#2859: Megan Fox (I)

No, not the actress – she’s up next – but yet another dense fundamentalist and creationist. This Megan Fox is (or at least used to be back in 2015) “a homeschooling, Tea Partying, conservative mother of two (with another on the way!) out and about in the suburbs who is also a popular columnist for PJ Media.”

 

A fine illustration of the kind of person we’re dealing with is the video she made of her visit to the ‘Evolving Earth’ exhibit at the Chicago Field Museum in 2015 and her interpretation of the exhibit as a showcase for the silliness of evolutionary biology and of how stupid the scientists are (indeed, Fox is a self-proclaimed specialist in “exposing” liberals and scientists – apparently, scientists and liberals are much the same thing): For instance, at the start of the exhibit, Fox reads a panel saying “At first, all eukaryotes were single-celled, and many still are today”, to which her response is “this makes no sense. No sense” (she hasn’t heard the term ‘eukaryote’ before); then she reads a panel reading “every organism, living and extinct, that is not single celled – including you – is made up of eukaryotic cells”, which she thinks is scientists admitting that evolution doesn’t happen: “doesn’t that suggest that every thing was made up of eukaryotic cells in the beginning, that they weren’t something else that became eukaryotic cells, that they were always and have been eukaryotic cells?” (Hint: no, it doesn’t suggest that). So when the panels start talking about things like mitochondria and evolution, Fox can immediately point out that “None of this makes any sense. It doesn’t make sense to a 5th grader, it doesn’t make sense to a 3rd grader, it doesn’t make sense to a 30 year old. None of this makes any sense.” Therefore evolution is bunk – i.e., since Fox doesn’t know basic biology and hasn’t heard about most of the stuff biologists are doing, the scientists are, just like her, confused and evolution is false: “This is not good thinking. This is muddled thinking. This is thinking from like Darwin’s thinking from a hundred years ago, and we should know better by now.” She does think, however, that “Darwin once said that if the single cell is more complex than I think it is, then all of my theories … I’m going to have to start all over again,” which is … not remotely a Darwin quote but a misunderstanding of a common creationist misunderstanding of Darwin. And to a panel dating the evolution of land plants, her response is, predictably, “sounds dumb. How do you know this? It’s just a fairy tale. It’s all a guess. No one knows. It’s all an opinion. Did they have a video camera then? Show me the video. There are no transitional forms. They made it all up.” Yes, it’s a familiar pattern: Fox is ignorant and stupid, and being confronted by facts and things she doesn’t know makes her angry, therefore all the things beyond her grasp is all bollocks and lies. But there is a teaching moment here: You see, reasonable people would use an exhibition like this to try to learn something; not creationists like Fox, though.

 

Fox’s own conclusion from the trip was that she “found many examples of inconsistencies” (i.e. things she thought were “dumb” – she is unclear about what ‘inconsistency’ means), and she accused the Field Museum of pushing “certain theories as if they are absolute proven law when that is not how the scientific method works” (no, she doesn’t grasp the difference between theories and laws – what did you expect?). Indeed, she “found enough bias” toward facts and evidence (not her words) to conclude that “the Field Museum pushed an agenda with quasi-religious overtones: the cult of ‘science’ where the ‘scientists’ are more like high priests pushing a religion instead of using the correct scientific method.” There is a decent response to Fox’s confusions here.

 

She later had a somewhat similar quarrel with the local library, which aroused her ire because it provided open internet access to the public, which could be used to watch porn! (She was also furious because they wouldn’t let her use the computers reserved for children in the children’s section, because they made her fill out a form to get a library card, and because the librarian was helpful and helped her get online since him being helpful to her suggests he would also be helpful to pedophiles). That quarrel ultimately landed her in court after an intense period of stalking and harassing librarians (including taking photos of their homes and falsely accusing them of drunkenness), filing hundreds of FOIA requests (with Kevin DuJan and dozens of moronic complaints with the Illinois attorney general, and disturbing library board meetings. She and DuJan published their account of the events in a book, Shut Up!: The Bizarre War that One Public Library Waged Against the First Amendment.

 

Thing is, though: Megan Fox isn’t just a local moron. She has written for David Horowitz at FrontPage Magazine and NewsRealBlog, and extensively for PJ Media. She is also a podcast host for The Fringe. In other words, she seems to have readers and listeners who consume her nonsense and nod in agreement with what she says! Flabbergasting.

 

Diagnosis: Megan Fox is stupid and ignorant, and her ignorance is a militant kind of ignorance: if she doesn’t know, then no one does, and any information about a topic she doesn’t know must be false. She is also quite clearly (and at least partially as a result of her ignorance) a weapons-grade asshole. That she also homeschools kids is a tragedy.

 

Hat-tip: Pharyngula