#2865: Bob Frey

Pretty obscure, perhaps, but anyways: Bob Frey was a 2014 candidate for District 47A of the Minnesota House of Representatives (he didn’t advance beyond the primaries) and possibly the looniest conspiracy theorist on the ballot in that state that year. His platform was a rather typically (for that time) wingnut one, including “Common Core must be stopped in Minnesota because of it’s political agenda to indoctrinate instead of educate” and “ObamaCare should be repealed at the Federal level”, but he nevertheless managed to make a bit of a name for himself for his views on the gay agenda – though as Frey felt it important to emphasize: “it’s not about the gay agenda but about the science and the financial impact of that agenda. It’s more about sodomy than about pigeonholing a lifestyle.” Now, when someone like Bob Frey invokes “science”, you know you’re in for some deranged nonsense, and Frey delivers: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there's an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it's the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That's why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.” It should be unnecessary to point out that this is not how anything works, but we can’t help entertaining a little bit of curiosity about what goes on in those parts of Frey’s deranged imaginations he doesn’t feel willing to share in public. Whatever source he thinks he is using for his claims, at least his son Mike used the same when he made the same claim before the Minnesota legislature the previous year.

 

When Frey talks about ‘science’, you should of course also keep in mind that he is talking about ‘real science’. Frey’s background includes running a group called ‘Creation Science Seminars’, which would claim that teaching creationism in public schools would reduce the rate of violence that teaching the theory of evolution had, according to Frey, brought upon communities. And in a 2004 appearance before the Minnesota State Senate Education Committee, he asserted that the fossil record proves that “dinosaurs have always lived with man” and that such “real science” should be taught in public schools rather than the scientists’ science they are teaching these days.

 

Diagnosis: Obscure, perhaps, but the fact that local village idiots like Bob Frey can get as far as he did indicates that there’s a lot people in Minnesota whose critical thinking skills and basic comprehension of their surroundings are so unfathomably low that they really shouldn’t be allowed to handle doorknobs without assistance. And they are the real horrors lurking in the wake and shadow of people like Bob Frey.