#2078: David Outten

David Outten is production editor for the religious right media group Movieguide (that would be Ted Baehr’s group), a website offering “in-depth analyses of current movies from a biblical perspective.” Outten is very concerned about the sorts of values people, in particular kids, get exposed to these days, especially stuff Outten disagrees with – and, being a paranoid fanatic, Outten disagrees with a lot, including in particular nefarious messages hidden in otherwise innocuous-looking stuff by evil conspirators.

So, for instance, Outten was worried (in “Is Disney’s New Princess Undermining Family Values?”) that Disney’s television show Sofia the First is may be undermining the traditional family and promoting the “modern family” at the expense of “the long-term well-being of children” because the protagonist of the show, a daughter of a single mother, “doesn’t need a prince,” adding that it would be financially beneficial for Disney to target traditional families who have more disposable income than single mothers (the tacit premise being, of course, that the middle class avoids watching shows about poor people if they can); Disney should “learn that a princess who has both a mother and a father to take care of them and guide them, and a princess who marries a prince, is more likely to escape poverty and become a better Disney customer.” Like many religious right critics, Outten didn’t like the movie Avatar either, objecting not only to its environmentalist message but to the fact that it “asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other, and us to the Earth. This is a clear statement of religious belief. This is pantheism. It is not Christianity.” This is not pantheism – unless, of course, “pantheism” is just a catch-all label to describe anything Outten doesn’t agree with, like “Marxist” or “liberal”. Which, we suppose, it is.

Together with Tom Snyder, Outten also wrote a scathing critique of The Hunger Games, warning that the movies and books – and especially their “homosexual and cross-dressing implications” and characters who act “effeminately” – “neglect America’s Christian heritage,” will exacerbate America’s cultural degradation and could even make “a tyrannical leader like Nero or Hitler” become “a distinct possibility for the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It will also lead to school shootings. Indeed, Outten maintains that sexual sin in movies in general (The Lego Movie and Captain America: The Winter Soldier singled out in particular) will lead to a Nazi takeover of America; you can assess (a discussion of) it yourself here since we are, due to no fault of ours, unable to summarize the structure of that argument. (It has to do with the “sexual revolution” leading to a “financial collapse of epic proportions” that will cause “chaos” and open the door for a Nazi-style military takeover, but there are some rather crucial premises in the argument that we are unable to identify.)

Diagnosis: Completely deranged maniacal lunatic whose writings consist of a fiery stream of deranged associations and projections, completely without anything resembling evidence, reason or reality to guide it. Influence admittedly unclear.