Emma Thorne made a compilation video of Kent Hovind and Matt Powell being “horrible, horrible people”. It’s pretty good, and illustrates why those two actually are horrible. She notes that they are “slipping in more and more dramatic, violent, out-there viewpoints into their religious ministry”, so there is cause for alarm, although I’d suggest they’ve always been this way, they’re just becoming more vocal about it.
Well, ol’ Kent is not having any of that, so he made a response video (I’m not linking to it, if you must, look it up). You can tell he’s having a slow burn over it, and he’s annoyed that his hateful views are being shown to the public in a disapproving manner. He’s pissed off — his jaw is clamped tightly shut as he watches — and when he can take it no more, he erupts into babble near the end. Emma highlights some of his more awful ideas, like his statement that All the Chinese look alike
(he usually keeps mum about his bigotry on YouTube, but in his unrecorded lectures I’ve heard him throw out all kinds of “jokes” about Jews and black people), and the fact that he brags about how brutally he beat his children.
His response to that last comment is to call upon someone in his audience at Dinosaur Adventure Land, at about the 24 minute mark:
Brother, how many children do you have? Four? Do you once in a while have to discipline them to get them to understand? Is that Biblical? Is it effective? Do the kids love you and want to do right, or do they love you for it? They love you for it!
Um, no. Children love their parents in spite of any abuse, and sometimes they stop loving them. You don’t get to call on the natural charity children exhibit for the people they depend on and have grown up with to justify any harm you do to them!
At about 26 minutes, Emma has hit him with his callous comments about the boy who drowned at his camp. Does Kent talk about his responsibilities as a manager, about the need to improve safety at his lake, his sympathy for the grieving parents? No. He responds with excuses, and justifies it all because the father of the dead child made a donation to his camp.
The dad of that boy loves our ministry, donated money to build a dock that gazebo out there, he paid for that to be in memory of his son. He had twin boys, seven years old, one was kind of hyperactive, and apparently came up under the dock, hit his head and knocked himself out, and nobody saw him. The water was 3 feet deep. The parents were there. Nobody saw him under the dock. And he drowned. I’m sorry. People drown in lakes all the time. It’s tragic and bad, but it happens. People get in car wrecks all the time too. They still want to say something about me, I wasn’t there.
It was tragic, but the dad loves our ministry. I should have him on the program sometime and say, look, guys, quit picking on Kent Hovind, my boy drowned in the lake, that’s bad enough, knock it off, OK, it’s fine.
No, it’s not fine. Hovind wants this man to appear with him on camera and say that it was fine that his child died (it’s OK, it was the hyperactive one, after all.) That is disgusting and psychopathic. He’s entirely focused on the harm done to him, that he’s getting “picked on”, not that a child died in his irresponsibly maintained bible school.
This is what he does throughout his response video. He takes a criticism from Emma, and tries to argue that it was fine, and makes it all ten times worse. We need a phrase stronger than “doubling down”, because this guy is just throwing everything into the pot all at once. He’s justifying everything she said while trying to defend himself.
For example — and these really demonstrate what a horrible person he is — Emma quotes him saying, Have you ever heard of the Palestinians? They should have totally destroyed them back then, three thousand five hundred years ago.
How do you think he should respond to a direct quote in which he advocated genocide? His response is to declare that God said it was OK, and besides, the Palestinians were filthy, dirty people who had sex with animals.
When God told the children of Israel to go into that land, he said to totally destroy certain nations. They were loaded with diseases. And god said utterly destroy them and they did not obey. And there are some diseases haunting humanity today that could have been wiped out in their infancy. The Palestinians, some of those people, had unbelievable sex practice with animals and other things like that, and God said to kill them all. The children of Israel did not obey, and that’s a long interesting story, but it’s what God said to do.
Well, now, the Bible says nothing about Palestinians, a modern people who did not exist as a distinct nation 3500 years ago. But this does not in any way lessen or excuse Hovind’s bigotry! It makes it all worse!
Oh, but wait until you hear how he defends himself when Emma quotes Matt Powell and Kent Hovind ranting about how homosexuals ought to be executed. He says of AIDS, suppose when the disease was first discovered, those who had it were isolated or euthanized.
Just a hypothetical, right? No, he really does believe they should have been rounded up and killed. He brings up a slide that says there are 30 verses in the Bible about homosexuality, and points out that it repeatedly says it is an abomination…and he looks up “abomination” in a dictionary, where it says “abomination: a thing that causes disgust or hatred.”
I guess it’s OK to hate gays, then, since the Bible says so.
Then it gets weird.
He goes on and on about disgusting things, trying to make inappropriate comparisons. Is it disgusting for a parent to let their baby eat poop?
This has nothing to do with private behavior among consenting adults; parents have responsibilities to their children. Most ironically, he also rants for many long minutes about how the government has the right to regulate many behaviors — Child Protective Services can take children away for good cause, they can set speed limits on roads, they can execute people for murder, they can get involved to stop sex trafficking, etc., all these things that are not at all relevant to being gay, unless he’s trying to argue that being gay is tantamount to murder, therefore execution is warranted.
What’s ironic is that he repeatedly defends the right of the government to decide on any punishment for any arbitrary law, while forgetting that earlier in the video (and many times in the past) he has tried to argue that he was innocent of ever violating any law. He also seems to assume that Emma Thorne is a proponent of capital punishment for certain crimes; I don’t know what her stance on that is, but at a guess, as a liberal lefty like me, she’s probably against it.
You can tell he’s warming up to say that we should have murdered all the gay people.
First case of what would later become known as AIDS was in 1981. What are the main risks of anal sex? Penetrative anal sex has a higher risk of spreading STIs than many other types of sexual activity. This is what the homosexuals do. They’re going to spread disease. “Nobody tells me what to do”, yes they do. They tell you how fast to go, they tell you what side of the road to drive on, that’s a moron, lots of people tell us what to do. Duh. 42,000 people were unknowingly HIV positive at the time. So in 1981, 42,000 people is the estimate, would it have been better at the time to quarantine or execute? Would that have been better for humanity? That’s what I said, and Emma, and her other homosexual friend AJ, are so upset about this. I’m just point out what God’s law says and the logic behind it. 42,000 people had it. How was it transmitted? How did they get this disease? Let’s see. Having anal sex is riskier than vaginal sex. This is where you get the disease, contact with the feces. Duh.
HIV related deaths. 1.4 million people died in the year 2000. Now hold it. When it was first discovered only 42000 people had it. If it had been stopped then, 1.4 million people would not have died in 2000.
All I said was would it have been wise to stop it then?
Yes, it would have been wise to stop it then. We could have saved a lot of lives. But take it up with Ronald Reagan, who ignored the disease, and didn’t do anything to protect people. Protect people, not round them up and execute them. Public education, health measures, active research into treating the disease, condom use, needle exchange programs would have all saved lives. But the plan that leaps to the sick minds of Matt Powell and Kent Hovind is that now they have an excuse to murder lots of people they don’t like.
Also, here’s a hint: the disease is primarily spread by the exchange of blood, not contact with feces. Hovind is just full of misinformation that way. He’s a very stupid man, as well as a bigot.
So let’s end our engagement with these disgusting men with one last amusing quote from Kent Hovind, as he mansplains British history to an English woman.
Study the history of England, and why your sailors were called Limeys. They brought sheep on board, and got all kinds of diseases from sex with the sheep, the sailors did, Emma, study your history.
Yeah, that’s how ignorant Kent Hovind is.
No Kent, the British were called “limeys” because the Royal Navy made their sailors drink lime juice to prevent scurvy. HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET SHEEP-FUCKING OUT OF THE TERM ‘LIMEY?”
Akira @1: Kent just got his derogatory terms confused. Non-British anglophones call Brits ‘limeys’ (with the etymology you gave). Anglophones from a particular region call anglophones from another region ‘sheep shaggers’ if there are more sheep per human in the second region.
Think he is wrong here.
This is where that number came from. The US CDC.
It refers to only the United States.
.1. HIV had been spreading in the rest of the world since 1920 according to our estimates.
This means by 1981 it was widespread in Africa and the Caribbean at the least.
The actual number of cases worldwide was probably in the millions.
.2. HIV has a long latency period between infection and symptoms. It is on the order of years. This makes in hard to identify carriers.
.3. “The first test used blood and was known as an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay or ELISA test. It was approved for use on March 2, 1985.” We didn’t even have HIV blood tests until 1985.
Without a test, we couldn’t even screen for the vast majority of asymptomatic cases in 1981.
Hovind is cosmically stupid and just babbles on without ever thinking about what he is actually saying.
If one could even somehow</> wipe out all homosexuals …. they would not even have a lasting 🤢 “solution” for homosexuality, let alone the imagined cooties.
@ 2
Thanks Rob. I didn’t know about that phrase.
The “Limey” bit at the end is especially funny because a common example of evolution in many introductory biology classes is the broken GLO gene in some lineages of primates (including humans) that causes the inability to biosynthesize vitamin C.
Cthulhu, this guy is dumb.
This is so wrong.
The first case in the USA was identified in`1981. It is a disease that arose in Africa around 1920. By 1981 it was widespread around the world to the point where we in the USA noticed it.
Stupid fundie xians.
The vast majority of HIV/AIDS is spread by heterosexual sex. The majority worldwide of HIV/AIDS cases are in women and children.
For most of the world, HIV/AIDS is mostly a heterosexual disease.
I ran some numbers once for Uganda and heterosexual transmission was something like 90% of their HIV cases.
We need a phrase stronger than “doubling down”
“Kitchensinking”
That works. But in Hovind’s case, we’ll always need even stronger terms.
PZ, are you ok? I get it, the rage and the outrage are understandable and I get it and it is justified. I just also hope you are ok too.
In a lot of countries, the HIV pandemic is being feminized.
For example, in Ethiopia, “HIV is 1.62 times more prevalent among adult women than men.”
I don’t see how quarantining or executing all heterosexuals is going to help things though.
He says of AIDS, “suppose when the disease was first discovered, those who had it were isolated or euthanized.”
…there’d be a lot more gay people alive today, much to Hovind’s dismay. And they’d probably be voting against the party that advocated and carried out such systematic mass-murder. Oh, and what measures did that party advocate to even track the spread of that disease? You’d have needed good tracking, otherwise “isolating” wouldn’t work.
Keeping the gambling metaphor, “going all-in” comes to mind.
Raging Bee @ 12
Cuba isolated known patients with HIV, but as Cuba at the time was (and possibly still is) a rigid dictatorship they could do things we consider unacceptable.
I am ignorant of how effective their tracking was.
(With this exception, health care in Cuba is very good, easily better than in the less affluent US states)
@ 7
Which is why conservatives spent a large chunk of the late 80s and early 90s claiming that heterosexual AIDS was “a myth.” According to them, you can only get AIDS through godless, unclean butt-sex because anal tissue was more “delicate” and prone to viral infection than that of the vagina.
@11 I wonder how much of that was due to the myth that sex with a virgin would cure them.
In addition to the truly horrible things they say, what stuck me is the adolescent nastiness. A couple of high school mean girls.
Notice how Hovind focuses on anal sex between men, completely ignoring the fact that heterosexual couples often engage in anal sex as well. On any given day in the United States there are probably more heterosexuals getting it on using that method than homosexuals.
When it comes to AIDS transmission, the group least likely to transmit AIDS to each other through sexual intercourse are lesbians. So, by Kent’s logic, we should be isolating and executing everybody but lesbians.
I, for one, welcome our new lesbian overlords. I know they’ll be kinder and more gracious than any of our heterosexual christian overlords have been over the last couple of thousand years.
Ah, dumber and dumber! Every time I see the 2 of them together. Not at all surprised about them calling for violence . It seems to be a common theme among fundies to want to kill , imprison or suppress everyone who isn’t a narrow minded bigot like them
Because YouTube unevenly enforces its own rules. If you’re making them money, you can do just about anything.
HIV entered humanity in several different geographical locales, due to the bushmeat trade. Blood from poached chimpanzees would drip down on those “harvesting” the meat, very bad if you got an open would while travelling through the forest.
The major outbreak of HIV started brewing in western Zaire. In the sixties, travel brought HIV from Africa to Haiti.
Impoverished Haitian immigrants to USA donated blood for money. This was the “express” route to USA but it would have arrived sooner or later.
The observed disease cluster among gay men brought the disease to public attention, but also served to demonize homosexuals, especially in the phase when little was known about the disease.
Ronald Reagan and his merry men sat on their hands in the early years when interventions would have been really effective. Religious idiots opposed the mention of “condoms” on TV, because reasons.
.
Political leaders in Africa were in denial and rejected the idea that HIV had started in the continent. It was seen as a racist lie, also it was convenient to blame it all in gay men. It was here the AIDS really took an immense human toll. The denial has started to wear off but way too late.
In the arab world HIV has also spread thanks to political indifference and corruption- in Saudi Arabia the deaths from Aids were attributed to other causes to sweep the problem under the carpet.
.
BTW the science fiction community lost Isac Asimov to the disease, yet another victim to contaminated blood transfusions. The hysteria in USA at the time was such that he and his family kept the disease secret and attributed his death to other causes.
Time travels in only one direction. You might think this doesn’t need to be said, but IME it does.
My parents subscribed to the UC Berkley Wellness Letter and I was aware of GRID in 1981 and to much assault, threats, and social pariahness I warned everyone in my high school and later university about it. I volunteered for the AIDS Service Center in Pasadena CA run by All Saints Episcopal Church when even the gay atheists I knew were doing fuck-all. This was the only place to get help on the west coast of the United States. Given the stoooopid way that heterosexuals were busy transmitting herpes and chlamydia the STDs du jour at the time, I fully expected GRID (later AIDS) (way back then) to be transmitted to heterosexuals here in the United States. I was even more certain of this upon volunteering because we did have some hemophilic/surgical/sex worker clients.
This never happened.
We can talk lots about how in the rest of the world AIDS is a heterosexual disease. But even given its huge latency, here in the US forty years later and that people still can’t keep their trousers up and their skirts down, it still isn’t. Even with certain patients getting this disease not because of their sexual orientation and preferences that I had observed and had been told: because people who are about to die and who are being otherwise treated as diseased pariahs will totally talk to you about the things they did that they’d normally keep quiet or lie about.
Saying that AIDS is a heterosexual thing is IME disingenuous. It interferes with the solution. You-all are factually correct, and foolish/unhelpful.
It is culture, lack of humanity, or relative poverty, both in the nation of the US and in the continent of Africa. We made an attempt to change gay and bi culture to make transmission less likely. We really truly did! This kinda failed. Dumb kids are still catching it despite PEP and PREP being paid for by my county. Dumb gay kids.
I remember when I was a kid (puts on grumpy old boomer voice) you were considered a hopeless square who was slaved to your uptight parents if you skipped the otherwise required by California eighth grade health class with your parents refusing permission. This is no longer the case, from the talks I have had with young folks at the AIDS Service Center then, and talking with millenials now.
Then, you spent your time studying in shame with one or two other students the Vice Principal, today there are so many exceptions schools have alternate time-burning classes. So there are a lot of uneducated Californian heterosexual “kids” (in the most part obviously not children even though they are grandnephew/niece age) out there. These heterosexuals who are prime targets for the virus because of the corrupting and evil influence of Ham and every one of his fellow-travellers on sex education that’s been going on for decades. They are not catching AIDS in a way that’s trackable. Time only travels in one direction.
The main difference now is that gay youth are not dying directly from AIDS anymore but from poverty because of the godsdammmed medication cost, cf very recent rulings about collusion among Big Pharma. The still rare heterosexual folks who are catching it are from the places in the country where you’d expect: the areas which refused supplemental federal monies for health and education. It’s culture, lack of humanity, and poverty.
Ham has the AIDS prevention right, just the wrong species. The AIDS virus was first transferred to humans from chimpanzees. We should have killed off all the chimpanzees!
And now onto Avian Flu.
Hovind and Powell – where freedom of speech meets the cess pit.
Stephen Alexander, the boy that drowned at Kent Hovind’s conpound on March 15, 2020, had a twin, but it wasn’t a brother, it was a sister.
As you noted, PZ, Kent referenced a twin brother.
Typical of the sorts of details Kent seems to deliberately misrepresent or not bother to check.
… Palestinians, a modern people who did not exist as a distinct nation 3500 years ago.
Oops – dunno how my # 26 got posted before I finished.
Anyway – the people called “Palestinians” were called “Philistines” way back when.
“Philistine” … “Palestine” – you only need to change one consonant and one vowel to morph between them. That’s some hardcore cultural continuity over 35-some centuries.
@ Pierce R. Butler :
Yes along with the Canaanites who were one of the main (?) ancestral peoples / cultures back then with many different groups occupying and intermixing with them including many mentioned in the Talmud and Bible e.g.. Jebusites, Amorites, Moabites, Amalekites, Edomites, etc .. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan
See also :
https://blog.ninapaley.com/2012/10/01/this-land-is-mine/
The Palestinians and many Israelis can trace their ancestors back to among these groups.
See : https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/genetic-study-discovers-the-true-modernday-descendants-of-the-people-of-canaan/
To answer the title question :
Why does hateful bigot Kent Hovind still have a YouTube channel?
Because youtube won’t do the right thing and kick himoff for hate speech?
As #
I wodner if reporting him tothem might
Dóh. Clicked wrong button. Apologies.
See also : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/
Plus the Phoenician Philistines too no doubt ancestors~wise as you (Pierce R. Butler) noted.
.***
Because youtube won’t do the right thing and kick him off for hate speech?
As #20 . WMDKitty — Survivor has already noted.
I wonder if enough people reporting Kent Hovind and his videos to them might change that? I wonder how many already have done that?
@ 23. answersingenitals :
We almost have given they are now endangered species.
Also, no, we should have left them be and not slaughtered so many for bushmeat which was where the problem came from – although that could be partly (?) the fault of capitalism and (neo?) colonialism too for putting locals in the position where hunting them is their main or only (?) source of income and they lack better alternatives maybe? Not sure.
Huh? Whaa ..why? Separate virus,and topic again isn’t it? Are you implying we need to kill off all the birds too?
PS. @ PZ Myers : i hope it is ok for me to comment on this issue, my apologies and please let me know if not.
Hovind constantly comes across as a rather unevolved person. Given his primitive communication skills — e.g. loud, often violent, very tribal, constantly flinging feces — he clearly has a lot of simian ancestry in his family tree. Even his name seems related to the word “hominid”, though that may be a stretch. Clearly his behavior would lead one to believe he is a far less evolved primate. In any case, given the evidence, its amusing to see such an obvious monkey-boy deny evolution so vehemently, while remaining entirely oblivious to his own behavior that likely mimics primitive primate ancestors. Perhaps Hovind’s personality is an example of an atavism?
@ ^ Dago Red : Reminds me of an old Dr Who scene where a (Victorian era Brtitish?) creationist priest / preacher of some sort was transformed by alien magic / science into an ape. I’m sure I remember seeing it and didn’t dream it or anything but sadly cannot find it on youtube or recallexact specifics which is frustrating.
Anyone else know the scene I’m thinking of there please – fairly sure it was one of the pre-Eccelston Doctors circa Sylvester McCoy – Peter Davidson maybe Colin Baker somewhere? But could be wrong..
@29. Annnd now I notice that the paper cited as my first link there has been retracted. Dunno why.. Arrrgh! FFS. Sorry. Think it’s basically still the case tho unsure now, sorry.
@ ^ Ghost Light with Sylvester McCoy & Ace notably the bit at the 50 seconds mark with the Rev Ernest Matthews. Wikipage :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Light_(Doctor_Who)
@ Dago Red :
Also reminds me of the decisive courtroom scene in The Simpsons Creationism episode.. when Homer has a bit of trouble opening his beer for reasons that are actually unexplained..