#3065: Steve Huston

The American Decency Association (ADA) is an extremist group of angry, paranoid conspiracy theory-oriented fundies that seeks “... to educate its members and the general public on matters of decency; to initiate, promote, encourage and coordinate activity designed to safeguard and advance public morality consistent with biblical Christianity”. It is generally allied with other fundie organizations like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel and similar organizations, and yes: we have of course encountered them before.

 

Steve Huston is what seems to be a longtime staff writer for ADA (he has his own blog on their website). Though Huston covers a number of topics in his writings, it is consistently from a Christians-are-persecuted-in-the-US perspective; ‘persecution’ of course understood as the fact that people – even politicians – disagree with them in speech and action and are allowed to do so, that democracy sometimes lead to outcomes Huston doesn’t favor, and that the ADA cannot force other people to behave and think the way ADA thinks they should behave and think. But as Huston sees it, not only are leftists and Democrats (and Muslims – do not forget Muslims) vile and evil: there is nefarious agency at work here. Not only do leftists seek to undermine Christian America through immigration (which is why Huston wants government to e.g. deny entry into the US to Muslims and people supporting Jihad and socialism in order to protect the freedoms, like freedom of speech, that he values), they have been bamboozled into promoting the agenda of radical Islamists and Chinese communists, who are in cahoots to destroy America: Marijuana legalization, for instance, is as Huston sees it the result of the “Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their plethora of illegal ploys used as a means of attacking America from within”. And don’t get him started on the War on Christmas and the forces involved in that very real effort to persecute Christians. To make his case, Huston relies heavily on ‘information’ from an impressive number of entries in our Encyclopedia, e.g. Tucker Carlson, Frank Gaffney and Tony Perkins.

 

In particular, Huston is (but of course) worried about the gay agenda and who is really behind that one. Here, for instance, is Huston explaining how a graham cracker ad featuring a same-sex couple with their children clearly reveals the active hand of Satan himself. That one’s from 2014, but Huston is still, in 2026, sore about Obergefell and wants and hopes to see it reversed. Indeed, same sex marriage seems to be the only topic on which Huston is willing to take exception to his general praise for Trump to admit that Trump doesn’t quite deserve a perfect score.

 

Occasionally, Huston broaches topics related to science, too. Huston is, for instance, a creationist, and in order for his readers to form their own educated views on biological evolution, he recommends resources from Answers in Genesis, including (in particular) videos about their bogus distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘observational’ science. During COVID, he would promote resourcing offering misinformation about COVID vaccines and various antivaccine videos as well, because of course he did.

 

Diagnosis: Yet another paranoid fundie conspiracy theorist. His affiliation probably ensures that his nonsense is unlikely to reach much of an audience beyond other paranoid fundie conspiracy theorists, but he’s certainly not making things any better.

#3064: Warren Hurst

Dredging up some more old garbage here: Warren Hurst was – or is, for all we know – a member of the Sevier County Commission in Tennessee who got a bit of national attention back in 2019 for a seven-minute rant he did during a county commission meeting. One target was, of course, zeh gays – Pete Buttigieg in particular: “It’s time we wake up people […] We got a queer running for president, if that ain’t about as ugly as you can get,” said Hurst: “Look what we got running for president in the Democratic party. We can go over here to Hoss’s jail [Sevier County Sheriff] and get better people out of there than those running for democratic to be President of the United States.” Then, he presented his opinion on race: “I’m not prejudiced, a white male in this country has very few rights and they’re getting took more every day,” Hurst told the (all-white) county commission; later, in response to critics, he defended himself by saying that some of his best friends were African American; he nevertheless stood by his comments because he’s entitled to his opinions, which really isn’t the issue. Later, the Tennessee House of Representative passed a resolution to honor Hurst.

 

Diagnosis: Old, angry and stupid sod. The thing to worry about here is really all those in the audience who cheered and agreed, and those for whom this is just local politics as usual.

 

#3063: Steve Hurst

Steve Hurst is a longtime member of the Alabama House of Representatives representing the the 35th District, having served since 1998. That has given him plenty of time to do plenty of silly stuff, such as being the (sole) sponsor of Alabama’s House Bill 258 in 2018, which would, if enacted, allow teachers to present “the theory of creation as presented in the Bible” in any class discussing evolution, “thereby affording students a choice as to which theory to accept.” The bill would also ensure that creationist students would not be penalized for answering examination questions in a way reflecting their adherence to creationism, “provided the response is correct according to the instruction received.” The bill was clearly modeled on the Kentucky Revised Statutes 158.177, which was enacted in 1976 and seems to be still on the books in Kentucky despite its patent unconstitutionality. Hurst has otherwise received some attention for earlier proposals to require public school teachers to read a daily prayer in the classroom and to punish sex offenders with surgical or chemical castration (that one eventually passed in 2019, but will never be used since it sets up castration as a condition for parole and the crimes for which it can, in fact, be used are not eligible for parole anyways – the whole thing was, of course, just to show off some sort of character.)

 

Diagnosis: Wingnut fundie loon the old-fashioned way – the kind we used to cover a lot of a decade ago but today seem almost quaint. Still a loon, though.

 

#3062: Dale Hurd

Dale Hurd is a longtime broadcaster for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) – yes, that’s Pat Robertson’s old playground, and that pretty much sums up Dale Hurd, too. And although Hurd might sometimes come across as downright reasonable in today’s media environment, Hurd is far from reasonable. Hurd is, for instance, one of the central promoters of the Great Reset conspiracy popular in wingnut circles, and, firmly planted in great reset nonsense, he helped promote an impressive number of conspiracy theories and ridiculous, paranoid narratives about COVID. Otherwise, he is known for pushing usual wingnut nonsense, including climate change denialism (and yes, that includes the global cooling myth) and praise for the familiar line-up of authoritarian, anti-democratic state leaders.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s very predictable, and his nonsense might, as mentioned, come across as almost reasonable compared to today’s wingnut standards. And that does make him somewhat dangerous, for by any sane standards, his nonsense is not remotely reasonable.

 

#3061: Sharon Hughes

Sharon Hughes is a wingnut fundie and the Founder and President of something called The Center for Changing Worldviews – which seems to be a website with a prominent “Store” section – and Host of Changing Worldviews TALK Radio, one of an almost innumerable mass of insane wingnut talk radio channels. Hughes is, for instance, a creationist, as laid out e.g. in her post The Effects of Evolution’s Racist Roots on Students (no url), where she repeats an impressive number of creationist falsehoods and misunderstandings: “Should an effort be made to explain that evolution is just a theory when teaching it in public school?” asks Hughes, before explaining how “Darwin’s theory of evolution on race, […] with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top” (no, she hasn’t tried and doesn’t care) is obviously to blame not only “for the increase of crime and other social problems, such as rape, that we’re seeing amongst our youth today” but for Hitler, Lenin, Mao and Nietzsche. Otherwise, her website seems devoted primarily to various MAGA stuff, fears about “the Marxist takeover of America” and similar seminal topics.

 

Diagnosis: No, we cannot be bothered to delve deeper into the nonsense produced by yet another one of these dingbat fundies. She probably has an audience, but that audience has enough to choose from that she probably doesn’t make much of a difference to anything. Forget it.

 

#3060: Scottie Nell Hughes

Yes, Mike Hughes is dead, but Hughes was also probably one of the most colorful, generally harmless (except to himself) and purified loons the world has ever seen, and we’d feel that an Encyclopedia like ours would be seriously incomplete if we didn’t give him a brief nod.

 

As for Scottie Nell Hughes, we don’t really know what she is up to these days, but at least she used to be a journalist, news anchor and political commentator for the Russian-government propaganda channel RT, where she would promote various pieces of Russian-backed misinformation – such as the died suddenly anti-vaccine conspiracy theory – until at least the American branch of RT folded in 2022. Prior to that she had enjoyed a stint for CNN as their (admittedly mostly dull) resident MAGA clown to defend Trump’s antics for CNN’s 2016 presidential election coverage, and she has been news director of the Tea Party News Network.

 

Hughes is perhaps most famous for her assertion, in relation to the “alternative facts” commotion in 2016 and in response to “people that say facts are facts”, that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.” Now, you might hear that statement as hyperbolic irony lamenting the current media situation, but that doesn’t seem to be how Hughes intended it: Trump’s lies “among a large part of the population, are truth”, whereas “those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up”. In other words, Hughes was profoundly confused about the rather fundamental distinction between something being a fact and people believing something to be a fact, between belief and reality. And yes, we’ve seen people with academic degrees being confused by that distinction, too (fans of Bruno Latour: we’re looking at you); it’s still a distinction so basic that failure to grasp it makes you an idiot. Her discussion of women in the army doesn’t exactly affect our verdict.

 

Diagnosis: Idiot. Yes, this is old stuff but it is still idiotic enough to pull it up again.

 

#3059: Eric Hufschmid

Eric Hufschmid is a semi-legendary anti-semitic conspiracy theorist who, according to himself, has been “avoiding Zionist traps since 2002” – ‘semi-legendary’ mostly due to his appearance on a Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Episode on conspiracy theories. Precisely what his views are is sometimes a bit difficult to determine, but Jewish people and/or Zionists are certainly at the core of them: as Hufschmid sees it, Jewish people – who may be reptilians – “use their intelligence to kill, sabotage and blackmail their competition [that’s us humans]”.

 

Further details may be superfluous at this point, but Hufschmid also believes that 9/11, the JFK assassination, and the Holocaust were Zionist false flag operations (the gas chambers used by the Nazis never existed and stories of them are a “Zionist invention”; even Michael Jackson’s death was a conspiracy to “divert attention away from Zionism, Israel, and Jews in general”, and at one point, he even suspected that his wife-to-be was a Zionist agent and that it was best to break off the relationship. Moreover, the moon landing is a hoax (the Zionist connection is unclear) and Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and replaced by an impersonator. And so on. Sometimes he also provides health advice; we couldn’t quite get ourselves to read his post “We do not need toilet paper!”, but feel free to look it up (no link provided).

 

Apparently, he has a book, too: Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (2002). That one actually seems to have caused some consternation in 9/11 denialist circles, insofar as Hufschmid harshly denounced a number of fellow truthers (Dave von Kleist, Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas, and Korey Rowe) for denying “that there is any Zionist involvement in 9/11. They are Zionist Deniers. In addition, they are Holocaust Promoters.” And “if Europe can arrest people for investigating the Holocaust, we in America should arrest Zionist Deniers.” And Hufschmid’s book does seem to have had some impact: it was for instance Hufschmid who convinced venture capitalist Jimmy Walter to launch his vast advertising campaign to contest the ‘official version’ of the 9/11 attacks.

 

Diagnosis: The internet gave him followers and the attention of venture capitalists. We don’t think that’s what he really needed.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki