Monday, May 20, 2013

#555: Dennis Campbell


Dennis Campbell is a self-proclaimed fundamentalist, and a baptist minister in St Cloud, Minnesota. He is pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things, one supposes, but his screeds are fairly typically crazy, and sufficiently incoherent to earn him a place in our Encyclopedia. Campbell has warned us (in an ad in a local newspaper) about the Muslim threat to the US, pointing out that ”Moslems seek to influence a nation by immigration, reproduction, education, the government, illegal drugs, and by supporting the gay agenda.” The evidence is, presumably, that gay rights were very high on the agenda of e.g. the Taliban. There’s an interesting follow-up to the ad here, and a good Dennis Campbell resource here. Campbell has also led a prayer in the Minnesota Senate, an event that was the source of some controversy.

Diagnosis: I suppose the indictment in this case really concerns a particular way of thinking: X is my enemy; Y is my enemy; hence X and Y are allies – a variant of the fallacy of the undistributed middle endorsed by a wide range of moronic wingnuts.

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