#1855: Jeffrey Kuhner

Profoundly delusional Intelligent design apologist, science denialist and – yes – conspiracy theorist Joseph A. Kuhn seems to have passed away. His misunderstandings wouldn’t have held a candle to the crazy compressed into paranoid conspiracy theories by Jeffrey Kuhner anyways. Kuhner is a Canadian-American radio host, former editor of Insight on the News, contributor to the Moonie Times, writer for various outlets, including National Review Online, and former president of the Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal, a dormant think tank devoted to lure minorities to the wingnut movement.

Kuhner on Obama

Though initially praising Obama (when he still thought Clinton would win the 2008 primaries), Kuhner has consistently been one of Obama’s more lunatic and paranoid critics. In a 2012 interview with Janet Mefferd, for instance, he claimed that “Obama is America’s Lenin,” asserting that “like many secular leftists, [Obama] seeks to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization,” that he is “in the pocket of the pro-abortion feminist lobby,” and that “Mr. Obama is our first non-Christian president.” None of the complaints sound chararacteristically Leninist. Mefferd offered that Obama might be more like Stalin. The complaints don’t make Obama sound particularly Stalinist either. We suspect that the point of the analogy was not to be analogous. Later Kuhner said Obama was channeling the spirit of Trotsky.

Kuhner later expanded on the “non-Christian” part, arguing that Obama is a kind of neo-pagan, because he has “embraced radical environmentalism – a form of neo-paganism” (True Christians™ don’t care about the environment) and is “behaving like a quasi-religious zealot” who “has nothing but contempt for traditional Christianity and the family,” as seen in his support for gay and reproductive rights. By disagreeing with Kuhner on politics, “Mr. Obama has declared war on our Judeo-Christian culture,” concluded Kuhner, and “[t]he path is laid for a soft authoritarian nanny state” (also “soft tyranny” and “socialist empire”). Catholicism is apparently a particular target: In relation to the election of Pope Francis, Kuhner accused Obama (again) for being an “enemy of the church” who is “waging a war on Christians and on Catholics in particular,” falsely claiming that “Obamacare encodes the federal funding of abortions” charging that “homosexual ‘marriage’ is a Trojan horse aimed at smashing the family – an invention by cultural Marxists to undermine Christianity’s ancient foundations,” and concluding that Obama’s policies contribute to a “culture of death.”

As for the connection between environmentalism and paganism: “The green movement – exemplified by the hoax of man-made global warming – has degenerated into a pseudo-religion.” You didn’t think Kuhner would accept the scientific evidence for or consensus about global warming, did you? More insights into Kuhner’s deranged delusions can be gleaned from his criticism of John Kerry’s 2013 speech about the United States’ failure to confront the reality of climate change. Yes, the scientific consensus on climate change is really “junk science,” according to Kuhner: “the greatest hoax of our time” and a fabricated “dark prophecy of an eco-apocalypse,” but you might well wonder why scientists would engage in such conspiracies: Ah, yes: “the secular left needed a new cause” following the collapse of communism and “found it in green socialism,” which he says is now central to their goals of “crushing capitalism.”

Oh, and immigrants! Apparently Latinos are teaming up with “Christophobic” Obama to attack Christianity (Catholicism in particular, remember) to cause “cultural Balkanization” and turn US into a “Third World Nation” and the “United States of Mexico”. In 2014, Kuhner again warned us about how housing migrant kids will turn Massachusetts into “Mexichusetts”.

Kuhner is (no shit) in general not above lying and making up his own alternative facts to prove his points. (He is particularly fond of lying about the ACA.) For instance, to demonstrate that political violence in the US is mainly caused by leftists, Kuhner asserted that “[t]he only known act of domestic right-wing terrorism was the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995”. This is … not correct. Not that Kuhner would care; he was post-fact long before it became popular. Here is Kuhner breaking the story about “Obamagate”. Here is Kuhner on “liberalist genocide” (notice, for instance, the symptomatic and ridiculously false complaint about how liberals have long sought to destroy religion for instance through ensuring that “prayer has been banned from school,” which it hasn’t, not remotely). And here is Kuhner accusing the US Census to fake jobs data to help President Obama’s re-election chances in 2012 (actually, Obama himself “deliberately manipulated” the Census data.)

Zeh gays

According to Kuhner “gay gestapo” will make sure anyone who criticizes them will be “burnt at the stake” and have their careers destroyed. Being burnt at the stake tends to do that, of course, but we suspect that cuddled snowflakes like Kuhner just means that being criticized and called out for his bigotry is just like being burned at the stake.

To Kuhner, however, members of the LGBT community “are even worse than the radical Islamists” and more terrifying than a slew of dictators with whom he likes to compare those who disagree with him (including “the Communist Chinese” and “Putin’s regime”), calling them “the most fanatical, hate-filled … and intolerant people I’ve ever met.” Expanding a bit: “You wouldn’t believe the vulgarity, the coarseness, the permissiveness, the promiscuity at the heart of the homosexual lifestyle. And […]the physical damage, and the psychological damage and the emotional damage that comes from living this lifestyle over many years, if the American people would see that with their own eyes I think they would have a very, very different conclusion and very different take. So what we’re getting is, it’s a form of cultural Marxism.” Sure underpins the “most fanatical, hate-filled … and intolerant” part, at least. LGBT people are worse than commies, too. And to risk repetition: gay equality will result in “moral anarchy and social disintegration,” “[t]heir lifestyles and behaviors inevitably lead to a culture of death” since “[h]omosexual behavior – for example, sodomy – is unnatural and immoral.” “I have never seen people as intolerant, as malicious, as so desperate to engage in smear and slander and libel as people and activists in the LGBT community, it is really despicable,” concludes Kuhner (our emphasis). So there.

Those sympathetic with the LGBT community are almost as bad as gay people themselves: “the homosexual lobby” is being advanced by the “modern-day fascists” of the judiciary, who seek to bring about “liberal fascism” (“fascism” means about the same as “communism” or “Lenin” or “Trotsky” to people like Kuhner), and a gay rights victory at the Supreme Court [this was written in 2013] “will be calamitous for democracy and the family” as it would bring about “social intolerance and secular McCarthyism,” such as hate speech laws, and exacerbate society’s “cultural decay and moral decadence.” Yes, hate, hate, hate. See how hateful gay people are, everyone.

Diagnosis: Yeah, Kuhner was post-fact long before it became popular – facts are anyways just a nuisance when sowing paranoid outrage. Otherwise he is a standard rabid, hateful, angry wingnut snowflake. We don’t really know how big of an audience he actually has – or whether his popularity primarily is a function of him serving so well as an illustrative caricature of delusional wingnut outrage.