson accused gay “fascists” of attacking the Oregon bakery in 2013, telling his audience, completely falsely of course, “that the Nazi Party had their birth at a homosexual bar in Berlin … This is what homosexuals do best and they will engage in their Pink Mafia effort to control and shut down businesses that do not cooperate with their agenda.” Christians are in fact being persecuted “all over the place” these days – indeed, people in the quiverfull movement, in particular, are the most persecuted people in the history of the country – because they are not allowed to execute or even discriminate gays anymore. An obvious example: people are criticizing his own anti-gay comments, thereby persecuting him and trying to shut down Christian media. Meanwhile, schools that teach things contrary to his interpretation of the Bible should be burned to the ground and public schools are “whorehouses” that are teaching kids to be transgender communists.

In 2012, Swanson defended Uganda’s draconian anti-homosexuality bills, lauding the country’s policies as a model for everyone to follow. In particular, the US should criminalize homosexuality for the sake of freedom; in particular, we should work to “impose God’s laws upon our systems, especially our political systems,” and “God’s laws require that we prosecute homosexuals who are caught in the act of homosexuality or the act of sodomy on the basis of two or three witnesses.” Criminalizing homosexuality would enable Christians to “press back the line upon those who are impressing their rights upon Christians who really need that religious freedom.” “Freedom” means whatever you want it to mean, of course. Swanson suggests waiting to introduce the death penalty (stoning, specifically) for gays until they’ve had time to repent, however. But he did add adulterers, divorcees and anyone watching porn to the list of people who should eventually be put to death.

Women and feminism

No fan of women feminism, Swanson claimed in 2016 that “feminism’s greatest victory” in the feminist movement’s war against America – a Hillary Clinton presidency – will supplant men: “If they can achieve the ultimate zenith of power, this will become the final chapter, in a sense, of the present war that feminists have waged over this nation,” said Swanson, having as usual no clue to what’s going on but plenty of rage to fuel his ignorance. (Swanson was not alone in these kinds of sentiments.) In particular, Clinton will turn a majority(!) of kids gay, and efforts backed by Clinton to improve women’s economic status will “destroy the nuclear family” and society at large by convincing a woman to “divorce her husband and walk away with her own cow.” Swanson added, for good measure, that Obamacare will inevitably lead to the introduction of North Korean-style death camps to the United States. He had already in 2013 said that Obama’s re-election “solidified our doom” and would encourage the election of “a bunch of softy-wofty, weeny socialists for the years to come” – and women were to blame for electing him since women tend to have “more communist” views.

Thus far, feminism has succeeded in getting women to stop loving their children; survey results on the rise of  “breadwinner moms” is evidence that “women care less about their children” than men do, and it’s all because of the “feminist zeitgeist” beating women with the message that “you do not love your children, you kill your children.”

Here is Swanson and Dave Buehner parsing the feminist movement: some feminists are “cute” (but dangerous), like Sarah Palin, some are “ugly” and will only find careers in academia and in government agencies, but all are “selfish, narcissistic, family-destroying whores” that together with “the homosexuals” are “destroying society.”

As you’d expect, Swanson has little aptitude for science (here is his interview with Ken Ham) and just as little understanding or ability to distinguish science from his own febrile imagination. According to Swanson “certain doctors and certain scientists” have researched the wombs of women on the pill and found that “there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb … Those wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.” Even his guest, fundamentalist Kevin Peeples of the anti-contraception documentary Birth Control: How Did We Get Here?, wasn’t quite ready to run with the suggestion. Swanson also said that a new strain of gonorrhea is divine punishment for sexual immorality: “God is in control and he can send a superbug to wipe out a lot of people who are engaged in this kind of sexuality and if that be the case then I guess we don’t need a political magistrate to do that work for us,” Swanson said. If you add that the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks were “a message from God”, Swanson’s God doesn’t sound particularly sympathetic. 

In 2015 he issued a dire warning to his followers to refrain from eating the evil lesbian communist Girl Scout cookies, since doing so may turn your daughter into, well, a lesbian communist; accordingly, the leaders of the Girl Scouts are worthy of death. Another lesbian-recruiting cesspool is the U.S. women’s national soccer team, and Swanson was shocked when even Republican presidential candidates congratulated them on their 2015 FIFA WWC win, an occasion that, Swanson reminded us, was also “celebrated, of course, by one of the lesbian players doing her lesbian thing with her lesbian whatever.”

There is a good Kevin Swanson resource here.

Diagnosis: If you read some Kevin Swanson you’ll quickly realize what’s going on: the guy is scared witless. He genuinely, truly, thinks that God might destroy the world at any moment for any mundane reason, and is sad, confused, frightened into incoherence, and – most obviously – deeply angry about it all.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki